From dusk til dawn: coyotes and other uninvited guests

For weeks now, my wife and I have been interlopers of a sort, straying to a place we probably shouldn’t be, to witnesses a hidden, wild-hearted world not far from our suburban backyard.

On my evening walks, I have usually stayed within a network of streets that wends around a 27-hole desert golf course. While all that greenery looks enticing, the signs warn “Keep Out.” 

This space, they said, was reserved for the culture of the little white ball.

Then one night, my wife challenged me.

“C’mon, she said. “Let’s go.”

How could I resist? I mean, who has adventures in the suburbs these days?

So we did, and now our walks take on an illicit, almost magical bent, like Dorothy going from black-and-white to technicolor in the Wizard of Oz.

Each night, we’re like teenagers with a bottle of Boone’s Farm wine, looking for a little wild, the thrill of being discovered coursing like a drug in our veins. 

Now we wait a bit longer before setting out, closer to dark, when the last of the golfers are hurrying to hit their final shots, driven in by the encroaching dusk, atop fast carts that head toward the clubhouse.

And then we cautiously descend from a world of pavement to one of greenery.

For me, those first steps onto that green grass was a revelation.

As we walked in the middle of one long meandering fairway, I stopped suddenly and laid down on my back.

“What are you doing?” my wife asked.

“Just do it,” I said.

For me, that grass was as comfortable as any bed. The ground smelled wet from the collecting dew, earthy, and my body sank into the softness. I looked up at the lingering clouds. It was still too early for the stars. 

I felt like a boy again.

“Wow,” my wife said, luxuriating. “This is nice.”

She grew up in Beijing, where this is scant little greenery. In that overcrowded city, most of the grass not found in public parks is surrounded by signs where little cartoon blade figures implore “Please don’t step on us!”

That first night, my wife and I lay there for the longest time on that grass — so impractical in Las Vegas and the West, but so crucial to my memories of growing up on the East Coast.

In Upstate New York, the smell of grass meant summer. I mowed our lawn as a teen, the thick smell of wetness in my nostrils. I played golf, and was used to walking miles on a course, trying not to take for granted the fact that each new step was as soft as the last one.

Back then, we took time to lay in the grass. We watched clouds move across the sky.

And at night, we stared up at the stars.

I have memories of grass, how old Lefty, the groundskeeper at Westvale golf course, spent entire days on his tractor-mower, so that his skin was golden brown. After an afternoon of summer mowing, the whole back nine just smelled like cut grass.

I could just stand there on the 10th tee, swinging my driver, taking in big breaths of that natural smell.

It was the cologne of my childhood.

As a paper boy, I walked across countless lawns, learned to be on the lookout for the little gifts left by passing dogs. I was ever watchful for Leo Collins, my neighbor, who didn’t think area kids, including the paper boy, should take the shortcut across his expansive and always well-manicured corner-lot lawn.

In San Francisco, I had two postage-stamp sized plots of grass outside my front door that no matter how hard I tried could never keep green. I didn’t know my Kentucky bluegrass from my Bermuda, or centipede, perennial or that fine fescue lawn grass.

And it showed.

It remains my greatest failure as a homeowner.

The Internet says green lawns mean you’re a solid citizen.

“Lawns are indicative of success; they are a physical manifestation of the American Dream of home ownership. To have a well maintained lawn is a sign to others that you have the time and/or the money to support this attraction,” reads one screed.

“It signifies that you care about belonging and want others to see that you are like them. A properly maintained lawn tells others you are a good neighbor.”

I have never been that good neighbor.

My association with grass has always been not about community, but the green sweep of military cemeteries, or the Battle of Gettysburg, where men fell hard and grass caught them like a soft net, a final resting place.

Walking that golf course at night, the grass beneath my feet, I realize how much I miss it.

We’ve had other adventures on the golf course, at night, my wife and I.

On the grass, in the evening, after a 100-degree summer day, you can feel the coolness emanate from the earth.

That’s when the rabbits come out.

We see them feeding on the tees and greens, always watchful, freezing in place or scampering away at our approach. 

My wife, of course, loves the bunnies. She marvels at the smallest ones, pointing to the big males that rule the roost.

I, of course, feel the presence of something more ominous.

Coyotes.

At night, when the golfers go home, this patch of manicured links reverts to something more wild.

From dusk until dawn, these are hunting grounds, the realm of the interlopers.

For several nights, on our walks, we’d feel the presence of the coyotes.

Then, one night, a figure moved across a high hill, on the other side of a fairway. 

Sleek, crouched low to the ground, as graceful as anything I’ve seen, the lone coyote was on a mission, maybe back to its den, or to some favorite hunting spot.

Rabbits beware.

Neighbors have reported small bands of these opportunists loping up our suburban street at dawn, but up until that night, I’d rarely seen one.

There were more, of course.

My wife saw them first, on a night when the rabbits seemed particularly watchful.

She pointed and called out.

Two coyotes moved ahead of us, turning back now and again to plot our progress.

Then we saw two more.

We were surrounded, and I advised my wife that we slow down, not to threaten them.

But they moved on, and so did we.

Two sets of interlopers on this green golf course grass.

The coyotes now gone, my wife and I laid down. For the longest time, we stared up at the stars, knowing that that in only a few hours, the rabbits and the predators would vanish, giving way golfers, the humans.

Until the dusk came again.