After five years of living in the woods, I'm back in the city. The consequences of the last hundred thousand years of human striving are everywhere around me; noise, light, the ceaseless butchery of civilization. There's a black walnut tree out the kitchen window, and the scrub jays like to thrash around in it. Some jays, like crows and ravens and other corvids, have adapted quite nicely to human-made environments. They might be ragged, but they're tougher than me.