The woman with the wide hat drives me up Mount Diablo, high above the Sacramento Delta. I haven't been up here in decades. Meadows and oaks up to the waist, pines groves on the shoulders. At last we reach the open top--just rock and brush. Vast views--white fangs of the Sierra Nevada on the eastern horizon.

But... it's all kind of empty. Where are the hawks? The deer, condor, grizzly, wolf, puma, bear? Where the millions of ducks, and billions of bees, and the flowerfields they spread? I remember whole hills of blue, yellow, purple and orange when I was a kid. Not now. Green, brown... and silent.

"It really shows", I say bitterly, "how we talk big about protecting land--preserve, park, wilderness. The Bay Area was unbelievably rich in wildlife--marshes, tidelands, forests, meadows full of food. And that richness shaped the culture--they were rich in leisure time they didn't need to farm--they worked two hours a day. But now the only animals left are us. Out to the horizon, all I see is ghost land."

She looks out over the Delta, and lets me stew.

"Yet," she says, and goes back to studying the horizon. Is that white cloud the snows of Shasta, 300 kilometers away?

"It was hopeful, that chart--it proved life can survive global warming and even our pollution--because those couldn't decimate sea life so selectively. Only one thing could do that. Us. We ate it. Same with the land. We scoured it empty--then call the hollow shell wilderness. And make it a park."

She finally looks at me. "What will you do?" she says, and I realize I don't know her name.

And I wake. Not knowing what to do.

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