From today’s Washington Post:
At 9 a.m. on the very edge of the dusty, desolate collection of adobe homes and Vietnamese restaurants that seem to form this city, David Iglesias begins his run through the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. This is not easy terrain. The footing is terribly uneven. The altitude can be unbearable. At certain times one can hear the grumbling of mountain lions and the feasting of coyotes.
I personally have never heard the grumbling of mountain lions or the feasting of coyotes in my nearly two decades in Albuquerque, but I clearly am not half the creative writer Sridhar Pappu is. Maybe that’s why.
Update: For the record, I have eaten at several Vietnamese restaurants here, though I had never considered them to be a signature feature of our growing community, unless you happen to live near my friend Andrew, over by the fairgrounds, in which case, holy mother of Ho Chi Minh there are a lot of Vietnamese restaurants ’round here.
When you hear the snarking of jaguars, it’s time to worry.
I wish you’d warned me about the coyote problem before I came to visit your city. I was wandering the streets without my musket and apparently in grave peril.
After a passage like that, I think it would be only fair if the Albuquerque Journal wrote a piece about DC. They could describe the rustic environment where you can see bears roaming free and feasting along the Mall as the lamp lighter makes his way along the street at dusk, doing his nightly rounds.