Column One

Jeff Sikich shinnied up a charred oak in the Allegheny Mountains of western Virginia, shined his flashlight down into the hollowed-out trunk and gazed into the wary eyes of a mother bear 10 feet below. As he fired a sedative dart into the black bear's shoulder, another biologist on the ground hollered for Sikich to block the opening to keep the bear from climbing up and out. Sikich leaned his long torso into the trunk's interior as the bear raced up, stopping about a foot from his nose.

Sept. 2 It's night. Mary Breckenridge is zooming her truck along the narrow, twisting road to Edison Lake. "You ever get nervous driving in the mountains?" I ask, trying to sound merely curious. "Never!" she says, accelerating. Once in the sagging white tent at the "resort," Mary takes out her bear earrings and her hearing aid, lays down in her sleeping bag on one of the four cots and that's it, she's asleep. Her strong, steady snore begins as her head sinks into the pillow.

MOADAMYEH, Syria - As his camcorder scanned the charred walls and partially collapsed roof of the mosque on the outskirts of town, Adnan Sheikh began his narration like he had dozens of other times: "Moadamyeh al Sham, 8-30-2012, the remnants of the damage and destruction that Assad's gangs inflicted when they stormed the city," he said. "Even the houses of worship were not spared. " A former physical education teacher here, Sheikh carries his camera wherever he goes these days.

Long before the promise to the dying man, the Buddhist stupa and the Supreme Court decision, there was the land. Once it belonged to no one, then it belonged to everyone, and that's when the trouble with the cross began. Mary Martin, superintendent of the Mojave National Preserve, read her mail in the morning, and on a spring day in 1999 she picked up a letter signed by Sherpa San Harold Horpa. It sounded like a joke. Horpa began by describing "a tasteful cross that stands on a small hill.

David Trujillo's torso is a web of scars. Shunts in his arms, hoses in his stomach, garish gashes left from biopsies and scalpel incisions. In the summer when he goes shirtless, people often stare. Sometimes, to lighten the mood, he'll say he was bitten by a shark. In reality, his body tells the tale of multiple bouts of kidney failure. David recently received yet another transplant. No. 4. He is 29 years old. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, only about 150 people since 1988 have received four kidney donations.

Gentleman Robert, wearing a pinstripe suit and maroon fedora, crooned the words to "It's All in the Game. " He wandered the room, singing to a few dozen people at a church on skid row. Jonathan James Brown donned a cowboy hat and sang the Muppets' "Rainbow Connection," enunciating each word just like Kermit. Linda Harris spun circles through the room, dancing with friends. Later, when her name was called, she grabbed the microphone and gestured with the confidence of a diva as she sang "I Hope You Dance.

SUTTER ISLAND, Calif. - As a child, Brett Baker learned farming fundamentals from his grandfather, who taught him to drive a tractor and gave him some advice about water. "There may come a time," his grandfather said, "when you have to grab a shotgun and sit on the pump. " The vast delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers east of San Francisco, where Baker's family has lived and farmed since the 1850s, has long been the center of the state's chronic water conflicts. It is the switchyard of California water, the place where the north's liquid riches are shipped to the irrigation ditches of the San Joaquin Valley and the sinks of Southland suburbs.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Doug Sterner drives from his cluttered apartment here to the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., carrying a portable photocopier and a belief in American heroes. Inside the Navy archives, he flips through thousands of typed index cards detailing bravery in battle. Sterner pulls out a card and starts reading. He's mesmerized by this story: Charles Valentine August, a Navy pilot who shot down two enemy planes in World War II, was later shot down himself and captured in North Africa.

MEXICO CITY - Somewhere underneath the hull of Armando Tovar's boat, the aquatic manifestation of the great god Xolotl was slithering along the muddy canal bottom, digesting bugs, laying eggs and trying to avoid extinction. Even though he could not see the creature, Tovar knew it would be confronting its troubled environment with that weird fixed smile, the one that makes it appear to be in on some cosmic joke. As a 9-inch salamander, of course, the ajolote (pronounced ah-ho-LO-tay)

Re "A way of life withers," Column One, Sept. 26 How disappointing on two counts. First, the subject of your Column One blatantly violates Los Angeles' gas-powered leaf blower ordinance; second, The Times is apparently so entirely ignorant of the 13-year-old ban as to illustrate the front-page story with a photo perpetuating the use of the infernal and illegal machines. William Campbell Los Angeles ALSO: Letters: Pension perspective Letters: Some clarity on pot policy Letters: Freeway noise -- get used to it