Wildwords

Edge of Winter

 

We’ve taken the first step into winter. Or maybe winter has taken the first step into us. In the last ten days three feet of snow has fallen, even more in the nearby mountains - five feet, six feet. Still, along the southern edge of my house - which on clear days is warmed by the sun - the snow is peeling away, revealing a line of green plants still not entirely done with autumn. Every afternoon whitetail deer come to that green line, preferring the grasses to the woody plant material that will make up their diet in the season to come (to the tune of five or six pounds of it every day). The deer are in perfect form now: fully formed, robust, weighty under thick coats of hair the color of wet sand. For the next five months that robustness will be measured out against the elements, the fullness of their bodies dwindling through the sub-zero nights, burned away inch by inch from hard treks through deep snow. Those adult females now pregnant will not only have to match their reserves against the demands of winter, but be lucky enough to encounter enough spring growth - and at just the right time - to fuel the production of milk for their fawns.

I watch them and I wish them well. And sometimes I remind myself that no matter how many icy roads I face, no matter the countless shovels of snow I may lift and toss from the driveway, no matter the cabin fever that will surely come in April, compared to the whitetail my road is hardly more than a Sunday drive.

A Stronger Bugle

Warm weather as of late in the northern Rockies speaks more of summer, than fall. Yet those out walking the backcountry have only to cock an ear to the hills to know that big changes are underway. It comes most memorably as the piercing bugle of bull elk, now deep in the season of the rut. That time when bulls gather and mate with groups of females, called harems. By the end of the rut the bulls will have expended a staggering amount of energy, often eating little or nothing along the way.

What the big bulls have going for them in this autumn, though, is the hearty, snow-filled winter that came the year before. Like other ungulates, in late spring elk push up the slopes of the mountains with their noses nearly against the receding snow line, in the process nipping the kind of young plants that form the most nutritious graze of the entire year. In years of good snow pack an elk can ride this “green wave,” as biologists sometimes refer to it, all the way into August. In low snow years, on the other hand – and those have become more common – that wave crests early, often in the middle of July. That one change leaves bull elk going into rut with considerably less strength than would normally be available to them.

Wolves in particular, which seem to always be paying very close attention, have figured out in autumns following low snow years - during that exhausted condition that follows the rut - bull elk which otherwise might not be appropriate prey, are up for grabs. But probably not this year. This year the bull elk will tire, then rise again. As strong and fierce as winter itself.

Bad Medicine

I have to say, when it comes to critical care providers these guys are a strange choice. I know they’re all the time touting their speed and efficiency, but most of that comes from the fact that they skipped those classes where they teach you how to use a scalpel, figuring they could do the job faster with an axe. Like a lot of surgeons they’re fond of playing music in the operating room, but only ever one song - a head banger anthem with really easy lyrics: Government is evil, the song goes. Screw the feds. Just that, over and over again. They know the song so well they can sing it while they’re chewing dinner, watching TV, drinking beer, making love. They can sing it in their sleep. It’s become the sound track of their lives.

For a long time after they opened their practice, back in the 1980’s, they never mentioned the fact that none of their patients recovered. (That whole “first do no harm” thing doctors talk about -  that they tell me is for pansies.) But these days they’re completely up front about their poor record. Even tout it on their business cards. The truth is they’ve built a solid practice around pissed off guys like them, eager to see that crazy, shuffling Uncle who moved in years ago put into a permanent coma.

The weird thing is, on evenings and weekends I see them at public gatherings around the area: Pushing hard to spend millions worth of Uncle’s money to plow federal roads into Yellowstone (it’s good for commerce). Insisting that Uncle keep killing coyotes for them, that he subsidize crops, lower grazing fees, build dams, control floods, fix potholes in the highway, keep e. coli out of their cheeseburgers.

Come Monday morning in the operating room, though, it’s back to swinging axes. Hacking at clean air. Strangling parks. Yanking out the arteries that supply money to educate kids, feed the hungry, screen for cancer, keep poisons out of the water supply.

Slashing with their axes at the chambers of the heart.

The Colors of Summer

At long last, the record snow pack has mostly left the mountains. For many of us in the northern Rockies it’s a relief, having spent two months wincing every time a hot day fell on the high country, knowing the melt would likely inundate towns downstream. But now, in late July, all that snow offers a small, though brilliant compensation: the best flowering season in decades. Four thousand feet above my house, the tundra is spilling over with the blues and lavenders of lupine and gentian and forget-me-not, the yellow of buttercup, the pink of spring beauty, the waxy white stars of marsh marigolds. Closer to home, the woods cradling my driveway is a riot of harebells and paintbrush and wild onion, snowberry and yarrow, and sego lilies by the hundreds.

 Most of these plants are will play an important role in feeding the creatures who live here - from grouse, to whitetails, to bears. Just as for thousands of years, many of the same plants fed or served as tonics for humans. But in this particular season, mostly what I’m thinking about is the beauty. Thirty or forty days from now it will likely begin snowing on the tundra. So an awful lot of us are climbing into the mountains at every chance, inhaling them. Tucking this richly hued, rarified expression of summer deep into our minds; where one day, in the face of some angry autumn blizzard, we’ll close our eyes and do all we can to be back here again. In this sumptuous July of 2011.

Steadfast Beauty

I used to think of springtime in the Rockies as a time to work on patience. Waking up to sunshine and sixty degrees one day, followed by snow and thirty degrees the next, and then again the next, tends to do that to you. But today, as the Canada geese drop out blustery skies, as the first sprigs of buttercup and pasqueflowers poke out of the ground, as finches and chickadees work their nests, as sandhill cranes begin to dance, I’m focusing instead on the matter of tenacity.

 

What is there about our relationship to earth that has left us unable to tolerate the environmental challenges now facing us? What is it that leaves us hiding under the covers when someone talks about climate change? Why are we so quick to turn away from the problem of mecury poisoning from our power plants, or from scientific studies released last month, suggesting exposure to organophosphate pesticides is eroding the intelligence of our children? Nature flowers, while we defend. Nature hums, while we hold our breath. Nature expands, while we shutter the windows.

It’s springtime in the Rockies. And for every day of blissful ease, two more will be made beautiful by the fearlessness of the struggle.

Tiny Men in Big Places

Tiny Men in Big Places

In 1898, a popular writer for The Atlantic magazine suggested that the Montana legislature was “probably the funniest governmental body in the world.” Today it would more likely be described as the most tragic. In a matter of weeks it has introduced bills to nullify the federal Endangered Species Act. To require local governments to compensate landowners if they deny subdivisions or other development projects. And in one particularly inspired moment, declaring climate change to be good for business. Stupid acts, not to mention highly unpatriotic given their willingness to trash the United States Constitution.

Of course it’s true that government can sometimes be spectacularly incompetent. Yet in Montana alone there are currently over two billion dollars worth of outstanding Superfund cleanup projects to be done - leftovers from an era when mining companies were welcomed in with neither rules nor oversight. (In the small town of Libby, Montana nearly 500 people have now died from asbestos-related disease, courtesy of the mine owned by W.R. Grace - the same company sued in the 1980’s for dumping chemicals into the Woburn, Massachusetts water supply and killing five children and one adult.)

 Such activity is made more tragic by the fact that Montana was once nationally renowned for (and rightly proud of) the generosity of its policies: Elevating the right of its citizens to clean air and clean water to the pages of the state’s constitution; allowing stream access to floaters and fishermen. The kind of far-sighted governance that helped create a booming tourist industry, now the state’s second-leading source of revenue.

Unfortunately, for this latest batch of angry white men all this counts for nothing. They are less committed to the difficult task of finding solutions to the troubles we face, than to scattering rumors of lurking evil. Evil presidents. Evil unions. Evil wolves. Rumors that distract and hypnotize, coaxing the spotlight away from the fact that much of what many people consider best about this region will under their dynasty be quickly traded away. Theirs is a selfish, cynical religion, and it’s guilty of one great sin: that of making the earth, the country, and our communities uncomfortable places to be.   

Ascendance

 

I’m writing this in the twilight hours of the ice moon. A moon already well above the horizon, brightening the east even as alpenglow still lights the west. Down below, in the middle of the creek I can see a lone raven, the last of a long parade of birds that spent the whole day dining on a deer carcas washed onto the rocks the night before. The feeding started just after dawn with a pair of bald eagles. First the male and then later the female, each one eating for about thirty minutes, dunking their entire heads under the water over and over again to grab just the right bite. During the hours they were gone from the carcass the ravens came, and when the ravens had had their fill and moved along there were magpies. In truth the whole spectacle was strangely comforting; this feeding of life from something lost, this earth-bound flesh taking to the sky.  

 

Annunciation

 A number of years ago, while teaching a nature writing class in Yellowstone, I had the great pleasure of having as a student Sister Helen Prejean. By then she’d gained much acclaim for her work helping the troubled and the down-and-out, including her correspondence with two convicted murderers, Elmo Sonnier and Robert Willie, which later became the book Dead Man Walking.

On our last day together, out walking along the Specimen Ridge Trail, Sister Helen brought up the subject of annunciation. I’d only known the word in religious terms, as a reference to the Christian celebration of the angel Gabriel telling Mary she was destined to become mother of the Son of God. But sister Prejean had a much broader take. She said annunciation was the act of making something fresh, of bringing an ideal more fully to life by making it real in our everyday world. It seemed a perfect notion for where we were right then, in that wild country high above the Yellowstone River, cradled in an ideal that a century before, and with lots of hard work, became the world’s first national park.

These are rough times in the West. A small, but powerful gaggle of angry white men are once again angling to undo longstanding American ideals, from dismantling the Endangered Species Act, to gleefully eradicating the wolf. The conservation ideals brought to life by people like Adolph Murie and Aldo Leopold and so many others – ideals of ecology and preservation – will not survive without renewed care and feeding. We need a conservation annunciation. We need to make those ideals fresh, see them with new eyes. We need them to again fire the notion that kindness to life on earth is an essential act of humanity.

Earth Giving Fire

On the night of the winter solstice, with the moon rising full, I had the privilege of making fire for a small group of friends gathered for a solstice party. The burn began with an ember. And the ember was created from a wooden spindle held in something like a violin bow, spun fast against a fireboard carved out of sage. It appeared after only twenty or thirty seconds of effort , and was then carefully slid into the bottom of what looked very much like the nest of a small bird, fashioned from strips of juniper bark. I then gently pinched the nest around the ember, raised it to just above the level of my face, and blew it into flame.

 

I learned to make bow drill fires more than a dozen years ago, while writing Shouting at the Sky in the canyons of southern Utah. While on first glance it may seem like nothing more than a good party trick, in that setting, where it was used as part of a wilderness therapy program for struggling teens, it was nothing short of a healing balm. Kids who arrived with ADD so severe they couldn’t hold focus for thirty seconds, were somehow able to spend an hour, even two hours, mastering the bow drill fire. From their tiny embers came the fires that lit our camps, cooked our food, kept us warm, drew us into conversation. So deeply satisfying was the making of these fires that a number of kids went back to their home cities, or their homes in suburbia, with fire sets and plastic bags of juniper bark. In the year or so that followed, when they wanted to celebrate something, as well as when they were struggling, they turned out embers.

Kneeling on the snow the other night next to the fire pit, I thought not just of those young people in Utah, but the millions of others across tens of thousands of years who drew life from this wood spinning on wood. Many indigenous cultures had a special name for it: “Earth giving fire.” How perfect that seemed, maybe especially on the night of the winter solstice, when the sun had stopped its southerly drift, pausing before beginning the journey home. Fire, we can call it, giving earth.  

The Deepest Season

Last week, following a stunningly beautiful autumn, winter came calling on Montana, showing up in a belligerent mood and with heavy suitcases. As I write this (not far from the glow of the wood stove), it’s four below zero with a foot of fresh snow. Tomorrow’s high will be ten degrees. Now if this sounds like a nightmare - and in truth, there are days when it can seem that way to us, as well - it’s important to keep in mind that one of the blessings of this season is that it always stands at the ready to tutor us on the subject of perspective. Sure it’s easy to think of snow in terms of hassle. But at the same time, especially here in the West, it’s also an enormous blessing - one having to do with frogs coming out of the mud in the spring; with what food bears will be able to find next spring in their pantries; with trout having enough water to swim in all summer through. Beyond that, those who actually go out into the winter woods over the next twelve weeks will have a chance to brush their lives against a profound kind of quiet, against the thin streams of life thrumming beyond the cold: pocket gophers building tunnels in the ground, sap running through the branches of the pines, tiny little fawns growing cell by cell in the wombs of the mule deer and whitetail.

 

This is when we might pour a glass of Scotch for an old friend. When we’ll set about reacquainting ourselves with the warmth of one another’s kitchens. Without question, there will come a day – likely in the bitter heart of January, weeks after the holidays - when we’ll wonder if we can make it to spring. On such days we’ll need memories, good notions of sun and rain and the smell of earth. From those memories we can squeeze much needed energy. Sort of like chickadees, going about the woods recalling their secret stores of seeds - tens of thousands of seeds, carefully stashed in holes and cracks and crevices throughout the forest – every swallow unleashing the bounty of some gentler season, come and gone.