Animal, Mineral, Radical Read online

  ANIMAL MINERAL RADICAL

  ANIMAL

  MINERAL

  RADICAL

  ESSAYS ON

  WILDLIFE,

  FAMILY,

  AND FOOD

  BK LOREN

  Animal, Mineral, Radical:

  Essays on Wildlife, Family, and Food

  Copyright © BK Loren 2013

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Loren, BK, 1957–

  Animal, mineral, radical : essays on wildlife, family, and

  food / BK Loren.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-61902-201-0 (ebook)

  1. Contemplation. 2. Nature. 3. Conduct of life. I. Title.

  BV5091.C7L668 2013

  814'.6—dc23

  2012040570

  Cover design by Domini Dragoon

  Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

  COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for Lisa Cech

  always has been, always will be

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Most names in these essays have been changed to respect the privacy of the individuals in the stories. Some of the places have been slightly changed if their exact location risks the privacy of the people involved. I strive for complete honesty on the page; however, I have no faith that recollection ever produces an absolute truth. Memory is never perfect, never static, and as far as I can tell, it evolves constantly with age. I’m grateful for that.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  ANIMAL

  Trends of Nature

  The Shifting Light of Shadows

  Of Straw Dogs and Canines: A Meditation on Place

  MINERAL

  Margie’s Discount

  Fighting Time

  Snapshots of My Redneck Brother, and Other Undeveloped Negatives

  The Evolution of Hunger

  Back Words

  RADICAL

  Learning Fear

  Got Tape?

  This Little Piggy Stayed Home

  Plate Tectonics and Other Underground Theories of Loss

  Word Hoard

  Gratitude

  Reprint Acknowlegments

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  Writing is listening. I have never believed writing has anything to do with having something to say. It always comes to me as listening. It’s a little like prayer, I imagine, though I have never leaned toward any religion. But I’ve been told that, in prayer, there is a moment of asking for something, and then there’s a longer period devoted to waiting. That waiting, in and of itself, decreases the desperation and the desire. In it, already, there’s a giving up. It throws a person into a state of listening, and—I would guess—the person who asked in the form of prayer begins to see and hear things that make sense in ways that hadn’t before asking. In the aftermath, the ragged beauty and reason of everyday life become more lucid. This, to me, is the same process as writing.

  If a person comes to writing with “something to say,” it risks drowning out this listening and replacing it with verbiage from the ego. I make no claims of lacking ego. But when I write, I pray that ugly beast retreats into its shell and lets something more important emerge.

  Each essay in Animal, Mineral, Radical grew out of a great deal of silence and listening. At times, this silence-listening was forced on me by a physical illness that wracked my body for over a decade and, on occasion, took away my facility for language altogether. (I talk about this in “Word Hoard,” the final essay in this book.) During these years, I was unable to write a word. Then one day, on the almost-other side of the illness, I went for a short run. When I came back from the run I wrote the first three pages of “Trends of Nature.” I had never written creative nonfiction before, and I didn’t know exactly what the lines I’d written would become—a story? A poem? The form confused me, but I trusted it. I typed one page after the other, and then let the words stand on their own. I didn’t worry about form or what I might “do” with the pages. I spent the next few months reading creative nonfiction, studying that form as I had others in the past.

  More than ten years after I wrote “Trends of Nature,” I’ve decided to gather a selection of these essays into a book. During this time, the writing world has changed about as much as my body and psyche changed during that long-term illness. When I first started to write again, the Internet was just on the verge of becoming the behemoth it is now. Facebook did not yet exist, CDNow was all the rage, no one had ever twittered a tweet, and a newish company called Amazon had yet to turn a profit. (Though it had been in business since 1994, Amazon’s first profit came in 2001.)

  But these days the Internet is the center of all media and a focal point of many people’s lives. A few mornings ago, I awoke, bypassed the newspaper (as I have done for the past few years), and went straight to my computer for the news. After I read sections of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the two local papers, I landed on a smart essay written by the distinguished editors of the literary journal n+1. This essay proclaimed that “all contemporary publications tend toward the condition of blogs, and soon, if not yet already, it will seem pretentious, elitist, and old-fashioned to write anything, anywhere, with patience and care.”1

  Though the essay didn’t say anything I hadn’t read before in some form, its concision and the overall cumulative effect of it and others like it sent me into a week or so of wrestling with what writing means today, what this book can possibly mean to readers. I looked back over the pages, and I remembered what it was like to write again after not being able to write for so long.

  During that silent period, what saved me were my daily excursions into nature. I don’t mean wilderness. I mean the small patches of nature available to almost everyone, no matter how mannered and procured the land may be. A tree in a planned park is still a tree, and sky will always be sky. Even these small remnants of the wild shifted my consciousness; I slowed down; I breathed differently; I listened, and the process was reminiscent of the days when I was able to write for hours. I felt a palpable connection between the mindfulness required by writing and the mindfulness induced by even the smallest bits of any natural landscape.

  About this time I read a book entitled The Tree, by John Fowles, first published way back in the predigital age of 1979. It’s a heady, tight piece that portrays the writing process as inextricable from the way we view nature. Our collective, cultural attitude toward the natural world, says Fowles, has everything to do with our collective, cultural attitude toward writing and reading. “The danger,” says Fowles, “in both art and nature, is that all emphasis is placed on the created, not the creation.”2 We jump to the end product and forget about the lengthy, multidecade process it takes to truly comprehend any art form. In short, he posits the notion that writing—the kind of writing that takes time and patience—is always “in process” and nature is always “in process.” Neither is ever finished. The flip side of this reveals that the degree to which we value writing that is short on process is on par with the degree to which we devalue the natural world. The “care and patience” that we are willingly forsaking in our approach to language, writing, and reading is directly related to the carelessness and lack of patience we demonstrate collectively—and unconsciously—to the natural world. If we lose “patience and care” in writing and reading, we will lose it in
the way we view and interact with nature. Any aesthetic that devalues patience plows the cultural mind-field into fallow ground that begins to tacitly accept the inevitability of oil spills, deforestation, human-induced climate change (global warming), in short, into a consciousness that is linked to, if not synonymous with, the state of mind that allows commerce to take precedence over people and all forms of life.

  Collective consciousness matters, and it is not limited to one thing. “It is far less nature itself that is yet in true danger than our attitude to it,” said Fowles in 1979.3 And in the twenty-first century, it is far less literature that is in true danger than our attitude toward it.

  I am keenly aware that, as a writer, I am not an anomaly. Most, if not all, working writers take care and patience with their words. But for every careful sentence that a writer labors over into the wee hours of the morning, there is also a professed cultural value for that which is quick, off-the-cuff, and uncrafted. If the editors of n+1 are right, and “soon, if not yet already, it will seem pretentious, elitist, and old-fashioned to write anything, anywhere, with patience and care,” then I hope Animal, Mineral, Radical offers a pretentious, elitist veritable fossil of a book.

  But, smart and prodigious as their words may be, I think—or maybe, I hope—they’ll turn out to be wrong. No doubt we, as a species, have waged (are waging) war on the natural world. For the sake of our survival and that of other living beings, I hope we stop soon. But in the realm of geologic time, the natural world will continue; it will survive, with or without us.

  We are currently waging war on language and “literature,” a term used fondly in the past and disparagingly these days, implying, as n+1 says, “elitism.” But human trends don’t ebb and wane in the same protracted time frame as geology. And I believe in the power of language in the same way I believe in the power of the earth. It will survive. Trite and old-fashioned as it may sound, the human heart will always need words (and work of all kinds) shaped with care and patience, both of which breed compassion. That’s what I hope to offer in the pages that follow.

  ANIMAL

  AS IN WILD, DOMESTIC, ESSENTIAL

  TRENDS OF NATURE

  A friend of mine says coyotes are passé. He says they’ve gone the way of the whale. “The whale,” he says, “was the first one to make a big splash.” He laughs when he says this.

  “What was it before whales?” I ask.

  “Happy faces. I think it went happy faces, whales, coyotes. But that nature stuff, it’s all passé now.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Now, it’s angels.”

  We were in a desert canyon, and it was the dead of summer, so no one pitched a tent. We, six of us, or so, slept along the banks of a river, most of us lying on top of our sleeping bags. It’s one of the simplest, most exhilarating things to do: sleep under the naked sky without a tent, without a sleeping bag, without clothes, if possible. You can feel the stars on your skin. It jump-starts something wild in you, like sticking your finger into a live socket and connecting up with nature. After all, you breathe differently out here. Certain things slow down (your heart rate, the noise in your head), while other things speed up (your awareness, your ability to laugh).

  So maybe it was because of how good it feels when there’s nothing between you and the sky, but when my eyes peeled open that morning, everything seemed like a hallucination. My friends were sleeping on shore, as they should have been, and the sun was rising, as it does. But there was no separation between earth and sky. What I mean is this: The world felt like an organism, and I was a cell moving through the riparian veins of some single living creature too huge to name. Over there were my friends, buddies on the molecular level, I assumed.

  The sky was the color of the inside of a vein: red clouds on the eastern horizon bleeding into white, moving like liquid. The sun pulsed like a huge heart, and everything moved slowly, like lava.

  That’s when I saw them. In that light, they looked like ghosts. Their legs were longer, skinnier than I’d imagined. The crisp outlines of their scrawny bodies blurred in my sight. There were three of them. Coyotes. Their gait was silent, as if they were not even touching the earth. I might not have believed they existed, except I could see them breathing. I could hear their breath, a certain rhythm almost like panting, but less desperate, more quiet.

  It takes a while for the brain to file information straight from nature. You don’t expect it. No matter how many times you go out into the woods, you don’t expect to see wild animals this close to you. At first, they loped. Then they crouched and lowered their heads, sniffing toward my sleeping friends. I should warn everyone, I thought. One coyote wouldn’t have posed too much of a threat, but three might have come up with a way to slow human population growth in their canyon. But I was not recognizing this sight as “reality.” I felt as if my dreams had seeped out of my brain and their images were pouring into my waking life: This was an illusion.

  I remained motionless. And the light of the morning changed from soft reds to a brilliant dome of blue burned through by a hot dime of white sun.

  The coyotes vanished as the day began. It was as if they knew I was on the verge of believing they were real, so they teased my tenuous grasp of reality and disappeared. Suddenly, one coyote stopped and looked up. They all stood at attention for a second, then ran. The way they ran made me certain I’d been hallucinating because I couldn’t track them. There was nothing tricky about it. They didn’t take some wild and hidden path. They just vanished. I can’t tell you where they went. If they had gone up the sides of the canyon, as I thought, why wasn’t I able to see them as they loped away? It was as if they entered the walls of the canyon, the way the dead baseball players in Field of Dreams entered the cornfields—except, better. A lot better.

  Eventually, my friends woke up, and while it was great to be outdoors, there was nothing dreamlike about the day. We ate breakfast the way river runners eat breakfast: eggs, milk, coffee, hash browns, pancakes, French toast, syrup, orange juice, tortilla chips, salsa, beans, et cetera. We didn’t scrimp. We celebrated and indulged. After all, this was nature. This was home. It would be weeks before we saw the inside of an office building or a shopping mall.

  Everyone is allowed to be in any mood they want in a place like this, and I was quiet that morning. I couldn’t shake the image of the coyotes, but for some reason, I didn’t want to tell my friends about them. I still felt like some particulate matter floating inside a monstrous creature. I don’t know why the coyotes affected me this way; they just did. I kept repeating the word lope to myself. My tongue leaned from the l into the oohh then fell softly onto the pah of the p. Lope. It sounded like coyotes to me, the way their thin legs moved, the way their paws stopped with a pah on the soft earth. Lope. Lope.

  That’s how I paddled my kayak that morning. My shoulder was loose and relaxed. My paddle tilled the water softly. The river was calm, class 2 all day. And I was a coyote. Or, more accurately, I was a human with the arrogance to believe that for a few hours before noon on that day, I moved with some sort of animal grace. Truth was, I couldn’t get their beauty out of my mind. They moved like every perfection I’d ever strived to attain. Yet they were anything but perfect. They just were.

  Like anything wild.

  After the river trip ended and I returned home to Taos, a pack of coyotes began trotting by my home at twilight. My windowsill was level with the ground, no screen attached, so the coyotes would stick their heads inside, sniff curiously, then continue into the night. My roommate would squirt them with water to scare them away, but I enjoyed their visits. When I was alone in the house, I just greeted them and wished them a prosperous hunt.

  When I landed a job in Northern California, I bid the pack and their new spring pups farewell and moved on.

  I entered another time zone upon my arrival on the West Coast. I’d picked Santa Cruz because I’d heard it was a “laid-back town.” When I lived Taos, businesses, even banks, closed on whim. If you wante
d the day off, you didn’t call in sick; you called up your fellow employees, and you all took a few days off. Customers would return another day. The weather, an ephemeral thing, was beautiful. That took precedence.

  This wasn’t the way in California. It turns out, laid-back referred to a style of dress, not a way of life. Coffee was essential to survival. Putting in fifty hours a week, I was a slacker.

  Add this to the commute. I couldn’t afford a place “close in,” so I drove forty miles to work each morning, along with thousands of other ants. The colony gathered just after dawn, and by seven, we were head-to-butt in line, gassing our cars and SUVs into the Silicon Valley, where we’d spend the day in smaller colonies working fast and hard, talking faster and harder, before returning home via the same frantic route to enjoy whatever thin slice of evening remained.

  A month of this, and I was spent. I decided to start my commute before dawn to avoid traffic. I didn’t drive fast. I sauntered. I pondered the redwoods ensconced in ocean mist making the forest look two-dimensional—black-and-white, shadowed. When the sun poured over the hills and the fog lifted, the whole place turned to a labyrinth of red spires draped with green.

  But at least once a week I overslept, skipped breakfast, slammed down coffee, jockeyed my way over the hill, and sprinted to my eight o’clock class, tests and essays flying from my briefcase and my students already in their seats awaiting my presence. My wimpish ability to adopt a California pace set my circadian rhythms to twitching like chiggers beneath my skin. I was living in a blur of a world that passed by so fast I couldn’t wrap my fingers around anything certain, and I’d grown addicted to the adrenaline rush that accompanied this pace. My car was an extension of myself, and I never thought twice about it until my car and I, speeding over Highway 17, killed a coyote.