Animal, Mineral, Radical Read online

  She was the first coyote I’d seen in California. And in the split second when I first saw her, I remembered the ghostlike grace of the pack I’d seen by the river. Though I’d seen scores of other animals in the wild, coyotes always seemed to me as if they’d risen straight out of the earth, like phantoms. But this one was not an apparition, not a hallucination. My eyes connected with hers, and there was no time to move my foot from gas pedal to brake. She emerged from behind the concrete highway divider, looked through my windshield, lost, sniffing toward me, and my car barreled into her.

  Still alive, she tumbled over the hood and into the steady stream of traffic behind me. Several other cars struck her before she landed on the shoulder of the highway. I watched this through my rearview mirror as I tried to change lanes and cut my way to the side of the road. Traffic never slowed.

  Sometimes when I tell this story, I talk about how I immediately parked my car and walked to the coyote’s side. I explain the fear I felt as I approached a wounded animal, something I’d been told was dangerous. I tell the story of how her eyes turned toward me, how I could hear her breath, fast and shallow, like small wings.

  I say, “I wondered if she was smelling me the way animals smell, the way they take in information through air, if she could smell her own death on me as I stood there, watching her die.”

  But the gap between the story I tell and what actually happened is equal to the gap between who I wanted to be and who I’d become.

  I did stop. The next morning.

  Night haunted me. All the possibilities of what I would have seen and felt if I’d watched her die and known I had killed her played like a film in my head. But the thing that got to me most was that the reason I was feeling anything at all was pure ego. This was the coyote I killed. I was on my way to work. I didn’t stop. I could have stopped. I made myself sick.

  What about the scores of coyotes—and other animals—I’d seen strewn along roadsides before? Why did it take my direct participation in a death to push me to the point of change? Why, in that moment, did I decide to move closer to my work and start riding a bicycle everywhere? Why didn’t the years of carnage I’d seen have any real effect on me?

  For weeks afterward, I felt caught. Not caught doing something wrong, but caught doing something I had not chosen to do. Peer pressure: simple as that. When I saw the spark of brown eyes framed by clumps of blondish-gray fur, the ears cocked like a quizzical pup’s, the graceful stride, the familiar lope, it was like retrieving a huge part of myself. For a split second, I remembered who I was. And then I saw myself driving fast, cutting people off, flipping that middle finger proudly, as if the marks of good character were summed up in a fast car, quick driving reflexes, and making a forty-minute drive in under thirty. So when the coyote emerged, I couldn’t stop. I killed her.

  The next morning I left before dawn. I drove slowly. When I reached the coyote’s body, I stopped. I wish I could say I was overcome with guilt, or anger, or fear. Any emotion would have been good. But I wasn’t overcome with anything. For the first time in my life I felt what it meant to be numb. It began in the marrow of my bones and radiated outward. It wasn’t that I felt nothing. I felt everything at once and everything became a wall of emptiness that separated me from who I’d planned to be.

  It took a while to find a place to live closer to work. Until then, I watched the coyote’s body decompose as I drove over the hill every morning. First it stiffened, then bloated. Then parasites and scavengers devoured her muscles, and her blond-gray fur was blown away by wind.

  When I run along the paved trails carved through City Open Space, I think of the Nacirema, a “North American group living in the territory between Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles.” They were a “culture characterized by a highly developed market economy which evolved in a rich natural habitat,”1 and “the Nacirema considered it of primary importance to completely remake the environment of the lands they occupied.”2 No natural place was sacred until it was transformed. Trees were okay, as long as they didn’t grow in their native settings. Where there was desert, the Nacirema brought in water and created lakes and models of oceans. In time, they say, the Nacirema might have sought to alter the stars and sun. They worshipped unnatural light.

  So I figure the Nacirema must have paved these Open Space trails, and I’m grateful for the little bit of nature they allow in my city. They’re wonderful for a quick jog. Mornings, I sprint past the tennis courts, picnic tables, and barbecues, then I turn eastward and travel alongside a water canal that I pretend is a natural river. Here, I’ve seen cormorants, kestrels, a variety of hawks and chickadees. The place brims with life.

  Recently, however, the houses along this stretch have begun breeding at an unreasonable rate. The oversized embryos develop each time I see them. First, there are the pine poles flagged with red surveyor’s tape, a housing developer’s announcement of estrus. Once these are up, you know the land will be fucked. Next, the wooden skeletons form, followed by the foil-covered, fatty layer of insulation. Then the hammers begin palpitating, echoing an off-beat rhythm through the empty air.

  Sometimes, to avoid watching this unrestrained propagation, I look only at my feet as I run. I concentrate on my breathing. I put on blinders.

  That’s how I was running that afternoon. There was no reason to look up. But for some reason, I did. I looked up in that way you do when you know you’re about to run into something—a pole, another person, a wild animal.

  I gasped, and that banal utterance “Oh my god” slipped through my lips. By now, I was familiar with every curve and outline of a coyote. But I didn’t expect to find one here, and I don’t think he expected to find himself here, either. It was a young male. He stood about five feet in front of me, right in the middle of the path. I didn’t know what to do. I just stared. The coyote just stared. Then he shifted his gaze from one side to the other.

  My eyes followed his. To the north, those houses were breeding like humans. To the south, the city was installing a golf course.

  I know a wild animal is wild and anything suggesting otherwise is a fairy tale. When the gates of Eden finally swung open, the animals made a firm decision. They fled, never again to befriend the creature responsible for destroying paradise. But what I saw in that animal’s eyes was not wildness, or at least, not as we’ve come to know it. I took a step toward the coyote. He didn’t move, but shifted his eyes again. Then he looked back at me and tilted his head. One of us had to move, and I think he wanted it to be him. But he didn’t know where to go.

  I’m reading all of this into the languageless space between the coyote and me, of course. But what else can explain that he compromised with me? As I passed, he sidestepped just enough to let me by. He never snarled, or even lowered his head. My heart pounded—with exhilaration? Fear? I don’t know.

  I ran backwards for a while so I could watch what he would do next. He stayed in that spot for as long as I watched. Then my path rounded a bend.

  When I returned a few minutes later, he was gone. Crusty snow blanketed a nearby ravine, and I saw his tracks, but not where they led. I didn’t want to see where they led. I wanted him to live out his life there. I hoped no one would ever find him. I hoped his small space would remain wild.

  Recently the “proliferation” of coyotes in our area has made headlines. Coyotes have been sighted on bicycle trails and walking paths. According to news sources, they’ve become a problem.

  Yesterday morning from my kitchen window I watched a pack return from their hunt. They ran across the field in a cloud of dust, then dropped behind the berm near the horse stables. The horses raised their heads and scattered for a moment, the contrails of their breath rising in the morning air. Then they went back to grazing.

  When I first moved to this neighborhood, I spoke to a woman who said she was feeding coyotes in her backyard. I suggested this might not be a good idea.

  “But they have puppies,�
�� she said. Her husband was the man who told me coyotes are “passé.”

  “We see coyotes so often now, they’re really overexposed,” he said. “The hot trend today is angels.”

  I took his statement to mean that the popular trend of nature as commodity has descended; the thing today is angels—beautiful, ethereal beings who grant quick miracles. They hover above the earth, are not born of soil, and come from a place more “heavenly” than ours.

  I try to conjure the image of an angel and a place more beautiful than earth. But I see them again, the ghostlike outlines of those graceful coyotes loping by the river where I lay perfectly naked beneath the round sky before dawn.

  THE SHIFTING LIGHT OF SHADOWS

  I’d seen ghosts of them now and then: the recently cleaned spine of a deer lying on a mountainside, bloodied ribs reaching up from the ground like fingers trying to hold on to empty air; on another day, a carcass so fresh I thought it was an injured deer lying with its head on a rock. I began walking toward it but stopped when I saw the shiny dark flask of the stomach removed and placed prominently on a nearby rock, ravens beginning to gather above it. I thought better of my approach then.

  I spent one winter tracking them as part of my job at Eldorado Canyon State Park. That’s when I learned that mountain lions crave fresh meat so much, they will not eat the predigested stench wrapped in the stomach of their kill. Cats are finicky eaters. They carry the stomach away, like an offering to the needier scavengers. I also learned to walk very upright as I tracked. I knew that bending down to, say, pick up a rock because I thought I heard a lion nearby was not a good idea. It would have turned my two legs into four, giving any nearby lion a familiar line of sight up my spine to my neck. A lion is generally stymied by the teetering, Humpty-headed stature of two-leggeds—perhaps one reason why attacks on humans are so rare.

  I always presumed I was in the presence of a lion when tracking. There are just too many cats in the foothills of Boulder, and too many signs to believe anyone ever walks alone here. Still, during those six months of steadily following cougars, I never saw even the tail of a cat as it ran away, never saw a distant lion pacing on a far-off cliff or heard one caterwauling under the shivering Colorado stars, though nearby residents said they heard lions almost every night. No doubt, lions were watching me as I searched for them with my comparatively feeble eyes. I probably looked right at a cat. But I never saw one.

  I never thought a tennis court would be the place. Imagine the “What to Do If You Encounter a Mountain Lion Here” instructions. Make yourself look big. Face the lion, and don’t turn your back. Never serve, but always volley if served to. Avoid running for the ball; this could spur the lion’s chasing instinct. Keep your eye on the ball. A lion could take direct eye contact as a full-court challenge.

  It would be pretty unlikely to see a wild cat striding across that smooth green surface where, earlier in the day, Edgar and George, vacationing from Texas, donned white shorts and Ts and ran with their creaky, sixty-year-old knees, on their spindly hairless legs, chasing bright yellow balls and calling, “Good shot, cowboy.”

  But predictability is not any big cat’s strong suit. My first sighting of the lions native to my Colorado home was on a tennis court in the Boulder foothills. I was staying in what I have come to call “my office”—a cabin I use in Chautauqua Park when I need a little extra solitude for writing. After work that night, I’d walked into town with my partner for dessert, and on the way back we were feeling good. We’d had some kind of gooey chocolate caramel ice cream thing and a split of champagne, and we were, maybe, a little bit buzzed. We were certainly oblivious, but no less so than the average person coming home, unlocking the door, and entering the house. It’s just one of those annoying human tendencies—to ignore where we are most of the time. As we rounded the corner to the cabin, though, that common obliviousness vanished. Lisa stopped talking midword and tugged my sleeve. “Look,” she said. I thought she was pointing to the silhouettes of two great horned owls sitting in the ponderosa pine. I looked up, but she tugged again, harder this time, and I looked down—and I saw it in the spotlight of the green tennis court: a mountain lion.

  I’ve seen bears in the wild before and have often mistaken them for something else on first glance. My mind, an unfortunate stranger to wild animals, clicks in and says, “Hey, that’s one huge dog, one strange-looking deer, a very fat black house cat” (the cubs).

  It was not this way with the mountain lion. It was unequivocally, distinctly, and immediately a lion.

  Even though that recognition struck me with certainty, it was hard to discern the figure of the cat. I’d spent six months looking for this creature. I had begun to believe in mountain lions the way some people believe in God. I knew they existed, but I’d given up finding anything other than circumstantial evidence. I never imagined meeting one in the flesh. Stunned, I watched the cougar cross the court, crouched, shoulder blades jutting from its back like the jagged slabs of rock it had emerged from. I guessed it was a male, weighing in at about 150 pounds of pure muscle. Even carrying all that bulk and power, it looked afraid. It looked as if it knew it was in unfriendly territory. It prowled along a decidedly precise path, as if it had a specific place to go and it regretted having to cross the tennis court to get there. It turned its head slightly from side to side as it slunk across the concrete, then leapt—all 150 pounds of it—soundlessly up onto the spectator’s ledge. It passed between two houses and emerged onto the street, caught between the headlights of a car and a group of teenagers.

  It was anything but aggressive. It hunched down and away from the headlights, like a house cat confronted with a mighty vacuum cleaner. With the car clearly in its line of travel, it had nowhere to go, so it turned and followed the teens, walked within ten or fifteen yards of them, and the second it saw an escape route, it vanished. I didn’t see its escape route. Simply, the cat was there, and then it wasn’t. My eyes couldn’t follow it. No sign of it remained in its wake.

  I wish I could say I walked quietly back to my cabin, let the whole event sink in as I sat by the fire, contemplating the animal’s beauty. I didn’t do anything as cool and enlightened as that. Instead, I celebrated like a fool. I had finally caught sight of something I’d been looking for for years, something sublime. I was exuberant. I called out to the kids, “Hey, did you know there was a mountain lion right behind you a second ago?”

  A boy looked over his shoulder. “What?”

  “A mountain lion!”

  The whole gang glanced back at me nonchalantly. Then they burst out laughing. “Right,” one of them said. One of them started imitating a mountain lion; then he stood up and they all laughed and went on about their nighttime carousing. It was as if they couldn’t fathom that something wild had been that close to them.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I woke every hour or so, looked out to the tennis court. When I did sleep, I dreamed of the lion over and over. In my dreams, it was less shadowy, more familiar. It seemed at home there, in my sleeping brain, where all sorts of impossibilities become real, even though the reality of them vanishes in the light of day.

  I spent a few years studying at the C. G. Jung Institute of Colorado in Denver. In Jung’s theory of dreams, the deeper, most complex layer of consciousness is the collective unconscious. The images it holds (archetypes) are, theoretically, common to us all. According to Jung, a particularly powerful dream probably has roots in the collective unconscious. In its logical extreme, the collective unconscious is not bound by time nor limited to humans. It suggests that we are all one—a notion that in Jung’s day had not been diluted by pop culture and New Age thought as it is today. It changed the course of psychological inquiry. Dreams, Jung said, are the doorway to the personal and the collective unconscious, and the degree to which we achieve individuation (which is not as much about becoming an “individual” as it is about becoming whole) is equal to the degree to which we integrate the unconscious.

  The cat came
to me like a dream, like a door to another world, a world so foreign and distant that I stumbled over the threshold of it; a world so familiar and integral to who I am, maybe to who we all are, that I longed for it. It was not a sentimental longing. It felt like the recognition of something necessary, not of a romantic accouterment.

  One of the most well-known of Jung’s archetypes is the Shadow. It is often misinterpreted as solely the negative side of the Self: the potential for each and every one of us to be everything that we fear in others, from self-absorbed and snotty, to liars and thieves, even murderers. And while all that unsavory stuff is true about the Shadow, the Shadow also holds within it all our internal repressed fears that are positive: the part of us that may be afraid of success, or of being loved, or of losing our temper. Or of the very daunting possibility of becoming whole.

  It seems more than coincidental that the mountain lion is often called the Shadow Cat. It is nocturnal. It shows itself when most of the people in the houses near its territory are dreaming. To ranchers and owners of livestock, it is sometimes viewed as a thief. Cats are often portrayed as mysterious, not to be trusted. Even more often, they are seen as killers, and it is becoming more and more likely that because of this, they will be killed (and we, the killers).

  It’s the most natural response one has when confronted with the archetype of the Shadow. Mountain lions embody what we fear and despise about ourselves, and we seek to eradicate it. We view it as other—unwanted and unnecessary.

  But eradicating the Shadow, rather than integrating it, would mean a breakdown of the personality. And eradicating the mountain lion from the wilderness would cause a breakdown of what remains of that wilderness, to say nothing of the effects it would have, consciously or unconsciously, on the human psyche. (Psyche, in Greek, means soul.) Annihilate all that you hate and fear, and it takes with it all that you love and desire.