Читать книгу Howl - Susan Imhoff Bird - Страница 11
ОглавлениеIce recedes at the river. Days grow longer. Sophie gives birth to two pups in her scooped and sculpted earthen hollow. Soon one no longer breathes. She digs a hole. She buries her pup. It will not be eaten by other predators. Another male wolf joins their small pack; they are now four.
Ice builds again, then retreats. Sophie gives birth to six pups—three male, three female—and the pack explodes to ten. A small gray-brown male searches the den, sniffing, pawing, yellow eyes gleaming. Green grasses grow tall, shadows short. Yellow Eyes follows the breezes, a hare’s musky scent, nose in the air then to the ground. A spotted snake stops him, hissing, snapping. He jumps and runs back home. The days lengthen. Yellow Eyes trails a red fox kit, a ground squirrel. A magpie crashes through branches, wind sends leaves tumbling. Nose twitching, he runs, captivated, a hundred different scents competing for his attention. His mother’s howl sings in the distance. He turns, the sound guiding him home.
The Tetons hold snow like treasure, buried under overhangs, beneath trees, in shadowed gullies. Sheer cliff faces are cold, gray stone. Some drip black with snowmelt. Jagged edges slice the air and mirror what within me is rough, defiant. We’re suspended eleven thousand feet above sea level, and the highest crags thrust another thousand feet into the sky. Jackson lies a vertical mile below the belly of our plane. Mark speaks into his headset and Kirsten responds, a muffled blur of sound. I cannot speak, a bubble of awe in my throat. The three main peaks of the Grand Tetons—Grand Teton, Mount Owen, and Teewinot—are the loudest of the range. Its other voices are no less resonant, though, and as we float, I see the sinew connecting them, the vales, the ridges of bone. The discordance gives rise to harmony, and I want to remain here, in this air, beside this massive disruption of earth.
Two hours later the wheels of the Piper Cherokee touch the Salt Lake City runway, and we chug to a stop by the hangar. We unload, pack everything into the back of Mark’s wagon, and slide my bike on top of it all. I’m headed home.
There are two in there, she says. I immediately accept this, as if I’d known these past four months that I’m carrying twins. It’s February, 1991. Bob leaps up in delight, dances around the darkened ultrasound lab. The technician moves her wand, clicks the mouse, measures, labels. You can clean off your tummy, she says, I’m all done. Bob hugs me and helps me sit; he’s glowing. I feel a bit larger than I did before.
They’re identical, and one is just a smidgen smaller than the other. Unusual in identicals, but not worrisome. They’ll keep an eye on it, and compare the discrepancy with next month’s ultrasound. I christen the big one Hoss, the smaller, Little Joe. I loved Bonanza.
The size disparity increases over the next two ultrasounds, but by the time I’m asked to come in for a test, Little Joe’s heartbeat is gone. He’d kicked the night before, perhaps performing his final somersault. The following day my body begins laboring, and at just shy of thirty-two weeks, my twin boys are born. Hoss is whisked to the ICU while I hold Little Joe. He is tiny, a few ounces over three pounds. He is dusky, no oxygen to blush his skin. His eyes, behind closed lids, must be blue, like Jake’s. I cradle him against me, tears flow. The obstetrician flicks her needle back and forth, repairing my skin, and, when she’s done, touches my knee. Tells me the nurse will take Little Joe when I’m ready. Ten minutes, twenty. I eventually release him to Bob, who hands him to a nurse, who carries him to the bowels of the hospital where his small, human form will be collected by the mortuary. We name Hoss, Jake, and name Little Joe, Joseph: he was going to be Andrew, but we’ve only ever known him as Little Joe.
I’d been in labor all night, and delivered the boys at nine on a gray, rainy morning. The loss, the death, the shock took my voice, took everything I thought I knew about myself and smashed it into pieces, then scattered them throughout the universe, laughing, daring me to find and collect them, to glue them back into a mosaic that might possibly, in small ways, resemble the me I used to be. Pieces float out of reach. Trust. Control. Lightheartedness. Wild abandon. Even today I continue to find small pieces of myself in unexpected places: dancing on a lake surface, looking suspiciously like moonlight. In the flick of a mule deer’s ear. In the eyes of my friend whose wife is gradually, almost imperceptibly, being paralyzed by ALS. I add these back, I fill in. I can live with a shattered heart. Like Doug’s wolves, I, too, can run with a broken leg.
Four days after the delivery, we stood in the cemetery, the winter-matted grass still dotted with snow. Family, the closest of friends, two dozen of us staring at Little Joe’s grave. Bob handed a white rose to each while I stood in a summer dress, arms wrapped around myself. Then we climbed into our car, and drove back to the hospital.
I return home from our Yellowstone and Montana trip the second Saturday in June. I drag my bags into the house I love, put my bicycle in the garage, leave the garage door open. Daniel and I hug hello, exchange a kiss. I look into his amber eyes, see a reflection of myself—wary, self-protective. I go to our room and change into biking clothes. He sits on a stool, in the kitchen. “Do you want to come?” I ask. “I need to head up Emigration.”
“No, thanks,” he says. “I’ve already been out, rode a little this morning.”
Transitions are difficult for me. This time I arrived home filled with longing for a closer connection to the land, to my earth goddess self. I’d spent a week away from everything I knew, and found that I was more comfortable in those foreign spaces than I was in my own home. My den. My disrupted den. I needed to visit my canyon.
Early in my first marriage I learned to decompress, alone, for ten or fifteen minutes after coming home from work. I was a buyer for Nordstrom, a position, it was said, that ate people like me for lunch. The more cutthroat you were, the more often you were promoted. I had climbed up the food chain by working an associate attorney’s hours, by always saying yes, and by learning to ignore pain and disappointment. I carried our medical insurance. It was less expensive than what Bob—a financial analyst—could provide. The coverage was excellent. It covered most bills from my pregnancy, even from the operating room delivery. And when the newborn ICU bills started flowing in, I used a notebook to track what they allowed, what they paid, and what I owed. Neat lines tracked the dollars and cents, columns representing needle sticks, blood draws, monitoring machines, nursing care, assessments from neonatologists, ophthalmologists, pulmonologists, gastroenterologists. The warming table, the incubator. And to keep this insurance, I would keep working. Jake had a preexisting condition, and Bob’s company medical policy would not insure him. After my leave, I would head back to my job to keep our family covered. I’d hire a nanny, someone to care for Jake while I was gone.
At the time, I didn’t know much about wolf behavior, that the breeding female of a wolf pack is known as the alpha, and that it is often the alpha female who directs the activities of the pack. It is she who chooses her mate and searches the landscape to find the right location for her den, then grows and gives birth to the next generation of hunters. As soon as she has recovered from delivery, she leaves her pups behind with uncles, older siblings, sometimes even the alpha male, while she hunts the rabbits, the elk, the bison, the moose, that will feed her pack. I’m hardly the only mother to head off to work.
The Inuit are one of many indigenous populations who rely on an oral history to teach new generations about the past. One of their folk tales is beautifully illustrated in Tim Jessell’s Amorak. In a fable of the beginning of the world, the Great Spirit tells the first woman to cut a large hole into the ice of the land. She does, and out of this hole come the animals, one after another, the bears and the seals, the snowy owl and the wolverine, the arctic hare, the red fox and the arctic fox, the lynx and the great auk, and lastly, the caribou. The Great Spirit tells the woman that of all the creatures the caribou is the most valuable, for it will be the animal to provide sustenance and warmth for the people of the land. And this grows to be true, as the caribou population flourishes. The children of the first woman hunt the caribou, obtaining meat to eat and skins to be made into clothing and coverings. The children hunt the biggest and best of the caribou, leaving the ill, the elderly, the small. And soon, the caribou population weakens, with the small producing more small caribou and the weak and ill creating more weakness and illness. One night the first woman asks the Great Spirit what they might do to return the caribou to health so that good meat and skins might again bless them. The Great Spirit tells the woman to return to the ice, to the hole she had made, where she will receive the answer. When she returns to that spot, she sees a great and beautiful animal coming from the hole; it is the wolf, amorak. Here, says the Great Spirit, is the animal who will hunt the caribou, taking the ill, the small, the weak. The wolf will keep the caribou healthy so that you and your children will again benefit from what they can give you. And thus the wolf ranges the land, raising pups and teaching them their role in keeping the caribou herd strong, playing their part in the way of the world.
This fable provides insight into the connectedness of the natural world, and suggests that humans may not always possess the innate wisdom they imagine. We are of the earth, but our tendency to overuse and destroy is so robust it overpowers our knowledge of that oneness. Instead of killing only enough buffalo to feed us, and letting them repopulate to feed us again, we shoot them to near extinction. We dam rivers, impeding or blocking salmon migration and decreasing spawning grounds, until events like the Klamath River fish kill of 2002 occur—sixty-five thousand dead adult salmon. We allow domestic cattle to trample streambeds, destroying habitat and food for uncountable wildlife populations. Wisdom about living on the land comes from time spent listening to, watching, and learning from the landscape. Sage advice comes from indigenous peoples, and is found even in fable and myth. Scientists propose action based on data collection, research outcomes. Philosophers consider morality, the ethics of behavior. My greatest strength as a human being is the ability to listen to all of these—the sage, the scientist, the philosopher—and to change my behavior when I learn that I should. To commune with the earth, to return to the hole in the ice, to welcome a new ally.
In 1982, The Talking Heads recorded a song called “This Must Be the Place.” Not a hit at the time of release, it has since grown in popularity, now covered by a handful of other bands and a staple on classic alternative rock playlists. An anything-but-typical love song, it has one particular line that hooks me: home, is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there. This line speaks two truths: home as a craving, and paradoxically, home as something that can be found anywhere. Home to me is sanctuary, the two words synonymous, and I am a ruthless protector of this space. In my sanctuary love is the foundation. Peace reigns. And expressed moments of frustration are accepted and forgiven. While most Americans reside in just a handful of homes during his or her lifetime, I am on my nineteenth. Dorm room, squished apartment, sprawling rambler on a hillside. What makes home home for me are soft places to curl up and read, private spaces and, ideally, nooks and crannies where surprises hide: a stack of themed books, a clock made of bicycle parts. Table and floor lamps. Framed family photographs perched in bookshelves and on tables and on dressers and on a wall or two or five. Books, everywhere, neatly aligned or haphazardly stacked, and rugs, soft and thick. Home has a strong roof and locking doors and windows that raise and lower to capture breezes and keep out rain and bitter cold. Home is safe for feelings and thoughts, and safe for its accoutrements and occupants. It is a place for respite, for rest, for eating. For nurturing, loving, creating, working, playing, sharing, being. Home expands outward to the yard with its flowers, trees and grasses, and the neighborhood. Home spreads up the hill and down the street and on a day when the sky is heavy with clouds, rain falls, and a rainbow pokes from hillside to distant valley, the entire city is home and my heart expands to encompass it all.
The deer, the elk, the beaver, squirrel, and coyote—all creatures have their own versions of home. Tunnels in the ground that open into dens, or acres of wildness. Aldo Leopold wrote—which strikes me in the heart—that wilderness areas are a series of sanctuaries. Sanctuaries, places of the natural world, places of peace and growth. However, the greatest difference between the homes of wildlife and those of humans is in their level of safety. The deer has no lock, the elk has no walls. Wildlife is constantly threatened by predators, humans near the top of that list. We are constantly intruding and encroaching upon traditional homes that belong to wildlife, forcing these creatures to live in increasingly smaller areas. We take, we confine. We call it hunting, we call it managing, we call it manifest destiny. We consider it ours. And as the human population continues to grow we expand further and further into land that is something else’s home.
Wolves live in family groups that stake and mark their territory, and they vigorously defend their land. Yellowstone research shows that most adult wolf deaths in the park are attributed to territorial disputes. However, two- and three-year-old wolves frequently disperse, leaving the pack to find a mate and establish his or her own family. Wolves are fabulous long distance travelers. Migrating wolves face challenges in the Western states because current law protects them in some areas but not others. Even Yellowstone Park wolves, during hunting season, are unprotected once they step outside park boundaries.
A movement afoot recognizes the challenge that humans and wildlife face living together on this planet. The Spine of the Continent Initiative, envisioned by Michael Soulé and supported by scores of other scientists and conservationists across North America, seeks to establish landscape connectivity and migratory corridors throughout our continent, allowing those creatures who migrate north and south to safely navigate their journeys, while also allowing wildlife to flow between our currently separated national parks, wildlife refuges, and other such areas. Without connected corridors, populations can become isolated and diminished, putting them genetically at risk. Imagine expanding our wilderness areas so that in corners and strips and stretches they touch each other, allowing wildlife safe, continuous passage from one area to another. Mary Ellen Hannibal, in The Spine of the Continent, explores the story of the pronghorn antelope of Wyoming, showing how multi-generational migratory patterns dictate a herd’s activity, and how man’s activity can affect these patterns. A narrow road that bisects a migratory path can wreak havoc with a herd’s journey, as can fences, because pronghorns, while capable of jumping, will not jump over a fence, preferring to slither underneath if there is enough of an opening. If there isn’t enough slithering room, they will often turn away from their path and that fence, and change a migratory pattern. What the pronghorn have done for thousands of years can be undone by a few strands of tightly strung barbed wire.
To establish a safe migration corridor for the pronghorns, two biologists rallied agencies with jurisdiction over the herd’s territories—from the Bridger-Teton National Forest and the Grand Teton National Forest to Wyoming Fish and Game and the National Elk Refuge to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the BLM—and private property owners, as well. The result is a protected pathway for this herd to travel, one free of fences and traffic. Spine of the Continent supporters want to expand this type of effort across the continent. The swath of creature-safe migratory pathways ideally extends from northernmost Canada, through the United States and down into Mexico, following the ridges of five thousand miles of the Rocky Mountains. This contiguous corridor will require hundreds of negotiations to finance and establish wildlife rights-of-way easements, passage over or under freeways, and other innovations in order to succeed. A long, connected path of wilderness protected from automobiles, guns, fences, and other human hazards, this stretch of land will enable safe migration and intermingling for hundreds of species, millions of animals, albeit one fenceless parcel or wildlife overpass at a time.
Yellowstone and other rigidly protected areas become anchors with “overlapping zones of various protection regimes and conservation goals radiating out from them, like petals from the center of a rose,” as Emma Marris describes in Rambunctious Garden. As humans move further and further into places once remote and difficult to reach, what we consider natural areas tend to contract, able to support fewer and fewer individuals within a species. Since they require greater ranges, large species populations first decrease, then possibly disappear from the area. But many small species will disappear from these diminished natural areas, too, because a difficult year—one of drought, sickness, pestilence—can wipe out an entire, reduced, population. By protecting wildlife in these connected zones, we increase the chances that species will become neither endangered nor extinct.
The Endangered Species Act itself speaks to the need to protect more than just a specific fish, plant, or creature. Its purpose is “to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved, and to provide a program for the conservation of such endangered species and threatened species.” The ESA makes explicit that the ecosystem underlies the existence of the individual. To protect the creature, its habitat must be conserved. As federal judge Beryl Howell wrote in her December 2014 decision regarding the continuing protection of gray wolves in the western Great Lakes, the ESA “reflects the commitment by the United States to act as a responsible steward of the Earth’s wildlife, even when such stewardship is inconvenient or difficult for the localities where an endangered or threatened species resides.”
For wolves, the expanded protection of wildlife corridors will allow for increased interaction between packs, which supports creation of new packs and fosters genetic strength. Although a female wolf will typically not breed with her father, other inbreeding occurs when populations are limited, leading to situations similar to that currently happening on Isle Royale in northern Michigan where, because of the island’s inaccessibility, the wolf population is weakened and likely to eventually die out due to lack of diversity. The larger wildlife landscapes of the Spine of the Continent initiative allow for healthier wildlife populations, protecting creatures from genetic demise.
A challenge in promoting connectivity projects such as the Spine of the Continent lies in their use of mapping, however, since maps draw targets by showing areas of potential change, areas presently inhabited by human beings. Viewed as threats to wildlife, people who live in targeted places on these maps are sometimes considered liabilities. Few want to be seen that way, or worse, asked to leave. Those who live and earn their livelihood in places mapped as potential migratory routes are understandably concerned and even angered. Tensions mount over this issue, and discussions of wildlife corridors can quickly become contentious. I sit for a few minutes to slip on the moccasins of those landowners and imagine their world. I find giving up my home and lifestyle for pronghorns and grizzlies a difficult thing to swallow.
Wolves, to retain genetic diversity and healthy social structures, require space to roam. While the typical territory of a wolf pack is approximately ten square miles, wolves can cover up to a hundred miles in a day. A GPS radio-collared wolf, known as OR7, has been tracked moving from his pack in northeast Oregon to California and back. He left Oregon in 2011, and traveled over three thousand miles in three years. He’s been nicknamed Journey. Echo, the wolf sighted on the north rim of the Grand Canyon in late 2014, had been collared near Cody, Wyoming, more than four hundred miles away. Though many young adult wolves disperse to begin new packs, the rest remain loyal to their pack and its territory. Those wolves typically roam, then return home. However, when wolves currently protected within national park borders travel outside of those boundaries during hunting season, they are vulnerable to hunters. Radio-collared wolves that are part of long-term research studies within these national parks have been killed while outside park borders, whether two or twenty miles beyond that safety line. The Spine of the Continent plan proposes to reduce the likelihood of such shootings by providing protected space around and between parks, allowing for the natural movement of mountain lions, wolves, and grizzly bears. Enlarging and connecting wilderness allows increased range for animals that have an innate need for space.
My family moved out west when I was eleven, my dad eager to get back to big land where he could ski mountains instead of valleys. The home my parents chose was in an offbeat sub-division at the top of a mountain pass fifteen miles east of Salt Lake City, where not everyone had water rights, but most had garages right next to the road. Snow fell deep and often. Our first year, it snowed September first and June first and on a regular basis in between. The house came with a snowplow, which my dad quickly upgraded, plowing our massive driveway storm after storm. That first winter he began making plans to build an addition that would place a new garage within ten feet of the road, not the thirty-plus where the existing garage currently sat.
Our low-slung, split-level, wood-sided house sat on the western ridge of the development, the back windows looking out over miles and miles of watershed, never to be built upon. Our front windows, facing east, were huge, offering panoramic views of sparsely populated valley down below through which Interstate 80 wove and further beyond, ridge after ridge of majestic peaks of the Uinta range, sixty miles distant. I had no idea skies could be so huge, that I could live on a mountain, that mountains could rim the edges of my world.
A few houses lined the road north of us, and to our south lay an expanse of sagebrush and bare dry earth, the only other houses so encased by pines and bends of the road that only a portion of roof top and the occasional glint of metal gutter were visible. Isolated from city life, even country village life, we were twenty minutes—in good weather—from a grocery store, schools, work, any kind of extra-curricular activity. A gas station and café sat at the interstate exit, one mile and two big hills below my house, and early on I learned that a quick bike ride down to buy a candy bar resulted in a twenty-five minute walk and push back home. My friends were ten- and fifteen-minute walks away, and though a few houses perched in between, most of what I walked past was sagebrush, oak, aspen, and wild native grasses. Grasshoppers clacked and flew past, a dragonfly might magically float along beside me for dreamlike moments. The soil was gray and rocky at the edge of the road. We had moved to something called high desert which was arid and parched when it wasn’t arid and covered with snow and ice.
We owned the sky above us in every direction, the air almost always clear and clean, the blue cloudless. I quickly learned the magic of Utah winters: snowstorms blanketing the land, wind whipping snow drifts to heights above my head, the world nothing but a blizzard of white, and then the clouds pass, breaking apart and away, and the skies turn blue as the sun sparkles and bounces from surface to surface, simultaneously blinding and thrilling the eye.
Here I learned the basics of conservation. Take what you need, and utilize well what you take. Never waste water: it is precious. Don’t use lights unless you need them, and always turn them off when you’re done. Plan ahead and consolidate your errand, work, and school trips. Make use of what you have, and be thoughtful with the earth’s resources. Arid land is fragile, wildlife wondrous and to be respected. Today’s snow is next spring’s wildflower and next summer’s drinking water. We are visitors, guests, stewards of the earth supporting and surrounding us. Act accordingly.
Stewardship is a concept espoused by most who work the land, by conservationists, by hikers and rock climbers and explorers, by those who run rivers and guide people on outdoor expeditions for a living. Experiencing changes over time brings home the effect we have on the land, and this effect is magnified in drier, western environments. Cryptobiotic soil illustrates the importance of understanding the landscape. It looks like a dark patch on sandy soil, but is actually alive. Made of lichens, algae, fungi, mosses and cyanobacteria, it not only helps retain moisture, but also stabilizes the dirt and sand, and plays a role in nitrogen fixation. One errant footstep destroys what may take from years to a century to re-form. Step here, don’t step there.
New discoveries blossom daily. When I’m introduced to a better way to grow vegetables, cut an onion, pedal my bike, I adopt new behaviors and become more efficient. More effective. When I learn that wild animals are at risk because of roads, fences, hunting licenses, or legislative actions, I want to change our rules and practices. But as a society, we move sluggishly. The fight for women’s right to vote began in the United States in the 1840s; the nineteenth amendment, establishing this right, was passed in 1920. In the mid-nineteenth century, sepsis—infection—killed almost half of all surgical patients. When surgeon Joseph Lister realized that infection seeps into patients via germs, he identified chemicals and processes to kill those germs. While he proved that germ-destroying cleansing of hands, tools, and wounds prevented sepsis and saved lives, his observations were greatly ignored, and a generation passed before Lister’s recommendations became routine. With their adoption, the practice of medicine changed. Both brilliant and wise, Max Planck once said that scientific truth doesn’t convert its opponents by being true, but instead becomes accepted when the naysayers finally die and the next generation grows up accustomed to it. Over time we’ve learned to build more structurally sound buildings, install smoke detectors, get rid of lead paint and asbestos. We have taken better care of ourselves. We’ve made our bodies and homes safer. Life expectancy has increased.
But we haven’t done as well for our environment. We’ve sliced away at wilderness, and let former ranch and wildlands be sold to developers. The Keep America Beautiful campaign began in 1953, and anti-littering laws exist in all states—in some, for longer than forty years. Yet people continue to litter. Cigarette butts are the most commonly littered item in the world: over 4.5 trillion butts are tossed out car windows, thrown on sidewalks and streets, ground into the soil of hiking trails. Each takes from four to five hundred years to completely break down. We take for granted our hills and canyons, our lakes and streams, and the soil of our farmland. We have been reluctant to respond to the promise of a warmer earth. We roll our eyes at environmentalists. But reality is that we share a single environment with every other being on this planet. Our collective homes form one huge, interconnected home. Risk to one is, essentially, risk to all.
As residents of this common environment, we are vulnerable to nature’s whims as well as to changes imposed by humanity. We have homes, rarely inviolate, but protected, sheltered, as best possible. Wild creatures are constricted to nests or dens only when they are newly born, giving birth or nursing. Once weaned, they explore trees and grasslands, hills and furrows and streams, expanding home outward. Knowing nothing of artificial boundaries imposed by humans until we enter their space and erect fences and buildings or draw lines on paper and state on this side of the line they are safe, on the other side, they may be shot.
