When Jason suggested the musky odor could have been that of a mountain lion, I understood the hot bolt of “fight-or-flight” that had risen from gut to throat to brain when the smell hit my nostrils. Something in me knew we didn’t belong in these dark woods. We were outmatched – under surveillance by things we could not see. As we bumped and skidded away from Cedar Springs down a dark gravel road, I found myself returning to a thought that had struck me a week earlier, when we spent an afternoon hiking in the mountains near Cloudcroft, New Mexico: what draws us into the wild, and into such dangerous proximity to animals powerful enough to rip us apart?
You get to watch creatures behave based on intricate patterns built mysteriously into the fabric of their being – patterns based on survival, knowledge of the seasons, knowledge of which resources become available at each time of the year, knowledge of their place in the tapestry of nature. While desire plays a tremendous role in animal behavior, it is of such a different nature than the desire with which we have become consumed. While displays of power play just as much of a role in the animal kingdom as they do in the human world, among wild animals these displays seem to have much more to do with a measured and very immediate sense of survival than they do with unchecked greed and total domination.
When you spend thirty minutes near a river’s edge in rapt attention while a small grey bird performs an intricate dance comprised of hovering in the air and then diving – again and again – after flying insects, while thrashing his wings madly about, your mind’s framework shifts from one consumed by self-consciousness and external concerns, to a terrain defined by wonder at the intricacies of this creature’s instinctive behavior. These moments draw me into an encounter with art and with beauty – namely, the artfulness of nature and its many creatures, and the beauty of their bodies, behaviors, and built-in wisdom. A bird like this little grey fellow at the water’s edge need not perform such an intricate dance in order to consume insects. And yet, this hovering, fluttering and diving are his ritual. They are the dance he was designed to do, as if by some daring choreographer.
And so even though I have not fully articulated it here, I think I understand why we long to draw close to the wilderness, even though we are not adapted to it, and even when drawing near to it means putting ourselves potentially in harm’s way. An increasing majority of humans across the globe live deeply entrenched within a machine-made, chemical-laden, disposable “goods”-ridden world designed and fabricated by man. We live imprisoned, to some extent, by the stuff we are conditioned to endlessly acquire, and by our relationship to a virtual reality of screens that has become as intimate to our moment-to-moment experience as are our breathing and engagement with our immediate physical environments. Further, our obsession with staging and capturing our own image and identity and presenting it back to each other in highly manipulated and deeply self-conscious ways has become such a fundamental part of our consciousness, that stepping outside of this framework has grown nearly impossible. On rare occasions, particularly in moments of crisis and profound transition, we are shocked out of this self-conscious, acquisitive, deeply anxious frame of mind. In such moments, we often long for a compass or a plumb-line to point us towards what is true beyond the machinations and dramas of 21st Century man in the era of Global Capitalism. In such moments, many of us turn toward nature.
While “nature” is a necessarily complicated word, I am speaking of any plant or animal or Earthly environment or substance that operates based on natural laws, processes, or instincts – ones that are neither designed nor manipulated by man. For many of us, the “nature” we are most apt to encounter exists at the interface of man and wilderness, in a transitional zone where man’s impact on nature is incontrovertible. In this sense, there are degrees of “nature”, degrees of “wild”, and in even the most diluted of these – such as one’s back yard – there is still wilderness ripe for encounter. Many of us look to these encounters with the “wild” and the “natural” in order to restore our senses, and, in order to restore our sense of what is most essential in Life. We draw close to nature out of an instinctive sense of overwhelm, out of hyper-saturation with worldly things, and out of a desire to recalibrate our own lives based on something saner and more sustainable than relentless desire and pathological self-consciousness.
My recent encounters with javelinas, Barbary sheep, deer, antelope, elk, osprey, and coyote continue to inspire reverence and wonder. I imagined javelinas, wild members of the pig family, would be aggressive. In fact, the mom and two babies we encountered ran from our sound, across a gulch and off into the opposing hillside. The small group of elk we glimpsed from a distance at the top of a mountain kept us in their watch, while keeping a deliberate distance from us. You could tell which member of the group was the "lookout", dutifully locking us in her stare while the others grazed in peace. The coyote we heard howling just after sunset on a hike in some nearby sand dunes was close enough to threaten us, but had no interest in us; rather, he was calling out to his friends. We were mesmerized by his high-pitched, bellowing call. Standing beneath a black sky peppered with stars, listening to the coyote's song while trying to make out his silhouette among the cacti and mesquite bushes, I had the same feeling I get when I set foot in a cathedral. I could have spent hours there, in communion with the cool, pitch-black desert and coyote's beautiful call.
My ongoing encounters with birds in the state of New Mexico continue to delight and fascinate me. The neurotic, business-minded roadrunner stands out in this crowd. Most of my encounters with this bird have involved her darting out from the brush in front of my car, crossing the road rapidly with her neck outstretched and head low to the ground for maximum "aerodynamism." (She is not unlike her cartoon counterpart, only smaller than portrayed by Warner Brothers.) I read that this bird has such a high metabolism and is in such constant need of food that she is known to kill and partially ingest a snake (a slow process), and then run around the desert floor in pursuit of more food, prey dangling from her beak! Think of her as a master of efficiency - or as a high-strung hoarder.
The interface of prairie and desert along the only water source for miles at Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge draws an extraordinary array of migrating birds to this region - most notably, the Sandhill crane. The Pecos and Black Rivers in the Carlsbad area sustain a lively bird population, as well, in spite of the dearth of water and food in large swaths of the surrounding desert landscape. I have attempted to make a list of the staggering array of birds I have encountered in New Mexico: Sandhill cranes, osprey, roadrunners, turkey, quail, hawks, buzzards, pelicans, herons, egrets, cormorants, mallards, coots, sandpipers, killdeer, cowbirds, ravens, shrikes, woodpeckers, sapsuckers, nuthatches, vermilion flycatchers, red-winged blackbirds, warblers, cliff swallows, Western bluebirds, Steller’s jays, sparrows, house finches, and white-winged doves, to name a few. For years, I have looked to birds, in particular, for life-lessons on resourcefulness, on striking a balance between agility and vulnerability, and on the virtues of grace and perseverance.