Ecology of Residency 2006 by College of Humanities

the ecology of residency essays from

The Murie Center Moose, Wyoming

June 2006

the ecology of residency essays from The Murie Center Moose, Wyoming

June 2006

For our teachers Teresa Cohn Linda Baker Ted Major Louisa Wilcox Doug Honnold Jolene Catron Jack Turner Florence Shepard Lyn Dalebout Ed Riddell Lee Carlman Riddell Charlie Craighead Franz Caminzend Dan Olson Felica Resor Bob Greenspan Joy Castro Nicholas Daniels Cerae Sellers Brooke Williams ...and the Murie legacy with special gratitude to the granite peaks, the Snake River, moose, elk, deer, coyote, osprey, red-tail haws, pine siskins, the continuing trill of ruby-crowned kinglets and fields of blue flax, sage, calypso orchids and lodgepole pines.

Table of Contents foreword

Terry Tempest Williams

the birds

the essays

Great Little Orange Dot Ascends the Mountain. Great Little Orange Dot Is the Mountain. Great Little Orange Dot Descends the Mountain. Catherine Ashton

Of Water, Wanting Wings Leigh Bernacchi

Notes Against Serotiny Joy Castro Wilding Nature,Wilding Language: In Wildness is the Preservation of the Word Robert DeBirk

My wilderness has wheels and a garden. Cecily Ellis

A Natural Autobiography Wade Finlinson

Roots That Run To Water: A Natural Autobiography Paul Grindrod

The Ontogeny of this Antochthonic Citizen Jeff Jopling

Guilt Trip Koshlan Mayer-Blackwell

The Domino Effect Rory Norseth

Wasting Zion Jared Richmond

Breathing Between the Bolts: A Natural Autobiography Katherine E. Standefer

FOREWORD It began with a lightning bold. We were gathered in the Murie home, candles lit, a fire burning, with a dozen students listening to one another describing who they were and why they chose to come to the Tetons to explore an “ecology of residency.” All at once, ka-boom! Thunder so loud our hearts stopped. A flash of light illuminated the meadow and we thought the house had been struck by lightening. Instinctively we ran outside. It was twilight. The Tetons were glowing. No fire was found, only a charged atmosphere with a redirected energy we would carry with us throughout the week. ‘A strike moment’ – this is the phrase that enters my mind as I look back to the second “Ecology of Residency” course held at the Murie Center from June 2 – June 11, 2006. Twelve extraordinary students created a community of inquiry. Together we walked Olaus Murie’s path “around the world,” a trail of teachings delivered by lodgepole pines, calypso orchids, coralroot orchids, Indian Paintbrush, lupine, sage, and willow. We stopped at reflective ponds and witnessed a peregrine falcon darting between two red-tail hawks. We caught the scent of elk, sensing the season of birth. We sat on the banks of the Snake River in high water and experienced the rush of the melting snowpack. A tiny frog sate with us as we spoke of maps.

We were graced by mentors. Ted Major, the director emeritus of the Teton Science School, took us to Leigh Lake. He is an elder, 86 years old and a friend of the Muries. He spoke of the power of Engagement and the conversation that must always exist between Conservation and biology. Doug Honnold, an attorney for Earth Justice who has defended some of the most significant environmental cases of our day from wolf reintroduction to roadless areas. His wife, Louisa Wilcox, one of the great activist in the conservation movement now working for the Natural Resources Defense Council, spoke to the students about grizzly bears, the Endangered Species Act and the legal battles facing the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem today. Lyn Dalebout, Charlie Craighead, and Edward Riddell celebrated the importance of art and the humanities through poetry, history, and photography. Lyn introduced the idea of vigor to the group, a more organic and vital state of mind than rigor. The students contemplated water with Teresa Cohn and how we map the world form songlines to traplines, from topography to spiritual telepathy. Suddenly boundaries and borders that had always seemed fixed became fluid. We became immersed in the “Abstract Wild” with writer Jack Turner. Philosophy became a form of pedagogy, as he challenged, provoked and inspired the students to think on a deeper level. Issues of surveillance in the national parks were discussed, alongside ecological ethics. Florence Shepard, a scholar and wife of ecophilosopher Paul Shepard, discussed his work, “Nature and Madness” with students. Suddenly, the Murie Ranch became a storied landscape where our development as human beings is seen as a shared evolution with animals. Jenny Lake. Hidden Falls. Cascade Canyon. They walked with these ideas, in silence and in conversation. Each student found their own pace, their own questions, and their own focus of inquiry. This was a highly intellectual group with a hunger for engagement. Rarely, have I seen a group of students with such stamina, such curiosity and an insistence on pursing what is difficult, not easy. They not only wanted to know how to think

about our relationship to the Earth, but how they could make a difference in the world, both individually and collectively. Mardy Murie, one of America’s great conservationists, often referred to as “the grandmother of the environmental movement,” felt passionately about place-based education. She said, “We are all whirling with the Earth together. Reaching out to the young generation coming along is one of the most important tasks of organizations. I am not saying that these young ones are all going to be national leaders, I am saying that I am sure that wherever they are, they will be alert citizens ready to take responsibility in their own communities, sensitive to what is happening on the planet.” Mardy Murie has articulated what I believe to be the heart of Environmental Humanities – to be responsive and responsible to our communities, to be sensitive and empathetic to “what is happening on the planet” and to engage with compassionate intelligence and vigor as aware, alert, and empowered human beings committed to social justice in the name of ecological health. This is a daunting path and a joyful one. “Now by the alchemy of moonlight, all was transformed into a soft duotone of black and silver. The tiny meadow lay silver bright, overlaid with a dark tracery of moon shadows form the pines… I cannot grasp it all. I want to do something with it, but don’t know what. It is this tiny ache, with all the beauty, that stirs me.” Olaus J. Murie, Wapiti Wilderness I love these students. I am in awe of their minds and I am inspired by their spirits. They are my greatest teachers. They are brave and fearless and vulnerable. They hold in their hearts an Earth-bound ecstasy that is not blinded to the very real horrors of our time. The reality of the fate of the planet resting in our hands does not deter them, rather, I see them consciously trying to find their own line of hope to hold on to, to bind other

hopes together, that can pull us out of this chasm of despair. I see them singing and dancing under a full moon in the Tetons. I see them swimming in the river, both yielding and fighting the current. I see them rescuing a bat, holding it in their hands and wondering what this remarkable creature who depends on echo-location to navigate in the world is hearing. I see them listening, each one, listening. Our hope and our faith lie in this kind of tenacious imagination.

Terry Tempest Williams

The Birds American White Pelican Great Blue Heron Canada Goose Bufflehead Common Merganser Turkey Vulture Sharp-shinned Hawk Red-tailed Hawk Golden Eagle Bald Eagle Osprey American Kestrel Peregrine Falcon Sandhill Crane Spotted Sandpiper Belted Kingfisher Red-naped Sapsucker Yellow-bellied Sapsucker Hairy Woodpecker Northern Flicker Western Wood-Pewee Gray Jay Common Raven Tree Swallow Violet-green Swallow Bank Swallow Black-capped Chickadee White-breasted Nuthatch House Wren American Dipper Ruby-crowned Kinglet

Pelecanus erythrorhynchos Ardea herodias Branta canadensis Bucephala albeola Mergus merganser Cathartes aura Accipiter striatus Buteo jamaicensis Aquila chrysaetos Haliaeetus leucocephalus Pandion haliaetus Falco sparverius Falco peregrinus Grus canadensis Actitis macularia Ceryle alcyon Sphyrapicus nuchalis Sphyrapicus varius Picoides villosus Colaptes auratus Contopus sordidulus Perisoreus canadensis Corvus corax Tachycineta bicolor Tachycineta thalassina Riparia riparia Poecile atricapilla Sitta carolinensis Troglodytes aedon Cinclus mexicanus Regulus calendula

American Robin Hermit Thrush Cedar Waxwing Yellow Warbler Yellow-rumped Warbler Western Tanager Chipping Sparrow White-crowned Sparrow Dark-eyed Junco Brewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Blackbird Pine Siskin

Turdus migratorius Catharus guttatus Bombycilla cedrorum Dendroica petechia Dendroica coronata Piranga ludoviciana Spizella passerina Zonotrichia leucophrys Junco hyemalis Euphagus cynocephalus Carduelis pinus

The Essays â&#x20AC;˘ A Prayer for this Place Inspired by a group walk within Cascade Canyon Leigh Bernacchi

May the mountains forgive us as we forgive ourselves May we remember our blood came from the same soil and snow at our feet May we use this collective energy to individually offer our gifts to this place

Great Little Orange Dot Ascends the Mountain. Great Little Orange Dot Is the Mountain. Great Little Orange Dot Descends the Mountain. Catherine Ashton

Just into the shade, beyond the boulder, the path opens to mist. A white water fall spills through boulders. Thirteen cousins, four adults, two toddlers, strapped to parents with rope harnesses, we arrive at Hidden Falls in the Grand Tetons. We shout, chasing each other over the rocks. We scramble over benches, over dirt, over boulders and fences. The cool air, roaring water, the destination invigorates us. How close can I get? How close can I be to the fall? I can almost touch it. Lying upon my stomach, small fingers extended out to graze the water, I can feel what I do not yet understand. I feel comfort, like a kiss, whispering to each finger tip, carrying the same life through me as the glacier running off the mountain. â&#x20AC;˘ Great Little Orange Dot Ascends the Mountain. â&#x20AC;˘

I know here. Here are the passionate. Here are the wonders, the wanderers, the wonderers of the world. Here are the humans who think and feel. Here is comforting. I am grounded. I am grounded in hope. I am grounded in knowing that there is more. I refuse to back down or sit out. I refuse to miss anything. I will live. I will live without stopping because I am alive. â&#x20AC;˘ I was harvested not born. I came into life when one can smell frost, just as the corn is drying and spotting, just as the moon gives rise to her greater glow and pumpkins are rolled off their vines. I was harvested from my mother with forceps, a doctorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dandelion rig, picking me from her womb. I am a daughter, the third of seven children, the C in the alphabet. (The alphabet ends with C.) â&#x20AC;˘ Great Melon #1 I bore this watermelon, seedless, and pink inside. Light green outer shell holding in all I had keeping the water for itself holding my youth in her rind. This melon, heavy with wait rests within my rusted barrow, a world of water from which I may not drink. #2 I bore you Seedless watermelon From my package of seeds, 59 cents

And plant starters, package of 10, one dollar. In my green house made of yellow plastic I watered you to sprout Then carried you nine acres to the garden, the spot Prepared just for you And tended with the rest I kept you tied to the nutrients of my land. And in the hot summer sun of July I watched you, Cut you open just before the October harvest And found even then, you were not ready. #3 Seedless pumpkin How strange you are a pumpkin, and not a watermelon I pulled your seed from the package of watermelon and planted you the like among the rows of seeded green rinds, pink tissues but you came out orange. A pumpkin, and I raise watermelons. • The picture rests on my dresser. There we are in the snow. Pink pants and a small green coat, I look like a blooming pea pod. I can not be more than two years old. I’m held close to her as she kneels in the snow next to me. Without a coat you can see her strong forearms wrapped around me as we smile at the camera. My mother’s eyes are blurry in the light, and my body does not smile, just our lips. We are each more focused on the other, she is pulling me in and I am pulling away.

â&#x20AC;˘

My Grandfatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s I am his beautiful strong boy. He and I work in the garden all afternoon, I, beside him, tend tomato starts. He, beside me, guiding my thick fingers through the dirt transplanting one plant and another, careful of the roots. I was his beautiful boy. I am his beautiful strong boy. Hot summer afternoons I, beside him, shirtless, my shoulders golden in the sun He, beside me, open shirt letting his chest hair bleach his pale skin goldening like mine. I was his beautiful boy. I am his beautiful strong boy. Riding shot gun on our way to the dump I watch out my window the life-size Tonka trucks. He, beside me, whistles tunes I know only from him singing me to sleep in his chair kept out by the pool for hot afternoons when he was too tired and I too strong. I was his beautiful boy. I am his beautiful strong boy Too beautiful to be a boy On Sundays he kisses my cheeks, rubs my nose On Sundays he is proud of my curls and lace I, beside him, fidget in my dress, listen to the choir He, beside me, letting his head droop, listening to God. I was his beautiful

• Great Little Orange Dot Is the Mountain. • My father’s hands were never small like mine. His round sausage fingers were split and rough from lifting, laying brick all day. His palms cracked, dried, calloused, chapped from his trowel and cement. Each finger: an elephant’s paw, strong, round and completely impractical for picking up anything smaller than a hammer. My father has Marvel hands; he is the “Thing.” My father never short of wonder would lie upon the grass under the honey locust tree beneath the delicately filtered light of the afternoon and stare at his hands. “Aren’t we amazing Catherine?” he would ask me as he flexed his fingers. “Look how the muscles and tendons move, and look at this thumb. We were made as God, remember that.” I want my hands to be my father’s hands: worked and worn so when I wash them the bubbles run brown down the sink; stained just so I can see the peaks and valleys, just so I can know my own map. I want my father’s hands that are strong and perceptible to the hot energy of passion, work, to the molecules of miracles, to the world all around. I want to have strong calloused hands to slip between the gentle delicate fingers of a delicate gentle girl. God made me a girl. God made me a girl with small palms and short fingers, a girl with little hands. I am not allowed to forget God. •

What is it to be one of the billions of black or white specks in a boulder of granite? If you are in the very center of a boulder, what are your questions? What is your purpose? Is this a punishment for the ages? How do you die? Are you named Clod? Do you know of blue skies or are such ideas mere fables passed down from one molecule to another, from the outside in? Are you more spiritual or religious? Do you know degradation? Do you worry about erosion? Do you worry about being washed to sea? Do you know the roots wrapped round the outside of your rock? Do you know the house built upon you? Do you feel sick when the house washes away in a flood? Do you feel dizzy when the tree is uprooted, tipped over, carrying you up into the air, rolling out of the earth, her roots still clinging to your foundation? Do you know foundations? Do you disappoint? Do you feel their disappointment? Do you feel ashamed at the tree’s fall? • Rain made the mud stick to my shoes. I did not notice. I saw only the bright green dipped in the spring fall – sagging saplings, heavy grass, and the creek rolling steady. There is a fence between the creek and me and I must go over. This is the pull of water; I am pulled to an inner self, drawn to what I know intimately. Up, over the fence, into the water. Roll rocks, throw sticks, kick waves. Time disappears until the sun grows pink sinking in the sky. I climb back up the chain link, over, and just as my leg clears my toes slip, my hands are speared, I hang from the fence. My feet scramble to release the pressure

and I fall to my back. My fall does not hurt as much as my palms, fleshy little chunks left on the spears. My hands scar for a long time. The new skin stretches delicately, sometimes splitting, when I open my palms. I am reminded of my father opening and closing his own hands. He will not let me forget God. He tells me that sin is painful, I tell him God is more painful. I accept my fall. • At fourteen, I learn to drive stick on a red 1972 forklift. Pushing the dump trailer around the property my brother clinging to the cage bars, we bounce across the field from one weed pile to the next. Weeds: a result of resistance to death. Death a result of wandering over the fields spraying roundup from a tank strapped to my back. Weeds a result of sun baking life dry. Piles a result of my efforts: rakes, muscles, blisters, working death. Choke it. More gas, clutch, hear the pipes groan and over the dirt careful not to dip the forks or jack knife the trailer. We work in the summer sun, our arms burning, our ears red, our cheeks pink. We pitch the hay weeds into the trailer, out of the trailer, into the burn bins. As the day begins to lose it’s ferocity we light the weeds. Smoke curls with our days work going up as exhaust, black exhaust fueled by orange flames, fueled by muscle, fueled by gasoline. • There is a moment in the garden. My mother’s dark red hair bounces with curl. She is wearing pink, but it looks beautiful on her in the morning light. We are weeding the garden, I am young but I know “plant” from “weed.” I must be six because Nielson is too young and yes, there is Paula in her baby seat under the cherry tree shade.

My mother is pulling the weeds quickly, almost finished with her row and I am plodding along not moving very fast. This row is mine. These are my weeds. • weed1 (wēd) n. 1. A plant considered undesirable, unattractive, or troublesome, especially one growing where it is not wanted, as in a garden. 2. A water plant, especially seaweed. 3. The leaves or stems of a plant as distinguished from the seeds: dill weed. 4. Something useless, detrimental, or worthless, especially an animal unfit for breeding. • I remember my mother’s soft freckled elbow resting against my little body while sitting next to her in church, sitting next to her on the hard benches and tiring of making up words to hymns I could not read. I would hold my mother’s arm and pull the soft skin at her elbow. I would pull it out making miniature mountains and river beds, then upon release watch it slowly lose form and find its way back to being a flat, curved, bumpy, soft, freckled elbow. I remember tracing with my finger tips the faint blue lines running down her arms until at her hands the veins bulged pushing up the skin slightly. My favorite game to push on the bulges with my thumb trying to crush them, but always upon release they sprang back into shape. My mother would smile at me. My mother has a beautiful smile. I wonder, if I have children, will she smile at them? I will not personally have children. That is to say, I will never carry a child in my womb, no miracle parasite within me. I was not born to bare children. My sweetheart assures me I will not have to carry a child. There are plenty of unwanted, given-up, diseased and forgotten babies in the world. This

is not a world of compassion. She assures me we will have children, and they will be our children. I know this too, but not my mother’s grandchildren, not her flesh and blood. Are the spoils of a grandmother’s hugs and kisses privileges only for blood relatives? Only for the religiously consecrated coupled off-spring? Only for others? Will my mother one day stop smiling at me even though these veins of mine – are hers? • My heart aches. My soul aches. There is a rhythm in one beat of my heart that cries with joy at being into the wild. Thu-Thump! And it is that “thump” that aches, rippling blood through my body. I can feel the ripple, it is as though for years my blood has been a pool, my heart constant Thu. Thu, thu, thu, thu, thu. But here is the force to waken my limbs, to move my spirit. ThuThump! • July 2005 Rachael, my girlfriend, and I buy our first house together. It is a sweet little 1928 brown brick bungalow. There are three factors we tell the real estate agent: within budget, “large” kitchen, and land to tend. We are not unrealistic. We are okay with a fixer-upper. We are willing to do leg work. But no more compromises. No more walls that are shared walls. No more parking lot yards. No more neighbors fighting in the apartment downstairs. No more calling the cops. We need peace, we need our own space, we need room to grow. This house is the one. We sign the papers sitting across from the mortgage broker and realtor both who will not look us in the eyes. We each have a mortgage, we

each have title privileges, we each sign affidavits, power of attorneys, we each are separate owners of half a house. These are our legal precautions, “in case something should happen.” We shake hands, get the keys. The house is now ours. We clean, fix, update, add, remove, plant. We will replace the windows, refinish the floors, update the kitchen. A garden to plant, fence to mend, trees to tame, the list is endless. In a society without place we are learning to make a house our home. • Great Little Orange Dot Descends the Mountain. • Hellen Keller said, “I cannot do everything but I can do something. I will not refuse to do that thing I can do.” We are each of us as Rembrandt stepped far away from his canvas. As we think of the whole picture we are able to paint the whole picture. It is by concept that we move, or keep, mountains. We are the whole picture as we are the individual molecules. It is the very act of conceiving connections that we are no longer self and other, but the collective whole. • I know it is not far, and just into the shadows, just beyond the tips of pine, just over the last root mist kisses my cheeks. The air is carbonation coming off a white foam float. In each second there is the desire to fling one’s self into the cascade, into the torrential downpour, into the white water-air and feel that power of being smashed so heavily against the rocks that one may be in both states of being – a vapor, a river; water and air.

There is that pull to chance. Would you be carried on down the river or blown off into the warm faces of onlookers? As part of that fall can you be in both places at once? This is my right eye burst into a million molecules and smashing each rock. This is my left thumb sliding down your temple. This is the state of being everything. I become the world just as I am now. We are not merely a melting glacier running off the mountain tops, but a state of beings touching everything; we are alive, we are dead, we are molecular, we are more. The mist is my kiss.

Of Water, Wanting Wings Leigh Bernacchi

Preface An ecology of residency, I wrote in my application for the course, is a study of the energy among active participants in a place. As with every ecosystem, the interactions change given the migrations, deaths, and outgrowths of all participating individuals. In the shadow of the Grand Teton, our community inextricably intertwined our roots, our breath, our fires and floods, our natural disturbances. I believe that after a shocking return, we settled into our homes with fresh plumage, new feathers to flash in the old nest, but that some of the safety and honesty we shared through bodily proximity, intellectual interactions, and sylvan walking became memory more than present. And perhaps this is as it should be because now we are moving and intermingling with others, twisting the vigor of the Murie Center into our present. The ebb and flow of hearts held close and then let go is the energy of our ecosystems. I am so grateful to have held Kosh, Wade, Jeff, Cec, Joy, Brooke, Ed, Jared, Kati, Rory, Rob, Paul, Catherine, and Terry so close to my heart, and for their active openness as well. Our community, now dispersed but still strong, afforded the opportunity to share a greater part of ourselves, an offering to the collective. The piece created by our energies described a very private experience, one Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d previously kept to lifelong friends and family. I felt relieved, empowered and released to have spread my secret in the sacred space our group created. Thank you for enabling that opening. I have chosen to include a dif-

ferent sharing of myself in this anthology, a reflection of our ideas and emotions and my memories of water and wasps, because everyone has given so much of themselves. Like the pale yellow clouds of pollen tracing the space between rippled mountain ridges and delicate scarlet gilia, our ideas have dispersed. Some pollen generates protein in the soil, some spills water from allergic mammalian eyes, some splashed out of the sky by rain, some blown by the wind directly into the small rhombus holes in female cones. Some cones swell with fertility, are devoured by beetles and squirrels, are knocked from the tree prematurely or drop seed in the shadow of an already towering conifer. Very few of those initially dispersed ideas, pollen grains, will eventually grow into a tree large enough to stand tall in the wind and glow yellow in June with its own pollen. Try to pick out which distinct grain will become the next tree in that cloud of possibility. • One: Ethics and Irony Book pages held back from wind by a swollen thumb. Tinted lenses close off glare from the undulations. Yellow plastic pockets hold air and body. Yellow and black pulsing abdomen swings too close. Annoyance, maybe fear, slashes book through thick air, connecting with fragile insect body. With less than a splash, the wasp is sucked to the underside of the surface. I peer from my side of the plane and continue reading John Muir. The whir of partially submerged wings, the whine of insect motor, the scratch and hum and failure of jagged segmented legs gripped by surface tension. Then guilt. I immerse one half of my body in the turquoise pool, hold the words of the father of conservation high above the other half and cautiously approach the drowning “meat bee”. If I free it, will it recognize me and sting? If I throw it on the white-hot concrete, will its wings burn? Why do I suddenly care? I opt to use a dinosaur’s reincarnation, Pleistocene plastic, China gold, the raft, and force one corner under the struggling body. But the water falls away before the ancient aunt of more kindly bees and ants can grip. I try again and again,

finally getting the right balance of water and pace for the wasp to safely grip the edge and catch its breath, I assume. I move closer and catch, with the fine hairs on my face, the wind off the wasp’s suddenly beating wings—quick dry. I watch the antennae, slender and bulbed at connections, like the arthritic joints and bones of my grandmother’s hands, twitch. I remember last summer the windowsill mausoleum had acquired a wasp who’d dried in the sun while we were gone. The antennae, its way to see the world, curled in a perfect spiral, ending pointing inward, towards itself. The hornet sits drying, perhaps remembering what she was doing. Brown lace extends in the shape of cat eyes from a middle shiny case. How can such delicate wings survive the weight of that viper head, the pressure of water, not to mention a paperback collision? She clapped the wings rapidly again. Bored, I brushed her away with a wave and continued to give myself a healthy glow of skin cancer. My dad came home that night and saw a new chandelier of paper, mud and saliva above the door. He left the door open and my mom said, “You’re letting the cool out.” He emerged bearing an aerosol can and proceeded to spray the hell out of the nest. He jumped in the pool and laughed, “Better living through chemicals” to me. Two: Vegetarian Vegetarians get their protein from legumes, eggs, ice cream, soybeans in various states, and caffeine, or maybe that’s just me. Like my grandfather chatting with the smokers at parties, absorbing their chemical elixir after my grandma made him quit, I will occasionally stand in the meat aisle and poke at the dyed flesh under plastic. Other times I gag at the sight of squids, their tangled white tentacles reaching over the plastic tubs on ice. I gaze into fish eyes staring coldly at fluorescent lights above me. In the past year, I have ingested three animal bodies (excluding spiders and mosquitoes): a cold shrimp, just to see; a hunk of what I think was chicken in the Seattle airport’s vegetarian tacos; and a sliver of beef jerky—it was awesome. Although Americans like their meat, we tend to fear other carnivores. For instance, the national bird allegedly threatened salmon runs. In

Alaska, nearly 100,000 bald eagles were hunted for a bounty worth two coins bearing their image, wings outspread majestically over what could possibly be olive branches. Several of our national parks were similarly rid of wolves and coyotes. Grizzly bears and American black bears, although omnivorous, remain on the wrong side of a shotgun in most of their home range throughout the states and Canada. Despite shared dentition, musculature and skeletons, we seem to fear what shares our tastes. This fear expands to the insect class as well. Wasps, the signature of Vesperidae, evoke horror at the picnic table, panic in the shower, or disaster when the frisbee hits the wrong branch of the tree. They are angry, bloodthirsty; those flying witches would steal your mother’s hamburger. They attack the cat food. In short, for an animal approximately 70,000,000 times smaller than the average adult, we harbor a great hatred. Now bees, the helpful pollinators, tend to float through the garden, dreamily drunk on the elixirs offered. Their rounded bodies eat pollen, not beef. Their hives, at least around my house, are built into hollowed oak branches. They calm under a puff of smoke and gorge themselves on honey reserves until the perceived wildfire has passed. Bees are highly specialized wasps, much like their ant cousins. Ants have raided our kitchens and cleaned Leiningen’s neighbor’s floors. They enslave aphids and fungus, like our ancestors did to other humans for their agricultural purposes. They split from the wasps and bees, but maintained the restricted mating castes and working castes. This social construction enables those who wouldn’t reproduce, the working females, to ensure that at least half of their shared genes will be the recipients of their care. In some wasps, females also lay unfertilized eggs that will become the males who will possibly mate with the queen. The focus is placed on the “family’s” reproduction, not simply the individual’s.

Three: Capture On our back porch, I watched wasps enter a single tube, ferreting out the koolaid nectar and chunks of salami in the base of a plastic dome. The

tube had as many twists as the massive labrynths my brother and I devised out of toilet paper rolls for our 18 pet hamsters, but was clear to enable a view of the yellowjacketâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s flashing wings. The wasp would join several of its sisters in the plastic hive, but they could never find their way out of this new hive. I would sometimes root for one as it approached the escape. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d blow into the tube, thinking they would remember the wind. Othertimes I just walked away to play with the gentler bees among the white popcorn flowers and ceanothus bushes in our backyard. When my brother and I tried to play in the sprinklers that shot rainbows of water through the mountain sun, the free wasps attacked every delicious puddle of mud. Our kinship created friendship and cooperation. We would spray the wasps out of the mud with that beloved hose. I think that they would get reinforcements because they always came back, printing the mud with six tiny pads arranged in two arcs, like a rising and setting sun meeting. Come the fall, I would place the wasp collecter and now tomb under the deck, rattling the dried chitin exoskelton of the wasps in the sun crackled plastic. Dried dirty crystal koolaid left a rim where the lure had receded. Four: Saving What I Done Bass lake is a hole dug from the forest and arrested at one end. Every Fourth of July, fireworks expand in warm wet air and shower down into the lake, swirling in the black waters. For the past two years a pair of nesting bald eagles prevented the show. My mom has taught high school social studies for more than twenty five years, allowing summers to be adventures for the three of us: Mom, Tyler, my little brother, and I. We lived in a little red house outside of town and would occasionally drive over to Bass Lake for some refreshing swimming. We would bring representations of other favorite ecosystems, like the northern Pacific, fill them with our own breath and ride them through the landscape. One of these idyllic days, my little brother was riding atop an orca with neotonic baby blues and long painted eyelashes. The dorsal

fin flopped over after a day of playing and capture. Its flaccid fold was a perfect perch. From there, Tyler could barely touch the water with his kindergartner toes. I pushed the whale out past the thin green rushes the mossy rocks, pressing on its uniquely patterned tail, because even Kmart whales have their own identity. As I propelled the whale deeper, jet skis whirred past and the mix of motor oil and lemony pine grew stronger in the heat. I jumped on the back of the tail attempting to get a better grip but sending a shock through the airy sac, forcing the orca to buck my little brother off. He splashed into the deep water. My mom screaming, running into the water. I remember being completely submerged under the body of my brother, pushing up on his foot and sunlight in the upper right corner of my vision waving through green and yellow light. Inflatable whale out of sight. In seconds, he could hold the whale again and breathe. I popped up behind. My mom, shorts floating in the water, towed us both in. I remember the swishing of water behind the beveled glass of my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s watch. The water had seemed so green from below, but captured under the lens, it became turquoise blue with tiny seed pearl bubbles. The watch sat on my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s armoire for weeks after the incident. We hurried to pack our things into the car and drove away from the possibility of breathing only water. Five: Underwater What is it that water affords us? Why are we so drawn to being in it, under it, throughout it? I swam with penguins once, who traded their wings for water. In another environment, I approached a turquoise glacier lake so apart from me and brilliant that I feared touching it would pull me under, trapped on the other side forever. Maybe like the wasp, as we hope to wet our lips, we also hope that the surface tension on our spiked elbows breaks and we are forced on the other side of the water. To see from another perspective. To feel the pressure and the buoyancy. To swim in Leigh Lake with Rory. To watch mergansers bellies. Only to hope that someone will pluck us out again to live out our airotic lives.

Notes Against Serotiny Joy Castro

I have learned this week the necessity of stretching, of reaching to embrace both poles of the continuum. Long future, long past. “Getting stuck in the binary view,” writes Paul Shepard in Nature and Madness, “strands the adult in a universe torn by a myriad of oppositions and conflicts” (29). I write from a torn universe but am filled with the hope of mending. I am no Jack Turner. I cannot discard the women joggers because I prefer the mountain lion; I cannot physically abuse the men whose experience taught them to see Nature as a caged amusement. I am no rugged hero. I am an educator. Latin, educate, to draw forth. To draw forth, perhaps, the secret, undamaged person that the Shepards swear is inside everyone. My work is to take that leap of faith. So I would like to dedicate this attempt to two figures: first, to the unnamed woman Jack Turner told us about, briefly loosed from her apartment and cubicle in Singapore and temporarily relocated by Intel here, to the Tetons, and herded around a lake by Jack. A woman overcome with excitement at meeting a squirrel, the first animal besides a bird she’d ever seen.

And I dedicate it equally to Pluie, murdered with her husband and three children in 1995 in British Columbia for trespassing on unprotected land, inspiration for the Y2Y Corridor, a wild swift wanderer for whom national borders held no meaning, a creature both solitary and social, loyal to her family and loyal to her path, a moving wolf in the rain. It is 1989, and though it is only mid-June it is already sweltering when the young mother straps her baby into his stroller—not a plush Graco stroller or an Eddie Bauer stroller bespeaking comfort and status, but an old hard plastic shell with no shocks and thin padding that someone has given her free. She pushes the baby, as she has every day since he learned to crawl, down the broken sidewalk past dilapidated houses in this mixednationality Latino barrio in a city of one million, in this neighborhood of gunshots where few own cars and where the Via bus line doesn’t go past the edge of town, where it is a forty-five minute drive in any direction to get to open land. They move past the dusty strips of ruined lawn clotted with gravel, glass, shards of metal, no place for a baby’s hands and knees, past the house where college kids buy their pot, down block after block, ten hot blocks, thirteen, until she reaches her destination: the old yellow brick brewery, now converted, in a masterstroke of urban renewal, into an art museum. An oasis in the midst of crime and decay, it’s edgy, it’s hip. Cool young people park BMWs and walk past her. Within the perimeter walls roll beautiful lush lawns sprung with sculpture, but she doesn’t pay the admission fee and wheel her baby in. She cannot. She has not come for art. Instead, outside the wall, she wheels the stroller onto the long strip of cultivated grass, four feet wide, that is sandwiched between the high brick boundary wall and the public sidewalk. She unbuckles her child, easing his sweat-sticky legs away from the plastic seat and setting him in the shaded grass, green and cool. Its thick blades spell moisture, growth.

She does not know to think about fertilizers, pesticides, monocultures, or the deep unwisdom of sprinkler systems in South Texas. She has not learned to be aware of them. She just knows that her baby needs grass against his skin. The museumgoers, making their way in and out, look curiously at the woman and baby. Humiliated, she does not meet their gaze. The museum guards, whether from apathy or pity, leave them alone on the grass strip, and her baby crawls, gurgling, and she follows him, steering him away from the hot cement time and again. When he grows tired, she straps him back in and pushes him thirteen blocks home. It is ninety-seven degrees, and she is twenty-one, and looking back I cannot tell you exactly what homing instinct drove her, day after day, to provide her son with what scrap of nature she could forage. And what I want to know now, looking back at that girl who was just one of thousands of impoverished parents in that city, is how and even whether I would have known to do that, to want that for Grey, without the Alps and the Everglades and the West Virginia hills lodged stubbornly in my memory, the indelible gold images of holding my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hand as we climbed Lowndes Hill together, all those lithographs of family-in-nature that laid unexamined in my mind from back before the time my family shattered, from a time before trauma and abuse and poverty and disintegration. I cannot not extrapolate from myself to those thousands of other parents, many of whom never enjoyed a time before poverty and trauma and familial fragmentation. (Remember that domestic violence escalates by a factor of five when you drop below the poverty line. Remember that abused children sustain the same level, we now know, of neurological damage as do combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.) I cannot not extrapolate from my city to a hundred megacities around the globe, some far vaster, some with ghettoes far more deadly. This is why my focus has veered repeatedly this week toward issues of privilege and access, has centered on how families introduce their children to

wildness and a sense of wonder or do notâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and what, if anything, can be done to mitigate the absence of such an introductionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and on how family stability and rootedness (especially multigenerational family stability and rootedness) seem to correlate with a heightened commitment to place and a concomitant awareness of the necessity of environmental protection. Plant biologists do not yet know what causes coniferous trees of the same species to produce both serotinous and non-serotinous cones, what makes some lodgepole pines drop cones closed tight as a fist and sealed with resin, refusing to release their seeds unless fire scorches them into fertility, while other lodgepoles drop open cones, their segments fanning out, their seeds ready for action. Nature photographer Edward Riddell explained to us that the personal threat of death in Viet Nam opened many of his generation to activism; Terry noted that the personal threat of cancer has opened many people now in mid-life to a reexamination of and commitment to their own authentic core values. But, to follow James Baldwin, I fear the fire next time. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want the opening of the majority of people to environmental awareness to take further war or cancer or ecological collapse. I fear we cannot run the risk of conflagration. I want to understand now what factors make some people, without facing personal threat, open themselves to environmental care. I want to develop ways to implement those factors gently, steadily, deliberately, and widely. Without incineration. Our assignment was to write a natural autobiography. Auto, bio, graph: self, life, write. Most autobiographies look toward the past, chronicling events already elapsed, but as Carolyn Heilbrun points out in her classic taxonomy of life-writing, some writers imagine a narrative, write a lifestory, in advance of living it. They must imagine it first, real-ize it, make it real in their minds and on the page, before they can move into it, inhabit it, enact the plot they have envisioned. So, although autobiography usually entails an investigation of the past, I will use this opportunity also to chart a future, to self-life-write, to make self, to map self, to write new life into being and write myself into a new life.

The rest of this essay, then, looks forward to the future and shares with you a plan of action I’ve developed from this week’s fruitful discussions. I share these ideas in the spirit of the copious literal pollination we’ve experienced this week from the pines, in the hope that you will give me feedback to make them stronger and share your own ideas with me. 1) Notes Against Serotiny. I came here searching for a next book project, but more deeply, a direction for future work that would compel my wholehearted commitment. I’m thrilled to have found it. My 100-page notebook is jammed with ideas that are, mercifully, starting to cohere, and I even have a rough outline: On Language and Naming On Gender and Vision On Religion, Apocalypse, and Time On Privilege and Education Aura Class Race Stability Family and the somewhat hokily titled final section, Towards a New Family Value 2) “Notes Against Serotiny,” v. 2. On my campus, a professor is invited each year to give the prestigious La Follette lecture, a lecture that connects that professor’s work to the humanities broadly conceived. The trustees fly in and attend; hundreds of faculty, staff, and students are there, and there’s a banquet afterwards. It’s all very hush-hush: the identity of the lecturer is kept secret until a week or two until the lecture. You are now the only people, together with my husband, to know that the La Follette lecturer this year is me. This October, I’ll have a chance to dryrun the ideas for my book in a real-world setting, a setting that requires dialogue and trust-building in a big way.

In that lecture, I’ll propose and describe 3) An overhaul of our curriculum that places the Earth at the center of our learning—and includes ways of incorporating a 250-acre stand of rare Indiana old-growth forest, which was willed to Wabash but is seldom mentioned or used, into our courses, as a way of building an ecology of place into the curriculum. The campus has recently embarked on a review of the entire academic program, so the timing is good for big new ideas. In the lecture, I’ll also propose 4) bringing Dan Olson to our campus to lecture, to meet with students (who would love him and want to be him), faculty and administrators— with the intended outcome of inviting him to analyze our own environmental footprint . . . which my friend Jim Amidon, the college PR guy, could then describe in his weekly column in the local newspaper, thus raising awareness in rural Indiana—and perhaps encouraging other local industries to consider initiating similar audits . . . 5) Convene a meeting with three local community leaders I know (small town) to discuss printing a guide similar to the wonderful Resource Guide to Simple and Sustainable Living in the Tetons. It will be a way to get people thinking differently about “development.” Just the exercise of comparing what you already have in place here to our own offerings in this line should inspire greater awareness of possibilities and potential directions for true growth. I’m hoping the discussion can generate a healthy urge toward keeping-up-with-the-Tetons. (Note: —I’ve started on this; it’s in the works!) 6) I love doing community outreach programs in creative writing at the public library, the domestic violence shelter, and elsewhere, and I loved hearing how screenings of the film Arctic Dance about Mardy and Olaus Murie’s long involvement in conservation prompted letter-writing activism in seniors.

On Wednesday, I bought two copies of the Arctic Dance DVD—one as a gift for my elderly in-laws, with the condition that, rather than just keeping it like a regular gift, they have to pass it on to friends when they’re done, who also have to agree to pass it on (Note: Done!)—and one so that I can partner with a member of the Hoosier Environmental Council to develop and offer evening programs in senior citizens’ residential housing centers in my region. It will take some fine-tuning, but what I’m thinking about is a screening and discussion of the film, some creative writing exercises that will get the residents to recall natural places dear to them, and then informational sessions about a couple of the most crucial environmental issues facing Indiana, letter-writing sessions to the state and national legislatures, and then ways of staying informed and involved. I could also seek funding to print collections of their creative writing for them to have—and maybe to archive in Indiana state library collections… 7) Overhaul the literature and creative writing courses I teach to place the Earth at the center of the curriculum. I no longer feel it is justifiable to do otherwise. 8) Design and coordinate a weeklong environmental course design and teaching workshop at the Murie Center, patterned on our “Ecology of Residency” program here together but also including components from another wonderful, transformative program I used to help run, the Great Lakes Colleges Association Course Design and Teaching Workshop. This blended experience would help interested faculty from across the country and across the disciplines overhaul their existing courses or develop new courses such that environmental concerns are placed at the center of the curriculum. Find funding. Get the right people on board. Publicize it. Run it. Make it great. Write it up. Explain how it’s translatable to other settings and other educational levels (i.e., K-12). Make it viral. Help it spread. 9) Be part of the infiltration of Hollywood, as discussed the other night (television programming for viewers of all age groups that focuses on environmental issues; feature films; etc.). I can’t do this alone: I’m lousy at

writing scripts; I’m no puppetmaster. I need your collaboration. 10) Work toward overhauling the American public education system so that Nature Education is an integral, non-negotiable part of every child’s experience. Green up the days of our children. Give all children the opportunity to regularly experience nature with the least degree of mediation possible. This is crucial. Mmm, obviously, this is a long-term goal… 11) Jack Turner told us that Yellowstone was not preserved for essentially environmental reasons; it was preserved because Thomas Moran’s watercolors taught people far away to value it. I am convinced by our experience this week that the wild needs its artists, so I’m going to propose that the Murie Center institute a new Writer- or Artist- or Musician- or Filmmaker-in Residence Program, one that would, preferably, privilege artists at the top of their game from urban and/or suburban backgrounds and with urban and/or suburban followings who would come to the Murie Center, engage in a program of education akin to ours, and then be set free to experience and create. Getting such a program funded and running is arduous, and the endowment necessary to generate dependable funding is beyond my wildest, still-paying-off-my-student-loans dreams. But I want to make a start. I want to make an act of faith. So I am donating a strictly symbolic amount—the cost of one-half of one night’s solitary stay in a plumbed cabin (solitude and plumbing being highly desirable to the working artist)—in the hope that one person’s commitment of resources can inspire more. Pollination. “One of the penalties of an ecological education,” writes Aldo Leopold, “is that one lives alone in a world of wounds”—environmental wounds few people want to notice or acknowledge. But one of the benefits of this kind of ecological education, the kind we have shared this week, is that we are no longer alone. We have each other.

No matter how wounded the world is, no matter how lonely our voices may be in the communities to which we’ll return, we will never again need to be alone with our rage, grief, or confusion about what to do next, or with the compassion society tells us is excessive, misplaced, and uncool, or with the joys of our successes, large and small. We have a place to share them all. We have a place to check in. You, the collective you and the individual yous, with your beauty and bravery and intelligence and strength, and with the power of the big mind, collective mind of tested and strengthened ideas, are my inspiration. I hope—no, I have faith—that we will be each other’s community.

Works Cited Heilbrun, Carolyn. Writing a Woman’s Life. New York: Norton, 1988. Shepard, Paul. Nature and Madness. San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1982.

Wilding Nature, Wilding Language: In Wildness is the Preservation of the Word Robert DeBirk As a student of literature the direction of my attention focuses on language, my life is inextricably linked to poems, novels, plays, and philosophers. I cannot stand in a forest of pines without thinking of Wordsworth, I cannot feel the touch of wind on my skin without remembering lines written by Shelley. I cannot feel the vertigo of Natureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rage without thinking of Nietzsche and I cannot experience love without the passing of private poems to my lover. Language filters all of my relations. I never thought of this way of relating to the world as problematic until my arrival at the Murie Center. At the Murie Center I found myself surrounded by scientists and naturalists, by people whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relation to Nature I found to be much more immediate, pragmatic and useful for the efforts of the Conservation movement than my own. The first two days it seemed horrifyingly apparent that the ability to explain the mystery of a serotinus pinecone or clarify the complexity of the dangers facing the Grizzly Bear are of much more direct consequence to conservation than the qualities of a quatrain or the prose of a deceased author. I have never before felt the need to defend my place in language and yet here, I felt as though it was necessary to explain in sci-

entific terms my studies and myself. Almost without realizing it, I began calling my readings investigations and thinking of books as laboratories as though this renaming would legitimize my interest in the humanities in the eyes of the scientists around me. The combination of science, explanations by naturalists and my own history in the humanities meant that walking in the Tetons was quickly becoming an inquiry into a complex ecosystem of art, where every flower, every mark of scat was linked in a web of verse transcending centuries. Freud wrote that within a single city is contained the memory of all the things that city has been and all the people who have passed through it. This is to say that one object can become the repository of many diverse experiences. In this way the spotted orchid became a name inhabited by the blending of my own readings in literature and the information divulged by others. I cannot have any experience without thinking of its relation to literature. When joined by others who do not share this view of the world, a kind of pathetic desperation at my own inability to communicate sets in. It’s as though I’m walking through the forest with two minds, one stretching to understand the language of naturalists and scientists, the other attempting to restrain my desire to share what William Carlos Williams said of asphodels. As an individual with my roots in the humanities I feel incredibly anxious knowing that I’m instructed in systems of myth, belief and poetics that are difficult to substantiate and that I’m among others who conduct their inquiries by evidence, the linking of cause and effect into objects as tangible as soil and immediate as granite. We may work towards similar goals but we do so by such different means that I feel desperate in my interactions with others. How do I justify my own investigations of the natural world through art and philosophy and how do I use these investigations to help preserve the natural world we share? How can I say that I don’t believe in God but in rock, in sun, in soil, and the touch of my bride yet justify to scientists, to myself even, that it is worthwhile to conduct these explorations, to feel these things through such an intangible means as language? How do I justify to scientists whose language is measurements, my own inability to quantify anything? How to explain to a world that is at the mercy of economic fads the importance of myth and beauty even if these things exist

only in the immeasurable abstract? “Fight abstraction with abstraction” Jack Turner would say, but how does abstraction stop a bulldozer and an obscure philosopher save a species. How is playing in these abstractions anything but self-indulgence? How to justify that the world I inhabit is informed by E.E. Cummings and not Claude Bernard? (While you and i have lips and voices which are for kissing and to sing with who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch invents an instrument to measure spring with? Yet, I also recognize in the “Who cares” of Cumming’s poem an unwillingness to conduct serious investigations in favor of rococo fun and frivolity. I recognize the demise of the spring, which sets the couple to kissing in the intransigent and willful ignorance of the author to science. The biddable breath of the author announces an intentional unawareness of the environment, an unawareness that mirrors current popular attitudes and the continuation of which that threatens to disrupt the natural world the poet is so dependent upon for his craft. So, what then is to be the role of artists and poets, painters and philosophers? Are the humanities destined, as we read in Cumming’s poem, to an ignorance of science and environment, to a childish name calling of scientists and other thinkers who have proven themselves more employable than poets? Can those in the humanities afford to avoid this question any longer? Can I? What are the humanities without the Natural world? Will I still be able to relate to either beauty or Nature when Shelley’s Mont Blanc no longer has glaciers, when the west wind signaling winter has shifted? What is the likelihood of another Wordsworth when smog conceals the lonely clouds? What is a poet to do when her guiding star is revealed as a satellite? Artists need to learn their role in augmenting the abstracted space of the laboratory, to realize the value in creating a carnival of that vacuum space. The humanities must meet the reduction of the natural world into natural resources with the same ferocity of a parent defending a child or a sow a

Cummings, E.E., six nonlectures. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,

1998.

cub. The humanities must remind us of what it means to act humanely. The similarities between poets and scientists are greater than one would expect. Both poets and scientists attempt to investigate beyond what is immediately apparent. It was said of the poetry of John Ashberry that all of his poetry is surface, but the surface is quicksand. Both the lyrical expositions of the poet and the investigation of the scientist mark a kind of radical inquiry where surface level investigation is insufficient. The inquiries of the artist take place in the form of symbols, in the reading of an object as a symbolic opening of interpretation. This is similar though inverse to scientific investigation. Scientific investigation leads to a precise definition that is itself an opening up, showing the relatedness of an individual species to the larger ecosystem. A scientific reading offers a keystone species such as a grizzly bear placed in a delicate balance between natural and human forces. The grizzly is at the mercy of cutthroat trout reproduction and beetles devouring pines. In addition, mathematical modeling and the pressures of the market place for development and hunting privileges decide the fate of the bear. This is the picture as painted by science. Educated in the humanities what I see is the grizzly bear as a keystone species of not only the natural ecosystem but also to the world of myth and symbol. As Paul Shepherd said in speaking of the importance of the bear as symbol: The bear is the keeper of all gates: those between life and death, this world and others, flesh and spirit, man and animal form, inside and outside, even of the faces of individual human life. He is the mediator between man and woman, the natural and the sacred. All guides and travelers to the other world in human form - shamans, Orpheus, Jesus - were represented by bears first. Reading symbols, I see man exterminating an animal that threatens his dominance. I see the bear skinned, coat ripped from its body and the dead form looking incredibly human. I see man slowly devouring himself

Shepherd, Paul. Traces of an Omnivore. Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1996.

through development and greed and I ask, my voice haunted by Wordsworth, “What man has made of man”. It is up to the painters and poets with their backs on the natural world, to close their eyes no longer while we slowly suicide ourselves. Poets must no longer be silent while the language of economics commodifies and harvests our oldest myths. It is time for painters and photographers to redefine the “total representation” of the natural world and for philosophers and critics to once again seize the words of Marx, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Once, the slogan of radical change was “Poetry in the service of Revolution” and under this slogan a rigid authoritarian ideology colonized poetry. The multiplicity and hybridity, the mystery and miracle, the challenging difference and play of poetry was pushed aside, forging language into the “ends to a means merely” to quote Kant out of context. This reduces Poetry to a cheap political product, akin to serving Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry” prechewed. In a world where Nature has been managed and processed, made into a monoculture to be quantified and consumed the outlook for poetry is bleak. To allow the homogenization of language, the domination of poetry by economic reductions and political sloganeering is to set the precedent for the domination of the natural world. The wildness of our language depends upon the wildness of nature; our language can only ever be as wild as the environment that is its genesis. The wildness of language allows a point of access to understand the wildness of Nature. The two are dependent on one another. There is nothing more frightening to me than thinking of a world were poetry has become a monoculture of thought and where the natural world is devoid of the wildness that inspires poems. What would it mean to say that what is desirable is not the fixity of Poetry in the Service of Revolution but instead the need for Revolution in the Service of Poetry. This is the desire for social change to occur in

Marx, Karl. Theses on Feuerbach.New York: Anchor Books, 1959.

favor of hybridity and multiplicity, for a Wilding of Language and a Wilding of nature. Revolution in the service of poetry is not new, it is an old idea and was sung in 1912 in the strike lines of labor, “Bread yes, but Roses too”. As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day, A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts grey, Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses, For the people hear us singing, Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses! And a portion of the second verse: Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread but give us roses! This song is incredibly important for me. It is two things, first, it is a justification of art and of beauty, the words: hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread but give us roses! This song is the proclamation of the spirit in the face of economic and scientific reduction; it is the willingness of the individual to engage in struggle for beauty and complexity in the face of Taylorist systemization of simplicity and efficiency. This song also posits art as a legitimate response in the face of this reductionism. Bread and Roses is a manifesto for art and poetry in a world that would impose a Cartesian mechanist-reduction worldview onto every living organism. Abstract art combats the capitalist abstraction of the body as a mere machine of labor. The return to symbol and myth counter the abstractions of the natural world as some would have us relate to the world only in terms of surplus, board feet, hunting licenses and economic profit. As Terry Tempest Williams said during the course of one of our conversations, “Art creates the structure of possibility.” The role of those in the humanities, my role, is to match the temerity of the scientists now speaking truth to power. To create the structure, the language, for the “possibility of change”. The humanities must revive the Romantics and return our collective gaze and actions to the wild, to wild things and wild places before all we have left to offer are our eulogies.

Lyrics: Oppenheim, James.

My wilderness has wheels and a garden. Cecily Ellis

My education in nature was not a wild one. Not a whirlwind quest, with a pounding of chest into the backcountry. Rather, my love for land was seeded in the many summers spent in the tameness of campgrounds. Making friends among strangers and having adventures under picnic tables in the woods. Scuffing our knees on pine duff and making our mothers crazy with sap-stained shorts. Then being herded back to bunk beds, stacked tight and stuffed in the back of our summer home on wheels. â&#x20AC;˘ My mother suffered severe scoliosis when she was a girl. Over 35 percent curvature of the spine. The doctor put her in a body cast for much of her early teens and she still has the scars along her flank from where the hard cast chafed her soft skin raw. As a result, she has fought backaches most her life and finds sleeping on the hard earth too painful to bear. Still, she had spent her young years traversing the country with my wanderluststricken grandparents and spending a full summer at home was never an option for us. To sleep under trees was a need she couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t shake and as

such, my family bought a trailer before I was old enough to talk. We slept inside at night, listening to the raindrops on the roof vents and playing cards after dinner on the gas stove. The trailer offered the comfort of home, along with the freedom to roam. Each campground that we called settled into, each pebbled highway pullout, even the grocery store parking lots when we were too tired to drive beyond, offered a different sensory experience. Sea breeze salty enough to be licked from the skin, plains state sunsets that escaped my best efforts to capture them in my camera, the dense, dark earth smell of the deep forests, the omnipresence of gulls. I became a collector of sorts: pinecones, film canisters filled with sand, redwood bark, maps of national parks, postcards, and seashells. Hording each item, each memory, in the cabinet wedged between my bunk and the bathroom in the back of our trailer. We would eventually go to New Mexico, Missouri, Indiana and Iowa, marvel at mountains in Colorado, spray each other cool with squirt bottles in the absence of air conditioning across the deserts of Nevada, and wind our way up and down the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington. Our favorite destination was a small bay named Bowman, near Whidbey Island, north of Seattle. My mother and her sisters played on this beach as children and continued the tradition as their own children learned the names of urchin, starfish, crab and clam along these shores. Together, my cousins and I made homes for banana slugs, graveyards for crabs not lucky enough to escape the gulls, and recorded sightings of the fox my grandmother named “Lucky.” I remember big logs washed up at the rocky end of the beach. Covered in barnacles and holding half to the sand with their bulk still in the sea. We would creep out on the logs, just beyond where the waves would break and pretend we were paddling to another world…one my red-haired younger brother called “honolululu.” Each night I would beg my father to wake me up before the sun. We would go together, slink down the steep trail behind our trailer to see the tide washed out. The beach stretched for miles out into the fog. Ripple after

ripple of wet sand, giving to my small feet and creating puddles in my wake. Heron shrouded in mist at the edge of sight. Anemone waving in the exposed pools at the shallow end of the pier. We wrapped our jeans around our knees and playfully dug for clams. It was a race, a game. They eluded me. Far easier to find were shells. I was an addict; hungry for each cockle, china man’s hat, blue-black mussels. My pockets growing fat until the water rolled in with the rising of the sun and chased me back to shore. I would dry my treasures on the trailer hitch and later pack them carefully in Pringles cans for the trip home. Other years the trailer became our home base as we worked as ranch hands on my great uncle’s limousine cattle operation in the inexplicably green town of Fallon, Nevada. Then, there was the year we simply stayed close, pulling to the edge of a clean stream in the Wasatch., spending days investigating the wonders of irrigation canals. And so it went when the weather got warm. For two weeks we were free. Roaming the roads of America at 65 miles per hour until a particular place struck my parents’ fancy and we found ourselves backed into a numbered plot with a picnic table and fire pit. • I was sixteen when we sold our summers on the road. My parents had decided that 25 years together was all they could take, and though their partnership dissolved at a painful pace over the next four years, the assets were split up quickly. The trailer was the first to go. My brother and I grieved as we watched the aspen shoots grow up through the empty gravel pad that once parked our escape. My father found justification in a job and left us so that he could forge a new path in Laguna, then San Francisco, then Marin, now Boston.

My mother sought solace in the permanence of place—a new home. A garden to plant. A new grounding. We spent the summer settling in. We could not afford, both financially and emotionally, to be on the move. But what my mom called secure, I called stuck. In the spirit of renewal, she offered my brothers and I a share in the back yard. We could plant whatever we wished. She wanted this place to feel like home. My brothers chose snapdragons and pear tomatoes. I couldn’t stand to see her cry anymore, to feel the weight of those tears, so I planted blue flax and forgot about it. At the time, I didn’t even care if they bloomed. I left for college shortly after. Her gracious gesture lost in my angst. I spent the next three years working a job I loathed to simply keep up with my tuition bills and had racked up enough debt to understand how drowning felt. My mother suggested I move home. I was violently opposed to the idea, felt it was a backslide, but knew that, as mothers often are, she was right. I struggled that winter. I withdrew. For the first time in my life, I was less interested in escape and adventure, less captivated by a far away place to discover, and more enamored by the concept of retreat. I loathed the fact, but I yearned for security. I sought out a simple connection that would root me to this place I had refused to call home when it was offered. So I began to pick raspberries. They were allowed to overrun eight square feet in the far corner of our yard and required daily attention. The task was meditative, seductive. Ripe, red, soft. One tug and slight squeeze to loosen from the cane. This repetitive responsibility to them became my sanctuary. When the raspberries took hiatus there were others to attend to. Snap peas. Tomatoes. Peppers. Rose bushes and spirea to prune. Pumpkins to pick in fall. The cycle of the garden soothed. Each day provided something to look forward to. The eventual return of the woodpecker. The seeding of hibiscus. I learned to track changes, see patterns. Learn my place. Become a collector of my own backyard. The garden provided a rhythm for my life when it had lost its beat. A loose predictability to an unknown path.

I began joining my mother in the mornings as she walked the edges of the yard. Noting new blooms, new fruits, singing silently to her favorites. Teaching me their names. Bleeding Heart. Stella de Oro. She woke me early the day the tiny blue flax blooms found the sun. • For all the places I had been as a child, my family never made Grand Teton our temporary home in our travels. Our beloved trailer never danced the road alongside the Snake. These mountains are foreign to me—a land without memory. Owen. Moran. Sprung up from a fault for which I never knew the name. Since I arrived I’ve been desperate for a frame of reference. Anything to fix me to this place. To be the connecting line between land and love. Desperate to feel at home. From our field guide: “June 5-11: young bluebirds are feathering, and blue flax, silky phacelia, and golden corydalis are making their first appearance.” Today there are fields of small blue flowers. Sprung up from the wet earth after the rain. Today my mother would have woken me early. • We need both. Those strike out moments of newness. Of a visit. Temporary residency. Living in changes for a short time and relishing in the excitement of its gifts. The sand in our shoes that we bring in from the coast. Snapshot of a Missouri sunset. But it is home that ties us down. Gives us context. Gifts us with familiarity, comfort, the courage to take the next step. Offers us smallness and color. Periwinkle blue in the shadow of mountains.

A Natural Autobiography Wade Finlinson

I want to write the content of my heart, but more than that I want to put my face into my pillow and release a lengthy cry complete with tears of anger, confusion, joy, and contentment. Each tear would not be wholly from any listed or other emotion, but each tear would be purged because of the presence of many and would therefore be compared justly with the individual who purged it in all his complexities. I choose to swallow the cry for fear of releasing it at present would cause me to forget the complexities within me which stir these emotions that I wish to cover and perhaps by retaining the weep inside of me, I will constantly reflect upon the emotions that I naturally ignore and would prefer to silence the ones that are troublesome. What an inconsistency it seems to display mixed emotions when Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve experienced an entirely joyous upbringing and now live an increasingly happy life. Each day with my Misty rebukes my worthless tongue for being unable to express how she more than blood, air, and nutrients makes me live. How could I deserve such a partnership after living a pre-Misty life that similarly seemed so complete and laden with joy?

The abundance of fullness could not be so until I realized that my good fortune is uncommon, that things live with excruciating pain and are bound to suffer the consequences of the choices of others, and are therefore held hostage to the dictates of an individual, movement, or a facet of “development” that forces suffering upon the unintended and those short on luck. Is there a difference between a fullness of joy and complete fullness? With my life full of happiness can I not arrive at complete fullness until I experience firsthand the trouble and anguish that the oppressed species feel? I think the two are interchangeable and in order to experience either I must cultivate pure empathy sufficient to understand how a mother feels at the loss of her child to political strife or be able to survey the dilemma of an elk herd finding their migratory path has been pinched by greed’s byproduct. The mere alertness to and acknowledgement of these and countless other painful instances is not of value unless my efforts reflect my sympathy. My unconnected-from-nature and selfish self would love nothing more than to work 40 hours per week at the office flipping paper clips at passers by, then return to dearest Misty and enjoy our time together and with those who are easy to be friends with. Conversely, the often selfish chap my past has sculpted feels the need to provide familial sustenance through currently popular channels of capitalist tendency, but I am unable to ignore the rampant pain caused by my fellow humans and feel prone to somehow alleviate unnatural hardship through effective activism. Effective activism includes efforts loud and soft, wide-ranging and personal. Without activism our sympathy for the destitute plant, animal, or person has no purpose, and in no wise does it aid to improve circumstances. Through acting on the emotional effect caused by awareness to disaster, one assists in seeking the welfare of others. That individual’s contribution is exponentially increased when their efforts are proactive as they seek solutions to tomorrow’s problems and by so doing, solve the current issues. One who watches the news and sends a check to a humanitarian organization does benefit from positive karmic accumulation, but

if the same engages in the purest form of citizenship and seeks to deeply understand issues and acknowledge their historical evolution, they will attempt to collaborate with all individuals who have the innate power to help and heal. In this wise, answers will be attained through the construction of figurative paths, the only type whose paving of which will lead to actual development. These collective efforts will promote the sprawl of solutions whose sustainable emissions give life to further progress. The most talented architects and engineers of our time could never construct a bridge comparable to those that will be erected through this movement. These spans will come by surmounting interpersonal rifts through understanding of those who are different than us and working with them to see the true power of the individual. After discussing a client’s unwillingness to wear anything German because of the Holocaust and his own anger over the flooding of Glen Canyon, Jack Turner said, “Some will find it obscene to mention the loss of six million people and the loss of one ecosystem in the same breath. I am not ignorant of the difference in magnitude, but I refuse to recognize a difference in causation. In the September 11, 1989 High Country News there is a picture of eleven severed mountain lion heads stacked in a pyramid at the base of a cottonwood. You can see the details of their faces. They are individuals. The association with death camps is involuntary. These are only eleven of the 250,000 wild predators killed by the U.S. government in 1987. No one raised a voice to the Animal Damage Control division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These deaths, the Holocaust, the destruction of the rain forest, and the deaths of two million Cambodians have a common source, a source that deserves our scrutiny and anger but a source we do not quite comprehend. I think of it as a tendency toward homogeneity- a hatred of the other- so common in modern times that it levels difference across many categories and scales.”1 Turner’s broadened definition of an individual strikes me as truth through a process congruent with my personal spirituality. The idea seems so whole and complete that it ought to be true for consistency’s sake. The existence of diverse landscape, plants, and animals that deserve my attention, causes me to consider my place among them. I can’t help but assess

that it is humans who disrupt the natural maintenance of these and that humans should control our problems between each other before exerting control over all land and life. It would be ideal if we elected rocks, orchids and bears to govern and plan, but until then, we must act on their behalf through the coordination and interests of all. Through consideration of what my role is here, I reflect below on the blissful upbringing that was mine. The community that raised me was the incorporated burgh of Oak City, Utah and the Greater Oak Creek area. I recall in discussions with an almighty fellow, going down every street in my mind and giving thanks for those who occupied every household, even those who I did not necessarily like, but knowing all combined to compose a town that I loved. I would subsequently offer appreciation for the mountains that cradled the settlement and for the beauty of their vegetation. Growing up in the same barn-shaped house my whole life, I received an education that could not have been attained at any university or other institution. With a faculty of family, friends and landscape, I learned the precious concept of value. Not to be mistaken for the often manipulated-during-political-campaigns term of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;values,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; I refer here to value in a holistic sense in assessing worth of life in the most expanded sense. I tasted of a quality of life that if all individuals as described above were to partake of, our problems would be miniscule. My father is the smartest man on the planet. His ability to permanently shut up and live his life in a way that those who know him admire his wisdom and wished that he would teach or publish his philosophy, but he chooses to allow followers to engage in real, practical learning by leaving them to figure out for themselves how to be most efficient and of greatest value in ensuring lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s value for all. He demonstrates that his family and community are most important, and has never been drawn to materialistic sentiments. I feel that if he were a foraging father in civilizations past, he would have regularly sought only the tastiest of berries for his family, no matter the distance.

He worked nearly 40 years at the same place and served several terms as a town councilman, volunteer fire chief, and was chairman of the county fire district. His spirituality is such that he knows his role in the cosmos and in his daily life and acts accordingly. He is awake to the importance of generational exchange and wants nothing more than to have his descendants live responsibly and encouragingly engage in community. I admire his stability and leadership, and appreciate that the only time any of his children has seen him cry was at my oldest brother’s college graduation, and not while speaking at my other brother’s funeral. This was not because of any ridiculous notion of favoritism, but that to him a college degree was impossible and death is unavoidable. This sensitivity inspired me to love and participate in nature, and not try to control it. Named after my Grandfather’s former girl friend and with a sense of humor to match, my darling mother is not quite as reserved about imparting wisdom as my father is. She tends not to require one’s asking before she obliges in giving her two cents. She held us accountable for our decisions and similarly taught us to take responsibility for our beliefs and the impact they had on others. She made sure we were active in service and helping people and causes. She organized family campouts complete with a makeshift handwashing station of a milk jug filled with water with a puncture at the bottom of one of the sides plugged with a golf tee and old panty hose tied to the handle of the jug with a bar of soap inside the recycled hosiery. She was never afraid of taking us on a long hike, even if she only had her slippers for footwear. She still maintains an incredible excitement for exploration and even though she’s been to every canyon around our town and has seen their caves and views, she makes it feel like you are the first person to visit each. The ability to stimulate the senses of others through their own enthusiasm for the outdoors is commendable, and I feel that there are solutions to be found in harnessing this same power. Now I do not suggest that my parents had any inclination to give large amounts of money to the Green Party or Sierra Club, but they understood the importance of exposure to nature even when the degree of that exposure often was the mere eve-

ning jaunt in the car to look at leaves changing color in the autumn or a simple picnic in the foothills. Even the stillness of a tiny town could not compete with the solitude of an area where the human footprint was not as noticeable. While it was chiefly my family who taught me that nature had a value that couldn’t be replaced, my friends taught me to trust in the goodness in people and the notion still inspires me today as I reflect on that tightknit community of young people who were drawn together through our similarities and amassed strength through our differences. Although our collective actions were rarely reminiscent of environmental activism, the acts of goodwill in the larger community were evidence to me that people want to improve the quality of life for others, and that desire could easily transcend into protecting ecosystems, encouraging sustainable development, or using their voice on behalf of the voiceless. Statisticians may not consider this group of twenty or so a sample size with any validity as to its representation of a larger population, but in proportion to the small number of people from there, it was an impressive number. I believe the task will be to convince those willing to civically participate of Turner’s deepened definition of the individual. Many already have a love for animals, plants, or rocks, and simply require the assistance of one to connect the dots for them, meaning that the objects they love are proficiently connected to themselves, along with all the revelations of the issues affecting each. It is true that my group of friends and family never got together to speculate how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but I learned from them that humans have incredible potential to triumph over greed and selfishness. Especially in rural Utah, I don’t think it is farfetched to expect citizens to listen to the earth. They will have to block the counterfeit patriotic rhetoric of the right and take responsibility for religion-based beliefs that are often more a part of human driven culture than of Godly origin. As a raised Mormon and one who has no desire to part with that tradition, I find that its’ purest doctrine and the essential force behind the conservation movement are supplementary to one another. It’s plain to see that there are plenty of Latter-day Saints who will argue that man owns the

earth and it exists to make him rich, and as long as he shows up at church, he is in line with his beliefs. Perhaps it may be difficult to actually find one who will actually argue that point with words, but actions should not be covered by manipulative tactics in the public arena. Many will not accept the reality that religions, including mine, evolve. I do not feel that what I call eternal truth will shift in the evolution of this organization with which I affiliate myself quite seriously, especially as it formally adopts aspects of the cause of environmentalism. Nevertheless, religious, social, and economic institutions accepting their crucial role for the earth’s cause is only a portion of the equation. Engagement in and reform of the present political structure is imperative and it is the principle avenue for which the status quo will be reversed. For it has been governmental bodies that have hurt the earth most, but has often provided her with varying forms of protection conversely. I believe that only through our presently inconsistent political system will our conservationist ideals be met. Since getting to know Pete Ashdown and interning with his campaign for U.S. Senate, I can’t help but be hopeful for what he could do for our country. I’m realistic of his chances of winning, as is he, but he is the only candidate I’ve ever known who would be a variable of positive change. A man of collaborative solution, he is the only politician I’ve known who means what he says. He is conscious of place and could drastically overhaul our faulty systems from within. Our poor earth is being pushed down a path of destruction, and although it is impossible to take back the mistakes we’ve made, we must engage in effective activism where we reach out to those we may not be fond of initially, but we will find that we are fundamentally similar to those in opposing camps, and dialogue will be the foundation for diplomacy, and productivity on the earths’ terms. It’s been eight years since I breathed the air of Oak City as a citizen. I’m a resident of Salt Lake City and will soon relocate to Denver. It has been enlightening to juxtapose my two locales of citizenship. Even though Salt

Lake is a short city when compared to other more prominent American cities, its much-higher-than-Oak City buildings wooed me as a child and these, along with their cousins in other cities, still have some effect on me now. I am intrigued by the ecology of cities, albeit unnatural, and surely the earth they sit upon would benefit from their absence, but the future is far too important and urgent to waste our time musing over what we should have or have not done. There are measures to be taken in every community where people reside, procedures that place emphasis on sustainability and interdependence in our efforts to coexist. Political dialogue and activism must be coupled with virtuous personal choices that demonstrate the unity between the earthsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; will and our own. These choices should reflect our rejection of mindless consumerism and promote a life more reflective of holistic behavior. Through improving our present infrastructures of civilizations with cleaner, more efficient, and ecologically sound characteristics in transportation, eating, and recreating, we will slowly pay back the owed reparations to this sphere of life. By so doing, we would at least figuratively tip our hat to nature and her processes. It comforts me when after we have desecrated her beauty with our filth, she still grants us the pleasures of watching a plant develop, grow, and often yield fruit. It can be native or exotic, and she does not forbid her own hand from blessing the event. Perhaps as long as this procedure continues, we will know she has not left us to find our own way, but the thought of such abandonment should be kindling sufficient for our efforts to burn ceaselessly in making certain the preservation of the earth. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Earth awakens to a provider who is nothing less than the all-encompassing Source passing beyond sight into light into sound.

The Sun: orange chlorophyll spilling earthward Plants: emerald sunlight break energy into matter. Converter of Life force. This is the only enforceable law around which our world revolves. Chlorophyll is Good’s will.”2

Works Cited 1 2

Turner, Jack “The Abstract Wild” The University of Arizona Press: 1996. Page 20 Dalebout, Lyn Chlorophyll in “Out of the Flames” Blue Bison Press: 1996. Page 75

Roots That Run To Water A Natural Autobiography Paul Grindrod

Rain fell in torrents and every ditch, pothole, and other depression in the ground is brimming with water. I am a toddler in diapersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;perhaps one and one half years old, maybe two. My older siblings are stripped down to underpants, splashing and playing in a big puddle in our Terre Haute, Indiana driveway. Somehow I am unseated from my tricycle and promptly sink in the murky water. When my feet donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t immediately touch bottom there is an instant sense of panic; I gasp liquid instead of air. Then my big sister grabs me and pulls me up. This is one of my earliest memories, as vivid as a series of snapshots. Did this really happen, or did I dream it sometime later? I havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t asked my sister if she remembers anything like this, nor has any family member spoken of it. It feels real to me. A few years later we are swimming in a creek or river underneath an old iron railroad bridge near the home of family friends. I am wading in the shallow part of the stream, but step off of a submerged ledge into water deeper than my height. My flailing attracts help and someone pulls me out. Despite these trials, I have many more good memories of experiences in and near water than bad ones. I am drawn to it like a hydrophilic plant; my roots run to water. My life, like all life, has been a concatenation of accidents, the random, purposeless movement of electronic impulses through complex amino

acid chains borne in water. The accretion of 4.6 billion-year-old organic matter that I am today began its coagulation into the perceptible, uniquely “Paul” shape that it currently possesses in Madison, Wisconsin, a city situated on an isthmus between two lakes; I was conceived and delivered surrounded by water. I was born in Wisconsin because that is where my parents happened to meet. My mother’s parents arrived in the western hemisphere from Russia on separate ships to separate continents, her mother to North America and her father to South America. I can only guess at the convolutions that brought them together in Milwaukee. My father’s Norse ancestors took Britain by sea in 900 A.D. and, from there, made their way eventually to America. The earliest directly traceable relative we have found is my great, great, grandfather Matthew, an immigrant from England. When I was just six weeks old, my tiny, neotonic body barely dry of amniotic fluid, my father accepted a job in southern Indiana. I was uprooted for the first of many times in my life. For the next six years I ate, drank, breathed, and sometimes inhaled Indiana. Where does all of this accumulated movement leave me, the offspring of the union of such unsettlement? Unsettled. Since leaving the familial nest, I have moved every six years or so, not yet finding the right fertile soil into which to sink my own adult roots. The past ten years, during which I have lived in Salt Lake City, represent the longest unbroken span of time I have stayed in one place since I was eighteen. And I realize now that I am in the wrong place, again. I am in the Grand Tetons in western Wyoming, seeing them for the fifth or sixth time in my life. Most visits have been as an adult—drive-by sightings from the highway on work-related trips through to Bozeman, Montana. I only stopped here once before as a child tourist of eight, one stop on a vast western family vacation, mid-western eyes sated, then stunned,

by the scale of western space and beauty. This time I have come to immerse myself in this place, to surrender to the natural and human history of the Murie Ranch, Moose, Wyoming, Grand Tetons National Park, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Sitting in the cold, eddying backflow of a braid of the Snake River, I am aware that I don’t belong here–here being the entire western U.S. I need more water around me than is generally available in much of this half of the country. If I stay I am part of the problem of humans’ overuse of a limited resource. To be the change that I want to see in how people relate to the environment I need to pack up and head east. A flash of movement in the sky above me coupled with a shrill cry pulls me back. A bald eagle is being dive-bombed by a pair of red-tailed hawks, one light-plumed, the other a less common dark-morph bird, the resident breeding pair. They are trying to drive the intruding eagle out of their nesting territory. The smaller, lighter hawks can climb more quickly and are more agile. While they pose no real threat to the eagle, their noise and persistent talon swipes are a nuisance. The eagle rolls once or twice and presents its own deadly talons, a potent threat should one of the hawks blunder into its grasp. Finally the eagle gains enough altitude that it can break out of the thermal it has been using to help it climb and soars out of the hawks’ home range. The hawks know their place. The odds are that one or both have bred here before, may even have hatched nearby. They will defend their territorial rights through these kinds of aggressive displays, even with other members of their own species. They must protect the prey base and their young; they are at home. In The Spell of the Sensuous, author David Abram writes that “we are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human” (22). For me, that contact and conviviality has come through birding, something I took up seriously about 12 years ago. Initially I was interested only in the raptors: eagles, owls, hawks, and falcons, but I did some fieldwork with songbird species too. One project was monitoring nesting success of

prairie-breeding birds. Their habitat is defined by openness and scarcity of water, small intermittent or ephemeral streams and prairie potholes. Like the human settlers who came to the vast grasslands after them and built houses of sod, many of these birds nest on or near the ground, crafting nest structures out of grass. Though imperiled in places by altered land use practices, they hang on. Humans haven’t adapted nearly as well on much of the prairie, its expansiveness seems too overwhelming. A second non-raptor field project looked at birds using riparian forest fragments along the Platte River in Nebraska. I felt at ease there. The twisting braids of the Platte were reminiscent of my native Wisconsin River, and the birds were mostly familiar from southern Wisconsin—blue jays, mourning doves, red-winged blackbirds, cardinals, robins, and red-tailed hawks in abundance. The steamy swelter of hundred-degree days and 100 percent humidity were all too familiar, as well, supporting a near-tropical abundance of mosquitoes. These torments were counterbalanced by the solace of cool water, the languid, desultory flow of the Platte at summer low water, or a swim in one of the ponds that were an inadvertent result of digging gravel pits near the river to build Interstate-80 where it runs nearby. Wild yellow irises thrived in the wet heat. I transplanted some bulbs to my parents’ lakeside yard in Madison and they flourished for a number of years after. Bird watching became a passion. It has been a consuming avocation in addition to a sometime vocation. Other than the obvious physiological differences between mammals and birds, there is an important, but littleconsidered difference between them and me. I need to have them around; they don’t need me. Their world would be un-impinged, or possibly improved, by my absence, while mine would be devastated without them. More than flowers and trees, charismatic large mammals, or mountains and plains, bird song is to my soul as water to my body. Recipe for personal happiness: Me Birdsong Water…Mix.

There is a reason that my favorite color is green. It is the color of chlorophyll, leaves, trees, and certain mountain waters, some still and some roiling. It is the color of the best bird habitat and the common thread in what nourishes all of us–humans, moose, elk, fish, and ospreys. The natural maternal instinct to protect and nurture the young is no more developed in humans than in any of those other animals. Just as the redtails attacked the eagle to drive it away or scream at us when we walk the trail near their nest, the osprey patiently warms its eggs or young whether it is sunny and warm or pouring rain. Today while I was writing, a moose cow and calf wandered by. The cow was attentively browsing on aspen leaves, ingesting their rich green; she was close enough that I could hear cellulose tearing. The calf was practicing its own leaf-stripping technique, and had stopped to sample a small aspen sapling while the mother moved on. Although they were less than 75 feet apart (and about equidistant from where I was sitting), when each one noticed the other’s absence each emitted a soft, snorting grunt. The cow’s was lower pitched and the calf’s was high. The baby moose loped gracelessly to its mother’s side, its legs too long, all haunches and shoulder blades. Re-united, the mother nuzzled her calf, licked it once, then again. Tactile reassurance, we are here together. Many of the animals we have seen here, the moose, elk, and many of the more cosmopolitan birds also occur near Salt Lake City; they can be and often are encountered in the canyons quite close to the city. Any of them could be relocated from Jackson to Salt Lake and would probably survive. They could find suitable food and habitat, and probably mates. But each of them would be out of place. Each was born to the Tetons and incorporates lodgepole pine and Teton granite. Anywhere else they would be as lost as I would be in Manchester or Kiev, as homesick as a reservationraised Native American in Los Angeles or an Oregon mountain sheep in Wyoming. Being among your own species ultimately may not be specific enough. One may well survive such dislocation, but can one thrive? In Nature and Madness Paul Shepard explores the problem of why we treat the earth the way we do—why we foul the only nest we have, why

we continue to gnaw away at the hand that feeds us. Pick your own metaphor for environmental degradation. Perhaps we can all abstract our terror into the background, sustain our collective denial of the disaster we face. If Shepard’s claim is on, or even near, the mark, then we are in the midst of a dangerous pandemic. My symptoms include congenital depression, impotent rage, preaching or being preached to by the choir, and a suffocating urge to hike, swim, dig in the ground, plant something, or stare at birds through binoculars until my eyes cross. These are not the result of bad parenting, lack of education, or poor hygiene. I suffer from the disease of rootlessness, the poverty of too few places devoid of technology and improved infrastructure, the comfort of complacency. I ache to feel indigenous to a place. Being indigenous implies being integral to a specific locale, a part of its ecology. It is a natal condition that, if lost, can never be reclaimed. At the same time, it is a way of being in place that we must learn to emulate. I don’t want to “go native” in any New Age, role-playing sense. I want to think native, to understand and practice those traits that allow a people and a place to sustain each other indefinitely. The ecology of residency suggests a conscious and deliberate awareness of where we are at any given time and an acute sensitivity to the interactions going on around us that make each place unique. Longtime habitation is not necessarily the only way to get to that state of awareness. To reside can also mean, “to be inherently present.” Thoreau wrote of the necessity of “direct intercourse and sympathy” with nature. There is a beautiful simplicity in this concept of being inherently present and sympathetic with ones surroundings. It will require work and attentiveness to become that integral with the environment, but only then will mere occupancy of the world grow into an ecology of residency on earth.

Works Cited Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, [reprint 1997]. Shepard, Paul. Nature and Madness. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, [reprint 1998].

The Ontogeny of this Autochthonic Citizen

Jeff Jopling

Part I: Optical Investigations The young Navajo boy peeks at me from behind the brim of the wheelbarrow. He remains quiet, echoing the stillness of the reservation. To him I am a six-foot stranger standing behind a strange box with three metal legs. Imagining myself in his position, I too would appreciate the buffer of a wheelbarrow between us. As my head disappears beneath the black camera cloth the first sound escapes his lips, a giggle. Even without being able to speak with him, his veil of shyness has been temporarily pierced. Quickly adjusting the lens forward, the image on the ground glass comes into focus. I work hard to frame the shot so that it catches all at once the myriad tones of the reservation: the spectrum of colors translated into shades of grey, the stillness and openness of the land, and even the condition of the people. The boy, adorned in oversized clothes, serves as a microcosm of the latter as he is sandwiched between the Hogan and the wheelbarrow full of wood weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve chopped.

A blur of motion arises on the ground glass of the camera and is accompanied by the patter of moving feet. I smile to myself. He doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know I can see him creeping towards me. My head emerges from the cloth in time to see the back of the boy as he retreats to his place of safety. Without the benefits of verbal exchange, I struggle to discover what I can do. I know that understanding my status as a foreigner here is important both to my success as a service volunteer, and as a photographer. How do I teach him about the camera and that I want to take his photograph? Even if we spoke a common language, how would I tell him to relax and be himself? His earlier movements make me think heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s curious. To ease his shyness, I lift the cloth and invite him to investigate the contraption. A few moments of gesturing with open demeanor and the invitation is accepted. After a brief inspection, he is satisfied and moves back to the wheelbarrow. Positioned at its side he dangles his arm on the edge, his confident gaze directed at me. We are now partners in this endeavor. The shutter clicks as I release it. I realized that I did not have to speak Navajo in order to communicate with and gain the trust of this young individual. Not being able to speak with him forced me to examine the message that my body and demeanor were sending, making me much more attentive to body posture and facial expressions. Even after this effort, the photo did not turn out to be one of my best. It had the potential to capture all of the complexities of the circumstances, but my technical skills were not transparent enough for me to convey them adequately. Still, looking at this photograph now brings back a range of memories. Like any good photograph it is itself a story. That is why I love photography. Master the fundamentals of my tools and techniques my instructors have taught me, until they become transparent. Only then can they be used to capture and communicate the complexity of the unpredictable moment, unveiling the truth and beauty that lie beneath. On a trip to Monterey, California I discover my photographic voice in the geology of the land. As the sun approaches its nadir my body gives in to

the force of the earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s magnetic pull. Sick from exhaustion, I feel buoyant resting on the warm smooth stones below. The sun hits the horizon line over the ocean and its last rays of electromagnetic energy snake their way towards me. Propping my head up on its chin, I see that, not an armâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s length away, the elements have made a small sculpture out of the giant rock upon which I rest. Grooves are cut horizontally and vertically, forming six small stone islands all lined up symmetrically, three to a side. I have been resting on natureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s abdomen, its own six-pack. Semiconscious, I capture the photograph just before laying back down to rest. Years later, I find myself at the end of a ten day stay at the Murie Ranch just outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming. My sole photograph on site is a portion of one of the wooden outhouses at the homestead. Unused, these small shacks are brown blemishes on the land, each slowly being taken back into nature. It is this reclamation that I am interested in, the intersection between man-made structure and nature. My best attempt at capturing insight into my natural habitat is at this margin. This image is a macro shot of a five-inch vertical segment of plank bounded on either side by intersections with other planks. Patterned on top of the tan background are flakes of bark, pale brown in color and brittle as potato chips. This in itself is a pattern. Another instance. I return from an ice-fishing trip with a black and white photograph zoomed in on a small strip of a picnic table coated with shimmering white flakes of ice. When pressed, the majority of observers guess that it is an image of a host of white butterflies. Disclosure of the content of the image is often met with surprise. Few of the observers have witnessed this beauty even though it is common to their own experience. Artistic forms have the ability to convey meaning and beauty in our immediate landscape. First step: representation and expression. Second step: understanding why we overlook this beauty in the first place.

Part II: Progeny Two people who have always been supportive in listening to my explanations and to my fascination with the complexity of the photographic process are my parents. Always encouraging, they put their favorite images on the wall in the living room of their home and listen to my narratives regarding the genesis of the photographs. Only now do I understand that their positive reinforcement has sprung from feelings of delight with my growth as a person more so than of their excitement in hearing about the images. The feelings of gratitude flow both ways between my parents and I. Gratitude, a memory. Navigating the hormone thick halls of my high school, the weight of a hand on my shoulder stops me. I pivot to find Mrs. Bolton standing before me, face radiating joy. “Jeff, I just wanted to tell you that your dad is a great doctor and such an amazing man,” she said. “He saved my baby’s life earlier this week and my family and I are so grateful for everything that he has done to help my child.” I stood stunned in silence for a moment. Thinking back a few days, I come up with the one she mentioned. I still have a clear memory of that night. My father and I had talked for hours about the novel I was reading for English class, and he did not mention a word about his own story from that day. He has always been humble about his accomplishments and in this moment, standing in the hallway at school, I understood my father’s proclivity to give others the gift of attention. I learned that by placing his needs and desires aside and listening to the other person’s story, he shows them that he values their thoughts and actions. Through his attentiveness, my father is always foregrounding the possibilities and potentialities of my developmental life course. He has challenges me to push my limits, showing me the process of growth. Though her work is often done in the background, it due to my mother’s persistent drive to inspire me to persevere, that my projects come to fruition, and my goals become actualized. My parents’ mentoring is powerful because it takes place in everyday settings. The manifestation of this mentoring

can be explained with any number of anecdotes. The following is one of them. I love bulk waste collection day. Monoliths of byproducts stand at the curb, each uniquely structured of components both organic and manmade. Navigating the streets of Sandy, Utah my father and I are marauders looking for our pirates booty buried in the waste of others. These raw materials are procured for our furniture construction endeavors, our focus in this annual recycling of goods. We target mounds that contain an abundance of wood, fresh pieces from trees that have been cut down. Traveling from pile to pile, we sort through the different types of wood: Quaking Aspen, Mulberry, Birch, Cottonwood, Douglas Fir, Oak, and Ponderosa Pine. A plethora of options are available, so we can be selective. We examine the texture of the wood. Is the bark fully present? What color is the wood? What is the length and width of the pieces? Do they branch? Where and how? At the end of a vigorous day, red scratches decorate both my forearms, their sting homing my focus on the joy of the experience. The deck at our house is now populated by neatly stacked segments of wood, which are ordered by size of branch and type of tree. Four segments of zebra colored quaking aspen are perfect for the legs of a chair or, cut in half, great for framing up two pictures or paintings. Having fulfilled their roles as Christmas trees, two long trunks of Douglas Fir will serve as a great framework for a ladder. Several stumps have enough character to inspire transformation into the bodies of lamps. All of these possibilities lay before us, with additional forms likely to spring up throughout the process. Two weeks later we commandeer a trailer to transport the raw materials to my family cabin located just above the town of Kamas, Utah. With chainsaw, axe, sealant and stain we set to work. An orchestra of metal upon wood fills the air with humming as a bookcase begins to take shape. With no level or skill saw, we are on our own to navigate the natural contours of the wood. Symmetry in height, not character, is the goal in structuring the end pieces. Mastering the use of the tools is harder than anticipated,

and sculpting with an axe and chainsaw is not the most graceful endeavor. I am outclassed and yet my father finds a way to shape the learning environment such that I feel an equal partner. End pieces complete, we construct this bookcase of Ponderosa Pine. Bottom up and shelf-by-shelf we align the stumps at the ends before placing stained shelves on top. Time after time, each shelf is a smooth slide for the books as it angles towards the ground. My mother has instilled that attempts are the lifeblood of success. The quicker the feedback cycle, the faster I can learn and choose to adapt. Try again, it slopes toward the back. Try again, it slopes to the right. Again, to the front this time. Mistakes are feedback from the gods; listen to what they’re telling you. After two days we’re finally finished. Anyone confused regarding the definition of rustic can look to this bookshelf for clarification. Among its brown blending of stumps and shelves lie not-so-hidden wedges, the sole insurance that the books don’t enjoy the pleasure of a trip down the slip and slide. Fully stocked end to end, we let the bookshelf be. To celebrate we travel down to Kamas to get milkshakes at the local Dick’s Drive-in. Dark brown sawdust litters the bookshelf when we return to it next. This fine-ground fertilizer covers every shelf and some has floated to the floor. We investigate the structure of our library and find tiny black spots against the brown of the wood: arthropods en mass. We have built a wooden home for books and bugs. My face flushes a scarlet red as I look to my father. He shrugs and admits, “That’s too bad.” “I can’t believe we wasted all that time and never got to enjoy it,” I lament as we immediately set to work removing the books and dismantling the bookcase. My father smiles, “Well Jeff, I just enjoyed spending the time with you. That it didn’t work out is something that is out of our control, we did our best during the process and learned from it.” I still encounter individuals and families who my father has helped. They tell me how amazing my dad is as a doctor, and even though I don’t know him in that capacity, I feel like I understand them. During our time together one on one, he has taught me how to have an interpersonal rela-

tionship where both people are comfortable enough to learn and grow. This has fundamentally influenced experiences in every aspect of my life, including community service. When engaging in acts of service, I have felt utterly frustrated, physically and emotionally exhausted, and sometimes quite uncomfortable. It often forces me to look closer at my life and in so doing makes me realize that I gain as much or more out of the experience than the people I interact with.

Part III: Embodiment Currently, I volunteer at a clinic for homeless youth where I am often given opportunities to interact with young adults on a first name basis. One in particular sticks out to me now. Her name was Alley Cat, then Peter Pan, and now Angel. Angel is one of the street youth of Salt Lake City, and these are her street names. As I take her vitals at the free open clinic, I notice the track marks and bruises decorating the crook of her elbow. She seems forlorn and maybe a little washed out from being in the sun all day. As I walk her back to the waiting room, I wonder what is ailing her. I soon find out as Dr. Sheetz invites me back to the exam room. Angel opens her mouth to reveal two giant lakes of lime green puss dominating the landscape of her bright red-fleshed oral cavity. The worst case of strep throat Dr. Sheetz has seen. I gaze at these pools of puss, imagining the pain is great. To dampen down the painful sensations we offer some brown, round tablets. Angel declines. I want to reach out to her and provide some kind of support. Simply because the option to act is there, I offer her what I can: my full attention. Knowing that I can not provide her with solutions to her medical problems, I seek to be attentive to her story. Offering up words of sympathy for the pain it must be causing her, I inquire why she waited so long to come to the clinic. Angel perks up, â&#x20AC;&#x153;I

only noticed them for the first time this morning.” My eyebrows furrow as I ask, “What? How? If you don’t mind me asking, how could you not notice the pain?” “Since I’ve been living on the street,” Angel answers as she hops off the table, “I’ve learned to ignore my body.” As she begins strolling around, the sterile white and green of the room melt away as I watch her gesticulating arms give life to her words. She goes on to explain that for her peers and her, there is no way around feeling pain. From sleeping in awkward and uncomfortable positions, to having a sporadic diet, to engaging in unhealthy drug use, pain and discomfort will come to rule their life on the street if they let it. After Angel departs, I feel good about our experience together. Though I haven’t cured any ills, I saw the twinkle in her eyes as she explained her story to an interested audience. Her troubled life has meaning and value, and she knew I recognized that. It is in my interactions with Angel at subsequent visits where I learn that whether it serves as a refuge or an escape, many homeless youth move to the street because that is the best available choice to them. This social and physical environment offers a safe harbor from previous troubles, but can also mediate the adoption of new ones. I now notice a look in many of the other homeless kids that I work with, a look asking me if I see them. A look that also asks me if I recognize them as my peers, both in who they are and who they want to be. Rain, the girl of sixteen who discovers she’s pregnant, looks to see if I believe that despite her circumstances she can care for another life. Boo, having hopped trains from Virginia to Salt Lake, stays mute as he discovers that he is HIV positive. He leaves the communicative space open for my criticism. I have none. I too know what it is to separate myself from my mind, abstraction as insulation from the pain. Pain born of hurting others, the other that is sometimes myself. I know why I try to let others speak before me. It enables me to be attentive. In so doing, it graciously allows me to impart respect.

It is this that has stuck with me from many of my interactions with these kids, my peers: the question of what it means to cut one’s self off from one’s bodily sensations. All of one’s life experiences take place in the context of a local ecology. In order to understand and navigate this local ecology, we devise a multitude of epistemic maps. These epistemological maps are constructed through the use of our sensory faculties and brains as we parse up the otherwise chaotic world into discernible and semi-consistent patterns. We then act off of our understanding of these maps and our actions beget results. These results are feedback that can be used to constantly refine our epistemic maps, thus influencing subsequent actions and understandings. Understandably, people block out things that they think are ugly or painful. During our normal daily routines we often block ourselves off from our sensory faculties and blame it on habituation. We walk twelve blocks and don’t remember a thing we have seen. We have twenty-minute conversations at the end of which we can’t recall anything that the other person has said. In all of these situations we encounter things of beauty and yet choose to ignore them. Admittedly, we also come into contact with stimuli that are disagreeable to us, such as static cement structures or people who are cold, and cut ourselves off from them. These repulsive things in our environment cause us pain, and it is because we are in pain that we shut ourselves off from it. This way we don’t have to deal with it. We push away the pain so that we don’t have to feel, but this affects our status as a community. Once we’ve turned ourselves off, it’s not easy to selectively open ourselves right back up again. Without this openness and attentiveness to others, a community cannot thrive. When we lack community, we lose our greatest buffer against the pains of the world. With this understanding, being open to one’s own bodily experiences is a necessary foundation for understanding oneself in the larger context of the overlapping ecological and social strata that make up our world. Our local ecologies have the ability to tickle all of our senses, evoking an awareness of the myriad organic and inorganic stimuli. We learn about these stimuli through interacting with them and govern our actions accordingly. When

we eliminate this ecological feedback loop we limit our capacity to fully immerse ourselves in the river of experience. In so doing we cut ourselves off from some of our most important modes of creating meaning in the world. With this understanding, registering and interacting with our local ecology is critical to our successful development as individuals, and to our cohesion as a community. My parents have implicitly taught me all of this over the course of my development as a productive member of a community. In teaching me how to interact with all the interrelated components of my local ecology, both on my own and with the assistance of tools, they have imparted me with a gift: the perpetual hum of noticing. Noticing beauty in every situation, as well as pain. Recognizing both for what they are, and the roles they play in my community.

Guilt Trip Koshlan Mayer-Blackwell

“Curiously, peace-time appeals for individuals to make some sacrifices in the rate at which they increase their standard of living seem to be less effective than war time appeals for individuals to lay down their lives.” -Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

I remember looking out from the main concourse of the Salt Lake City Airport It was right after Christmas, two years after Saddam’s statue had been torn down, after mission accomplished, after any American triumphalism in Iraq had lost its luster. I was flying back to New York. The winter inversion that hung over the Salt Lake Valley stalked the tarmac, pressings its muzzle against the large double-pane windows. All around me, soldiers of my age and younger filled the airport with their tan fatigues and black boots, the coming and going between family and duty. I hated almost everything about this war and this president.

I would never say it aloud out of political correctness, but I carried a sense of relief knowing that only poor people were being sent to fight. Keeping the wealthier half of my generation out of this war seemed a move of inadvertent brilliance. Perhaps it was the only long-term thinking this administration had yet to manage, as if it hoped fighting wars without a draft might stifle the next wave of would-be anti-war writers. It was a hawk’s dream: to keep the future Vonneguts, Hellers, and O’Briens as far away from the front-lines as possible, insulated from the absurdities of war in Ph.D. programs, in medical schools, or on Wall Street. As I stood on the moving sidewalk to Concourse D, Tom Till’s and Thomas Mangelsen’s framed and glossy versions of nature tracked past me. The trophies of place. Those photos didn’t belong there. They felt like anesthetics dulling any real sense of the vanishing wild. They were as shallow as my own environmentalism. Attending college in the East, it was easy as a westerner to wear my environmentalism on my sleeve. Yet, my college activism, my national parks pass, and my Sierra Club membership card obscured an inadequate relationship to the place where I grew up. Everywhere, I witnessed a war on the environment, yet I did not feel well prepared to be a foot soldier in her defense. My generation doesn’t monkey wrench; we don’t even seem to get angry. My sense of loss was abstract and unspecific. My resident’s knowledge of the ecology where I grew up was limited to names of good trailheads and ski runs. I never took the time to learn the names of plants or birds. I barely knew the difference between an osprey and a heron. I didn’t even own a copy of Walden. I don’t have a power animal. Nearing my gate, I passed magazine shops selling candy and copies of the New York Times with the obligatory picture of Falluja, or Basra, or Baghdad in flames. I passed more men in buzz cuts and camouflage. Seeing them, I thought of how little I had done to stop the mountains and deserts I pronounce to love from being scarred with oil roads and the screeches of coal-bed methane rigs. Still, I know it is working-class people, the same people who have their kids in the Middle East, whose jobs green liberals like me seem keen to outlaw.

Since college, I had been earning money writing for some green and leftleaning magazines. I received my last check for writing a 200 word insert that was never published. The text was meant to accompany two charts comparing deaths during the Vietnam War and Operation Iraqi Freedom. A layout editor pulled the strikingly similar pie slices delineating race, region of the country, and level of education in favor of a non-threatening advertisement for a Toyota hybrid SUV. • The smell of driver’s cheap aftershave filled the taxi that carried me into Manhattan across the TriBorough Bridge. I had a free day in the city before I had to catch a train to Albany for an interview. My repressed yuppie had booked a single room at a boutique hotel on 88th and Broadway, the kind with square duvet pillows, black marble bathrooms, a square steel sink, narcissistically placed mirrors, and triple-ply toilet paper folded at the end into a neat triangle as if it were origami paper. I cracked the backseat window and leaned up to tell the cab driver to take a long route across 125th Street past Columbia before heading down the Upper West-Side. As I passed through the now gentrifying borders of Harlem, I watched the red tail lights in front of us blur as I tried to picture the streets as they might have been when my father went to college forty years earlier. I imagined for a minute that my father and I occupied the same city, lined with pin-stripe suits, long Lincoln town cars, and Edward Hopper diners. I had only a day to probe my guilt and understand how a vacuum cleaner bag had saved my father’s life. In 1969, the year that Congress ended college deferments, my father was in his junior year at Columbia. The ping-pong ball carrying his birthday drew a low draft lottery number. A month later he was called to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn for a medical examination. It was not as if doing away with college deferments put an end to the country’s economic draft. At the time, most upper-middle class kids assembled a battery of documents--some real, some forged--that they hoped would excuse them from serving a tour in Vietnam. Some got letters from family doctors attesting

to dehabilitating sports injuries. Others got letters from school guidance counselors pronouncing that their mental health was in question. It was widely rumored that some young men even pretended to be insane, traveling to their examination with peanut butter between their ass cheeks so that they could pretend to eat their own shit in front of the evaluating psychiatrist. My father, having never distinguished himself in athletic pursuits, had no dislocated rotator cuff or hyper-extended knee upon which to embellish. His only chance at a medical exemption was a poorly documented case of childhood asthma. When he delivered a record of a single asthma attack to the Long Island Draft Board, he was almost laughed out of the room, but in accordance with protocol he was granted an appointment with a respiratory specialist. Within minutes of reaching the hotel room, not even bothering to climb under the sheets, I had fallen asleep. I dreamt myself back on an airplane, not the same one that had brought me to LaGuardia, but a smaller one with a glass floor. As the ground rushed by, the dream borrowed the view from a red-eye flight I once took from Austin to Atlanta. I gazed down on the endless lights of the Sunbelt: the contiguous sulfur-oxide veins and nodes that outshone the stars for a thousand miles. In the morning, I took a cab down to Greenwich Village. It was still early and the winter cold hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t lifted. Steam drifted out of manholes, foot traffic was slow, and the sunglass gypsies had yet to arrive. After a few hours of scouring, I found a shop with a promising cache of vintage 1960â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s junk. Inside the store, hanging from the rafters above the cash register, was a red Cadillac-finned guitar that reminded me of the electric that Hendrix smashed to bits the year my father escaped the draft. I ran my hand through a basket of embroidered patches that I imagined had been pealed from backpacks being traded in for briefcases. By a stroke of luck, I spotted a retro Hoover vacuum in the back of the store. It was lying behind piles of scratched up vinyls, Peter Max t-shirts, and geometric furniture in every shade of orange, items that had been stripped of all but a patina of their radical significance and were now being re-sold as artifacts of the

counter-culture. I wasn’t in the mood to haggle so I paid the eighty-five dollars and wheeled the vacuum out onto the pavement, wheeling it behind me for thirty-two blocks back towards Midtown. The day of my father’s medical exam, in an act of desperation, he vacuumed every corner of his apartment in search of cat dander, pollen, and dust. He ground up chalk and sucked it up into the bag. He took the vacuum bag with him on the subway, inhaling its contents until he was red in the eyes and wheezing. An hour later, still gasping, he managed to fail his exam. He only told me the story once. More than any other, it has stuck with me. I respect my father, but this is not something I retell with pride as if it was a courageous act of civil disobedience. I guessed that my father, like me, was opposed to, but not radicalized by, the war. I imagined he acted mostly out of fear and not conviction. He must have known, like I do, that we were asking others to fight in our place. “Sir, do you need me to call housekeeping?” the man at the front desk of the hotel asked as the vacuum and I waited for the elevator. “No,” I said. “It’s just a souvenir.” “Right, then,” he managed. “I know a website where you can buy old lawnmowers. You should…” “I am not going to keep it,” I said and turned away. In the confines of my hotel room, the obvious lunacy of my plan almost knocked me down. I took a hot shower, letting the water soften the tired muscles in my back. Crustacean red, wet, and wearing the hotel towel, I sat on the bed and stared myself down in the mirror across the room. I could see the varicose in my left leg draw heavy with blood. The deformed veins, veins I share with my father, twisted back on themselves around my calf. For a second I saw only the writhing imprint of beetle pathways left on fallen trees, grey and naked of bark.

With only the towel still around my waist, I propped my door open and pushed the vacuum into the hall. The plug was old and I had to bend it so it would fit into the socket. My hand guided the vacuum into the corners where housekeeping had missed some dust. A man came out of his room. Seeing me, he took a step back and slammed the door. There was not enough dirt in the hallway and I was not adequately dressed to continue my search on the next floor, so I went back to my room. I forced the window open and ran the vacuum tube along the ledge. I wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t ashamed of my father. I was no more ashamed of him than I could be of myself, but I regretted how easy it was for me to go weeks without thinking of what it meant to be at war. Feeling disconnected, in a time when the use of violence and the constant assault on nature are both waged through campaigns of disconnection, sent blood and anger into my face. It was not enough to say these wars are not my wars. I knew they reflected other problems and histories to which we almost always obscure our personal connection. I got dressed and ripped the bag off the vacuum cleaner. I carried it toward the 116th subway station where my father would have caught the train. As I walked the streets past bookshops and exposed fire-escapes, I felt no absolution for driving a car that gets thirty miles to the gallon, for talking longingly of more public transportation, or for rolling my eyes at all the right times when people talk about Bush at dinner parties. I had barely opposed the obvious war, to say nothing of our deeply rooted culture of extraction, which will be with us long after the last troops are pulled out of Baghdad. I took the stairs, descending among the baby blue tiles of the Columbia subway station. The train arrived quickly, coming down from the neighborhood north of Harlem. People in janitorial uniforms and worn tennis shoes waiting to go on second shifts stared at the floor. No one seemed to notice the bag I was carrying under my jacket. I found a seat in the back of the car and hung my feet into the aisle.

The overhead speakers announced the arrival of the 110th street station. The doors opened and pulled more people in. By 103rd, the car was beginning to fill up. In the front, people stood wearing grey and blue suits. Their hands searched for space on aluminum poles. The yellow lights, like Morse Code issuing an SOS across the tunnel walls, blurred into a streak before coming back into focus as the train lurched into the brightness of the next station. Clinging to the bag, I closed my eyes and imagined my father. Together, thirty-seven years apart, we entered the darkness between stations. There was nothing we could do to slow this train. The subway car wobbled as if losing its grip on the tracks. My mind lost its balance long enough to make some sense of what I was doing. I had gone to New York seeking a feeling. I wanted to feel the fear and anguish that my father must have felt. Was it possible to remove some of the emotional layers of privilege that insulated me? I pulled the bag over my chin and inhaled, remembering to hold in my breath like taking a drag off a joint. My eyes burned. Coughing, I put the bag back around my mouth and inhaled. I needed some way to make painful my dull sense of loss. I inhaled harder until my mind was deep in my lungs, diving into the thinnest lining of my breathing soul. There was a hole right next to the heart where I could feel the heat of my curiosity, my creativity, and my compassion collapsing. I tried to cough my way back up, but was suffocated by the bag still held around my mouth. I coughed. The whole train was going up in a forest fire. Dropping the bag to the floor, I stumbled through the aisles past people who stood stiff like pine trees nude of their quills. I felt the heat building behind me, the spark of violence, the flames of extinction, the pyre of so many lives extricated from the natural world. The doors opened, and I was flung out. As I collapsed on the cold cement, I breathed again, spastic gasping breaths as if I had been held under water. With each breath, my mind cleared. My environmentalism will have to change. It will have to change from an

abstract environmentalism of ideas and fashionable outrage to an environmentalism rooted in place. It is not enough to be an eco-tourist. I must learn to feel a stake in what is being trampled. I can no longer rely on the mobility afforded by wealth and youth to seek out greater natural places. I must seek out a greater connection to nature by acquainting myself more deeply in an ecology of residence. The fact that I do not know the name of a single person fighting in Iraq is similar to the fact that I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know the name of a single person who grows the food that I eat or the name of single endangered species in my own state. It is no coincidence that the erosion of compassion for the rest of the living world, for wolves, for bears, for lodge-pole pines, for lichen is connected to a deficit of compassion for humans in countries far out of sight.

The Domino Effect Rory Norseth

There are times when God stops to catch her breath – Earth pauses in rotation; clouds in stasis in the sky. These are the times, between heartbeats, when choices are made; choices of empowerment from victimhood; choices that define one’s place in the world. These are the times, these domino moments, of great strength out of weakness, joy from sorrow, love from hate. When we know we can go no further, falling within that abyss that guides us forward. I woke that morning to a world of slow-motion grey-scale. I went through the motions of living. It was difficult to move, to breathe. Running in a dream, I watched as my wife and son left for the day. Fay has taught special education at Jackson Elementary in Salt Lake City for 15 years. She drops Christian off at Highland High School’s vocational daycare and preschool on her way to work. He is four-years old. The daycare and preschool is exclusively for employees of the school district, a rare perk for school teachers. It still costs $350 per month. I watch the morning occur in fascinated detachment, my life projected in two dimensions. I am mechanical. I am a witness to my thoughts; a busy brain racing along the “what-if” highway. The drugs, the career changes,

the wasted fucking time, who am I? I am the skywardly fornicated brain chatter psychic impotent background noise of despair. Lethargy, lethargy, lethargy, I am heavy. I wade through stiff Jello to my garage. I climb up to the loft and take it down, unzip the case, remove the bolt and check the barrel for obstructions. Replacing the bolt I release the safety and pull the trigger. The loud metallic “click” of the firing pin intrudes upon the stillness. I run my hand along the silky barrel. I slowly slide my finger around the rim of the scope and re-discover the dent where it slid down the side of the truck and hit the open door when I was 14 and going through that ritual in the woods. The silken steel is cool and sensual. It is the only thing I have felt so far today. My father gave me this gun. Should I leave a note, attempt to explain myself? How do you explain the inconceivable to your soul-mate and your four-year-old son? Is a suicide note to your wife the same as a love letter from the devil? Words, words, words. I press the barrel against my forehead. I can just reach the trigger with my thumb. “Hmmm, no, this won’t do, too run of the mill.” I begin to calculate; an “X” on the floor, a bracket made of wood, a small pulley, a string, angles, lines and velocities. A 270 Remington bolt action has a faster muzzle velocity than, say, a 30-06. This is due to the smaller caliber slug with the same 180 grains of gunpowder. The rifle, as I recall, is sighted in at 200 yards. The rifling in the barrel causes the slug to rise like a Randy Johnson fastball spinning its way from the muzzle to freedom. It planes out by 200 yards according to how I’ve sighted it. How much will it rise in 20 feet, the distance from my workbench to the east wall? If I aim for the bridge of my nose it should hit me in the forehead. I pull a tape and make some quick marks on the smooth concrete floor with a new black “sharpie.” I like the smell of the ink. I gather the wood and string. I know I have a pulley around here somewhere. I am curious as to whether I’ll hear the report. My plan is simple. I’ll get it all set up and ready, maybe a dry run or two, then I’ll call 9-1-1 on my cell phone from the garage. By the time they

come it will be over and done. I will be over and done. (“It” always replaces the pronoun “I” unclaimed by self.) That way Fay and Christian won’t come home to a big mess. I am pretty sure the time requirement has been satisfied in the suicide clause. “They’ll get all that money...” I realize I have no bullets. In a dream state that I imagine is similar to that curious euphoria at the tale end of freezing to death, I wade back into the house for my checkbook. I pick it up off the counter and notice Christian’s forgotten snow-boots by the door. He needs them. He won’t be able to play outside at recess without them. The school is on the way to the sporting goods supply. I park in the school lot, get out of the truck and walk quietly down the hall. As my eyes adjust to the light I can’t remember what the floor looks like. “Is it one-by-one linoleum tiles, white with black swirls, or is it marble. No, that’s the capital building... huh...” The door to his classroom is ajar. My footsteps make no sound. I peek in. “I’ll just watch him for a minute.” He is wearing a smock made from a man’s old shirt. He is wearing a doctor’s hat and a plastic stethoscope. Several children are gathered around him. He’s teaching them how to squirt tempura out of an oversize syringe onto white butcher paper. He is so incredibly beautiful and confident. I watch as the colors swirl and blend, yellow to green, blue to purple, red to orange, bright, bright, brightness. My soul begins to breathe and these thoughts leave me never to return again. He sees me and smiles. I place his boots in his cubby and spirit him away into the empty, quiet hallway and I hold him forever. I squeeze him tighter for a moment and go home and walk my dog, Albert Einstein. Fay and Christian come home at the usual time and I am here, present, in the moment and awake. At dinner I experience joy of a magnitude grander than mountains. Wonderful, fertile confusion consumes me, and I say nothing. They must never know the depth of my own selfishness and despair. After dinner we watch “The Simpsons” together on the couch. I am struck again by a sense of duality, only this time it is a gift. I see two

timelines diverge along two separate trails of falling dominos. Again I am witness to my thoughts. To my left I see them, secure, happy, nurtured and wrapped in my love. To my right they are silent, clinging to each other in stunned desolation. I have chosen the correct path and I am terrified. I remember that day in the third person from a vantage point elevated over my right shoulder and a few feet behind. It’s as if I’m viewing a photograph from memory. A photograph can be a lie. That is not me. There are so many things wrong in the world and I fear I have no voice to change them. “Click”...polar bears... “click”... caribou... “click” ... civil rights... “click” ... thousands of languages and cultures lost for all eternity... “click” ... rain forest bio-freakin’ diversity sapiens sapiens my ass! “Click” is a synonym for extermination. Those of us in the developed world have the luxury of concerning ourselves with such things. In the third world, while the corporations we support suck the very life blood from the land in the name of profit, a young boy watches as his father’s head is lopped off by a machete and used for a soccer ball while his mother, raped, pleads for her young son’s arms not to be chopped off. But we must never speak of these things. Guilty, guilty, guilty. A friend of mine told me only 28% of Americans believe in evolution. Of the remaining 72%, how many read books about ecological indicators of anthropogenically induced climactic alteration such as biomes stranded in the wrong climate? For Christ’s sake, it’s even hard to say it. How do you reach enough people so my little boy grows up knowing his wildness? How do you reach people insulated and air-conditioned and fattened on the calories of dinosaurs? Education isn’t radical enough and mass protests are just pissing on a fan. We have become jaded towards complacency because it is easier, and we are afraid of our own voices. I can no longer live in denial.

My father’s hands were never patient except when he was fishing. Then the quick flicking of the wrist that set the hook relied heavily on that patience. Fish, fish, fishing for fishy fish, spilling guts and bashing heads on a rock. The river ripples and dances around our hip-waders and the yellowjackets strafe our sandwiches in hot air that smells like sage and campfire smoke. My heart ached for his love to be expressed in words. But I hear it now in river song and the quick flick of memory’s fly-rod. I loved my father much more than I ever expressed. He gave in his own angry way and I in my timid manner. He needed his anger. It was his armor that covered the tenderness of his soul and the anguish in his heart. When I was 17 and the embodiment of that fridge magnet that says, “Hire a teenager while they still know everything,” he took me with my stringy, shoulder length hair and eyes clouded over from marijuana and too much or too little sleep, to his bedroom and opened the third drawer down. Deep in the rectangular intimacy he reached in and produced a thick stack of $50 treasury bonds. “I’ve been getting one of these a month since 1949 from Disabled American Vets,” he said. He had taken shrapnel through the nose in Belgium. “These are for you to go to college with.” I flippantly turned him down and argued about the value of college. “I’ve been going to school for twelve years,” I said. “Why the fuck would I wanna go for four more when I’ve got such a good job at the bowling alley?” I watched as a light dimmed in his eyes. What a cruel and thoughtless act of treason. What a mean and angry rebellion. I’ve never forgotten that dimming. My father grew up poor. His father had a heart condition that prevented him from working. This was before the New Deal and social nets. My grandfather died before I was old enough to walk. I have a memory, or I imagine a memory, of a thin man in a tee-shirt seated in a hard backed chair with his arms extended. My grandmother ran a floral shop with my great-aunt to support the family, four boys and two girls. Once, during the Great Depression, a man came in to rob the store and my grandmother chased him down the street hitting him with a broom and telling him he was a bad boy.

One Christmas when my father was twelve, he and his older brother and my grandfather worked in secret to make a sled for the family present. They labored on it for a month. On Christmas morning they put it out on the back porch and went in for breakfast. When the family went out to get it and go sledding it was gone. They could see the tracks and footprints where the thieves had towed it away through the back yard. That was it. That was Christmas. And here I was, dismissing his gift of a college education. Something he had scraped and clawed for himself on rice and beans and the GI bill. (These were the days before “Ramen Noodles.”) He held a master’s in geology and hydrology. After he died I was sorting through his things. In a small, unobtrusive box inside a tweed cabinet, I came across an even smaller wooden box with dovetailed joints. In memory it is lined with red velvet. Therein lay a Silver-Star and a Purple-Heart. No explanation. None needed. Perhaps that’s why he never spoke of the war. He had buried it in boxes within boxes. My sister Sally at the family reunion, “Daddy, did you get killed in the war?” Laughter from my aunts and uncles, silence from my father. Well, there was this one story he would sometimes tell. He was trained as an army ranger in WWII. Shortly before his unit was deployed to the Philippines he contracted the mumps and couldn’t go. He was quickly retrained and found himself in a glider on D-Day soaring over the beaches, fields and farmhouses of Normandy in the pre-dawn darkness. There had been a navigation error, a chance trigonometric miscalculation. They overshot their landing field and found themselves behind enemy lines. When they made it back to the beach where they were supposed to land they discovered the Germans had constructed wicked barricades from railroad-ties and short lengths of sharpened train track. They were designed to impale the gliders in the darkness. On the way to the landing zoned they crossed a bridge and in doing so passed by a column of Nazi soldiers marching the other direction. Like that famous black and white scene in “The Longest Day” they passed in

silence. None dared make eye contact. They became invisible to each other honoring an uneasy truce. As he told this story his eyes would slip away and his hands would shake, and I was riding on his broad, bent shoulders to safety. The fighting was terrible between my older brother and my dad. Kerry smoked and dad yelled at him for it while unconsciously tamping the tobacco deeper into his pipe. My older sisters, Sally and Laurel, hid and giggled. Kerry would never back down. My dad’s temper raged and my brother answered with his own. He was fourteen-years-old and I was three. I would crawl behind the living room couch as Kerry would attempt to escape to his bedroom. Sometimes my father would pin him to the wall but catch himself and quickly withdraw. I would stare at my brother’s fists, clenched and white knuckled, fighting back tears and weakness. He wanted to hit him. He wanted to hit him hard. The cigarettes protruded from his tee-shirt pocket. The ashes and embers would fly from my father’s pipe as it waggled in his yelling mouth. I don’t remember the words. I shut them out in my quiet, cool cave behind the couch. I recall my mother in the kitchen making dinner. This was normal. My father’s and brother’s voices would rise together and blend in rage. The crescendo of screaming male voices would climax with a slammed door and a broken heart. Once my father pinned Kerry to the wall by the lamp, one of those pole lamps that hold themselves in place with a compressed spring that pushes a rubber tipped rod against the ceiling and floor. I was behind the couch softly singing “Give Said the Little Stream” when the living room went dark and the door slammed and shook the wall by my head. When I dared look, I saw the orange glow of my father’s pipe ember increase in brightness and dim in rhythm to his breathing. The lamp lay broken and the chair overturned. A line remained in the ceiling where the lamp had gouged an ugly scar as it fell. I remember my mother’s frightened countenance, the dutiful wife and mother; fear, fear, fearful. Do the right thing... the right thing... the right

thing... echoing and fading within her gentle soul. I was an accident, a happenstance of sperm and egg. I remember asking her as a child why I wasn’t a little Negro boy. I liked their pink fingernails, palms, soles of their feet and shiny, curly black hair. She laughed and tried to explain. Once, when I was five and playing in the yard, she came to me. Her apron smelled of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. On her knees in the grass she held my, “Rory, I want you to promise me you will never smoke cigarettes.” My mother had never asked me to promise anything before. How could I resist that fearful, gentle request? I admit to lighting a few and holding them in my mouth in high-school. But they made me nauseous and dizzy if I inhaled any smoke. Other than that, I’ve kept that promise. Before I was born a span of five years elapsed between me and the next youngest sibling, my sister Sally. It wasn’t until my late twenties I learned there had been another between us, a girl, perfectly formed and full term with the chord around her neck. My mother wasn’t allowed to hold or even see the dead baby. She had been dead in the womb for a few days and the skin was sloughing off. How I have longed for my sister. She has become my imaginary simpatico. I dream up memories of a childhood running through fields and wading in streams with her. The bishop, as my brother tells it, came to the house with the ward teachers. He told my mother God was upset with her and took the baby. He and the brethren had to leave rather abruptly to avoid my father’s leather oxford up their asses. We, the family, stopped being Mormon after that. Mother still tried to make us go to church, always trying to do the right thing. “Goddamn it, get your asses to church like your mother told you!” was dad’s only involvement, his pipe ember glowing and dimming. By the time I was twelve and held the “ironic” priesthood, I refused to go. They stopped trying to make me. I am now forty-four and have my own family. I have been away for several days at a writing workshop in the woods. I am homesick. I was given an assignment. Write the letter you would never dare to send. I wrote it to my wife and son:

“Dear Fay, Three years ago I nearly killed myself with a rifle. How incredibly selfish and shortsighted of me. I could never, never leave you again. I had an affair with death. I sexed my soul with abstraction. What wicked loathing of life was coursing through me that morning? How could I leave you to flounder and ache and yearn for some sensibility when there was none? How could I become hopeless with your love surrounding me?” “Dear Christian, Your innocent and loving soul cannot comprehend malevolence. How could I leave you to make your way through the world hardened, aching and angry? How could I condemn you with the sins of the father? I am so ashamed. I am in love with your heart and shame has no power over me now. Love is all there is in me now.” I opened my suitcase on the bed of my cabin. There was a lavender envelope I had not put there. It was an anniversary card from Fay. This was our ninth anniversary and I had forgotten once again. “Hmmm... What clever trick can I pull to redeem myself this year?” I’m trapped for ten days in an island of pine trees. There are fewer options for gifts and cards here. Should I buy you a rubber tomahawk at the gift shop and express mail it at the Moose Wyoming post office? At least she can’t scalp me with it when I get home. Instead I wrote a letter I and mailed it: “Dear Fay, I found the card you slipped into my suitcase. Thank you! As you have probably ascertained by now, I forgot our anniversary again. I sat in my cabin and meditated. I visualized the ballpark. I wanted to be present at Christian’s game. I could clearly see Christian in his uniform and red Cardinal’s hat. He looked a little scared because I wasn’t there. I could see the grass, the sky, the clouds. I could even see Christian’s coach. But I looked and couldn’t see you. Finally I realized I was seeing through your eyes. Love, Rory”

Wasting Zion Jared Richmond

Of Science and Marriage I have nearly drowned in promises. I have been pounded with promises, argued and carried away by promises. It is no secret that there exists in the American persona, a nebulous cloud of promises, of opportunity and expectation. The America of my birth has never stopped working to convince me of such promises, that America is a promised land and of chosen people. However, by my ninth birthday the verdict was finally in at our West Jordan, Utah home in suburban Mormonia, and since then promises have all looked and felt suspect. No one spoke to loudly, or said too much in the house for the final short while that the four of us would be living together, as a family, in a house. However, quiet was an eerie trade-off from the violent precedent of so many years, but living was not always so, there were times of solace and play. Now for us all it would be the big â&#x20AC;&#x153;Dâ&#x20AC;?. I never wanted to be married with my two parents, figuratively speaking; I wanted to be a child, to do and think of what is kiddish. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to understand what adults cognate by the demands of necessity, the pro-

cesses associated with survival, the emotional battlements that come with adult struggle and adult life. I wanted my parents and reality to prove to me that the idyllic photograph of promise, of home, Utah and America, which I had been endlessly embossed with, was in fact legitimate. There are catch phrases that are apart of the semantic catalogue in each of our heads, given to us by whomever they were initially gotten from, a genealogy of semantic catch phrases. “…You have to be strong.”, “…never give up.”, “…don’t quit.”, “…you have so much to offer.”, etc. They don’t necessarily mean anything, but can be said merely for the sake of having said them. I was learning these sentiments at a very young age amidst the conflict of my parent’s disharmony, and I started to grow up, getting wise to what was trustworthy, beginning to emulate the marriage of disharmony. Children are married with their parents. The only acting barrier between the two can be the doorway to the bedroom, all else kids do experience for they are constantly observing and learning from their environment. Even more than the married couple itself, children are the palpable expression of their parent’s marriage, from their own blood to the structure of their small bodies and minds. An actual physical “oneness” of their adult progenitors, they are living father/mother, a manifestation of yin/yang, earth/ water, Shiva/Shakti, 23/23, X/Y. Children are their parent’s marriage. As with so many under modern pressure, my home was constantly vibrating with discord and static, but the details became arbitrary enough to me that I sought refuge in the very ideas that I found to be threatened at home and in myself as a boy, what I could trust as being true and what was real. I became awed by science. For my 5th birthday I got a chemistry set with a microscope, I bought a telescope with money I made peddling greetings cards to the neighbors, and I was successful at the regular harassment of a retired Kennecott geologist who showed me rock core samples taken from the Titanic Bingham copper mine looming ever above our West Jordan neighborhood. We are all people of innocent beginnings. We grow up to the knowledge and understanding of the world and its history as it is presented to us with an honest trust and constancy, this is the lesson of children to all. The

home experience caused me to start thinking in harder terms as a boy of 5 or 6, and I believe it is because of this that I got bumped up a grade in school and changed schools. My new quasi 2nd and 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Browning, wore large round-rimmed spectacles and had a kind round face with a large brown braid of hair that ran down the entire length of her back. In a more specialized classroom we learned about the greenhouse effect and the nature of CFC’s. We studied glacial melting and focused on the northern and southern ice caps and how they would melt away as the earth’s temperature helplessly rose. It is incredible for me to think of how long this discussion has been taking place. Since the catch phrases I received at home weren’t taking effect, I began to put trust in the almighty Science. What the trusted science was instructing me, just as at home, was that the world was changing for the worse, and I believed it. From then on, when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered “...the weather man.” But there were more reasons for this than just a fascination with science and a hope for snow days at school. Mormon Country Though ideologically I cannot now identify myself as a Mormon, or even a Christian, I acknowledge that culturally I will always be such, for this is the classroom in which I spent my childhood and adolescence. It is the super-structure of my youth. As a child of this origin I feel that I hold a more colloquial understanding of the way which Mormon people in Utah regard the landscape. The idea of nature as an ‘environment’ holds unrecognized connotations in this community. Generally speaking, environmentalism isn’t local jargon but seems to represent an outsider’s state of mind. In Utah, nature doesn’t exist as a clinical ‘environment’, but as broad expanse of wilderness drawn out in pastels from an endless saline desert-scape against a Sinai like backdrop of the granite and quartzite Rocky Mountains. This place is no environment but landscape, nature, country, it is majestic country, and it is God’s country. Mormons are old world, Old Testament people, they think in the school of ancient prophesy, of parable and folksong. They believe in miracles and

divinely inspired powers, not as a symptom of faith, but the truly faithful claim to have an adept knowledge of such things. Mormon heritage is a curiosity of world culture in which a reconstruction of the ancient Hebrew tradition has been met with the promise of America and western expansionism. There are many likenesses that can be seen between the lore of the Old Testament and Hebrew tradition and the history and doctrine of the LDS faith. Mormon history is marked with itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s origin in upstate New York until under the yolk of persecution its people migrated by way of a mass exodus across the vast American landscape to the shores of a dead salt sea in a wild unadulterated wilderness desert. Though each story is unique to its own culture and geography, a close reading of the Mormon story alongside that of the early Israelites will undoubtedly produce a long string of similarities. Christian thought is replete with natural symbolism. Just as in all JudeoChristian theology, the canons rehearsed in Mormonism are chronicles of people in the landscape. Because it is the wild, which acts as the stage for so much of the folktales contained in scripture, the tales and parables themselves are consistently interwoven with natural imagery and symbols. In Utah, amongst Mormons, there exists a natural/cultural aesthetic which links people to great wilderness and the spirituality of wilderness, not necessarily the democracy of it. This is because in Utah, faith and the thought of divinity hold much more gravity than any form of governance, though the church has shown itself to be highly complicit with government rule and social trends. Natural/cultural association in Utah, is a relationship and an identity which non-Mormon citizens of Utah may not wholly acknowledge, for in the church the role of nature isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t articulated as much as it can be simply culturally implicit. As children we take the world in as a matter of fact and Jesus Christ became an axiom of the ideal world I wanted to live in. It is in the midst of this Christian interpretation of nature that I first began asking my own questions as to what my individual relationship to the world was and how I would act within it.

A Child of Eschatology “…The word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness…As it is written in the words of Esaias the prophet, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth; And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” St. Luke 3:3-6 Eschatology is the formal philosophical study of the end of the world. The official name of the church I was raised in is, ‘The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’, and this society and its teachings formed both the core and the periphery of my entire world. Though the first part of the title simply indicates the churches identity as Christian, the ending, ‘…Latter Day Saints’, indicates something that few seem to recognize. The church teaches that as the true orthodoxy of Christianity, it has been restored to usher in the promised return of the Messiah in these ‘last days’. Though the symbol of Christ is one of true peace and love between people and nature, as one birthed into a tradition of apocalyptic forecasts at home and at school, it is only appropriate that even at church the space between my boyhood self and this symbol of true peace and harmony would be mapped with destruction. I was never told at church to perpetuate the environmentally and socially destructive events, which would ultimately call the Christ back to the earth, but I understood the connection. I like all wanted peace and a place of love in the most ideal way. Strange as it may sound, as a boy of 7 or 8 I started littering in the name of Christ. Walking home from the gift shop of the Jordan Medical Center in the summer time with a Big Hunk candy bar in hand, it would take the entire walk to eat it amongst the loud clicking of grasshoppers in the grasses along the roadside. Now, under more subdivided housing and widened roads, the West Jordan of my youth was still under sprawl, and south of our house lay a raw remaining gully with a creek through its belly. Knowing that if I was seen simply throwing

trash on the ground I would be ridiculed for it, I finished my Big Hunk in the gully, tore up the wrapper and threw it on the ground, this event was practiced often and I remember feeling very good about it. At church I told my Sunday School teacher about my acts of faith, and was of course told I was wrong in doing so, for it is not our job to bring about the events of prophesy, they would just sort of happen, it was our job to keep the commandments, none of which was littering. However, in my mind, if the goal of all this faith was the utopian return of the Savior, and if we were loyal people chosen live here during the momentous event of Christ’s return, why not act in the sake of divine prophesy? If it, that is the destruction of the earth, was simply a matter of destiny and Christ the Savior was the causal product of wasting nature, than the faithful wasting of nature, to me, brought our entire earth closer to purity. I trashed the gully across the street from my house because I accepted apocalypse and hoped for the promise of Christ’s return. I wanted to grow up to be a meteorologist thinking that having an eye on environmental disturbance would give me a forecast on Christ’s second coming. I considered these things because I felt the gravity of what they meant to me personally. Living by Proxy In his publication, “In the Presence of Fear” (Orion, 2001), Wendell Berry describes what is the oversimplification of our responsibility to the world and each other. We have been brought up today somehow thinking that by playing patron to a larger body, be it a corporation which provides food or health care, taxes for education and public services, or a church which may give peace of mind, that all of our personal obligations to the earth are somehow satisfied. That thereafter we may almost just do and be as we please. The danger of living by proxy of such larger institutions is evident in the environmental and social crises, which are spilling over. Crises on a much broader scale than anyone could anticipate. It isn’t a goliath HMO, which provides us with a genuine state of personal health, or a profiteering agribusiness that puts nourishing food on the table. What

does is a devoted personal respect for our own health and welfare, and a respect and understanding of the actual soil and method by which our food is produced. In the context my story in this text, it isn’t the large nebulous body of a faceless society, which may ultimately bring about social and environmental calamities of a truly apocalyptic scale. It is the aggregate of consumptive and wasteful individuals, each acting in almost perfect disconnect to the next. To simply assert that apocalypse will occur because it has been written is to pass accountability to the amorphous identity of an arcane text or tradition. The purpose of this paper is not to vilify Mormonism, or Christianity as a whole as being anti-environment for the sake of perpetuating prophesy. However, in cultivating and normalizing the horrific and detestable concept of apocalypse and the eventual ‘end of the world’ in people’s minds, in my mind as a boy, this writer whole-heartedly does contest on this point. By normalizing and instituting such proxies, the moral obligation each individual has to the amount of energy they use, the amount of carbon they produce, or the amount of natural resource based materials they consume, et al, is simply defrayed by passively accepting the promise of what they are taught is somehow divinely inspired. At least in the Christian tradition, the second coming of Christ and the foretellings of it can be used as a scapegoat for an individual’s responsibility as a steward of the earth and the human family. Though I bring these proxies under scrutiny here, the concept of sustainable living has been well explored through Christian interpretation. Charles Cummings, a Trappist-Cistercian monk living at a monastery located in Huntsville, Utah, writes of this in his book, EcoSpirituality (Paulist Press, New York 1991 p.103). “Each individual is responsible for his or her own choices which either add to the ecological crisis or help to relieve it. As a way of building a sustainable society, tactics of accusation and denunciation are counterproductive. What is needed is a sweeping change of attitude and practice. What is needed is the cooperation of all parties in the interests of saving the earth” (emphasis added). Granted that as Cummings says in his

book , â&#x20AC;&#x153;..If blame must be handed out, there is enough to go around for everyoneâ&#x20AC;?, I wish to illustrate that ecological crises in my opinion stem largely from institutionally derived ideas of living by ideological proxies such as appalling ideas like apocalypse. For each of us to identify that the fate of this living world rests more readily in our individual understanding of what proxies we passively live by, is to set our unique landscapes and places of reverent wildness on the path of true preservation. We can only have the peace of such an understanding if we have an active role in that local place of preservation. Seeking a home place, peace or the ideal of utopia is likely the quest of all human beings. In this paper I have conveyed a symptom of societies direction as it is manifesting today. The story of these symptoms as it occurred to me as a child, in the breakdown of the family nucleus, the foreboding message of good teachers, and the subliminal messages of mythic stories as they are passed down, can be seen as a barometer with which to re-evaluate our choices and value structures. I do not believe that these are the last days of the earth, of people or the innocence of nature, but I believe yet today as I did as a child that there is promise for great casualties whether or not we as a human family choose to re-evaluate the role of self, and the extension of that new self into our local communities, and government. I believe that if we do look again to the trusting nature of our childhood and each act out in the sake of preserving integrity and natural innocence, than this absurd rendering of global despair will become a simple, yet meaningful symbol of myth. We are today the children that our parents desperately hoped and believed would live more transcendent lives than they did or could. We are now the ones so heavily bestowed with the responsibility of mindful action for the sake of our progenitors, for the sake of our own families and for that of wilderness and innocence. What we must ask of ourselves is perhaps gratitude for what is living, and that which continues to sustain us. We must be able to live with an expectation of each other, that a tradition of social competitiveness will simply be replaced with a cooperative effort to preserve all that we can still be grateful for. This simple expectation is not for a small serving of hope for

tomorrow, but a grateful harvest in what can certainly be a wholesome planet and a vibrantly evolving people. From our aging parents we must insist that you help us with what this daunting task of global-environmental harmony entails. Our parents must understand that in light of the myopic energy economy which has been selfishly built, along with the harrowing prospect of global warming, the future we see looks most sincerely daunting. The open worldview many of our parents and grandparents enjoyed and all of the democracy rich choices that came along with the luxury of that worldview, is a landscape of freedoms that rising generations will likely have little relationship to. From my perspective, democracy in this country has not worked very well. Our parents can help us directly by considering more efficient means of consumption; we are now sharing resources generation to generation. Particularly, our parents can help us in America by casting votes toward candidates who tout policy for energy and the sanctity of wilderness which resonate the loudest with sustainability. The color of a candidates tie doesn’t matter a damn to us, what does is the idea of having air, water, forests and food which are healthy enough for us to give to our children, your grandchildren. Quoting John G. Mitchell, “…Since it is the earth environment that concerns us here, then youth must be heard. This is their earth more than anyone else’s: they will have to live with it longer, for better or for worse.” (Eco-tactics, Sierra Club Press 1970, p.6)

Breathing Between the Bolts: A Natural Autobiography Katherine E. Standefer

“We are no more and no less than the life that surrounds us.” [terry tempest williams]

So we take Gilmer Road, the one that goes out on the marsh plains north of Cook County, where you wind through stands of ancient maple and past that barn painted like an American flag. For a good forty-five minutes you can roll down the window and swallow a sweet wind, watching tallgrass and corn blow by. This time it is me and my little sister in the front seat, my sprained foot popped up on the dash and her arm out the window, tapping on the rubber edge. We are heading up to the sprawling Wisconsin lake where I spent my childhood at church camp; it is like going home, and also like going to hell. Here is what I know about Midwestern summers: you will need a towel on your car seat. You will stick to everything you touch. Your hair will not obey. Probably you will wake up in the morning with perspiration heavy on the wood-paneled walls, feeling like you’ve already spent the day in the shower, and the sky will be a hot white with the heat. More than likely your mother goes to craft fairs on the Upper Peninsula and

buys things like the weather stick, which raises its slender arm to the sky when things are good and dips low when it’s raining—in case you couldn’t tell by sticking your head out. You hate the weather stick because it is psyched about the white heat on days you sleep in the basement and wish you didn’t have any hair at all. A Midwestern summer means Midwestern parades, when fat people pull their folding chairs out on the sidewalks and kids scrabble for candy. The Girl Scouts in the parade are on roller blades, and the high school tuba players in head-to-toe uniforms are passing out. Moms rush back and forth squirting water into mouths. Politicians with big chins wave out shiny cars. Old people live on their porches sucking ice cubes out of cold tea and everyone hangs American flags in front of the house. You are told you live a privileged life, but if you think about it, the only time you are really okay is two a.m. when the lightning storms are rolling in, heavy and electric, when you’re up writing novels about people who get in the car and leave and don’t come back. They’re good friends, those people. They always drive West. I used to think enough drives West would one day cleanse my blood, erase all this information, root me deep in the sage flats among the perusing bison, and that would be it. But here I am, having lived away from Illinois for years, with my heart still catching sometimes at the heavy air—at how familiar it is, how much it tastes like my own joy and heartbreak. Here I am, still terrified that I will never really leave. • What I know about Lake Geneva is this: even at age eleven, it was a sort of savior. The neighborhood I grew up in was a perfect grid of cookie-cutter houses edged by roaring two-lane highways running back and forth along the strip malls, which even then seemed to be coming faster every week. I was the kid hanging a head out the window staring gape-mouthed at the FOR SALE signs on overgrown corner lots. “When I grow up,” I would say, “I’m gonna buy up that land and just let things grow on it.”

“What about a nice park,” my mother suggested. But I was thinking of weeds, primarily, and also of making strip mall companies mad. “Maybe,” I said, “but it would be nice if things could just grow, too.” There is a space, as a child, when you do not understand change, when you assume your fat-cheeked toddling sister will never be a blonde teenager singing loudly in the driver’s seat next to you. You know for sure that you will never want to kiss a boy, or grow your hair out. And if there is a marsh at the end of the street, it is safe to assume it is your marsh; that if deer occasionally run down the sidewalks, it is likely they will continue. So there is no part of you that knows what to do the first time you step out on the asphalt in your bare feet and realize what those bulldozers are doing down there. You walk the dog around the block again, staring at the matching pastel siding and screened-in porches. You think that maybe you don’t have to keep the dog on the leash anymore, because there aren’t any deer, but you don’t think this is a good thing. You wonder if there’s still time to find money to buy that last lot, to say, No thanks, I like it how it is. It becomes a checklist: the field across from the highschool is a grocery store. That stand of trees near the pizza joint is K-Mart. And they’ve started putting in condominiums all around your favorite apple farm, so “It’s only so long,” your mother says. • Our road to Lake Geneva used to be Route 12, a two-lane diagonal that runs all the way up over the border. But by now the boat shops and restaurants have dug in for a continuous hour out of town, and when I come home I can’t handle it. So we take Gilmer Road. Its sides are spidering out into brand new cul-de-sacs and lake communities, too, but I try not to look, a concerted effort of hope. I am rewarded at Lake Geneva, where the Williams Bay community still looks the same, the police parked at the bottom of the hill and, down the street, Papa Something-or-other serving

his hamburgers out of a cement igloo. We take the hill into camp slowly, the heat smoky, for once, with the smell of living things. Once, this was a place I ran for wildness. The cabins were old, with chipping paint and rotting porch rails. Everywhere, a tangle of brush. And late afternoons, when the grey clouds were piling in for the night, I’d swim out to the far corner of the roped area where the water was deepest, sinking down into the seaweed. If you brought goggles you could see the silvery sides of bluegill flashing past, and the legs of the dock standing ancient and spongy. There were other worlds out there, the air old and rich, that quick twinge of fear that there was something lurking. I built my life in the Midwest off that feeling. I was seeking, always, the sharp taste of mystery. A particular slant of light, the opening of my pores to scent and movement. There was something in my body then, flushcheeked and wild-haired. I was six when my father first read to me from his volumes of Tolkien, and I grew up expecting that days be filled with breathless adventure, danger, early mornings snaking up bare mountain passes and creeping down ancient forest trails. It was only sitting silent in the thick of it that I truly felt alive. And of course, there was the West. We were skiing people, headed for the Colorado border each year packed into a mini-van. On the way home we crept up through the corner of Wyoming, a little girl sobbing in the back seat, refusing to turn eastward. Out the back window, Basin and Range slid into the dust. In third grade, she wrote in her journal, “I don’t fit in here. The other kids aren’t like me. I just want the mountains, adventure.” • Here is what I know about the suburbs: Pavement. Widen the roads. Widen the parking lot. Build the next strip mall. Make sure it has the same stores as the one two miles away. Use right angles. Teach the little girl to pull up weeds, to do it from the roots so they can’t grow back. Tell her to stack the bodies in the lawn bag just so. Teach the

little girl to plant things in even rows. Tell her she should brush her hair and shave her legs, daily. Send the little girl to middle school, where boys gawk at her developed body and kick her backpack as she walks. She is the only one in the sixth grade who bleeds and everyone knows it, because J.P. Forbes threw her pads all over the hallway one day. Send the little girl to middle school, where a day consists of walking from one box to another box through a box. Show her how writing, like math, is a formula. Give her an A on content and a D on following the scientific rules of paragraph layout. • Then winter. Then the snow comes in thin lines and freezes on the streets, forming black clumps on the sides of the roads. The sun forgets to show up for nine months straight, peeking out, if it does, in a pale shadow no one believes. The trucks roar back and forth belching diesel clouds. Road salt eats shoes, and god knows what else. No one leaves their house. There is a space, as a child, when you are certain for all the world that there has to be something to save you. You have seen yourself opened by the grace of slender leaves and shafts of sunlight, but here you have been cut off, slit dry. You are alone. You’ve lost the world. In the pit of your stomach you find a passageway, and the passage leads into a hole. Rung by rung you descend. There is nothing to see, only a knawing. And in your hunger you can eat the world. In your hunger you wrap yourself in yards of fat so thick the world can’t get in anymore. It becomes easy to just wear sweatpants, over the years, easier to cross your arms across your belly, because at least they’re not looking at you anymore. Because no one expects anything of you, except for maybe you. And you’re the only one who sees you those nights sitting on the edge of the bed, tearing at your own flesh with your fingernails. You howl. You wish you could push it down but it just sinks into the hole, and then you’re empty, empty again.

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Where has the magic gone? We know we have seen it, sparkling between the blossoms in early spring, or hanging damp over the grass in late August. We once ran forest pathways laughing, dirt beneath our fingernails. There were fireflies and something like stars. But there is no forest here, no unexpected flowers. What we see we have created. What we have created we know to be exactly what it isâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and so we know ourselves to be exactly what we are. This, for the human spirit, has never been enough. Hope is the thing unplanned, the sudden sign of turning or movement or beauty. If we have rationalized our world to such an extent that we no longer encounter wild things growing of their own accord, we have done our best to eradicate hope itself. It was like this: we all played in the gutters on hot summer days. After our parents washed the cars we scooped up soap-water in plastic buckets and sold it at the market as milk. Soon the black skies blew in from over the plains, and we ran back and forth over the steaming pavement hollering, feeling wild and invincible before mothers swooped in wearing cover-ups to carry us downstairs. Halfway into the basement the electricity cut, the walls vibrating with the roll of thunder outside. We sat in a circle around lit candles and waited for signs. So many summer nights spent watching storms! The suburban children of the Midwest might not admit it readily, but most of them pray for tornadoes. Secretly they are creeping down on their porches in the middle of the night to watch the lightning explode over rooftops. Secretly they are imagining the roar of wind it would take to shake things up, to change their insides. It was the only thing I had, those storms. Letting them split my belly, getting my hair wet. Those were my novels, the summer I was thirteen, up all night every night trying to invent a world. Age fifteen and a high

school administrator tried to have me suspended for staying out in lightening. But there was no option: breathing between the bolts, dancing every storm. • As a child crossing the country at night I sat tight to the window, praying for a horizon that had no lights. There were the moments of darkness split by farmers’ lanterns, or the wide beaming billboards screaming hotel rates and fast food promotions. There were the frantic buzzing overheads of empty gas stations, the clusters of them visible from miles away by skyline signs’ fluorescent glow. And there were the long lines of trucks outside rest stops, front bulbs burning dimly from the highway. I sat silently, stuffed animal tucked into lap, praying for mystery to reveal itself without gimmicks. I was a shell, waiting to open. There is a picture of a girl, fifteen years old, breaking up out of the water with her arms outstretched. She is under Commissary Ridge, in one of the unnamed Fontenelle Lakes of the Wyoming Range. She woke one morning to the roar of wind and could not believe it was something other than highway. She turned from the stars one night to find the horizon empty of lights for three hundred sixty degrees. And with her hands out she pulled the sky into her chest and learned the rhythm of the wild once more. She had one month, living with only what was on her back; one month traversing steep valleys and learning the heavy scent of duff after rain. There was heartleaf arnica, the hope that comes after burning. There was the glance of a moose, the hope of unexpected understanding. There was sage, the hope of root in dry places. Most of all, there were the unexpected tears, the trembling, the joy coming up in her chest rough, and organic, and new. • She returns to Illinois. For the first time in a month, she enters a box. There is no hope, only pavement, and mute water trapped in faucets. What has opened closes. She realizes that she is unbelievably hungry.

In the span of the years she is trying harder and harder not to care. High school is damp hallways, yellow light, formatting rules, girls wearing too much makeup. She sits alone most of the time, trying to write herself into existence and everyone else out. She is still certain she does not want to kiss any boys, like she is certain she does not miss the disappearing friends. She gets two jobs, works to send herself West, lives eleven months for one. She tears her skin at night to make it move. Late nights sometimes she slips on her hiking boots and walks through the snow to the end of the street, where there’s one stand of trees left. Like being somewhere else. Looks up at the sudden moon through the naked branches, stunned at the way the light spills. There is an instant of being alive. Later that winter they finally dig up the pumpkin field on the last empty corner, all the way to where it meets the end of her street. She pretends not to see the bulldozers, the stacked bodies of maple and evergreen in frisked piles on belching flatbeds. She pretends not to notice when the pavement goes in, the parking stripe lines, the big square ALDI, except she walks by it every day. •

Dante writes in La Vita Nuova of the night Love came to him in a dream. In the vision Love reaches into Dante’s chest and pulls his heart out. Makes Beatrice eat it. Can you see? She’s sitting across from him at this table, crying, blood on her lips, and he’s letting that part of him go, and she’s taking it into her. That’s what love is, I think, a sort of violence, blood on our mouths. And if you come to the table you come to risk, praying for acceptance; but what you give you don’t get back either way. In Wyoming, my body is sacrifice. I’ve climbed mountains laughing, crying, throwing up. I’ve twisted limbs. I’ve been lost. I’ve been burned, sliced, scarred. I’ve fought through crowded stands of willow for miles down rivers, learned names and sounds, had my hair stand on end from the lightening in the air. My first summers working on the ranch I swore the ruffed grouse was my own heartbeat. And one July morning I carried

a broken thirteen year old five miles through the mountains on my back, showing him all the way the deep fresh sites of the sacred. Desperate for relation, I instinctively gave anything and everything the mountains asked of me, but what I never learned was how to love a human being the right way. I’d lived so long with the cordon of my own body in response to a dispassionate world that when a good man came to me in a blizzard I could not make myself vulnerable and open; could not understand what was to be done. We sat at the table in early summer with the water rushing down in swollen rivers, and he pushed the small fleshy pieces of himself across. I ate, and was filled; but never did I offer myself in return, nor see that it was necessary. One hot morning the mountains dried up, and he left the table. • The name Katherine means Pure. It means I have never been kissed, never had a man take my hand in his. It means that, more than anything else, I fear the breach of this identity, even as I crave it. It means that until this year, I did not touch even my closest friends, felt uncomfortable folding them into my arms when they needed it most. It means that in a world where we build walls every day I am always up on one arm over everything I love—besides Wyoming. I once worked at a fish cannery out on the Kenai Peninsula nineteen hours a day, putting the headless bodies of frozen salmon into plastic bags and shipping them all over the country. I was only then learning that the failure of love was my fault: that rather than being left, I’d pushed him away. It was all too perfect to spend my days doing penance in front of a negative-twenty-degree freezer, staring at boxes that said PERISHABLE: Keep Frozen. Perishable, I kept thinking—it has no head!! What part of that fish do you think is left to perish? I did not see a live salmon until the day I left Alaska, after holding thousands of their dead bodies to my chest, running fingers over their frozen veins. The salmon circling in the pond that day were ancient,

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chunks of flesh hanging from behind their gills as they flung themselves up the beaver dam over and over, catching on sticks. “They can smell home,” my friend told me, “and they’ll die trying to get there. They’re just too old.” I stood gripping the rail, and cried. For the first time I saw spirit in those beautiful canisters I’d swung around for a month, their veins pumping, actually, upstream. The marbled blush of their bodies. Salmon die trying to reach the place of their birth, and aren’t we always doing the same thing? Praying to be recognized, to be known. Searching for a lover that feels right, the mother who no longer exists—aching for the marshes and forests that once hummed at the end of our streets. Even if we hate where we come from, we know it, and are drawn to it: the stories coincide, and maybe the stories help. What fulfillment of journey do we take from salmon by mass slaughter? What fulfillment of journey do we take from ourselves by shipping thousands of them away without understanding their rhythms? We eat the salmon insulated from the story, from the possibility of deriving joy or hope from it. We ship the salmon for consumption without relation, thinking of its perishability only in terms of our economic interests. And in the meantime we, too, are tiptoeing around terrified of perishing, stripping ourselves of spirit, unable to thaw for one minute; denying the vulnerability that allows intimacy, both with humans and with land—that calls for sacrifice, and lives behind all the things we’ve been taught to keep ourselves wrapped in. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is my opening, my splitting. Coming up fifteen in the south Fontenelle Lake with the water breaking into my fingertips. I got out with hot blood moving in my veins for the first time in years. For the Wyoming Range, I am willing to be perishable. I am willing to stand among peaks carved by ancient things afraid, willing to feel insignificant before their grinding processes of ice and erosion—because this is what makes me human, makes me more than the apathetic robot I was told to be in a place that banned hope itself. We stand at the edge

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of a great wind and feel ourselves shrink—and yet somehow are moved to tears by the curl of lilacs, the burdened bodies of salmon, the crackle of electricity in the sky. Somehow we meet someone and find sparks in our eyes, fingertips, find home. In the face of what makes us nothing we become even more violently something: able to love, able to sacrifice, able to go in search of mystery. • So Christine and I slip into kayaks. It’s windy on the Lake, and the day before Memorial Day: the water is buzzing with motor boats. We pull the water, slow and smooth, over the ridge of dying wakes. There is a curl in the land where the trees come out to a point, and we linger there, letting the beat push us to shore. She points at a shadow beneath us, a fish that has come close to the surface, and I suddenly realize that I love my sister. I am caught, unable to breathe. This is not something that has occurred to me—not like this. I am caught, or catching, like the first brilliant glare off the lake in the morning—the one that breaks your heart. The one that says no matter what, there are people who have loved you here, who you love, that are caught up in the tangle of foliage on the side of the road or in the hot white sun. And there were places here that meant your survival. You cannot separate it, any of it. Things you love will be destroyed; what you hate lives inside you. You will have to come back, sometimes. And over and over you will make decisions about the walls you live in, about whether or not you allow yourself to strip them away, to feel the weight of landscape and sacrifice in the darkest roots of your heart. I see now that my natural history can no longer be told as two lives but only as one, as one willing to be vulnerable enough to the past to learn from it. To place hands in the ground in this place; to dig deep for roots. • “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart, this nullity imagines it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.” [max weber]

The Ecology of Reseidency 200

standing from left: Brooke William

s, Rory Norseth, Koshlan Mayer-B lackwell, Cecily Ellis, Robert DeBirk, Nic holas Daniels, Lyn Dalebout, Jeff Jopling sitting, from left: Paul Grindrod , Joy Castro, Wade Finlinson, Jare d Richmond, Terry Tempest Williams, Catheri ne Ashton, Leigh Bernacchi

special thanks The College of Humanities at the University of Utah Printing Services, The University of Utah Lindsey Hornkohl, Illustrator