Fear, then Enchantment

 When I first read an article about the Rewilding Institute, its mission undertaken for habitat conservation in the American Mountain West, I felt a sense of being called home. Awesome to behold a convergence between our tremulous human hold on earth, air and water--while population explosion is spinning off climate breakdown with destructive weather in ever more places, along with extinctions, water shortage, urban sprawl--and now this team of people has set out to restore--re-wild--degraded open lands that less than a century ago were strongholds of creatures like grizzly bears. A valid question: What might more and more Americans discover they've been craving? Truer answers might go a long way toward resolving widespread depression, apathy and morbid sedentariness / obesity among our kind. Earth was created to be home to a grand documentary of living species that we have seen pictured or read of. Don't many of us long, based on what's being lost, for a world that replays for us its most cherished legends that come back and back to us out of documentary and folklore, that upholds for us a realm of familiar, exotic or evidently perished types of creature, including the potential that we could meet them out of doors? What if we could live as neighbors with a spectrum of wildlife in all sizes and classes that we'd find ourselves describing while talking to each other? How about a habitat mosaic that could turn out to be historic at the same time as real. For a moment, take fear of the alien out of the picture and concentrate on the magnificent and the lyrical.

Why have people devolved to thinking that becoming civilized means paving over natural land, denuding it of long grass, brush and trees and controlling the outdoors as nearly as possible as if it were hallways, bedrooms, kitchens and conference floors? Yes fear, Dick DeAngelis reminds us in his documentary "BeWild to Rewild" featured on the Rewilding Earth website--and in great part a failure to know ourselves as extensively as we might. 

What if we were taught early in life what justifiably warrants fear, out of a ranking of most to least likely sources of danger surrounding us? Most of us were as little children conditioned to fear living things like germs we can't see in the outdoors. Ongoing guidance about the storied hazards from venomous reptiles, rats, stinging insects, toxic bacteria and other threats to our health stemming from nature around us would provide us with reassurance about basic avoidance, or medical treatments easily available for treating what injuries might, if we're even a bit careless, occur. We could be taught to place fears of predators hidden in wild bushes, freshwater, grass and leaf litter in a realistic low ranking, below threats from muggers, shooters, leaking chemical storage sites, trucks careening out of control, etc.

If more and more people saw, instead of perils, the kinship between what grows in garden, grove and thicket we might be able to apply a fascination with the small-scale wild to bigger habitat that some still like to call wilderness, in a future when the mega-growth of our industrial civilization has, via natural calamity, plague and unspeakable tragedy been contained within a new understanding of limits. I'm leading to a theme of utopia here, yet what's inadmissible about utopian visions, especially in a present day when our collective modes of getting around and raising food and maintaining our comforts are so badly out of step with our life support here on earth?

Fear and shame underlie lifestyles so intensely tied to bodily comforts--luxuries, they used to be called--that half or more of us habitually eat much more than we need, sit our way through all forms of work and travel and contribute to climate havoc with the expectation that everything we do is substandard if it's not automated. Fear of bugs, bears or other vicious beasts goes way back and continues today; fear and shame about heading outdoors, having strength and muscular co-ordination enough to walk uphill and down are more and more the lot of modern people whatever our age, remarkably. Apart from people who suffer crippling diseases or neuromuscular trauma, ordinary folk in industrialized societies like ours have given in to a premise that riding something with a motor is their preferred option anywhere they need to go. With the mental acquiescence comes the body's own. With that mindset in possibly a majority is the acceptance of controlled, artificial indoor living and work space as a perpetual ideal.

On the larger topic of fear and shame, I found myself emotionally caught up in an article in The Sun magazine, issue 562 for October 2022, "All in the Family" by Mark Leviton, which was an interview with therapist Faith Friedlander. She cited common issues between adopted children and adoptive parents, leading up to her co-founding of a clinic in Ventura County, California with her husband, specializing in care for the adopted and for adoptive parents. Herself an adopted baby girl in the 1940s, she had tried kindling a friendship with her biological mom whom she had located during midlife but had met with a cold detachment and anger from the woman, by then a mother and grandmother several times over, who had given birth to her during a World War II military career. Single at that time, the mom had had a series of affairs with men unwilling or unable to make a commitment to her and did not know who the father was. As a trained therapist, Faith, warmly befriended by her newly-found half sister, could justify her birth mom's rejecting treatment on the grounds of intense shame she had undergone in that mid-20th century era when women who bore a baby out of wedlock were hushed and hidden by agencies set up to manage their collective plight. In today's terms it was a much-reflected-on genre of  scandal in which women much more than men were held to blame.

I was riveted by the concept of shame and humiliation, but from my own daughter's perspective, from what she experienced through her growing up as a stepchild in two households. Though in each one we adults, at least half of us, tried to make her feel like a welcome and promising girl on her way to competent womanhood, she was also made to feel during some intervals like a mistake who belonged out of the way of the adults. I won't point out those who were most culpable but for my part try to rate myself as a loving, earnest mom who never-the-less had my own preoccupations, was negligent in ways my child didn't understand how to point out, but still spent hours, days, emotional energy, gasoline, frustration, worry, money and statements from the heart making sure this daughter knew I loved her, that her future beckoned, that she abounded in capability and had wonderful talents surpassing my own and surely others'.  But still, now that she's far away, in her thirties and in a lucrative chosen profession, I never hear from her except in text messages, remote in tone and timing. She's a minimalist in regard to family ties. Yet I've come to a point of seeing that admitting to this as estrangement pains her; she has denied that it is estrangement. True to her character all the way back, she wishes not to hurt me. The article pointed out to me that our underlying problem is her humiliation, a thing I could never undo or apologize enough for if even she'd give me the chance. 

Why there are these intense, generation-long frustrations and losses of privilege in all of our lives, ironies whose purposes we often struggle to name, which we could never have believed would happen to us, boggles us as we privately or out loud attempt interpretations, the process fading with the decades. We hope and pray there will evolve an ideal, gratifying outcome. Along with everyone, I suppose, in our smaller, vaster, more or less agonizing ways we've been wounded. And many wounds prove useful.

Last evening walking in golden October, with a chill like winter's from a cold wave lurching, abnormally early, from the Arctic all the way south to the Gulf coast, I thought to myself that art projects--I have two mixed-media watercolors pending, waiting for my return to a setting of cliffs and cedar tree configurations--are on a parallel with wounds to the heart. Or if wounds sound overly dramatic, then they're piercings. A fair number of us let such accidents happen to us by exposing ourselves to them in a scene not under our control, either sought out or unwitting. Our hearts and inner eyes were penetrated suddenly, tantalizingly or painfully, which we felt and still feel. To someone else the same thing might have only been something that just unimportantly happened--if to them it even happened. But as piercings or holes in us, they've left scars, and a scarred place in the act of healing is what an unfinished artwork somehow feels like. To heal as fully as we can, we have to finish the piece of art, thoroughly, attending to all details. We keep at it, even come back to it. By the end there'll be a healed scar and a creation we undertook, whatever it may be worth in the world beyond ourselves.

Going Afield--Southwestward in a Hesitant Springtime

 We returned for a second visit to the Black Mesa region, out at the tip of the Oklahoma Panhandle in April, 2022, following on a first trip in late winter 2021. I had picked April for coming back there on a hunch that April brings to those southern plains what May brings to Minnesota and the Canadian border region--greening up and songbird arrivals--only to notice the bleached yellow of the grass left standing the length of Highway 325 to Kenton, Oklahoma, which is a walk away from the border with New Mexico. Winter appeared to be hanging on to the land much as it was way up north, though snowless and crisp with sand and yucca plants.

Our arrival was on Easter Saturday, ahead of which, by phone, our host invited us to the yearly Easter pageant held nearby on the premises. Starting that evening at seven with the judgment and crucifixion of Jesus, at six the next morning another half would pick up with His resurrection and reappearance among the disciples.  So we joined the line of cars and pickup trucks proceeding a mile or so up the road in the lowering of evening, and saw what was to be a play with costumed actors on the cliffside within part of the mesa. All the audience parked and sat in their cars and trucks facing the cliffs like an audience at a drive-in movie. An announcer could be heard through outdoor loudspeakers and through everyone's car radio, if we tuned into one setting at the bottom of the dial. I found myself awed by the pantomimed enactment of the Christian story, set into the loftiness of the natural cliff amphitheater rearing high to our front and right side, with zigzagging pathways all the way to the top and in their midst the opening to a cavern--Jesus' tomb--the round cut-stone door rolled to the left.

As soon as we pulled away from our cabin in the shivery-cold dark of Easter daybreak we heard the pop-pop of tire trouble from our left rear wheel. Jerry got out on the gravel roadside and inspected all the tires, seeing nothing abnormal, and the sound quit as I sped up to match the pace of traffic in front of us. But parked again at the amphitheater, I got out and looked at the left rear tire, finding a bolt, with thread and nut jutting at a startling height from the middle of the tread. We finished taking in the spectacle of the troupes of disciples, Pharisees, scribes, procurator, Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and at last the risen Messiah, all the satin robes gleaming red, pink, purple, aquamarine, gold, black and white proceeding on routes more vertical than level as the sun rose to light the cliff with its pathways and ledges, the re-opened tomb and the three crosses uppermost at the peak, yesterday evening's rags signifying the crucified by now stripped away from the wood. Once we'd bumped our way down to the gravel and dust beside our cabin and set about removing the wheel, the tire by now crushed in folds and stinking of ruined rubber, Jerry detected a hole through the metal alloy of the rim between two of the spokes; that bolt had pierced all the way from the tread to the wheel as we crept the necessary short ways to a privacy we'd have done better without. Later we joked about changing the tire in the midst of the pageant's last act while the robed players descended the cliff to help out, building some modern-day roadside salvation into their message.

The next three days, as we waited for shipment of a new rim to the nearest Toyota dealer--many miles westward and north in Trinidad, Colorado, we had few options but to explore the Black Mesa on foot and by car, Jerry driving at a gentle pace with the lightweight 'donut' spare tire at risk of a blow-out far in rocky back country. Our host Jane filled us in about the area's drought, worse than that we'd endured in Minnesota over the previous two years; at least we'd had intervening scatters of snow or rain during ours, whereas locally, she said, no moisture had fallen since the last August. The cacti throughout the ranch crouched brown and puckered where not already dead, and thorn trees I could not name stood barren everywhere back from the budding cottonwood giants that lined one tributary of the nearby Cimarron River, much of it dry or in separated pools, winding its way northwestward. I gained one life bird species, the pair of ash-throated flycatchers in a thicket sprung from the streambed, birds willing to pose, however wary, vocalizing in alarm notes that alternated with courtship calls. Through three days of varied chill and dry heat with nearly constant wind, any birds were a scant few in number and variety compared to what I'd imagined before we came: one or several loggerhead shrikes that perched, foraging, among the thorn trees, the odd mockingbird, and bursts of sparrows across the pastures and slopes of scrub--birds quiet in the concerns of their apparent migration to mountainsides, prairies and tundra higher up the continent. Surprisingly numerous were the lark sparrows, the most I had ever seen in one place, now and again with vesper and white-crowned sparrows intermixed.

Black Mesa State Park

Even a parching scrubscape has a feel of animal potential, like a burn or a bog a thousand miles to the north, home of my heart and my artwork; and coming in the mysticism stoked by the Easter pageant, from a regimen of reading on the origins of and later bases for Christian faith was a reminder that Jesus and those convinced by his life and resurrection were desert walkers. An old philosophy that had soured for me was one I had built upon a vision of the stuff of life--mud, sand, rock, living matter, trickling water, mysterious enough to console me with its own mechanics, familiar, imaginable, a diversified embodiment of divine mystery. For many people stuff obedient to defined laws of physics remains enough to relax the mind and soul. But by now, I  draw courage from--indeed need--evidence of divine energy borne of a faraway yet encompassing source of things that knows us each as we can't know each other or ourselves, that's able to transform any material, any situation into something beyond what our limited reasoning would allow. With my wavering faith in the eminence of the supernatural embedded in the natural and scientifically understood physical, I find I've gained confidence that this landscape may, along with most, scorch to extinction generated by the trapped heat of our industrial gases and yet may, here and elsewhere, flutter again much later with foliage and flowing streams. Because that is the potential of ultimate Creation. Yes, and we owe our homage and life-saving work to tend it, protecting it for our era and the future as we protect ourselves. Long-term survival is a function of time in a magnitude that isn't ours to try and reckon. The scarce native creatures I saw there, always suddenly and by surprise--like the herd of pronghorn skimming along pathways beset with thorns, and the jack rabbit escaping me in kangaroo-bounds fast as an accelerating car--someday, somewhere may get their chance to increase; the coveys of quail I had hoped to find may end up common and daily visible--maybe, in another dimension, lovers of earthly creation will dwell alongside all these things and more. Maybe I am also delusional, but entirely so, probably not.

Meanwhile the Black Mesa remains a place hard to live in; animals of every kind need space around them to sustain themselves with enough water and nourishment; cattle, which are big in the local economy, must disperse themselves while their owners carry feed by truck to them as there is not enough grass for grazing. Conditions are lacking for growing hay. Landowners like our proprietors, Jane and Bobby Apple, who've stayed in that countryside for three generations have long since become savers and recyclers, gracing the various guest lodgings that include a log cabin and a stone house with a trove of the things that define a kitchen, the finds and keepsakes that cheer up a home anywhere they're put. Antlers in pairs throughout the guests' log cabin serve as coat hooks and towel racks. Mismatched dishes pulled out of bygone homes, given away or resold at thrift stores or yard sales await use on sideboards or in plain wooden cabinets under the sink. All of it homey with function, pieces on the wall inscribed by someone's hand or painted with a scene, hung and placed to give comfort to travelers little known to the hosts. 

Prickly pear

We avoided crossing any of the big cities lying between Black Mesa and home, driving state highways and old U.S. 2-lane routes instead, so that my conception of modern-day America shifted and gentled, ever so slightly. I had not realized there was quite so much tallgrass prairie throughout the agrarian state of Kansas, because we passed through the Flint Hills going westward and the Gypsum Hills coming back, and we saw a huge amount of grassland especially covering hills that no one had wanted to till and apparently no one much was grazing either. In Missouri and Iowa, greening, whipped and soaked by evening thunderstorms, we saw lots more wild old grass, with buildings scattered as if in deference to stubborn realities of what remains affordable. The motel room in Clarinda, Iowa was itself an exhibit in make-do and harvested material that in another, maybe more prosperous economy than what many of us live within now would not have occurred to the builder or remodeler as inviting decor: corrugated steel seen oftener on farm silos alongside the bed, and rough-milled raw boards of cedar used as corner trim from someone's rustic sawmill in back country that may have been the mountain West.

We're so many of us coming back from a shutdown, a shortage or tragedy, learning to do what we can to repair damages. In 2020 Vine Arts Center, the member gallery just north of Lake Street in Minneapolis, was hit with jets of destructive water when sprinklers in the ceiling went off reacting to a fire on the roof, ignited when a bar just up the avenue went ablaze during the George Floyd protests. Hardwood flooring warped and lifted up, electrical and other structural ruin ensued and the gallery, along with a lot of neighboring studio space in the Ivy Building was forced to close for months to undergo repairs. At least one entire body of artwork was destroyed. Just now in spring 2022 the Vine is virtually ready for use, needing only replacement lighting and ceiling fans which have been ordered. Plans are in discussion for a first member show in September. A drawing group has been welcomed to use the gallery space; soon members and the public will again gather there to boost the careers of Minnesotan and regional artists, musicians and writers with monthly shows, readings, concerts, you name it.

There is a never-ending, but even heightening, demand on us that we learn creative responses to what happens around us. Our climate everywhere, I think, is becoming harsher and unfavorable for the rituals we rely on like food production, foremost of all. We are being forced against our will to contain our growth and impact upon this earth. Re-openings remind us of what we can--it may be now or never--start to do for ourselves and each other. The Earth has long been an intensely co-operative place.

An Autumn Vagrant, Come then Gone

Four highway hours down the state from our home the sighting of a Ross's gull, ultra-rare in the U.S. Midwest, showed up on Facebook the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Bursting with the exuberant hope that the prospect of my next life bird instills in me I drove, next day, the distance down to Point Douglas, a community just across the St. Croix River from Prescott, Wisconsin. I arrived right at noon. Skies were vivid blue, the air with a nip of late autumn, and predictably a swarm of birders, most, in this phase of my life, much younger than me, swirled just below the Minnesotan end of the river bridge where, on the base of a sunlit abutment, sat the gull, an immature bird already showing the pink tinge on the breast feathers that many an enthusiast might have expected to see only on an adult Ross's. 

Soon after I had focused my scope on it, the gull, probably stressed by the gathering crowd, flapped away and beat across the ripples to the Wisconsin shore to lose itself against a riprap embankment. A  man who could have been my daughter's age graciously refound the gull for me where it hunkered by crevices in the stone, greyish-white against more greyish-white background but plain to our studying eyes, once it was in focus and crisply defined in viewing light that could not have been better. I could see facial marks, bill and folded wing along one side. People gazed, chatted, joked and enjoyed standing maskless among like-minded strangers and friends in the fresh air; new arrivals were offered assistance from those present, while the gull gradually roused, eased itself to the waterline below the rocks and gulped a little fish. 

To imagine: this dainty gull, all alone with no gull neighbors whatsoever, hatching probably in Siberia or else Arctic coastal North America before, for whatever reason, flapping or coasting all the vast latitudes over to Dakota County on Minnesota's eastern state line! Not too much later for the onlookers the bird lifted into air and flew high, back our way, exhibiting the greyish-blue underwing setting it strikingly apart in terms of color from our commoner gulls, and the short wedge-shaped tail, blackish at the tip, that also marks this species. Many of us rejoiced, as I announced for anyone in sympathy with me another gift from the universe and got ready for the drive back north. All birds I've yet to see before, especially if they're accidental visitors, are sacred gifts in my estimation.

Two days later the gull was reported dead on arrival at the Wildlife Rehab center in Roseville, after being collected, listless and grounded, from the same area of riverbank where we'd all stood watching it. The sighting had been the fourth reported for Ross's gull in Minnesota. News of this death smote significantly at some hearts among followers who had gone and seen the gull and felt uplifted at the thought that here to our heartland had come something like an emissary of its kind, driven by the great Unknown on a quest as far-reaching as the Mississippi flyway. In response a birder named Andy Forbes from Dakota County, MN posted an excerpt on a birding listserv from A Year on the Wing: Four Seasons in a Life with  Birds by Tim Dee: 

  "The yellow-browed warbler I saw …  had made a mistake, and it is probable that no amount of nurture on Fair Isle could truly rescue it.  Vagrancy is a death sentence. Almost all of the rarities that arrive on the island (and almost all vagrants anywhere) will have the same fate. They are wonderful treasures from far away that we cannot keep and cannot save. There is very little evidence that vagrant birds reorient themselves and correct their  journeys.  It seems likely that the yellow-browed warbler, having gone southwest where it should have gone southeast, would continue this aberrant direction and fly on west out over an ocean that has no refuges, no green skirts, for thousands of miles.  That would be the end of it.  It would  soon be homeless.  I was watching a lost child at death’s door."

I was comforted by that reading and sent the poster a note to say so.

My hand illustration in my customary mixed media based in watercolor and gouache followed in about a month's time; I completed the piece on paper that buckled in two places where the birds' wings extend from their shoulders. Those dents have been edited out in software but remain in the original. From this impromptu little artwork I plan to offer cards for recipients awed by the grace of gull flight and by the potential, ever with us on earth, for sighting a rare bird out of place and oriented by the not-impossible motive to survive under new circumstances.