Foxie? As if he were a pet. As if hanging around a fox was tantamount to decorating a terrier in tartans or teaching a parrot to solicit crackers.
During the show, I’d treated the fox slides as though they depicted a typical wild animal passing by somewhere. I did not give any indication that I had a relationship with him. How did she know? How had she sat through a two-hour slideshow and picked out the one animal in the entire lineup who differed from the rest? There had been just two slides of Fox, the angles and proximity no different from those of other animals on the screen. But Fox, unlike the others, was modeling, decorating the screen while I discussed the dynamics between wolves, foxes, and coyotes. In the slides, Fox wore an enigmatic expression, looking a bit like the famous woman in the da Vinci painting. Students, I hoped, would see a demure wild animal while I would see a droll one. Just like the famous model, Fox was posing three-quarters to the artist in front of mountains, hills, and a river. But now it appeared that my pictures of him weren’t mysterious at all. He had been called out—not as a wild animal or the Mona Lisa, but as a pet.
I reminded myself that it was only because I was not The Leonardo.
At breakfast, Jenna and I caught up with each other’s lives and reviewed logistics: hiking distances, bus schedules, the impending rain, whether normal people spent all that much time talking to foxes. But I did not tell her about my fox. Then the bus arrived to bring us into Yellowstone Park for the day and we hadn’t even finished our cereal.
“Talking to foxes,” Jenna said, scribbling students’ names on the sandwich bags in the cooler, “is not something that normal people do much.” I wasn’t trying to emulate normal people, but I did like knowing what they were up to.
On the bus, I told her a little about the fox, the slides I took of him, and about the “Foxie” comment. She suggested I explain my relationship with Fox to the class. Awful idea. “Maybe no one else noticed,” I said. “Maybe that one woman has a sixth sense.”
“She doesn’t.”
I had barely enough social intelligence to understand that adults, least of all trained scientists, don’t go around treating wild foxes as if they had personalities. I reminded Jenna about the author of The Little Prince, his boa constrictor drawing, and his conclusion that there are some things that people will never understand. Things like my relationship with a wild fox.
“But this is your job. Talking to people. Explaining things.”
“Saint-Exupéry said that explaining things to people who were never going to understand was exhausting. So he just ignored people.”
“Don’t you think that’s a lonely way to live?”
“He was not lonely. He had the little—”
“I know what you’re thinking,” she interrupted. “But you? Don’t you already have enough make-believe friends?”
That night, back in my cabin, I turned the big armchair from the television set to the sliding glass doors. I understood that I could not keep my relationship with Fox a secret. One thing a private person cannot afford is secrets. People will leave you alone if they know you’re not hiding anything. I also knew I had no idea how to explain my relationship with Fox.
I picked up a notepad and my chunky seven-dollar pen, let my legs dangle over the side of the chair, and asked myself how to explain the relationship. Start at the beginning. I tried to imagine when Fox and I first became more than just two itinerant animals crossing each other’s paths. I wrote “April,” then realized that there was no “Eureka!” moment in our relationship. There were no exclamation marks at all. Maybe the relationship had developed so smoothly that I never doubted that all was as it should be, or maybe it had developed rapidly enough to keep me perpetually confused. I crossed out “April” and wrote “March.” I closed my eyes and listened for the river, heard the TV from the attached cabin and voices from its married occupants. Crossed out “March.” Having never acquired a television or a spouse, I wondered how to illustrate my fox with enough clarity that no one would mistake him for a hat.
little brown bats
The next day of field class, hot wind hit us like a blow-dryer. That evening, pungent humidity from the big river lured me out to the deck, while Myotis lucifugus—little brown bats—kept me standing near the sliding door. No one wants to get whacked by a bat.
Lucifugus means “avoiding the light of day,” like Lucifer, El Diablo. Common in caves, the Little Devils also enjoyed sneaking into tall, dark lodges and ricocheting between ceiling beams. When they intruded into our classroom auditorium, I would swat them with fat whips of terry cloth towels. But you cannot swat bats out of your head so easily. They are haunted. I was convinced that ghosts of cave creatures were visiting those deck bats. Never mind that I’ve never actually seen a specter and hadn’t been inside a cave for years. Irrationality is the hallmark of ghosts.
Back inside, I sat sideways across my cowboy-motif chair, drumming on my notebook with the tap end of the seven-dollar pen. Good pens were free; better pens were inexpensive. As a homeowner, I could have collected and stored scores of cheap, free pens. But I couldn’t shake the idea that all my belongings needed to fit inside my car. So I carried one good Pilot pen. The notebook was blank, except for a few crossed-out words, but I wasn’t looking at the pages. The river had reached high water, and it was surging through the willows as it ran past the patio.
I needed to be thinking about how my relationship with the fox began and why we rendezvoused every day at 4:15 p.m. We were meeting, after all, under odd and uncomfortable circumstances. Foxes are supposed to avoid people, free spirits are supposed to avoid schedules, and everyone except a person with the wit of a nit is supposed to avoid humanizing wild animals.
I wanted to believe that Fox and I were meeting every day because we had followed a logical and inevitable path. I decided that I could diagram that path and drew two stick figures in my notebook: one on the bottom left wearing a ball cap, the other on the bottom right with pointy ears. One line extended toward the center of the page from each figure. The two lines converged, and a single line continued up the page. I flanked the line with overlapping isosceles triangles that symbolized impassable mountains and left only a narrow corridor for the route on which Fox and I would have no choice but to meet. The line passed through stars, which represented key events. All journeys have key events. All I had to do was figure out what they were and label them.
Then I could bring the map to class and show everyone that my relationship with Fox had followed a natural course of events and that nothing happening between us was bending the immutable laws of science. “Here’s what happened,” I would say. “One thing led to another.” Running my finger along the line and the stars hemmed in by mountains, I would wait for everyone to reply, “Yeah. Well. When you look at it that way”; shrug their shoulders; and agree that they too would have befriended a fox.
I was a park ranger before I earned my doctorate in biology. In fact, I was pressing a Stetson on my head and cinching up that iconic pinecone-embossed belt before I finished my bachelor’s degree. I’d studied botany and zoology in college. In Washington’s Mount Rainier National Park, I patrolled the backcountry; my trail circuit included a region known as Three Lakes, where I stayed in a tiny cabin that smelled like wood and wax. A few feet shorter than my blue-roofed cottage, the Three Lakes Patrol Cabin and its outhouse perched on a knoll above First Lake, the largest of the three lakes. Giant, shaggy-barked evergreens surrounded and almost completely shaded the lake. I never called it First Lake. I treated all three lakes as a single body of water temporarily separated by a transient meadow and called it all Three Lakes no matter which shore I stood on.
Not many hikers trudged the six miles uphill to Three Lakes from the nearest road. Even fewer came by way of the Pacific Crest Trail, a long journey that required camping overnight. Every morning, I rose from a sleeping deck that ran flush with the cabin’s window and scratched myself into a uniform—one
badge on the shirt and another on the jacket. Wearing a .357 in a shoulder holster, I hiked down to the lake with coffee in one hand and a government-issued logbook in the other. Across my green cloth logbook, in fat black cursive, I had written a quote from Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: “Meditation and water are wedded forever.”
For Ishmael, an impecunious sailor hustling jobs in “Manhatto” in the 1800s, meditation meant exactly what it meant to me at the Three Lakes cabin in the twentieth century—pondering. If it had any other meaning—scholastic, formal, or religious—I wasn’t any more aware of it than Ishmael would have been. Overall, our lot and luck didn’t differ by much. We’d both found ways to keep wild animals and wild water nearby. Melville could have dropped Ishmael along the Shriner Peak Trail and let him join me on the eight-mile hike up the exposed ridge to the fire lookout. After surveying wildlife and hammering PVC pipes into snowbanks, we would haul jerricans filled with meltwater back to the fire tower. In the evening, we would stand on the tower’s railed balcony to admire our priceless view of Mount Rainier, and never mind the thousand miles or the 150 years that separated us, the same thought would cross our minds—an eight-mile hike: no better view in the northwest asked less of a person.
After a night at the lookout, we would follow Laughingwater Creek through old-growth forest, using Leatherman tools and pruning paint to repair graffiti that scalawags had carved into the thin, gray bark of silver firs. Laughingwater Creek traces the park’s border around the rim of the Three Lakes basin, so we would have to check on boundary signs. Pausing periodically at the white metal signs with green embossed letters, one of us would slip the reverse end of a claw hammer under a double-headed nail, pulling just enough to prevent the sign from eating into the bark of a boundary tree. We wouldn’t mind the workload; we were outdoors, away from civilization, and free from anxiety. An impecunious sailor in “Manhatto” in 1800 expressed anxiety by “deliberately stepping into the streets and methodically knocking people’s hats off.” To a backcountry ranger in the twentieth century, anxiety meant turning into mercury, a metal that evaporates in ambient temperatures, becoming invisible, odorless, and completely unassuming. Disappearing into the woods saved me from questions that caused anxiety: Where are your parents? Why are you all alone? Doesn’t anyone care about you?
When Ishmael needs open air and physical labor, he quits a respectable job as a schoolteacher and joins a whaling crew. Except for the part about killing whales, the job is perfect. When it comes to locating whales to harpoon, Ishmael keeps “a light hold” on his obligations. On masthead duty, instead of watching for whales, he meditates and thinks through life’s necessary philosophies. In fact, he never calls a whale on any of his watches. I wouldn’t either. If I had to stand masthead, I’d close my eyes and wear mirrored sunglasses and a “save the whales” T-shirt. Like you. Or someone you know. Or someone you used to know.
Or someone you used to be.
“The whale-fishery,” writes Ishmael, “furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men [who] . . . in their secret souls . . . would rather not see whales than otherwise . . . lad[s] with lean brow[s] and hollow eye[s]; given to unseasonable meditativeness . . . sunken-eyed young Platonist[s]. . . . Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending . . . of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for . . . that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature. . . . In this enchanted mood, [his] spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space.”
Yes, sometimes I had to stop reading and call “man overboard” on Ishmael. At Three Lakes, I learned to keep my feet grounded when I went pondering. Otherwise, one moment I could be sitting on Three Lakes’ shore listening for the pitter-patter of an elk poacher’s gum-soled boots, and then, without any warning, I might find myself in “unconscious reverie” at Fourth Lake.
Like Ishmael, I cured anxiety and boredom with jobs in wild and beautiful places: North Cascades, Mount Rainier, Voyageurs, and Glacier National Parks. But when The Real World spiked out the bait—a checking account and health insurance—I bit hard. Still, my head swiveled back behind me as I left, filling up with regret and memories: red berries the size of toad eyes scattered on deep soft moss that bounced under my boots; cobalt-colored ponds so nearly frozen that when I dove in I felt a wave of closing capillaries from fingers to toes; pond-pocked meadows below fields of thigh-high blue lupine so beautiful I held my breath and whispered, “So this is what breathtaking means.”
I memorized scenes because I didn’t have photographs, and I ended up carrying them as talismans to calm me or chase away my worries. These images prowled around in my mind for years and, over time, transmogrified, merged, became chimeras. An image from a Glacier Park trail might collapse into a memory of North Cascades. In my mind’s eye, I would be leaning against my cherished North Face Moraine, a red-and-navy internal-frame pack—one of the first designed for females—in some rivulet-scored mountain meadow, inhaling buck scent, listening to bumblebees, watching monkey-faced flowers the size of fox paws bob above curvy, subalpine deadwood. I used several tents and bivy sacks, but the red-and-navy Moraine went everywhere.
When I stumbled into cavernous problems that seemed insurmountable, I called out one of the chimeras, watching it in my mind’s eye. If I got lucky, new ideas—creative, viable, and edifying—filled the space vacated by the deported worries. Usually, I wasn’t that lucky, but the habit of pulling up these beautiful images kept them from disappearing. A lack of money caused most of my stress, and my health suffered: infected wisdom teeth, a nonmalignant tumor, no medical insurance. I thought that if I lived long enough, the images of the backcountry places where I lived and worked would benefit my life more than the lack of healthcare would detract from it.
At graduate school in the city, it seemed that every living thing wore a leash or a collar or sat in a cage. I felt like I did too. Worn down and landlocked, I had time for only the most scripted thoughts; my opportunities for pondering diminished, then disappeared. Instead of wilderness, a manmade environment surrounded me: asphalt and elevators and fake ponds pitted into manicured lawns where croft ducks on the lam ate caramel popcorn. The acrid smell of excess carbon monoxide, the sound of electrical buzzing, and the purple illumination of fluorescent lights filled the lecture halls. Classroom windows, out of reach and out of sight, lined up along the high ceilings to prevent distraction and discourage jumpers.
Now, six years after leaving university, having gone back to the wilderness, and back to the academy, and back to the wilderness again, I met a wild thing: a fox. The fox was alluring, almost magical. But the timing was inconvenient. I had recently begun to wonder whether I belonged in this isolated mountain valley. The academy offered more than a paycheck and health insurance; it offered companionship with people. A long time ago, I had arrived at the prudent and logical conclusion that when your own parents don’t want you, no one else will. So I had been living a solitary life. Now that I was teaching field classes for the second summer, I had a sneaking suspicion that if I knocked persistently, and not too loudly, the doors to social acceptance just might open. But only if I left Fox and the mountain behind.
Moths fleeing little brown bats were sneaking through tiny rips in the patio’s screen door and making their way into my cabin. I slid the glass door shut to protect the owner’s shiny new upholstery. The River Cabin students were probably already asleep. I thought about past afternoons spent watching for a fox with a demanding schedule and not an iota of patience. On those days I had nothing to do but wait and watch and think.
I remembered the first step we took toward our friendship.
“Start here,” commanded the map. I picked up my pen. Next to the solid blue star, I wrote, “Vole Forest.”
vole forest
After dinner on t
he second evening of the class, I continued filling in the map. If the students were still interested and asking questions about Fox on their last day, I would have an illustrated story prepared.
Fox first crossed my path the previous October, during The Great Vole Debacle, a performance I planned, orchestrated, and directed—sometimes while glimpsing an errant fox in my audience. Months later, at the Debacle’s finale, the errant fox was conducting; the voles and I played from the pit.
I had spent the summer teaching field classes for the University of Montana Western in Yellowstone National Park. The theme for the students was wildlife and wildflowers. For me, it was Homo sapiens. For three months, they surrounded me all day and most nights too. I observed the world like one of those fancy pet telescope goldfish, eyes popped open and treading water. All the women were wearing cropped pants, so I cut my green jeans at the knee and sewed on cuffs of orange and gold ribbon. Terrible idea. But Patricia, one of the popular instructors, complimented my handmade crops, so I wore them almost every day.
When I finally figured out from all the smirking that Patricia’s compliment was actually a comment, summer was almost over. I doubled down on my observations. Stopping in West Yellowstone on my way home, I bought brown cargo-crops that matched those Patricia had been wearing.
(The next summer I wore my brown cargo-crops; Patricia did not wear hers. “Do you know you have these exact same pants?” I asked when I got tired of waiting for a compliment. “No,” she said, while I tried interpreting her stare, “they don’t look familiar at all.”)
I was relieved to return home to the country where I could wear what I wanted, because, as expected, there was no one keeping me company. Not anyone with hide or hair anyway. I did know one special black widow spider. I would not call her “company,” but she’d been a reliable occupant for over a year now. She used to share my dark, windowless garage with eight other widows. They’re not accustomed to the cold, and when the wind howled, seeping into the cracks around my roll-up garage door, they gathered up their billowing webs from the top edges of the doorsill and high-stepped to the sheltered interior, cozying up in inconvenient places—near the light switch, the car doors, the hanging tools. My college textbook said a widow’s bite was “rarely fatal.” But it can cause temporary blindness, which is something to worry about if you’re living alone. So I carried an old sneaker into the garage in case I needed to whack any of them. And now only one remained. Unlike her wind-averse and widowed sisters, she built her web in the front of the garage, where it didn’t threaten me.
Fox and I Page 3
