by Pam Houston
I thought about the books that had shaped my sensibility as a young writer: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Silent Spring, A Sand County Almanac, Refuge, A River Runs Through It, In Patagonia and Desert Solitaire. Now, amid the most sweeping legislative attack on our environment in history, a colleague wondered aloud to me whether it was feasible, or even sane anymore, to teach books that celebrate nature unironically. This planet hadn’t even been mapped properly a couple of hundred years ago, and now none of it, above or below ground, remains unsullied by our need for extraction. As we hurtle toward the cliff, foot heavy on the throttle, to write a poem about the loveliness of a newly leafed out aspen grove or a hot August wind sweeping across prairie grass or the smell of the air after a three-day rain in the maple forest might be at best so unconscionably naïve, and at worst so much part of the problem, we might as well drive a Hummer and start voting Republican.
Maybe. But then again, maybe not. Maybe this is the best time there has ever been to write unironic odes to nature.
I have spent most of my life outside, but for the last three years, I have been walking five miles a day, minimum, wherever I am, urban or rural, and can attest to the magnitude of the natural beauty that is left. Beauty worth seeing, worth singing, worth saving, whatever that word can mean now. There is beauty in a desert, even one that is expanding. There is beauty in the ocean, even one that is on the rise.
And even if the jig is up, even if it is really game over, what better time to sing about the earth than when it is critically, even fatally wounded at our hands. Aren’t we more complex, more interesting, more multifaceted people if we do? What good has the hollow chuckle ever done anyone? Do we really keep ourselves from being hurt when we sneer instead of sob?
If we pretend not to see the tenuous beauty that is still all around us, will it keep our hearts from breaking as we watch another mountain be clear-cut, as we watch North Dakota, as beautiful a state as there ever was, be poisoned for all time by hydraulic fracturing? If we abandon all hope right now, does that in some way protect us from some bigger pain later? If we never go for a walk in the beetle-killed forest, if we don’t take a swim in the algae-choked ocean, if we lock grandmother in a room for the last ten years of her life so we can practice and somehow accomplish the survival of her loss in advance, in what ways does it make our lives easier? In what ways does it impoverish us?
We are all dying, and because of us, so is the earth. That’s the most terrible, the most painful in my entire repertoire of self-torturing thoughts. But it isn’t dead yet and neither are we. Are we going to drop the earth off at the vet, say goodbye at the door, and leave her to die in the hands of strangers? We can decide, even now, not to turn our backs on her in her illness. We can still decide not to let her die alone.
I have always believed that if I pay strict attention while I am out in the physical world—and for me that often means the natural world—the physical world will give me everything I need to tell my stories. As I move through my day, I wait to feel something I call a glimmer, a vibration, a little charge of resonance that says, “Hey writer, look over here.” I feel it deep in my chest, this buzzing that lets me know the thing I am seeing/hearing/smelling/tasting on the outside is going to help me unlock some part of a story I have on the inside. I keep an ongoing record of these glimmers, writing down not my interpretation of them, not my imagined connection to them, not an emotional contextualization of them, but just the thing itself. Get in, get it down, get out and move on to the next glimmer. Then, when I have some time to write, I read through the glimmer files in my computer and try to find a handful that seem like they will stick together, that when placed in proximity with one another will create a kind of electricity.
I try to keep my big analytical brain out of this process as much as possible, because I believe my analytical brain at best only knows part of the story and at worst is a big fat liar. I believe—like religion—that the glimmer, the metaphor, if you will, knows a great deal more than I do. And if I stay out of its way, it will reveal itself to me. I will become not so much its keeper as its conduit, and I will pass its wisdom on to the reader, without actually getting in its way.
In addition to being my method, the way I have written every single thing I have written, it is also the primary way I worship, the way I kneel down and kiss the earth.
On Memorial Day weekend 2015, I drove William back to the ranch after ten weeks in California. He’s a good sport about our time in Davis but there was no mistaking the smile on his dog face when we crested the top of Donner Pass and got back over to the leash-less side of the Sierras. We stopped every four hours for walks along Forest Service roads or multiuse trails all the way across Nevada and Utah, but nothing ever feels better than the first pasture walk back at the ranch.
On Sunday morning, we did what we call the large pasture loop, out to the back of my 120 acres and then over the stile into the national forest, up Red Mountain Creek and across one edge of my neighbor’s 12,000 acres, and then back down alongside the wetland and back over my fence again. It was me, William, and another writer friend, Josh Weil, who would be watching the ranch for the next several weeks while I went off teaching in Vermont, Marin County and France.
We were nearly back to my fence line when we heard a high-pitched cry, which I first thought was a red-tailed hawk, until it cried a few more times and I realized William had found himself a baby elk. We ran up the hill, called off William and watched as the calf took a few sturdy steps and then settled back into the underbrush where she had been hiding. Satisfied she was unhurt, we went another hundred yards down the hill only to find a dead cow elk, the blood in the cavity still wet where the coyotes had pulled her guts out.
I tried to make the hole in the neck look like something other than an entry wound—the tooth of a coyote perhaps or the peck of the little-known round-beaked vulture. I did not want to believe one of my neighbors would shoot a cow, illegally, at the peak of calving season, right here at the edge of my property, where my horses spend summer nights grazing the edges of the wetland. I didn’t want to think anyone would shoot an animal for practice, for pleasure, and then leave the meat to spoil.
“That baby doesn’t have a chance,” Josh said, as we stared down into the cow’s pecked-out eye, as we kicked at the wet grass that had been pulled out of her stomach. “It’s probably starving already.”
We both knew the rule of thumb was to leave abandoned calves alone; we also knew we might be in the presence of an exception. Those unspeakably long legs, those airbrushed spots, the deep brown eyes, and slightly pugged-up nose.
“I wish we hadn’t seen the cow,” I said, stupidly.
“I do too,” Josh said, “but we did.”
We were both thinking of the two rejected domestic lambs my spring ranchsitter had been feeding, and the mudroom full of milk replacer. We were both looking at the sky, which had begun serving up one of Colorado’s famous May blizzards: the temperature was dropping, the snow was sticking and the wind was starting to howl.
“Let’s take William home,” I said, “and heat up some milk and bring her a bottle. If she is still here when we get back, if she lets us approach her, maybe you carry her back to the barn.”
We took our time getting the bottle. If her mother was still alive we wanted to give her plenty of space to react to the distress cries once we were out of there. We drove the 4Runner around to the closest road access, so Josh would have to carry her three hundred yards instead of three thousand. We found her easily, and she blinked up at us sweetly, apparently unafraid. Maybe she was already too weak from hunger to save, I thought, and yet she had jumped right up to get away from William.
I sat down beside her and offered the bottle. She wasn’t too keen at first, but when I gave up and drew it back across my chest she stretched herself across my lap to give it another sniff and chew a little on the nipple. She’d only take a little at a time, but before long we’d gotten about a cup down her. She put her head in
my lap and started to go to sleep. Josh said it might be a good time to try to transport her.
She did not love being carried. She wiggled and squeaked like she had when William had found her, and I prayed a giant elk cow would come crashing through the trees to fight us for her, but the woods were quiet and Josh held on tight and once we got to the 4Runner she curled up in the dog bed in the back like she had been doing it all her life. Back home, Josh carried her the short distance to the barn, where we made a bed of straw for her, which she rejected in favor of the dirt floor, and I went inside to heat some more milk. That time she drank almost two cups. She shivered in the cold, and I rubbed her warm with my jacket. It was at that point Josh named her Willa.
The internet said it wasn’t uncommon for cow elk to leave their babies for several hours, because the babies could not keep up with the herd at the pace of their daily grazing. It said the calves were scentless, and would not attract predators, and the herd would come back and pick them up around dusk.
“If the dead cow isn’t her mother,” I said to Josh, “we may have just done a really bad thing.” But it was snowing in earnest now, the wind screaming, and mistake or not, Willa was warm and dry in the barn.
I did what I always do in Creede when I don’t know what to do and that’s call Doc Howard. He said there was a sanctuary near Del Norte that would take her and raise her. He told me to call Brent, the wildlife officer, and that Brent would come get her, take her to the sanctuary and, while he was at it investigate the shooting. He said, “There are several other things you could do, Pam, but not without violating ten different laws.”
I knew everybody had gotten freaked out about elk since chronic wasting disease became a thing in Colorado, but I also knew we had never had a case of it in Mineral County and they checked every elk the hunters took out. Still, I didn’t really want to raise an elk baby with a bottle. What I wanted was for some yahoo not to have shot her mother. The website said to feed your orphaned elk four cups every four hours, so I left Brent a message and went out with more warm milk. This time she was interested and drank with less coaxing. She followed me around the stall, and when I would sit down in the straw with her, she would touch her nose to my face and hair.
Josh and I spent another hour with her, watching her walk around on her long long legs, greeting her when she wanted to make contact, feeling what it was like to be in her presence—which had a mystical quality to it, a visitation from some otherworldly being. So calm, she was, so delicate and full of light.
“Now, Pam, I’m going to need you to trust me a little bit,” Brent said on the phone, and because of the tone in his voice when he said it, I did. “The sanctuary in Del Norte won’t take elk anymore because of chronic wasting. There’s a place in Westcliffe I might get to take her, but her best chance at the life she is meant to have is if you put her back out there, exactly where you found her. There’s a good chance the herd will come pick her back up.”
“Even if the dead one is her mother?”
“Even if,” he said. “If the herd has another cow nursing, she’ll probably be okay. I’ll come up at seven in the morning and if she’s still there I’ll put her in a kennel and take her to Westcliffe.”
It’s hard to put a week-old elk calf back in the woods at sunset within a hundred yards of a ripped-open elk carcass the coyotes already know about, but by the time we talked ourselves into it, I had gotten two more cups of milk down her, it had stopped snowing, and the last sun of the day was warming things up a bit. Josh carried her back to the 4Runner, we drove her around to the back fence and Josh carried her, kicking, squeaking, back to the exact tree where William had found her. We didn’t know what we were going to do if she followed us, but she didn’t. She curled back in right where her mother had put her, and waited, we hoped, for the herd to come at dusk.
“What a story she’ll have to tell her friends,” I tried, as we turned our backs on her.
“Oh, she just thinks this is what happens to everybody,” Josh said. “On the seventh day of being an elk you get to ride in the back of a car.”
The next morning, I had to leave for the airport at four thirty, and the air was clear and full of stars and 29 degrees on my car thermometer. I said another prayer that the herd had come back for Willa, that her mother hadn’t been the shot one, and nobody minded she smelled a little like humans and the back of a 4Runner usually occupied by giant dogs. “We might have messed up,” I said, to whoever I thought was listening at that hour—some genderless Druidic earth power, I supposed, perhaps the mountain itself—“but we talked it out every step and tried to make the best decision.”
I watched seven come and go as I drove farther away from Creede and closer to the Denver airport. I knew news wouldn’t likely come until nine, but every minute after seven was torture. Finding her dead would have been the fastest outcome; loading her into the kennel and sending her off with Brent the next fastest after that. Searching the woods for her would take the longest. It was hard to even know what to hope for.
Finally, when I was sitting at gate B23, Josh called. The cow had been shot; that was certain. They had looked long and hard for Willa and found no sign of her. They had also looked up and down the road for a shell casing to help identify the poacher and had not found one of those. Brent would go up to Spar City and ask around, but he wasn’t hopeful he would find out anything more.
I have decent intuitive skills, which have improved with the onset of menopause, so I tried to quiet my mind to get a sense of Willa. For whatever it is worth, she did not feel dead to me. I know how potentially self-deceiving that sounds. But she was, among other things, a magical being. Josh and I gave her up to the mountain, and I believe the mountain took care of her.
It’s hard to be ironic about a dying dog. It’s hard to be ironic about an elk calf when her nose is touching your face. It’s hard to be ironic when the young writer who tends your house and cuddles your dogs and who you know loves the earth with the same passion you do is walking behind you down a dirt trail with thirty-three pounds of baby elk in his arms. It’s hard to be ironic when your pasture erupts after an unexpected May blizzard into a blanket of wild iris. It’s hard to be ironic when the osprey that returns to your ranch every summer makes his first lazy circle around the peak of your barn.
Last January, I was speaking with an environmental scientist who said he was extremely pessimistic about the future of the earth in the hundred-year frame, but optimistic about it in the five-hundred-year frame. There will be very few people here, he said, earnestly, but the ones who are here will have learned a lot.
There are times when I understand all too well what my colleagues in Davis are trying to protect themselves from. Times when seeing the world’s bright beauty is almost more than I can bear, when my mind is running the grim numbers the scientists have given us right alongside. And it is also true, had I never laid eyes on Willa, I would not have spent five sleep-deprived hours weeping—often sobbing—in the car that morning on the way to DIA. If I hadn’t slept those three nights on the porch with Fenton, it would have been three fewer nights of my life spent with an actively breaking heart. But a broken heart—God knows, I have found—doesn’t actually kill you. And irony and disinterest are false protections, ones that won’t serve us, or the earth, in the end.
For now, I want to sit vigil with the earth the same way I did with Fenton. I want to write unironic odes to her beauty, which is still potent, if not completely intact. The language of the wilderness is the most beautiful language we have and it is our job to sing it, until and even after it is gone, no matter how much it hurts. If we don’t, we are left with only a hollow chuckle, and our big brains who made this mess, our big brains that stopped believing a long time ago in beauty, in everything, in anything.
What I want to say to my colleagues is that the earth doesn’t know how not to be beautiful. Yes, the destruction, yes, the inevitability, but honestly, Doctor Distant Reader, when was the last time you sle
pt on the ground?
How will we sing when Miami goes underwater, when the raft of garbage in the ocean gets as big as Texas, when the only remaining polar bear draws his last breath, when fracking, when Keystone, when Pruitt? I don’t know. And I imagine sometimes, often, we will get it wrong. But I’m not celebrating the earth because I am an optimist—though I am an optimist. I am celebrating because this magnificent rock we live on demands celebration. I am celebrating because how in the face of this earth could I not?
1 Timothy Morton, “Wordsworth Digs the Lawn,” European Romantic Review 15, no. 2 (2004):318.
Ranch Almanac: Puppy
Today, Isaac rolled the puppy, with, I believe, the intent to kill her. I have always been told donkeys offer the best coyote protection possible, but I didn’t fully understand that statement until I saw the efficient and systematic way Isaac got the twelve-week-old pup up under his feet, his legs creating a kind of cage around her, and then proceeded to pummel her with all four hooves at once.
Olivia—Livie, as we call her—seems to have come through the incident unscathed and is currently chewing on a dinosaur toy bigger than she is, dragging it around the living room by its neck. I spent a few hours watching her closely for signs of internal or external injuries, but everything seems to be working okay. No blood coming out of any orifices.
William gave himself away completely in the moments after it happened, first by trying to get into the corral to kick Isaac’s ass, and then by running back and forth between the corral and the house, where Livie had retreated—screaming, shrieking—and then coming back to hurry me along to where she was hiding.
It should have occurred to me that the puppy, in Isaac’s eyes, may as well have been a coyote—this long-legged, tail-wagging Janey-come-lately. The donkeys have been at the ranch for two years. The last thing we need around here, Isaac must have been thinking, is another soon-to-be-giant dog.
