Animal, Mineral, Radical

by BK Loren

  It’s not any more “New Agey” to say that cats are symbolic to Americans than it is to say the eagle is symbolic. If the eagle has come to symbolize some collective sense of “freedom,” the cat has come to symbolize solitary strength, self-awareness (awareness even in darkness), keeping to one’s boundaries (the way a female lion defends her territory); it symbolizes the heart of the wilderness we all need and desire—the wilderness that is shrinking beneath us, unconsciously, like a dream forgotten upon waking.

  The next morning when I went to the lodging office to check out of my cabin, I mentioned to Kathleen, the concierge, that I’d seen a mountain lion on the tennis court. Kathleen and I had become friendly since I began staying in the Chautauqua cabins; but as soon as the words left my lips, I wished I’d kept them to myself. I’m not a religious person. But I’d witnessed, the night before, a messenger from a place I hold to be divine: the wilderness. True wilderness is pretty much gone now, but a remnant of it remains in something as wild as a mountain lion.

  After I spoke to Kathleen, I walked downtown, and I knew that my world had somehow been shifted in the same subtle but certain way it shifts in the aftermath of a powerful dream. Likewise, to describe that shift would be as impossible as explaining the impact of a dream.

  I can only describe it like this: I walked into my favorite coffee shop–bookstore and took a seat at a table where someone had left a stack of books. On top was a slender volume entitled Caught in Fading Light, and it had on its cover the dusky outline of a cougar. It told the story of the author, Gary Thorp, tracking one specific mountain lion daily for over a year and never seeing it.

  Jung would call the appearance of that book on the table where I sat after seeing a cougar synchronicity, two events connected by something stronger than chance. I didn’t call it anything. If I’d been in another state of mind, it might have impressed me. That day, it just made sense. Just as it made sense that the next book in the stack was by Rainer Maria Rilke, and when I turned to the first page my eyes fell on a poem called “Archaic Statue of Apollo.” In this poem, Rilke is struck silent by a sight so beautiful and unfathomable that it shifts his world. To him, it was a statue of an ancient god, an archetype. In the presence of the piece of art, Rilke sees everything that is possible in him, but that he has not yet become. The last few lines of the poem are

  Otherwise the shoulders

  would not glisten like the fur of a wild animal:

  would not, from all the borders of itself,

  burst like pure light: for here there is no place

  that does not see you. You must change your life.

  Rilke, nearly a full century ago, called upon the image of a wild animal to illustrate the peaceful yet powerful strength that comes to us rarely and shifts our world. The possibility of it exists in all of us. It is the dream of a common language that harks back through history and provides a connection between us all. Here, there is no place that does not see you.

  I finished my drink, bought both books, and, well, as soon as I left the place the mundane world wiggled its way back into my life. My cell phone rang. On the end of the line was a park ranger. “We have a report of a lion sighting in Chautauqua,” the ranger said.

  “Yes, I saw a lion.”

  “It stalked some teenagers?”

  “It didn’t stalk them,” I said. “It walked behind them, looking for a place to go. It acted just like a lion should act. It was a good lion, a good lion.” I knew that any behavior illustrating this cat had grown too used to humans could label it a “bad cat” and put the animal at risk.

  Though I knew that Kathleen had done the right thing by reporting my sighting (the cougar was on the tennis court, after all), it also felt somehow wrong to me. Maybe my personal unconscious understood the need for monitoring a large predator’s behavior, especially when people had chosen to live smack-dab in the middle of the predator’s habitat. But at the same time, something in me, maybe my collective unconscious, wanted that cat to remain untouched by human eyes, uncontrolled by rangers, and completely wild.

  The conversation I had with the ranger edged too close to an absurd moment I’d experienced in my little suburban home. I was out one morning at dawn, working in the garden, when a red fox emerged from the blond, dried grasses in the open field behind my house. I stopped, leaned on my shovel, and fell momentarily in love with that fox. With its long, lean body, its bushy coat, the red that deepens to black on the tip of the tail—oh, yes, it really was love. Just then, an SUV pulled up to the stop sign on my corner. The driver caught sight of the fox, too, and her jaw dropped. Her window was down, so I waved and called out to her, “Gorgeous, huh?” She picked up her cell phone and put it to her ear. I thought, What an unfortunate time to receive a phone call, right when she could be taking in the sight of this magnificent fox running across the field at dawn.

  She looked frantic, though. I figured she’d received upsetting news on the phone, something that sent her into a near panic. So I picked up my shovel and walked closer to see if I could help. She rolled down the window and almost screeched at me. “Did you see that animal?” she said.

  “Yes.” I kept up my bright smile.

  “Good, good. I’m calling animal control right now. They’ll take care of it,” she said.

  I wondered at the fear bubbling up so readily inside her, and at her trust in something—a phone call—that could so easily put that fear in check.

  Luckily, my conversation with the ranger turned out to be nothing like my conversation with my neighbor. I had feared it might, until I realized, in true “Shadow form,” that this ranger was doing exactly what I had done when I worked for Eldorado Canyon State Park. At the end of the conversation, she said, “Yeah, we know that lion, or at least we know of it. It has a kill over on the north side of the mountain. It was no doubt just heading out for its dinner.”

  Jung once said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”1

  If the lion, in all its dark, nocturnal otherness, in all its light, internal sameness, does not exist for future generations, if we destroy its habitat, or call open season on it, what could we possibly find to replace it? It is precisely because we fear large predators that we need them. They hold within them so many things we have lost, or are on the verge of losing, personally and collectively, permanently and forever. If we sacrifice the fear, we also sacrifice the strength, the wildness, the beauty, the awe.

  In those few seconds when I was in the presence of the lion, I did not say to myself, “You must change your life.” I knew, right then and there, that my life had been changed. A piece of something necessary had clicked into place inside me. I had become more aware, more intimate with my own fear and my own possibilities. I remembered what it was like to be humbled by awe. I became more compassionate. I became a better person.

  OF STRAW DOGS AND CANINES: A MEDITATION ON PLACE

  Coyotes are consummate illusionists. Take a western landscape, a few piñon pines gnarled like arthritic knuckles, chamisa blooming like handfuls of sunlight, mesas mirages in the distance, and there, on that wide horizon, they will materialize. Where there was nothing now there is something, long-legged, loping. They give you their tough-guy glance, and panting, they move on. You barely believe you’ve seen them before they sink back into the earth. You think of the word vanish and understand the sound of it now: the hard V at the beginning, the hush by the time it ends, how quickly something comes to nothing.

  The Hubble Telescope pointed its powerful lens at a bigger expanse of nothingness than any poet’s wasteland could ever define, and more than ten thousand galaxies appeared, seventy-eight billion light years away, the distant past of them emerging before our eyes in a place that was once empty.

  Place is never empty.

  When I was a kid, my brother told me the Rocky Mountains surrounding our home were wolves, their jagged shoulder blades hunched up, heads lowered. Their coats changed
with the seasons: snow white in winter, granite gray in summer. But to me the mountains looked like a sleeping dragon. The crags to the north: the spiny tail. The lumpy hogbacks to the south: the dragon’s snout. I have always needed stories. Mountains were my first stories. They’ve been telling my life over and over ever since.

  Now I am a writer, and I understand characters as bodies of land; they rise up from place like coyotes, like mountains, like me. I see the red dirt of Colorado, and it looks like the marrow of my bones: gritty, rust-colored mud.

  Without place, all stories become weightless, their characters dangling from dog-eared pages, hoping for a word to give them marrow, bone, body. Even the way we speak is formed by wind whistling across certain landscapes, the words of New Yorkers streetwise enough to turn corners too early, dropping rs as they run to grab a cab; and the voice of a rural girl saying haa-ay, making it two syllables, as if she had all the time in the world.

  Without place, every sentence is from nowhere.

  For years after I’d grown, after my parents died, I lived in my childhood home. Over my lifetime, the small field behind the house had become a Hubble galaxy. On first glance: some land. Years later: the migrations of birds I knew better than any calendar could predict, down to the day—Swainson’s hawks in mid-March, barn swallows in May. The turn of the day ticked in my ears like the rhythms of wings flying home. Night saturated me: howls of coyotes in the field, wind skittering across the pond, predawn meadowlarks singing. The sound of the nearby train rumbled through my sleep, a comfort, not an intrusion.

  When I am embraced in place, I don’t need to buy anything to organize my life. Each step appears in the sway of the day. I don’t need anything to fill me. I sense what is possible, my day brimming with discovery where there was once familiarity, the land a palimpsest that layers with time.

  The pretense that place does not matter turns us all into straw dogs subjected to the whims of marketing. If we are unattached, we need. We need so many things to ground us. If we point the lens into the core of us and no galaxy appears, then what? We dangle, storyless, bland words rolling across the windy landscapes of our tongues. We stay awake all hours of the night, peering out windows until, at last, we let go of longing and accept the constellations that connect us all. We rest our eyes on a horizon that tells a story from the bones out, embraces us from the skin in, lets us rise from the dust of where we’ve been and where we are, like coyotes, hunting, hungry, finally knowing exactly what it is that feeds us.

  MINERAL

  AS IN SOLID, CRYSTALLINE, INTERLOCKED, CREATING A SOMETIMES JAGGED BOND

  MARGIE’S DISCOUNT

  My mother loves a good bargain. We’re in the designer section of the department store where she worked for two decades. She says, “Don’t you like this one better?” She holds up a blouse.

  I counter with another blouse. “This one’s the same, but it’s ten dollars cheaper.”

  She tucks her own find under her arm and approaches me. She looks at the label, then the price tag. She holds high the blouse she picked out. “This is a Liz,” she says in the same way I might say, “This is by Faulkner.” My mother points to the seams, explaining the underground world of designer clothes to me. “Liz clothes last forever. And look, this used to be fifty-six dollars and it’s marked down to twenty-five, plus my discount.”

  “Do you get a discount here?” I say, teasing her because “Plus my discount” has been her mantra for the past two hours of shopping, as it is her mantra whenever we shop at Joslin’s, where she worked for years.

  “Yes, I get a discount,” she says, in the same way I might say, “Officer, I did not run that red light,” with indignity and a hint of doubt, even though I really did not run the light. She adds, in a whisper, “And I get an extra 15 percent on my VIP card.”

  My mother wears hats, has a virtual stockroom of shoes (bought on sale), and lives in a mobile home. She’s built a little like a tree if the tree could be a redwood and a willow simultaneously, with a strength and rootedness accumulated over time, with a pliability and grace that bend with care for those around her.

  Although I can’t put a finger on what it is, there’s a quality to the expression on her face that pinches my emotions. It’s an expression that remains even when she’s relaxed. One eyebrow is higher than the other, sharply arched; the other brow curves softly, the eye underneath it more open, more innocent. This asymmetry gives her the constant look of confusion. Not the confusion of one who does not understand the world, but rather, of one who understands, but perceives something is wrong. The expression has been there since she was a child. I’ve seen it in old photos: Margie and her brother, Bill, standing by the dairy cart; Margie and Bill proudly holding a stick with two or three trout dangling from it; Margie holding her handmade rag doll; and later, Margie holding her first child, her second, her third, her fourth. She is my mother, the woman with the eyebrows unevenly arched, the eyes that suspect everything and are simultaneously innocent in every moment.

  This month is my birthday. Though I am in my forties now, my mother will shower me with gifts, and as I unwrap them, she will say, “Guess how much I paid for that?” I will not need to guess high in order to satiate her appetite for bargains. She will have given me the best of the best for the least of the least. She will look at me with the eyes that tell two stories. She will say, “Open this one next.”

  I don’t remember when the love of a good bargain overtook my mother’s life. She was free of the condition when I was a kid. My earliest memories are of her rising in total darkness, putting on tights and a T-shirt, and exercising. I sat on the sofa with my legs curled into my chest and watched as she raised her arms to the ceiling and touched her toes, once, then again. She did backbends and knee bends. She sat on the floor, stretched her legs into a V, and held out her hands.

  “Row with me,” she’d say. And I’d lower myself from the too-big sofa, sit on the floor, stretch my legs out, place my feet on the inside of her knees. She’d grasp my hands, and we’d row back and forth, then bend at the waist and circle to the side, back, and forward again, around and around. With her legs in almost-Russian splits, my mother could touch her chest to the floor. She didn’t do push-ups on her knees. She ran three miles a day before Nike told her she needed a special shoe to do so. She did all this in the silence before dawn. By eight in the morning, she looked like anybody else’s mother, smearing peanut butter on two pieces of Wonder Bread, licking grape jelly from her thumb, patting meat and bread crumbs into a loaf for dinner, wearing an apron, opening the screen door halfway to check on me or to wave hello to another kid’s mom.

  I’m sharing her ritual with her these day, not the shopping, but the workouts. I get up at five, put on my sweats, and lug my gym bag to the car. When I arrive at my mom’s place, she’s sitting on the porch, the half light of dawn shadowing her, making her look even smaller than her five-foot-three frame. She waves from beneath the eaves and comes out wearing a red tam cocked to one side of her head.

  “You don’t have to wait outside for me, Mom,” I say. “It’s dark.”

  She says, “I wasn’t waiting long. I heard your car.”

  As she slides into the car seat, I think of the avocets. I’ve been riding my bike to a marshy pond where they stand in the bent morning sun, their long, amber necks sometimes shadowed, sometimes gilded in the light, their black wings like precise pencil etchings on their white shoulders. I think of them not because my mother resembles them in any real way, but because she is graceful and quiet beneath her body that appears to some to be growing awkward with age, her mind that will not still from worry.

  She says, “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m deaf in one ear, so I couldn’t have heard your car. But I did. You always drive in on my good side.” She points to her hearing ear.

  “Are you riding the bike today?” I ask.

  “Yes. I went 10.8 miles last time. I’ll go 11 today.”

  In the gym, I tak
e my place on a treadmill behind my mom’s stationary bicycle. I watch as her feet pedal in circles, and as I run, I can feel the rain that fell on us the day we rode mountain bikes in Crested Butte when she was sixty. My memory keeps clicking backward, her odometer, forward. I close my eyes, let my memory go. But shortly, my mother pokes me. “I did it,” she says. She’s standing beside me, pointing to the bike odometer. “Eleven miles.”

  “Good job, Mom.” I stop the treadmill and follow her to the weights. We look like retired boxers, our sweaty towels hanging around our necks. She places the pin under the sixty-five-pound plate. I spot her. I watch her left arm tremble, her right arm remain steady as she lifts.

  “That’s the same weight I lift, Mom.”

  “You better work harder then.” She laughs and spots me as I lift.

  Though my mother is strong, there are two challenges that inevitably defeat her: She cannot allow herself to sleep more than five hours a night, and she cannot remain quiet when she’s feeling an emotion. This is not to say she speaks about the emotion. Rather, it goes like this: After we work out, it is tradition to have tea and toast at my house. As we enter, my mother sees a photo of my grandmother, her mother, on my coffee table. “Is that a picture of Mom?” she says.

  “Yes. I was going through old photo albums.”

  My mother pauses for some time, both physically and verbally, then, referring to her mother’s premature death, she says, “I never got a chance to thank her.” She stands motionless.

  “She knew,” I say. “Like you know how grateful I am to you.”

  Her eyes well up, then zero in on the living room carpet. “Is that spot from one of the dogs?” she says. She walks quickly into the kitchen, returns with a wet rag, kneels down, and starts scrubbing. It takes me five minutes to convince her to join me in the kitchen. “I’ll be in in just a minute,” she says, her voice cracking. After tea is served and the toast is hot and buttered, her bent body rounds the corner. She’s fighting the emotion still; I can tell by the way she focuses on the rag and talks incessantly. “I think I got most of it. You might check it later. When things are wet you can’t tell for sure if they’re stains or . . .” She takes a seat by the window, her audible stream of consciousness like a river during spring runoff.