The West Will Swallow You

by Leath Tonino

  We stared the idiot-stare of exhaustion and disbelief, the plow blasting and blasting and blasting until it stopped beside us. The driver opened the door. He was wearing a brown Park Service collared shirt, sleeves rolled up, no jacket or expedition gear. His hair was combed, his mustache trimmed. This gentleman looked like he was en route to the supermarket, perhaps heading to pick his kids up from soccer practice.

  “We’ve got to get a couple of trucks to the rim this afternoon,” he said over the noise of the engine. “If you boys are tired of skiing, I’ve got the road cleared all the way out. Should be easy walking on the whole.”

  It didn’t make sense, nor did it matter. The driver nodded and the snow burst skyward. Grandma danced a jig.

  “Let’s burn the skis!” he hollered. “Let’s burn them and stroll ourselves out of here in style!” His boots clicked on the road’s hard surface. His arms and legs spasmed with an energy I hadn’t seen in days. “To Las Vegas! To all-you-can-eat buffets! To quitting cross-country skiing! To the rest of our lives!”

  The plow was soon a mile away, a crumb-speck again, the land both bigger and smaller around it. Though I firmly opposed burning any of our gear, I didn’t want to let Grandma down. I clipped out of my skis and joined the celebration. That conversation could wait.

  Old Friend

  Do you remember the time? I was driving, you were sitting to my right, the summer day was blurring by—aspen, Doug fir, northern flicker, Steller’s jay. Neither of us knew what the heck we were looking at, some moving thing the color of the road’s dirt and, in places, in the pattern of leaves, the color of shadow. The windows were down, the radio off, the jeep bumping along. I eased us to a stop and the animal stopped, twenty feet ahead. We cursed for joy. We sang dirty words of surprise and disbelief and gratitude for our good fortune.

  I’d never met a bobcat in the wild, never looked into a bobcat’s face and felt a bobcat looking back, and neither had you. It really shut us up, that feeling, really paused our mouths and minds. It sounds cheesy, but it’s true—the eyes, those eyes. We stared and the bobcat stared and the shared staring bonded us, everything deepening and stilling. Catching a glimpse of a secretive animal is one thing, but catching a secretive animal catching you, appreciating the mirrored fascination, seeing that it has a face like yours, with ears and nose, a mouth and eyes, and that it casts its senses into the world like a soft net, as you do, as I do, and with that net retrieves the faces swimming out from the shadows and the sun …

  What can I say? It shut us up and shut us up fast. That seems to say it all.

  But do you remember the thing that happened later, after the bobcat broke the trance, disappeared into the woods, after we drove away, talked, swore some more, laughed and felt blessed and went quiet? What I remember is sadness. No, what I remember is shame. My outward gaze turned inward. I realized we’d done wrong.

  That bobcat we saw, that bobcat we admired, what did it see? Bumping along again through the shadows and sun, the blur of aspen and Doug fir and woodpeckers and jays, it hit me in a painful way—a jeep. Bobcat gave its perfect body and we gave a jeep. Bobcat gave its eyes and we gave a windshield. In return for fur, we offered steel. That bobcat we saw presented itself honestly, but we did not. We took without giving. We absorbed without being absorbed. Unaware that we were doing so, we played ourselves off as a machine.

  Sure, it would be easy to say that the bobcat didn’t care, only stopped in fear or shock, that bobcats don’t cast their senses like a soft net into the world as we do, or for the same reasons. But you were there. You saw the eyes. It was trying to look. It was looking. I can’t say what exactly it was looking for, but I can say with certainty that it was looking.

  Beers. A dip in the pond. A bonfire that night, the flames licking up, the owls hooting and scooping overhead. We told the story and our friends were excited and since then I’ve told the story to others who also were excited. But now I’m telling a different story, the story I felt when the jeep bumped along and we both finally went silent—the story of imbalance, of seeing but not being seen.

  Old friend, it’s been years since we were last together and I know this is late in coming and I know you’re busy and all the rest. Please, though, I have a request. From time to time, step out into the world as yourself—not your car, not your house, not your clothes and socks and hat and sunglasses, not your shampoo and soap, not your blaring music, not your little screens, not your machines. Quit stealing yourself from the soft-flung nets that would snag you, the eyes and ears and noses and mouths that would see and hear and smell and taste you. Offer yourself to the millions of lives that knew you and me and everyone in the recent past.

  I’m not saying the critters of this earth will thank us. I’m not saying they will care. I’m just saying that we can take a few breaths and step out. And that if you do this, old friend, I will do this. And that I’ll look for you there.

  Long-Distance Relationship

  I call Sophia and she asks what’s new. We haven’t spoken in a week. I’m cold and tired and don’t feel like talking. The wind is blowing, the pines loud overhead. I pull my hood up, tell her what I can of Arizona.

  For the last three nights running a great horned owl has perched on the same branch in the ponderosa snag across the road from the pond. Last night, he took a bat. It was dark but the sky still held a bit of blue, just enough to contrast with the bat’s black wings and the owl’s black legs. The legs shot forward, retracted. It happened maybe four feet beyond the tip of my nose.

  The aspens a mile down the road on the right are beginning to bud, though the aspens on the left, a mile farther, haven’t started. I’ve been jogging to the second group each afternoon, checking in. Wednesday was cloudy. By the time I reached the first group—rain. By the time I reached the second group—snow. It snowed hard, then stopped. Then more rain.

  Today I counted fifty-six dark-eyed juncos, twenty-two mule deer, and four wild turkeys. I counted northern flickers but lost count. A locust thorn stuck my pinky finger near the third joint, close to the nail, and the pain, though quick, was distinct. I found a red-breasted nuthatch’s cavity-nest. I also found some porcupine quills, two coyote scats, and what I’d like to think is a badger’s sett, but really I have no clue.

  A silver balloon, the shiny kind sold at supermarkets, got caught in a sapling. I released the balloon and it floated up, stalled, softly dropped. Written across the balloon with an orange marker were the words “Happy Birthday Mom, Love Hugo.”

  Oh, yeah, somebody hit a rattlesnake. It was dead on the road. I thought the dead snake was a stick. I ran the stick over with my truck.

  The conversation swings to California, to Sophia, to her stories of fogbanks, mockingbirds, people in wheelchairs, people shrieking, cute dogs, a few long city walks. She went searching for the red-shouldered hawks we saw in the eucalyptus grove at the edge of the park last year—no luck. Leaning against a tree, she can smell the ocean as we speak. Parrots chatter in the tree’s crown. She lifts the phone and I listen, but the parrots don’t sound like much. More than anything, they sound like static.

  A cloud crosses the sun. A folk singer’s name is Tangled Oak. A cormorant died on the beach. Its eyes opened wide, opened wider, and closed. Three grains of sand were stuck to the left eyeball. Sophia witnessed the final breath.

  After half an hour, we stop talking. I can hear sirens on her end of the line and she can hear wind rushing the pines on mine. Neither of us wants to hang up, so we don’t. Our foreign worlds meet in the space between words, as if there were no Great Basin, as if my forest and her metropolis, her California and my Arizona, as if these were pressed one against the other, tight as two bodies. It’s unnatural, a false geography, like maps ripped apart and collaged together, and it leaves us feeling bad.

  I’ll call again on Saturday. Same time. Love you. Bye.

  Sophia cuts to silence and a single snowflake slants past my face. Don’t ask me how I know, but I do know, for cert
ain, that this is the last snowflake of the year. Winter is gone, spring sliding, summer approaching. The birds are nesting and the aspens are budding. It will be months of small stories separating this snowflake from the next.

  If you feed a relationship these stories, can it grow? Can it live on such passing wonders?

  I stand still, totally still, as though moving even slightly will break something important, something I do not understand. Almost dark now, the early stars are barely showing. I’m thinking the great horned owl will appear, that it would be a fine time for him to declare his presence.

  Nothing comes. Cold, tired, phone in pocket, I walk away.

  It’s tough not to call Sophia back and tell her about that snowflake, that last snowflake of the year, that diagonal line in front of my face. And it’s tough later, when I so badly want to tell her about the owl, the owl not seen but heard, out there, somewhere, hooting in the distance.

  Doug

  The Douglas fir was 150 feet tall, perhaps taller. It leaned over the meadow, a steep green propped against open sky. Once the day’s work was through, once the great horned owl’s round vowel had filled everything and faded to silence and filled everything again, I liked to tamp tobacco into my pipe and have a leisurely smoke. Rest my head against the cabin’s parched clapboards. Stare at the tree and forget that I was staring.

  This was Arizona, the Kaibab National Forest, those years when I ascended ropes and lifted from bulky nests of sticks the not-yet-fledged hawks that my boss, an ornithologist, needed to see up close. I’d settle the birds in a bag and lower to the ground. I’d wait for measurements to be taken, blood to be drawn. I’d flinch, an angry mother stooping, screaming. Then I’d haul, set the birds in place, check my knots, and rappel.

  The canopy was new to me, a secret home above my home, and I couldn’t get enough. So it was hardly surprising to hear, following two cups of strong coffee one aimless Saturday morning, the Douglas fir calling my name. I wiggled into a harness, dressed in loops of webbing and clanking carabiners, crossed the meadow. Solo. Uncertain. The best way to make friends with a giant tree.

  There are methods that allow for a safe rise through boughs, tricks to gain the heights, but these technical details are unimportant. What’s important is the hour of higher-higher-higher, the meticulous gripping and pulling, how such tactile intimacy, such focus, becomes a kind of portal. To which magical realm does the portal offer passage? To this realm, nowhere else. To the secret home of shiny black ants and gymnast squirrels and baby birds. To the mazy body, the labyrinth of bark and space that houses hundreds upon hundreds.

  The Douglas fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii, is monoecious, meaning individuals bear both male and female cones. Still, he was a he. After that first exploration, that long afternoon of breezy sway and drifting pollen clouds and butterflies in the belly, my evenings smoking outside the cabin were different, altered. Old man, how you been? Anything to report? Doug didn’t answer, of course, yet somehow he always answered.

  Four seasons in the field, summer plus summer plus summer, countless fine Saturdays aloft. My sister visited from deciduous Vermont, land of maples, and I guided her through corridors of needles, chambers of resinous air. We strung hammocks just below Doug’s top and lounged until sunset, talking about Jonah and the Whale, about greater beings swallowing lesser beings, about ants, squirrels, spiders, bats, the many lives that live their lives inside larger lives.

  Alas, by standing fast as young men chase their futures, elderly trees come and go. The raptor study ended and I said goodbye to Doug, got involved with coast redwoods, aspen groves, other jobs and other things. Now, a decade out, my mind returns to those countless fine Saturdays aloft. Opening the paper, clicking the laptop’s news, it’s too damn easy to feel as though what’s holding your life is a complicated wrong, that you reside amid horror, that the hug of your habitat, your home, this world, is all toxic waters and flaming skies and gape-mouthed children stabbing fingers at their dusty bellies. And drone strikes committed in your name. And blatant thievery. And loss.

  Oh, but across the meadow and above the meadow, through the portal that is the Doug and leads into the Doug, oh, another truth emerges. The truth of an alternative scale. The truth of a timeless hug. I go there often in memory.

  Purple dusk. Owl’s round voice filling the entirety of Arizona. My buddy Zak, from the research crew, is straddling a branch, switching on his headlamp, and I am rappelling, leaving him in the leaning crown. Later, free of gear, resting my head against the cabin, I puff my pipe and watch Zak’s floating glow, a tiny dot of light within Doug’s dark hugeness. That’s the glow of a man who is an ant, a squirrel, I think. That’s the glow of a man who, like me, like everyone, is a baby hawk.

  Honestly, I never much enjoyed bagging those babies, never much enjoyed stealing from bulky nests and lowering to the dangerous ground where we humans go about our dangerous business. Giving them back to their secret home, though, setting them there gently, carefully, looking around for a moment, breathing deep before checking my knots—that was really special. Even after I’d hit the duff and unroped, even after I’d walked away, a piece of me lingered in the canopy. I suspect that piece won’t ever come down. Or maybe I hope.

  Big Canyon

  The canyon is big. For the sake of this story, let’s call it Big Canyon. Let’s call it Arizona. Let’s call it August, a heat-blasted weekend, no plans.

  My boss—crusty government biologist with a passion for prehistory and a back-of-the-hand backcountry knowledge—gets to reminiscing over black morning joe. I jot zero notes, pretending I can commit his verbal map to memory.

  Eleven of us. Five cabins and three picnic tables. A remote field station in the woods above the desert.

  Saturdays like this—for adventure.

  Hey, you lazy sleepy sonofa …

  Mike is groggy but game. Always game. A proper buddy.

  And we’re off. Twenty miles by jeep, the warren of sandy tracks increasingly confused, the pinyons and junipers sparse, then sparser, then gone. We park the rig. Take a piss at the rim. Take it all in.

  How much water did you bring?

  Some.

  Let’s do it.

  Indeed, my broski.

  With a gallon of sunscreen on our necks and arms, floppy canvas hats on our heads, we pick our way—step after careful step—into the cracked earth.

  Trails? Yeah, right. That’s why we’ve got bossman’s instructions. Follow A to B to a spot where you’ll be able to glimpse C. Contour eastward. Drop through pink sandstone ledges, maybe two hundred feet, maybe three hundred. Once you’ve hit the bottom, turn left. Hike the wash. Scan the north wall. Pay attention.

  At the house-sized boulder, well, enjoy the shade but realize you’ve gone too far.

  We’re lost, stumbling.

  What did bossman say, something about one with red earrings, one with a long penis, one panel where gods parade among turkeys and sheep? And spirals, didn’t he say something about spirals?

  We’re doing the heat. We’re done by the heat.

  Shrike with hooked beak, perching nearby. Phoebe with peachy belly, grayish nape. Three ravens, six if you count the flying shadows. In the binocular’s dark tunnel I almost feel cool, refreshed.

  Really, though, what did he say?

  It’s not scary—being here, being in and with this wilderness—but it’s not easy, either. Intense. Intensity. Afternoon gold hammering the mind flat, each blow telling us to turn around, return on a cloudy day, try again in winter. Telling us Big Canyon is big and we are small, so very small.

  Yo, let’s keep going, huh?

  Definitely. I wanna find that panel.

  It happens slowly, quickly, outside of time, inside the guts of time. Inside geology. Inside our blistered, light-shot brains. Inside the outside, the great outdoors.

  We’re stumbling until we’re stopping, standing, staring. We’re alone until we’re not alone.

  A flipped switch. Awareness.
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  Peoples—human peoples, animal peoples, squiggly abstract peoples—everywhere.

  Unblinking. Eyeless.

  We gaze and gaze.

  Hours later, Mike has turned in for the night and the stars are thick overhead. We’re drinking whiskey, boots up by the bonfire, me and my crusty boss.

  So it went okay?

  Oh, amazing. Your directions kinda sucked—chuckle, chuckle—but eventually we found hundreds. They were scattered, tucked into nooks and crannies. Just needed a tweak of perception to see ’em.

  A special spot, eh?

  Hmm. A special spot, certainly. But how to answer?

  What I’m thinking is ravens, their shadows, the heat, the sandy roads, the smooth stone, the ancient stone, hands spreading pigment, hands reaching up, today and tomorrow, millennia past, the wandering, the stumbling, the thirst—how there’s no separating anything, no difference between the place and the experience of the place and that long penis we call art, that turkey we call image, that squiggle we call a pictograph or a god or a mystery or whatever.

  Tip the bottle. Another snort.

  A special spot, a killer Saturday.

  I thought you’d like Big Canyon.

  COLORADO

  Creeking

  I went to the creek and stumbled on a six-point buck, field dressed, hollow. The next week I crept past a man sleeping in a nest of rags below a bridge. Foxes weave trash-paths. Addicts shout from brushy hideouts. Once, a US Geological Survey employee in waders taking sediment samples spoke to me of two girls, how they drowned downstream.

  By winter I was putting in eight-hour days, bashing through brambles, crawling through tunnels, falling through ice. Hobbies like playing piano and hanging with friends were slowly displaced, the creek’s waters rising inside me. Come spring I was flooded: I knew what scared me and what fascinated me and what filled my head with muck. Someone called it creeking, and that name sounded right.