Just another animal - #106

Catching a scent.

On Friday night, I was driving south. It was 11pm, and at that time of night, no one’s driving north. The moon was on the other side of the world, and I was alone with the stars. I don’t drive with the stereo on that late at night. It’s like pulling into a parking lot and turning down the volume to find a parking spot. I’m always looking for something, and here I always find it.

Two small globes reflected back at me and I slowed the vehicle to a stop. A bull elk stood on the edge of the road. I couldn’t see any others with him. He stood there as I approached and he stood there while I waited for him, pulling my phone out of my pocket to snap a photo. Seconds passed before he considered the situation more clearly and reared off back into the forest. 

Next was the porcupine, the sloths of North America in their achingly slow movements. Their quills give them away when left on the road after someone was driving too fast or too selfishly. They don’t dart in front of cars. Cars just obliterate them as they make their gentle way across the road. But I saw this one, and she’s fine, just a small thing. Did you know baby porcupines are called porcupettes? I sat in the car in the road and waited for her to finish her crossing, no lights coming in either direction. She ambled into the brush, hidden amongst the grasses.

Our little town is hidden too. There is no sign to make the turn, just an unmarked dirt road that almost falls off toward the creek. The turn is in the apex of the curve of the highway, like centrifugal force is pulling you away from the town, luring you further south. The turn has a wide mouth, and at night, deer sometimes stand in the corner of it. It’s easy to cut that corner, but I never do since I saw the deer. It’s not often you see deer on our road, but you do see them. One was mutilated earlier this year, pieces of her cut and spread down the roadway with twins fawns in her abdomen. The stain of blood lingered on the dirt road and even without religion I would do the sign of the cross as I drove over it. Mule deer can live to be around 10 years old, but not when you’re driving too fast to see them. 

As I turned left off the highway onto the crunch of gravel, there she was, a wide-eyed mule doe. I pulled around her, flicking off my brights for the one house built into the hillside. It’s an old one — some 12 generations of mule deer deep — with the curtains always drawn, a stone foundation, and two doors sitting several feet off the ground for a past long since left behind. There’s a lot left behind here. Like most mining towns, once the mines closed, so did everything else: the saloon, the hotel, the church, the school. What didn’t burn down or get taken out in avalanches fell to time. 

On April 26, 1919, the local newspaper published a piece on it: 

About 4 o’clock Monday a mammoth snow slide came down out of Spring gulch and ran clear to the main street of the town, taking with it the hotel building, the saloon building and houses of Henry Banzet, and ran nearly to the Brown cottage. It was twenty feet deep and 300 feet long and certainly was a bad looking thing as it swept down out of the gulch upon the town. The slide is what is known as a wet slide, the ground warming up under it and turning the great avalanche loose. 

You might recognize something in there — Banzet, our middle cat, named after the saloon. The Banzets were also the first family to have a baby girl in this town. Never not trying to plant seeds. But the saloon and its foundation are long gone, and I don’t know if another one was ever built. It’s not a dry town on purpose, merely a bedroom community without a business aside from the child mafia hustling overlanders to buy lemonade and “crystals.” Nature almost took this town back, as it whittled to a population of 1 in the 1950s before a ski resort was built nearby in the 1970s. By 1980, 38 people lived here.

But someone else has always lived here: black bears, bighorn, mountain lions, bobcats, lynx, marmots, martens, beavers, coyotes, mule deer, hares, cottontails, foxes, ferrets, weasels, skunks, badgers, mink, otters, pikas and porcupines. Not to mention bats and rodents and birds. 

Dusk into night is the best time to see them, when they’re on the move. The beavers get busy on dam repairs before the sun sets. The deer are all at their local hangout: the road. Coyotes bound through the field, often with a treat in mouth. During the day, we rarely see anything in town. The dogs roam free here, like town police unaware of any unified task aside from enjoying themselves. But they keep the predators at bay — a lucky stroke of luck for a small dog like Cooper who now has more freedom in the high mountains of Colorado than he did just outside LA. 

You can still hear the coyotes on the hillsides, still find the stashed kills of mountain lions tucked into trees, and many a resident has seen the mama bear with her cubs roaming around 11,000 feet. Us humans keep to our roads and our houses mostly, and the animals keep to their glens, aside from the ping pong sized burglars always finding new ways into our cupboards. And of course aside from when we aren’t in our houses, when we’re bedecked in nylon and wool, carrying or riding apparatuses of all sorts to weather what the animals weather so well. 

In many of the places I’ve lived, the wildlife has played a leading role. The raccoons and white-tailed deer of the Midwest, the lizards and frogs of the islands, the coyotes and bobcats of the Santa Monica Mountains. The way you stored things, the way you drove, the way you did or did not let your pets out — we created rhythms to act in balance with the animals. Here, it’s the same. When my three little lions climb into their three red harnesses, their outdoor time is vigilantly supervised. Only Finn has earned the right to be left unattended for short intervals and that’s because he hides in the same bush every time. Cooper gets to go outside by himself, but really only during the day, and he’ll only venture as far as one house away before returning to sun on our deck, protected from the eyes of any distant predator while his friends of three or four times his size patrol the neighborhood. 

I miss the moments of looking out the window of the old hunting shack in Topanga to see coyote pups coming out from under our house or the bobcat sitting on the perch rock a mere 15 feet away surveying the hunting below. But animals don’t choose to be that close — they are only ever that close because we’ve encroached on their land. We don’t see the animals very much here because there’s space for them. They have a vast wilderness to themselves and without any outdoor trash to convince them it’s worth the risk to go to town, they simply don’t. You’ll see the occasional ungulate tasting someone’s garden, or get the rare glimpse of a weasel when his shifting coat hasn’t changed in time with his surroundings, and you’ll hear the marmots screaming at you, but everyone else is as rare as they should be. 

When I was moving here, occasionally people would ask me if I was scared to be in the woods alone. The only animal I’ve ever truly been afraid of is humans, and sure I would not want to upset a grizzly, but they don’t live here. Besides, bear attacks of both kinds are still quite rare when you consider how many people travel into the backcountry every year. 

When I am in the woods here, I don’t feel in danger, but I also don’t feel at ease. Instead, I feel alive. There is an orchestra in the forest and the bowls, an almost swirling of involvement so tiny to so vast that it can sweep your senses off their bearings. 

There’s a similar swirl in society — a whir of air conditioners and furnaces and mufflers and airplanes, the vibrating hum of civilization. When we were shopping for a house, Ben would always talk about how he didn’t want a “house hum.” The house hum comes from appliances and HVAC systems, pipes and electrical, the sound of a house at work. We found as stupid a house as we could — no special systems, barely any heat, and at night you can hear nothing aside from tiny little feet busying themselves in the caverns of the logs. 

What we wanted more than anything else was the quiet so when we were in the woods, we could find ourselves lost in the shimmer of the aspen leaves like vibrating cymbals, the high knocking of trees against each other, talking in a language lost to us, and the hollow strike of each foot on the ground, only ever one hefty stomp away from the underworld. It’s only when I run into another person that the reverie is broken, when I am the elk in the headlights unsure if I should continue on or retreat. And who would be surprised in a house full of animals and plants that I feel this way, happy to kneel in the pine needles, happier still to do it alone. 

People say birds are a gateway to the wilderness. They’re the easiest way a human surrounded by asphalt can feel surrounded by something else. They’re a simple way to attune to a world completely different than your own. Here, they tell the time. While the bears might tuck away and the elk amble to lower elevations, the birds are easier to read as they migrate through, appearing like a traveling carnival before packing up and heading south again. The gray jays and stellar jays slowly disappear and even the magpies seem to make their way somewhere else. 

However many animals are in the forests, it’s almost always me and the birds. When winter comes, they disappear. It’s in that season that you find a quiet so deep, so unending that a reacquaintance with the rhythm of your breath isn’t a mindfulness task but an inescapable soundtrack. 

For now, the magpies are still cawing. The deer still crackle through the branches of the forest. A beaver slaps its tail and a marmot bleats at your arrival. Maybe a cat or a marten watches from the trees, but they don’t say anything. Even the porcupine merely gazes at you before reaching branch to branch, blending into the bark. You’re merely part of the swirl, another animal with their scent on the wind moving through the meadows and streams to find whatever it is you’re looking for, hoping not to get hurt.