On Ways of Being Alive
Hello! I’m back. Thank you for your patience as I worked through a section of my book that required my full attention. I think we’re back to our regularly-scheduled programming.
The heat seems to have broken this week, and we’re seeing signs that may, with luck, indicate an early fall. The Sandhill cranes are gathering. On any given evening there are fifty, up to seventy five of them, grazing in a big hayfield near Pine Creek. They do this before migrating, and that they’re starting to gather this early is a good sign. This little guy above is just about as tall as its parents now — I saw them Sunday night when I drove in, all three of them in the alfalfa field at the bottom of the hill. I haven’t seen the little guy flying yet though. It’s a lot, to grow five feet in a single summer, and learn to fly well enough to migrate all the way to Mexico. The elk have begun coming down the mountain in the evening again, the first ones we’ve seen since probably May — descending to snack on Alvin’s alfalfa field. And the hummingbirds! The hummingbirds are having wars and draining the feeder, another sign the season is shifting.
We are not summer people, either of us. Too hot, too glary, too many people.
Sunday night was one of the first evenings in months where it’s been pleasant to sit on the back porch. We were hanging out and chatting, waiting for the bats who live in the shed to start showing off, zooming mere millimeters away from the screens, when we heard a very weird noise.
What was that?
It sounded sort of like a nightjar, a kind of falling croak, but much louder, and not a bird. We both looked around and didn’t see anything, but I went to bring Hank in from the front doorstep just in case. As I came back through onto the porch, I caught something out of the corner of my eye, something large and black in a place where there is not usually a bush or a boulder.
“What’s that?” I said pointing it out. “Alvin’s cattle aren’t up here, are they?”
And then it moved. There were two of them, no! Three! “It’s a bear!” I said, grabbing the binoculars. It was an adult grizzly with two subadult cubs. They were probably 100 yards away? On the other side of the irrigation ditch. We handed the binoculars back and forth for a few minutes until one by one they hopped the barbed wire fence (well, one sort of blooped through and got a teensy bit stuck for a minute). Then they disappeared behind a rise.
About five minutes later I saw them head up the neighbor’s driveway. They’re nice neighbors, but this is at least their second home (if not third) and they left a couple of weeks back. Probably for the best, since three grizzlies in the remnant apple orchard in your front yard is a lot. The smallest bear, who was the size of a fully-grown black bear, was sort of bouncing along up the driveway, as if it knew where they were going, knew there were apples. A whitetail doe saw the them coming and high-tailed it out over the jackleg fence. We watched until it got too dark.
The thing about living a long time in a place where you are not the highest animal on the food chain, is that you develop a sense of pattern recognition. I was thinking about this as I walked Hank-dog the next morning on the back road where I take him for his unleashed walk. Last week we were out there, and he was nosing around the tree-where-there-are-chipmunks when I realized something was off ahead of us. I walk him first thing in the morning, before breakfast, so I’m usually half asleep and thinking about a writing problem. So when part of my brain said “hey? what’s that?” as I looked at a hillside I’ve walked past several days a week for 20 years now, it was a wake-up call.
The strange object was a cow, right up against the barbed wire fence, at the bottom of a steep piece of property that is usually empty of livestock. Not just a cow, but a pretty feral looking cow with horns. Maybe six feet off the road. A barbed wire fence seems really flimsy in circumstances like that. Luckily I saw the cow before Hank did, and got him leashed up, which I was especially glad of when we turned the corner and saw the rest of them, five or six more cow/calf pairs and a bull. Hank is getting old and creaky, but he does still feel he should be allowed to herd, a skill that’s hard wired into him but for which he has very few skills. We got past the group of cattle, surprisingly close to the road, and went on our way.
Do people who don’t live in ranch country know how big a cow is? How solid? When I first saw the bear over on the far hillside at the cabin, she was so dark I thought it was a cow. Both animals are about the size of my old Honda Fit. But what caught my eye with the bear was the shape. A cow is a rectangle from afar but a bear, a grazing bear, a bear just hanging out is convex. Think of those Hopi bear carvings that were everywhere a few years back. Add a grizzly hump, and you have a large black shape 100 yards away that was not there a few minutes before, and that is definitely not a cow.
I’ve been reading a French philosopher named Baptiste Morizot all summer, and this claim has been stuck in my head: that for most contemporary first-world people “Being at home is being able to live without paying attention.” Morizot defines the function of modernity as the quality of being able to “dispense with attention, that is to say to be able to operate everywhere, in any place, despite one’s ignorance, quite carelessly, i.e. without knowing a place and its inhabitants.”
The gift of grizzly bears in the yard, the gift of a surprise horned cow on a dog walk is the way it wakes you up. I’ve been carrying bear spray all week when I take Hank out to do his business in the morning. Where you cross the irrigation ditch is pretty willowy, and overgrown, and frankly, I’m a little spooked about it at the moment.
Writing about animal encounters is tricky because frankly, we’re weird about animals. Especially the apex predators we live with here — grizzlies, mountain lions, and wolves (also black bears, bobcats and coyotes). Too many people are terrified that these animals even exist. There’s a woman I used to see dog walking, the wife of a rich Texan who, rumor had it, had an entire pack of wolves taxidermied in his living room. She was nice enough but she was definitely not my people. One morning I ran into her and she was all freaked out, showing me a picture on her phone of two guys holding up a very large dead mountain lion. Her husband had given them permission to hunt up behind their place. She was terrified that the gigantic cat had been up there. “Connie!” I said. “You’ve been living with that lion for years now! Has it ever bothered you?” She had to admit it hadn’t.
I forget that for so many people, the majority perhaps? it’s normal to go kill the thing they’re afraid of, even if it isn’t bothering them. And now they’re doing it with people. Rounding up people for being brown, just because they’re afraid of them. In a regime one hair trigger away from turning the guns on people, is it any surprise they’re trying to delist the wolves, and the grizzly bears. Turning a blind eye to poaching?
We alternate nights between town and the cabin, and when I got down there two days later, Chuck told me the bears had been in the alfalfa field, under the big cottonwoods when he drove in. They were agitated, he said. He only stopped for a minute to watch, because they were so upset. They’d moved on by the time I drove in twenty minutes later, but the fact that they’re hanging around is both very cool and a little worrisome. Not for us, for them.
They’re essentially fugitives here. Too close to houses. Too close to livestock. If they get in someone’s trash, or chicken coop, if they draw the attention of the authorities, the best they can hope for is relocation, the worst is a death sentence.
It’s the reason that while I can send this story to you all via this newsletter, I can’t post it online. It’s why I led with long paragraphs about Sandhill cranes and the weather. I can’t risk the grizzlies appearing above the fold. It’s why you can’t post cool animal sighting on socials anymore. People go kill them. I’m assuming none of you will forward the location of the bears to people who would do so.
How we think about animals is how we think about the world. As Donna Haraway says: it matters what stories we tell stories with. Baptiste Morizot is trying to find ways to build better stories between humans and other-than-humans. The book of his I’ve been dog-earing and underlining the most is Ways of Being Alive which not only outlines the deep roots of the dualistic thinking that hinders our ability to work relationally with the natural world, but shows how false the very idea of “the natural world” is. We all live in one world, a world of animals and viruses and minerals and rivers. As Gary Snyder wrote 30 years ago, there is “No Nature.” There is no “Second Body” as Daisy Hildyard would have it, it’s all one living breathing world in which we live, a world in which as the 11th century Zen monk Dōgen observed the mountains and rivers are endlessly walking. Understanding nondualism is a life’s work. It’s tricky. It comes and goes. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.
The part of Morizot’s work that I find the most interesting is his use of the concept of “the Diplomat” as a potential pathway out of the trap of the human/nature, wild/domestic dualisms that govern most of our relationships with animals. The problem with dualistic thinking is that both terms are always flip sides of the same problem, and as Morizot points out, the only way to escape a dualism is to get outside of it. For Morizot, the figure of The Diplomat is one way to begin the process of finding ways to communicate across species, and to negotiate accordingly. Morizot has spent much of his career studying wolves, tracking wolves that have returned to Europe, traveling to Kazakhstan and here, to Yellowstone, to learn from wolves.
His central example of interspecies diplomacy is the way that conservation groups have, over the past thirty years or so, developed pretty effective communication models to negotiate the age-old problem of wolves and sheep. Diplomacy, as Morizot uses it (influenced heavily by both Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers) is not the diplomacy of someone trying to wield power over a subordinate. Morizot’s diplomacy is a process that involves multiple actors, each of whose interests must be taken into account. Wolves are a good example because what has worked to reduce wolf-sheep conflict is systems that include large-breed guardian dogs, electric fencing, and human attention. These are systems that require pastoralists to give up the idea that they “own” the high mountain pastures and that require people who value apex predators to get involved to help shepherds protect their flocks. It is a web of multi-species diplomacy that brings other-than-human species into negotiation with several groups of humans who also have varying values and priorities.
So where does this leave us and the trio of grizzly bears? Diplomacy in this case involves keeping out of the bears way, and not ratting them out to the neighbors. Diplomacy means hoping they’re smart enough to avoid people, and keeping our trash indoors for the time being. And diplomacy is tied up with having paid enough attention in the first place to have recognized a weird noise, to know the regular noises well enough to hear a change in the pattern.
If being modern means being able to “dispense with attention,” then I think it’s safe to say that the two of us gave up a long time ago on being modern. You can find us on our porch, where we know the habits and sounds of our other-than-human neighbors, and where we’re hoping they’ll remain safely fugitive from our human neighbors with guns.