Not just for the birds

Category: The Human Condition

  • Ebbing and Flowing

    Ebbing and Flowing

    “The road to Neah Bay is serpentine, a thin twist of wet double-yellow-lined gray. It flirts for twenty miles with the edge of cliffs that seem to stand at the mercy of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and its wide swath of soon-to-be Pacific Ocean. Mapmakers mark it as scenic when it would be better marked IMAX: waterfalls and cliffs and mud slides on the left; white-capped blue water on the right.” — Robert Sullivan, A Whale Hunt

    There is only one way in and out of Neah Bay and I know the road like the back of my hand now and take every opportunity in between hairpin turns to look out to the water for gray whales, big waves, and cargo ships carrying colorful stacks of containers. Back home in Idaho when I’d drive the winding road into the canyon to go chukar hunting I knew every hairpin turn, too.

    Our first major purchase besides our house just outside Neah Bay was a big portable generator because the locals told us that in the winter the power goes off a lot and sometimes for three days. We were also told to have supplies like food and water in your car in case you get stuck behind a landslide, and even to carry a chainsaw in case a big tree falls over the road. It rains 144 inches a year here, and life on the Peninsula is dictated by the tide charts and storms which come often. One second it’s pouring rain and then it’ll be sunny. We were also told it doesn’t start raining a lot until November but it rained 20 inches in October and an inch a day so far in November. After 40 years of living in Idaho where it rained 12 inches a year it’s been hard to get used to the wet climate.

    This past summer in-between home improvement projects and the many trips to Home Depot and shopping two hours away we took the dogs out exploring and we’ve found some logging roads so the dogs can run off-leash. These roads start at sea level and head up into the coastal mountains forking, intertwining, with dead ends and roads you can see on maps but they don’t exist anymore or have gotten so overgrown you can’t find them. In this part of the Olympic Peninsula where tall Sitka spruce, red alders, and Douglas Firs grow thick, they have provided a nice canopy to get out of the rain; but sometimes the precip smothers me, so I’ll seek out the huge clearcuts in the forest where I find solace and familiarity like the wide open spaces back home in Idaho.

    Bloom is almost 7 months old now. He’s turned into a beautiful dog with long legs and a show dog gait that when he runs reminds us of his great uncle Angus. He moved here with us when he was 8-weeks old and has only known the rain forest and the smell of ruffed grouse and the chukar wing that he chased around the backyard before pointing.

    Bloom and the Salish Sea

    We’ve been out looking for birds but grouse hunting in the rain forest can be a tricky proposition we have found out. Besides being steep and wet, it’s so thick of sword ferns, brambles, and tangled deadfall that when the dogs do occasionally find a grouse, trying to get close enough and into shooting range before they fly is next to impossible. I thought many times about just shooting my shotgun into the air to see what kind of reaction Bloom would show.

    Grouse hunting in the Olympic Peninsula
    Solace in the wide open clearcuts

    We all carry a relationship to land and to the place that we call home, or in my case the place that I used to call home and that is or was part of my identity. It was what molded me. The pull back to the place where I felt connection through nature and place was too strong to resist, and like a salmon heading upstream from the Pacific and back to the place it was born, I felt like I had no choice but to go. I said goodbye to Bob as he headed off to school one day and loaded up the dogs in the pickup and headed East and to a place where I knew Peat would find birds for Bloom.

    After eight hours of driving the landscape around The Dalles, Oregon changed from emerald green to brown, dry, and parched. A few hours after that when I finally got down into the canyon and to familiar places that had green shoots of bunchgrass growing back, cattle were now covering the hills and grazing it and eating all the grasses down to the nub that would — if they’d live — provide cover for the birds. I was sick to my stomach because of the overgrazing.

    My excitement and happiness being back to familiar surroundings was taken over by my anxiety and fear of going hunting alone with no cell service and I worried about everything that could go possibly wrong in taking a puppy hunting chukar for the first time. Things that went through my mind were, what if Bloom gets lost, gets torn up by barbed wire, bitten by a rattlesnake or falls off a cliff or his pads get ripped up from the rough rocks. My worst fear was what is he’d be gun shy or he he’d be a jerk and blow through every one of Peat’s points.

    Bloom and Peat on the chukar hills

    It was mid-afternoon when we finally arrived to the place where we parked and I put the collars on the dogs and took my shotgun out of its case and headed out. It felt great to be out of the pickup after the long drive. Within ten minutes Peat found some birds and when I got up to him he was in his classic Peat point which is almost comical but beautiful at the same time. Bloom caught up to us and seemed oblivious of what Peat was doing. I wanted to yell at him, “Look at Peat, back him!” Bloom instead was intensely smelling the ground and running around, and then he ran right through the covey of Huns that were hunkered down near some sagebrush. I lost my cool and in my frustration didn’t get a shot off and instead watched the birds fly away. I watched Bloom watching the birds and it was almost like he realized that we weren’t out for just a hike but we were actually hunting. It dawned on me that Bloom only knows rain forest scents and had never smelled Huns before, in addition to all the other smells of the High Desert. On the next couple of coveys of chukar and that initial group of Huns that Peat would eventually relocate, Bloom honored him. I was so relieved. Bob assured me before I left that Bloom is going to be good. He was, and nothing bad happened.

    After the hunt, I found a dispersed camping spot and I watched the sunset over the Wallowas. I could see in the distance the mountains and ridges that I’ve covered on foot, hundreds of miles over the past ten years with Bob, Angus, and Peat and know like the back of my hand just like the serpentine road back home in Neah Bay.

    Home

  • Reason

    Reason

    If one speaks it should only be to say, as well as one can, how wonderfully all this fits together, to indicate what a long, fierce peace can derive from this knowledge. — Barry Lopez, “Children in the Woods”

    And then a Plank in Reason, broke… — Emily Dickinson, from “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain”

    Not recognizing but trying to recognize the wrinkles on my hands tells me something I don’t want to know but know too well: my childhood is long over. The new year began with radically different challenges for me than the last, and an ennui I can’t recognize and don’t want to. So what? Does it all fit together, wonderfully or not? Does seeing an integration in one’s life create peace, fierce or otherwise?

    I grew up with some great influences I wouldn’t trade for anything. Parents who I think unwittingly complied with Lopez’s notions about how to speak to children in the woods; teachers who provided similar tools; shelves full of LPs that hammered me with another plane of existence entirely, infecting me with instruments of utopia and war and peace: these things and more fit together because I’ve allowed them to, and the fact that I see that they do is wonderful in itself. But where’s the peace?

    Bird hunting, because it requires (the way I want to do it) integrating a dog whose very being makes me understand better than anything else Emily Dickinson’s obsession with death (others’ and hers), has also made me really pissed at time and gravity. How much longer will I have the muscles to walk uphill? There was an old guy in my old neighborhood in Boise who used to be a chukar hunting fool. He walked like a fool, every day, rain or shine, a walking stick in each hand and a fetching houndstooth Tam O’Shanter on his head. Often I wanted to yell at him, “You’re nuts!” He wasn’t strong enough to hunt chukar anymore. I wonder what he thought he was training for, or if he was just trying to cheat death. I still don’t get it.

    I think my season is over, but I might get out another couple times before the end of the month. My log shows I climbed more and hiked farther than ever this season, and I wonder how that’s possible, but — surely — am grateful to have been able to have done that. But lots of things were different this year, and it sure felt more segregated than integrated. For whatever reason the parts didn’t jell: Peat had the big seam to cross and figure out how to hunt without Angus; I didn’t recognize what we were doing without the old warrior, especially at first; Leslie had to learn how to hunt without the best partner, and we fought over that; Medusahead seemed to have cropped up overnight in places it didn’t exist last season; bird numbers were way down; shooting steel seemed like a good idea until I literally hit nothing for weeks; we ran into more chukar hunters in one week than in the last decade combined; I was no longer a teacher and had become a ______________.

    I already wrote about the 2020-ness of 2020, so I guess this is just more of the same. Sorry. The new year, and the promise of a new administration and vaccinations and improving health and economies and weather and the plunge of Twitter from ever-present consciousness loom as a great array of “I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it” things. Maybe all this froughtness is just my response to seeing that I’m in the group that won’t get a vaccine until June. That’s probably it. But it still feels like a disintegration still happening in slow motion. Chukar hunting, this season, has not been the antidote it was once. There’s been little there there.

    It seems, though, that in a way there is in fact integration going on here, although its wonderfulness is open to debate. It all is what it all is. Do we even have a choice to refuse fitting things together? I think it was John Lennon who said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” He would know, right? I look out the window, and notice that seventeen straight days of f-ing frigid fog is lifting just before Beer:30 and I can see my old friend the mountain. I have a headache and am worried for the thousandth time I have Covid. Leslie’s sitting near me reading a book of words about words and I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. 73 quail are eating us, to our delight, out of house and home. The fire’s about to go out but there’s more wood on the porch. Dinner is coming (“Garden burgers AGAIN?!”). Peat sits on the other side of the dog door in the garage waiting insanely for his half cup of kibble. Twenty-six miles northwest chukar are eating as much of the fresh blades of winter grass as they can, if their crops on the last batch we butchered are any indication.

    Sense might be breaking through. Peace.

  • What Happens: A Tribute to Barry Lopez

    What Happens: A Tribute to Barry Lopez

    The quickest door to open in the woods for a child is the one that leads to the smallest room, by knowing the name each thing is called. The door that leads to the cathedral is marked by a hesitancy to speak at all, rather to encourage by example a sharpness of the senses. If one speaks it should only be to say, as well as one can, how wonderfully all this fits together, to indicate what a long, fierce peace can derive from this knowledge.

    “Children in the Woods,” from Crossing Open Ground

    When you’re out there. Head. Thoughts. Observations. Hidden rocks the size of a golfball take you down, all stone of you. My experience is mine. Yours yours.

    Here’s something of mine, what happens during and after, and also before the hunt. Not the hunt, but a hunt, and I’d be surprised if most chukar hunters don’t do this, too: things I’ve read that week or that stuck in my graycraw wash into the footsteps and missteps and breathing and hearing. When you’re climbing you’ve got the goal you can see — the ridge, the outcrop, the abutment, the hawthorn vein — but it’s never a straight line, especially with a pointing dog who, after all, is your partner. You repeat that, sometimes out loud and sometimes not, as if some or even you won’t really believe it. The fact of gravity resented. The failure to lose the weight you promised yourself you’d shed. Math. The sharp pain in the back of your throat. Is it Covid? It can’t be. I’ve been careful. Or have I? During a short rest a sound.

    Howling. I hope it’s a wolf. We’ve seen prints nearby in the snow years ago. Suddenly I’m transported back 15 years to a solo elk hunting trip. The two nights I was camped featured nightlong wolfpack serenades. Ecstasy. Prescient or not I’d brought Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men to read. On the second day of the hunt a tall wolf — one of the singers? — and I met at 15 feet on undulating ground. It vanished before my eyes while I marveled. Lopez’s book added to my admiration of these dogs, deepening the irony of living in a state seemingly committed to committing the sins Lopez documents in Of Wolves: extermination without cause. Worse: the science shows wolves improve elk numbers and genepool, but if only the politicians and ranchers would read and think they’d make a place for this predator. But that’s asking too much.

    Reading while listening to wolf music

    Caught up in this thoughtmemory, I’m a little further up the hill. Peat’s on point. I get over to him. Because they’re in the rocks they spot me miles away and bust wild. I reorient to the climb and return to the thought which now is more like a dream, triggered by another howl. I appreciate Lopez again and think of some of his other work, writing that — in part — led me to Idaho because I wanted to be like him, or at least write a little bit like he did, or at least about the kinds of things he wrote about. River Notes, Arctic Dreams, Crossing Open Ground. I had this romantic idea about the land and trying to fit into it and onto it and let it get through me and through to me. I still do. Without work like his, and others of his ilk (David Quammen, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Edward O. Wilson, Farley Mowat, John McPhee, Robin Kimmerer, Rachel Carson, Diane Ackerman, and Annie Dillard, just to name a few), what happens when I’m outside would be, I’m certain, much different. Worse, I think.

    And then, nearing the ridgetop, I remember my favorite piece of Lopez’s, “Children in the Woods.” My mom, an art teacher, tricked my brother and me into competing to become the bird identifying champion of the Back Bay. I don’t know why. I also don’t know why my dad, a poet, built a cabin in the woods of Idaho but it set us free to explore and learn so many names of things in the forest that we didn’t even need to speak them anymore because we’d prefer to pay close attention to what we sensed and think about relationships between those things and us. When I think about it, as I did on this hunt, this, this is really the only peace I have. It’s as good an explanation as I have for why I keep wanting to hunt.

    While recovering yesterday from this momentous Christmas Day hunt (momentous in so many ways, not least of which was the wolf howl and what it conjured), Leslie told me Barry Lopez had died. May he rest in fierce peace.

  • 2020

    2020

    I went elk hunting one day this October. A friend went with me. We got to the spot I’d planned to leave the truck, and — nobody was there! With plenty of dark before dawn we set out for the short hike to the spot I wanted to glass. I’d hunted birds there several times and noted (from looking at past years’ logs) that elk often hid out in this little bowl we perched above. I’d never seen anyone anywhere near this spot, so figured it was as good as any place I could go.

    It was overcast and not too cold, so the wait for visibility wasn’t uncomfortable. I began getting excited, and my ears played tricks on me: it seemed I heard elk making their way to the little bowl from every direction. But I thought I was probably wrong.

    When the veil of dawn finally offered a view of the landscape, I scanned the area horizontally. Something caught my eye. I re-scanned and couldn’t see it. So I tried again and found it: a pickup parked in the center of the bowl with someone sitting in the driver seat. I handed my friend the binoculars. He saw it, lowered them, looked at me, raised his eyebrows, and said, “2020.”

    It’s become lots of people’s mantra, catch-phrase, excuse, punch-line, or whatever, to explain the unprecedented, inexplicable, anomalous, uncanny, bizarre, and — maybe more than anything — the highly and unbelievably undesirable things that make us batshit crazy about the state of the world right now and how batshit crazy it is.

    Well? What?

    Chukar Hunting 2020 for me is, well, as 2020 as anything else. It’s not immune, which kind of sucks because it’s been the holiest of hobbies for me for 20 years. Last year, 2019, was, well, 2019 (read my year-end reflection, which was more of a rant, so…). This year is different, though, at least for us. For the first time ever we took a couple weeks off in September to take a trip to someplace that had no chukar. We half-heartedly tried for grouse and that didn’t go well (conflicts with bow hunters; expensive emergency barbed-wire injuries to Peat; the constant fear of getting eaten by grizzlies), but were just trying to get away. We and a zillion other people who — like us — apparently didn’t need to be chained up somewhere.

    Is it just me, or does this season feel different? For us, we’re a year older, edging toward the JRC (Joint Replacement Crowd), but hunting nearly an hour longer on average, going further, and coming back with fewer, what?, birds, blisters, shells, dogs, stories? Opening day of chukar was exciting for us because we had guests from Nevada come up to hunt with us; we’d never met them in person and were excited and a little nervous: they’re much younger and fitter and obviously better shots (or used to seeing lots more birds) judging from their tailgate photos. We’d planned a boat trip to a hard-to-access spot I knew would have decent numbers of birds. One or both of their dogs had never been in a boat, so they were excited. We drove to the put-in, but it was blocked unexpectedly by a fire crew: access closed to all. Plan B was to go hike for hours in some brutal terrain and see literally one piece of dried chukar shit between the 7 of us (4 peeps and 3 dogs). Damn. Their attitude was far better than mine. “That’s chukar hunting!” I was like, “Yeah, that’s why I’m sick of it.” I never claimed to be a positive guy. Leslie’ll tell you.

    So that’s how it started. But, actually, we haven’t given up (thus, the bigger hunts). I suppose feeling different about this season, and this season feeling different about us (not the same thing) shouldn’t be a surprise given that the main reason I began this ridiculous activity, and became obsessed by it, and started this blog, and spent gigabillions of pennies on it is not a part of it anymore. Physically, anyway, although that’s not entirely true: we each carry some of Angus’s ashes, and our shells contain some as well. But until we hunted with his nephew Custer for a week or so recently we hadn’t seen that type of movement from a dog across that type of landscape since Angus died. It brought tears to realize it wasn’t him, but also to know he’s out there somewhere. For us? For whom? When we die, who’ll love his memory? How many dogs’ souls are ghosts?

    And so we’re still trying to figure out how to do this thing we thought we understood. How to make it the same even though it’s not. Expectations are a bitch. Not expecting things that blind-side you are, too. The world and what’s going on in it, also, have been creeping into and sometimes all-out invading my time out there. How about the rest of you? It doesn’t seem as fun somehow. Or maybe I’m just stressed about being involuntarily and (I hope) temporarily retired (thanks, Covid, and the disastrous non-response to it). Who the hell knows. Anyway, it’s not the same. I keep looking for something familiar. And then Peat points, and it comes flooding back and I forget everything. And then we’re done as soon as it began. It’s not the same. It’s 2020.

  • Love and Grief

    Love and Grief

    “Her name is Rosie”, the old man that was camped near us with Florida license plates told me as his dog walked over to me. Rosie was an overweight black lab with gray on her face and eyes clouded over with glaucoma. “Come on Rosie, don’t bother her,” he yelled in her direction.

    I yelled back. “She’s okay, I like dogs.” He still walked over in my direction to fetch her.

    “I’ve been coming to the Madison every year with her for the past 7 years,” he told me. “This year she’s had a hard time jumping up into the camper. She just turned 12.” I bent down to pet her. “I don’t know what I’ll do when she dies, I love this dog and I’m already dreading the day I have to put her down,” he sighed.

    “My husband and I just had to put our 13-year-old Brittany down last month; he had cancer.” I tried not to let him see that my eyes were starting to tear up as I told him about Angus. “He didn’t suffer; he went downhill pretty fast.”

    “I camped here with my son years ago, we used to ride motorcycles together, but I don’t ride anymore,” he said. “I like going back to the places that we used to go together.” He paused for a moment, “He died a few years ago.”

    I hesitated responding, remembering how my own dad used to ride motorcycles and go on trips with my older brother. On a gorgeous fall day in September, 16 years ago, my brother took his own life only a couple of days after he’d spent the weekend going on a motorcycle road trip with my dad. “I’m sorry to hear about your son, that’s tough,” I told him. I don’t know why, but I didn’t ask him how his son died. I just remember telling him, “Yeah, it’s nice to go back to those places that you shared with someone you loved, it makes you feel closer to them.”

    As he walked away with Rosie, he said “I’m sorry for your loss.” I appreciated the words of condolence from this total stranger who reminded me of my own dad.

    To get to this place on the Madison River was a long drive in stormy weather on hundreds of miles of winding roads. Bob and I drove in separate vehicles bringing the extra one to use for longer shuttles on the days we fished out of our drift boat. I’d been listening to music along the way, but somewhere between Grangeville and Lolo Pass, a song called “Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel started playing on my Bluetooth shuffle and it touched a nerve. It caused me an overwhelming sense of emptiness and panic, and I felt like we’d left Angus behind. Teardrops followed like the rain falling heavily on the windshield. Peat was in the cab of the pickup with me; he’d been sleeping soundly but was awakened by my loud wailing over the music. Not wanting to upset him, I made myself stop crying and focused on the curves in the road. I’d been forcing myself to forget about it but I vividly remembered that dreadful day, that day we drove Angus to our vet in Council in the back of our old Jeep that we parked out front next to the curb and we ended this life. I remember trying to be strong and comforting for him and not let his last moments of life be watching me crying and being so upset. He knew what was happening, he was ready, he was the strong one, the stoic one. When I think back and remember life with Angus it isn’t just those memories on the chukar hills but those days in-between because he had a calm presence that just made everything seem right in the world.

    I called my father immediately after Angus died to let him know Angus had just died. Angus had been my loyal companion from the time when he was small enough to fit in my hands. I thought my dad should know, but he didn’t answer the phone and never called me back. It’s complicated, thorny, and complex, but I’ve got a non-existent relationship with my dad and it’s been that way for years and I’ve learned to accept it.

    After talking to the old man from Florida, I sat in my camp chair and stared at Peat and wondered if he remembers being on the Madison with Angus and running in the golden fields near our campground and if he’s sad because he’s gone. I wanted to come back to this campground on the Madison to remind me of happier times from the previous summer when life wasn’t so strange, surreal, uncertain. The time before lost lives, broken friendships and when people used to be kind to each other, the days before we knew Angus had cancer even though it was already growing inside him.

    Innocent times

    As we drove away from the campground to head home, the old man from Florida was still there alone in his camper with Rosie. We headed west and through the rolling hills, mountains, and ranches near Dillon and Wisdom that reminded me of home but on a much larger scale. On our last night on the road we camped in a National Forest campground high up on the Idaho/Montana border that we’d visited two years before with Peat and Angus. After setting up camp, Bob, Peat, and I walked along a beautiful little creek where we went the last time we were there. I watched this funny dog that makes me laugh constantly, this little dog that loves life and play and that I adore and that I’ve raised since he was 7-weeks old explore the world without Angus. I remember Bob saying, “I think he’ll be okay.”

    I love Peat but we have a complex relationship. At home Peat has replaced Angus as my constant shadow but sadly the last three years he didn’t want to hunt with me in the field when Bob and I were hunting together. Peat prefers Bob, and it is as if I don’t exist. It’s weird but I’m okay that Bob is the alpha. When it’s just Peat and me out together, he’s fine and he hunts hard for me but just like humans relating to one another, relationships with our dogs can sometimes be complicated, intricate, and painful. Angus is missed terribly and I’ll miss having him be my hunting partner on chukar opening day but I’m looking forward to having some quality days with Peat this coming season.

    Grief is loud but love is even louder.