Remembering the wildlife
I was writing a very good friend tonight in reply to a really cool picture of a deer in her backyard she sent me. It evoked a memory that took long enough to compose as an email that I’m loath to attempt to recreate it here. So I’m going to cheat and copy it here. It’s a good memory, worth preserving.
I’m approaching the age where you have to write things down before they leak out of your brain. Of course you immediately lose the note and in your frustration manage to forget what you wanted to remember. Old age sucks in many ways. I’m not even all that old, my mistake is I live in a world populated by people half my age. Peers are fewer. My real-world boss could be my son. That could almost depress me if I could remember it. So those around me make me feel older than I am. It’s their fault. Inside I’m still in my twenties.
The following describes a Winter trip John and I took from Eastern Idaho to Jenny Lake so he could make drawings for some paintings he had been commissioned to paint. He was quite successful, and I enjoyed being with him and watching him work. I was a photographer, and his framer, so I had my own reasons for tagging along on these trips, beside getting to spend some quality time with John. And the dogs loved these trips. Colin was a keeshond and Bob a Malamute/Sheperd mix. Both happy in cold weather. I spent 13 years in Idaho. Many good memories, many bad ones. That’s life…
I miss living among wildlife probably most of all when I think about the things I hate about living in the city. Some of my most vivid memories invlove wildlife. I don’t romanticize the situation, though. I know that lovely deer can instantly become a liability by eating plants it shouldn’t or wandering into a glass door and wrecking havoc in its panic.
I remember the times I went to Yellowstone and Western Montana. Pure cowboy country. Even I got all macho and “Cool-hand Luke” whenever I spent time there. Did you know a lot of young cowboys are really cute? Oh, yeah, anyway… Several times I warned first-timers to that area that elk were not to be messed with. Where a deer can be dangerous, an elk can be deadly. They wouldn’t do it with malice. They just don’t appreciate how fragile humans are.
One of the most seriously frightening moments of one visit to Jenny Lake, just outside the Western side of Yellowstone, was when a moose was crossing a narrow road over a bridge about 3′ in front of my small Ford pickup. There were two of us in the cab, John, my painter/boyfriend, and I. In the bed of the pickup, covered only by a tarp as it was snowing at that moment, were my two dogs, Colin and Bob, barking their fracking heads off at this weird and fascinating smell. I couldn’t back up because there were cars behind me, it was late at night so not only were the dogs going to get us killed by this moose but would also seriously piss off every other nature-lover for twenty miles in all directions, there was a river running under the bridge so the idea of jumping in it was truly a last resort (and when do you ever get to the last resort? As long as you’re alive, there’s always at least one more resort than what you’ve resorted to yet). John and I were sitting looking up at the moose. It was at least 8′ tall at the shoulder. As a wildlife biologist might observe, the motherfucker was huge. I knew in my heart that if it attacked the dogs there was no way in hell I could hope to come to their rescue. The best I could do was try to watch for a way to get John and I the hell away from danger. Humans first… Perhaps that attitude is less than noble, but my inclination nearly all my life has been to rescue humans. I’ve always been fascinated by my own species, and when push comes to shove, I usually side with the homos (sapians, that is).
Anyway, all the worry was for nothing. The damned thing stopped half way across, looked long and hard at the pickup (John was trying to sketch it the whole time) then slowly and with more dignity than a drag queen sauntered off the bridge and John and I started breathing again. The dogs both stopped barking almost immediately. Being both mellow by character and naturally dim, they generally didn’t bother to bark at things. It wasn’t worth the effort.
| 1.7 |
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