The elk herd that stands far off in the meadow by the Saint John’s River looks to me, at first, like either dead shrubs or bales of hay. My binoculars are not powerful enough to do much good, until finally the shrubs begin to move. I also make out their pale haunches, rimmed in darker brown, I presume as an erotic costuming, the crotchless panty of the animal world. The summer has been dry and the grass is spare, so the elk forage in the dust for the pale withered blades.
There’s only one trail, running atop the levee that separates the meadow from the river. It leads to an old hunting blind that’s been restored as a viewing blind. We gradually become aware that the bird noises we’ve been hearing, the squeals and whistles, are actually coming from the elk. I’d heard the word bugling used to describe their calls, and so I pictured an assertive tooting, but these are shy wooing sounds that seem wrongly scaled to the size of the animal. The muffled cries sound like a kettle that has not yet come to boil.
The males make the sound — this time of year, they wear ornate interlacing horns. I count just five of them, as opposed to maybe thirty females. It seems that the size of the headgear determines the male’s status in the herd. One male wears a great scaffold with six pointy tips on each of his antlers, and he struts as if he’s king of all the rest, who are mostly occupied with snuffling in the grass.
That the big male has a strand of lichen wrapped around his horns like a green feather boa apparently doesn’t seem to affect his standing in the herd, even though he looks completely ridiculous as he leads the others in the direction of the parking lot. Ridiculous to me, and also a lesson — that one can go through life quite successfully without considering one’s objective image presented to the world. A mirror would only enrage the big buck now. He would see a rival there, another male with a rack as big as his, and he would probably charge ahead and smash the mirror, thereby solving the problem.
A Cripple in the Wilderness
I used to be a naturalist, but, in all honesty, what I liked more than the names and facts and maybe even the sights of nature was the opportunity that being a naturalist gave me to walk around in the woods. For a while I worked at Mount Rainier, and, in the early summer, I liked to go to a place called Summerland, where I skied on slopes that were not too crevasse-covered or steep. Finding my way was difficult with the trail obliterated by snow, and I was vain about my willingness to go alone, though I looked like a child.
In my late teens I had spent my summers as a naturalist along the Appalachian Trail where it veers near New York City. Young people were dispatched in teams of two of the same gender to live in primitive cabins — no toilet, and our outhouse was a quarter mile away — where we ran nature programs for children from the city. We bathed in the lake and swam in the nude — now I realize that living there with no telephone or radio was probably the most dangerous immersion in nature I ever had. During those summers, female hikers were raped along the Appalachian Trail and even killed. But I never had a hard time with anyone except a man who, as was the custom of those days, gave me a hallucinogenic drug and returned in the middle of the night to pee on my tent.
In my mind, I survived by becoming aloof: naturalist as bitch. But this is silly, to imagine I was not vulnerable. A bullet makes no distinction between bitch and sweetie-pie.
Becoming handicapped has meant becoming a little more congenial, in that my accessing wilderness now requires collaboration, as on this day when my friends and I are headed up to Mount Rainier. For Angus, this is an opportunity to put more break-in miles on the Harley-Davidson Dynaglide motorcycle that he just purchased down near Portland. I had navigated him home with my car because he wasn’t yet supposed to take the bike over fifty miles per hour, nor was he supposed to drive for long at a constant speed, and this meant we had to use the back roads, where the pages of maps he had spent days printing off the computer and highlighting and annotating were useless. The hundred miles took us five hours. At one point we drove in circles, which we noticed only because we passed an old barn painted with “Dr. Wilson’s Remedy for Weak Women” twice.
When Angus starts the motorcycle, it attracts the notice of Bob, the man who is painting my house. I feel guilty going off on an excursion while Bob works, which is another concession that becoming handicapped requires — I pay other people to do my work. Having always painted my own houses, this is a bitter pill. I’m not even driving the car loaded with my electric scooter; my friend Becky is.
“Nice bike,” Bob says, though Angus can’t hear him above the noise of his pipes.
“He just bought it!” I yell back. Angus is a chubby bald man closing in on sixty. I don’t know why I feel compelled to give out information as the Harley warms. “His wife died! He has not ridden a motorcycle for thirty years!”
Many of us can be made bold by grief.
You can see what people call The Mountain on clear days from our town, the main roads laid out to give a dead-on view of it when you head east. Three peaks make up its crown, like a molar tooth. Now that I am crippled, rarely do I go there, even though some of the trails are paved in order to protect the alpine meadows. So theoretically I could ride up them, and this is our bittersweet mission of the day. When the snow melts, flowers bloom in such profusion that the colors make you swoon.
We missed the peak flower-blooming weeks while we arranged our trip. My psychic tendencies lean toward disappointment and lament. We have missed the flowers! Becky assures me there will still be plenty, being the kind of woman who can peer into any cup and spot the trace of moisture that still resides. We’re leading Angus out of the desecrated Northwest that has been manufactured recently by countless big-box stores and cheap tract homes. You have to stay right in town, close to the water, or else go into the wilderness — because what’s between them is a place of death, the towns of no town, the quickly manufactured present, which has no soul. I can’t imagine our strip malls fifty years hence: they will be torn down within a decade, or else they will be dusty and decayed, abandoned structures where squatters will set up camp. The giant supermarkets will someday house our slums.
So we leave them, good riddance, and rise into the foothills, after crossing Mashell Prairie and Ohop Valley. It has not rained all summer, and yet the valley somehow is a green dip between hills, a velvety swale without any desecration. This is where you finally catch your breath, and no one stops here. It’s a hands-off place, a place where the riders in their vehicles stay put, as if they know better than to blight this ceaseless stunning bright bright green.
Then we rise into the clear-cuts, a thoroughly blighted place, where the small firs grow as high as a tall man’s head in stands that are unnaturally dense. The forest has been ravaged, and yet the forest is making itself again, in a mutant, hypertrophic way. Environmentalists see the ravagement and the mutation; industry people see the resilient growth, and the human life span is too short to know which view will win.
But soon we leave the clear-cuts behind, as the road zips by Alder Lake. This summer, due to the lack of rain, the lakebed is a flat expanse of mud, sliced by rivulets and divided into planes of different color, colonized by different algae. The lakebed should be littered with driftwood, giant stumps with gnarly, webby roots. But this has all been carted off. In a random act of art, someone has created a horse and a fish with the only wood that’s left.