Discuss: Spectral Light

A beautifully written and honest accounting of not only an event but the challenge to all of us to cross the borders of our ideas. In my native Alaska, we are all too familiar with the balance between the old and the new.

One issue I would take is that ” we are back on the… menu.” We have never been off the menu.  While there are clearly incidents resulting from encroachment on habitat, our self-exclusion from this habitat is the only thing which has allowed us to suffer under any delusions that we are not still prey. 

The necropsy performed on the bear which mauled the two Alaskans mentioned in your piece- who were kayakers, not backpackers, and whom the authorities said “did everything right,” (not “most everything”) was a healthy male bear, not suffering from either malnutrition or any kind of injury or illness. (http://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/Accident/detail/accidentid/909/.mobile)

While climate change is certainly has profound implications for the Arctic, the link to that attack in particular is specious. Officials deemed the attack predatory, which, however unlikely, seems well within reason for a predator and a wild animal.

Whatever the reasons for unfortunate interactions between the wild and humans, you write beautifully that we might “become viscerally, sensually invested in our surroundings.”  Perhaps this might heighten our appreciation for nature’s and our own diversity.

Thank you for this piece.

I don’t know if I could tire of reading the passage (pasted below) I interpret as not only bridging divides but also getting beyond that.  Could this also be an explanation for love?  Could this also be what freedom looks like?:

“But if our model of advocacy, no matter what the cause, requires that we stridently defend our territory without leaning across the fence to consider, wholeheartedly, another view, if we cannot embrace the Other in both its delightful and repelling pigments, then the world has little chance to be spared. For this is what it means to forge meaningful conduits between our existence and every other bit of biota. Swallowing the spectrum whole is to devour the exquisite breadth of life. After all, diversity is the strength of a people. Of an ecosystem.

The hunter and the hunted. The Old West and the New. The wild and the tame. We must be lithe enough to stretch between.”

I loved this article. It really got to the heart of what I have been pondering for the last couple of weeks, the inability to heal or move forward without wholeness, the reunification with the other, the shadow self. I will definitely post a link to this escellent article on my blog, http://www.thecosmicmonkey.blogspot.com. I think there is no more important work to do then dance with the shadow and find our whole self, so that we can go out and say, this is possible. We don’t need to simply choose a side and go to war.

I carried an ice axe on yesterday’s bushwhack.  I told myself that there’d be no room in that trackless denseness up there for trekking poles.  But I also wanted a weapon.  Because I’ve been seeing this coming for a bit, and have been starting to sort of prepare myself.

We’ve forgotten that life takes life to live.  And that defending oneself, even in a shrinking world where we are the main problem even as we define it ourselves, is an option.  I don’t know how we could forget that basic a thing, not with what we have seen in supermarkets and restaurants our whole lives, but we have.  When we get outside our walls, and away from the technology we have erected to protect our bodies from flesh-eaters, all bets are off, and now more than ever.  I don’t know when or whether I will start carrying a firearm on a hike.  But I could see it as a possibility.

We sneer at the predatory potential of coyotes; yet a healthy young woman was recently killed by one.  (Was it two?  Does it matter?) A solo coyote has been seen attacking an adult bison.  Just checking out the possibilities.  They’re hungry, and they learn.  It might be a better way to go than many, but I’ll have to think about that.

I may even have to start thinking about my enjoyment of backcountry.  They act the way evolution has honed them to act; and when they do, we kill them.  Maybe, if the trend continues, every last one of them.  It won’t be wilderness, then, because as Edward Abbey said and he’s right:  it isn’t, unless something there can kill you and eat you.  And suddenly it’s not so theoretical anymore.

Great article.  And it really does give anyone who wants familiarity with animals a pretty good idea of what constitutes same, and what does not.

Donn and I have long shared the opinion that the rules are changing…back to the old rules…which never changed.

I think that anyone who has spent the number of years that we have in various backcountries on this continent has gone through a gradual evolution of fear. That first night you spent in a tent, going to full panic at every rustle and click, was probably your evolutionary apparatus doing what we’ve evolved it to do. Then, bowing to the edicts of macho peer pressure and sheepishness over many years, you bully that scared inner nebbish into submission. It is precisely then that you are at your most vulnerable. More and more I find myself glancing over my shoulder in lion country (and that would be ANYWHERE) and not letting the kids wander too far ahead or behind. The trade, for me, is that you get to experience a heightened sense of reality that just can’t be found in too many places anymore. Your moment may never come, and probably won’t….but do you want to be surprised, or something else?

Ice axe? Sure. I’ve never been fond of trekking poles as they are a single purpose tool. I carry a shod 5’ hickory pole for that very reason. I would just feel really foolish trying to dissuade something that wanted rip my liver out by brandishing a glorified ski pole.

That said, and easy for me to say this, but if I was to offer one observation it would be this: Never put yourself in harm’s way for the sake of window glazing. I God man, load the rifle and shoot him THROUGH the door next time. (We lawyers can overly complicate anything.)

Wade

What a wonderful, remarkable articulation of the need to look for both/and, rather than either/or solutions to problems;
to recognize that some problems, rather than requiring solutions, are simply dilemmas to be held in tension. Well done, Amy.

As Plowboy notes, imputing the predatory presence does much to put the tang back in wild.

It’s no real surprise to me that the coyote, and probably the mountain lion, have moved out to claim and re-claim range rather sub rosa; being predators, after all, high profile is not their thing.  My rule of thumb is that the tip of the iceberg is the part you can see; a confirmed individual automatically means the presence of more than one.  In the mountains, I keep my kids close too.  On one occasion I let the smallest range out some, and it was with more than a bit of discomfort that I set out quickly to rein him in once That Thought had planted itself.

When I say “now more than ever,” I mean that for most of our history, our relative defenselessness and tastiness has been a significant part of our cultural baggage.  Wariness in the wilds was natural, and hunters the wariest of all.  In fact, it’s interesting to me, upon reflection, that those who seem still to carry the biggest load of that baggage are those NOT accustomed to spending time outdoors.  As Plow says, you backpack or climb or paddle or ski for a while, you start thinking you are the one who has things sussed, and you inwardly chuckle at the friends and relations you bring out for a breath of fresh air who gasp, there are BEARS out here!?!?!?  Yep, one of the highest population densities anywhere, said to make them shudder for your entertainment more than to educate.  Maybe they’re the ones with the proper grasp.  The explosion of recreational (and poverty-chic agricultural) use of the big outside by the weaponless, who don’t just ignore, but sneer at the weaponed, has loosed upon our predators a river of flesh, a veritable outpouring of the naïve and clueless (and their wards) – most of whom think they’re the ones with the clue.

Nature has her ways of feeding her children.  This was priming itself to happen.  The only way to deal with it is to deal with it.  We are all part of it; we all need to eat.  I see no difference between a world after global conflagration and a world with nothing in it to put me in my place, its stomach if it comes to that.  I want no part of either world, and would unhesitatingly choose death first.

What a pleasure to find Fitzgerald’s definition of intelligence demonstrated with such literary talent. I mayhave grown up largely in the (then) largest cityin the world, but was always exposed repeatedly to the country—in several guises. I notice that the comments are from people who are completely committed to staying as close to wilderness as they can. Just proves how many more people need to be able to read this essay.