Summer Solstice 6-21-2022

 It wasn't the longest day of the year but the morning before when we saw a large coyote dash across the road down from our house. It wasn't scrawny and kind of pathetic like the ones that roam the streets of Los Angeles, skittish garbage hounds. This one was muscular with thick fur and a bush for a tail that seemed to fly across the road in a single lunge. Many years ago I saw a strange creature just out my back window that, at the time, I was certain was a wolf. It was huge, mottled gray and black, with a sharp snout but surprisingly ratty tail and coat. Ratty but huge. It ran behind some spruce trees, haunched down, and howled. A workman in my house at the time wanted to shoot it, but I said no to that one. Whatever it was out there howled then disappeared in the tall grass of an adjoining field, and I haven't seen it since, a dozen or so years. 

Now, we're told that a new breed is roaming these parts. We've had coy dogs for awhile, coyotes that have interbred with dogs creating a dangerous species of wild animal unafraid of humans. Coy dogs. They're the ones that hang out there just beyond the front coach lights and yap at you like the devil's in your ear. However, that new breed - grey wolves migrating down from Canada have interbred with coyotes creating another species - coy wolves. Is that what I saw some dozen years ago? Who knows what the hell is running around back there?

Two Autumns back, I was walking down from the mountain behind our house at dusk when the most terrifying howl cut loose. My backbone froze. My blood curdled. Somewhere in the tall grass, not twenty-five yards from me, was a creature that made that sound. I never saw it but I knew I'd better get out of there, and not at a run, either, but a nice slow, steady walk. 

Years ago I took myself for a hike on Bear Mountain. I was living in NYC at the time, recently divorced, and had to get outta there. So, I found this isolated trail on Bear Mountain, and purposely chose a weekday so I'd be alone. A nice day. A nice hike. Easy. Relaxing. Then...I literally felt as if something were boring into my back. I kept walking but it didn't go away. Something was boring into the small of my back. So, I stopped and turned around. Right there, maybe a hundred yards behind me, were two large, German Shepherd like canines with slack jaws hanging open exposing large, lolling red tongues. These were feral dogs, and they were tracking me. Holy shit! They're on me! I thought my heart would leap from my chest. I had a walking stick with me, a six foot dowel I'd bought at a lumber yard, three inches around, stout as Babe Ruth's bat, so I swung the thing around and around and ran towards them screaming, at which point they scattered and disappeared. I'm not sure which was worse - seeing them or not seeing them. Were they circling around to get me from another angle? I'm gettin' outta here and backtracked out of the park, half the time looking over my shoulder, and not really breathing 'til I hit the road. How did I know they were back there in the first place? Why couldn't they have simply sneaked up and pounced? How would I have known? How did I know?

Another time, hunting season, I was sitting on a hillside in deep snow with my back against a tree watching for a nice big buck to come along, when, once again, I felt something boring into my back. When I turned around, a neighbor with a rifle was staring at me from behind a barbed wire fence. He was a nasty son of a bitch with whom we had had a run in years ago when we brought our children home from South America. Basically, he warned us not to pollute the valley. This time, across the barbed wire fence, we stared at each other - locked eyes, said nothing, two seconds, three - until he turned and walked away. 

Now, I'm not one to take claims of ESP and mental telepathy seriously without multiple pounds of salt - forget grains - We're talkin' Pounds, amigo! - but these two incidents actually happened to me, and, no, I was not drunk or otherwise impaired. However, in thinking about this, I wondered if there had been some common denominator and concluded, yes, there had been: I was alone in the woods both times. Meaning what? Meaning that, when I'm alone in the woods, all my synapses are locked and loaded. I'm never so alert, never so sensitive to sound and smell, never so much in the present, my eyes constantly flitting from one sight to another, the movement of a leaf, a glint of sunlight, peripheral vision on insta-cam. I leave one world behind and enter another in which its native creatures are far more alert than I, and, if I want to know them, I need to know this other world, their world, full time. The air I breathe is the exact same air every single creation in the forest breathes, for that matter, the exact same air breathed by every creation in the entire world from the Amazon to the Alps to the United States of America. 

Imagine that.

The Heart Before The Hearse

 What? Another couple of weeks I’m lookin’ at 82, and I’m not supposed to think about this stuff? I could ignore it except I can’t. It’s only the biggest event in my life since the first biggest event in my life - Birth. You know what it’s like trying to contemplate this thing? Like standing at the base of a gigantic redwood, leaning back as far as possible, and still not able to see the top. I’m supposed to ignore this and go about my business as if yeah, yeah, I get it, OK. Next. I’ve got things to do. What? What things? Like going into the hospital for a test and winding up with your heart, literally, in some stranger’s hand? Will that do for a thing? Open heart surgery? Triple by pass? Not one. Not two. Three! Gimme a break.

So, the big sleep, the long goodbye, annihilation, eradication, extermination, termination - I’m supposed to jump up ‘n’ down and click my heels for joy at the prospect of necrosis? Eternal Rest? RIP? You don’t rest when you’re dead because you’re dead and don’t do anything but transmogrify into something someday will be unrecognizable. You rest while alive, while breathing, while loving what’s around you. Rest your eyes upon…your garden in August; your favorite person disheveled and in bare feet; makin’ out on the front seat of your International Harvester, short bed, pick-up on Gold Creek Loop in Montana; Father’s Day; your honorable discharge…Here ye. Here ye. Hang it on the wall, and be proud. This ain’t the 60’s no mo’. Nobody’s gonna spit.

And speaking of death…

It was with me years ago when I trekked across Alaska mostly by my lonesome. I developed some kind of malady which gave the medical folks in Los Angeles some concern. This was a Thursday. They wanted me in the hospital on Friday. A test had not come back with news they wanted, so better to keep a close watch. Could be gruesome. Things were critical, except I didn’t think so, and I was the one who felt fine. We had a conflict. I was due to take off for Alaska Friday so no way was I gonna back off that one - LA to Fairbanks then bush plane way far north to a place where, at one point, I’d be fifteen miles from another human being. How could I miss that?

“A man with your condition should not be going to Alaska.”

“I feel fine.” I did. I felt great.

“You could die,” they said.

“At least, I’ll be in Alaska. Listen, You’re still trying to figure out what my condition is. You don’t even know what to call it, yet - some kind of “-itis”. Here’s the deal: if I have this thing, I’m going to Alaska, and, if I don’t have this thing, I’m going to Alaska. I’ll check in with you when I get back.”

”If you get back.”

Obviously, I got back, and didn’t have the thing I can’t remember I was supposed to have had. Something else but no big deal, a secondary not a primary condition of whatever it was. Jamie met me at the airport. We’d only been dating a short while so what I did was contract with her neighborhood florist to send her a dozen roses two weeks after I’d gone but a few weeks before I came back. Smart move, Bub. That smile when she saw me!