This morning I’ve been driving down I-84 in Oregon. A couple of years ago the ridges were clear. Now there are clusters of wind farms – lots of big white whirling fans.
“This is so, milkshakey, dude” (quote from customers here at the coffee shop in The Dalles).
Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley in May.
I saw The Tree of Life a couple of nights ago. Pretty powerful. There are times when it felt like there was no structure – like it was a series of related images flowing by – but in the end, there was plenty of structure. Hardly any words, but definitely structure. Like dance maybe. At one point there is … well, I think it’s supposed to be a baby dinosaur, but maybe it’s just a small herbivore – like a rabbit. When we’re first introduced to the baby, it’s alone, in the woods, looking around, listening, uncertain if it’s alone. With the big wide rabbit-eyes (side of the head, like deer, antelope, ungulates – so they can see all around – better to escape) it seems innocent. Later, it’s lying flat in a bar of stones in the middle of a river. A much bigger predator dinosaur sees the baby, trots over to it, and puts one foot on its head. It holds its foot there. The camera shifts to the pov of the predator, looking down at its foot on the head. It lifts up its foot. The baby looks up and slowly starts to raise its head. The bigger animal puts its foot back on the head pushing it back to the ground. We can see the baby’s sides moving in and out, breathing. I kept waiting for the bigger dinosaur to rip into the baby and start eating. Finally, it lifted its foot off the baby’s head and trotted back through the shallows, across the river.
Because of the flow of the movie, with the family, father-son battle that’s happening (harsh, angry father who demands that he be kissed and hugged by his boys right after laying into them – very confusing and I think typical of a lot of fathers at that time – spare the rod, spoil the child), I’m not sure if this predator/prey thing was that or if it was supposed to be a parent/child situation. This confusion/conflation is probably exactly what Malick was looking for (I remember the terror of waiting for my dad to come home). This scene of the baby lying still, trying to escape detection, felt very similar to a situation we stumbled on in Yellowstone.
It was the last afternoon of our workshop. We took the bus/van out to where there was an old wolf den. On the way, we kept seeing a grizzly bear in the distance. Sometimes he would run – like he had somewhere he was going and he was certain of it. From our distant vantage point we could see antelope getting nervous, elk looking around, even bison (who usually are too big and tough and cagey for your run-of-the-mill predators) were paying attention the approaching bear. We followed the bear from one pull-out to the next, watching him with binoculars and spotting scopes. He always seemed to be sniffing something, nose up. Finally we saw him go up into the treeline, up into the treeline where the old wolf den is. The wolf den that we were going to be walking up to. We lost sight of the bear, assuming that, if he kept moving at the same speed, we’d be fine.
Watching the grizzly run – and later, watching four wolves from the Lamar pack running absolutely flat out, chasing two intruder wolves from their territory – it made me think about … damn. It’s this whole weird mix. These animals are living their lives out there, a lot of it in full view of all of the tourists on the Lamar Valley road. If the four wolves catch the two others, the two will get the shit kicked out of them and somebody will probably die. Watching the bear – why is it running? What is it feeling and sensing that makes it run now, trot later, run faster – what is it trying to catch? Time. Space. Perception. Food is there now. Food moves. Catch the food before it moves too far.
As we’re walking up towards the den (still have a lot of open ground to cover before we get to the treeline) we see a black bear running hard up a hill away from where we were. We kept watching the elk and bison and whoever else was around to see if they were alert and/or nervous. We couldn’t really tell why the black bear was so nervous and fully sprinting.
We get up to the den, just under the edge of the trees. As we walk under the trees the eight of us are all trying to stay close together. But after looking at the den, taking pictures of the den, posing with the den … people start feeling more relaxed. The group starts to spread out a little more. Looser. Not so concerned. While Jon had told us to stay together, I think most of us non-wolfy people were subconsciously a little anxious about going to see a CAVE. Maybe the running bear was sitting in the DEN, waiting for us in the CAVE that he had taken (by force) from the puny wolves? But once we saw the cave, well, sure – no bear. No wolves. Ah.
The den.
With the charms of the den fully absorbed, we started to drift down the hill. One of the Institute’s volunteers walked off, up the side of a small ridge/clearing in the trees. He hadn’t been with us the day before. He seemed very eager and very chatty and very much Wanting To Help and Wanting To Help The Guests (us paying folk) By Shouting Out When He Spotted Any Living Creature In The Valley (omg – the competition of SEEING in any of these trips, birding trips, etc. – I am such a sucker for the pack mentality. See, the day before there had been two older guys on our trip, in their 70’s, and a younger woman – college, there in Yellowstone to be an interpreter – me, and two other women who had just turned 40 and were there as gifts – escape the kids! – from their husbands … so, that day, I was NOT The Old Guy. But on this day, because of a mud/landslide, people had to leave early – so it was just me, the two moms-away-from-kids, our leader Jon Trapp, his wife Barbara, and two new volunteers. With the shifting of the pack, I was now The Old Guy. And the younger, fitter, louder, know-it-all who Shouted Out When He Spotted Any Living Creature In The Valley had slipped into the beta position of the pack. I was relegated to Nearly Dead… at least this is how I was feeling that day).
O.k., so SOWHSALCITV walks up the ridge. He comes back. Very fast. “There’s an elk fawn, right over that hillock – right there! It’s laying flat, completely still. It looks just like a pile of sticks. I almost stepped on it.” We have a small chat about whether we should leave. We don’t want to disturb the fawn. Or the mother, which must be around somewhere nearby. Jon, the leader, ends up saying its ok for us to go up a little higher to look down on the fawn. Now, when I say “go up a little higher” I’m not talking much – we walk up 30 yards, giving a 25 yard berth to the spot that SOWHSALCITV said held the baby elk. There are four or five of us, maybe there was six? We’re looking at the fawn. It’s 20 yards away. We’re all looking at it with our binoculars. Sure enough, you can barely see it. It’s laying completely flat, completely motionless. I wonder why it’s so still?
Then Jon is saying, with alarm, “Grizzly. Back away. Back away. Don’t run. Move quickly.” I turn. I look. And, yes, 25 yards away (Jon said 20 – but I’m doing my best to not give in to any fish-that-got-away exaggeration) was a grizzly bear eating another elk fawn. The bear looking right at us. A mouth full of leg. If the fawn that we were looking at was at 3 o’clock, the bear was at noon. If you have a minute, mark a spot, walk 20 paces – that’s how far we were from this bear.
We moved quickly down, away from the bear. Jon Trapp was excited and a little freaked out. I was too tired to be freaked out, too much of a greenhorn to know how dangerous this was. I did not feel a rush of adrenaline. I did not feel elated or euphoric. The main reason I knew I should be alarmed was because Jon has the resume of a guy who does not get freaked out (worked in Air Force intelligence, for a long time trained pilots survival skills, now works as an EMT and mountain rescue worker, last email I got from him had him fighting a wildfire in Georgia) … and Jon was freaked out. I looked once, saw the bear – just a quick snapshot – his face full of blood and sinew – then I moved, looked one more time and then moved down with everyone else, maybe 250 yards away from the bear. We all turned to watch him with our binoculars.
He buried some of the fawn, built a small hill of earth over it, lay down on it and seemed to fall asleep. All of this 40 yards from where the other fawn lay flat, stock still. The fawn that we had been looking at. Here’s some elk calf facts: when they are born they have no smell. Even so, bears eat 60% of all elk calves born in a year.
We watched the sleeping bear for a little while. And finally, we left. The bear slept. The elk fawn that still lived, lay flat, and would continue to lay flat until it’s mother came and touched it. I thought about fear. These two small elk were – at most – a day old. Not a whole lot of time to “learn” anything. The elk fawn laying flat was doing this entirely on instinct, reflex, primitive elk genetic survival hardwiring. Did it feel fear? If it did sense something that you or I might understand as “fear” – is it entirely chemical? The smell of a big stinky grizzly bear equals fear?
Why didn’t I feel any fear? A couple of days later, I was sitting on the back porch in Champaign, Illinois. I had gone out there to write about this thing that happened in Yellowstone National Park. As I sat down, in the warm sun, I heard a loud buzzing – JESUS! CHRIST! A HUGE BUMBLE BEE! FUCK! RIGHT NEAR MY HEAD! I got bolted up, dodging, lurching, running. Because, you know, hell… it’s a bee! A huge surge of adrenaline. Fight or flight (for this situation, it was absolutely flight).
(Wolf prints. Would you please look how big those paws are?)
So. Let’s recap. I don’t think bumblebees sting. But, damn. I was scared. I DO know that grizzly bears eat meat. I could very well have been meat. But I don’t really think of myself as meat. Ever. My experience with grizzly bears has been entirely on screen or through lenses (well, once through windows of our old van up in Denali). A bee is real. A bear, well, it’s an actor, a puppet, a metaphor for The Devil fighting Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins. That thing 25 yards away that I only got two very quick glances at before I was 250 yards away, looking at it through a pair of lenses – well … c’mon.
There is a gap between domestic and wild, urban and rural, myth and science, fear and comfort – but the gap is probably all in our heads and differs with every person (the terror Woody Allen feels leaving Manhattan). A wide gulf separates The Wolf (Lions! and Tigers! and Bears! Oh my!) as symbol and the wolf as a living, breathing animal. With our escalating population, “wild” space is managed to reduce human/animal conflict. So, in many ways, we end up with artificial spaces – gardens without fences, zoos without cages. The time on the wolf-management workshop’s bus didn’t feel that far removed from a safe, controlled theme park tour. The time we spent watching these animals through binoculars and spotting scopes felt like watching a slightly disappointing Wild Kingdom or Animal Planet – disappointing because the animals were smaller, there wasn’t a soundtrack and then they would run behind a tree so you couldn’t seen them for very long.
So what do you do with something that doesn’t fit into a Narrative? Something that doesn’t fit with your idea of the world? Something that’s in The Tree of Life, only it’s in real life and the metaphors aren’t immediately apparent and the semi-crappy 3D work done with the baby dinosaur isn’t pulling your mind off screen. I imagine the adrenaline would have kicked in if the bear wasn’t so gosh darned happy with it’s delicious baby elk. I imagine if he’d chased us, I would fit it into my big fancy important Story, if I lived to tell the tale.
