travel

a mammal den in Yellowstone

It’s been a long journey and I’m gathering the pieces.  My man Jeb delivered by outfitting this blog with a photo album, so I’m grouping some of the many images I took into different folders with twelve images each that I’m calling portfolios.

I’m also gathering all the varied experiences that unfolded out in these dry expanses.  I noted on many occasions how the clime acted upon the fragility of personalities the tourists carried into the West.  How they would scurry from AC to AC, quickly pop out of the rented motor home for a group shot next to a sing or at some scenic overlook.  My favorite was watching an uncertain father backing up with his two son’s ever closer toward a bison to get a better shot.

Then there were the two European couples stuck at a crossroads.  They had turned a corner some hundred feet up the trail and come face to face with a grizzly.  They were undone when I came upon them.  They warned me off through broken English, pantomiming that one should carry a gun.  A big gun.  I sensed they had made enough of a fuss that the bear was probably long gone.  Cautiously I moved forward only to find after a half a mile, more humans enjoying the trail.  It’s as if all tourists wear mouse ears…and no doubt, when I’m not realizing it, me too.

I also noticed how the residents have been grown differently, have been shaped by the ever present forces where spacial relationship dominates the temporal. The rational is simply a screw tape if it doesn’t meet the hard fact.  And hard fact pushes in from all sides. And the locals manage to find there refuge.  Some healthier than others, no doubt, but as one woman in a gallery said to me “you people (I had told her I was from New York), you people need to learn how to relax.”  Then she pointed to the dog spread out on the floor keeping one eye on me.  “No that what I mean,” she continued, “I think he sleeps with his eyes open.”

Perhaps it not from each other that we should look for the answers, but to our wider family of beast.  Mammals of all sizes, from mice to wolves to bears, make dens in the Earth out here. I watched two badgers pop in and out of a den.  I watched a marmot do the same.  And chipmunks.  And I thought of how we fashion our homes out of the earth’s materials but that we think of our abodes as built upon the earth.

In the Earth…that’s where mammals of all sorts find sanctuary.  They dig in.

So on the surface or into the depths…an analogy for the posture we take into all our experiences.

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