Four days after the delivery, we stood in the cemetery, the winter-matted grass still dotted with snow. Family, the closest of friends, two dozen of us staring at Little Joe’s grave. Bob handed a white rose to each while I stood in a summer dress, arms wrapped around myself. Then we climbed into our car, and drove back to the hospital.
I return home from our Yellowstone and Montana trip the second Saturday in June. I drag my bags into the house I love, put my bicycle in the garage, leave the garage door open. Daniel and I hug hello, exchange a kiss. I look into his amber eyes, see a reflection of myself—wary, self-protective. I go to our room and change into biking clothes. He sits on a stool, in the kitchen. “Do you want to come?” I ask. “I need to head up Emigration.”
“No, thanks,” he says. “I’ve already been out, rode a little this morning.”
Transitions are difficult for me. This time I arrived home filled with longing for a closer connection to the land, to my earth goddess self. I’d spent a week away from everything I knew, and found that I was more comfortable in those foreign spaces than I was in my own home. My den. My disrupted den. I needed to visit my canyon.
Early in my first marriage I learned to decompress, alone, for ten or fifteen minutes after coming home from work. I was a buyer for Nordstrom, a position, it was said, that ate people like me for lunch. The more cutthroat you were, the more often you were promoted. I had climbed up the food chain by working an associate attorney’s hours, by always saying yes, and by learning to ignore pain and disappointment. I carried our medical insurance. It was less expensive than what Bob—a financial analyst—could provide. The coverage was excellent. It covered most bills from my pregnancy, even from the operating room delivery. And when the newborn ICU bills started flowing in, I used a notebook to track what they allowed, what they paid, and what I owed. Neat lines tracked the dollars and cents, columns representing needle sticks, blood draws, monitoring machines, nursing care, assessments from neonatologists, ophthalmologists, pulmonologists, gastroenterologists. The warming table, the incubator. And to keep this insurance, I would keep working. Jake had a preexisting condition, and Bob’s company medical policy would not insure him. After my leave, I would head back to my job to keep our family covered. I’d hire a nanny, someone to care for Jake while I was gone.
At the time, I didn’t know much about wolf behavior, that the breeding female of a wolf pack is known as the alpha, and that it is often the alpha female who directs the activities of the pack. It is she who chooses her mate and searches the landscape to find the right location for her den, then grows and gives birth to the next generation of hunters. As soon as she has recovered from delivery, she leaves her pups behind with uncles, older siblings, sometimes even the alpha male, while she hunts the rabbits, the elk, the bison, the moose, that will feed her pack. I’m hardly the only mother to head off to work.
The Inuit are one of many indigenous populations who rely on an oral history to teach new generations about the past. One of their folk tales is beautifully illustrated in Tim Jessell’s Amorak. In a fable of the beginning of the world, the Great Spirit tells the first woman to cut a large hole into the ice of the land. She does, and out of this hole come the animals, one after another, the bears and the seals, the snowy owl and the wolverine, the arctic hare, the red fox and the arctic fox, the lynx and the great auk, and lastly, the caribou. The Great Spirit tells the woman that of all the creatures the caribou is the most valuable, for it will be the animal to provide sustenance and warmth for the people of the land. And this grows to be true, as the caribou population flourishes. The children of the first woman hunt the caribou, obtaining meat to eat and skins to be made into clothing and coverings. The children hunt the biggest and best of the caribou, leaving the ill, the elderly, the small. And soon, the caribou population weakens, with the small producing more small caribou and the weak and ill creating more weakness and illness. One night the first woman asks the Great Spirit what they might do to return the caribou to health so that good meat and skins might again bless them. The Great Spirit tells the woman to return to the ice, to the hole she had made, where she will receive the answer. When she returns to that spot, she sees a great and beautiful animal coming from the hole; it is the wolf, amorak. Here, says the Great Spirit, is the animal who will hunt the caribou, taking the ill, the small, the weak. The wolf will keep the caribou healthy so that you and your children will again benefit from what they can give you. And thus the wolf ranges the land, raising pups and teaching them their role in keeping the caribou herd strong, playing their part in the way of the world.
This fable provides insight into the connectedness of the natural world, and suggests that humans may not always possess the innate wisdom they imagine. We are of the earth, but our tendency to overuse and destroy is so robust it overpowers our knowledge of that oneness. Instead of killing only enough buffalo to feed us, and letting them repopulate to feed us again, we shoot them to near extinction. We dam rivers, impeding or blocking salmon migration and decreasing spawning grounds, until events like the Klamath River fish kill of 2002 occur—sixty-five thousand dead adult salmon. We allow domestic cattle to trample streambeds, destroying habitat and food for uncountable wildlife populations. Wisdom about living on the land comes from time spent listening to, watching, and learning from the landscape. Sage advice comes from indigenous peoples, and is found even in fable and myth. Scientists propose action based on data collection, research outcomes. Philosophers consider morality, the ethics of behavior. My greatest strength as a human being is the ability to listen to all of these—the sage, the scientist, the philosopher—and to change my behavior when I learn that I should. To commune with the earth, to return to the hole in the ice, to welcome a new ally.
In 1982, The Talking Heads recorded a song called “This Must Be the Place.” Not a hit at the time of release, it has since grown in popularity, now covered by a handful of other bands and a staple on classic alternative rock playlists. An anything-but-typical love song, it has one particular line that hooks me: home, is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there. This line speaks two truths: home as a craving, and paradoxically, home as something that can be found anywhere. Home to me is sanctuary, the two words synonymous, and I am a ruthless protector of this space. In my sanctuary love is the foundation. Peace reigns. And expressed moments of frustration are accepted and forgiven. While most Americans reside in just a handful of homes during his or her lifetime, I am on my nineteenth. Dorm room, squished apartment, sprawling rambler on a hillside. What makes home home for me are soft places to curl up and read, private spaces and, ideally, nooks and crannies where surprises hide: a stack of themed books, a clock made of bicycle parts. Table and floor lamps. Framed family photographs perched in bookshelves and on tables and on dressers and on a wall or two or five. Books, everywhere, neatly aligned or haphazardly stacked, and rugs, soft and thick. Home has a strong roof and locking doors and windows that raise and lower to capture breezes and keep out rain and bitter cold. Home is safe for feelings and thoughts, and safe for its accoutrements and occupants. It is a place for respite, for rest, for eating. For nurturing, loving, creating, working, playing, sharing, being. Home expands outward to the yard with its flowers, trees and grasses, and the neighborhood. Home spreads up the hill and down the street and on a day when the sky is heavy with clouds, rain falls, and a rainbow pokes from hillside to distant valley, the entire city is home and my heart expands to encompass it all.
The deer, the elk, the beaver, squirrel, and coyote—all creatures have their own versions of home. Tunnels in the ground that open into dens, or acres of wildness. Aldo Leopold wrote—which strikes me in the heart—that wilderness areas are a series of sanctuaries. Sanctuaries, places of the natural world, places of peace and growth. However, the greatest difference between the homes of wildlife and those of humans is in their level