This entry was originally written in my journal during a regional geology trip to West Texas from March 12-19, 2011. For the complete list of regional geo blog posts, click here.
day two: driving from El Paso
I found a coyote today. I saw tracks, a set of footprints telling a story, spelling out yesterday’s intention. Two sets of scat—one canine, dark, segmented with pointed ends and full of fur. One red, orange, with nut shells, seeds. A bit of fur in one. Looked like a coyote too. Why both there, why together? How old were they? Just how much of that story can I train myself to decipher if I work at it?
Science and tracking seem like convergent evolution at first. Tracking is knowledge applied out of necessity, deeply rooted in place. Science promises us the same precision, the same attention to detail, all for our insatiable curiosity, our desire to understand the world we live in. I want to be both, and sometimes they seem so similar. They’re about process and discovery, about getting intimate with dirt and plants and rock. But they’re also so fundamentally different.
Tracking demands humility because your very survival depends on the information you can wrest from the ground. It’s collaborative, about give and take. It’s a delicate dance between the animal, trying to remain hidden, and your very real need to find answers, to find food, to grasp whatever tiny details of information lie hidden in the dusty prints by the side of the road.
Science requires patience and coming to the natural world on its own terms, at least sometimes. But it’s born from curiosity, not necessity. It’s us above, trying to make sense of our world below. It’s the triumph of the human mind. It’s us knowing how to manage a forest but not remembering how to talk to the trees. There’s beauty in all that too, in the insatiable curiosity of the human mind, in our ability to decode natural laws and ascribe meaning to the rhythms and patterns of nature. But sometimes, I just want to be a tracker.
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