Regional, day five: talking to deer, crossing the river

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 5: Big Bend National Park

The Rio Grande smells like salt. Matthew says it might be from sulfates, maybe from agricultural runoff. The most polluted river in the country to separate us from Mexico. The macro is scenic—desert mountains, hills stretching for miles. It’s in the details that I start to see a story.

Across the river feels immediately different—it’s hotter, more humid and smells like horse poop. There’s trash strewn everywhere and dozens of trails leading everywhere, leading nowhere in particular. This is not the federally protected wild land that exists across the river. This is somewhere people live and work, out of necessity.

I cross back, stopping the middle to let the polluted waters rush past my legs. It’s not a ritual, not an absolution. It’s just water, mixed with past mistakes, with ambition and regret.

* * *

We hiked Emory Peak today—5.1 miles more or less straight towards heaven, then back down to Earth again. I saw three deer, stopped, watched, tried my best to talk to them. I stared one down, tried to tell it I meant no harm. It looked back at me, seemed a bit puzzled, on edge, on guard. Sometimes I wonder if it’s ok to tell them not to fear me. What if they make that mistake with another human? What if they trust me, keep trusting once I’ve learned to take care of myself, to hunt? Where will my allegiances lie then?

Deer have so much to teach me. I could barely make out the tracks. If I’d stayed for longer, I might have seen the bite marks on the shrub it was chewing on, the shrub I still don’t know the name of. If I’d been raised to see properly, I would have been able to see its tracks, to follow it, to talk to it.

How can I defend my landbase without knowing it intimately? I don’t want to be the biologist, the chemist, the naturalist, the geologist. I want to know the plants because I depend on them for food. I want the knowledge that is my birthright, the knowledge to take care of myself and give back to the land as it feeds me.

Regional, day two: tracking vs. science

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.

Tracking in the desert

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Back of Beyond, the Known Universe, Utah

In the washes, there are sets of four-toed tracks compacting the dust, no longer than a nickel, made sometime before the rain this morning.

I feel the crunch of soil compacting under my show, step after step as I create a new trail across the desert and I feel guilty for all the fun I’m having.

There is a conversation taking place behind me, four people who used to be in my shoes telling each other stories whose words I can’t make out.

Tracking is a lot like journalism. You’re given pieces of information but left to piece them together, decide what’s relevant, and decipher meaning. You start casting a wide net, gathering as much data as you can. You write down anything you can, ask as many questions as you can think of. You get close, get obsessed, caught up in trying to find the story. You try angles, test theories, try to stay unbiased. Not every government project is hiding a larger social problem. Not every track with four toes and the perfect x above the metacarpal pad is a wolf track. You learn from everything imaginable, and your biases guide what you follow and where you choose to go. There are stories etched deep in every landscape if you look hard enough.

Today, following those coyote tracks, I found myself in a trance. It’s almost meditative, the inquisitive silence punctuated by gasps as you look down to see a print so clearly defined you could frame it and sell it as art. I got on all fours, trying out gaits, trying to decipher what I was seeing. I know the names—direct register walk, trot, lope—but I have so little practice picking them out in the sand. I want to be a better student, spend more time drawing and journaling and seeing everything the land has to teach me. But I like what Craig said today—try so hard to pay attention and you miss things. All of our minds wander. I’m no less holy or motivated because Ke$ha is stuck in my head, because I’m spending half of my walk across the canyonlands worrying about civil engineering. And those things that snap me out of my self-centered thoughts, the things that slap me across the face and make me sit up and pay attention—those are the things I want to learn about. And more of the than not, they’re tracks.