Belonging — with, not to
Something really wonderful graced the internet last month. It was this trail camera footage from December 4 of a wolverine spotted outside the northernmost developed area in Yellowstone:
I don’t know more than any member of the public about the precise location of that trail camera. My final tour as an NPS seasonal in Yellowstone — when I might’ve learned such inside info from a coworker or old friend working among the wildlife biology ranks — was over six years ago, and all reporting on the trail camera system that captured the wolverine indicates the primary aim of that motion-activated surveillance effort has been monitoring cougar activity since 2014.
Nonetheless, that any wolverine was captured on camera in Yellowstone in the latter days of 2020 is not small potatoes. The last estimate of wolverines in the contiguous U.S. had them numbering only a few hundred, and the last estimate for Yellowstone’s resident population was in the single digits. So this was exciting content for anybody who’s into one of the rarest and most climate-vulnerable circumpolar species on our planet. However, that one was sighted as far west as Mammoth with denning season for reproductive females just several weeks out, struck me as astonishing.
The only eyewitnesses to wolverine activity in the park that I knew personally prior to 2014 were a pair who were year-round residents at the Tower government area, which is not far south of Mammoth, but is far enough east that the trending hypothesis had always been that any wolverine that came through likely denned some distance north and west in the Beartooths. The suspicion was that Tower Junction, which is about mid-way between the park’s north and northeast entrances, could conceivably be near the western perimeter of a Beartooth wolverine’s home range. For reference, in the last pockets of the Lower 48 that can accommodate wolverines, a reproductive male’s home range typically exceeds a couple hundred square miles in size.
It’s not as though Mammoth, which is maybe 15 miles west of Tower as the crow flies, would be that out of the way for an animal that regularly covers hundreds of miles of country at its famously tireless lope. It’s just that they’re usually bound to environments with heavy snowfall and cool year-round temperatures, and it’s difficult to imagine the utility for them in hanging out below subalpine elevations of 9,000 feet for much more than a drive-by on their territorial patrol rounds.
If not for last month’s footage, I would’ve struggled to fathom a Greater Yellowstone wolverine of breeding age with a territory encompassing anywhere close to Mammoth. Not because they’re not highly resilient creatures that are well-versed in the art of making adaptive lemonade. But I suppose because it’s so close to the largest developed area in the park. Hell, for years, I thought the tales of a wolverine trading snarls with the Tower couple’s golden retrievers through the window next to their woodpile was a bunch of codswallop. But then I lived and worked at Tower in the summer of 2014 and watched one lope across the entrance to the government area in broad daylight.
In the moment it happened, I remember going back and forth between thinking I’d merely seen a strange badger with gigantism that manifested in an elongated torso, or believing that I’d hallucinated the whole thing. The prospect that I had seen a larger cousin of badgers from the weasel family didn’t even cross my mind until several days later.
One of my good pals out there mentioned he and his supervisor had spotted one in the sagebrush flat on the opposite side of the road, still just a stone’s throw from the government area. They were just hitting the road for a backcountry hitch when they saw it and stopped their truck immediately to get out, hoping they might catch a better look. But the effort was moot. The creature was long gone, or at least undetectable to the feeble faculties of us modern upright bipedal-types who wear clothes and navigate more of our lives by the year with the assistance of silicon gremlins.
Their story brought me to grips with the reality of what I’d seen some days earlier. And it kind of left me petrified. For a long time, it was hard to express how I felt about it. It’s only the second time in my life that I recall feeling like I was given exclusive access to see something that, in sheer statistical terms, I should never get a chance to see as a human being living in this century.
Before either such experience, landscapes were really the only thing that had ever induced a similar effect. For me, there is always an intense feeling of belonging that accompanies any run-in with something that feels alive, rich with biomass, bearing the scars of ancient geological processes, and well isolated from any human activity. That feeling mostly eludes me in the synthetic world of organized human society, and it’s a large reason that I identify so strongly with southwest Montana and the Greater Yellowstone backcountry that I sort of got to come of age in. However, there is a marked difference in the degree of that feeling — simultaneously one of undeserved access and primal belonging — when the subject of it is a moving target and not a comparatively fixed thing like a landscape.
For me, a wolverine sighting feels like a considerably greater, far less earned privilege. Unless I had been deliberately on its trail through GPS chip or collar data, or had lured it into a trap with fresh meat, my choices and movements that day had no bearing on the encounter. I just happened to get out of a utility truck and turn around in time to see a notoriously elusive being as it was going about its life that day. And I very nearly missed it. The only previous experience in my life that felt comparable was in May 2013.
In the final days of my second year of undergrad in Virginia, I had finished printing off a bunch of materials that I would turn in as a final portfolio for my creative nonfiction class. I’ve never been much of a productive night owl, but in rare form, it must have been close to midnight by the time I emerged from the library. After I’d walked some distance away, for no practical reason that I can recall, I turned around and faced north. I had done so just in time to watch an extremely bright green, yellow, and orange streak of light fall elegantly through the sky, ultimately plunging out of sight behind the library.
I was definitely not the only person out and about at that hour on a college campus. But I didn’t hear any excited utterances of “whoa!” or “did you see that?!” from any of the dozens of people within eyeshot that night. So, as with the wolverine scenario more than a year later, one of my first instincts was to assume I’d hallucinated. Not that I’d just been perhaps the sole witness in the vicinity to a cosmic light show taking place in some mysterious realm, mega-fathoms beyond our terrestrial existence.
I believe it was a week or two later, after I had already returned to Montana for the summer, that I did some internet sleuthing and found that something called a fireball meteor had been spotted in several East Coast states on the same night and at the exact time I had seen the fireball pirouette down and out of sight. It was one of two seen that night. The second was the one I saw, a bright fireball over central Pennsylvania reported by witnesses in Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia that sailed across the sky around 11:45pm ET.
I’m sure such sightings aren’t especially rare among avid stargazers who monitor meteor activity regularly, but as an oblivious schmuck who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to witness something so beautiful and ephemeral, I’m inclined to wonder about these things. And at the risk of overwhelming people with chronic talk of synchronicities, the materials that I had printed in that 2013 episode before walking out of the library were for an instructor who’d written a book about the vanishing darkness of our night sky, the first edition hardcover of which made it into the world that July. I didn’t manage to acquire and read it until a solstice sojourn out to the Southwest some years later, but it left an indelible impression when I finally did. I would go so far as to say it shed light on a phenomenon that consumes many of my waking hours these days, wherein there are so many things that have never been governed by humans that are more and more influenced by, and at the mercy of, human activity.
I do think the way that phenomenon applies to other terrestrial creatures humans share a home (Earth) with is a little different from how it applies to stuff we share a broader universe with. For example, with the elusive critters among us, the biochemical and behavioral impact of our activity is more direct and immediate — even if “immediate” means it takes decades or centuries to observe. In evolutionary terms, that’s the blink of an eye.
By contrast, with things like meteors and all modes of intergalactic wonders, I suspect it’s not impossible that our choices could touch stuff that far away in a concrete, material way eventually. But in the immediate term, I certainly think our activity can impoverish our awareness of, and appreciation for, our gaseous cosmic cohabitants. My former instructor’s book, The End of Night, is kind of about that. It’s about how edifying, grounding, formative, and healthy it is to be able to have true darkness and to be able to see things like the Milky Way relative to our little spot in the universe, and how much harder it is to do that in an industrialized world that’s mired in our artificial light, rampant commercial interests, and disorganized circadian rhythms.
The prospect of an existence on our planet without any way to avoid traces of human activity is deeply sad to me. And for reasons I tried to hash out back in August about my relationship to society, I really can’t imagine anything that would make me feel more lonely. This dissonance of human activity leaching into worlds and lives we don’t have dominion over has been a real bother to me for most of my adult life, and probably most prominently since reading Doug Chadwick’s The Wolverine Way for the first time back in August 2015.
Chadwick’s book chronicles the Glacier Wolverine Project. At the time, the five-year project that ended in 2007 was an unprecedented study of the most significant population of wolverines left in the Lower 48. And “significant” in this case means probably no more than 50 individuals, only a handful of which are breeding age and contributing to the genetic diversity (and by extension, survivability) of the species.
Of what is known about wolverines, there’s certainly much to admire about them as multifaceted beings. They’ve carved out an impressive niche for themselves as modest-sized carnivores. They seem to thrive in the least forgiving conditions. They’re persistent as hell. Pound for pound, you’d be hard-pressed to find a fitter or stronger critter. Mature ones are principally solitary, but there is evidence that they retain long-term social bonds with their immediate family members — challenging all our conventional wisdom about selection pressure, which would presumably pit them against each other, in constant and fierce competition for what little viable habitat there is left for them south of Canada. All of that is animated in compelling fashion in Chadwick’s account of his time volunteering for the Glacier project. But the lasting effect of the book for me was a sense of how much cooperation it’s going to take from humans, commerce, and all the layers of bureaucracy involved in the management of natural resources to make a coordinated effort to give our greater-than-human neighbors a shot at posterity in the only terrain they have left to occupy in this century.
And I guess it’s easy to shrug off all that’s needed to do this in the vanishing window we have to do so if you don’t feel a sense of responsibility to sustain the living world, or if you feel like undomesticated non-human beings live a world away from us. But I find it far easier to derive a sense of identity, kinship, and belonging from shit that humans didn’t have a hand in engineering, extracting, or otherwise subduing to their will. And that’s made me wonder if where we get our sense of identity or purpose or status from fits into this meta-narrative.
For my part, my sense of identity as an adult has never been tied up in what I can own or conquer, nor has it been tied up in my occupation or my vendettas. Realizing that felt notable insofar as I have felt a need recently to do an audit of how I understand what I guess you could call my own origin story, and my reason for being based upon it. I won’t say I’ve landed on some sort of sealed and notarized narrative of me because I’m starting to think even something as seminal to our existence as our sense of identity is probably not static. But in the process of trying to wrap my mind around some major events in the U.S. that I think consumed all of us last month, I did at least come up with some things that I think a healthy sense of identity, purpose, or status cannot be based on.
In short, if a sense of identity hinges exclusively on endangering, objectifying, scapegoating, or outright harming other beings, I can’t imagine it has much substance. And, I don’t know, I’ve read some books in my life, and I feel like history bears that out, right? Anyway, I’ve been trying to reflect on the extent to which I’ve had to dehumanize other human beings (most of whom are Republican lawmakers or billionaires) to make their existence make coherent sense within my concept of reality.
I don’t possess the psychological chops to really understand what motivates a lot of people in a way that will allow me to see them as anything other than toxic and abominable. I’ll own that. But I am trying to examine how I’ve perpetuated the cycle of violent dehumanization that I know is just a dead end. And I have to implicate myself in saying this, but it feels so sophomoric that we’re not even good at being humane toward other humans. Like, if we can’t even get on the same page about something like white supremacy being a paramount issue in our social fabric, it feels like we’re such a long way out from dismantling the anthropocentrism that allows us to view other living things as somehow entirely distinct from us — as though our fates are unrelated.
But what’s been interesting to me is how something that goes on in the synthetic society we’ve created very closely mirrors our lack of appreciation for shit like wolverines and a dark night sky. Something that’s become a pretty intense preoccupation of mine is the inflow of affluent people to places in the Mountain West like my hometown. It’s by no means a new development — there’s always been an enclave of ultra-wealthy second-home owners who find their way into pristine mountain towns, but something is changing. It’s not just that there’s been a recent uptick in that inflow of people with means who can telework (or not work) and decide to move to some charming montane hamlet, displacing several long-time residents in the process — though that trend has certainly been exacerbated by the pandemic.
What I think is changing is that people are actually talking about the consequences of this economic disparity now, and how unsustainable it is. And I know I’m not the only person to notice. Referencing a very excellent High Country News story about Crested Butte, Colorado that hit the world wide web on January 1, Melodie Edwards — who hosts the terrific Wyoming Public Radio podcast called The Modern West — had this to say:
She absolutely nails what’s been going on in a collective sense. But what I’ve only recently been able to articulate about why this phenomenon personally troubles me so deeply is that it consistently entails displacing the people who make these communities vibrant. To me, it always means making a place less livable for the people who make it meaningful. And I actually think that parallels industrial society’s track record with the living world. In the extractive paradigm, prosperity for a small number of humans has always meant making our world less habitable for other humans and other species. It has also meant making our experience of that which we can’t monetize more impoverished. In the case of our night sky, for example, I suspect we’d be much more concerned about preserving darkness if there was a way to harness it in terms of a commercial transaction.
I’m sure there’s a critical mass of people who will never think that any of this is that disturbing, but here’s the deal: I don’t want to live in a world that’s only livable for human beings and machines. That is the stuff of nightmares for me, and I will have to throw in the towel if I’m still around when we get there.
Modern society as humans have devised it has a way of making me feel like I constantly have to compete or be owned by someone. Outside of organized society, I actually feel like I belong with this world — not to one person with money, power, and a mind to game the system and own it all, who also happens to occupy the same planet as me. Even if I don’t really stand much chance at survival without modern conveniences and my ability to move in and out of remote and treacherous places with relative ease, I will take belonging with remote landscapes and the beings that live in them over belonging to something or someone every time.
I struggle to imagine a universe where I’d ever feel the need to possess something that I feel connected to as if it were my private property. Maybe that’s because I come from peasant stock, but I can’t imagine feeling differently. Not when I’m aware of the arbitrariness of our economic systems and the fact that we’re all made of dead star matter that never consciously chose to materialize as human beings in this time and space we all find ourselves in. I guess it’s for that reason — that none of us chose to be here — that I feel a sense of responsibility to try to make this place livable for the things that make the difficulty of being human bearable, and sometimes even worth it.
In the past few months, one of the biggest breakthroughs in my reading about healing from trauma was this explanation of the midline structures of the brain where we process different aspects of our self-awareness. What blew my wig back was this finding that many of those midline regions are offline in folks who’ve been exposed to chronic trauma. And apparently, it’s often only the region responsible for processing our basic orientation in space that’s still online in these same folks prior to doing exercises and therapies to bring the rest of the midline structures back online. If you hung out here with me back in December, you know some of the backstory, but the short of it is that my sense of self-awareness has always been almost exclusively defined by my relationship to where I grew up, and wherever I am relative to it at a given time in my life.
In my own recovery journey, I certainly think it’s worthy to work toward and aspire to a more complete concept of myself, preferably one that includes greater access to sense perception than what I’ve been limited to for most of my life thanks to sustained trauma in developmentally critical years. However, what I think I initially read as something discrediting or pathological — a quality of my nervous system in need of serious rehabilitation — actually feels like it will always to some degree be the cornerstone of my sense of who I am. That is, I think I will always identify principally with the physical landscape I grew up in. I think I will always be sensitive to where I’m oriented relative to it. And as far as sources of identity go, I think that’s a pretty damn benign one, even if it is only a piece of a much larger whole that will eventually come into focus.
I feel like it’s that sense of identity that makes me want to figure out how to make places like my hometown and the subalpine climes of the Lower 48 livable for the beings and the experiences that make those such precious places to live. I have some raw hunches about ways I might be able to make myself of use in such efforts, but nothing definite or in motion. I hope some ideas firm up before it’s too late, and I’m cautiously optimistic that they will.
As I mentioned at the top of this month’s dispatch, I don’t know about the exact location of the trail camera that captured last month’s footage of a wolverine in Yellowstone. The appearance of what looks to be a breeding-age wolverine “outside Mammoth” had me internally speculating about what adjacent alpine regions, if not the Beartooths, could support a den site. But I don’t think that’s ultimately important. That there are any gulos out and about these days, coming from anywhere within a hundred miles is enough to make me think some natural processes are still working, not because of, but in spite of human activity.
For good measure, I asked my mom something the other day. Legend has it that in my lifetime, people have routinely been able to still see northern lights from just outside my hometown. I asked her if she thought that was still the case despite the pace of development in southwest Montana, and she said, definitively, it was. She recalled that within the past several years, she and an old coworker who were in the office early one morning decided to drive to the large pullout for the Rescue Creek trailhead, just barely inside the park boundary, for a pre-dawn glimpse of the aurora. I have no photographs to show for that, and I doubt I know anyone who does. But this month’s image features another area my mom has cited as a prime place to watch the dancing lights of the aurora glow behind the south Gallatins. And this fact is probably interesting to only me, but the May 9, 2013 date for this photo suggests I took it very soon after returning to Montana for that summer, mere days after sighting a fireball in Virginia.
I guess this is all a long way of saying that it heartens me to know that the landscape I consider home sweet home eternal still plays host to the elusive forms of life and strange tricks of light and physics. I hope that’s always the case as long as I’m around.
