Free write on the Wolf-man encounter (vignette #2 yesterday's post leaving off at...)
...I discover soon enough that he knows perfectly well wolves do not inhabit the Santa Cruz mountains. He asks the question because wolves are what he wants to talk about...
I don’t know a lot about the wolf situation in Idaho. What I do know I’ve heard from my pro-wolf friends which is that the wolves are entitled to protection. They’ve painted the anti-wolf crowd as gun-happy rednecks with a low IQ. My friend Callie tells me that while vacationing in Idaho she spotted a personalized license plate that read: NO WOLFS.
“Well,” JR says. “One of ‘em just crossed into California so it’s only a matter of time.”
He puts his magazine on his lap. It’s Muscle Magazine. On the cover is a gleaming close up of a man’s torso, biceps look ready to burst.
It doesn’t fit at all, JR having this magazine. I’d expect maybe Cigar Aficionado or American Hunter.
He raps on my knee with his knuckles which makes me jump a little, but there’s nothing suggestive about a rap on the knee. He points to one of the biceps.
“Imagine this muscle right here is Canada. The wolf crossed over here to Washington, traveled to Oregon and moved into California right about here.” He indicates a vein wrapped so tightly around the bulge circulation seems impossible.
“He’s been cut off from his pack, see. And he’s trying to find a female. He’s been traveling over forty miles a day. No wolves in California though.
A lone wolf. I see him in silhouette as he trots along the edge of cliffs. Imagine him hunkering down on a bed of redwood needles for the night, sleeping light after his one, solo howl bounces unanswered off canyon walls.
“Not since 1924,” JR says. “My guess is he’s likely to head back to Oregon along this route,”
He’s back to the bicep.
I get sleepy when people throw around dates and try to acclimate me geographically. I stifle a yawn and JR senses he’s losing me. He raps on my knee again.
“You ever seen a cougar in person?”
I don’t tell people about the lions anymore. The truth is I see them too often. More than any of my neighbors. I see them when they’re not supposed to be around, like midday on mountain roads. They’re supposed to be nocturnal. They’re supposed to be light brown to golden, but I see a black one cross the road about fifty feet in front of me, and linger for a moment as he watches from the shadows, his long tail floats a few inches off of the ground.
That’s one of the ways you know it’s a cougar—the tail. It’s long and curls up a little at the bottom. When a cougar is in motion, the tail doesn’t hit the ground, but floats suspended in a downward slope.
My dogs see him too. They sit suddenly, on their very best behavior. Another dog or a cat they’d bark their heads off and just about yank my arm out of the socket.
I tell everyone about my first few sightings. I pull up alongside other runners in my car, roll down my window and say “Just so you know, I saw a cougar alongside this road last week,” They look around, a little freaked out, not sure. Maybe they don’t believe me. Maybe they do, but they’ve researched the stats and know that cougars almost never attack people. Almost never.
I tell my friend Mary, a neighbor and nurse at the hospital where I work.
“Another one?” she says, her eyes widen.
“By the alpaca ranch,” I say.
A week later two alpacas are attacked, but not killed.
Smart cougar. Imagine the fur ball.
“I see them all the time,” I tell JR. “So often that I don’t tell people anymore.”
“Why not?” he asks.
“I barely believe it myself.”
It’s not that I’m prone to hallucinations. There’s only been one period in my life when I see something that isn’t there. Spiders. Big spiders, suspended inches over my head. I wake up in the middle of the night and literally jump out of bed like those traumatized Vietnam vets we see in movies, you know when they hear a firecrackers or a helicopter. I Race to the light switch, flip it on and crouch down. No spider. Oh my god! Is it on me? I strip off my clothes and scrub my fingers through my hair like a madwoman. I rip the sheets off of the bed, take out the vacuum, examine every nook and cranny. Nothing.
This happens night after night and always when my husband is in Mexico for five week stretches.
I’m not anxious when he’s gone. It’s true that my young daughters and I are alone at the end of a remote mountain road, but we have our dogs and I feel safe.
Other than taking mushrooms two or three times, it’s not like I’m having flashbacks from past hallucinogenic abuse—never acid or anything like that.
Yet night after night—not always consecutively—there might be a few days between visits, but the spiders come back, primal terror, and nothing. Afterwards I sit up in bed with the light on, too terrified to go back to sleep. I’m exhausted.
There’s this German woman I work with--Prema. A name she was given by some guru. Prema is a bossy know-it-all and I hate to reveal any kind of vulnerability to her, but I know she’s up on dreams and symbolism and I’m feeling desperate. I tell her about the spiders.
“You must listen to the spider woman,” she says. “She is trying to tell you something.”
“But what do spider dreams mean? You know, symbolically?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “What matters is what she means to you.”
My friend Edwin, a minister, laughs at Prima’s interpretation.
“How does she know it’s a female?” Still, he thinks it’s a warning of some sort. “Let’s face it,” he says. “It’s terrifying you. You can’t sleep. It only shows up when you’re alone. It can’t be a good thing”
He thinks it’s a sign that I need to stop fucking around and come to Christ.
I never really get to the bottom of the spider thing. The last time I see a one I’m on a plane- my first trip to Europe. I fall asleep and wake up and on the seatback in front of me is a spider made of pure, brilliant light. It moves its legs, and glistens and throws off shimmering rays before it bursts into billions of sparkling fragments and evaporates. Just disappears. I blink and there’s nothing there.
I feel calm. I look at the girls happily chatting across the aisle from and me and snuggle into Michael's shoulder
So yes, there was that. The spider incident. But that was almost twenty years ago.
The lions are different.
They don’t scare me. I get scared a little afterwards, when I think about it, but the two times I’m on foot and see one I watch it disappear soundlessly into the forest and I keep walking. I look over my shoulder a little bit, pull my dogs in closer to me, but I keep walking.
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