Elk

or
The Pain of Self Examination and the Subsequent Deliverance

Last Sunday we had our ecology book club meeting and one of the members asked the following question: would you be excited if you heard that several dams and cell phone towers had been blown up overnight?

I immediately answered that I would.

She responded with skepticism. “But wouldn’t you be scared?” she asked. “I mean if the system were really crashing down?”

When she first asked the question, it never occurred to me that a few blown up dams and cell phone towers might actually imply an end to the system. If the system really were crashing down, I would be scared, damn scared. But, here’s the thing, I don’t think it’ll come down—not in my lifetime. Deep down I don’t believe it’ll happen. In a really perverse way, I have faith in the system—faith that it’ll endure. What I also realized is that if it did come down, I’d be left feeling a little empty—not because I’d miss the system, but because I wouldn’t have anything left to fight for. I wouldn’t have a purpose anymore. So maybe it’s the sense of purpose that drives my anarchism more than an earnest wish to see my anarchist values put into place. In short, I’m a phony!

That night I had a dream. I was attending some sort of a performance, a performance that had an interactive quality to it and which began with a brief interview. I was asked if I have a car, for example, and a few other questions I can’t remember, but questions that one might hear at a job interview. Later (there’s a gap here that I can’t remember) I was asked by the company organizing the show if my uncle (or someone like my uncle) could use my car for his driver’s test. I agreed and then watched as my car was wrecked pulling out of a parking space. I got furious. Then, when I realized my uncle’s insurance wouldn’t cover the damage and he was unwilling to pay out of pocket and the company who asked to borrow my car in the first place was equally indifferent to remedying the problem—I got even more furious. The dream goes on but that’s all I remember. I know, it seems like a pretty trivial and arcane incident, but I think the feelings it evoked are somewhat meaningful. Here’s why. First, even as I was dreaming, I felt taken aback by my initial response to my car getting wrecked. As an anarchist who’s fully committed to the slacker lifestyle (living outside the labor economy as much as possible), I shouldn’t have reacted so strongly to the prospect of losing a little money, especially since my current financial situation is pretty stable. What really bothered me in the dream, I think, is the fact that I felt let down. I trusted these people with my car and they failed me. What’s interesting about that is that I’m not supposed to trust in the system, anyway (I’m an anarchist!), yet clearly I do. So I’ve been exposed, first in my waking life and now in my dreams, as a fraud. Moreover, my uncle, someone with a kind of outsider status in my family (but also a ward of the system, in a way), seemed to get really pissed off at the fact that I was making such a fuss. Maybe he saw through me. Maybe this dream is confirming the self doubt inspired by the question raised at the book club meeting; maybe it’s telling me that there’s more of a rift between my ideals and my actions/emotions than I think there is. Maybe it’s showing me just how enslaved to the system I really am.

Needless to say, I started to get a little down on myself. And by Wednesday, my birthday, I was pretty depressed. Since my birthday last year was ruined by a psycho girlfriend I had at the time, I decided that this year would be a private affair—and I went hiking. The weather, though, suggested I should’ve made other plans. The clouds got darker as I got to the highway, and by the time I left the city boundaries, I was hydroplaning at every curve. Nevertheless, I was determined—determined and also quite contemplative about aging another year, so contemplative in fact that I missed my exit and wound up taking an unfamiliar detour where there were no marked hiking trails. But, like I said, I was determined. So, even though there wasn’t a trail, I pulled off to the side of the road and made my way into the trees. By this time, it had stopped raining. As if by miracle, I had found the only square mile in Colorado where the rain had, at least for a moment, stopped.

As soon as I got to where I couldn’t see the road, I slowed my pace and started to take in my surroundings. The cloud-darkened skies, the mist, and the shade from the pines gave everything a soft obscure glow, and, just like that, I was enchanted.

I made my way to the top of a ridge and looked down. Suddenly, from about twenty feet away, a rock stood up and looked at me. It was an elk. A beautiful, tall, regal, chestnut-brown elk wondering if I was a predator. Seconds later, another twenty rocks stood up, and, being led it seemed by the elk in front of me, they galloped away. They were moving too fast for me to follow, so I sauntered along what was left of a deer (or more likely an elk) trail, which took me several times away from the ridge’s edge and then back again. Though I took my time, enjoying the solitude of the pines and stooping every now and then to run my hands through the dew-tipped grass or to ponder my mortality in front of a pile of old bones, I kept running into the elk every time the trail led back to the spine of the ridge. By the time I reached the crest of the hill, the elk were a mere ten feet away or so, their eyes searching below the hill for me while I spied from behind a clump of trees. They loitered for a minute, then fell off the opposing hillside and disappeared. I tried to follow, reaching the edge of the hill only seconds later, but they were gone—vanished, it seemed, into the earth. I was awestruck. The deftness with which they leapt the barbed wire fence at the top of the hill, the sheen on their hides, the easy grace of their trot, the apparent poise they showed in the face of danger, made me feel as if I’d chanced upon a secret witch dance, but without a movie screen to protect me. The effect only increased as I descended the hill, now in a gentle quiet rain, and got back into my car.

I no longer questioned whether I’d miss civilization if it came down. I wouldn’t. I was in love with the outdoors, with the elk, the trees, the mist, and the rain—and with every person I met that day. And I felt no fear. I wasn’t fighting for a “cause”; I was fighting for something I loved. (Art—the theater, I realized—was a mere substitute for what I missed by not being in contact with the beauty of nature). And that makes all the difference. I would still be afraid if the system started crashing down around me. Transitions are difficult, no matter how necessary. But, right now, at least, I’d be more excited than afraid. Kind of peculiar how loving life makes you less afraid to lose it—less afraid to die.

Maybe the most inspiring thing I saw in the elk was their courage. For all they knew, I could’ve been a hunter with an easy shot. And, while certainly not laying down to let me take better aim, they didn’t seem overly panicked. Their black eyes were alert, but still soft, ingratiating, accommodating, and unknowable—like temperate pools of confidentiality—like the natural world.

Seeing elk in a zoo or even on a free-roaming ranch isn’t the same as seeing them in the outdoors, especially when you’re alone. Seeing them in the outdoors is like seeing the flash of fin in the waves as opposed to the flogged octopus spread out on the sunny asphalt (see “Link”). It’s like seeing the woman of your dreams stop on an anonymous street corner, look at you knowingly, smile, and then rejoin the crowd.