Wilderness Interface Zone

Saturday night, my husband and I made a last minute run to the only grocery store within 22 miles before it closed at 9 p.m.  On the return trip, I drove with the SUV’s highbeams on, because we live on a country road whereon we’re likely to come across animals on the pavement, everything from cats, rabbits, deer, mice and coyotes (toads in the summertime) to neighbors’ loose horses and cattle.

As we arced along a curve, the vehicle’s lights splashed against something moving on the road.  A small cottontail had emerged from cover, probably looking for something to eat where the unusually heavy and long-lingering snow had melted back from the asphalt’s edges.  Seeing and hearing the truck, the rabbit bolted unsteadily toward us.  I hit the brakes.  “A bunny,” I said.  As our vehicle slowed to a stop, we saw another flash in the headlights, high up in the air to our right.  A great horned owl dropped out of the darkness into the swath of our lights, swinging its talons toward the rabbit, working its wings to correct its trajectory.  “Whoa!” we said, surprised by the sudden drama. The cottontail feinted right, seemingly away from the owl but still heading toward the car.  The owl hesitated mid-air, quite possibly blinded in our headlights, then tumbled to the ground a good two feet off its away-scampering target.  For a moment, the bird sat the roadside, staring after the rabbit.  It looked like it considered giving chase but, glancing at us, seemed to decide the risk wasn’t worth it. The opportunity had passed.  With another flash of wings it lifted away, back into darkness above the highbeams.

I don’t remember who said it, but one of us said, “Wow, that was something.”  I asked, “Is the bunny under our car?”  It would be a grief if the rabbit, having escaped the owl, suffered death beneath our tires.  My husband grabbed a Maglite and slid out to look.  “No bunnies under the car,” he said, getting back in, and we drove the very short distance home.  “A bunny lived a little longer and an owl possibly went hungry because we were there,” I said to my husband.

Probably many of us have had this experience—happening to be somewhere then seeing our being there affect some outcome, perhaps powerfully.  It actually occurs more than we might realize.  Sometimes just choosing to walk out your door is enough to engage you in a phenomenon; sometimes your involvement in an incident occurs only in witnessing it, which is no small thing, since, one way or another, witnessing an event inevitably changes it.

Example: One day I was walking home from BYU when a commotion in a hedgerow caught my attention.  I heard small birds’ panicked shrieking, then a kestrel flew out of the hedge clutching a sparrow in its talons.  The image of the silhouette of that sparrow rising toward its end, its head hung, its beak parted, has stayed with me for years. While I think that drama was well on its way before I arrived, my being there to witness it became part of the event and it entered my life.  My telling of it now expands its occurrence.

Here’s an example of my more direct yet unintentional involvement in a similar experience.  After we moved to SE Utah, one morning I walked out my front door in a routine act of departure.  A flock of juncos rummaging the yard for seeds took to flight at the sight of me.  Perhaps because they’d invested attention in me and/or were involved in reading each other’s movements, they didn’t see the mid-sized hawk arrowing toward them till too late.  The hawk struck one bird in flight, knocked it senseless, then snatched it up as it floundered against the ground.  It all happened too fast for me to even be able to identify what kind of hawk had benefited from my unwitting assistance.  Lesson (still being ) learned.  I am grateful that I was aware enough to see what happened; many times, I’m not.

Back in the bad old days when I lived along the Wasatch Front, I went on my usual morning walk through town on a route that took me past an elementary school.  As I started up the hill, ahead of me on the opposite side of the street I saw a boy of about eight or nine years old chucking fair-sized rocks at a girl following him that I’d guess was kindergarten age or maybe first grade.  As I processed what was going on, the boy pegged her a good one on the leg.  The girl’s face contorted.  She sat down on the sidewalk, grabbed her leg, and cried.  The boy picked up another rock.  “Hey!” I yelled from half a block away. “Stop it!”  The boy turned, saw me, dropped the rock.  Unsure of what to do or what I was going to do, he stood, fidgeting, ‘til I walked past.  After I’d proceeded up the road a bit, I turned to see what course of action he’d chosen.  He’d crossed the road, leaving the girl sitting in a sulk on the sidewalk where he’d stoned her.  I don’t enjoy giving orders, but the moment seemed to require it.  “Go back and help her cross the street,” I said.  Obediently, the boy turned back, helped the girl up, led her to the corner and across the usually-busy-but-then-empty road.

The obvious effects of my “happen stance”—of my happening to be there at that moment and becoming involved—was that the boy stopped throwing rocks at the girl for the time being and then saw to her safety as he helped her cross the road and led her to the school.  The less obvious effects?  Who can say.  But they include whatever impact the incident had upon me, that changed me, and that now carries forward into whatever meaning the telling of this story gives rise to.

It really is a beautiful, terrible, endless, destructive/creative, full-bodied participatory world, where events echo and continue to unfold moment-to-moment.  Where they arise in language, such as in the telling of these stories, they likewise “happen,” engaging readers in the continuity of events by of their choice to drop by WIZ today.  I’ve said this before, but human language is every bit as active as any other action and not merely passive expression or the diluted by-product of an action.  It is.  It does.

Many is the time I’ve gone out into nature, become involved, and surprise and confusion stripping me of favorite clothing of suppositions, found myself wondering, “What just happened?”  I might not have achieved much during the experience itself, but as I considered my actions afterward, I took another happen stance—that of self-appraisal, of witnessing the movements of my own body and mind across the landscape of an event and then choosing differently.  Such after-the-fact choices might only affect the outcome of the enlivening event in how they change me.

The incident of the cottontail and the owl has carried forward in this blog post—given rise to it, in fact.

Is life just too much, or what?

Anyway, it’s always more than we know.