Chapter 1
No Human Path - The Red Road - Sagebrush - The Spring - The Water Jug
This is a poem about the world
That is ours, or could be.
Finally
One of them—I swear it!—
Would have come to my arms
But the other
Stamped sharp hoof in the
Pine needles like
The tap of sanity,
And they went off together through
The trees. When I woke
I was alone,
I was thinking:
So this is how you swim inward,
So this is how you flow outward,
So this is how you pray.
—Mary Oliver
***
Usually I walk in canyons to particular destinations, to specific features. I walk where there is water. I walk where other people walk, where there are trails. This time was different. I would be walking a path no humans walk, at least in its entirety. Humans cross this path; there is Highway 89 and there are numerous dirt roads, but these lines of travel all run counter to the path I was about to take. Humans pass on human errands. A family on vacation crosses this route, speeding down the highway. A rancher crosses too, bumping down a dusty red road in the predawn light to check his tanks.
I was going to be walking about 100 miles, following the migration route of an individual deer from her winter to summer ranges. Because this route was not a human one, I had to take human precautions. I had to find on maps all the potential springs along the way, but I had no way of determining their reliability. I decided it would be safest to drop water at about every 10 to 20 miles along the path, at least for the first leg of the journey.
I rolled into Kanab, Utah, picked up two two-and-a-half-gallon water jugs from the grocery store, and headed east on the 89. Thirty miles outside of town a sign indicated a deer migration corridor for the next four miles. Tall fencing lined the road, broken occasionally by wildlife escape ramps. The fences also channeled the animals into underpasses marked with signs urging cars not to stop. I supposed that lingering in these critical areas of passage could deter the deer from crossing the road, at least temporarily. But what would that slight delay matter? Curiosity growing, the questions began to pile up as I turned onto a red dirt road and stopped the truck on a side-road surrounded by huge, lush, sagebrush growing out of the red soil.
Lush is not a word typically used to describe this arid plant in this arid place, but lush they were, and the smell was intoxicating. The place smelled of other things: the dirt, the recent rain, the juniper, but the smell of the sagebrush overwhelmed all the others, and it was the smell of my home. I was born just 30 miles from there. I can easily imagine this smell was one of my first, and it entered my nose nearly daily for the first two years of my life. When I moved to another part of the Colorado Plateau at two and a half, the sagebrush was smaller, the junipers were sparser, everything was drier, but when it rained, the smell was almost the same. Almost. Something about the sagebrush at the base of the Vermillion Cliffs is more intense. It’s almost too much. I was concerned it might keep me awake all night.
The sun went down and the gradient sky shifted to purple. How many times has this happened since I’ve been gone? Has it happened at all?
I walked down the road to see if I could get cell service. Given that I had only been away from home for a couple days, I was still looking for distractions from the quiet, from the loudness of my thoughts that the quiet allows. Bars came and went. I didn’t need to be connected. I put the phone on airplane mode and shuffled slowly back up the dark road to the truck.
***
A silver band rung half the horizon behind junipers and the blue land for the first time. Black cows still blacker than the shadowland across which they stood tossed their heads and bawled and grunted in the predawn blackness for the first time. Little gray birds rose, flitting, turning, in controlled chaos in and out of the yellow roadside brush for the first time. The very road they lined blazed across the sagebrush plain for the first time. A raven, croaking, cut the violet gradient for the first time. Canyon wrens dropped from perch to perch, turning, hopping mechanically towards orange chinks of light for the first time. Their descending calls echoed across the vastness where my two-year-old heart and my adult heart sat side by side and the sun struck the vermillion cliffs for the first time.
Soon I was rolling down the red road again with coffee steaming from the cup in my cupholder. I parked where two canyons met, slid a two-and-a-half-gallon container into my backpack, and started up the wash. It was slow going in the sand and the four miles to the spring took two hours. Two miles an hour was a terrible pace, but any faster was probably impossible.
When I reached the spring there was water, but not much. What water there was emerged from the red dirt between bright green mosses and sagebrush and trickled slowly down the rock. There was enough to drink, and it would be possible to fill a bottle, but it would be a tricky. A black, plastic pipe planted in the ground ran to a rusty trough where the channeled water sat brown and opaque. Yes, I could drink this, but I preferred not to. I pulled the water container from my pack, shoved it under a serviceberry bush, and tucked a few rocks around it to camouflage it.
Back down the wash I trudged, the sand beginning to wear down the skin on my left heel. I sat on a boulder and dumped the sand out of my shoes for the fifth or sixth time, stuck a piece of medical tape over my blister, and kept going. When I climbed out of the wash and began walking on firmer soil toward the car a chorus of yips and howls erupted right behind me. Startled, I turned and examined the tall weeds intently, hoping to catch a glimpse of a coyote, but there was nothing. The yips faded and the wind bent the weeds and the sun baked my neck and I just stood there. They must have been following me for a while. Not as potential food, but out of curiosity. They would wait for something more attainable—a rabbit, or maybe even a fawn.
The red road took me back to the highway where I switched out of four-wheel-drive and turned west onto the pavement. Chris would be meeting me at Bryce that evening, so I headed that way.
Chapter 2
Bad Weather – Naming – Winter Range – Highway 89
The next morning, we stood at Bryce Canyon’s Yovimpa Point looking through our breath at a dusting of snow on the pink slopes below. The weather was expected to get worse, with snow above 6,500 feet statewide. The initial plan was to follow the route of one deer from her winter range near the Utah/Arizona border to her summer range near Cedar City, Utah, a journey of about 100 miles. This particular leg of the trip was going to end here in Bryce, but the discouraging forecast made it clear this was not going to be possible within our timeframe.
Chris and I quickly revised our plans and picked up some purple dishwashing gloves from the grocery store in Kanab. “No one’s ever bought me dishwashing gloves before,” said Chris. “Well, now someone has. You’re welcome,” I responded. The choice to buy the gloves came out of my insistence that there is nothing worse than walking with wet, cold hands.
While Chris and I both lived in Salt Lake City long ago, we only met and became friends after he returned to Utah after living for nine years in Boston. Interestingly, when he was back east, friends would describe him as my doppelgänger, more in terms of disposition than appearance. They said the world would explode if we ever met. It didn’t, but we did hit it off. He got into backpacking back east, driving on weekends to the White Mountains. After a breakup freed him up, he returned to the west for the space, the vastness, the feeling of walking across the desert. He would be an ideal companion on this adventure, I had planned out plenty of desert walking for him.
Five minutes from the trailhead it began pouring. We snapped on our new gloves and walked up Buckskin Mountain in dumping rain and temperatures in the low 40s, peering back occasionally at the Paria Plateau, which was half-veiled in dark streaks of rain. Horizontal orange and vertical blue. Through chattering teeth, Chris asked if the deer had a name. I told him it was Magdalena, that MD17F0104 was pretty cute, but it was hard to remember.
When I described my project to friends, their first question was always, “what’s her name?” When I read off the string of letters and numbers to one friend he simply told me that that wouldn’t do, and that I would have to name her Magdalena, which, of course, the “MD” in MD17F0104 had to stand for. I went with it. I have heard Jane Goodall talk about the naming of animals, and the pushback she received by the scientific community for giving chimpanzees human names like David Greybeard, Flint, and Goliath when she began studying them fifty or so years ago. Scientists prefer numbers. It’s easier for cataloging, so I don’t blame them. But it does feel impersonal.
How to name animals has been hotly debated for quite a while. Writers at the turn of the 20th century like Jack London, who gave their fictional animal protagonists names, were accused of imposing anthropomorphism on things that were clearly not human. Teddy Roosevelt called these writers “nature-fakers.” Critics like him opposed anthropomorphism at the time, claiming animals were lesser beings, and that the two should not be equated with one another. Now we know that many species use tools, have culture, and have language. We know that trees communicate with one another. Elephants display symbolic thought. So today’s critics of anthropomorphism have a different concern. They worry that anthropomorphism is unfair to the animal, the tree, or the mountain. As Ed Abbey says, “it’s unfair to impute the piñion jay with motivations other than his own.”[1] Agreed. But the deer has obtained a name. The naming is done.
Carl Safina says that “bringing the animals too close and keeping them too distant are equally bias-inducing, if what you need to do is see them in clear focus.”[2] Am I trying to see this deer in clear focus? Or am I trying to let her be the one who sees? To let her eyes hold an entire interior world behind them, just waiting for the external world to meet them? Both MD17F0104 and Magdalena are human constructions. So is “deer,” but maybe it is somehow closer to what I’m after in its ambiguity.
I do not know if either MD17F0104 or Magdalena is her real name, or if there are secret names that lie in all things. That’s why I’m walking. Somewhere in all this text maybe her real name will emerge. In code, maybe. Decipher it if you can. Let me know what you find. The secret name of a deer or a mountain may not take a form we are used to. It won’t be written in human language, but in wind, geology, plants, and their repetitive interactions that make possible specific identities such as that of the deer I follow. Only she and the land know this secret name, and we, by accepting this reality, may come to know it too.
***
The sun came out, warming our shoulders, and I checked the GPS (an app called TopoMaps I downloaded to my old Iphone 5) occasionally to make sure we were still moving toward the waypoints that indicated the place where the deer had wintered. We passed through areas where piñion and juniper had been removed, inundated now with cheatgrass and other nonnative grasses. No waypoints there. We passed under high voltage power lines. No waypoints there, either.
When we arrived at the winter home of the deer, a story emerged from the landscape. We left the road we’d been walking along and moved down a wash, arriving at the first waypoint where, over a month ago, she stood protected by piñion and juniper trees. The wash was dry, but provided substantial windbreaks and likely contained water when snow melted. We observed sagebrush, bitterbrush, rabbitbrush, willow, and various berry species in the area, all suitable forage for winter range.
We continued down the north side of Buckskin Mountain toward the highway, gathered the water we’d left under a big juniper, and about a half mile from the road we dropped our packs in the wet soil and made camp. Trucks sounded like they were barreling down on us where we sat boiling water and snacking on chocolate. Somewhere out in the forest, frogs croaked. I went looking for a pond but found nothing, and as I approached the sound, they stopped. Was there an ephemeral puddle out there somewhere just big enough to manifest frogs? I stood in the darkening trees for a long time just listening while the big moon began to blue the world.
The next morning, when the sun hit the trees they began clicking, and we laid out our sleeping bags in the patches of light to dry. As the morning warmed, the clicks became faster and more consistent until there was a continuous drone all around us, above and below us. Indeed, inside our very skulls. Cicadas. We walked toward the highway and tossed our trekking poles through the wildlife escape ramp before climbing up and lurching through the weeds. Then we waited as cars sped past from both directions.
For those of us who don’t hunt, we only see deer as unpredictable roadside forms which seem as if they don’t know what they’re about to do. They bound senselessly in front of Geo Metros and 18-wheelers alike. Often, they look stupid, frozen in the yellow glow of my headlights with thousands of pounds of metal charging towards them, threatening to make a human/Toyota/deer chimera out of us. But I do wonder if this apparent stupidity is actually one manifestation of the wildness of a deer that we humans don’t know how to grapple with. Are we engaging with their wildness every time we have to slam on the brakes for them? Every time we have no idea what nature is about to do? Maybe we’re engaging with wildness by killing 1.5 million deer on roads in the United States every year.[3]
Seeing a couple of humans on the side of the road, no drivers slammed on their brakes for us. We must have seemed like more responsible highway-crossers than they were used to. I wondered how many deer look both ways before crossing. It was strange to find myself in this reversed role. I was seeing the highway through the deer’s eyes, albeit in full color instead of black and white. I found it to be more challenging than expected, and if it was challenging for me, it must be damn near impossible for a deer. Or at least a gamble. They don’t seem to have figured out motor vehicle roads very well after having dealt with them now for over a hundred years. I wonder how long it would take. Or if they’re even capable of learning about roads.
On the other side of the road, under a juniper, we found the remains of a deer; some pink was still visible on the gnawed, white bone. That one didn’t make it, but most deer cross safely since the Department of Natural Resources and the Utah Department of Transportation improved this four-mile section of Highway 89 with fences, wildlife escape ramps, and underpasses. This has drastically reduced wildlife-vehicle collisions, and apparently allows MD17F0104 to cross easily and safely each year.
The next waypoints were in the piñion and juniper four or five miles away—between us and them was a sagebrush and russian thistle flat punctuated by the occasional barbed wire fence. We could see that she had blasted across this open range in mere hours and then lingered for a long time in the trees. We moved across this rangeland quickly too, heeding her advice. Additionally, I preferred to not encounter a rancher. Despite being on public land, we were not in an area typically backpacked-through, therefore our presence could potentially be confusing. Better to simply avoid an interaction. I picked up my pace, scraping my already red shins on
sagebrush and greasewood.
When we finally reached the treed hills, the landscape was entirely different. Deer prints transected thick, black biocrusts and everything was blooming and sweet-smelling. We intuited our way through the hills and found ourselves on well-used deer paths. There is always a best way to traverse a landscape, and animals tend to find it. Even we humans, now devoid of many of our instincts, managed to find the path of least resistance. We spotted the most gradual slope into an arroyo without any conscious effort, and we unwittingly copied the deers’ exit as well. Just as the mountain lion who follows the deer walks in “single register”—placing a hindfoot precisely in the impression made by the forefoot—I placed my body in precisely the place where deer placed theirs a few weeks ago. For an instant I imagined the deer and I one giant animal—she the forefoot, I the hindfoot— tethered only by concept (what concept?), our body made out of ideas (what ideas?). We were getting closer to some kind of connection, some kind of understanding.
***
But I am still studying a deer only through following dots on a screen. I still haven’t seen the actual deer, and there’s a good chance that I won’t. How connected can we really become? How much understanding can I really gain? And the dots don’t tell the whole story, either. Between them she meandered, or browsed, or stopped and raised her ears to listen. The dots are just where she happened to be every four hours when her collar sent out a signal. To get a better idea of her route I had brought the points into ArcGIS and stitched them together. The generated line connects winter to summer ranges, making a path of her whereabouts, but it’s jagged, digital. Between angular turns she walks straight as an arrow through forest and desert. She passes straight through trees as if she were a ghost.
It was a ghost that I was following, anyway. I wasn’t studying her actual behavior before my very eyes. I wasn’t observing her lower her gray head and sniff at the ground, her mule-like ears moving with sounds I cannot hear; I was just looking at the land through which she passed. And I was walking as she walked, looking as she looked, listening as she listened. Listening for what? That’s the question, which if I knew the answer to, would negate the need for walking. Is my immersion into the path of the deer the scientific method, or is it something else?
Anthropologist Tim Ingold reminds us that our typical ways of knowing the world are not the only ways. He says that before Francis Bacon and the birth of empiricism, people in medieval Europe engaged in ways of knowing that were performative. They would go along with nature, immerse themselves in it so that “any boundaries between self and other or between mind and world, far from being set in stone, [were] provisional and fundamentally insecure.”[4] They tracked animals in the book of nature as if they were following a line of text. The land before them was always unfolding, the animals continually becoming. They recognized animal behavior as traditions, performances of handing over or carrying on. In this way, each animal was not so much a living creature as it was a way of being alive. And to the medieval mind, engagement with each way of being alive “would open up a pathway to the experience of God.”[5]
Science, in contrast, became not about joining with nature but about being informed by what is already there. It was about cataloging rather than blending, which encouraged a further separation.
Ingold also tells the story of the Thunder Bird who sometimes appears to the Ojibwa people of southeastern Canada, and who seems to exist just as the thunder exists. Because they “quest for knowledge through experience, the powerful more-than-human beings that inhabit the Ojibwa cosmos, including Thunder Birds, are not analogical resources but vital interlocuters. This cosmos is polyglot, a medley of voices by which different beings, in their several tongues, announce their presence, make themselves felt, and have effects. To carry on your life as an Ojibwa person you have to tune into these voices, and to listen and respond to what they are telling you.”[6]
The quest for knowledge through experience has to include the imagination. Dreams, visions, walking without cataloging, these are all experiences, they’re performative ways of knowing. And they give non-scientists ways to engage with the natural world. Through a reengagement with tracking, following lines, performing the deer’s movement, maybe I’m making this effort. I could be carrying on the grand tradition of immersive ways of knowing.
I’m listening for the deer to speak, but I don’t know what I’m listening for. I’m listening in ways I don’t fully understand. Listening for a voice I don’t know how to hear. But through the performance of walking, maybe I’ll understand something.
Maybe her voice is the line that runs over sandstone, through sagebrush, through forest. Her voice could be the way she signed her name, looking like the shape of a cane made from a piece of twisted root, with its ferrule in the snow and its handle in a grassy meadow. The land gives her a pen and holds it with her and shows her how to write her name. Or their name.
***
As Chris and I walked we talked about everything except for the thing that should have been occupying my mind the most. The jokes got stranger and stranger. Seeing turkey prints in the wet sand we fabricated a story about a turkey thug who wears a leather jacket, a wallet on a chain, and has razor blades taped to his claws. After enough miles, conversations get weird. Nonsensical and fantastical, I thought it was exactly what I needed. My wife and I had just split up a few months before, and I was avoiding processing it at all.
I suppose maybe I took the pain, wadded it into a ball, and placed it in a dark corner, because in my dreams I was running. I was in underground factories, hurrying down long concrete hallways in the sourceless half-light. I was in the rafters of a nonfunctioning underground warehouse being chased by some invisible, Gollum-like entity. My psyche, like the stomach of a deer, was ruminating, but my conscious mind wouldn’t catch up to it until after my deer-following was done. And it wasn’t until then that deer would start to enter my dreams.
Chris and I hadn’t talked much about our intentions on this trip. I had originally asked him if he wanted to go on a “deer-following trip” and he said he would. It wasn’t until we were actually walking along that he asked me why I was doing this.
I said I chose to study this mule deer migration because it is one of the longest in Utah. I wanted to find out why MD17F0104 chooses the same exact route year after year. I hoped to learn, from an on-the-ground perspective, how the materiality of the land determines the shape that the corridor takes. And I hoped that by highlighting MD17F0104’s story, she might be revealed to be the protagonist in a story of seasonal movement and possible shifts in suitable range. I hoped the individualization of this animal would make her story—and, by extension, other animals’ stories—more impactful to humans.
Chris had other ideas. He hoped that by following her, he could reconnect to the instincts that live in all of us, those which may lie dormant and unused. Uncertainly, I said that I hoped so, too. I didn’t know it then, but later I realized that Chris was onto something.
If I was being honest, my intentions were still blurry. I was walking to figure it out. I was asking questions that developed out of my conversations with others. A couple months prior, when I began reaching out to local environmental nonprofit organizations for support with my project, I received some resistance. I explained to two different nonprofits my interest in the ways that deer might represent connections between landscapes, but they couldn’t hear me. They promptly reminded me that deer are not in need of protection, that the state protects these animals, and that the state kills predators. What I heard them saying was that deer have nothing to do with conservation, and that by emphasizing this one species, my project was at risk of overlooking other aspects of the ecosystem. I heard them saying that deer are only of interest to hunters, and we as conservationists are not part of that group. I understood, but I intuited that the story was more complex than this. And I wondered what I might learn by studying an animal known primarily as a recreation animal, from a non-recreation perspective. What could this one animal reveal about the region, the land, and the challenges that are present? I then began to wonder if there was something these environmental nonprofits could be missing. We would see.
Hunters hold a different view of deer. A survey by sociologist and deer-researcher Carol D. Miller found that hunters hunt primarily because it is a challenge. And she says that hunters construct deer in a way that enhances their own identities. They recognize the deer as skillful and wise, a master of its domain, and so by killing it, they are matching their wits to those of the animal. They don’t tend to construct deer as common, available, plentiful, or tame because this would contradict the image they’re trying to cultivate.[7]
I already found myself admiring the deer’s skill and wisdom, so I could align with the hunters in that regard. But the construction of deer as uncommon, unavailable, scarce, and wild felt like a bit of a stretch. The tall fences that line the highway, the fact that deer are collared, the hunting permit system, all tell a different story. The ancient corridor is managed, contained, subdued. In some ways it’s just a larger version of deer parks, which became popular among the wealthy in England in the 1000’s, and attempted to convey a sense of wildness yet were clearly managed by the landowners.[8]
Was I strolling leisurely through a deer park, or was I hunting weaponless for some kind of interspecies understanding? I was no longer certain. The fact that my deer-following adventure seemed silly to both conservation groups and (most likely) hunters alike is interesting in and of itself. One group asks why I would follow something not in need of protection. The other might ask why I was following a deer if I wasn’t planning on killing it. It highlights a binary I walked to dispel. Or, if I didn’t dispel the idea, I might come to believe it.
Deer weren’t always perceived so narrowly. Hominids have been hunting deer for the last 1.8 million years, and they have been the most common quarry across cultures. As well, our heavy reliance on them has positioned them as one of the most common subjects in myth and symbolism. And with the small exceptions of reindeer, and now red deer in New Zealand, deer have never been domesticated.[9] This wildness must contribute to humans’ awe and admiration for them. Deer come to us, we don’t go to them. Wildness like theirs can only be contained when the agential being gives itself to us. The hunt has shown us the entire universe approving of our endeavor to live. A direct link to the eternal, to the spiritual, and also to luck, which appears to be wrapped up in this connection.
What I was hearing from these environmental nonprofits was that deer no longer hold this meaning. If we feel like the deer is coming to sacrifice itself to us, we are fooling ourselves. They are so heavily managed that we are always going to them. We’re shooting fish in a barrel. There’s nothing wild about that. They could be right, but this made my inquiry even more important. Could I recognize some of these old meanings through following this deer, or are they lost forever?
[1] Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (New York: First Ballantine Books Edition, 1971).
[2] Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, Reprint edition (New York: Picador, 2016).
[3] John Fletcher, Deer (London: Reaktion Books, 2014).
[4] Tim Ingold, “Dreaming of Dragons: On the Imagination of Real Life,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 4 (2013): 734–52.
[5] Ingold.
[6] Ingold.
[7] Carol D. Miller, “Virtual Deer: Bagging the Big One in Cyberspace,” Ann Herda-Rapp and Theresa L. Goedeke, eds., Mad About Wildlife: Looking At Social Conflict Over Wildlife (Leiden ; Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005).
[8] Fletcher, Deer.
[9] Fletcher.