The Ungovernable

“We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.” …Eleanor Roosevelt

Somewhere in one of my texts for a university political science class, I read that the first rule of political science is: The world is ungovernable. And one of the few ways humanity can overcome this ungovernability is to encounter some kind of genuine outside threat that will force us—a family, a community, a nation, a species—to cooperate.

Bull Elk, © Ken Rodgers 2012

You may find the association unusual but I thought of this “rule” last Friday evening as Betty and I and some other folks stood outside in the cool night in Garden Valley, Idaho, and listened to elk bugle. We were staying, along with communications and internet guru Stephanie Worrell, with friends Ken McKay and Elaine Ambrose the night before Elaine’s fifth annual Write by the River retreat.

Not only were competing males, or bulls, bugling across the meadows—the distinctive sound caught in the nooks and headers of the pine-covered ridges—but we also heard chirps, mews, squeals, whines, barks and bleats. The language of an elk herd. One bull, the male who seemed to be closest to the herd, sounded like he possessed the best bugle with the most music and oooomph at the end, and I speculate that he was the leader of the harem and also the herd.

With a flashlight, you could barely see a few of the elk, mostly an outline of their large-deer bodies and the beam of the flashlight reflected in their eyes. We guessed there were sixty or seventy out there.

All the bugling and chirps and mews were a serenade that rose into the night. A serenade by an elk symphony with different and individuated voices singing at us. Something about the music touched me. I don’t know what it was. A similar feeling as when I perch on a mountain top and see the Milky Way strung out over me like an artistic morph of a time lapse photo of LA freeways. Or the music from the singing of a thousand toads and frogs awakened by the late summer rains that wash the dust from a desert sky. Or the liquid gold notes from competing meadowlarks as their mating cries skip along the tops of sagebrush at dawn. A feeling that clutches me in the gut and squeezes out an emotion so primitive it’s hard for me to articulate…an emotion born of eons of familiarity between the molecules that now inhabit me and make me the twin, the cousin, the relative of all the things that ever were and will become.

Later, we heard the crash and crack of antlers as the bull elk battled over who would govern the harem of cows and as a reward, and a duty, breed the females and perpetuate the line. And that was part of the symphony, too, the conflict within a species to make sure the top bull passes on the best traits to ensure the survival of the species. A chaotic mix of cooperation, begetting, and battle carried across the breezeless nighttime meadows of the Idaho mountains.

It also occurred to me as I stood there and listened to elk music that even in the face of the chaos of breeding, the music was something that anyone could hear for miles…any friend, any enemy. Besides the goofy preening and posturing that I knew the males were doing as they bugled, they still managed to stay focused on what dangers might be around—men, cougars, bear, wolves, coyotes, all which live in the general vicinity. And just as important as breeding and begetting is survival in the moment, for both the elk and us, and for that matter everything else that lives on Earth.

Ken Rodgers, photo courtesy of Kevin Martini-Fuller

All this takes me back to the poli-sci business of being ungovernable that begins this blog. The thing that keeps these elk together and working as a herd is the fact that something might eat them or their young. They have their conflicts, but the need to keep the herd together and protected is crowned over all other behavior.

And that makes me wonder about us, in this country, right now, and all the rancor and division that comes with, I suppose, democracy in action. But it seems to me that the bile only gets worse, and from both sides; epithets like “liar,” “idiot,” and other names for those who don’t agree with what we want and think. I wonder if we might end up eating ourselves, metaphorically speaking, instead of being eaten (Read: destroyed) by outside enemies. To quote the cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” It seems to me we need to see our problems as something bigger, something approaching a national survival crisis, so we can come together once again and be “governable.” Like the elk herd that performed for us in Garden Valley, Idaho.

On John Rember, Sun Valley and Ernest Hemingway

This morning Betty and I are in Sun Valley, Hollywood in Idaho, at the Sun Valley Film Festival. Our film wasn’t chosen to be screened but our friend and mentor, Christopher Beaver has a film—Tulare-The Phantom Lake—entered and he invited us to represent him since he would be busy filming elsewhere.

Besides representing Chris, we will be doing some networking with film folk and as always, finding time for Betty to practice her photography.

Sun Valley is a beautiful place, but like many locations that sport ski areas, it seems a little too glitzy for me, so we will take a break or two from the festival and head north (if the weather permits), over Galena Summit into the Stanley Basin and escape to something a bit more real.

Fairfield, on the Road to Sun Valley

The Stanley Basin is a hard country—a beautiful country—but a hard country. The Salmon River and several of its tributaries meander down from the surrounding peaks and form a bowl that holds the heavy air of winter so that the climate in the Basin is some of the coldest in the country. People who endure in the Basin year ‘round are few, they are hardy and they have an arrogance that announces they can make it through the frost, the cold, the wind, the snow, the long, long teeth of winter’s bite.

The valley is rimmed by the Sawtooths on one side and the Boulder-White Clouds on the other. The bottom land is willows and sage and aspen in the cold, wet spots. A favorite recreational area, the Basin draws sportsmen from all over the world as does Sun Valley, but a twain often resides between the kinds of men and women who go after the glitz of Sun Valley and the folks who travel into the Stanley Basin.

Big Wood River, south of Sun Valley

Not to say that I am either a glitzer or a rough-necker, I am neither. I do enjoy the outdoors, but also enjoy the conveniences of the town where I live.

The Stanley Basin is one of those places that is so beautiful in late spring and summer and fall that you just want to rent or buy a cabin and live there away from it all. But according to Stanley Basin dweller and part time native, John Rember, the Basin and its hardies eat up newcomers like premium ice cream.

Last month I heard Rember, an author and educator, talk about writing. He also read one of his short stories. Rember lives in the Basin on the property his father and mother weaned him on when being able to kill a buck, an elk, catch a salmon, really mattered to one’s ability to survive. Not like now, where the state regulates hunting and fishing and we go do it because it’s fun and our friends want to kill something and so do we.

I was so impressed with Rember, I bought two of his books, MFA in a Box (Dream of Things, Downers Grove, Ill, 2010) and Traplines (Vintage Books, New York, NY, 2004).

MFA in a Box is a how-to, a why-to book about creative writing. But more than that it is a journey through literature from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Ernest Hemingway. On the way, we get a little Jung, Dostoevsky, Boccaccio, Borges, Atwood, Camus, Conrad and Bly, to name a few. We also get a look into Rember’s life. Besides being a survey of literature and a how-to book about writing, I think the book is also memoir.

For example, here is a passage from the chapter on “Writing Image.” Rember is writing about a dream he had, about Hemingway (Rember evidently used to run into Hemingway before that author’s suicide in 1961), and other things.

I’m walking along a river. It’s swollen with spring runoff, and as I am wading through flooded riverbank grass I look ahead to a crowd of people clustered at the side of a bridge. I get closer and see that they’re looking at a body wrapped around one of the pilings. When I get to the crowd, I ask who has drowned. Somebody says it’s Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway looks awful. Fish have eaten off his nose and his flesh has the clean translucence of death-by-washing.

When I initially read this passage, I thought it was real because of the quality of the writing. Notice Rember’s prose. Short and gets to the point, and not unlike something Hemingway would have written ninety years ago. Notice how Rember uses imagery in the piece. You can see the setting, the people, the death.

In his book Traplines the author delivers fourteen essays about the Stanley Basin: learning to hunt and fish, making bombs, building fence, and trapping, among other things. In his spare prose, similar to Hemingway’s style in that regard, Rember muses on his days running a string of pack mules in central Idaho; on skiing volcanoes; on shooting rockchucks with his first date, an older girl named Corinna, the sheriff showing up as they are drinking beer, Rember being the age of fourteen; hauling freshly cut and peeled posts in Harrah’s old De Havilland Twin Otter aircraft into a ranch in the back-country.

Along the way, we get insights into how Rember thinks, what is important to him. Educated at Harvard and the University of Montana, having taught creative writing at College of Idaho(among other places), he has a somewhat unique point of view considering the meaning of life.

I have not been into the Sun Valley or Stanley Basin country since I read these two books by John Rember. So when we go over the summit, I will be looking at the country to see if I can identify places he talks about. Along the road looking at the russet branches of willow and the bare limbs of the quakies in the cold places, I will consider what he told me in his books and mesh that with what I think, what I know about life coming from another place—the desert—and having my own stories of hard-bitten life.

And if I see a moose, or not, I will think I’m in the wilderness, even though the glitz is just over the summit.

Gesture

Four days before Christmas last Betty and I ventured to Socorro, San Antonio and the Bosque del Apache on the Rio Grande River in central New Mexico. We went in search of photography and nature and hot chili.

Dodging uncharacteristic assaults of big blizzards, we spent a day and a half seeking and photographing the great migratory birds; cranes and snow geese. We went in search of the Owl Cafe and green chili cheeseburgers. We sought raptors, songbirds, waterfowl, cottonwood trees, fiery skies, roseate sunrise and sunset. We found all of that.

Bosque del Apache, San Antonio, New Mexico

At dawn the sandhill cranes awoke and began their morning gestures. They skraked, croaked, walked and pranced, flapped their great gray wings and pirouetted against each other like high school kids sparking at an after-football-game dance.

Sandhill Cranes

Then the snow geese rose off the water and flew in wide formations towards their corn field feeding grounds. They reminded me of upset old drill instructors yelling at each other over recruits, this all magnified by the thousands. The geese’s great World War II bomber-like formations etched against the dull gray skies that threatened us with foul weather.

The racket bounced off the flat water and hustled up to the sage covered hills. It was cacophony. Music. Conversation.

Bald eagles watched from dead snags in the middle of ponds and pintail ducks with their elegant necks dabbled, quacked and whistled. Ladderback woodpeckers ascended the trunks of cottonwoods, the willows captured solstice light with a color quality of polished Spanish doubloons. Patches of cattails blew puffs of cotton-like pollen that gleamed in the glare of the sun.

Redtail Hawk

Avian mayhem carried the day punctuated by cries of alarm when fancy-coated coyotes sneaked around with their tongues dangling from the sides of their snouts. Javelina gangs rooted in the roads. Roadrunners lifted fancy crowns, then hid them, then lifted them, as if sending us signals.

At the Owl Cafe in San Antonio, where Conrad Hilton cut his teeth, green chili burned our lips, our palates, made our foreheads sweat. Not once, not twice, but three times, we let the savory flare of chili reconnoiter our mouths and conjure our ancient New Mexican memories.

Threats of a big blizzard kept showing up with other rumors: an Aplomado falcon on the south end of the preserve, a herd of elk grazing in one of the corn fields, mule deer bucks locking horns along one of the ditches on the east side, a bobcat darting across the road just below the visitor center. For us, these rumors all remained unfounded.

Sandhill Crane

We went armed with our photography gear, waiting for the gestures, the moments that told us something was afoot not tied to our Anglo-Saxon lexicon. Something in the way a wing gets lifted, or how the sun shines off the white pate of a bufflehead duck. Gestures that communicate something different from what we know. Or that tell us something common to all of us: humans, birds, New Mexican dirt, the aurora borealis, the universe.

Maybe we found it. Maybe we didn’t and imagined that we did. I am not sure there is a difference. The thrill often lies in the quest. Seeking holds much meaning.

The bird song, the crane cries, the goose flight, the rough coats of the javelina illuminate my thoughts.

Leaving Socorro, where we spent the nights, specks of snow dotted our windshield as we went in search of our next adventure.