Wilding Out At Home

It’s a little hard for me to write this week — a little hard for me to concentrate on anything for more than about 30 seconds — because, moving from the wild to the domestic, our cat, Malka, has just had surgery.

Michael — my husband — and I separated about a year ago now, but we see a marriage counselor and talk daily and take care of the cat together, and the past six months has sent us an escalating series of decisions concerning Malka: financial decisions, emotional decisions, decisions about the roles of animals in our lives, and how we relate to them. Moral decisions, really.

It’s funny, how often morality comes up, in relation to animals. I think it must have something to do with their power over us, as well as our power over them.

My friend Michèle has just become the world’s biggest fan of sharks. She went on a week-long Boy Scouts sailing trip with her two older boys in the Florida Keys, and saw all the pretty fish while snorkeling, which was lovely. Then, down below, among the coral and flashes of gorgeous color, she saw something else, more powerful: the sinuous forms of Caribbean reef sharks.

Source: Gary Rinaldi, via the Caribbean reef shark wikipedia page.

It was like mindfulness without trying, she said — meditation without all that background noise: “Am I doing this right? I’m thinking about meditation right now. Now I’m thinking about my to-do list. Now I’m going to sleep.”

But when you’re in the presence of a powerful animal, there you are. You are effortlessly, ceaselessly, thrillingly in the moment.

I’m reading Wild at the moment — I’m almost done with it, and the parts I like the best are the parts when the author, Cheryl Strayed, describes this kind of relationship with the wilderness though which she’s walking.

I’d read the section in my guidebook about the [Pacific Crest] trail’s history the winder before, but it wasn’t until now — a couple of miles out of Burney Falls, as I walked in my flimsy sandals in the early evening heat — that the realization of what that story meant picked up force and hit me squarely in the chest: preposterous as it was, when Catherine Montgomery and Clinton Clarke and Warren Rogers and the hundreds of others who’d created the PCT had imagined the people who would walk that high trail that wound down the heights of our western mountains, they’d been imagining me. It didn’t matter that everything from my cheap knockoff sandals or my high-tech-by-1995-standards boots and backpack would have been foreign to them, because what mattered was utterly timeless. It was the thing that had compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days. It had nothing to do with head or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed, it would always feel this way.

It seems strange to think of these animals, these moments, in the context of Malka, cosseted as she is at the moment in a little cat t-shirt called a “Surgi-Sox.” Already this morning, she’s gotten her Surgi-Sox wet as she teetered over her waterbowl; the Surgi-Sox soaked up the water, leaving her a damp mess, so I put her in her cone of shame and dried the Surgi-Sox with a hairdryer. I have also given her tuna oil with a plastic syringe, and fiddled endlessly with her kitty thermal-pad.

A reef shark she isn’t. The time we’re having together isn’t a hike along the Pacific Crest Trail by any stretch of the imagination.

And yet part of what makes the interaction so magical is the very otherness.

To be close to an animal is to experience that great gulf of distance, the feeling of being next to a creature with a completely different experience of life. For that privilege, you empty the water bowl again, you take another step on the Pacific Coast Trail, you open your eyes to the other, you choose life, you keep choosing life.

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Bonus Malka Burrito Pics:

Just home from surgery.

Starting to complain that I’m not serving breakfast fast enough! :)