A fire burned as people began to gather. A large pot of soup I prepared the night before sat on the burning flame, full of onions, chicken broth, squash, and Daisy’s sweet cream. The one thing that separates us as humans from the rest of our mammal kin: we cook.
We stood in a circle, fifty people who had gathered for a meal on the ranch. We gave thanks for all of creation that selflessly gave sustenance. We gave thanks for gathering all together and the dance of the flames as we listened to the crackling of the redwood branches ablaze, a hungry fire devouring the wood like a wolf eating its kill. We sent thanksgiving and greeting out to all life on earth as well as the unseen powers that move through all things. The hunger we felt couldn’t be met by just a meal. We were hungry for the gathering, for sharing stories, for feeling the land around us embodied in the food we ate.
The long table outside our front step was full of laughter, people sharing stories, and kids running to grab a slice of bread to take to the fire and warm on a stick. We ate greens, both wild and farmed, raw and cooked. Smoke rose up from the coals and the smell of venison grilling wafted across the long table that stretched around the front and side of our yellow farmhouse. The strips of venison were sliced thinly to reveal a crimson center gradually fading into a burnt umber. We all experienced something primordial when we tasted the venison. Knowing the land where the buck grazed and where Erik took the life of the deer with gratitude and reverence brought the story of the land inside our bodies. The fire brought out the enticing taste, and we considered that humans have been in relationship in this way with deer and fire since the beginning.
After we ate, I stood at the end of the arching table and called everyone’s attention. I told the crowd, “From the coast of California to the pebbled shores of Lake Ontario, tribes are gathered to protect our most basic need for clean water.” I glanced at the decanters on the table filled with water from the spring on the ranch. “Imagine if the water we’re drinking tonight was tainted with highly volatile oil that was being fracked on land that was once lush prairie that supported the venison and greens on your plate. Similar struggles over clean water and unpolluted lands are happening all over the world. Common people like us are struggling to live a life where they can drink the water, know what is being put in their food, and raise their children where there is a future of living on this planet in the most commonplace harmonious way. We were invited by our Native American friends to assist in the protection of the water here on the continent called Turtle Island. So Erik will be traveling to Standing Rock to bring winter supplies to the water protectors.”
Over warm apple persimmon crisp topped with fresh whipped cream, we finished the evening feeling our hunger had indeed been met: not just by the food, but by the stories we had told, the community we belonged to, and our shared commitment to caring for all of our kin.
I stayed at the ranch to care for the animals and the children when Erik traveled to Standing Rock. He phoned me the first night to give me an update. As Erik approached the Oceti Sakowin, meaning Seven Council Fires camp, at Standing Rock, which was laid out in the shape of a buffalo skull with the Missouri River as the backdrop, he became part of a history that will be told for many generations to come. It had been nearly 150 years since the Native American tribes of the region had gathered, and they marked this historical event by setting up their tepees in this symbolic manner, to honor the buffalo. The dance that once took place between the Indigenous people and the buffalo regenerated the perennial life on the prairie, and of course it’s the model we’re striving to mimic on our own lands. The role of predators, including humans, moving the herbivores through the grasslands to regenerate soils and biodiversity.
Erik told me that when he approached the fire in the center of camp to bring the wall tents, butchery knives, tables, and chairs to Winona Kasto’s Traditional Foods Kitchen, which fed hundreds of people each day, two deer carcasses had arrived at the same time as him. The kitchen crew was grateful for the extra supplies as they quickly used the butcher knife to break down the deer and to hang strips of the meat on a rack for jerky. A large fifty-gallon pot sat on a fire, corn hung from rafters, and herbs were laid out in a dehydrator all to feed the water protectors.
Erik went to assist the Spirit Riders and their horses, the young men who rode their horses to the front lines of the protest to attempt to halt the construction of the pipeline. As a rancher, Erik immediately found kinship with the horses and their riders. Placed at the tip of the buffalo horn, the Hunkpati, or Crow Creek tribe, formed the camp of Spirit Riders. Thirteen young men, all with horses, were part of a larger group of Spirit Riders who rode every year in memory of 38+2 of their chiefs and holy men who were hanged in the largest one-day mass execution in US history, on December 26, 1862. They say 38+2 because at first it was only 38, and then shortly after two more were found and killed. Erik assisted the Spirit Riders in building a winter shelter for the horses. Erik and Greg Grey Cloud, the horse manager for the Spirit Riders, got to work designing a windbreak and purchasing supplies, and within the first few hours of them beginning the work on the shelter, the horses began to gather. That night was met with freezing temperatures combined with a wind chill that would make any animal seek out shelter.
As ranchers, we stood with the people of Standing Rock to protect the sacred. There is still so much for us to learn from Indigenous tribes as we go about our work of stewarding lands and feeding people. If we are to produce food and withstand climate change, the most pressing threat to our world, then we need to use every drop of wisdom we can learn from those who have lived close to the earth, treating each species as kin. Standing Rock reminded us that traditional wisdom combined with appropriate renewable energy technology is the only way to move forward in a world where people in power are driven by profit alone. Only the movement of millions can create a future where our children, many generations to come, can have the privilege of drinking from streams and rivers of pure water, walking amongst an intact prairie or old-growth forest and knowing that it was their relatives who made it all possible.
The fire that burned in the center of camp, keeping the water protectors warm and fed, was the same fire inside those who gathered to stand up for their right for pure water.
When Erik returned from Standing Rock, our first frost of the season also arrived. It was as if Erik had brought some of the cold of North Dakota to the shores of the Pacific. The cold also marked an end to a search that had been underway in the Parvati Valley of India, high in the Himalayas, for one of my dear classmates from the Wilderness Awareness School, Justin Alexander, who had danced the mountain lion around our fires and captured the flag in the scout game.
The last time I saw Justin was in a chance encounter in a San Francisco hotel lobby in 2012. He had just flown in from LA and was checking in at the hotel as I was leaving with Erik’s mother, who was staying there. We looked at each other after not seeing one another for nearly ten years and immediately were reminded of our bond in our youth and our common language of nature. Since then, I occasionally read his blog, Adventures of Justin, witnessing as his own search for freedom took him to live with the Mentawai in Indonesia, the Dhokpas (the last remaining Tibetan nomads), and in the end to Himalayan caves with a Naga Baba, or Hindu holy man. I was not surprised to see that our time at WAS, immersing in nature, had fed in each of us a yearning for freedom and authenticity.
Justin never lost the spirit of adventure, of pushing himself to his physical, mental, and spiritual limits. I can’t help but think he was fulfilling what we all had dreamt of when we were teenagers in the wilderness of Washington, to be like the legendary Apache scouts and be able to go anywhere in the world and survive in the wild. Eighteen years following our training, he walked out into one of the most unforgiving landscapes and never returned. Sometimes when people are given the tools to fly, they never put their feet back on the ground.
We lit a sacred fire for Justin at dawn. I could almost picture all of us as youth sitting around that fire, telling jokes, talking about the mysteries of our tracking adventures, and singing songs. Anne, our WAS mentor, came. The group of us from WAS had not kept in touch often, as each of us forged our own path, yet when we did come across each other, it felt as if no time had passed since our days in the woods, by those earlier fires. We told stories of the great adventures we had together and with Justin. Some classmates sent messages. Terry Skyped in from Seattle and told of a time when he’d spent the day with Justin on the beach on his seventeenth birthday. Justin had made sure Terry had the time of his life. Terry, now the director of a circus and an acrobat for Teatro ZinZanni, says he developed his passion for circus by learning animal forms around the fire at WAS with all of us, and watching Cirque du Soleil on our long road trips in Chris’s Suburban. Greg messaged from Berlin. Still tracking daily and teaching kids at a forest school, he gave me a report on the wolves in Germany. They have come back strong, possibly even leaving their scats on those statues as the biologist had hoped. They are repopulating a country that at one point was the center of the hatred towards wolves and now has strict laws to protect the species.
The sacred fire we lit for Justin is a tradition of the Odawa people and was brought to us at WAS by Paul Raphael, a peacemaker for the tribe on the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. A young man, Liam, who was trained as a fire tender, came to our ranch and lit a fire as a connection to the ancestors, so that people who knew Justin could gather by the flames and release the agony, grieve for their loss. The fire became our connection to spirit, our light in the darkness, and a pathway to the unknown.
As the sacred fire died down, we released our friend Justin, who had spent all those years with us in the wilderness, and who had now entered the decay stage of the life cycle, as we all will in time. We knew that just as his body would return nutrients to the earth, the memories of our time together, the rites of passages we went through as teens, and those timeless moments around the fire in the wet Western Washington wilderness will continue as memories, and our stories will live on, nourishing us and our descendants. We learned to live like wild animals so that we could make a difference in the future. Our time together shaped us, and we are all in our own way striving to find the meaning of life and death, the best way for humans to interact with this beautiful planet. With Justin’s disappearance, with the loss of a man who cared deeply for this earth, more responsibility lands on the rest of us.
There may be a time that things get worse, when rain will not fall on endless deserts and birds will no longer come to deposit seeds and feces because there is no food for them. But for now, we have so much to be grateful for. For now, the beavers remember how to be beavers. They build the pools and wetlands that will in turn bring dragonflies, frogs, birds, and newts. The birds remember how to be birds. They deposit tiny seeds that will grow into giant redwood trees. The salmon remember how to be salmon, running up streams until the streams are colored red by the fish and shaded by the redwood forests. Herbivores remember how to be herbivores, moving across vast prairies, disturbing and fertilizing the ground. The grasses remember how to be grasses. They capture the carbon and hold it where it belongs, in the soil. The soils of the prairie and forests remember how to be soils. They continue to host billions of organisms in a small spoonful. Those billions of organisms are also held in the bodies of humans, making it possible for us all to live.
It appears that it’s up to humans to remember, right now, what it means to be humans. We need to remember how to live in reciprocity with our kin, to respect and honor this beautiful world and all its inhabitants, before everything we depend on and everything that depends on us is lost. As long as we remember, dawn again will come and the sun will continue to provide the energy for life.
Anne brought pictures of our time in Alaska, the trip where I’d been with wolves for the first time, where I’d found my pack after being led there by a white wolf. There were also pictures of my classmates and me beating drums and dancing the deer, dressed in buckskins we had tanned and sewn into clothes using the sinew from the deer as thread. We were all smiling and laughing in the pictures, wild inside and out. Anne also brought a basket I had made her, woven of willow branches.
Holding that basket woven next to the Snoqualmie River so long ago, I held a symbol of my life. I remembered so vividly the unskilled hands I’d brought to weaving at first, the way the patterns of weaving, the sensitivity with which I had to choose the right materials, had calmed me and helped me focus my intentions. I wove my life together on the banks of that river, sitting for hours alone in the silence.
With the basket cradled in my hands, I realized that all of my intentions for my life—communing with my wild kin, having a family, impacting the planet positively, and being part of a larger network of regeneration—had come to fruition. Every single piece of my life, disparate as they all may have seemed, had come together to form a cohesive, useful, sturdy whole.
Those wild branches that grew near my birthplace had woven my life basket, still bound together after all those years.