A TEXAS CHILDHOOD

It’s late January, and I’m sitting on the porch at the farm in South Texas again, watching Mary Katherine and Lowry, now nine and six, playing out in the middle of a pasture, surrounded by balmy breezes and birdsong—a week’s respite from the Montana winter. After long-winter’s accruing numbness, this premature burst of song and warmth rests upon all our skin exquisitely.

Watching the girls play, so far from the Montana wilderness, I find myself wondering, What, from childhood, informs us as adults? What images of nature—and what relationships—last? The physical memories of the world, surely, and yet also the fabric of stories. Both must make a child, and then an adult.

It seems a paradox to me that the more deeply physical senses are felt or otherwise engaged, the more deeply the mind can be stirred: as if these things, birdsong, breeze-stir, sunlight in winter, distant dog-bark, reminding me of my own childhood in Texas, are but story themselves. Occurring again and again in that manner, they are as strong, once the echo or memory of them exists in your mind, as they ever were to the original physical touch or sensation.

As a culture, we have been presented with the idea that a thing must be either-or. But isn’t it a valid possibility that deeply felt physical experiences can act not as a trade-off for the more interior world of emotion or story, but instead as a gate or path into a deeper interior world?

For a long time I thought the two were oppositional: the physical senses versus the life of the mind, as if the two were engaged eternally in some giant tag team pro-wrestling match of winner-take-all. Like so many others, I fell into the trap of thinking we were separate from nature—that we had not been birthed from the dust, and that because of the size and complexity of our brains, we were the exception to any rule we desired to oppose or discard.

But these thumbs that we’re so proud of—the ones we are so sure have led to such rapid advancement as a species, allowing us to pick up and examine almost anything—have acted like a shortcut to the experience of millions of years, gotten otherwise by treading through time (moving across slickrock domes with padded feet, climbing trees with claws).

The shape of our calves are but direct reflections of the shape of the earth that we walk across; our arms, spreading from the warmth of our chests, are like nothing but the limbs spreading from the trunks of the deciduous trees that must have flourished in the land and the time that existed when we were being born. Our songs, our fluted musical instruments, so like those of the cries of migrating geese, or the howls of coyotes, which, heard from a distance of only a mile or so, are nearly indistinguishable. And what is a mile to natural history?

Our hair like the prairie grass, our skulls like river-polished boulders.

A thousand touches, and then ten thousand, and finally one day—the thumbs lifting and examining and holding and possessing, until we arrive, not like an afterthought nor any crowning glory, but instead only as if Yes, here is room for you, too, there is room at the inn . . .

Perhaps if we keep touching things, keep experiencing the world—perhaps we are only ten million-million more touches away—we will someday muddle through all the present clumsiness—this polar ice cap-melting, Ebola-contagion, nuclear-pissing-match foolishness—and will become even more graceful upon the earth, even more fitted to the shapes of our magnificent mountains, our arroyos, our sand dune beaches, grasslands, wild forests . . . . Perhaps . . .

I was talking about story, which I have come to think of as perhaps little more than the electrical charge that exists—like sparks across a synapse—between touch and the processing of information gathered from that touch, on its way into the catalogue of memory.

If this is so, then everything is story and therefore for a writer or storyteller, there could never be a dearth of stories, only a dearth of time in which to tell them.

These tiles beneath my bare feet, my bare feet in January, for instance—I aim not to spend but a sentence or two on them, though even as I sit here watching our girls play out in the cow pasture (sitting on beach towels in lawn chairs out in the bright sun in caps and sunglasses and swimsuits), I am reminded, spark-like, of the story, the saga, of how these tiles beneath my feet got here.

My parents and my youngest brother B. J. had crossed the border and driven down into Mexico to buy the tiles more cheaply at the factory, choosing from the culls that had never been shipped to various ports—tiles of varying shades of salmon, tangerine, and sandstone red; tiles with little cat and dog and rooster tracks on them, from where various domestic pets had scampered across the damp clay of the still-drying tiles, after they were poured but before they were baked in the kiln. A penny a tile, or some-such.

All right, five or six or seven sentences.

They’d taken their old manure-speckled, slick-tired cattle truck across, rather than renting a flatbed, and had stacked it full-to-groaning with tiles. In the summer heat, and on the ragged roads, they’d encountered various flat tires, so that they kept having to off-load all those tiles, one by one, to change each flat tire.

When they finally got to customs, my father was in a vile mood. Understandably, his trailer was pulled over to go through the special inspection line, where, after an hour or two of inching forward in the long line, it was finally examined, and he was told that it did not have proper papers: the trailer would need to be quarantined, and the manure he had brought into the country would have to be sprayed off, and the trailer disinfected. He’d have to wait until Monday or maybe even Thursday of next week to get a permit—it was a Friday afternoon—unless my father could produce some form of documentation.

The sagging trailer, with all its tonnage, was blocking the only lane through the customs-search line. One of the old bald-patched tires was hissing, as was the radiator. Another tile off-loading was imminent. The cars and trucks in line behind my father seemed to stretch to the horizon, like the scales of some glittering and unending reptile. Horns were honking.

“All right,” my father said, handing the customs agent the keys. “You can have it. It’s yours. I’ve had enough. Come on,” he said to his family, “we’ll walk across. I’m tired of it. I don’t want the tiles anymore, or the truck, or the trailer. We’ll just leave it all here.”

Steam was spewing from beneath the hood now, and the radiator was singing like a tea kettle.

“Wait,” the agent said, panicking now, refusing the keys. “Just go on.”

They proceeded. It took another eight hours, and four more flat tires, but they finally got back home and eventually built their home and laid their tiles—and now, B. J., who accompanied them on that sojourn, at the tender age of seven, is twenty-nine, and a stonemason, comfortable and accomplished in the patient and rigorous discipline of stacking and unstacking, sorting and choosing and weighing and measuring, but that is another story; there can never be an end of stories, they travel in all directions, for all distances . . .

Which ones become the quarrystone below? Who knows what moments—what combinations of landscape and story—conspire to ignite the sparks of enduring memory?

What is the nature, the effect, of various landscapes upon such memories?

I believe, as do others, that there are lightning-spark transformative moments in our lives, epiphanies, in which the milieu of all of one’s previous experience is illuminated into an experience more profound somehow than even memory itself, so that the event seems to have somehow always been within you, waiting only to occur, predestined, miraculous, and splendidly unique and yet in retrospect completely unavoidable.

Perhaps there are a handful of such deep upwelling moments in every life—and yet (as if with the patience of a stonemason), I want to believe deeply that the general background dailiness of one’s life is as important, in the long run, as any of those key handful of defining moments that occasionally come from the reservoir of one’s life to provide that sudden jolt of deeper awareness or even understanding.

Where I live now, so close to the Canadian, rather than the Mexican, border still affects my daily life. What world, what values, will we protect here for our daughters, and what inspirations and knowledge will come from the fabric of the elements we have chosen to make available to them, here in Montana? How will their lives and interiors be shaped by their seeing, in all the days of their childhood, these mountains and their storms, these moose and wolves and eagles and bears? By helping me hunt and take and then give thanks for, and then clean and prepare our own meals from the forest—deer and elk and fish and mushrooms and berries?

How will it all add up for them—the day the wolf was in the yard, the day the mountain lion followed us, the day the golden eagle caught the goose in the marsh?

What is the sum of this daily appreciating, and even becoming accustomed to these things: not taking-them-for-granted, but being accustomed to them, until you become so comfortable with the shape of things that their presence in your life fits you like your own skin?

And further, in such a life of woodsy immersion, do the occasional childhood upwellings of grace—characterized chiefly by a sudden sense of profound belonging—manifest themselves differently for woods-children already accustomed to being surrounded by such beauty? Do moments of deep nature-epiphany really arrive only for children of the suburbs and the inner cities?

I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe a slow and steady braid of beauty is every bit as durable and powerful as any tiny cluster or bouquet of crucible-forged revelations. Perhaps in the end it’s all the same, and there’s little difference, in this regard, between a Houston suburb and a Montana wilderness.

I don’t believe that, however. I believe it is more a testament to the strength and purity of the hearts of children that the epiphanies of the natural world’s beauty can and will come almost anywhere, at any time, rising as if from below, and unsummoned.

I think also that such a phenomenon makes the presence of wilderness all the more important, not less.

If semi-urban or domesticated nature can deliver such profound change and power to us, then what mystery must reside and flourish in the seething woods and swamps and mountains that lie beyond the reach of our roads?

And if glimpses of grace can be seen by children in even the narrowest, vanishing wedges of semi-domesticated nature, then what store must lie at the source—available in such free and undiluted state as to perhaps be readily observed and deeply felt by even the jaded eyes and hardening hearts of adults?

“Of what avail are forty freedoms,” Aldo Leopold wrote, “without a blank spot on the map? I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.” It was more than sixty years ago, and if he were still alive, I’m curious as to which he would marvel at more: the fact that so much wild country has been lost, even as he noted the rampant pace and breadth of its leave-taking three generations ago, or the speed of time’s passage. As if surprised, ultimately, not at the quantity of loss, but by the brute law of how damned fast time passes.

In Houston, in my childhood, there was a farthermost place I could get to by riding my bike down sandy trails for a mile or so, beyond the last road and beyond the last house, and then by traveling farther on foot, through greenbriar and cane and willow and dewberry, along the game trails that followed the high cutbank bluffs of the serpentine bayou: traveling several miles of bayou-bend oxbow in order to traverse a single mile on the map. It was a style of physical discourse or engagement that perhaps impressed itself upon my way of thinking, even my way of sentence-making, and is still where I am most comfortable.

There was always something to see, and I didn’t want to miss anything. Leopard frogs leaping from bluffs out into the muddy current below; giant softshelled turtles floating camouflaged in sun-dappled patches of bayou, their dinosaur necks seeming as long as those of snakes; primitive alligator gars longer than I was tall and as thick around as my waist, cruising on the surface like mysterious submarines; armadillos, again seeming as strange as dinosaurs, and more beautiful than any bronze or golden jewelry, hopping across the trail, alarmed by my approach; box turtles wandering through the forest; and flying squirrels, fox squirrels, gray squirrels, raccoons, and opossums scurrying up the trees . . . . Nine-lined skinks scampered across and beneath the dry leaves of oak and hickory, their tiny scrabbly sounds distinctive, sounding like the first few faint drops of rain upon those same leaves.

There were sometimes even deer, there on the edge of the bayou—what a shock it was, to encounter an animal larger than myself—and often, while I was running down one of those trails, running only for the joy of being alive, I would sometimes surprise any deer coming down those same trails, and in their fright, they would sometimes crash through the brush and hurtle down those steep banks and dive out into the bayou and begin swimming for the other side.

There was a lake back in those woods—a deep swamp, really, already in the first stages of eutrophication, but all the richer for it—that I called “Hidden Lake” due to the fact that I never encountered anyone else there, nor even a sign of anyone’s presence—no stumps, no litter, not even any footprints—as well as for the manner in which one came to the lake: passing through an old-growth forest of pine and hardwoods, with no indication that the lake lay before you, until you stumbled right onto it, with the many gray-spar rotting hulks of dead trees that surrounded its black water reflection forming roosts for an aviary that was nothing less than astounding.

Great blue herons would croak their ancient cries and leap into the sky—sometimes in their haste the old rotten limb they’d been perching on would fall into the lake with a large splash—and wood ducks, which back then had been hunted almost to extinction, would leap from those same black waters in a spray and blur, squeaking their whistling alarm cries.

Best of all were the egrets—snowy egrets, as well as the cattle egrets: ghostly birds rising and flying through the forest, as brilliant white as was the water beneath them black, and with those birds’ slow graceful departure mirrored perfectly in the still waters beneath them.

I went there almost every day after I got home from school—this would have been forty years ago now—until the roads began being built into it, bulldozers and chain saws and concrete trucks, and fluttering ribbons tied to trees that I knew individually. And just like that, over the course of only a season or two, the woods were filled with noise, and then they vanished.

I was moving into adolescence by that time, and probably would have had my attention diverted anyway, for a while—and in that regard, I never really had to grieve that loss, as I had begun to supplant it, even as the forest was being leveled and the swamp being drained. It could have been a lot more painful than it was.

And perhaps an even larger blessing was my failure to realize, for a long time, that I was part-and-parcel of that taking: that my weight upon the earth, which was and is more or less the equal to any of us in this country, was part of the very thing that was flushing those copperheads and box turtles from hiding and sending those deer crashing into the bayou, swimming for the other side, to the brief safety of the wilder country beyond.

It is the unoriginal and damning realization of the fact of my complicity—of all of our complicity—that has helped lead me into activism, I think: a response fueled really by nothing more complex then an awestruck love of, and reverence for, wild creation, mixed with what remains perhaps a child’s naive and deeply felt sense of justice and injustice.

Those days, I believe, were for me the braid, rather than the epiphany: the slow accruing weave that helped form a medium out of which future lightning-bolt moments could occur, once struck, once ignited. Days in which I became more fluent in the language of that which would speak to me, and had already been speaking to me, and would speak to me again and again.

I don’t think any sort of woods-fluency is necessarily requisite for defining moments to occur. I think these illuminations of beauty are a far more universal phenomenon, one in which the order of the natural world, and the grace of our inclusion in it, is shown to us as surely as if drapes or curtains have been peeled back.

Instead of our requiring any sort of earned woods-fluency, I suspect that there are periods in our lives when we are susceptible—or sufficiently un-distracted—to refocus upon the world and see deeper into its beauty. And whether such moments result from some cellular activity within us, some maturation, or some shifting hormonal processes, some new-forming variance in the profile of our blood chemistry, or whether these shining moments are dispensed to us from above, dispensed every few years as if from some great and largely impersonal cog-and-gear revolution of stars and time and chance and fate, I have no idea: I know only that they exist.

Why? Almost anything can be explained through the lens of natural selection. Even love can be diced and parsed into terms of evolutionary advantage. But not these shining moments. Are they flaws in the system? What possible reason can there be for these occasional moments in which we are shown, as if through a rent in the clouds, or a slot-crevice in the cliffs, or even a tear in the curtain, such fuller magnitude of the beauty in which we are immersed?

I can’t begin to guess what the reason might be for such epiphanies. But I’m glad and grateful that they exist in domesticated nature, and in the rawer, farther wilderness, too.

In Texas—in Houston—I milked whatever wildness I could from the faint patterings of creatures beneath the leaves, and from the high-above brayings of the migrating flocks of geese, always synonymous with weather changes, and from little more than the north winds themselves, which, though rare, would clear out most of the petrochemical haze that hung over the city like a glowing dome. I milked wildness as much from the ghosts of wildness gone-by, or from the imagination, as from any remnant essence of the thing.

I prefer the slow and enduring form of sculpting—a geological sort of pace that allows for rises and falls, mistakes and redemptions both, but with absolution and success in the end; a pace in which any and all clumsiness yields finally to something smoother, as if that clumsiness is finally transformed by time running across and around lives. It doesn’t matter, does it, whether you get your hundred volts one day at a time or all at once?

So keenly felt is even a single volt of the world’s beauty that often even that single volt feels to me like a hundred. I think I am drawn more toward the daily, understated devotional of staring out at a marsh for long moments at a time, or at a forested mountainside, than any search for high-intensity moments of illumination, simply because I’m not sure the husk of my body could hold up to the rigors of any amped-up intensities.

My girls are far flashier in the world—far more fitted to it already: bright and beautiful, and certainly deeply loved. What will their moments be? Which will influence them more strongly—the slow daily braid, the continuum of nature, or the curtain-parting moments of supreme revelation? It can’t be controlled, of course, nor perhaps even observed, not even by them. Of my own defining moments in nature, only rarely do I ever remember being aware in-the-moment of thoughts as cliché as I will never forget this, or, Wow, this is a revelation. Even those highly illuminated moments sank deep, as if into a river, and it was only after I had gone on some distance that I understood what had happened: that those moments were foundational images, mid-river boulders that changed somehow the patterns of all the subsequent flow downstream.

A different braiding, then, as the divided currents merged again.

The moments cannot be set up in advance. Magic comes when it comes. Perhaps this is another reason I am more comfortable with the accumulated daily sweetness instead of the exalted once- or twice- or thrice-in-a-lifetime euphorias.

I can help lead the girls to those quieter places. No one can do magic, but any of us can show up for work each day, can lead children to the raw materials that, once braided, conduct the world’s magic. Like apprentice workers pushing a wheelbarrow full of various quarrystones to the place where a master stonemason is working, we can gather and select and then ferry those individual days.

Beyond that, nothing—only magic. The laborers can only show up for work each day.

In this vein of what can be controlled, or at least influenced, versus what can’t, I suspect that ritual and tradition are almost like quarrystones, or volt-moments, in themselves and that rituals or traditions undertaken in the out-of-doors can possess the same strengthening power—the same transformative ability, the same integrity—as the stones and antlers and feathers themselves.

The cross-country ski trip we take each year up the long ridge to cut a Christmas tree, the campout at a mountain lake each summer, the camping trip into the backcountry each October, when the larch are turning gold, and when some years the snow is already falling. . . . These and a hundred other traditions exist for us already, some indoors and some outdoors, and they form a constancy, a security that I feel certain is good for children, and which, in these astoundingly fluid times, is probably pretty healthy for adults, too.

I don’t mean to compare and contrast indoor and outdoor traditions; constancy is constancy. I don’t mean to pit the minimalist against the maximalist. But I believe there is substantial value to our imagination in having the opportunity to hike up a long ridge in the autumn, through all that quick color, and upon reaching the top—sweating, in the dry October sun—to witness the same scene magnified unending, an uncut larch forest of complete gold, and mountain ranges stretching to the horizon, and—in the imagination—perhaps farther.

The imagination is a phenomenal thing, a spectacle in its own right; by squinting just so, you can look at a birthday cake until the glimmering candles waver and appear to be the tops of golden trees, swaying in the breeze—but eventually you’ve got to open your eyes again, and see what’s real and what’s not. A cake’s a cake. A mountain range is a mountain range. We can bake cakes. We can’t make mountain ranges.

The scale of the backdrop of nature—particularly of wilderness—encourages and instructs us to see large, think large, dream large.

Maybe you see only what you want to see. Maybe we have the ability to almost always find what we are looking for. But the other day, I had not been thinking of these things—the illuminating moments of childhood—when one seemed to pass before my youngest daughter, Lowry, and me, rising not from the buried humus of centuries below us, nor from the braid-and-twine of the blood within us, but passing before us instead like fog—the fog-cloud migrating slowly, in the manner of an animal moving through the woods—a moose, perhaps, or a bear—and intersecting, that day, with our own curious wanderings.

It was a rainy day in January, raw and ragged and dark. The old snow already down was the only light in the world, and even it was dull. The moss hanging from the trees was sodden, and it was one of those days when dusk seemed determined to arrive two hours early.

The girls were home from school and were hanging out on the couch, eating slices of apples and slices of cheese, watching some movie on the video—The Princess Diaries, or something like that. I can’t remember how it happened. Mary Katherine might have discovered she had some homework undone, but Lowry and I ended up going outside to ski for a while. I have to confess, I kind of forced the issue—something about the comfort with which they were ensconced alarmed me, the fact that they had not been outside all day, and that dusk was coming on—and there might have been a little of my own winter-craziness at play too, for I ended up issuing a mandate, a proclamation, acknowledging to Lowry that while, yes, I understood she didn’t want to go outside, it was going to be a requirement, this rainy day, that we go outside for a moment, even if only fifty yards up the driveway. That it was for our health, and to break the braid, the pattern of the couch.

I don’t know why I felt we had to get out that one afternoon. Certainly, other days have passed—rainy, foggy, drizzly days in the winter—in which none of us venture outside.

But this nearing-dusk day I was agitated. It didn’t seem that I was asking too much. “Fifty yards,” I told her. “I know that you don’t want to go outside today. We’ll come right back in. But we have to go fifty yards up the driveway. We just have to get out for a minute or two. We don’t even have to have fun,” I said. “Think of it as work—like emptying the cat litter, or something.”

Maybe this was shaping up to be a train wreck. Cat litter equals the great outdoors? What surer way to dull a child’s innate curiosity and even enthusiasm for the natural world? Had I snapped, in the seasonal deprivation of light, and turned into one of those awful eco-fascist parents? How was this dictum any different, really, to a six-year old from forced wind sprints, or a hundred push-ups? Dad the drill sergeant.

I’ll tell you the truth, there were a few tears as Lowry got up and turned the movie off, and then pulled on her snow pants, and laced up her cross-country ski boots. “Why do we have to go fifty yards?” she asked—a very valid question—to which I answered, “We just do.”

Maybe I was feeling something after all. Some summons. Or not. What does it matter?

Lowry stamped outside. She can be more obstinate than a mule. She can be more obstinate than me. Why, she asked again, and now that I had her outside, into raw nature this nasty, foggy day—now that we had broken somehow the cycle of the couch, where, now that I remember, she had spent the previous afternoon also, I was able to negotiate downward, and said, “Okay, you don’t have to ski fifty yards, I’ll pull you in the sled for fifty yards.”

She dug in further, sulked deeper. She’s not one to negotiate. Was I going to have to physically lift her in the sled? “Oh, wah,” I said, “please, Daddy, don’t pull me around in the sled, please don’t make Princess ride in the sleigh, oh, wah.” For a moment she started to giggle—it was enough for me to lift her in—but then she folded her arms and the Great Lip came back out.

“I don’t want to go,” she growled, and I felt like I had gone too far, and yet I felt I had made too much about it—the importance of getting outside for a breath of fresh air, even if only for a minute—to back down. I felt as if I had presented her with a choice, at least—skis or sled—but that I had gone too far. So far that I certainly couldn’t turn back. The child-rearing books, I knew, would have all sorts of lucid and correct advice, but that didn’t do me any good, for Lowry was already in the sled.

We started up the driveway, into the gloom. I pointed out the fifty-yard mark. She pouted and griped the whole way, milking her full fifty yards’ worth. My God, how I hope she ends up on our side; how formidable an adversary she would be on the other side.

At the fifty-yard mark, I turned around, true to my word, and began running down the steep hill, and finally, that broke the ice-shell, the plaster cast of displeasure, and as she laughed and then asked me to do it again, I felt like an alchemist or magician.

It was the most amazing feeling: as if I had held her unhappiness cupped in my hands, and had done some trick—rolled it around for a moment as if mixing dust and water to make clay—and when I opened my hands again, there was happiness, where previously had existed only unhappiness.

It wasn’t me, of course. It was the woods, and the earth—the slope of the hill, the laws of gravity, and so forth—and the condition of childhood, which seeks so earnestly, relentlessly, joy—but it was wonderful nonetheless to be witnessing it, and participating in it.

I pulled her a few more times, and then, truth be told—raging hypocrite!—I began to long for the warmth of the woodstove, the winter cabin light of hearth and home. Lowry was all bundled up, but I had neither coat nor gloves, having been certain we would travel only fifty yards.

Each time I suggested that we head back inside, she coaxed me into one more run, but then, finally, when we truly had made the last run, the one-more after the one-more after the one-more after the one-more, rather than going inside to warm up (hot chocolate, I urged her, and Harry Potter), she became absorbed by the myriad of deer tracks stippling the snow in the driveway: the regular herd of half a dozen (twenty-four hoofs) that wanders down the driveway at various times of the day.

There were tracks everywhere, traveling in all directions—days and days of tracks—but Lowry, with her typical singularity of focus, seized upon one track among all the hundreds of others, and then began following it, hunched over like Inspector Clouseau.

As best as I could tell, she stayed with it, too, parsing out for a little while that one deer’s tracks among so many others, identifying it by size and shape as well as smoking-gun freshness, the blue-glaze sheen of that one set of tracks among dozens possessing a slightly brighter glow. Soon enough, she was tracking in a wandering maze of tight little circles, with me behind her, so that seen from above, our path would resemble that of these little teacup-bumper-rides in amusement parks.

It was nearly full dusk now, and darker still farther into the woods, and again, now that my goal was accomplished, I kept wanting to quit and to go back to the house and call it a day, even as Lowry was growing more and more engaged with following those tracks.

What it felt like to me was that something around her was unspooling—that if I had had her on some sort of psychic leash, it suddenly no longer applied, for whatever reasons—and so I followed behind her, careful not to comment or correct her, letting her believe instead she was hot on the trail of that deer, stalking it, inch by inch and foot by foot, and that we might come upon it at any moment.

So lost was she in following the one set of tracks through the maze—traveling in slowly widening circles—that I felt certain she had lost track of time and was so totally into the tracking that in her mind we had traveled miles, rather than continuing to circle back to more or less the same starting point.

Eventually, however, the circles widened enough that we found ourselves coming nearer the marsh, and as if still believing she was following the same deer, Lowry left off her circling-style of tracking and began following the tracks on a line, like an eager hunter closing in now, having solved both the riddle and the challenge.

The deer—still one among dozens, or hundreds—traveled, according to Lowry, down toward my writing cabin, where it circled my cabin before heading off farther into the woods, with so little light remaining now.

Do I know for certain that Lowry was entranced—illuminated—during this strange trailing, this impromptu, wandersome exploration? Not at all. And even during the traveling, the thought had not yet occurred to me. It was only when we heard the eerie whooping dusk cry of a pileated woodpecker, and she took my hand and led me to a clump of winter-bare alder, and hunkered down into a hiding position, that I began to consider that she was deeply in another world—or rather, deeply in this one.

“If we hide,” she said, crouching behind a slender tree, “maybe he won’t see us. Maybe he’ll come closer.”

The woodpecker called again, from high above, and not very far away, and Lowry pressed herself in closer against the spindly little alder and motioned for me to hide myself better.

We watched intently, waiting for the woodpecker to show itself. I could feel Lowry’s focus, patient and keen, and I marveled at the purity of her desire. She didn’t want to trap or hunt the bird, or even sneak up on it: she just wanted to see it, and to watch it, unobserved.

There was no way we could hide sufficiently behind that bare little alder, but Lowry didn’t know that, or didn’t believe it, and we waited longer, watching and listening. It was only when we finally heard the bird call again from much farther away, and with a deeper dimness—almost, but not quite yet, true dark—that we rose from our crouch and began walking back up the trail toward the house, with Lowry leading the way, excited and fulfilled, with the tears of less than an hour ago completely vanquished.

So strange was the turnaround in her mood and demeanor that I wondered if the woods-euphoria hadn’t somehow been set up by the chemistry of the tears, allowing her to feel the day more sharply.

Goofy thoughts, I know. But she seemed so self-assured, curious and confident both, that foggy dusk, that I couldn’t help but wonder if the images of the day weren’t etching themselves indelibly upon her, like light coming through a brief lens opening to expose itself to the waiting film within.

There’s no way to tell, of course, other than to one day ask her, far into the future—to see if that memory has withstood the test of time—and it may be that she won’t remember at all: that the moment was not for her the vertical illumination of light that I imagined I was witnessing, but instead simply more of the regular daily braid of her life; that the moment was not a landmark pivot point, a boulder emplaced in the center of the river’s current, forever after influencing all downstream flow, but that it was instead simply the river itself, always flowing.

My point being that none of it can be controlled.

And again, perhaps it is this simple: how powerful, natural, and necessary it is to our imaginations that that wild and rare bird had a place to fly off to. It just vanished from sight and hearing, when it went off deeper into the woods. But it didn’t really vanish. It—and our imagination with it—kept going, drawn on farther and further and gracefully, into the wild.

Maybe this is what I’m getting at, working my way toward it in much the manner of Lowry trying to parse out those tracks, making wider and wider circles—glimpsing the one path, then losing it, picking it up once more, only to have it vanish into the brush again.

Wilderness is not necessary to develop a love of nature in children. I’m convinced we’re born with a reverence for the natural world and that that affinity can then be strengthened, maintained, corroded, or buried—like anything else in the world.

The joy, the realization or remembrance of that love, can be stimulated by one ant, one sparrow, one seashell held to one’s ear. In this regard, the pastoral can be as powerful as the wilderness. But wilderness is still the long-ago mother of the pastoral and occupies a critical place in our imagination, which is one of the things that most defines us as humans.

Without wilderness, we ultimately compromise our ability to imagine further.

Without wilderness, we ultimately become less human. Whether we like it or hate it or are indifferent is beside the point: we need wilderness.

Surely there will almost always be ants, geraniums, deer tracks, and bird calls for children to ponder over and be smitten and captivated by.

But they should have the choice—should retain the choice—of being able to decide whether to travel even farther and further then, with that love, and that imagining, if they so desire.

We should all have that choice. It is, and should remain, one of the tenets of our culture, and one of the spiritual as well as physical riches of any great and powerful civilization.

Back at the farm, the wild Montana girls are sitting in lawn chairs, out in the cow pasture, feet propped up, wearing their sunglasses and swimsuits, beach towels over their shoulders, books in hand. The only sight more surreal to this image than the scraggly bonsai-reach of the thorny limbs of the weesatche and gnarled mesquite trees around them is the endless anthill-like mounds of manure, the scattered horse pods and cow pies.

But there’s space, a comfortable amount of space, and there’s also the exquisite luxury, to our Pacific Northwest psyches, of sunlight in the winter. A physical model, perhaps—that yellow light pouring down upon us—for how it is in our interiors, on those unmappable but deeply recognizable moments when that larger grace, and the hint of a larger understanding, or at least a larger acknowledging, pours down upon us.

Will these vacation days spent in another, more pastoral landscape, become some of their illuminating moments—and if so, how might that affect who these girls become, as opposed to the daily and nightly presences of mountain lions and bull elk?

Again, only after we have traveled farther downriver will any of us be able to pause and look back and remember, or not. But once more, the answer seems clear: we need as many natural places—as wide and diverse a mix—as is possible. Whatever the wild or natural world has, it is part of who we are and always have been, as well as who we are becoming. And that as we lose those various landscapes, we run the risk of becoming ever more brittle, until one day our imaginations and spirits might be as barren as a gully in a dry land, through which water once murmured, and alongside which cool shade trees grew, but no more.

You don’t have to go down to that river—you don’t even have to like such rivers—but we must retain them in our culture, all the different kinds of nature, and we must afford the most immediate and secure protection to the rarest kinds—the fast-vanishing big country, the gold standard of wilderness.

I was speaking of children, earlier in this essay, but now I understand that I am speaking to and of myself, and of the person I have become, and of the child I was, of one of the various paths that have opened before me, and that I had the freedom to choose.

Traditions and rituals, then—secure, predictable, and repeating—can be their own kind of vertical structure upon the landscape of who-we-are and who-we-become; and the repetitions or constancy of traditions can be like currents influencing boulders emplaced midstream, allowing for growth and complexity and creativity and movement downstream. It sounds at first like a paradox—how can something identified by its quality of sameness, of unchangingness, bring forth the fruit of change and spur the imagination?

But to know, or believe, that there are places in the natural world that are not likely to change too dramatically in a lifetime, harbors and refuges against the world’s dynamic essence, can be a powerful and vital force that helps shape the growth of a child, and even the continuing growth of an adult.

So tradition can be a landscape unto itself—and story, or memory, can be like another of the physical senses, as deeply felt as any touch or odor or taste or sight, as deeply felt as any intuition or song.

Imagine, then, please, the sweetness I encounter on those occasions when I am able to bring my Montana girls out of the wilderness and down to the same pastoral landscapes I inhabited at their age—the pastoral farm, with its muddy stock tanks to fish, rather than high, pristine mountain lakes, and then, later in this vacation, to the deer pasture itself, the one-time ultimate arbiter of wildness, to a young boy, but a quantum step down, in wildness, to these girls.

Imagine the wonderful disorientation I feel as we arrive there at night, with jackrabbits bounding in front of the beam of our headlights, zigging and zagging in all directions as Mary Katherine gets out to open the gate.

The same scents, the same sounds, and even the same stories, there at the camp house that night. We build a bonfire of cedar in the same firepit and sit outside looking up at the same stars, and despite the fact that the lions and bears and wolves and jaguars are gone, it is still its own kind of wildness, to me, if not to these girls; though I can also say truthfully that if the farther horizons of Montana’s wildernesses no longer existed, this place, too, and even its stories and traditions, would lose some of its wildness, wildness finally seeping out of this place, and all the other ones like it, in the manner of blood trickling from a wound that will not heal.

The sameness of security of these things allows us—encourages us—to change: to grow and reach and stretch, to dive deep and travel far. To go away, and to return—becoming as shaped, in our travels, as any of the other enduring shapes in the world.

The child standing next to a creek in the fog with a flashlight, peering down through the ice at a school of translucent, suspended fish, appears little different, thirty years later, from the young girls stalking along that same creek, trying to sneak up on, with their own flashlights, the night frogs and crawdads.

A clamant wildness, irrepressible, running beneath the surfaces, and across the surface, and just above the surface. A wildness in the heart of the farthest roadless area; a wildness in the sight of a single butterfly in a suburban backyard. A wildness in a single story, told or dreamed or remembered.

We need it all. We do not have to go looking for any farther or further wildness, but we need to know, or at least be able to imagine, that it exists. We need to be able to at least hear the echo of where we came from, even if a long time ago, and barely or dimly remembered now.

We need the dream of such a past, and the promise of such a future.

The green pastoral meadows sculpt us, the city parks and gardens sculpt us, and even now, the last few blank spots on the map sculpt us. It is all but one continuum, and we need it all, and our children deserve the possibility of it all.

And for those such as myself who have had the privilege of experiencing it all—high nature, low nature, city-garden nature, as well as the deepest wildernesses—it is this richness, this bounty, that inspires me to work for the protection of the rarest and most imperiled type of nature—the unprotected wildernesses, such as those that remain in the Yaak and other places—so that hopefully such a choice might still be available, in all the years to come beyond this one. All the generations not yet born, but coming, almost as surely as time itself.