The Wild

    The sounds came late in the night as in late when one is dead to the world, a colloquial term that somehow accurately describes that feeling when you've mentally left our phyiscal world and begin dreaming, drifting through that deep complex mist of a what seems another dimension.  But even in that state, the sounds will awaken you instantly...a baby crying, a dog pawing at the bed, a whimper from your spouse having a nightmare.  In this case it was the coyotes, lots of them.  They were pups most likely, about six or eight or twelve of them all howling and chattering like they were feasting; security came (we were back in Sedona for a getaway), the coyotes all just over the stuccoed wall but sounding as if they were mere car lengths away.  They're just playing, the guard said, relatively unconcerned (the howls after a kill do indeed sound quite different, much as the sounds of children screaming differ from the sounds of children playing); but for us city-folk the coyotes sounded right there, not really threatening but a bit too close for a sound we didn't recognize.  It was the sound of the wild.

   One tends to sometimes forget how the wild still exists.  We hike through cleared trails and view vast expanses of land, watch films of predator animals taking down prey animals, and gaze at the beauty of it all, praising the "wild" and yet still surprised when we the wild comes so close to us.  The occasional hawk or falcon is okay, but the mountain lion or coyote somewhere just past the patio door, not so much.  But then we have to remember (as with many peoples and cultures), that this is actually theirs and we're uncomfortable because we're relative newcomers, building fences and walls and making ourselves feel safe...the intruders.  We even lock the wild into zoos but who's really in the cages?  Looking at our yards and cities and guns, the animals must be laughing.  Night vision goggles?  Who needs those when that is when hunting begins, when it's cool and dark and the element of surprise is what helps in the art of survival.  No McDonald's here.  If you want to eat you have to go get it.  Couple those same elements in the city --the dark, the element of surprise, the got-to-have-it-- and we think of being robbed.

    I couldn't help but think of one comedian's routine about how the dumb have survived and he wasn't being at all mean.  He tapped on his microphone, telling the crowd that he had no idea how it worked; take it apart and hand it to him and he would be clueless as to what made it amplify sound.  Then he talked about his smartphone and what great pictures it took; no idea how it works, he said, maybe gremlins or leprechauns in there drawing, who knows, but somehow he could take a quick picture and see the result right away.  How does it do that?  Dumb.  That's me, I think.  For while I can order food and pick up a carton of milk and turn on the tap for water and take my shower, I have no idea how it works.  Oh, I can read about it and understand a bit of the engineering system and such; but put me out there with pretty much nothing and well, I think those coyotes would be howling over finding yet another "meal" and rather quickly.  I'd likely flail and kick and defend myself valiantly for a few minutes but I would be 100% out of my element.  I love the wild, but I am nowhere near knowledgeable about being "in" the wild.

   Back here in Sedona (and in many other places), the wild is all around you.  The hills are ancient and captivating and luring but equally so expansive that they can swallow you without notice.  Lose the cairns and signage and markers and before long you are feeling more and more thirsty and wondering why you didn't bring a pack or at least put more IN your pack.  It's that feeling of flight or fight, our basic "wild" coming back to us.  Discover had an interesting piece  by health journalist Amy Paturel (whose background is in psycholgy), one in which she stuggled to scientifically explain her dad's near death experiences, something that nearly 5% of all people in the U.S. report having experiened.  Was it merely chemical changes that gave such people visions of relatives waiting or life reviews or bright lights or total darkness?  NDE reasercher and neurologist Kevin Nelson of the University of Kentucky tells me fading blood flow, even for a few seconds, signals a crisis to the brain.  That emergency launches a cascade of survival reflexes, not unlike flight-or-flight, that lead to the thoughts, feelings and sensations of an NDE. "It's this physical and emotional crisis that translates to especially vivid recall of NDEs, but also to a shift in how survivors lead their lives following the experience," he says...When we're staring death in the face, Nelson says, there's strong evolutionary pressure to remember every detail.  Survival demands an alert and attentive brain to meet the threat head on and be prepared to combat it again in the future.

    The coyote pups playing, despite the late hour, was somehow almost attractive to my ears; totally out of my element, I was also (and perhaps foolishly) drawn to the sound.  Perhaps this was because I was safely in my "cage" standing outside on an upstairs patio, blockaded by walls of wood and glass and iron rails, safe from the "threat."  But who was the one out of their element?  The animals would likely move on at some point, retreat to their dens and invisible homes as construction crews and more vehicles came to evict them from their grounds.  The animals would adapt as water lines and cables got buried and more dumpsters appeared, their wild side slowly being eaten away by the arrival of these strange creatures that kept coming and coming.  A different form of food for them was growing more plentiful, food half eaten and left in strange wrappers, tossed into bins that seemed to be everywhere on cool grassy areas that were themselves so alien to this land.  Times were changing, much as they had over 200 million years ago when Arizona's Petrified Forest was ruled not by dinosaurs not much larger than the coyotes.  Said a piece in Smithsonian: Most of the creatures you’d encounter would be distinctly non-dinosaurian, with low, ambling gaits or plate-like armor down their backs.  At the time, those other lineages seemed poised to outcompete and dominate dinosaurs altogether...You can see some of their remains at the Rainbow Forest Museum, a low beige building that blends into the vast expanses of desert around it.  Fluorescent lights shine on skeletons belonging to four prehistoric creatures: an herbivore, a carnivore, a flying pterosaur and a two-tusked protomammal.  All of these appeared on the evolutionary stage during the Triassic, between 252 million and 200 million years ago, just after the worst mass extinction of all time.  The world’s ecosystems had just been wiped clean: More than 75 percent of known species on land and 95 percent of species in the seas had died.  But life came roaring back into a world of new possibilities.

    We humans might be part of those "new possibilities," complete with flight-or-fight mechanisms ingrained in our brainstems.  We think that we are the new wild and dominate the planet as the new dinosaurs but if so, why does the "wild" still both fascinate and scare us?  How can something as simple as a few wild pups playing cause me to jump out of a dead sleep?  And how much more might be "buried" in our brains, how deep do our memories go?  Is it generations or way beyond that...do we share more than we think with our wild ancestors?  It's too much to think about, at least for my puny brainstem...besides, it's my wife's birthday so it's time for us to leave our cages (our room, our car, our nightclub) and go wild.  After all is said and done, the animals will still be out there or perhaps they'll be safely tucked in their cages.  Time to start dreaming and get in touch with my brainstem, the one stuffed full with millions of years of data.  There is still so much to learn...