Sweet Bondage in Nature

The bear didn't know me, nor did the skunk, nor did the deer; but I knew them.  Or did I?  Do I know myself?

A few weeks ago, a black bear walked across the highway about 500 metres ahead of where I was driving east,  60 kilometres west of Williams Lake.   Last week, driving west not east on that same highway, I picked up a hitchhiker fresh out of jail.  He said that we're in the bears' territory.

While we drove west, a skunk walked across the highway a couple hundred metres ahead of us.  It was the first skunk I saw in this area.  Where I come from, hundreds of kilometres and a couple mountain ranges east of here, I regularly saw skunks.  My passenger, his hitchhiking companion asleep in the back seat, said he was glad the skunk did not spray us.  I knew that such a spray would not affect us, rolling along at 90-100 kilometres per hour in a vehicle.  I said that washing with tomato juice helped those sprayed by skunks:  the things one hears, and remembers decades later.

This afternoon at Scout Island,. a nature preserve in the namesake lake of this city of 10 000, I sat at a picnic table and to read for awhile.  I aim to read and discard decades of accumulated books, an enticing burden.  Today's book was an Englishman's description of touring Canada during the mid-1980s.  His tour goes from east to west.  We've left Newfoundland and are in the Maritimes.

A scuffle in the nearby grass, sprinkled with fall leaves, alerted me to a doe, less than ten metres away.  She and I looked at each other for a few seconds.  Then she walked in front of me amid the big, sparse trees, and started nibbling the grass below.  A few minutes later, another scuffle showed a young deer, hers I thought, coming to join her.  For a half hour, they nibbled and wandered, 10-20 metres from me.  They only looked up after noises, such as crows or the breeze made in the trees.  They nibbled at each other's head, neck, and ears some, too:  grooming, bonding.  As I got up and walked my bike to the road, the deer peacefully kept doing what they were doing. 

Three geese honked overhead as I rode away.  Later, a sparrow got into my daughter's apartment via the air conditioner badly sealed into a window every summer.  Next summer, she doesn't plan to install this contraption our landlord offers each year.  Long live fresh air, blowing into a window, or against one's body riding a bicycle.  May geese and sparrows be in your life, but not necessarily in your home.  Instead, share their home, the Earth.       

Riding my bicycle the three kilometres home, under that soft, beautiful light of early evening, I thought about the deer.  And I thought about myself.  And I thought about John Livingston's book Rogue Primate:  An Exploration of Human Domestication.  I borrowed a Vancouver library copy when I was there in 2014, read it, returned it to my library to forward back there, and noticed a copy in my library's book sale a few months later.  It was not the first book sale book there that was superior to most of what the library retains.  Livingston's quote of the phrase from Percy Shelley's poem Queen Mab is the title for this story I write, patient reader.

We lost our link to nature, the famed Canadian ecologist and broadcaster Livingston argues.  He narrated Hinterland Who's Who, was a Nature of Things host, that show's title from Lucretius's Ancient Roman book, of course, and Livingston led The Canadian Audubon Society and its successor, the Canadian Wildlife Federation.

The bear, skunk, and deer know none of this; but as I rode home today, I realized that the deer and I live and die in the same world.  I'm conscious of this and the deer aren't.  Livingston argues that rabbits and their predators are so linked to nature that they're unaware of it.  Human delusions of being separate and above nature, however, have weakened our link to nature and therefore our joy of existence; but there's hope, Livingston argues.

This is a relevant part of what I wrote after I read Livingston's book:

     "What then must we do?  Livingston asks.  Try to love nature, respect it, link to it, regain
     our wildness inculcated out of us as children.  See a predator fix on prey, its whole being
     alive, in an intense moment, un-selfconscious, merely but profoundly being, in its world,
     linked to all around it.  See prey perhaps escaping, perhaps succumbing, accepting its
     state without self-objectification, without a burden of ethics, morals, judgmental dreck,
     add-ons that cloak and distort wildness."

See bears, skunks, and deer, full of life.  Fill yourself with life.  My reflection on Livingston's book ends, "Ah, sweet existence, precious, brief, wild!"

Percy Shelley knew.