Becoming All Animal

“But she didn’t entirely forget. We are always in both worlds, because they aren’t really two.”

—from The Woman Who Married A Bear by Gary Snyder

            You study the sky, hesitant to have left shelter. Wind pushes clouds over the granite ridgelines like predator and prey, the white ones seemingly chased by darker ones. But for now the sun is warm on your hair. You have time and needs to meet. Something in your bones surges and you feel your feet make the decision to proceed. Your load is winter-ponderous, not the light lift of warm weather, but your back revels in being useful, capable. As you move, your breasts, fuller at this time in your cycle, amplify the sway of your body over land. Your haunches rally as you step up rocks; shoulders, hips, and ankles balance-dance as beneath your feet the granite shifts color, clouds still dashing across blue plains above.

            This is not just another solo backpack trip. I am on a mission, sent by that inner voice that, when I hear it, I cannot disobey. Though the forecasters call for the first winter storm of the season, and though I’m used to the milder climate and terrain of the southern Appalachians, I doggedly stuffed one more warm shirt under the top pouch of my pack this morning, and drove an hour-and-a-half to South Lake Tahoe to get my permit. There is irony in having to gain society’s permission to escape it. The ranger wrote out the parking pass and hunted down change. That’s what I was hunting too, in another fashion, and I was glad the ranger was female when she asked, “How many?”

            “One.”

            “Any dogs?”

            “No.”

            Locking my car, I pause before hefting the pack, always unreasonably heavy when I go alone. If I were a werewolf, or the bear husband of the old stories, this is when the hair would quickly grow in across my cheeks and shoulders, the claws emerge and back hunch. People watching would know then. But here in this parking lot, a family walks by and looks only at my pack and pony-tail. They have no idea the changes going on inside me as I attempt my first shape-shift. As I deliberately become all animal.

   You are away at college and have gotten up the nerve to kayak. Bobbing with what comes, hips starting to react on their own, you follow the experienced paddlers. At the end of the drop the back wave catches your edge and you’re underwater. So slow and dark and cold. And then you’re up, shaking your head like a spaniel. Such a different world beyond the familiar surface — now you know. This is what you came for. To belong somewhere like a frog or heron.  Like the people cheering you who belong on the river — so beautiful and strong and free — so unlike the people you grew up around. Laughing, you peel off wet clothes by the side of the road, not caring who sees. Later, in front of your mirror, you stare at your body, neck twisted, watching your back, flexing both arms at once. There, between your shoulder blades, new ridges. The beginning of wings.

            Of course I know and you know that we are animals. But like the phrase “Boys will be boys,” the fact that we’re animals is treated as something we can’t help, rather than something to be proud of, to cultivate. I don’t remember when it first occurred to me that by inhabiting my animal nature more I might find a way around my fears, which had grown rather than shrunk over the years of traveling, hiking, and backpacking alone. Fears of meeting human males in the wild; of being told, if I made it out of a bad situation, that I should have known better; of believing all the voices out there that say it’s a woman’s fault for going anywhere — but especially into the wilderness — alone. Maybe it was when I read about grizzly sows having to avoid and ward off attacks from the large males. They can’t hide away all the time and they don’t look for an even larger male to protect them. They adapt. They use their senses to discover if a male is around. If so, the sow tries not to feed in the prime areas when the male is likely to feed. But if she or her cub is charged and the sow must fight, she fights tremendously. And who of us would suggest if she fails and is killed, or her cub is killed, that she asked for it?

            At the trailhead I check the map for distances. A man with a toddler is ahead of me.

            “How far you going in?” he asks.

            “Don’t know yet.” I evade the question. Though my instincts say he is harmless, I won’t give my destination. Smiling, I leave them behind. My goal this trip is not to act as a female grizzly would, or any particular animal, though I often think about what I know of animal behavior. I want to become my own animal. To do this I must shut off the cultural white noise and remember what it is to think with my body. My cerebral cortex has been thoroughly colonized, but my haunches are still pretty pre-cultural. My hands and feet are quick to solve problems when I trust them to.

            I approach two middle-aged women at the top of a long stair-like climb. They’ve been resting and watching my small steps and deliberate foot placements.

            “How much does that pack weigh?” one asks in fatigued awe.

            “I have no idea,” I say with a breathless laugh. “Never weigh your pack. You want to believe it’s lighter than it is when you start out, and to brag it was heavier than it was when you get home.”

            This attitude is more self-preservation than suicidal tendency or ego. If the pack is too heavy, my back will tell me (I try it on at home). But put a number to it and my brain will convince my body it’s too heavy regardless. Or worse, if I’m having a bad day, I don’t want to know the pack is plenty light and should be no problem. Animals don’t weigh loads, and I know that when I’m out on my own my body amazes me. What seems heavy in the driveway seems infinitely doable on the leaf-strewn trail.

            You are thirteen, swinging down from the cherry tree by your window. It is quiet except for the sounds of cars nearby and your mother’s voice in your ear: not after dark . . . never alone. . . don’t you read the papers?  No one understands your restlessness. The suburbs suck. Your brothers get to go where they want, even at night. You get to go to your room. Because there’s nothing else to do you walk the black edge of the road, with each step daydreaming of woods, dogs that come every time you call, and strong, kind boys. A half moon winks through the trees. Then someone whistles. “Hey baby, you don’t have to walk.” You remember where you are. Stuck. The car doesn’t stop. What if I want to walk, you think. What then?

            Like many female adventurers, I’ve had to learn the hard way and I break society’s rules. I’ve struggled free from some of the traps western culture has set out to extirpate my instincts, and I feel lucky not to have lost a limb so far. Although a mouthy child, always be polite, was firmly ingrained by the time I became an adult. Attached to that was don’t make a scene. Following these rules makes it almost impossible for the civilized female to prevent a threatening encounter with a male, so caught up is she in giving him the benefit of the doubt until he has his hands on her, is forcing her into the car or on the ground.

            I laugh at the centuries-old message that civilization is created for and maintained by women. Civilization — that place with walls where humans deceive themselves about the extent of their control and buy into the myth of security. The only place, we’re told, where women can be safe. I am not less safe in the wild. Statistics show I’m at greater risk of attack in my house or on a city street, where unethical men may prowl the night, than I am miles away from a trailhead or parking lot. I don’t trust what civilization and culture tell me anymore. I trust my gut. Out alone, I look everyone in the eye once and then avert my gaze (but never, ever look down). I turn to face anyone coming up the trail from behind. I can look ornery and unapproachable in seconds. I don’t wear the shroud of fear and vulnerability I’m told is attractive, is feminine. I bare my aggression, like teeth. If a man does not understand how to respect my privacy — a kind of territory — then he deserves whatever growls he’s given.

            Two young women day-hiking ahead. One steps aside and as I pass, whispers: courageous.

            It breaks my heart.

             Someone rounds the turn below you. Something about his size, or that he’s alone, or the way he cocks his head sends a tremor up your back. There is a large boulder and you slip behind it. What about this person makes your ruff go up, makes you not even want to sniff out his intentions? It doesn’t matter. There are no walls here and disappearing is not hard. As he reaches the boulder and moves past, you’re crouched, ready to pretend you were peeing if he looks. He doesn’t look. Why would he? No one expects you to be here. A little amazed, you watch him march uphill, oblivious. A wren perched without moving in the bushes nearby meets your gaze.

            Men are animals. This is what I’ve been told countless times before driving cross-country or going camping by myself. Most often it’s male friends who have drummed this into my skull. I understand them to mean that men are driven by their dicks which pulse with instinct, not reason. They mean that men can act badly. Well, women are animals too — treated like such is the way many feel. And animals are animals. I leave civilization to be with animals and to be an animal, and surely I can allow men inside this definition in the same, less derogatory way I’m including myself. Most animals, especially the best killers, the blood-thirstiest, have ingrained inhibitions — both social and genetic — that keep deadly conflicts among members of a species to a minimum. Especially prevalent are the inhibitions males of these species (most birds and mammals) have that keep them from physically attacking a female. It seems our culture evolved too fast; our hereditary inhibitions couldn’t keep up.

            Or maybe the messages given females are social inhibitions devised by patriarchal culture rather than biological evolution. The messages: “You’re putting yourself in danger!” — as if women should never take risks or don’t want to; “You’re asking for it!”— the ”it” presumably the same as in “doing it”; and “Take someone with you!”— an especially problematic message for single women since more than 80% of sexual crimes are committed by someone we know.

            Women are domesticated through fear. We’re taught that we need — no, deserve —protection. A privilege that we enjoy like poodles who’re primped, dressed in bows, and carried around. I don’t want to be a decoration or a pet who waits for her husband to come home. My husband and I do things together — climb, hike, kayak, bike, read, debate. But we also do things separately. And when I go into the woods alone he has to defend both my decision and his to others (not to stay, but presumably to have let me go).

            Even in other primates, possibly the most social of animals, members take time by themselves. For some people, being alone in a crowded city street or bar is enough, or having the whole house to oneself. I need the woods, mountains, and rivers which remind me dirt and sweat aren’t undesirable, that I have muscles for a purpose. I need places without mirrors. In all their good intentions, people who’ve tried to keep me safe have helped keep me from discovering myself and exploring my creativity, my body, and the land. A room of one’s own? Yes, but an isolated canyon, peak, or valley occasionally is just as necessary. Let me go, I begged my mother. Let me go, I begged the voices in my head. I never would’ve married a man I had to beg this way.

            When you reach the lake it’s still sunny. You hurry, hoping to get in a quick dip while the sun is full-force. After scouting out a place in the steep granite walls that will let you camp above, unseen from the banks, you reclaim your pack and huff it up manzanita and scree to the flat. The wind, as if it’d been waiting, surges as you pitch the tent. You check from below to make sure it’s hidden. Once it’s weighted down with rocks in each corner and over the stakes, you explore the shoreline. All the hikers have left. Each time the sun’s consumed by a cloud you wonder, Is this it? Kingfishers rattle. You strain to hear the sounds of conversation carried a long way, relax when you determine it’s the wind-thrown water hitting logs and rocks. As a stellar jay cries and heads for the lone Jeffrey Pine, you settle in to listen to the voices.

            Even with everyone gone, I have to concentrate on the sounds around me, make them familiar, before I can completely relax. The animals that live here know these sounds, but I’m new to this habitat. I’m used to rustling leaves and eastern rivers, not the irregular slapping of lake water on a rugged shore. Sun heats my face and I begin to strip, hoping it will hang around long enough for me to run into the cold, clear water. Then a cloud shoulders the warmth aside and, reluctantly, I pull my shirts back on. Am I being wise or wimpy, I wonder. Skinny dipping is an obsession of mine, even when it’s too cold to really swim. Immersing myself in natural waters is a conscious reminder that I don’t have control over things like temperature, depth, or what’s on the bottom. It’s a reverse-baptism, one that celebrates my body and mortality by baring myself to this beautiful, relentless creation. Two mallards come right up to where I’m filtering water, and I enviously lose myself in their antics and the iridescent blue, green and purple feathers up close. As they paddle away I screw the lid on my bottle.

            “Is that water potable?” I spin. The man has stopped a respectful distance away.

            “No, that’s why I have a filter,” I fumble. I didn’t hear him. I hadn’t heard him.

At first this is all I can think, but as a woman catches up with him I realize this time it’s okay. Maybe animals stalked from downwind feel this way when they finally get a sniff of a too-close stranger.

            “Sorry if I startled you. I didn’t expect to see anyone out here,” he’s saying. “You know there’s a winter storm watch. . .”

            I nod. I’ve categorized him as one of my kind — pleasant outdoor enthusiast who appreciates solitude. “The weather report called for snow down to 7,000 ft. That’s why I didn’t go any further in.”

            “5,500 is what I heard.”

            We all look toward the lake, imagine snow covering the shore, pines, and granite ledges. The hush of the next morning.

            After they leave I feel truly alone. It’s wonderful. The wind has picked up and I’ve started the stove even though I ate my sandwich only two hours ago. Like the other animals, I must scurry for food before the storm hits. In my case, hot food. The temperature is dropping fast. As creamy garlic pasta burps in the pot, I squat on a boulder to get a better view. Like an animal, I stayed when people fled to their cars. Like an animal, I’m not uneasy that a storm is coming. Perhaps, as for the other animals, this can be a kind of home. At least I feel at home, the way when the curtains are pulled you can walk around in your underwear, not caring if your hair’s combed or teeth brushed. Here, on this ridge, I’ve escaped society’s gaze.

            The steep scree and aspen slopes rise above on three sides. Could the black bears around here scramble up them? It’s hard to imagine. I stare at the nooks in the rock walls as I eat way more than I need, trying to hoard all the fat against a cold night. I compare each gust with the last and each one’s stronger. No bears pass through. The barometric lows before a major storm make animals lethargic, I recall. That and my full belly has me thinking it’s time to den.

            A few drops of rain convince you to take a last pee in the half-light. Something moves, a dark head bobs in and out of the tall manzanita. Your heart stops. They’ve come for you. More follow the first, but they’re in baseball caps. You look back and the bear becomes a guy whose navy sweatshirt hood is pulled tight around his head. You’re disappointed.

            And nervous. They came from another direction, off-trail, and head toward the high point of nearby rocks. They didn’t see me but can’t help but notice the tent from where they’re going. My brain says to zip up tight, avoid contact, but my body wants to stand ground. They know where I am; I want to see where they are, where they go, and when they leave. Can they tell I’m female? Probably not in my shell and hat. But if they come closer. . .?

            They’re not dressed for the weather that’s coming. They don’t even carry daypacks. What brings them out here? To my place? I remember how ethologists say an animal will be the most aggressive toward others of its species in familiar territory. The fact that I’ve settled in may be why I’m not interested in retreating. It doesn’t take long for them to wander out the back way they came, and I consider how I’d feel if I were holed up in the tent now. I wouldn’t know they were gone. Even if I peeked out and didn’t see them, I’d wonder if they were hidden. I’d worry all night. My body made the right decision.

            It’s started raining and I consider keeping the food bag in my tent. What animal will be out in this?  Or I could just stash it in the crook of a small tree. I mean, there aren’t many tall enough and all the lower branches on the pines are broken off so that . . . but my body is not listening.

            My hands grab the unwieldy clothesline and double-bagged food, while my feet and eyes hunt for a suitable spot. There is really only one option. The pine is on a steep, scrubby slope which makes it difficult to get into good position for an underhand throw. I didn’t often have to hang food where I’m from, but after a couple tries I lob the rock over the branch and the tied rope follows. Now I stand amidst juniper and rock. It’s only me, with no reinforcements, and I’m enough.

            Finally in the tent, wet gear off to the side, I think about how I came to doubt myself. Was it that I was born with a suburban spoon in my mouth which fed me all those white middle-class fairy tales about how great it is to have men do everything for you? Was it that in the seventies and eighties females were working hard to prove their competence in the male world of commerce, emphasizing their minds and masking their bodies? Was it that no women I knew sought solitude outdoors? In the metropolitan area of my youth, the wild was something only men were supposed to crave, and then only a few weekends a year when they tested their brawn against their pin-striped brains.

            You are five, racing around the front lawn behind your older brothers on the first really warm spring day. Your mother calls you aside and hands you a shirt. You start to cry and point at your brothers. “Little girls are different,” she says. “Little girls wear shirts.” But you cry harder and beg for one day more, one day, and she relents. No longer sure what the game is, you roll down the hill again and again. Grass sticks to your back and belly. Climbing the magnolia you pay special attention to how smooth the bark is as you hold the trunk. Your brothers go inside. It’s getting cool. Under the wisteria you tuck your knees to your bare chest for warmth, afraid to go indoors. Afraid of never being let out.

            With short hair and a penchant for dirt, I was always mistaken for a boy when little. I prided myself on being a tomboy and wore my brothers’ hand-me-downs until puberty dropped me into a vat of pink-glitter lip gloss. Luckily, once at college, the hippies got me comfortable with a clean face again, and the rednecks reminded me that flannel could be flattering.

            Today I’m still caught off guard by the people — both males and females — who describe me as butch. When single, I learned it was easier to move around in social circles if I grew my hair long. A man I’d been working with for over a year and whom I admired, asked if I knew how much taking up knitting had changed my image (why do people assume lesbians don’t knit?). This man and I took high schoolers on hikes and longer trips. In the woods I felt no qualms about spitting if I had to, competed in belching contests, and — like the male leaders — didn’t suppress any gastric emissions caused by the rice and bean diet. Not my behavior in a restaurant, but they didn’t necessarily know that. It now occurs to me that those actions construed as manly are really me at my most animal.

            How did it happen that men get the freedom to act as animals? Do we really think they can’t help it, or, rather, that we can help it more than they can? Maybe it’s feared that women who let themselves be a little wild will, like the woman who married a bear in Northwest Indian tales, choose not to turn back. I don’t know if that’s still a possibility anywhere in the world, but it’s not one I’d choose. Still, I’ll claw and kick for the chance to temporarily drop as far out of human society as possible. And to spit when I need to.

         The wind is crazy now, pushing your tent’s dome from all sides, bending the poles concave at times. You hear each gust gather in another valley and grow to the great growl of Urset that charges over the ridge and shakes your den. Maybe you are trespassing. Your full bladder whines insistently so you slip out of your bag and into rain gear. Outside it’s dark, as if the earth rolled into a cave. The cold rain stings your butt with its quills. Shadows everywhere shift and settle. Remember what the elders say: if you meet a bear, open your coat and show that you’re a woman.

            Back in my sleeping bag trying to warm up, I wallow in memories of sun on my skin: hiking the Cumberland Island beaches on my first backpack trip, all of us naked except for what we carried; stripping my shirt off every lunch stop during desert day hikes; standing nude, shin deep in the Colorado River, admiring the rich colors of the Grand Canyon while a breeze slips between my legs; celebrating Independence Day by skinny dipping solo in the Rio Grande, stroking back and forth from America to Mexico.

            I’ve always wanted to get rid of barriers between me and the earth, but it wasn’t until my freshman year in college that I finally returned to the outdoors as the little girl I was before impending breasts and periods separated me from boys and nature. I remember nervously approaching the reservoir’s edge with others for a dip to wash off all the grease and stress of the restaurant’s late shift. I said I’d go but wouldn’t strip. No one cared. When I’d almost reached the water, others were just starting to splash into the shallows. The dark swallowed the details and suddenly I felt more self-conscious in underwear. The next instant I was wading to where the black water could slide over my chest.

            What do we lose when we become afraid to ever bare ourselves, emotionally or physically? When we’re uncomfortable being naked except to make love or wash? The distrust of our bodies is crippling. As girls, we’re told they beguile ceaselessly and cruelly, so we clothe ourselves to hide or accent them. We’re told they’re weak and can’t protect us, so we cower. Then, sometime when we’re older, we hear from women who’ve found their voices, who have begun to expose these lies. They tell us together we can fight to make the world safe someday. I know their work has made it easier for me to shape my life, and I’m grateful. But I don’t believe the world will ever be completely safe for anyone. And I’m glad because a safe world has no room for wildness.

            At midnight the rain slaps the nylon even harder, unlikely to ever gentle into snow. Can this cheap tent hold up for six or seven more hours of this? I feel certain a pole will snap or nylon tear. As it is I’m riding on the raft of my Thermarest, the decomposed granite outside unable to absorb this much water. It’s pooled underneath my groundcloth and the tent floats between where the corners are staked. The fly doesn’t even cover the back of the tent where the full force of the storm has soaked the wall. I imagine trying to hike the steepness in these gusts with a full pack in the dark. I don’t think I could get down the manzanita slope, let alone keep from getting blown off the narrow cliff-edged trail. For a few minutes I stare anxiously at the nylon sides pressing in on me. Then I remember why I’m here. No animal would stay awake worrying about what might happen. It’d just react if something did. Abruptly I release the tension in my body. The reality is I don’t want to have to deal with a busted tent or stashing my pack so I can get to the car in the dark, but I know I could. Now I concentrate on the noise and let it drown out the cultural messages my brain tries to send. The storm distracts me from pointless human worry, and I welcome it.         

           You’re on the borderline between awake and asleep, afloat in a deep pool of belonging. Your heart reaches out to other creatures burrowed in this place, enduring the same forces. To creatures nested in places you’ll never know, living lives you can’t imagine. In their world the expectations are simple. You sense that their world is your world but without the lies. You release those lies, which turn into ravens calling and winging above the dark valley. You have not taken back the night.

            Better, you are sharing it.

The Litchfields, Lynda Barreto