wild like a fox
long live the weeds and the wilderness yet
The habits and habitat of modern life are simply not evolutionarily stable. Metal and plastic. Electric lights blotting out stars. Ten-story buildings blocking sun and moon. Cars honking and everything else ringing, beeping, and buzzing until we can't even hear aspen leaves quaking. Think about all the changes that our species has experienced in the last several thousand years. Too many. Too fast.
A person would be crazy if she weren't anxious.
— Catherine Raven, Fox and I
The words that come to mind when describing Catherine Raven’s Fox and I are the sorts of overused and tired words we often employ for things that are just nice, but that should be reserved to describe a novum such as this memoir: singular, remarkable, unusual, unique and myriad adverb-adjective combinations of the above that writing professors hate: unusually singular or uniquely remarkable.
Perhaps the reason “good writing” isn’t supposed to lean on those familiar and comfortable crutches is that a true novum. Is there anything new under the sun? Ecclesiastes begs to differ.
The wicked beauty of humanity is that we are this strange improvisation—we can indulge in the delight of surprise. And those interruptions of established patterns we often attribute to the Divine—that thing outside of ourselves that moves us? That’s grace. That’s miracle.
But we are perhaps not so accustomed to seeing even the ingrained patterns of our human—dare I say animal—nature as a revelation of God’s image within us. If we take so seriously that the world is charged with the grandeur of God—the heavens and even the earth are telling the glory of God—then perhaps even the stuff in us that is “natural” that is “instinct” has, deep in its core, a divine origin story.
Anyhow.
If you have read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or, I suppose, even 20% of Thoreau, then you may disagree with me that Raven’s book is such an original. But I hope you would agree with me that it’s an arrestingly beautiful book. To read it is to have one of those Keatsian encounters where you don’t want to be quite the same putting it down as you were when you picked it up.
Scott Russell Sanders, an English Professor emeritus at Indiana University, penned an essay on ecological restoration in the most recent Notre Dame Magazine. But he prefers, he said, the term “rewilding” because ecological restoration sounds human-controlled and a bit academic. But, “To rewind a place is to invite the full energies of nature back in.”
“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” according to Henry David Thoreau— in wildness, not in wilderness or pristine areas of nature we visit as tourists and then retreat to our concrete, definitely tame, bunkers of cities and suburbs—where 74% of North Americans have lived since 1980.
Rewilding is an activity or a movement that demands something of the humans involved as well. We are implicated. Rewilding means recovering some of our own nature that perhaps we have forgotten in our cages. Rewilding is, one might say, a conversion. Surely, any sort of restoration or healing of the ecology demands that the planet’s current apex predator (that’s you and me, baybee!) become more cooperative and less tyrannical overlords of our territories.
Wildness and tameness are the two poles Raven’s inner compass point swings between in Fox and I. She finds a propitious North Star on this journey in Fox, who marks his territory once an elderly vixen abandons her luxe lair on the ridge above Raven’s cottage.
Fox, as the resident owner, keeps a close eye on the girl—Raven names herself from her imagination of his perspective—Hurricane Hands. And, slowly, much to the chagrin and discomfort of Raven’s scientifically-trained, naturalist conscience, they become friends.
Their friendship begins with a very neighborly good deed—two loose dogs give chase to the fox, and Raven, a loather of fox-hunting and blood sports, feels for the fox and attempts to drive the dogs away. The fox disappears into water to lose the dogs, and Raven retreats to her radio, where the death of Pope John Paul II is being announced across the airwaves. She opens her door to see a shivering, bedraggled fox curled up on her doorstep, unafraid of the human behind the door and grateful for the assist.
She breaks another credo of her park ranger training by feeding Fox egg yolks mixed with garlic as a home remedy for the lethal mange that she spots on his tail. Human intervention in the “natural” death of an animal is taboo among wilderness guides. But Raven is not in the wilderness, she is in the wild. And part of the natural world are the great bursts of compassion and care—the fellow feeling and fondness that spring up between two beings who take the time to notice and regard one another.
She notes that, anyway, mange was introduced into her state of Montana through a government program in the early twentieth century, to help sheep farmers who were trying to annihilate the local coyote and wolf population. Again, rewilding might demand repentance for our sins. Egg yolk and garlic seem a small price.
Maybe I was the only one in that university town with blood-dampened hair, but I was not the only one with anxiety caused by modern habits and habitats that were not evolutionarily stable. Take an auditorium filled with university professors and doctoral students and pull them outside in groups: the ones addicted to food, tobacco, diet pills, alcohol, marijuana, sex, hard stuff, antidepressants, antipsychotics; the ones who couldn't stop pulling their hair, or picking their face, or cutting their arms. The perpetual psychiatrist appointments, the suicide attempts, the television binges. Maybe I wasn't any better than they were, but I wasn't any worse.
Raven dialogues throughout the book with Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s own friendship with foxes, and his famous parable of his crash and survival in the Sahara Desert—The Little Prince. In The Little Prince, the fox and the prince “tame” one another. But, in Raven’s book, she does not tame Fox, as one would a pet, to put him in the evolutionarily unstable environments we inhabit so anxiously, but rather he makes her more like himself—she is made wilder. And that wildness of her peculiar friendship allows her to enter back into her life.
It makes one think of St. Francis of Assisi (why is he so universally invoked? Have there been no other saints?) and that the point of his preaching to the birds was not so much that he could speak with animals rather than human, but that he was so human he was able to also speak with the animals.
We are hampered, in some way, from being what we ought to be for others—and those others include our neighbors who are humans and the land and life on it that we live in as a gift. It’s hard to feel like land is a gift when you are, as I am right now, staring out from a Barnes and Noble looking at a mall’s concrete parking structure.
On Epiphany Sunday, a small dusting of snow came down, just enough to reveal tracks on the driveway of my childhood home in Minnesota. One set, my dad identified as a mouse, the other perhaps a rabbit. And a third looked more vulpine. Perhaps a fox, he said. And I thought of the foxes I have seen trotting up and down our suburban cul-de-sac. Perhaps they’re trying to tell us something. Perhaps when someone is ready to hear.