We lost one of our cats recently. Mr. Allnut (named for Humphrey Bogart’s character in The African Queen) asked to go out at about 4 one morning a few weeks ago, and I let him go. He never came back, and a week or so later, a neighbor confirmed Mr. Allnut’s fate—met, we all agreed, at the business end of a coyote.

We live in central Austin, but a very steep and heavily wooded ten-acre draw cuts through our quiet neighborhood. The terrain is so treacherous it’s hard to explore, even with the permission of the friendly neighbor who owns it, which means it’s easy to forget that the nightlife is literally quite wild in our back yard. We used to hear the coyotes occasionally years ago when sirens sounded at dusk or dawn, but they’ve apparently learned to sing under their breath. They’re still here.

I loved Mr. Allnut. He looked like a stuffed animal, with his regular markings and crossed blue eyes, and he behaved like one too: he suffered being cuddled and cooed over with a resigned limpness and clawless stoicism. And I still miss his sister Adelaide, and Spike with the light bulb at the end of her tail, and Kerbey and Skitter and Widget. They were cats of regular habits who just disappeared over the course of the years. I learn a lot a lot slower than the coyotes and must finally acknowledge that we always live in the midst of predators.

Apparently a lot of us are deluded into thinking that large predators are restricted to “wilder” places than cities and suburbs. One multiyear study in Chicago surprised the wildlife biologist conducting it; he found that the city’s coyote population was much larger than expected and that urban coyotes lived longer and are much more active at night than their rural siblings. They live not just in green spaces but also in apartment districts and industrial parks. Because they learn very quickly to avoid traps, it’s hard to get an accurate number, but the author of the Chicago study thought there could be up to 2,000 coyotes there—a much denser population than would cover a rural area of equal size. It’s likely that this study applies to most major metropolitan cities, including, of course, Austin. (In fact, former Madroño Ranch resident Melissa Gaskill wrote a piece on the city’s coyotes for the Austin Chronicle back in 2008, and coincidentally a story headlined “Tensions Over Coyote Trapping Split Austin Neighborhood” ran just this morning in the Austin American Statesman.)

Predator. It’s a compelling word, derived from the Latin meaning to plunder or to rob, so to call something a predator is to freight it with moral judgment. As far as I can tell (which isn’t far because I lost the magnifying glass to our edition of the compact Oxford English Dictionary), the word referred only to human behavior until it made a zoological leap in 1907. I wonder if that leap helped give steam to the notion in land management circles that rubbing out entire species was not only a reasonable stratagem but a righteous crusade. Predators rob and steal and, therefore, must be punished. Destroyed.

The Wolves and Moose of Isle Royale project is the longest continuous study of the predator-prey system in the world, spanning more than fifty years of observation on this frigid island on the Michigan side of Lake Superior. The scientists involved have concluded that to designate wolves simply as dangerous nuisances to be eradicated is to miss the hard and necessary work they do; the apex predators are vital to their complex ecosystems, despite the fear they inspire and the losses they cause. In other words, as Aldo Leopold wrote in his essay “Thinking Like A Mountain”: “too much safety” from wolves, and presumably other apex predators, “seems to yield only danger in the long run.” Because we often don’t take into account the needs of the mountain or all the other participants in a predator-prey cycle, we ranchers or hunters or businessmen end up poking ourselves (or our grandchildren) in the eye. The length of the Isle Royale study has brought academic rigor and complexity to Leopold’s beautiful musings, and has showed the scientists how much they still have to learn: “Navigating that complexity without hubris will be a great challenge.”

So you can probably connect the dots so far: despite the loss of Mr. Allnut and his compadres, I can’t entirely condemn the responsible coyote, who was just doing his job. He’s also probably eaten many, many rats and provided other services I don’t know about. A righteous campaign for coyote extinction would be understandable but could also be very ill-advised.

Now I’m going to make a crabwise move. At about the same time Mr. Allnut disappeared, we lost our beloved ranch cat Callie. Despite the fact that she was mostly white like Mr. Allnut, she managed for the eight or nine years she lived at Madroño to stay clear of coyotes, raccoons, foxes, bobcats, hawks, eagles, owls, and the occasional mountain lion. She was also immensely talkative and sociable, always accompanying us to visit the chickens and occasionally eating out of the feed buckets right alongside them. I frequently scrambled her an egg, a privilege she just as frequently lost each time I found her counter-surfing yet again. She spent many, many hours on my lap, drooling and kneading, shedding and purring. She was a good mouser and all-around excellent creature.

After she was diagnosed with skin cancer on her nose and ears, ranch manager Robert Can-This-Really-Be-In-My-Job-Description Selement smeared the affected parts with sunblock as often as possible, but of course she licked it right off. The cancer began quite literally to eat her nose and upper lip. We balanced our distress at her appearance with her comfort as long as we could bear. She’s now buried by the shed, near her empty food bowl, her grave awaiting a marker as colorful and lively as she was. It’s very hard not to think of cancer as another kind of predator, not to think: Eradicate. Kill. That’s what predators deserve.

In her thought-provoking Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag examines the language we use to describe some diseases and the use of disease as metaphor in non-medical arenas. A three-time cancer patient herself (she died of leukemia in 2004), she wanted to release cancer patients from the invisible but real shackles language slaps on them. Cancer, in her view, is “in the service of a simplistic view of the world that can turn paranoid,” encouraging radically reductive thinking and action. She particularly objects to the images of war, pollution, military or alien invasion, and genocide that cluster around cancer as a metaphor because they inevitably become confused with the individual cancer patient who becomes a loser by dying, a toxic dump site by being diagnosed, an invaded country, a helpless victim of ruthless overlords. Having cancer is a complex issue in and of itself without having to bear the burdensome, accusatory implications of the metaphors surrounding it.

As a language nerd, I wonder how to name to my own metastatic cancer because my words shape the choices I make in treatment and the rest of my life. While I can see why declaring war on cancer seems appropriate, I’ve come to find the analogy misleading at best, self-eradicating at worst. This cancer is as integrally a part of me as the coyote in my back yard, as the wolves, as any predator is a part of its distinctive ecosystem. Like a coyote, my cancer quickly learns to avoid the traps we set for it. While I don’t want to be eaten, I also don’t want to declare war on myself. Perhaps we’ll find some intimate connection we don’t know about yet between the loss of apex predators and the rise of cancer. Perhaps cancer provides some kind of service in this world of ours that has been so rapidly rearranged in the last century, when we began to use the word “predator” to describe non-human behavior and then went to war. Perhaps we need a new metaphor that allows us to live consciously and respectfully and curiously with the world around us and within us, navigating that complexity without hubris—and without metaphors of violence and condemnation.

What we’re reading
Heather: Christian Wyman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
Martin: Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership

Last week I started rowing again after an eight-month hiatus. It has been pure pleasure, despite the inevitable price of blisters on my baby-soft hands. First, the pleasure of seeing my friends at the dock, including the ducks and C.J. the chocolate Lab, who howled and wagged when he saw me; next, the pleasure of reestablishing a relationship with a boat in the water, negotiating the jostling demands of wind, current, oars, river geography, swans, kayakers, and my own stiff body; finally, the pleasure of being on the river itself, of seeing what has changed and what remains the same. The water changes quite literally with each breath; despite the dams, it’s still a living river. Trees and boulders have grown or fallen. Purple martins have replaced cormorants. And yet something persists, apparently unmoved by the passage of time. I’ve missed being on the river.

In the meantime, I was seeing another river, or at least imagining it. Martin has just finished reading Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow aloud to me, also pure pleasure. As have my rowing muscles, my reading-to-myself muscles have atrophied, and Martin reads with accents tailored to the characters and inflections appropriate to the plot. We’ve read like this for about a year now, usually at bedtime. Sometimes we can’t help but sneak-read in the daytime, wanting to be swept downstream by the whorls and eddies of words, characters, and plot like river-rafting thrill seekers.

One of the main characters of Jayber Crow is the river that runs through the valley in which the story is set. Jayber, the narrator of the novel and the barber of Port William, Kentucky, is a river-watcher as well. Late in his life and in the novel he asks:

How many hours have I spent watching the reflections on the water? When the air is still, then so is the surface of the water. Then it holds a perfectly silent image of the world that seems not to exist in this world. Where, I have asked myself, is this reflection? It is not on the top of the water, for if there is a little current the river can slide frictionlessly and freely beneath the reflection and the reflection does not move. Nor can you think of it as resting on the bottom of the air. The reflection itself seems a plane of no substance, neither water nor air. It rests, I think, upon quietness. Things may rise from the water or fall from the air, and, without touching the reflection, break it. It disappears. Without going anywhere, it disappears.

For Jayber, the reflection is an image, so to speak, of the divine, of how divinity is in this world and how it thwarts any logic that would fix that divinity in one place or locate it. It rests upon a condition rather than a location, on a “how” rather than a “where.” How can this condition be in the world? In quietness, says Jayber—a quietness that I think is born when the worlds outside and inside a person are married together. The natural world always carries its own quietness as it moves through time, but we humans need to practice marriage to know this quietness.

Honestly, I’m not sure what I’m trying to say by pulling marriage into this already multi-tentacled discussion, but having just made it to the other side of our twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, and given the national discussion on what makes a marriage, I’ve been thinking. (Those three words always fill Martin with foreboding.) If you take Jewish and Christian scripture seriously, marriage is that process by which two people become one flesh. This process requires rending; each must leave his or her parents and cling to the other in order to become one flesh. After this rending and clinging, they stand before each other naked and are not ashamed.

As a youngster I thought that becoming one flesh was merely a reference to sexual congress, the least generative and generous level of meaning in this most profound of texts. As an older-ster, I know that becoming one flesh can include sexual encounter but that the two are very distinct realities. Becoming one flesh may, in fact, begin with the self, with learning to bridge the slippery banks of individual consciousness and the physical body, so often at odds with each other. I’ve come to see cancer as an icon of this struggle, our stuttering inability to conjugate the distinctive languages of consciousness and its endless mysteries and of body and its appetitive requirements. To live as one flesh in the river of the self seems to require an awareness of the reflection that Jayber noticed, the reflection that rests on quietness—a sort of third party that allows the hands of consciousness and bodiness to hold each other, to mingle and flow into the river between them. Of course, to live as one flesh within a single body—to be married to yourself, and thus whole—is a work that flows as endlessly as a river, but that allows those glancing moments of standing naked and unashamed.

To include someone else in the work to become one flesh… well. It requires an endless series of rendings and cleavings from the past, from what has been, to create something new, the way a river changes every day and yet is still the same river. Sex can be a sign of one-fleshness, but is just as likely to be a hindrance. Only when that third party of quietness, that generous generative flow between the banks of two bodies that reflects something beyond itself—only when the three are present can there be one flesh. When the possibility of being one flesh reveals itself—within the self, within the couple—that body begins to grow, including within itself children, friends, strangers, enemies, the world itself. The capacity for stepping off the banks of the self into the river, beckoning those on the other side to join in, might manifest itself just a few times in a person’s life, or never, or every day. A few people barely towel off before they jump back in, married to the whole world and all that’s in it, no time for messing with clothes or shame.

So practicing marriage is not the same as being married. One training ground I’ve found for the practice of marriage has been reading aloud. It’s something children know immediately, that a story read or told aloud is an opportunity for teller and listener to jump into a river of words and ride them together, making a net of meaning that holds them even when they scramble up their different banks at the end of the story. That’s why the practice of reading scripture aloud is so important; it allows people to jump together off the banks and into its great narrative flow.

It’s been instructive to be a child again as Martin reads aloud and I listen, creating for us a net of meaning through both rough and placid rides. Even if we spend the day ignoring the other across the bank, or throwing rocks, we climb together into that river of words, emerging refreshed (or sometimes asleep) or even naked, when one of us is moved to tears or left helpless by laughter.

That’s why, with so many figurative rivers running, I’m happy to be back on (if not in) a literal river: yet another chance to practice marriage.

What we’re reading
Heather: Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Martin: Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (still)