I’ve just introduced myself to the pleasures of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There. Called the father of wildlife conservation in the United States, Leopold heard in the revving of the great American economic and technological engines the death knell of what he called “the biotic community,” in which humanity is merely a fellow-passenger, not the driver. A Sand County Almanac was published posthumously in 1949; more than sixty years later, Leopold’s ability to see where those engines would take us seems eerily prophetic.

Aside from what he says, I love his tone—warm and humble, courteous and scholarly. But what he says is compelling and important. In one essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” he recounts an experience he had as a young man working for the Forest Service in Arizona, at a time when land managers “had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf.” One day, from a “high rimrock,” he and his colleagues spotted a pack of wolves, including some pups, and opened fire. Leopold, having shot a female, climbed down and “reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

Over the years, as he watched the destruction of the wolf population and the subsequent explosion of the deer population and disappearance of the mountain flora, Leopold came to understand the wolves’ vital place in the biotic community. He became a passionate, but never strident, defender of predators and other despised or voiceless members of his tribe, like soil, water, flowers, and mountains.

I’m thinking about the mind of the mountains because last week my sister Isa, my brother John, and I walked into what we consider their heart. We climbed up to Buckskin Pass, our mother’s favorite hike, on the first anniversary of her death. We agreed that one of her greatest gifts to us was a deep, abiding love for wild places, especially those in Colorado, a love she shared with everyone she could. I don’t know if she ever read A Sand County Almanac, but I know that she, too, thought about her response to the inner life of mountains and encouraged us to do likewise.

At the end of “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold writes this: “We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness…. A measure of this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”

I was particularly taken with his misquotation of Thoreau; in a previous post I wrestled with my own misquotation of the same line. What Thoreau actually wrote was this: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” But I love Leopold’s rendering, since the substitution of “salvation” for “preservation” gives the minds of wolves and mountains a distinctly theological dimension. (Coincidentally, I’ve also just discovered Thomas Berry, an ecology-minded priest and writer who proclaimed himself a “geologian.”)

How might the wild minds of the mountains save us? I’m not sure there’s a single answer to that question, especially since the mountains are just as capable of destroying as saving. I remember times during our childhood forced marches when we had to sprint down from above tree line to avoid summer storms that seemed to come out of nowhere, bristling lightning. Even as their come-hither beauty draws me to these high places, their monastic austerity keeps me in my place. My brother John, an alpinist by vocation and avocation, has spent more time dangling in very thin air than most normal people, and he confirms the almost erotic call and implacable heart of the mountains—or at least I feel sure he would if I asked him.

How might the wild minds of the mountains save us? Here’s one answer: in The Solace of Fierce Places: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, Belden C. Lane recounts the parable of an Englishman visiting Tibet some years ago:

Only as the grandeur of the land drew him beyond himself did he begin to discover what he sought. Walking one day toward a remote monastery at Rde-Zong, he was distracted from his quest for spiritual attainment by the play of the sun on stones along the path. “I have no choice,” he protested, “but to be alive to this landscape and light.” Because of this delay, he never arrived at the monastery….

Most compelling to his imagination was the fact that the awesome beauty of this fierce land was in no way conditioned by his own frail presence. It was not there for him…. Hence he declared, “The things that ignore us save us in the end. Their presence awakens silence in us; they restore our courage with the purity of their detachment.” Becoming present to a reality entirely separate from his own world of turmoil strangely set him free.

As John, Isa, and I descended from the emphatic heights, talking about a strangely controversial effort to designate 350,000 nearby acres of national park as a wilderness preserve, John stopped, turning around to look at Isa and me with his mouth wide open, pantomiming astonishment. Wondering what could possibly astonish someone as unflappable as John, I looked down the rocky trail.

A young man with no legs was walking toward us. Yep, walking, on his leather-gloved hands, up a trail that sucked the breath out of people with legs. His concentration was so intense that he was unable to acknowledge our presence. I recognized him as the subject of a story I had read online a few months before. Kevin Michael Connolly, born without legs, is, at age twenty-four, a champion skier, globe-trotting photographer, and charming smart-aleck, if his website is any indication. He’s also the author of a memoir entitled Double Take.

I’ve never been quite as awe-struck by another person as I was in that moment. Once again, I felt very small, amazed by the community—this time the human community—of which I am a part. So many things, people, and circumstances by which I might be saved.

The things that ignore us save us in the end. They allow us to step out of the endless hall of mirrors we usually inhabit and to find ourselves in a relationship with something outside our fears, fantasies, and projections. This was one of our mother’s great gifts: she showed us how we could step outside our defended little selves for a while. She taught us where to find courage when we need it: in this place where we knew ourselves to be small and helpless and yet utterly at home, at least for a few ragged breaths.

What we’re reading
Heather: Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Martin: Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic

Last Thursday got off to a grisly start in our West Austin neighborhood, bringing a stark reminder of the violence inherent in the way we humans live on the land. We usually attempt, more or less successfully, to keep this violence implicit—behind the walls of slaughterhouses, say, or with the cleanup crews who scrape the roadkill off our highways—but every once in a while it bursts forth in explicit, unimaginable horror, demanding to be acknowledged, as in the aftermath of oil spills. Or, on a much smaller scale, on our street last Thursday.

It was about 6:45 a.m. and Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound and I had just set out on our usual two-mile morning perambulation. As we turned the corner to climb the first big hill I saw S. and A., two of our neighbors, standing in A.’s front yard. The light was still tenebrous, and my eyes were still filled with morning blear, so I asked them, stupidly, if everything was okay.

In response, A. gestured at the spiked black steel fence that encloses his back yard and said, “Deer caught on the fence.” I looked again, and sure enough there was a young buck hanging from the top of the fence by one back leg, kicking occasionally in an attempt to get free. Since Chula was getting increasingly agitated, I pulled her away and continued up the hill.

When we returned, some time later, A., S., and the buck were gone. I allowed myself to hope that all had turned out well, but then I heard the unmistakable pop of a gunshot—an unusual sound in our part of Austin—and then another a few seconds later. When we got to the bottom of the hill, I saw a small group of men gathered around something by the curb.

I put Chula back inside and went to investigate. The object by the curb was the buck, his mangled hindquarters covered by a tarp, his eyes rolling around in his head, which thrashed and clattered against the pavement in his death agony. An astonishing amount of blood rolled down the gutter toward the storm drain.

A. filled me in on what had happened in my absence: while S. had gone to fetch a pistol to dispatch the creature, the buck had worked his way loose from the fence, but not before hopelessly mangling both his back legs in his frantic efforts to free himself. He somehow dragged himself across one street and two front yards (including ours) before they caught up with him again. S. fired once and missed, then fired again from point-blank range; unfortunately, as they discovered later, the second shot merely went through the buck’s cheeks, causing him to get up and haul himself across the street, where he finally collapsed in the gutter.

Unwilling to fire any more shots, S. and A. asked C., the neighbor in front of whose house the buck had collapsed, if he had a hunting knife. C. went back inside and got what A. later described as “the world’s dullest hunting knife.” S. hacked at the buck with the knife until he finally slit his throat, but, as A. said, “waiting for the buck to bleed to death became too much, so S. was able to sever its windpipe, which quickly—and thankfully—brought the deer’s life to an end.”

It was at this point that I wandered up. I’d been standing there only a few moments, trying to take in what I was witnessing, when A. looked over my shoulder and said, “Heather doesn’t need to see this.” I turned around and saw her walking toward our little group, and headed back to intercept her. As we walked back up our driveway, I noticed several spots of bright red blood, signs of the buck’s last agonizing procession toward its death. There were more bloodstains on our front walkway, and indeed all across our front yard.

Later, as I hosed some of those stains off, I thought about the other deer which had gotten hung up on A.’s fence last year, another beautiful young buck who managed to gut himself on one of the spikes and hung there, head down, slowly dying. It had been difficult not to think of Jesus hanging on the cross while looking at the helpless creature.

A. and his family had been out of town on vacation, and no one knows how long that buck had been hanging there before someone found him. None of the neighbors who were there that day had a gun—we keep all our family firearms out at Madroño—and eventually we called our local veterinarian, who finally came and administered a lethal injection. We carefully lifted the dead buck off the fence, and a man from the city parks department took the body away.

Deer have been living in close proximity to us—and sustaining us—for centuries. They are associated with Artemis/Diana in Greek and Roman mythology, and four stags feed on the world tree in Norse mythology. St. Hubertus, the patron saint of hunters, supposedly saw a crucifix on the head of a stag he’d been pursuing, and St. Giles (depicted above), the Greek hermit, lived with a doe as his only companion. The indigenous Huichol people of Mexico make offerings to the Deer of the Maize and the Deer of the Peyote, and in Shinto, deer are considered messengers to the gods. In Austin, many of us are accustomed to virtually tame deer foraging in our gardens. But the deer that died on A.’s fence, like the countless dead squirrels, raccoons, possums, and deer we see on our roads, remind us of the violence inherent when urban, automotive humanity impinges on wild (or even semi-wild) nature, or vice versa.

It’s silly to think that without us these animals’ lives would be free from suffering, pain, and terror; they all have numerous natural predators and parasites, after all, and those predators and parasites don’t go out of their way to kill humanely. (Sometimes I think it ironic that humane derives from the Middle English word for human, but the fact is we do have a choice in how we kill the animals we use.) And Madroño Ranch is, after all, in the business of selling bison meat, one of the requirements of which is first killing the bison, and we do derive income from hunting leases during deer season. But there’s something about the useless and prolonged horror of the way these deer died that hits me very hard. They weren’t shot for their meat; instead, mutilated by a symbol of human territoriality, they died slow, agonizing, gruesome deaths—victims, in effect, of our notions of private property. Where’s the redemption in that?

What we’re reading
Heather: Michael E. McCullough, Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct
Martin: Glen David Gold, Sunnyside

We spent last weekend at Madroño with Shawn and Susanne Harrington of Asterisk Group, who are designing a visual identity for the ranch suitable for use on business cards, website, food labels, letterhead, gimme caps, T-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, etc.

Since so much of what we hope to make Madroño stand for is based on a very specific sense of the place and its unique qualities, we wanted to give Shawn and Susanne (and their son Oliver) a tour of the ranch. They especially wanted to get a first-hand look at the buffies, thinking that they’d be an ideal image for the ranch, but unfortunately, as far as the Harrington family is concerned, the Madroño bison remains a mythical beast, more rumor than reality.

It was a gray and drizzly Sunday morning when Robert Selement, our trusty ranch manager, came by and picked us up in his big ol’ pickup. Robert may love showing the place off even more than we do, and Shawn and Susanne oohed and aahed in all the right places, even though the misty weather meant that we had to imagine the normally breathtaking views from up top.

The high point of the tour, of course, was to be a close-up view of the bison, complete with newborn calf (or perhaps calves, as several of the cows seemed to be on the verge of dropping babies). So imagine our chagrin when, after driving all over the ranch for two hours, we failed to get even a single glimpse of them.

You might think it would be hard to lose a herd of thirty or so critters, each weighing in at a thousand pounds or more, even on a place as big as Madroño, but, as Robert said with some asperity, “We’ve got buffalo poop, buffalo hair [where they’d rubbed up against convenient tree branches], and buffalo tracks, but no buffalo.”

Bison are interesting animals. With a dearth of natural predators, they once roamed the North American prairies in untold millions, and were vital sources of food and other necessities for the Plains Indians. Then the railroads started building across the continent, and the real slaughter began. One of the notable things about bison is that they don’t run away when they hear a gunshot or see one of their fellows fall. Instead, they tend to wander over and nose the corpse of their fallen comrade, in a manner that can seem uncomfortably close to mourning.

This, of course, is one of the reasons they were almost eradicated by nineteenth-century buffalo hunters, but it most assuredly does not mean that they are in any way tame. In fact, they retain a distinct whiff of wildness, even on a ranch; a sublime atavism shines from their dark eyes. When we were in New York last month, we met a rancher from Pennsylvania at the Union Square Greenmarket who told us, astonishingly, that he invites school kids on field trips to wade into the midst of his herds and pat his bison. Just the thought of that made all the hair on our heads stand straight up. (It was quite a sight.)

As if their immense size and somewhat, er, unpredictable temperament weren’t sufficient encouragement to treat bison with a healthy respect, they’re also astonishingly fast and agile. They can jump into the bed of a pickup (or so we’re told; fortunately, we haven’t yet seen that firsthand), or across a cattle guard, or over a four-foot fence (when, that is, they don’t elect simply to go through it). They can work up a substantial head of steam—up to thirty-five miles an hour, in fact, which is faster than even Robert’s trusty pickup can go on Madroño’s steep and rocky roads—and they can move as fast backward as they do forward, which is why they’re sometimes used to train cutting horses. And, as we learned last weekend, they have apparently evolved the ability to turn invisible when they want to.

Shawn and Susanne were pretty good sports about it, and Oliver just wanted to play with an old ammeter that was rattling around in the back of the truck. (It’s hard to predict these things with any certainty, but Oliver at age five seems bound for a career as an electrical engineer.) But I know Robert was concerned; the fence that can keep bison in when they want to go out has yet to be invented, and we feared that they might have decided to pay a social call on the neighbors. Again.

This is always an awkward situation, not least because you can’t really compel bison to do something they don’t want to do—like, for instance, return to your property. Fortunately Robert has conditioned them to respond to the rattling of a bag of feed cubes, and can usually tempt them back from wherever they’ve strayed with the promise of treats. But having several tons of ornery meat invade the place next door is not exactly the way to foster neighborly feelings. (In March the foreman of a West Texas ranch shot fifty-one bison that had gotten loose on his property from the place next door. The fact that the place next door was a hunting ranch, and the bison would otherwise have ended up as little more than targets in a shooting gallery for rich Texans, didn’t make the story any less shocking.)

Fortunately, our neighbors have thus far responded with patience and good cheer, even when the bison cornered a herd of their terrified cattle—it must have looked a little like a scene from one of those old Westerns in which a gang of outlaws menaces some frontier town.

By the time we had to leave, late Sunday afternoon, Robert still hadn’t tracked them down. We lamely told Shawn and Susanne that we hoped they’d come back another time to see the buffies (who finally turned up above the trout ponds, safe and sound and on our side of the fence; I’m quite sure that if bison could snicker, they were snickering at us). I mean, they couldn’t possibly pull that disappearing act twice in a row, could they?

Well, could they?

What we’re reading
Heather: Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
Martin: Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

The first sparks for the idea of Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment were kindled about a year ago in conversations with my mother, Jessica Hobby Catto. She has listened carefully and thoughtfully to my sometimes wildly utopian ideas, offering hard-earned practical advice and persistent encouragement.

Her death on September 30 has left me so stunned that I’m having trouble relegating her to the past tense. I am struggling to stay in the present perfect, which refuses to point to a specific time, preferring instead to drift between the present and the past. This grammatical eddy allows me to dawdle a little longer before I face a present and future without her. At the same time, I know that at Madroño her spirit is always present, always past, always future.

My mother’s love for the outdoors shaped my life. The first house I remember was on a bluff north of the San Antonio airport, terrain that didn’t qualify as even remotely suburban at the time. Since my three siblings and I arrived within six years of each other, my mother must have deemed it a survival strategy to push us out of doors as much as possible. We had no immediate neighbors and spent our time pretending to be lost in the woods, investigating the draws and seasonal creeks that occasionally flooded and kept us home from school, and sliding down the cliff (strictly forbidden) to visit the nearest neighbors who rewarded us with butterscotch candies. The gravel road on which we lived was rural enough that people felt comfortable dumping trash on it. Every few months my mother would send us to drag a large trash can and pick up the trash on the road that we could pick up: we were permitted to leave the large appliances and dead livestock. Her point was—and is—clear: some human interactions with the landscape are unacceptable.

She also taught me that love of place is a perfectly reasonable principle by which to order a life. Converted to the Church of High Altitudes at Cimarroncita Ranch Camp in New Mexico, she began proselytizing to her children in the mid-1960s when we began annual summer treks to Aspen, Colorado. In the requisite station wagon filled with pillows, the reek of Panhandle oil and cattle, and squabbling children, we always stopped at the top of then-unpaved Independence Pass (12,000-plus feet above sea level) to play in the snow.

Aspen then had one paved street, one stop sign, a drug store with a soda fountain, and two fine old movie theaters. What more did we need? On days we didn’t hike, my mother shooed us outside to play in the puddles if it was raining or to climb up nearby Aspen Mountain with raincoats or pieces of cardboard upon which we would slide back down the meadow grasses. When my father’s career took us away from Texas and to other interesting venues, Colorado was the place we always returned to, my mother’s spiritual center. Despite her peripatetic life, she had a profound love of the Roaring Fork River valley, its smells and flowers, its imperious weather changes, the varieties of its wildness. These never ceased to sustain her, and she in turn worked to sustain them through her involvement with various environmental causes, particularly land conservation.

When she was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer in 2007, my parents began spending more time at their San Antonio home to be near the doctors she most trusted. Since she had long since given her heart and energy to Colorado, I was worried that she would feel unmoored during her time in San Antonio, adding to the discomforts of treatment. As we talked about ways in which she could stay connected to the conservation world she loved, especially in a state like Texas that so dearly values its private property rights, the idea of creating a gathering place for people passionate about nurturing the natural world was born.

I know I will eventually move out of the strange timelessness that hovers around times of death, but never completely. Despite her preference for the mountains, she saw the beauties of the Texas Hill Country and bought the original piece of what has become Madroño Ranch more than fifteen years ago. The blessings she bestowed on me—awareness of human limits, love of place, the place itself—are with me as long as I am here to receive them.

What we’re reading
Heather: Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
Martin: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations