Author: Judy Rintoul

Being able to gambol about with pronghorn is a peak experience. And when one is surrounded by pronghorn and high snowy peaks at the same time. It is peak upon peak. One starts to run out of superlatives. We were fortunate to make sightings, first in the desert where they browsed in the heat on new bunch grass. They crossed the road, single file in front of the car.

When we continued to make our way up into the Sawtooth mountains in Central Idaho we found the graceful ungulates again this time in a shallow valley surrounded by ragged mountain chains 6,000 and 9,000 feet. The pronghorn were mildly curious but mostly engaged in their own mysterious behavioral rituals. Staring at each other and capriciously galloping through the sage if they were startled in any way. When they turned their cloudy white bums on us we would inch forward so as not to lose our connection. Sometimes they would look back at us with striped faces and twisting horns.

“The fastest land mammal on the continent,” our waiter reminds us later at dinner. Yes, they evolved to out-run the now extinct North American cheetah.

The pronghorn fascinate. I’m taken by the evolution of their skillful speed in relation to an external threat. Like these speedsters, sometimes my greatest strengths emerge entwined with the fear that brought them into being. I wish it were otherwise. Calm reflection has brought me gifts too. I look no gift gazelle in the mouth. Now that time and science have shown me that true fear is huge energy, I have nothing to fear of fear itself. It can power a pronghorn. The fleet beauty is not paralyzed by thoughts about fear. In that regard they squarely agree with Winston Churchill: “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”. It is thoughts about fear that bring me down. Pronghorn don’t run their emotional sensations through a cerebral filter. Fear itself is a life saving, complex engine, pumping necessary neurochemical, muscles, blood and oxygen. A good blast of terror and I can see myself out running the cheetah. Fear can be a peak experience too. It depends on how pervasive the thoughts and images of the cheetah. I’m sure the North American cheetah was magnificent, but it is no more; outlived by a springing creature of controversy. Is it a deer? A sheep? A gazelle? Antelope? Peak experiences are mostly ones of curiosity. What is this creature? Who am I in relation to fear? Where is the pronghorn of speed, strength and endurance in me?

You don’t go to Eastern Oregon simply to visit a remote place. You go to be infused with incongruity. The crushed sage leaves in your hand will flare your nostrils to take in more and more of the scent of sun, sand and sky.

Looking over the Malheur Wild Life Refuge

And then, at the edge of the silvery slope the smell will turn immediately to mud and the spreading marshes will wash through your recepticle self with a mixture of grass and water, a kimchi of the past, fermenting its way to the future.

Mesmerizing Marshes

You will inhale the dust and the lushness side by side. Then feeling like a small speck in the universe, and similtaneously seeing yourself expand to fill a larger space, you will confront any part of your life that is filled with sameness; that has narrowed, limp and dank, without the contrast of opposing sounds or smells. Walt Whitman, the poet said “I am large,” claiming his spacious identity. He held the contrasts of time’s turning. Who you are changes to fit the environment. You will rise up to take in the desert proprioceptively, forsaking your over-dependence on thought. You will confess amid the sparkling song traffic around your cabin that despite a professed love of nature and pride of literacy in its abundance you can’t return the bird calls by name.

The trills that tickle the ears are annonymous. Once they make their way through the cerebral labyrinth, a longing sadness emerges that you can’t greet them either by name or by note. The same with the fragrances. They rise from the desert, indecipherable and defying all metaphors.

When you look up at the striated Pillars of Rome, golden columns that speak of the endless cyce of deposition and erosian, let your breath fall to the flowers at your feet and rise to the clouds with the same cycle of filling and emptying. You will be large too.

Pillars of Rome

What would make me leave my comfy cottage where I tend the comfrey and columbine and drink wine at a room temperature of 75 degrees?
Surely it would be a bison. Despite living in the US for most of my adult life, I have not seen a bison in the wild.

(painting by Jeffrey Muhr)

The problem with setting out to see something iconic is that I have visions of how the revelation of the bison will take place. We will crest a small hill and following the road to the bed of the grassy plain below we will see the shaggy behemoths spread out before us by the hundred. I will feel a zig zaggy motion tickle its way up my sternum. Excitement works that way for me because my body is divided like a capricious lightning squiggle. The right expanding and responsive to these flashes of emotions. The left a cold lump that pretends not to notice and certainly won’t dance with the right, or even lean forward with the nuances of sightseeing. So together these very different sides of myself will look out on the majestic beasts I have traveled three states to see. They appear wooly, wise, unshakeable yet cuddly in my internal reference library.

Already I start to dread that I could be startled by two or three mangy beasts beside the road on some ranch before leaving Oregon. Then what? Will there still be a reason to journey on? If the magnificence of multitudes is missing or the journey delivers too soon, how will I continue? My reassuring Taurus self tells the flighty side of me that connection to these bovidae is not the only reason for the quest. Remember your Columbine, the giant cow of my sun sign urges. It grows in soil that migrated from the place to which you go. True, I am the more recent immigrant, having lived in Oregon’s Willamette Valley 9 years and having come from a land of very different buffalo; smaller in size but more ferocious in charging habits. The Cape buffalo that inhabit sub-Saharan Africa are more festive and flexible. They have stylized horns, like ladies’ hairdos from the 50s. Yet they have less hair than the cousins who live at higher elevations. Wide curving horns wouldn’t look good with shaggy beards. How is it that I choose to forsake warm climes and seek the glacier chilled air of a wilderness?

(painting by Lin Barrie, see more at http://wildlifeandwilddogs.wordpress.com/art/)

For now let me return to less dangerous flora. The flowers that nod quietly at our Corvallis cottage bury their feet in Montana’s topsoil. It slid in here with the series of Missoula floods in the ice age and plans to be here until the next “big one”– the 700 miles of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate lurking in the Cascadia subduction zone off of Oregon’s shores is due any minute to slide under the North America plate and tilt the Northwest coast an estimated 6 feet under water while scrubbing parts of the topsoil into the ocean. What a waste! Geologic terrorism! So much for growing hairy herbs in a peaceful college town.

My journey is not just to find myself–the part that has so strongly identified with the practical, strong, earth-connected bovine of the early astrological cycle–but the big-picture self travelling through wide space to examine my very roots through time. Are they in Montana? On the Savannah? Or will I find them here when I return resting in the rich loam, entwined with those of the comfrey that taunts me with its monstrous size and bee-filled bells? Existential tickles of unease are as much a prompt to journey as the more dramatic losses and cataclysms of the classic hero’s journey. Odysseus went to help fight the Trojan war to bring purpose to his own life. To this end, he emerged from a wooden horse, one reputedly larger than a bison, and did some sort of vanquishing of people who later had their tribal name misappropriated by a condom. In the end, the horse held its place in history, as did the condom-inspiring tribe, and the Greek hero is still known for his swashbuckling journeys around the Mediterranean, portrayed by Homer the poet in The Odyssey. I don’t know if poetry will be inspired on my journey, but I’m open to many gods of exploration and creation, hopefully the journey will be brimming with bison rather than dodgy Greek super dudes. I don’t plan anything heroic, but I know from every journey I’ve ever taken, that it will shape me. Hallelujah!

Columbine are hard to leave. Their wistful whiskery wings have historical meanings such as dove, innocence, and granny’s nightcap. They spring up unannounced in my garden like characters in the Punch and Judy puppet show of the 1800s, which did indeed feature a commedia dell’arte type character named Columbine. They nod and dance. I could be happy to stay and perhaps never see a bison at all. I am no scholar of language. But when I consult the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it tells me that columbine and behemoths both found their way into print in the 14th century. They nestle together, unlikely bedfellows of the late middle ages, the 2019 online Merriam-Webster, and this blog.

Together we all pass through time and the world mostly in free association, married only by fascination with disparate elements and experiences. We try to bring meaning and order only after the fact. As I prepare for my trip, the art in my own home reminds me that these images of flora and fauna, evidence of my chaotic biophilia, have been in proximity for years. I pressed the innocent columbine to its wax bed in an assorted dried flower panel when the seasons rotated away from their blooms. The bison is standing in the embrace of the the crab that Jeff painted, connecting his ocean Cancer sign to my bullish earth one. They have been hanging on our wall, waiting for years, suggesting this journey together. They urge us out of our frame to seek fresh encounters in the wider world. The images tell us what to look for: the columbine, innocence of the dove–a gentle lens of the beginner, free from learned assumptions and painful reactions–and the the bovine, the one that bends its massive head to supple grasses with homage and appetite and assurance, promising strength. And what of the crab, usually scuttling around the familiar? It will scratch instead at what is unseen in this otherwise very literal way of encountering the world. There must be some crustacean to move things to the surface of consciousness.

Before I leave town there is conditioning to be done. Faster. Faster. Faster. He urges my speed with his finger on the stopwatch. This is the sound of the second phase of my brain recovery. Paul, the physical therapist, is trying to decrease the time in which I can stand up from a chair and walk across the room. He knows I am preparing to take my post-stroke leg on a quest. He suspects I’m not yet ready to run from any stampeding mammals. My leg still wobbles beside my cane and my elbow still clenches in an endless gesture of offering my arm to an imaginary companion. Nevertheless, I manage to shave 3 seconds off of my time since the last “evidence-based” test. Paul seems excited.That makes me happy. I could care less if I did it in 17 seconds rather than 20, but he is a numbers guy and I the one to comply. What I really care about is the width of the sky not the swing of my leg in geologic time at a stuffy physical therapy gym and its rules about “evidence-based medicine”. Where is something infinite and immeasurable? Show me that please. For everything else, as they say, there is a credit card. Wide skies and bison are reason enough to send me on a journey. What delight is there in the endless thrusting of my inert limbs against a stopwatch compared to real or imagined roads of exploration? Yet all the same, I give credit where it is due. Paul and my leg, working together, allow me to once again be the explorer. The Oysseus of curiosity in the west.

The lure of the road returns me to epic Greeks. They lost Helen. We take journeys when we lose things, in my case the connection between my arm, leg and brain. We seek restoration. Helen was the beautiful bartered woman whose face allegedly “launched a thousand ships”–the journeys made to retrieve her. I need strong symbolic medicine for recovery. Maybe it will be a moose rather than a bison, but I trust that what I see will be invigorating. I already know this is how it works. I have learned to create my own reality. I am alternately a bison, Odysseus, Helen, the horse, crab and the condom. Sometimes the columbine. In this case, encountering visually powerful metaphors, I believe, will build resilience for the rest of my journey. Maybe even to Troy. Stay tuned.

The comfrey waves to me as I get in the car. It is the exuberant teen left alone at home while the parents take a trip without her. Neither of us know if I will actually see bison in Yellowstone National Park, though the chances are good, justifying the 1,000 plus miles round trip in the car. The comfrey lies to my face and says: “I’ll be good.” I know better. When I return, she will be the size of Montana and the Columbine will be no more, buried just like the rest of us when the big one comes. Isn’t that reason enough to get going?

Please your own bison, travel stories, plant collections to share here.