My grandfather’s ring, gold, scored, and inset with a diamond, circled my middle finger. I pushed it there when I was twelve and never removed it. My grandmother had given it to him the first time he went to jail. She died about two decades before my birth, so I can’t ask her for the details. I loved the ring because I loved my grandfather, and I loved my grandfather because he was the only adult who held my hand and sang to me and took me to Disneyland. Or maybe because he was the only adult who held my hand. He drove me around on the back of his Harley and in the backseat of his T-Bird. I especially loved chasing horned toads up the brick wall of his house. He sent me birthday cards signed with an X. Not the letter X, the figure X; that’s how people sign when no one has taught them the alphabet. I don’t know much about him, and he didn’t know much about me. When I was twelve, my father told me that he died in prison and when I put up a huge fight about going to the funeral, he taught me a new phrase, “potter’s field.”
All the furniture except the bed and the two second-hand sofas folded or doubled as packing crates. For the first time, this paucity of belongings embarrassed me. Mark referred to the cottage as a “starter home,” implying that a real home was in the works or at least in the realm of possibility. It wasn’t.
Shallow home is a better description of the cottage. Like a sun-bleached sand dollar, I left just a little dent in my substrate. Have you ever tried to pull a sand dollar from the beach? As soon as you lift it out of the mire, a water vortex obliterates all traces of the spot where it had settled. Beginning in college, every place I lived had been tentative or uncertain; I became stuck wherever a disinterested tide left me. But a shallow home is no home at all. So why didn’t I dig in, mark my territory, and transition to a forever home? I had so many reasons. As soon as I talked myself out of one excuse, another one advanced forward. Either I was waiting for something (like a real job) or someone (like a real relationship), or I didn’t need a forever home after all. And even if I did need a forever home, I didn’t deserve one anyway.
We finished emptying the cottage with time remaining on our two-hour allotment and fire fuming above the back hills. Mark took photos. The fire’s visual impact must have been astounding for a professional artist. For me, the fire produced a more visceral reaction. I had spent enough time on the land to recognize that fire and I were so much alike—fueling ourselves with carbohydrates, exhaling carbon dioxide, consuming oxygen, releasing water—that we threatened each other.
Carbohydrates are composed of nothing more than carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Those odd and noncaloric ingredients turn into sugar and starches when plants cobble together water and carbon dioxide. The sun powers the entire process.
If my God were physical instead of spiritual, it would be the sun. If trees had a god, it, too, would be the sun. And for the same reason. The sun warms and feeds us, providing fuel for all the work we do and for every intricate task our cells perform. Every time a plant cell creates a carbohydrate, the sun adds a little spark of energy to it. Pairs of carbon atoms hold the energy. They act like two kids stretching a rubber band between them. Each carbon holds on to one end of the band and pulls. In the case of a tree, they might hold that taut band for hundreds of years. When a wildfire attacks, billions of carbon kids let go of their rubber bands all at once. Zing! Energy explodes into the atmosphere.
Mark and I could feel the heat as we walked up to Helga’s wagon, my ride back to town. I opened the door and it sank toward the ground, threatening to fall off. Above us, wind was spraying flames sideways across the hillside. A long line of black smoke trailed behind the blaze so that it looked like a fire-breathing dragon was scrambling in and out of the dales.
Only days earlier, our natural history class had visited Grant Village interpretive center, where we had picked up brochures from the Department of the Interior that opened with this line: “If variety is the spice of life, then fire is the very life of variety.” It also stated, “Fire is the great recycler.” This made fire sound like a good thing. Well, better than a fire-breathing dragon anyway. Most fire ecology websites or books will explain that combustion mineralizes nutrients and transfers them from living tissue mass to dead tissue. Mineralization is primarily the work of animals. Animals mineralize nutrients by excreting their food. Elk pellets. Night soil. Bear shit. Buffalo pie. The food they eat is living tissue—biomass—and the substance they excrete into the soil is dead tissue—necromass. Fires are so much like us they can perform the same task, consuming biomass and spitting out the raw minerals.
Living things need nutrients that are in limited supply. Unless they’re recycled, we’ll run out. Phosphorous, for example, is a critical component of DNA. Tonic and Gin were absorbing phosphorus from the soil and using it to build new cells. If they were caught in the wildfire, the phosphorous in their tissues would be “mineralized,” or recycled, into the soil and absorbed by their surviving offspring. Someone studying Gin and Tonic with an objective eye might conclude that the old junipers were unproductive and that combustion would be a good, fair death, like pneumonia to an old man.
One ridge beyond my cottage, a cumulus cloud swelled above a fire plume. Mark and I watched hopefully as if a rainstorm was thinking about rescuing us. In reality, the fire was burning through a mature pine forest and creating its own weather. As each tree succumbed to the fire, it released an amount of water equal to about half its weight. The resulting steam column rose about six miles before condensing into a cloud.
When Lori came out and reminded me to check the front door one last time, I hurried toward the cottage but detoured at the steps. Running now, I picked up a soaker hose and dropped it off between Gin and Tonic. When I returned to the vehicles, Lori was tapping her watch. She was smart. And she taught school. She must have already known about fire convection columns, the cumulous clouds forming above them, and how the fire threatening my land was simply, and importantly, recycling water. But she was too polite to lecture us. Our planet exists inside something like a sealed terrarium that prevents water from entering or leaving. So, we’ve got a limited amount, and we have to share. If you are a gamer, think of water as a zero-sum competition. If one player gains a unit of water, another player needs to sacrifice a unit.
It’s true that wildfires recycle water. So do pandemics. If a virus wipes out a portion of my county, dead bodies will surrender their water allowance to the terrarium’s atmosphere, where it will be available to other living things. This type of recycling is not analogous to tossing an empty pop can into the correct bin. Fire robs water from one forest and gives it to another. Like Robin Hood, but without any morals.
Lori shut the door to Helga’s wagon, and we took off. I told God not to let the fire recycle Gin and Tonic. They were the oldest living things I’d ever loved.
I didn’t love the cottage, but if it burned down, I could never replace the time and energy I’d devoted to building it. Finding and buying raw land had been a monumental task. I began by visiting the county plat room to see who owned what. While there, I read well reports and recorded the depth and head pressure of all the extant water wells. I drove around and checked out the land with good wells, and when I found parcels that looked inviting, I visited the owners. In fact, I visited the owners of the land I ended up buying multiple times before they gave in and agreed to sell. Then I got a loan from a farmer’s bank.
Learning graduate-level physical chemistry was easier than developing raw land. My original loan only covered land; I needed another loan before I could start building. With one room on each level, my floor plan was too odd to qualify for a Fannie Mae. I found a mortgage broker who helped me score a construction loan even though my salary came from guiding backcountry hikers—a part-time gig with no health insurance. The search was slow, but I finally found a wonderful contractor who was willing to build a hobbit hole in an isolated area. Meanwhile, an affluent city, sixty miles west, was paying laborers more than I could afford, so skilled workers w
ere hard to find. Next came improving the well, testing the water, filing water rights. Then the hard work began: choosing the size and aspect of the house and driveway; designing the floor plan; selecting wall colors, light fixtures, and appliances. The nearest Home Depot was more than two hundred miles away. The builders and I haggled over window placement in the Rainbow Room. I wanted windows spaced unevenly so I could gaze on certain peaks while standing in one spot. Before transferring from construction mortgage to home mortgage, I needed a home inspection. And a new mortgage bank.
Some jobs were emotionally taxing: driving sixty miles to the contractor’s house to ask why he hadn’t painted the downstairs yet; finding out that he was waiting for me to change my mind about “pink walls”; explaining again that the color I chose was rose adobe, not pink; dealing with a well-drilling team who didn’t want to finish the project because my place “looks snaky.” Do you know what kind of men work outdoors in an isolated area downriver from a place called Rattlesnake Butte and don’t bring guns to work? The kind of men who cannot legally carry guns. The kind of men convicted of domestic assault.
As you might imagine, there were not too many single women developing raw and isolated land.
I trundled home several days after the evacuation. My cottage was smoky but unharmed. All three kits had survived the fire and were roaming around looking for things to steal. The vixen stayed hidden but caterwauled sporadically. The smoke cleared in two weeks, and a high-pitched wail and a kink-tail poking through wheatgrasses signaled the commencement of fire drills. The great land baron, humbled by wildfire, ran out to renew battle with runaway dogs, feral cats, and slough-stuffing tumbleweeds.
Fox was missing.
A firefighter stationed half a mile down the road to log and orient the arriving mop-up crews didn’t think any of their heavy vehicles had run over an adult fox. I froze. He rephrased his words. “No. We’d have noticed. No one ran over a fox. But a scrawny fox—”
“Yes! That’s him!”
“Real scrawny? An adult? Headed to the river one night.”
I started toward the river.
He called after me that he was sorry. When I turned around, he shrugged and shook his head as if to say, It’s a fire. Animals die. I shuffled toward the river with my muddy-feet walk. He would have been right if he had said, “It’s a fire. Wild animals die.”
If I had owned Fox, if I had licensed, collared, tagged, or leashed him, then firefighters would have tried to save him. But if I owned him, how could I have called him my friend?
After bushwhacking through thickets of delicate red willow, rubbery coyote willow, and fragrant wolf willow, I reached the river. On the far shore, Cloud Catcher Mountain rose three thousand feet above the water, its wide alluvial fans spreading into sagebrush steppe. A white disk-shaped cloud was hovering between its twin peaks, rocking like a meniscus in a glass. Fox could have fled to safety with the vixen and the four-month-old kits, but I believe he waited for me. I imagined him upright on his hind legs and pressing his nose into my front window like he used to do. I could see him standing with his ears drawn back until his ankles shook and then skipping backward to regain his balance. His last memory of me was an empty house. But what could I have done if I had seen him? I couldn’t have taken him away with me.
When I headed home, the white disk cloud was still rocking between the peaks, unable to generate enough energy to splash over either one.
Purple-tinged bird droppings speckled Surfboard Rock. Birds were taking liberties they wouldn’t have dared a month earlier when their faith in Fox’s hunting prowess kept them off his pedestal. He wouldn’t even let me touch the surfboard. One day rain was pelting down so hard that mud splashed into the air. I was putting a plastic tub outside for Delbert, our UPS man, and Fox, sheltering under Tonic, was watching me. When I got too close to the surfboard, he abandoned cover and pounced on it. I stood under the portico watching rain drench him until the concave pits on his baby boulder turned into little pools. He wasn’t going to let me grab that rock. It was his second most favorite.
I had stolen his first favorite right out from under him. The limestone block, a fairly well-formed rectangle, had been performing an important function: decorating the dirt path between the driveway and the front steps. Like most limestone, it had solidified under a shallow sea, in this case, 350 million years earlier. Partially embedded crinoids and brachiopods made the surface rough and uneven. Fox was always rubbing his fuzzy butt on it and—I imagined—wearing down the raised clam shells and other Paleozoic fossils. Soon after we met, when I was still impatient with his company, I caught him scratching his stomach on my precious specimen. So, I got a wild hair and yelled at him to scoot. Footprints in the dirt betrayed him; he was sneaking back when I wasn’t looking. Foxes do not need bidets, I thought to myself when I brought it inside, and anyway he’ll never notice. Now the sedimentary sample reclines indoors on a felt-covered pedestal and serves no purpose at all. When your friend is gone, you remember these slights and ask yourself what difference one more fuzzed butt would have made to a 350-million-year-old rock. You don’t answer the question because it’s rhetorical.
Since then I have realized that massaging himself with that slab—the only one in his home range with a perfectly rough surface and a shape that fit his body—put a little well-earned joy in his life. And now I was serving penance by scrubbing bird droppings off Surfboard Rock, like a monk in a Japanese fox shrine.
Well, the shrines are not really for foxes. They’re for Inari, a Shinto and Buddhist deity whose close relationship with foxes begins around 700 CE. I learned about Inari from my Japanese students. I told them about my best friend; they told me about Inari foxes. Foxes are Inari’s guardians, messengers, or servants; the relationship is as fluid as a fox. Some of the fox statues that monks wash are human-sized. Holding their heads and tails erect, the foxes wear red ceremonial capes and guard the temple entrances. In his 1894 book, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Lafcadio Hearn writes that hundreds of stone foxes reside in shrines to Inari, “the God of Rice.” Shrines and temples in larger towns might have thousands of carved fox figurines, some small enough to hide in tiny crevices. Fox icons—and often real foxes—appear in thirty thousand Inari temples throughout Japan, a country the size of California. In other words, if we distributed the temples evenly throughout the country, one would appear every twelve and a half square miles. Fox images are everywhere in Japan.
And why not? If you follow the Shinto belief system and immerse yourself in nature, you’ll see a lot of wild animals, but none more charismatic and strikingly beautiful than a red fox. And in the days before pesticides, none more useful. Imagine wrapping your blistered hands around a wooden hoe shaft as you toil in your vegetable field. Gazing downfield, you spy onion greens slipping into the dirt. An underground vole is sucking on the bulb, siphoning your crop as you watch helplessly. Foxes arrive and rescue you from starvation. They are glorious animals and you adore them.
Hearn interpreted the personalities of the Inari fox statues: “Whimsical, apathetic, inquisitive, saturnine, jocose, ironical; they watch and snooze and squint and wink and sneer; they wait with lurking smiles; they listen with cocked ears most stealthily, keeping their mouths open or closed. There is an amusing individuality about them all, and an air of knowing mockery about most of them, even those whose noses have been broken off.” If he had written even those whose voices have been broken off, he could have been describing Fox.
From Hearn’s writings I learned that foxes can be supernatural and convey prayers and wishes to Inari. Shape-shifting foxes trick, deceive, or enchant people for both good and bad ends. Their most egregious crime is “taking diabolical possession of [people] and tormenting them into madness.”
If you want to believe Shinto stories about foxes shape-shifting and communicating with gods, well, then, you need to take it on faith. But as for foxes spreading a little inspiration, casting spells
on people, and chasing mischief, well, that sounds right to me. Country people living with foxes would have plenty of stories to tell, all of them springing from the natural behavior of foxes and people. Consider a farmer shambling home from the rice field, exhausted and hungry, when a bright red fox leaps through the field, stops, and gazes at him. That night his wife gives birth to the son he’s been praying for. He’d seen dozens of animals that day—sparrows, squirrels, beetles, frogs, flies. But he remembers the fox. And so it goes, his story entwining with other villagers’ tales of fox sightings coinciding with momentous occasions. A woman discovers a fox den and forfeits her chores to spend days, then weeks, watching foxes play. The tales spread and become part of the cultural folklore.
Hearn writes that Japanese country people, “like the peasantry of Catholic Europe,” make up myths for themselves. If I lived in an age when stories depended upon word-of-mouth instead of books, Fox and I might have become a myth. Our story, like any traditional folklore, would be brief and symbolic: Once upon a time, a girl who needed a friend grew up believing she was a magpie. From the magpies, she learned to allow ancient memories to command her attitude toward people. She adopted the magpie habit of taking whatever was offered to her but would not acknowledge or deign to rely on the giver. A wild fox pursued the magpie-girl, and she fell under his spell. From the fox she learned the purpose and the responsibility of friendship. He helped her choose a path for her life. But when a great wildfire came, she left the fox to die. Realizing her wrongdoing too late . . . Well, and then they would end it with a few words. Maybe, overtaken with grief and guilt, she would (figuratively) stab her beak into her breast and tear her flesh out like the mandarin duck hen in Lafcadio Hearn’s folktale; or she would revert to her magpie personality; or figure out how she can find another friend; or learn what to do if she doesn’t find one.
Fox and I Page 26