by Dean Kuipers
He couldn’t even talk to us about his religious beliefs, or ask us about ours. Until the trees came, the subject had been too threatening. We always thought his church life was fake because he never mentioned his faith at home. He had never once sat with any of us to talk about our salvation. He only barked out little clues about Jesus when he was angry or challenged. Instead, he took us to that church building and hoped we got it. It was back to the river: You just fish upstream until you find me at the hole with boulders as big as Volkswagen Beetles.
Diane changed his relationship to women by telling him he was full of shit. Prior to meeting her, any desire for intimacy sent him out into the night looking for less demanding company, and any sharp words were more evidence that women were against him. But she had the right kind of authority, and experience, and facts. Dad trusted her.
Because of her and because of those trees, he began trusting life on earth. Maybe for the first time ever.
Joe, Brett, and I all desperately needed to witness this change. Not because Dad was an ass and we needed him to stop being an ass, though that was certainly true. But because we were like him. We were all living some version of the childish adult and were as lost as he was. We needed to see him mature so we knew the way. We saw him arrive at the cusp of a mature relatedness and watched it strengthen his faith, repair his relationships, and make him happier. Without that, we might not have had any chance of getting there ourselves.
I didn’t go marching into the Kuipers Hunt Club with my books feathered with sticky notes to lay out this thesis to Dad. I was just glad he changed.
“You never struggled with farm life like Dad did,” I said to Mom.
“Well, no.”
“Why not?”
“I guess because my dad, Grandpa Bub, loved farming.”
“He had all his birds, his horse, his goats.”
“Yeah. He had all this life. He surrounded himself with family and the farmworkers and animals and plants. Living things.”
“You’re not worried about what happens to life after you die?”
“My spirit goes to be with the Lord and this world goes back to dust.”
“So the world carries on.”
“The world carries on.”
Joe, Brett, Dad, and I were on the Greys River in Wyoming, looking for mule deer. We had the Wyoming Range to the east and the Salt River Mountains to the west and snow dumping out of the sky. No power lines. No phones. We’d been up since three A.M., and the snow poured past us as we clung to the horses in the cold, rifles in the scabbard, Orion so barbed-wire sharp it left black scratches in the sky as it sank over a ridge to the southwest. That morning we rode up a short box canyon and made a fire under some Douglas fir to wait and watch. Dad said we’d probably never see anything with a fire burning, but the young guide muttered without even looking at him, “That don’t bother ’em.”
Leopold wrote in Round River: “The deer hunter habitually watches the next bend; the duck hunter watches the skyline; the bird hunter watches the dog; the non-hunter does not watch.” We were watching the side of a mountain in front of us like it was a drive-in movie: for a couple of hours, we listened to a young bull Shiras moose coming down the valley to confront us, grunting and huffing. We would never shoot a moose, as they are already rare enough and their populations are fragile, and we cheered out loud when this ungainly giant finally reached the valley floor and broke out of the trees, prancing into the meadow and pacing back and forth, snorting and mad-dogging us.
“It was worth the whole trip just to see that,” said Dad, an inch of snow on his hood and flakes in his mustache.
The next morning we rode up a mountain in the Wyomings, getting colder and colder until long after daybreak, following some precarious knife-edge trails in the snow where one false step by our mounts would have meant a plunge of thousands of feet. We arrived at a high meadow park where the horses could stand in some trees that made a natural windbreak and we glassed the valleys all around. The trees where the horses were hitched smelled of puma piss and the horses stomped and complained, but our guides stayed close to them and made a small fire where we could eat lunch. A snow squall came through and we sat peering into the storm through our field glasses and right behind it came blazing sun, so hot it made our clothes steam, and we cut branches off the pines and laid them in the snow and pulled our hoods around our heads and went to sleep.
After a half hour I sat up and looked over at a guide named Okee peering intently through glasses at deer moving way across the valley, far out of range. Dad was lying next to me and Brett and Joe farther over, the four of us lined up and sunk a foot and a half in the snow as though the rifles across our chests were pressing us into the mountain. Dad had the most exquisite smile on his face. I had seen him so uptight and nervous in the company of guides in the past. But he wasn’t chasing a trophy up here—we didn’t bring home a single deer from this particular five-day hunt—and it was already a success: He had us all up on the hill, watching the deer, watching one another, watching the skies for the speechless speech.
Dad’s face was sunburned but he was smiling the smile I’d seen him smile while the woodcock danced in the Scots pine cut. It had become his smile. It had followed us here.
“I could stay here forever,” I said.
“We’d miss you at the cabin,” he said, not opening his eyes.
Michigan was broken open and all kinds of information poured out of it. I began to wonder how much information is howling around us at all times that we just don’t catch. Relatedness opened deep channels. Maybe there’s no limit to what can travel over them.
A month before deer season 2006, I was fast asleep on the couch in my home in Los Angeles. I slept on the couch more and more, as Meg and I were fighting, and in the middle of the night I’d usually shuffle into the living room to close my eyes. It was a difficult time for us, and my dreams were full of fear and worry. But I was shocked one night when I sat bolt upright in the still darkness with a great in-whooshing of breath, a gasp, and said out loud, “Oh my gosh, Judy just died.”
Judy Stevens was the mother of the big family that farmed two hundred acres of cherries and grapes and asparagus across the street from our house near Crooked Lake. I hadn’t talked to her much, recently, but she had been on my mind. During the years in the 1970s that Dad didn’t live with us, I’d go to the Stevens house every morning and sometimes eat breakfast there and ride with her oldest son, Matt, to school. Matt and I were still close. Judy developed Lou Gehrig’s disease in her sixties and I had visited her while she was ill, but I hadn’t had any news for months. I decided not to call Matt on that particular morning, either. What do you say—Hey, I just had a dream that your mom died? Instead, he called me from Michigan a few hours later.
“I just wanted to let you know that Mom died this morning,” he said. “She always considered you one of her kids, and I thought I should call you.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something weird,” I began. I explained the abrupt wake-up earlier that morning, which was about the time she had died.
“That is really weird,” Matt said. We talked about it for a while and he decided, “Somehow it makes me feel good. You were connected.”
Judy and I were friends at a time when I needed friends. Friends talk. Sometimes I think that the clock of her life was wedged into my mind when I was a child and just remained there, spinning down, so the whole thing was internal to me and didn’t require any external input. But this would suppose I knew the hour of her death decades in advance. And that clocks of other dear family and friends might still be inside me, winding down, a clamorous crowd of clocks waiting to spit a deadly cuckoo, which seems borderline insane.
But let’s be clear: I really did wake up at the moment of her death. Just like I really have a cabin and brothers and mosquito bites that itch. It was an actual event.
When I tell people this story, they say things like, “You were on her wavelength,” or “Everything is con
nected.” But here’s what that means: somewhere 2,153 driving miles away, Judy’s mind went supernova and I caught the edge of the spreading light. Once you start talking about this, you realize that every explanation or even metaphor includes the notion that something moved. Some information traveled. This begs two questions: what is it that moves and how does it move? How does this awareness instantly get across two thousand miles of prairie and Rocky Mountains and dangerous mall parking lots and into my head?
I’m going to make a wild guess and say this information moves through the ecological unconscious. It’s a clunky term, but useful as a way to describe the vast flow of psychic experience that runs through all life. Even a purely psychic medium or layer of consciousness, however, is still a medium, a stuff, physical or not, a tissue of ideas trying to manifest before my mind’s eye. And it may be that there is more than one. Maybe dreams have their own psychic channel. But the emotional shock of her death had to travel through some stratum of jellied cogitation or electron fog or force field or charged particles like solar wind or temporary mind-pipe to get from her to me.
Does that ecological unconscious have a basic alphabet, some kind of cardinal data set like ASCII code that all beings on earth can read—even rivers, rocks, and wind—thus giving rise to the invisible solicitations? An alphabet that constantly re-births Jung’s archetypes? Or are those images themselves the alphabet? Is this what is “read” by the imagination to form images in dreams or even in active, wakeful imagining? Is this what seeps into me from the dark shapes in the blind at night? Is this the bedrock of what we know as reality?
Sensory perception works differently than imagination, but I like Gregory Bateson’s idea that our senses are designed to read “difference.” His take on perception is that you see a kingbird on a pine branch and all along the edge of the bird you see the outline where the bird-ness is different than the pine-ness and the sky-ness. You see the difference between where one feather begins and another ends, where one pine seed in the cone stands out from the next. All these things are seeable because they’re composed of billions of bits of difference. There are lots of problems with this, of course. Bateson was a cyberneticist and a systems theory guy, so it appealed to him to render every bit of info into a discrete particle. Which lends itself to determinism, and makes it hard for a dream to travel two thousand miles in an instant. But I like this idea of “difference,” because it is never static. It suggests that the perceived thing, like the image in imagination, has to be constantly built and rebuilt, over and over every moment as those bits of difference change. The constant flow of change.
Judy was alive and then Judy was dead, and there was a massive amount of difference between those two moments. Like a shock wave.
Bateson certainly wasn’t the only ecologist or early computer theorist to think about information traveling in unique pieces. Howard Odum, who along with his brother, Eugene Odum, wrote the first textbook for the field of ecology in 1953, Fundamentals of Ecology, and popularized Arthur Tansley’s idea of an “ecosystem,” was absolutely transported by the notion that every bit of difference or information could be considered a discrete bit of energy. He was a systems theory guy, too, and he designed his own circuitry drawings to represent energy flows of any size or complexity from single bits of carbohydrate entering, powering, and leaving a cell, to the energy budgets for entire forests or watersheds. He called this science “ecoenergetics” and figured it was theoretically possible to budget the energy flows of the entire planet.
The Odums figured that bits of thought or mentation could also be considered units of energy. After reading their books, it’s hard not to think that information moves in particles like grains of sand. But that system gets messy when I think about Judy, or dreams in general. How does the particle move from her to me, across America, instantly? Even if we think of the “particle” as just a figurative idea, an abstraction, an image of a difference signaled to the imagination, it still has to move, through what would necessarily be a psychic rather than physical medium. What is that medium? All day I think about this. It carries real information, like the death of my friend, so the information is material as well as magical. As Aquinas noted, even God is restricted by the laws of nature. Einstein ran into this with his “spooky action at a distance,” a communication between electrons that may be separated by vast distances and which (as of yet) has no Newtonian explanation. The idea that this unconscious is like a torrential flow of information and “thoughts” from anywhere and anything in the universe makes me ponder its role in the everyday lives of you and me and farm crops and oceans.
Maybe when Judy died there were billions of changes or warps in that flow that formed a disturbance that took her shape. Perhaps physical perception is inadequate to know what we need to know about the bazillion relationships required to live. Evidently there’s no limit to the length of the circuits looping mind with mind; if they can stretch over two thousand miles, then they can probably jump any gap. Astronauts report they reach at least as far as the moon just fine: we still dream terrestrial dreams there and get intuitions about our loved ones back on earth.
Like geese, like trees, we are fluent in this language beyond perception. It is native to us. I might not know when the ice is off the lakes in Wisconsin, and maybe that is signaled by a change in the Gulf Stream or some other physical sign, but the most outrageous thing about my dream of Judy is that it’s so ordinary. People have these kinds of dreams every day, these spooky experiences, and we call them premonitions, or intuition, or synchronicity. Other beings probably also have them: we know that dogs and rats dream like crazy. I am beginning to think now that these premonitions are just tiny coronal flares of news that break out of huge flows of difference and pop up into consciousness. Deep underneath what Jung called the “tyranny of words,” this communication could be going on between everything, everywhere, all the time. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.
Dad retired and he was in the woods from September till Christmas. It was not unusual for him to be out eighty or ninety days in the fall, sitting in blinds and walking fields. The deer camp had made his life so good that he lived more and more of it out in the field. His sweet dog Rose died, but he and Diane got two new griffons, Libby and Greta; they were trained as hunting dogs but were allowed to live in the house.
“You would have loved this elk hunt in New Mexico,” Dad started at lunchtime, sitting at the cabin’s big table and voicing his reverence for his bowhunting guide, a Carlsbad fireman named Jason Lowe. “Jason and I were up on our spot on the mountain for three days and we didn’t see or hear anything. Nothing at all. No scat, no bugling, nothing. We know the rut is on, and we always see elk like crazy there. This year, they’ve moved elsewhere.
“Finally, on the third day, we’re coming down the mountain and we run into this kid who sometimes guides up there. He says he didn’t see anything, but several days earlier he had seen some animals down this other road. He didn’t tell us exactly where, but Jason had an idea.
“The next morning, we go down that road and we hike up to a ridge and look into the canyon and there are about six hundred elk there.”
Dad stopped and his eyes got misty. “Six hundred elk. At least. I’m not exaggerating. They had all yarded up in one place—not because someone put them there, they have nothing but wild terrain to roam, but because that’s where the rut took them. Jason turned to me and said, ‘Bruce, let’s just watch ’em for a while. You will never see this again in your lifetime.’ And I knew that was true. So we decided not to kill any. There were big bulls in there. But we just sat there watching them, eating our lunch, drinking tea, marveling. Oh, boys, it was easily the most beautiful thing I have ever seen and I felt so privileged to be part of it.”
“That’s a beautiful story, Dad,” I said. “I’m glad you told us.”
“I get so close to them, now,” he said. “Now that I know what I’m doing, a lot of times I’m
just standing there about fifteen or twenty yards from a seven-hundred-pound bull. He probably knows I’m there, but I call him in and he comes anyway. Sometimes it’s like that for days and days and you never have a shot, but that’s okay. I just want to be that close.”
Joe quit his job running the group homes in order to go on the hunting trip to the Greys River in Wyoming, and after he got back to Michigan he basically collapsed. It was his last job in the mental health field. He spent some time staring at the night from the porch of his house and riding his mountain bike around and around Fort Custer over by Mom’s place in Augusta, riding with his teeth gritted in rage, taking brutal falls, breaking one of his ankles again. He had developed a fixation with Hazel’s mother that was unhealthy at best, and he was trying to keep his body in motion to avoid circling the drain. I never met Hazel’s mom and Joe never told me much about her, but he did not want to make a family with her. Joe loved his daughter and he didn’t want her to grow up in an unhappy marriage like the one he’d grown up in. He probably saved them all a lot of heartache, but the inevitable result was that they each raised Hazel separately. They didn’t talk. Joe worried constantly about how to pay the child support and had to go to court several times to sort it all out, and on at least one occasion Dad had to go, too. Joe felt more and more isolated, and mountain biking was one way to get out of his head. He grabbed at every possible opportunity to get in a river. The people in the world had lost their last fine filigree of trustworthiness and life had been reduced to a series of financial transactions, so he returned to the nonhuman world that had kept him alive prior to his foray into being a professional.
“I just have nothing left,” he told me. “I’m just wasted. The whole thing with the court and Hazel’s mom has just fuckin’ ruined me.”