I never figured out how to explain to Hannah that in more than thirty years of following tracks I have never—either before that day or since—walked a track right up to the animal that was making it. It was as if Hannah’s question about the outcome of the antelope’s trail had somehow called the animal into being—as if by reading the trail’s story carefully, she was able to write for herself a satisfying conclusion to it. If a trail is certain evidence of our faith in things unseen, the pronghorn was for Hannah the substance of the thing hoped for.
The exposed hilltop on which we live is desiccated by extreme aridity, raked by howling winds, inundated with deep snowdrifts, rocked by frequent earthquakes, incinerated by raging wildfires, and inhabited by rattlesnakes, scorpions, and vultures. Hannah Virginia and her little sister, Caroline Emerson, have never known another home. To them, living in this place and under these conditions is simply what little girls do. This is the place our stories come from, by which I mean this stark high desert landscape holds and inspires fantastic tales, but also that it profoundly shapes the larger story of our shared lives—our human attempt to structure, articulate, revise, and interpret the narrative of our experience in the world.
When I was Caroline’s age, my father told me bedtime stories about Harry the Duck, a character of his own invention. Like my father himself, Harry was a great friend and also a comic figure. He was a resilient creature, always in a little trouble but perpetually able, through resourcefulness, generosity, and good humor, to escape his various predicaments—though I recall worrying that Harry might not survive some of his more harrowing adventures. When, at about two years old, Hannah seemed ready for bedtime stories, I considered making Harry an intergenerational narrative figure in our family. But as I reflected on how attached Hannah was already becoming to her desert home, a duck seemed the narrative equivalent of an invasive species, an alien figure ill suited to the dry hills among which we live. Instead, the very first story I offered to tell Hannah was about a pair of black-tailed jackrabbits that frequented the weedy sand flat that passes for our yard.
“What are their names?” she asked.
“Well, the older one is named . . . Peavine,” I said, quickly appropriating the name of the mountain to our south to cover for my lack of preparation.
“And his little brother is Charlie!” she declared, out of nowhere.
“Sure,” I said. “That’s right. Peavine and Charlie.”
From that moment on, Peavine and Charlie became a part of our family, and each evening I’d detail their latest adventure for Hannah before she slipped into slumber. In the early going I wasn’t a very resourceful storyteller, and I noticed to my disappointment that Peavine and Charlie, endearing as they were, tended to become dull, especially when I was tired, or when the frustrations of work impinged on the joy the jackrabbits would otherwise have sought and found. Worse still, many of my narratives seemed heavy-handed and didactic, as if the brother rabbits existed only to serve my adult need to foist lessons upon my daughter. I often felt that I had imprisoned poor Peavine and Charlie—who were, after all, wild animals—in a narrative cage fabricated of my own fatigue or anxiety. There were some evenings when I almost sensed the jackrabbits’ frustration with me, and they might well have wished they could step out of my bland tales and wrest control of their telling, if only to liberate themselves from the constraints of my tepid imagination.
Over time, though, Peavine and Charlie began to push back, to defy my urge to control them, occasionally rupturing the boundaries within which my stories tried to enclose them. They became less predictable, wilder, at times even irreverent. They would suddenly do or say things I hadn’t anticipated, taking my tales in new and sometimes dangerous directions. When the rabbit boys were challenged to a soccer match by Raven and Magpie, they secretly persuaded Pack Rat to piss on the ball, since they suspected—correctly, as it turned out—that their corvid opponents would find the stench intolerable. When Peavine and Charlie were warned by their parents not to venture beyond the rim of their desert basin, they instead persuaded Golden Eagle to fly them all the way to the summit of the highest mountain in our valley. Whereas in earlier stories the boys might have learned a valuable lesson from their disobedience, they now had the time of their lives, returned home before supper, and were never found out. In some stories the jackrabbits even shared adventures with Old Man Coyote, an unsavory companion borrowed from Native trickster tales: a witty, energetic, ingenious, libidinous, transgressive, impertinent outlaw who drinks heavily, has sex frequently, farts lustily, and boasts loudly about it all.
The most important developments in the Peavine and Charlie tales, however, came from Hannah, whose increasing involvement in their telling helped the brother rabbits to grow into three-dimensional characters. When I first began this bedtime ritual I would announce, with unassailable adult authorial intention, the topic of the evening’s story: “Tonight I’m going to tell you about the time Peavine and Charlie went to a birthday party with the white pelicans.” And that was that. Later, Hannah began asking me to repeat stories, which I soon discovered I could not do to her satisfaction, since her memory of a story’s details was so much keener than my own. As a result of this incapacity on my part, Hannah inadvertently became a more active participant, a co-narrator who corrected and inserted details as necessary: “No, Dad, the king of the white pelicans baked a chocolate birthday cake, remember?”
As Hannah’s role in the evening storytelling grew, a new dimension emerged in our narrative collaboration. She began to ask me if I knew a particular story—but in asking she would refer to an original story rather than one previously told. For example, she might ask, without provocation or precedent, whether I knew the story about the time Peavine and Charlie flew from Nevada to Australia in a hot air balloon—a story I had never dreamed of. Hannah’s presumption was that the story existed independently of my ability to create it, and so the question was not whether Peavine and Charlie had actually flown to Australia in a balloon (of course they had!), but instead whether my own limited life experience had made me familiar with that particular story. As our bedtime stories evolved, we no longer told tales of my own imagining, and we ceased repeating tales. Instead, each evening Hannah would ask if I knew the story of the time Peavine and Charlie took a nap on top of a thundercloud, or the time the jackrabbits ate a bunch of fence lizards just to see if they would get a tummy ache, or the time they saw Old Man Coyote drink up the whole ocean, or the time they helped Kestrel fly so fast that it made the sun dizzy to watch.
What came of this new phase in our evening storytelling was as remarkable as it was simple, as illuminating as it was obvious: it turned out that I did know the stories. All of them. While Hannah expressed amazement each night that I knew every tale she suggested (asking once, “Dad, when did you have time to learn all these stories?”), I too was amazed. I was astonished at the elasticity and power of narrative to spontaneously express any set of experiences that two jackrabbits—or, by extension, a father and his daughter—might have, and in that amazement I was liberated, along with Peavine and Charlie, from the repetitive plots and moralistic conclusions that had previously constrained me. Instead of forcing my furry protagonists forward at narrative gunpoint toward a preconceived and didactic conclusion, the jackrabbits now led us into fields of story we had never imagined. While the new stories were fragmented, often implausible, sometimes even unfathomable, they were utterly spontaneous and fresh. They were also funnier and more engaging, though less conclusive. Telling Peavine and Charlie stories was now like following tracks: the more attention we paid to each meandering narrative hoofprint, the more certain we were that a big buck was out there, even if it remained invisible from where we stood or lay while telling the tale.
Soon enough Hannah was no longer simply suggesting the stories but actively helping me to tell them. I’d ramble up to a particular plot point and then ask her if she “remembered” what happened next—even though the story was
being told for the first time. So if Peavine and Charlie were swimming across Pyramid Lake on the back of Lahontan Cutthroat Trout, I’d ask if she remembered where they swam to.
“Oh, sure!” Hannah would always say at first, perhaps to give herself a moment to formulate the next passage of the story. “They swam all the way to Anaho Island so they could eat rattlesnake eggs and visit the magic well near where the white pelicans live!”
“Exactly,” I’d reply, affirming her acts of imagination. “And do you remember how they got the water out of the magic well?”
“Oh, sure! They drank it up with a really, really long straw!”
On we’d go like this, taking turns telling, stitching together stories off the cuff and on the fly, without the slightest idea where we were headed, enjoying the experience immensely. We never corrected each other or felt that one person’s story had been stifled by some outrageous turn the other person had interjected into the narrative. On the contrary, the delight for me came from the way the collaborative dynamic prevented the narrative from conforming to my own narrow, linear adult expectations for how a story should proceed. Because I’m a grown-up—which I can’t help and for which I might well be pitied—I would have thought Peavine and Charlie would retrieve Anaho Island’s well water using a bucket. But, of course, I was wrong. Since they had instead used a really, really long straw, that magical water was now inside them, and it would be up to me to discern what wonderful effects it might produce. The godlike omniscient narrator was at last dead and gone; what remained was a world of uncertainty and flux, which is to say a world where it is easy to become lost and where everything you experience feels inimitable and enchanted.
During this phase of our collaborative bedtime storytelling, Hannah never once implied that she viewed our stories as the product of invention or imagination. Instead, she continued to speak of the tales as if they preceded both the tellers and the telling. As far as she was concerned, all possible stories existed, and all existed independently of our speaking them. Even in their most unexpected and peculiar details, the tales were to Hannah an infinite number of tracks that we had not made but could always follow. To her, the stories of the nonhuman beings whose lives we narrated already possessed an uneditable fullness and integrity of their own—a fantastic, preexistent logic we could never contain or control but were free to discover and express. As our collaborative storytelling progressed, I began to wonder if Hannah wasn’t somehow correct that even our wildest and most improbable narrative imaginings simply describe the world as it is. Because the world was there before us, maybe she’s right that the stories were there before us too.
Hannah, who was three years old at the time, began telling stories to baby Caroline on the day Caroline was born. This introduced yet another phase in the lives of Peavine and Charlie, one that positioned Hannah as the primary teller of tales in our family. Many of the stories Hannah told her sister in that first year seemed designed to convey practical information about our home landscape. There were stories about how Peavine and Charlie learned to recognize and avoid the buzz of the rattler, and how they used snowshoes to keep from becoming trapped in the drifts, and what precautions they took when wildfire scoured the hills behind our house. In one tale, Peavine and Charlie strayed too far from home one evening but navigated back by walking toward Polaris, the North Star, which Hannah explained could be found by drawing an imaginary line through the Big Dipper’s bowl. In another, the jackrabbits wisely avoided going out after dark, since Mountain Lion had been hunting the area. In yet another, the rabbit brothers failed to carry enough water on a hike up our home mountain and so would have become dehydrated had not Raven flown to their rescue from Summit Spring carrying water in a bag of balsamroot leaves woven together with strips of sage bark.
In addition to being dramatic admonitions about scorpions and rattlers, Hannah’s stories for Caroline also functioned as an introduction to the natural history of this high desert environment. In the single story of “Peavine and Charlie’s Bird World Series,” for example, Caroline was introduced to most of the avian species that live here in summer. In the tale of the rabbit boys’ long walk to Lone Tree, Caroline was offered a clear overview of kid’s-eye geomorphology: the best climbing rock, the canyon where the snow stays deep, the ridge where the stars look so bright. The story of the jackrabbits’ “Great Water Race” identified the general locations of the two natural springs within hiking distance of our home, while the account of how Peavine and Charlie enjoyed a midday nap in the shade of some boulders seemed calculated to instill a potentially life-saving respect for the intensity of the desert sun at high elevation.
I listened to these stories but never interfered with their telling, except when I was asked to help—as when Hannah couldn’t quite fill out the rosters of Peavine and Charlie’s bird baseball teams without me suggesting Juniper Titmouse, Say’s Phoebe, and Western Tanager. As I listened, I was amazed not only at how much Hannah had learned about her local environment but also at how clearly she could convey information through the vehicle of her Peavine and Charlie narratives. It was telling, too, that while Hannah’s stories were replete with joy and humor, they also seemed crafted to convey lessons that one’s little sister, if she intended to become a permanent inhabitant of the sagebrush steppe, would need to learn. In this sense, Hannah’s stories adopted a touch of Dad’s earlier didacticism, the key difference being that her jackrabbit tales were not contrived morality plays, as my stories had so often been, but instead were engaging, detailed, informed local narratives that used nonhuman lives to convey valuable information about how to live well in this place. And this, it seemed to me, must be very close to the root of all stories, which from time immemorial must have sprung from the desire of one person to teach someone they love how to feel at home in the world.
If Hannah had in some senses taken on the adult role of storyteller, it was interesting how quickly Caroline consequently grew into the role that Hannah had once played. Not content with only listening to and learning from the tales, Caroline by age three wanted to help shape and guide the narratives, often blurting out suggestions that Hannah was challenged to accommodate. So, for example, Hannah would announce that she was about to tell the story of the time Peavine and Charlie discovered the buried treasure, when Caroline would stubbornly insist that the treasure was not buried but instead hidden in the crown of a cottonwood tree. Or Hannah would prepare to tell of how the jackrabbits helped California Ground Squirrel and Antelope Ground Squirrel get married, when Caroline would instead demand to hear how the rabbit boys taught the ground squirrels to play blues harmonica. I confess that it was amusing to see Hannah’s exasperation in these moments; each time Caroline shouted out a suggestion, Hannah was compelled to relinquish her own narrative intentions and expectations and instead follow the tracks that Caroline’s imagination was laying down. Hannah had to learn to share the stories: to view them as the fruit of collaboration with her sister rather than as the product of her own unmediated authorial intent.
Then another wonderful thing happened. Caroline began to ask Hannah, just as Hannah had once asked me, if she “remembered the story about the time” the jackrabbits had this or that adventure—referring, as Hannah once had, to entirely new stories of her own invention. Hannah, for her part, fell naturally into the role I had formerly played, which was to reply joyfully that yes, in fact, she did remember that particular story. Although little sister was duly amazed at big sister’s wonderful capacity to “remember” all the stories she requested, Caroline nevertheless participated actively in their telling. Rather than seeing her involvement as a disruption of a stable or proprietary text, Caroline instead assumed, precisely as Hannah once had, that all the stories were simply out there in the world, preexistent and waiting to be recalled by their tellers. To listen to the girls tell Peavine and Charlie stories was not only to marvel at their imaginative capacity to empathize with the lives of jackrabbits and their other nonhuman neighbors; i
t was also to realize that in the girls’ world no story’s path was ever blocked, no detail unchangeable, no conclusion assumed, no possibility foreclosed. For Hannah and Caroline, the tracks of a story could lead anywhere, and did.
We are each the hero of our own life story, which we write daily with our actions and ambitions, failings and fantasies. If we’re fortunate, we may be able to construct ourselves as comic rather than tragic heroes, but our attempt to write our lives ultimately remains embattled. We struggle to control a recalcitrant protagonist, to impose narrative structure on a disorderly reality, to extract meaning from a personal story that is by turns fragmented, unfathomable, or mundane. And we often adhere obsessively to a preconceived story line, even when our lived experience is painfully incongruous with it. I’m certain, for example, that those of us who are parents remain bound by a story line within which we teach and inspire our children, helping them to mature into truly good people while also demonstrating our wisdom and affirming our values. But even as we wish our lives to proceed according to the stories we tell about them, we also struggle with the obdurate tensions those lives invariably present: their fractured narrative arcs and rough transitions, glaring stylistic flaws and troubling ambiguities, undesirable settings and underdeveloped characters, tediously predictable plot points and frustrating lack of closure. Rather than embrace the inevitability of this uncertainty, difficulty, and flux, we instead stubbornly pretend that we possess infallible authorial control. As a consequence, the writing of our lives reflects an impoverishment of narrative possibility—an overreliance upon a limited set of plot lines designed to force our story toward the denouement we most desire.
I try to remember how the world looks to a kid, but I find this imaginative leap increasingly difficult to make. There is something about adult perception, however finely honed it might be, that struggles to attain the sense of possibility that is instinctive to children. While I reject sentimental rhapsodies about the angelic nature of children—romantic propositions that the odor of a single diaper plainly refutes—it does seem to me that children possess the enviable capacity to imagine and thus inhabit a world in which all stories remain possible and in which any story may be told by any person at any time. The fluidity with which Hannah and Caroline’s spontaneous tales narrated imaginative voyages across the permeable boundary between themselves and their nonhuman neighbors showed me how wild are the stories that link our domestic sphere to the natural world that is our wildest home. Even here, by the wood stove’s hearth, the girls discovered a wilderness of possibility in the expansive relations those words helped them to imagine.
Raising Wild Page 10