by Leath Tonino
While a commitment to accuracy—to realism—has long been the hallmark of topnotch wildlife artists, the profession has changed significantly since the early 1900s, both in regard to materials and techniques. To illustrate the progression from “back in the day,” when the old-timers used scrap lumber and papier-mâché to make their forms, Penasa ushers me into a closet where a creepy mountain goat resides. Head lumpy, eyes pale and flat, the creature resembles nothing so much as a cheap costume in a bad monster movie. “We use foam manikins now,” Penasa says. “Companies are doing synthetic antler reproductions, all sorts of fancy stuff. It’s a huge industry, especially in the West.”
Having locked the goat-beast into its cell, Penasa leads me to the main studio, a clean, bright, high-ceilinged space with smocks hanging from a nail in the wall and an assortment of tools—ranging from drawknives to paintbrushes—cluttering tall shelving units. It’s somewhat reminiscent of an elementary school art classroom, if you disregard the shoulder-mounted ungulates in various states of finish: shiny bolts protruding in lieu of antlers, tear ducts in need of touching up.
Penasa emphasizes that despite twenty-five years of experience and five thousand North American mammals to his credit, he’s still got a bunch to learn. “A big part of it is just studying the animals, knowing what they look like,” he says, seating himself at a workbench. “Before Google, I was cutting photos from magazines, organizing all these scraps in folders, using them as references—how do the nostrils go?” He dumps a soggy, supple elk hide out of a white garbage bag, where it’s been rehydrating in preparation for gluing and stitching. “The art is making it natural. You’re trying for perfection, but you can’t ever reach perfection. You can’t ever be good enough.”
Adjusting spectacles on the bridge of his nose, he leans over the hide, inspecting. My attention wanders away, coming to rest on a nearby mule deer, two beads of dew clinging to its whiskers; they’re the tiniest details, pinpricks at best, yet they glisten, throw sparks of light.
“Mod Podge, a couple drops,” Penasa says, noticing me noticing. He smiles, perhaps remembering the many hours spent molding that deer’s ears from auto Bondo, its face from clay—perhaps remembering the satisfaction of applying that last dab of glue. “Brings the story in again. It’s morning, he’s roaming the meadow, and now maybe he’s hearing something, looking up, wondering.”
Adjusting Monty
It would be easy to call Aaron Peterson a horse whisperer—easy and incorrect. Sure, he works with horses, but he likewise works with humans, dogs, even a bent-out-of-shape heifer on occasion. Furthermore, when he is engaging a horse, palpating its spine, wiggling its pelvis, massaging its massive jaw, he doesn’t whisper. Over the course of an hour—an hour that tends to leave him sweaty and short of breath but also calm, loose, “emptied out”—he will hardly utter a word, at least not with his mouth.
“Horses don’t speak English, obviously, but it does seem like they’re very responsive to energy,” Peterson said on a crisp November morning, pulling his truck off aptly named Sage Drive, north of Gunnison, Colorado, and parking between a barn and a fenced riding arena. He smoothed back his red ponytail, combed three fingers through his red beard. “The word chiropractic comes from the Greek for ‘practice by hand.’ I have to feel each horse in its body, as an individual—push the left-brain stuff to the side, all that conscious analysis of biomechanics, and respond with touch, you know?”
I didn’t know. The science-art of adjusting Clydesdales and Andalusians—of improving their performance and, generally, their quality of life by “releasing sticky joints” and “clearing the system”—was way the hell off my radar. I told Peterson as much, employing a slightly more colorful word than “hell,” and he chuckled. “If I get to chatting with someone, and they learn what I do, I usually hear one of two responses,” he said. “Either: You’ve got to be bullshitting me. Or: Oh, fantastic, where are you based, can you come see my Nelly, she’s been having some trouble with an inflamed hock.”
Formerly a rock-climbing guide in California, Peterson switched careers a number of years ago—traded cool gray granite under the palm for warm brown equine, as it were—and now has a private practice that keeps him traveling from stable to stable, all around Colorado. Exiting the truck, strolling across a gravel yard topped with thin patches of snow, I learned that he spends about a week on the Front Range each month, tending to a rotating clientele of Denver show horses, some of whom he’s adjusted dozens of times. And what about this morning’s appointment, I asked, deep in the heart of ranching country? “Travis Underwood is involved with animal rescue,” he said. “I’ve met Monty twice before, but this will be the first we’ve seen each other since last spring.”
On cue, a man outfitted exclusively in black Carhartt, save for his cowboy boots, stepped from the barn, lead rope in hand, one thousand pounds of elegant power—or powerful elegance—trailing behind. “Monty was one of twenty highbred Arabians trapped down in Arizona, locked in a stall for eight years, almost totally neglected,” Underwood said by way of introduction. “He’s got a club foot and it messes with his gait.” Peterson patted Monty’s flank, adding, “Their hooves are incredibly important. I try to have a global mentality, but I do pay a lot of attention to the feet.”
Our parade of four entered the riding arena via a dented metal gate, Underwood tickling Monty’s twitchy nose, cooing at him, calling him “goofball.” Peterson stood to the side for a minute, observing, then came in close, lightly placing both hands on Monty’s withers. “He wouldn’t let a vet hang out there,” Underwood said. “Monty hates needles. But this, this feels good, eh, boy?”
And so it began—a fluid sequence of stances, positions, pressures, pinches, stretches, shakes, tugs, tweaks. Picture a kid playing with the utmost intention and professionalism on a mammalian jungle gym. Better yet, if it’s possible, imagine a kind of nonsexual tour of the Kama Sutra, bodies twining and untwining, spinning slow circles, silvery breath-clouds rising in the clear autumn air. Peterson gripped a leg and gave a quick whip, as one might a tablecloth or bedsheet. With the aid of a dense foam block—his only instrument—he gained enough height to administer CPR pumps of a sort to Monty’s lofty hip. Fingers busied themselves with croup, gaskin, shoulder, knee.
More interesting than the dynamics of this interspecies dance though was a certain underlying stillness—the stillness that characterizes intense focus, immersive concentration. Specifically, I was drawn to Peterson’s semiglazed eyes, which were on the ground, on distant buttes, on a turkey vulture overhead, on everything besides Monty. Practice of the hand indeed! The dialogue here wasn’t just nonverbal, it was largely nonvisual. As for Monty’s eyes, they were “sleepy-soft,” according to Underwood—a sign, like the Elvis lip-curl and rumbling belly, that he was relaxed.
Having checked the “occiput and atlas,” scanned for “vertebral subluxation complexes,” conjured a resounding pop from who knows what ligament, and dodged a few innocent kicks, Peterson concluded the adjustment with what appeared, despite its assuredly technical function, to be nothing more than a friendly hug around the neck. “Go to your pooping corner,” Underwood said, his tone that of an encouraging father, and Monty burst toward a mound of sun-dried horse apples on the far side of the arena. The mound got bigger. Peterson smiled.
“I enjoy doing humans, but I really love doing horses,” he told me after we’d said our goodbyes and hopped into the truck. “With humans there are these layers of psychology, this onion that you have to peel. I can tell a horse that his healing depends on accepting Allah, Jesus, Buddha, whoever, but the horse won’t care. What matters to a horse is physical, direct. It’s a cleaner line of communication.”
Peterson smoothed his ponytail, unaware that, like Monty’s tangled black mane, it now held a quantity of yellow hay.
“But don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I only vaguely speak horse.”
HITHER AND YON
The Atlas
It’s
always like this. I knock, they come out smiling, we hug, briefly discuss the weather, the news, baseball, my drive—and then an atlas appears on the dining room table, alongside roasted almonds, glasses of water or soda or beer. I’m not exaggerating: It’s always like this. The food and drink, but that’s incidental. What I mean is the atlas.
For ten years, I’ve been showing up on their doorstep, dirty and sore from adventures in baking arroyos and blinding snowfields. The doorstep has moved—they used to live in Grand Junction, Colorado, on the Western Slope, and now they live in Windsor, Colorado, on the Great Plains—but little else has changed. Ten years of the road-weary me and the welcoming them. Ten years of the table and the atlas. Ten years of this conversation that roams from Juneau to Tucson to Taos Pueblo to Yellowstone and beyond.
Who are these people, these geographers? There are different ways of answering the question. They are my great-aunt and great-uncle. They are a girl on a farm during the Depression and a boy backpacking into the wilderness prior to its designation as “Wilderness.” They are Jeanne, age ninety-one, who recently published a novel, and George, also ninety-one, a former Forest Service entomologist. She’s intrigued by Burning Man. He jogs six miles at dawn. Open, engaged, vibrant—they are my mentors.
Okay, fair enough. But here’s another way of answering the question: They are the atlas.
Before heading to bed, we talk for five hours, pages fanning, words crossing thousands of miles: the Missouri’s headwater streams, the Chiricahua’s bird-loud canyons. At breakfast, our fingers resume where they left off, tracing lines between counties and states, between this phase of life and that phase of life. The 1950s, Alaska and seals. The 1960s, California and sequoias. By 1971 they were in Golden, Colorado, flank of the Front Range. By 1991 they were retired, cruising Arizona’s White Mountains and New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, home a fifth-wheel trailer.
Says one of them, passing the almonds: If you happen to be going down the Moki Dugway …
Says the other, refilling my empty glass: That reminds me of getting invited into this rancher’s parlor to tour his collection of …
Is there anywhere my great-aunt and great-uncle haven’t been, any pictograph panel or podunk library they haven’t spent a day enjoying? Nonagenarians often mistaken for septuagenarians, their minds are snappy, their cumulative experience vast. Elk antlers, potsherds, rutted BLM two-tracks, moods and moments, places and places and places: Indeed, they are the atlas.
Or perhaps that’s a bit misleading. In a sense, the atlas is its own person, a fourth talker at the table. Gathered around, bumping elbows, leaning close, we listen to its stories of jackrabbits, rainstorms, monuments commemo-rating massacres, ice cream shops in dusty towns, unanticipated beauty.
Says something, some voice: If you’re lucky and catch it on a winter afternoon, the shadows here will slant …
Time pauses under this spell of topographies and toponyms, age vanishes, and we three become equals in wonder, in curiosity, in the desire to light out for the territories once again, once again, once again. The West, it seems, is too deep to fathom, too broad to traverse. The West, it seems, is infinite.
Really, I find myself thinking, is there anywhere they wouldn’t love to go, these geographers, these mentors, these trailblazers? Given an extra couple decades, given a slug from the Fountain of Youth, is there any opportunity they wouldn’t seize, any rock they wouldn’t put their shared weight against, tilt upright, and peek beneath just because?
Oh, but time—it can’t stop itself from running. The atlas falls shut and age returns. Standing in the driveway, our visit over, we briefly discuss the weather, my route, and then with a hug I’m launched. Gas pedal pressed. Unsure when I’ll be back.
I have to assume that Jeanne and George, who are sixty years my senior, will die before I do, will blaze that dim trail as they have countless trails already. I have to assume that eventually they will go and I will stay and that my staying will resemble motion, the same old wanderlust. I have to assume a ratty sleeping bag and pavement beneath spinning tires. I have to assume the continued need for a doorstep, a friendly greeting, a dozen almonds, a cold drink.
In this imagined future, I see myself more alone on earth yet also less alone. The atlas, the completely ordinary atlas, the magical atlas, the atlas that is spirit and possibility and exploration and every type of dirt and sky, every type of feeling, everything that counts, everything simultaneously: The atlas will remain.
Maybe they’ll bequeath it to me in their will? I’d like to have such a thing available for my grandnephew, that eager traveler of the distant future, should he ever need a hand getting oriented in the world.
Wild Reading
On April 26, 1336, the poet-scholar Francesco Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux, in Provence, for “harmless pleasure.” Reaching the summit, he didn’t wrap himself in a warm cloak, gobble some crusty bread, and stare dumbly into the blue distance, as one might expect of an exhausted bushwhacker. Rather, he cracked a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions—that “handy little book”—and filled his mind with text. The excursion may have been the birth of modern hiking, but it was also an early instance of another outdoorsy pastime.
For years I’ve been intrigued by wilderness reading, asking myself the meaning of lugging literature into the back-country. What was going on there atop Mont Ventoux? What’s going on each time a Kindle sneaks into the kit? And why did I once allow David Foster Wallace’s 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest to ride my achy back like some kind of evil monkey for two straight weeks? It was waterlogged from having been fumbled into a stream. It was splotchy with mold. It was … welcomed?
Sleeping bag, stove, iodine tablets, Swiss Army knife, extra socks—sure, these items are useful on a backpacking adventure. But books? Do they deepen our immersion in place? Do they distract us from place? Really, what’s the deal with that evil monkey?
I first contemplated this subject at age nineteen, while trekking solo from Denver to Durango on the Colorado Trail. New to the West, disturbed by the aridity and vastness, I decided to meet the strange region with as little mediation as possible. Like any proper ounce-counting minimalist, I carried the barest essentials: bivvy sack in lieu of a tent, scavenged-twig chopsticks in lieu of a metal spoon. Needless to say, Emily Dickinson and Plato stayed home.
The forests were oddly unpeopled that August, and I regularly found myself in the company of solemn spruce and brooks that failed to babble. Without human voices rising from the page, offering me conversation and comfort, I grew lonely, edgy. By the end of the third week, my supplies were dwindling and I was ravenous for Belgian waffles, Klondike bars, conversation, dumb jokes, Sports Illustrated, scripture, whatever. A cute blond bibliophile toting a rucksack of Melville, Snickers, Twain, and Doritos would have proved that wishes can come true, but a gruff miner-dude with an eighty-word lexicon and a case of cheap beer would have been agreeable too.
And then, as I crossed a dirt road beneath drizzly morning skies, what should appear but a rusty pickup? The truck slowed at the sight of my raised thumb and I hopped in. Please, sir, drop me at the nearest supermarket. Is there a used bookshop in town?
That evening, having gorged on junk food and, more importantly, acquired a tattered paperback for fifty cents, I returned to the cold, rainy mountains. My headlamp’s beam locked onto a biography of Mozart—and refused to let go. Here was the Sawatch Range enfolded in storm, some of the tallest peaks in the lower forty-eight, and here, also, was bustling Vienna, Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the life and times of Wolfgang Amadeus.
Never before had I devoured nonfiction with such a ferocious appetite. Six hours and twelve chapters later, eyes burning, I passed out, only to rise at dawn, hoist my pack, and hit the trail. The spring in my step made it clear that literature can serve as a kind of fuel for the solitary walker. Like instant coffee and oatmeal, it gave me the strength to push on.
Which leads to another aspect of reading outdoors: What to bring? Dehydrat
ed pea soup? Pepperoni? Wordsworth? Toni Morrison?
Occasionally the answer is easy—think of Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra for a Yosemite pack trip, Powell’s The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons for a Grand Canyon float. More often than not, though, the possibilities overwhelm a nerd like me. The Tetons with Mardy Murie are not the Tetons with Isaac Asimov, and the Owens Valley with Mary Austin is not the Owens Valley with Roger Tory Peterson, Kurt Vonnegut, or Geoffrey Chaucer.
Cut to the foggy gray beaches of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, a thin strip of sand bordered by nearly impenetrable rainforest on one side and wholly impenetrable ocean—ranks of tiered breakers—on the other. A couple years had passed since the Colorado Trail (spiritual bike tours with Bashō and Thomas Merton, an arduous winter expedition with Sir Ernest Shackleton) and I was again tromping solo, hoping that a spell at the continent’s intense edge might …
Well, I didn’t know what I was hoping for, actually. Perhaps it was visceral contact, the tang of salt in my soup. Perhaps it was an elemental scouring, a cleansing of too many months spent indoors worrying about fame, glory, power, and how to pay the rent, how to afford pinto beans. In either case, I figured that Kerouac’s Big Sur, with its Pacific coast vibes, would make for suitable bedtime snuggling.
Turns out I was wrong, quite wrong. Lying in my damp, gritty tent, mere paces from the thrashing water, I discovered that Big Sur documents Kerouac’s descent into alcoholic insanity, what his pal Ginsberg described as “paranoiac confusion.” Furthermore, the story culminates with a dissonant aural hallucination, a poem that is essentially the author’s inebriated ear submerged in surf, fishing for lyrics.