Selected Writings

Hobos at Heart
by Brenda Peterson

DEAR READERS,

Since I'm at work on a new novel, RAILROAD GIRL that takes place on a train, many have asked to see again my New York Times travel piece, "HOBOS at HEART," celebrating the romance and nostalgia of riding the rails.

Midnight, mid-continent, streaking across Kansas in a honeymoon sleeper, my parents made me. My mother had recently retired at 21 from her wartime years as a telegrapher on the Wabash Cannonball. In the tossup between her railroading and marriage to a young forester, my father won. But not for long.

Though he took my mother away from her first steamy, steel love, he couldn't take trains from her blood. Riding the rails runs in our family like a dominant gene. Some families pass along sharpshooter eyes or stolid legs like roots -- but my sisters, brother and I inherit a hobo waywardness.

In fact, our uncle was a hobo. My earliest memory of my mother's brother, Clark, was dropping him at a railroad crossing in the middle of a California desert. He knelt by the tracks as if in prayer. After a long while he leapt up, slung his knapsack and bedroll over his shoulder and sprinted off. But where was the train? Uncle Clark counted aloud as he ran, shouting with what we children instantly recognized -- though it was rare in adults -- as sheer joy.

Suddenly the ground thundered and, as if called, a train caught up with Uncle Clark. It slowed only a little, but not enough to catch, even for my uncle, strong and sleek as he was. Undaunted, he let out a piercing whistle. Out of the black square shadow of one boxcar shot a long arm. In a flash my uncle grabbed it and was hoisted inside the wide door. We never saw the other hobo, we only heard them laughing at the show they'd given us townies.

Not too long after that, my parents yielded to their four children's clamor to take a cross-country train ride from California to St. Louis for the usual summer stint with our Ozarkian kin. The first night in our roomette, my 3-year-old sister frog-kicked my father out of the top berth and knocked mother silly. Unperturbed by the hubbub above, my other sister, baby brother and I played Parcheesi in the bottom berth. I remember most the horizons that gently curved both earth and steel tracks as we rolled along. The world was wide and open -- and so were we. We even endured my father's lectures on the changing flora and fauna.

"This used to be buffalo country," he'd say sadly as empty South Dakota prairie swept by. We imagined shaggy ghosts grazing in the sweet grass. Our family still takes trains cross-continent in this era of faxes and flight. Trains are a trance state that make planes seem high-pitched, a hysteria. The human heart is slow. How, in the space of several hours, can we really adjust to opposing sides of a continent? Or comprehend leave-taking, longing, loss, or even love?

Uncle Clark, who now works for Social Security, still vacations near narrow-gauge railroads and every Sunday he reads the paper down at the Kansas City depot, counting trains and chatting with Cannonball conductors. My sister Paula, her three girls, and I now consider the Silver Meteor line, which runs up and down the Eastern Seaboard between Miami and New York City, as our home away from home.

This past summer, Paula planned her greatest train trip to date -- traveling from West Palm Beach cross-country to San Francisco, then up to Seattle, along the Canadian border, back down to Florida. When my family heard about my sister's train adventure, we all signed up to join her on various jogs. Mother boarded and rode from D.C. to Philadelphia; and I flew to San Francisco to take the Coast Starlight Superliner back to Seattle.

When I met my sister, her three girls and their Colombian nanny in San Francisco, they had accumulated another friend, Madeleine, with her 8-year-old son, and 19 bags. "It's like traveling with the Shah of Iran," I complained as porters boarded us. We had booked two sleeper compartments in the same car. Over the next 22 hours we stretched ourselves, amoeba-like, between Vista-Dome, dining car and compartments.

As the Coast Starlight steamed out of San Francisco, we cozily settled ourselves into the dining car. "Our sleeper car is a regular soap opera," Paula happily reported. "See that couple over there? They've been riding since Atlanta -- and the honeymoon is definitely over!

"Over the days everyone becomes a kind of gypsy family living in one long house."

She went on to fill us in on the details of our traveling companions. There was a Swiss family whose son had attached himself to our troop because his parents were preoccupied with a murderous, never-ending Monopoly game. Then there was the old lady in sleeper C of our same car who monopolized our steward because she believed first-class meant servants. Later I visited this intriguing, if demanding, woman and heard her tales of having survived both the 1906 and the 1989 San Francisco earthquakes.

Seems railroading was in her blood, too. Her father was a conductor on the train out of Sparks, Nev. Once he'd worked the legendary Hiawatha line that ran through the Pacific Northwest.

That first night the dining car was divine. As the adults lingered over wine and peach pie, we sent the kids sprawling into the Vista-Dome where they watched the movie "The Bear" on a big-screened TV. My nieces counted shooting stars like so many sparks thrown from the train. When we all finally retired to our tidy bunks, we were experts at the polite, lurching side step and shuffle of narrow aisles. Looking into each roomette as we slowly passed, I saw a man leaning over his needlepoint, an old couple nodding on one another's shoulders as they held hands, fast asleep; I peeked into another sleeper and eyed an entire family riveted on their bleeping Game Boys and a teen-age couple who might as well have been in the back seat at the drive-in. So much life right alongside mine.

As we all bunked down for the rock-a-bye night, I figured we were somewhere lost between redwoods and northern California seacoast -- wild land with only a few lights here and there. But inside this train was an intimacy, a tenderness as simple as sharing sleep. In our room's four bunks, we all hooked ourselves up to various headsets -- everything from country-Western to my own "Les Miserables" tape, to my niece's "Sesame Street" songs. Lying happily in my berth, I gazed out the window at mountains silhouetted by a slight moon and gloried in the knowledge that this was how I chose to enter the world -- by train.

Next morning during a breakfast of buttermilk hotcakes and sausage, we stared down chasms over coffee and hardly blinked as ancient Oregon forests surrounded us. Fog swirled as if the land were still asleep. We were about 5,000 feet outside the small town of Chemult, Ore., when the mists cleared to reveal a mysterious dark Odell Lake. The conductor told us in his leisurely travelogue that it was 300 feet deep. Staring down from the trestle tracks as the Starlight Coast streaked across windswept water, my niece insisted, "No, it's lots deeper. Something else lives there . . ." She looked at us, her expression at once wide-eyed and wise, "and it's not like us."

"Ohhh, I don't know," my sister told her. "After a month on a train, what else is like us?"

She was right. I knew it, even after my mere 16-some hours. We were all changed. It wasn't the travel; it was the movement. Maybe it was the stirring in our genes, our blood -- all my mother's mesmerizing miles, all my uncle's hobo longings, all our own accumulated memories of just rocking along going somewhere, but not fast.

The way we travel reveals the way we live. I like delayed gratification; I like a lingering hand, a lulling voice, a close and deliberate dance.

Already my sister and I are planning next summer's train trip. We rack up cross-country conference calls discussing the pros and cons of the Zephyr vs. the Empire Builder. All winter we'll sort out which novels, clothes, games, and companions are just right for "the slow-motion adventure," as Paula calls our train rides. "Sometimes . . ." she muses, as we talk long-distance, "I think it takes almost as long to pack for a train trip as it does to take one."

We both laugh leisurely and fall silent. We've forgotten that there's a phone meter ticking away, we've forgotten all about expensive air waves and the blank heavens above. We're thinking about buffalo ghosts in the Badlands and a lake so deep there's nothing human about it. We might as well be lounging on our berths while something as slow and vast as a country drifts by us. Even cross-continent, we're on the same track, remembering all the sleepers that carried us, the steel that still vibrates in our blood, the great body that cradles us with long curves, with tunnels dark as dreams, with an unbroken embrace of earth.

Photo by Antoine Beauvillian

Saving Seals: Our duties in this world, and beyond
By Brenda Peterson

For more information visit http://www.sealsitters.org/

“WITH 9/11, the blessed countdown for the Rapture has begun,” my neighbor George informed me almost casually.

He caught me off guard. After decades of giddily anticipating the end of the world and getting no response from me, most of the true believers in my family have stopped asking if I’m ready to be swept up in the Second Coming. Plus, this was the last place I expected to be proselytized. George and I sat perched on driftwood, keeping watch over a seal pup that had hauled up onto our backyard Salish Sea beach. Because most Seattle city beaches are barricaded by concrete sea walls, these natural beaches are precious to harbor seals, a place where they can give birth, nurse, rest. Every spring through September, mother seals leave their pups here while they fish. Staying the official one hundred yards away as required by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, we neighbors keep watch on the vulnerable pups in shifts of usually four hours. It’s a startling stretch of time together with people we usually whiz past in our busy lives.

“Hmmmmm,” I answered in a whisper, hoping that my neighbor would lapse into the companionable silence we usually enjoy together while seal sitting, as we call our beach communion. “Hand me the binoculars, will you?”

This pup was about two feet long, round and robust, its speckled fur camouflaged against the rocky beach. It was breathing regularly, with no yellow discharge from its mouth or nose — all good signs, according to Kristin Wilkinson, the expert on marine mammal strandings from NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) who gave us our training. We didn’t see any wounds, such as orca bites, propeller gashes, or bullet holes. But he could have suffered some internal injuries. Only careful observation and time would reveal his fate. If the pup is injured or doesn’t leave the beach after forty-eight hours, we call NOAA, which may send someone to remove it to a rehab shelter for treatment. Though Washington State has a thriving seal population, 50 percent of juveniles do not survive their first year, and every seal season we neighbors witness at least one or two seal pup deaths.

George and I were sitting second shift, after Mike, our “poet laureate of seals,” and Suzanne, a labor and delivery nurse who is particularly adept at reading the newborn seal’s body language. Can he lift flippers and head in the agile “banana position” to scan for predators and mother? There are twenty-four of us who patrol several beaches. We keep a phone tree and Internet contact, and when someone spots a lone pup, whoever is available heads out to keep watch. Our most important job as seal sitters is to politely shoo dogs and overly curious people away from the pup, partly because diseases are communicable among the three species. We also chat with other neighbors and passersby, and educate them in seal etiquette. If the mother returns and finds her pup surrounded by too much human activity, she may abandon her baby.

“This pup looks plump and healthy, don’t you think?” I asked George in a whisper.

“I sure hope so,” he murmured.

Suddenly, a foghorn moaned in baritone blasts, and the seal pup shuddered. He lifted his head, his black eyes huge, his tiny ear slits opened wide, listening.

“That’s how it’ll happen, you know,” George said quietly. There was a note of triumph in his tone. “The trumpets will sound, and we’ll be lifted up far away from here.”

For a moment I considered not engaging in this loopy, no-exit dialogue. But we had a lot of time and a seal pup on our hands.

It was April, and perhaps Passover and Easter were on my neighbor’s mind. After a particularly chill and rain-soaked winter, spring seemed a resurrection with its blizzards of cherry blossoms along our boardwalk, its tulip trees and bursting purple and scarlet rhododendron bushes. “Listen, George” I began. “Why are you so . . . well . . . cheerful about the end of the Earth?”

This gave him a moment’s pause. Then he said, with some chagrin, “You can’t blame us born-agains for wanting at last to get our heavenly rewards. We’ve waited thousands of years.”

His dark eyes flashed a familiar fire I’d seen in preachers’ faces at the summer tent revivals of my childhood when sinners dramatically fainted, either from the heat or the paroxysm of their inner demons “getting behind them.” It was always bewildering to witness usually strait-laced adults flail about speaking gibberish, and then transform again into perfectly upstanding and polite believers just in time for the potluck.

I will never forget Mrs. Whitdinger rising from her impressive fit on the dirt floor of the revival tent to politely serve up heavenly hash — that Southern concoction of lime jello, whipped cream, mandarin oranges, and miniature marshmallows. I figured repentance helped work up a good appetite.

As I watched our seal pup settle back into his vigilant scanning of the waves, his belly rising and falling in those deep drafts of breath that only the very young of any species seem to enjoy, I persisted, “Why would you want this world to end, George? What’s the hurry?”

I could see that my neighbor was now studying me as if I were the seal pup, as if he had already passed me in the slow sinner’s lane on the freeway to the Apocalypse. “The hurry is that right now we see signs and wonders proving that the End Times are upon us,” George insisted. “We’ve got holy wars, globalization, Israel’s military power, Islamic terrorists, and even global warming.” This last sign he pronounced brightly, as if our global climate was gleefully graduating into a hot time in the old world.

I wanted out of the conversation. I felt claustrophobic in the tight grip of my neighbor’s end-times intensity. Oddly, I wondered if my restlessness was like the anxiety fundamentalists seem to feel about the whole world, as if they are trapped by the original gravity of their sins. Perhaps to the Rapture hopefuls, the Earth’s fall into global warming signals that our world has become what they always suspected — hell, the “fire next time.” Perhaps their Rapture prophecy is a kind of biblical lullaby to calm their environmental terrors. As one of my family assured me, “There are no drowning polar bears and melting ice caps where I’m going.”

It struck me that being “raptured” out of this world trumped the insecurity of living and the surrender of dying. No bodily indignity. No suffering. One is simply whisked off with the fellowship of the believers, the Rapture gang, to a heavenly and just reward. In the twinkling of an eye, they say, the righteous will ascend, dropping golden dental work, nightgowns, and perhaps some spouses. Unless you count losing the Earth and billions of unfortunate sinners who cling to it, getting raptured is a blast. Who wouldn’t want to escape the prophesied plagues of locusts, frogs, and killer viruses, an Earth overwhelmed by tsunamis, volcanoes, and nomadic legions of the unsaved?

“Sandwich, George?” I rummaged in my backpack for a pimento cheese sandwich. Though I’ve backslid from my mother’s Southern Baptist religion, I still carry on her fabulous food rituals.

My neighbor shook his head. His hunger was spiritual. Not to be put off, he told me, “I’m afraid you’ll have a rough time of it here during the Tribulations.”

“Don’t you love any of us who will suffer in those tribulations?” I asked. “Those of us you leave behind?”

George took my arm a little too tightly. “But you could come with us, you know.” George was closing in, just as surely as the tide was rising, surf coming closer to our seal pup’s small, whiskered snout. I politely disengaged. Now I was a little worried. It had been twelve hours since the discovery of this pup. In a few more hours it would be high tide again. Where was the mother?

Excitedly George pulled his laptop out of his backpack.

He often brings his home office to the beach while seal sitting. We can tap into dozens of wireless haloes shimmering unseen around nearby apartments. “I’m sending you this link,” George said. “It’s the home page for the non-raptured.”

Squinting in the morning marine light, I could barely make out the computer screen, which read: “Inheriting from the Raptured.” A very official last will and testament followed: “Contact your saintly friends now. Offer to let them use the convenient form below to keep their fiscal assets from slipping into the hands of Satan’s One World Government agents.”

“But, George,” I protested, “this site isn’t serious.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s joking,” George insisted, “it will still work.”

I saw that the will had blank signature lines marked “Infidel Witness #1” and “Infidel Witness #2.” “Well, I suppose,” I suggested with a smile, “that we can ask some of the other seal sitters to witness this for us.”

But George was completely serious. Then I remembered I had seen his car boasting a new bumper sticker: “In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned.” I had wanted to tell him that I was going to get a new bumper sticker too: “In case of Rapture, can I have your car?”

Now here he was, my dear neighbor, actually signing me up to inherit his worldly possessions — his world.

I was strangely touched.

With a pang I realized that while some End-Timers may not have the stamina and constancy for compassion, for “suffering with,” many, like George and my family, feel real concern for the infidel loved ones they will abandon. And watching George’s expectant face, I reminded myself that his spiritual stewardship, like that of some other evangelicals, did include other species and the natural world. Not long before, George had built a floating platform for an injured pup so he could find sanctuary offshore while saltwater and sun healed his gash from a boat propeller. Anchored by another neighbor’s boat buoy, this “life raft” became a refuge for many other resting and nursing seals.

George has also helped me bury the pups who don’t survive each season. We were trained to bury them deep under beach sand so their bodies can nourish the whole ecosystem. Once we seal sitters had the sorrowful task of burying a pup as the mother swam back and forth in the surf, calling and cooing to her newborn to come back to her. The mother’s moans stay in my mind these many months later.

“Oh, look,” George exclaimed in a whisper and snapped shut his laptop. “He’s up!”

Our pup intently scanned the waves for his mother and the beach for predators. For the first time, he fixed his full attention on us. Through the detached intimacy of binoculars, I could see that his breathing had steadied and he was actually rolling over on his side into a more relaxed and natural position. As he lifted his front flipper up to scratch his whiskers, his huge eyes held mine with that unblinking gaze that is at once wild and very familiar. After all, seals are our mammal kin. In coastal cultures all over the world, they are said to be shape-shifters, selkies, shedding their seal skins onshore to become human, if only for a night, a nuptial, a haunting reverie.

George and I tracked the seal pup’s every move — and now there were many. Repeatedly, he lifted his head and hind flippers to scan the waves and beach, then scratched, scooted, rolled over, and gave a long, leisurely yawn.

If, over the hours spent hauled out, seals are protected by a discreetly distant circle of seal sitters, we’ve actually seen their initial wariness relax into deep naps. The seals know we are near, and because we do not approach they find some peace. And so do we. Even more than a service to wild animals, seal sitting is a refuge in a world polluted by busyness. How often are we humans privileged to watch an animal dream beside us? (Studies have shown that, like gray whales and gorillas and many other animals, seals do dream.) In the way that meditation can be an anchor for all action, our neighborhood seal watch is the ground of communal compassion.

Even when a sea gull nipped at his tail flukes, our pup barely stirred. Fast asleep, he was dreaming deep through the late-afternoon dissonance of commuter traffic, rap music, some schoolboys’ Frisbee contest. Was the pup certain his mother would return? Was George this sure of the Second Coming?

“George,” I suggested, “why don’t you take a break? Go join your family for supper.”

“Anytime now,” George murmured, “the mother will return. That’s my favorite part.”

And then I understood something about my neighbor and about myself. All of us know what it feels like to wait for someone to call, to finally come home, to recognize our love, to reunite with those of us who long for something more, something greater than ourselves. Maybe it will come in the night, in that twinkling of an eye. Maybe it will save us from a lonely beach.

As if in answer to our longing, a glossy head popped up far out in the waves. The seal pirouetted to find her pup on the beach. George and I sat absolutely still, hardly breathing. A soft cooing call from the mother. The pup fairly leapt up, flippers unfurling like wings. Flop, flop, flop, and then an undulant body-hop along beach stones as the pup inched toward the surf.

“Ah, you’re safe now, buddy,” George sighed, as the seal pup slipped into the waves and swam as fast as his tiny flippers could carry him back to his mother. There was tranquility in George’s face, a sweet calm that often comes from sitting on the beach all day with nothing to do but watch over a fellow creature. From our driftwood seat, we saw the two seals dive and disappear. Nearby, comic black-and-white harlequin ducks popped up in the waves. Even though our seal sitting was over, we didn’t move. A great blue heron swooped in with the caw of a dinosaur bird. How could this ancient bird fly with such huge wings? How did she escape extinction? Somehow the great blue had adapted beautifully.

The driftwood creaked slightly under our weight. It was a madrona log, its soft ruby bark peeling from years lost at sea. I surprised myself by going back to the subject I had worked so hard to avoid. I asked George, “What if we’re sitting here to make sure that there will be something left for our kids?”

He seemed to ponder this for a while. “You’re a really good neighbor, George,” I told him. “We would all miss you so much if you zipped up to heaven. We’d all say, ‘Well, there goes the neighborhood!'”

George took the compliment in stride. Along with seal sitting, he also participates in our neighborhood block watch. He is someone I might call upon in an emergency, unless, of course, that emergency was the Rapture.

“I’ll miss you,” George admitted, “and . . . and all this, too.”

“You know George,” I said softly, “I really want to be left behind.”

My neighbor looked at me thoughtfully and then fell quiet as we watched another harlequin float past, bright beak dripping a tiny fish. Happy, so happy in this moment. The great blue cawed hoarsely and stood on one leg in a fishing meditation. Wave after bright wave lapped our beach, and the spring sunset glowed on our faces. We sat in silence, listening to waves more ancient than our young, hasty species, more forgiving than our religions, more enduring. Rapture.

Excerpted in Orion magazine from I Want to be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth by Brenda Peterson

Lessons in Stillness: What blue herons can teach us
By Brenda Peterson

Photo by William Foley / Unsplash

For Kate Rogers

“The possibility of being present in the world in a whole, undivided way can be a gift of the animals.”

—Ladson Hinton, “A Return to the Animal Soul”

A PAIR OF great blue herons are on the beach early most mornings, kraaking an ancient duet of hoarse caws from the time of dinosaurs. Long, delicate legs lift off with an audible flap-and-swoop, and the whoosh of wings so wide, it’s astonishing they can fly. Low tide reveals a sandy spit of tide pools and shallow surf, a littoral zone between land and sea that is perfect fishing for these amphibious birds.

One late spring morning while listening to the news, I watched a stately great blue wade into the Salish Sea, noting her cloak of silver-slate blue feathers, sharp orange beak, and black streak highlighting a fierce, amber eye. Mesmerized by the heron’s statuesque stillness, I barely heard the reporter’s lament of yet another terrorist attack, ecological disaster, school shooting, record-shattering heat wave. What if stillness—this heron’s tranquil focus on the natural world—was also a way to navigate our human tragedies, without denying them? The bird’s full attention to the tiniest slippery fish, the shushing waves under a soft, scented wind, and the sea’s steady pulse, was a survival skill I might learn.

While contemplating the poise and grace of the blue heron, I saw something I will always remember. A man strolled onto the beach, facing the sea. Eyes closed, the man’s palms lifted in a gesture of reverence and surrender. He was murmuring in a low, gentle voice, perhaps a chant. I wondered if he was praying for the world—the human turmoil and despair I’d just heard detailed on the radio.

With a blur of six-foot wings and an otherworldly cry, another great blue rose up and landed near him on the wet sand. After studying the man intently, the heron turned trustingly away to also face the water. With mighty wings outstretched and silver plume rustling like a monk’s feathered robe, the bird sunbathed in the bright breeze. The great blue was almost as tall as the meditating man. I remember reading that in parts of Asia, herons are divine messengers.

Together, the heron and slender man seemed to hold still a world careening into chaos. There were only the lulling waves, the man’s musical chant, the heron’s serenity and faith in sun, wind, and human. Perhaps this was what the Taoist sages meant long ago when they taught that one had great lessons to learn from a calm and happy spirit. Perhaps the heron sensed that she was safe to fish and sun herself so close, right in front of a meditating man. As I witnessed the serene self-possession of both human and great blue, my whole body relaxed, rested.

Suddenly there was movement: The man lifted one lithe leg, his arms wide, in a slow-motion swirl of hands, as if he had found his own wings. Thousand-year-old movements, as he gracefully performed the ritual “crane dance” of Tai chi. Stepping deeper into the surf, sand sinking under his feet, he kept his balance.

We may well be an impermanent species; our consumption and exploitation of nature and other animals foretells the unintended consequence of our own extinction. But perhaps the pandemic and our mandatory retreat gave us a far-sighted glimpse of how much nature and other species will recover from our overstep. . . .

The great blue turned to watch the man’s flowing dance, her keen, yellow eyes taking in his imitation of movements that cranes and herons embody so naturally. Other species of cranes, like the Northwest’s sandhill cranes, perform stunning courtship dances in the lifelong ballet of their mating. Birds have an intelligence born of the far-sightedness of sky, the knowledge of wind currents, the memory of many migrations. Birds perceive through visual, tactile, auditory, and chemical stimuli, any bird site will note. But what did this heron make of a man trying to dance like her? Perhaps with her. Bird and human bonds are as ancient as these cranes. In Japan they tell an old folktale of shapeshifting, the story of the “Crane Wife.” A lonely, poor man discovers a wounded crane in the tall reeds, her luminous flank pierced by a hunter’s arrow. Because he is destitute and hungry, the man prepares to kill the crane. But when she lifts her elegant head, silver feathers trembling, those golden eyes holding his, the young man cannot bear to deny the world such bright life.

Tenderly, he lifts the crane and carries her to home. Pulling out the arrow, he heals her wounds with herbs and salve. He attends to her with the devoted kindness that is the best of any species. Soon her wings quiver in anticipation of flight. Wind currents and other birds call her to come home to the sky, to lush and warm wetlands, to their nightly rookeries. Though this crane is the most beautiful being the man has ever encountered, he intuits that she is not his possession, or even his companion. She must be restored to her own wild and radiant destiny. He opens the door, and the crane takes flight. Soaring over the woods, she soon joins the V-shaped curve of other cranes moving like loud constellations in the clouds.

The man is lost without her, remembering the gentle cooing as she cocked her head and listened to him tell the story of his limited life, the flap of her wings as she hopped about his house, the way she watched his every move—as if he mattered. He believes that nothing magical will ever again enrich his life.

But that night, he is surprised by a tap-tap-tapping on his door. There in the moonlight stands a stunning young woman, clad in silver and gray silk.

“I am your wife,” she tells him simply, her voice flute-like and musical. He falls back, astounded, as the woman enters his home with authority and such graceful steps she might as well be dancing.

How can a woman so lovely lay claim to a sorry soul like me, the man marvels?

He is so shy he can only watch, awestruck, as the woman takes possession of his meager home. She swoops around, cleaning every cobweb, mending every broken window, setting everything right. The slender woman sleeps in his bed, while the man spends three nights in the ashes of his own fire.

“I cannot support you,” the man must admit as they both grow hungry, and he cannot find work. “You deserve a much richer man, someone to take good care of you.”

“It is I who will take care of you,” the woman smiles, her eyes like sunlight. “But you must not disturb me while I work in my little room.”

Of course, he agrees. His life is already so much more wondrous with her. In love for the first time in his young life, he waits outside her door, summoning the courage to whisper through the knothole, “Will you . . . could you . . . marry me?”

A chirp and little cry from inside her room is his answer.

When she finally emerges, she offers him a brocade of silver-gray silk so richly woven, he gasps. Any woman would want this to adorn themselves in splendor. But shouldn’t she keep it for their wedding day?

“No,” she assures him softly, “sell this at the market and we will want for nothing.”

Her silken tapestry, woven with black and gold threads, is so gorgeous that women flock to purchase even small pieces. No one in the village has ever seen such artistry. The man and his new wife grow rich, perhaps spend a little too much, and soon the wife must return to her solitary room and weave more brocade.

“Let me be,” she again warns her husband. “Do not disturb my work.” But, like most spouses, the man is too curious. He desires not just the woman, but her soul and her secrets. How does his wife weave such wonders, what is she hiding from him? He leans his head against the door, hears her spinning and whistling. Stealthily, he opens the door to discover—she is not human. Transformed, standing on one long leg, plucking her own plume of silver feathers, is that same magnificent crane he once saved from a hunter’s arrow. Now, to save them both, she is stripping herself of what she needs to survive. He had not noticed that after each creation of silk brocade, his wife grew weaker. Now, she was giving him her all. And he had broken her only request of him. For privacy, for a room of her own.

His remorse is great, but his loss is greater. She gives him one last, long, and intimate look: then her wings flutter, whoosh, lift. She flies above him, crying—the keen of grief, the caw of betrayal and lost love, the sigh of release.

THERE ARE several versions of this “Crane Wife” folktale. In Tsuru no Ongaseshi, or “Crane’s Return of a Favor,” when the man realizes that his wife is sacrificing herself for their love and survival, he begs her to stop plucking her feathers for them. But the crane wife says her gift of silken feathers is for love. “The man says that love exists without sacrifices, but he is wrong. He who lives without sacrifices for someone else doesn’t deserve to be with a crane.”

These contemplative and often endangered cranes have sacrificed much to share habitat with humans. Here in the Pacific Northwest, as well as worldwide, crucial wetlands are shrinking as we encroach more on their fragile littoral zones; their fishing is also depleted as oceans warm, and fresh and salt waters are polluted by agricultural runoff. In some countries, cranes are still hunted. There is also the neverending blink and blast of electricity, the ubiquitous din of our species’ relentless activity, artificial lights often dominating the night, disturbing great blue heron rookeries and nocturnal hunting birds like northern spotted owls. Natural dark is rare, and so is solitude—the only thing the Crane Wife asked of those who loved her.

But sensory pollution also diminishes people, like stripping off layers of sensitivity, poise, and presence. Many other species are going extinct in this loud, manic, crowded, and deeply distracted world. But what is going extinct in human nature may be our ability to be attentive to rhythms other than our own—the musical lilt and call of birds, the original songs that the wind makes breathing through each tree, the radical silence and hush of stargazing above timberline, the rapt focus of a heron fishing.

During the global pandemic, humans had to stay home, sometimes in solitary rooms, as wild animals reclaimed our deserted cities, towns, and waterways. Like the Crane Wife, we stayed inside, transforming ourselves to create the beautiful fabric of an inner life. With such heightened senses and solitude, how differently did we perceive our natural world? What in our natural world healed, when our own thoroughfares and neighborhoods were more populated with animals than people? Our shared ecosystems were more vibrant, more visible, when we were invisible. Wild animals have never really left us. They adapt and abide undercover, until our human quarantines allow animals to reveal their true selves, like in the old Japanese crane folktales, free to spin their silken gifts for us.

Like the Crane Wife, we have stripped ourselves of the very animal senses and protective skills we most need to thrive. For love, for ego, for riches, whatever drives us. We must ask, given such willful deprivation, such an extinction of attention: Do we deserve to take up so much space in the same watery world as cranes?

In his wonderful book An Immense World, Ed Yong writes about the “radical empathy,” which is our superpower. “Empathy toward other species and toward nature is the only way out of our current ecological predicament,” he says. This is not new. Folktales like “The Crane Wife,” mystics from Lao Tzu to Christ, Buddha, and the Dalai Lama, have taught compassion as a spiritual path—and a survival skill. What’s new in the twenty-first century is that mainstream science is finally embracing such spiritual traditions.

THE FIRST STORIES that we tell our children teach empathy and close attention to other animals. “The deepest layers of our psyche still have animal characters,” notes psychologist Ladson Hinton in his essay “A Return of the Animal Soul.” Children naturally commune with animals. They include animals in their bedtime prayers; they easily shapeshift to imagine becoming animals; and they have imaginary friends who are animals. Eighty percent of kids’ dreams are about animals. That bond has fallen to 10 percent by adulthood when one’s life is burdened by busyness and distraction. Imagination and empathy are often sacrificed to greed and the grind of getting ahead. The crane husband lost the great love of his life when the mystical animal bond was broken.

As I watched the man doing Tai chi on my beach in communion with the great blue heron, I recognized the swirling circle of his arms, like wings, as the “silk unreeling” of my own decades of Tai chi practice, a reminder of the silk weaving of the Crane Wife tales. I wondered what the great blue heron made of this man’s subtle dance, what the Dalai Lama calls “spiritual mindfulness.” Did she feel connected to the man in some cross-species recognition of the dance, the stillness? Certainly, she allowed his presence and perhaps shared his reverence.

Most wild animals flee or hide when humans are near, when we come crashing through underbrush or racing motorboats across waves. Why did the heron accept such intimacy, such abiding closeness? Man and bird stood only ten feet apart, but they were not separated in their seamless quality of attention and meditative presence. The heron’s bill was not pointed down to instantly pounce on a fish in the shallow surf; she was standing on one leg, her eyes fixed on the distant horizon. As if sensing the bird’s reverie, the man also ceased his dance, his palms resting on his belly. Both human and bird stood in absolute calm, gazing out across a sea so glassy and sunlit, a shining path that shimmered from shore to horizon.

Our species rarely cultivates such calm—the kind of animal stillness and scrutiny that is the opposite of fight-or-flight stimulus. And yet, in such meditative moments, we often see the world most clearly. The clear seeing of man and heron. Contemplation and the inner life are antidotes to fear and mindless distraction. As the Taoist writer, Huanchu Daoren writes, “Best be very calm yet radiantly alert.” To answer the Crane Wife folktale, this reverent and compassionate man, who included another animal in his own spiritual practice, certainly deserved to be with a crane. She had chosen him, to abide together, though just for a while, because great mystics also teach impermanence.

We may well be an impermanent species; our consumption and exploitation of nature and other animals foretells the unintended consequence of our own extinction. But perhaps the pandemic and our mandatory retreat gave us a far-sighted glimpse of how much nature and other species will recover from our overstep, our breaking of all our treaties with the earth. The contemplative Time Out we endured might also help us imagine another future than extinction for ourselves and other animals. The man and the heron dancing together on the beach will always be for me an image of a healed, restored world. That is what we must imagine, a future in which the Crane Wife doesn’t leave—because we help heal her and honor her needs, what Ursula Le Guin calls her “serene, inexhaustible fullness of being.” Only then can we stay and survive together. Cranes, after all, mate for life.

A foghorn moaned in the marine mists. With the slightest wisp and whisper of wings, the Great Blue lifted, her legs dangling one more moment in the surf. The man turned to give the great bird a deep, slow bow—a gesture at once grateful and glad. With a mighty flap, the heron lifted, circled above him, called out in that timeless caw, and then was gone. Into the great blue.

Excerpted from Wild Chorus: Finding Harmony with Whales, Wolves, and Other Animals by Brenda Peterson

Ecological Civilization: Animal Allies by Brenda Peterson

TIKKUN magazine, March 6, 2019, originally published in ORION magazine

“My imaginary friend really lived. . . once,” the Latina teenage girl began, head bent, her fingers twisting her long, black hair.

She stood in the circle of other adolescents gathered in my Seattle Arts and Lectures storytelling class.

Here were kids from all over the city—every color and class, all strangers one to another. Over the next two weeks we would become a fierce tribe, telling our own and our tribe’s story. Our first assignment was to introduce our imaginary friends from childhood. This shy fourteen-year- old girl, Sarah, had struck me on the first day because she always sat next to me, as if under my wing, and though her freckles and stylish clothes suggested she was a popular girl, her demeanor showed the detachment of someone deeply preoccupied. She never met my eye, nor did she join in the first few days of storytelling when the ten boys and four girls were regaling one another with favorite superheroes.

So far, their story lines portrayed the earth as an environmental wasteland, a ruined shell hardly shelter to anything animal or human. After three days of stories set on an earth besieged by climate change, environmental evacuees, and barren of nature, I made a rule: No more characters or animals could die this first week. I asked if someone might imagine a living world, one that survives even our species. It was on this third day of group storytelling that Sarah jumped into the circle and told her story: “

“My imaginary friend is called Angel now because she’s in heaven, but her real name was Katie,” Sarah began. “She was my best friend from fourth to tenth grade. She had freckles like me and brown hair and more boyfriends—sometimes five at a time—because Katie said, ‘I like to be confused!’ She was a real sister too and we used to say we’d be friends for life. .. .”

Sarah stopped, gave me a furtive glance and then gulped in a great breath of air like someone drowning, about to go down. Her eyes fixed inward, her voice dropped to a monotone.

“Then one day last year in L.A, Katie and I were walking home from school and a red sports car came up behind us. Someone yelled,‘Hey, Katie!’ She turned . . . and he blew her head off. A bullet grazed my skull, too, and I blacked out. When I woke up, Katie was gone, dead forever.” Sarah stopped, stared down at her feet and murmured in that same terrible monotone, “Cops never found her murderer, case is closed.”

The kids shifted and took a deep breath, although Sarah herself was barely breathing at all. I did not know what to do with her story; she had offered it to a group of kids she had known but three days. It explained her self-imposed exile during lunch hours and while waiting for the bus.

All I knew was that she’d brought this most important story of her life into the circle of storytellers and it could not be ignored as if she were a case to be closed. This story lived in her, would define and shape her young life. Because she had given it to us, we needed to witness and receive—and perhaps tell it back to her in the ancient tradition of tribal call and response.

“Listen,” I told the group,“We’re going to talk story the way they used to long ago when people sat around at night in circles just like this one. That was a time when we still listened to animals and trees and didn’t think ourselves so alone in this world. Now we’re going to carry out jungle justice and find Katie’s killer. We’ll call him to stand trial before our tribe. All right? Who wants to begin the story?”

All the superheroes joined this quest. Nero the White Wolf asked to be a scout. Unicorn, with her truth-saying horn, was declared judge. Another character joined the hunt: Fish, whose translucent belly was a shining “soul mirror” that could reveal one’s true nature.

A fierce commander of this hunt was Rat, whose army of computerized comrades could read brain waves and call down lightning lasers as weapons. Rat began the questioning and performed the early detective work. We determined that the murderer was a man named Carlos, a drug lord who used local gangs to deal cocaine. At a party Carlos had misinterpreted Katie’s videotaping her friends dancing as witnessing a big drug deal. For that, Rat said, “This dude decides Katie’s to go down. So yo, man, he offs her without a second thought.”

Bad dude, indeed, this Carlos. And who was going to play Carlos now that all the tribe knew his crime? I took on the role. As I told my story, I felt my face hardening into a contempt that carried me far away from these young pursuers, deep into the Amazon jungle where Rat and his computer armies couldn’t follow, where all their space-age equipment had to be shed until there was only hand-to-hand simple fate.

In the Amazon, the kids changed without effort, in an easy shape-shifting to their animal selves. Suddenly there were no more superheroes with intergalactic weapons— there was instead Jaguar and Snake, Fish, and Pink Dolphin. We were now a tribe of animals, pawing, running, invisible in our jungle, eyes shining and seeing in the night. Carlos canoed the mighty river, laughing, because he did not know he had animals tracking him.

All through the story, I’d kept my eye on Sarah. The flat affect and detachment I’d first seen in her was the deadness Sarah carried, the violence that had hollowed out her inside, the friend who haunted her imagination. But now her face was alive, responding to each animal’s report of tracking Carlos. She hung on the words, looking suddenly very young, like a small girl eagerly awaiting her turn to enter the circling jump rope.

“Hey, I’m getting away from you!” I said, snarling as I imagined Carlos would. I paddled my canoe and gave a harsh laugh, “I’ll escape, easy!”

“No!” Sarah shouted. “Let me tell it!”

“Tell it!” her tribe shouted.

“Well, Carlos only thinks he’s escaping,” Sarah smiled, waving her hands. “He’s escaped from so many he’s harmed before. But I call out ‘FISH!’ And Fish comes. He swims alongside the canoe and grows bigger, bigger until at last, Carlos turns and sees this HUGE river monster swimming right alongside him. That mean man is afraid because suddenly Fish turns his belly up to Carlos’s face. Fish forces him to look into the soul mirror. Carlos sees everyone he’s ever killed and all the people who loved them and got left behind.

“Carlos sees Katie and me and what he’s done to us. He sees everything and he knows his soul is black. And he really doesn’t want to die now because he knows then he’ll stare into his soul mirror forever. But Fish makes him keep looking until Carlos starts screaming he’s sorry, he’s so sorry. Then…” Sarah shouted, “Fish eats him!”

The animals roared and cawed and congratulated Sarah for calling Fish to mirror a murderer’s soul before taking jungle justice.

Class had ended, but no one wanted to leave. We wanted to stay in our jungle, stay within our animals—and so we did. I asked the kids to close their eyes and call their animals to accompany them home. I told them that some South American tribes believe that when you are born, an animal is born with you. This animal protects and lives alongside you even if it’s far away in an Amazon jungle—it came into the world at the same time you did. And your animal dies with you to guide you back into the spirit world.

The kids decided to go home and make animal masks, returning the next day wearing the faces of their chosen animal. When they came into class the next day it was as if we never left the Amazon. Someone dimmed the lights. There were drawings everywhere of jaguars and chimps and snakes. Elaborate animal masks had replaced the super heroes who began this tribal journey. We sat behind our masks in a circle with the lights low and there was an acute, alert energy running between us, as eyes met behind animal faces.

I realized that I, who grew up in the forest wild, who first memorized the earth with my hands, have every reason to feel this familiar animal resonance. But many of these teenagers, especially minorities, have barely been in the woods; in fact, many inner city kids are afraid of nature. They would not willingly sign up for an Outward Bound program or backpacking trek; they don’t think about recycling in a world they believe already ruined and in their imaginations abandoned for intergalactic, nomad futures.

These kids are not environmentalists who worry about saving nature. And yet, when imagining an Amazon forest too thick for weapons to penetrate, too primitive for their superhero battles, they return instinctively to their animal selves. These are animals they have only seen in zoos or on television. Yet there is a profound identification, an ease of inhabiting another species that portends great hope for our own species survival. Not because nature is “out there” to be saved or sanctioned, but because nature is in them. The ancient, green world has never left us though we have long ago left the forest.

As we told our Amazon stories over the next week, the rainforest thrived in that sterile classroom. Lights low, surrounded by serpents, the jaguar clan, the elephants, I’d as often hear growls, hisses, and howls as words.

They may be young, but kids’ memories and alliances with the animals are very old. By telling their own animal stories they are practicing ecology at its most profound and healing level. Story as ecology—it’s so simple, something we’ve forgotten. In our environmental wars the emphasis has been on saving species, not becoming them. It is our own spiritual relationship to animals that must evolve. Any change begins with imagining ourselves in a new way.

But children, like some adults, know that the real world stretches farther than what we can see. That’s why they shift easily between visions of our tribal past and our future worlds. The limits of the adult world are there for these teenagers, but they still have a foot in the vast inner magic of childhood. It is this magical connection I called upon when I asked the kids on the last day of our class to perform the Dance of the Animals.

Slowly, in rhythm to the deep, bell-like beat of my Northwest Native drum, each animal entered the circle and soon the dance sounded like this: Boom, step, twirl, and slither and stalk and snarl and chirp and caw, caw. Glide, glow, growl, and whistle and howl and shriek and trill and hiss, hiss. We danced as the humid, lush jungle filled the room.

In that story stretching between us and the Amazon, we connected with those animals and their spirits. In return, we were complete— with animals as soul mirrors. We remembered who we were, by allowing the animals inside us to survive.

Children’s imagination is a primal force, just as strong as lobbying efforts and boycotts and endangered species acts. When children claim another species as not only their imaginary friends, but also as the animal within them— an ally—doesn’t that change the outer world?

The dance is not over as long as we have our animal partners. When the kids left our last class, they still fiercely wore their masks. I was told that even on the bus they stayed deep in their animal character. I like to imagine those strong, young animals out there now in this wider jungle. I believe that Rat will survive the inner-city gangs; that Chimp will find his characteristic comedy even as his parents deal with divorce; I hope that Unicorn will always remember her mystical truth-telling horn.

And as for Sarah, she joined the Jaguar clan, elected as the first girl-leader over much boy- growling. As Sarah left our jungle, she reminded me, “Like jaguar . . . . I can still see in the dark.”

Howling with Wolves
by Brenda Peterson

Originally published in Orion.

IN THE 1990s, the internationally acclaimed French classical pianist Hélène Grimaud had an encounter with a captive she-wolf. “The wolf was life itself,” she wrote in her memoir, Wild Harmonies: A Life of Music and Wolves. “[It was] more biting than the frost. Life itself, with an incredible intensity.”

In 1996, Grimaud cofounded the Wolf Conservation Center (WCC) in New Salem, New York, which since 2003 has helped to breed Mexican and red wolves and release them into the wild. Some of WCC’s most popular educational events are “Howl for Pups of All Ages” and “Howl for Adults,” during which people can blend their voices with wolves’ calls.

“Why do wolves answer our human howls?” I ask Grimaud during a recent phone conversation.

She speaks in thoughtful bursts and riffs, as if following some musical score in her mind that is scrawled over with notes on wolf science. “Perhaps wolves are generously nondiscriminating,” she says wryly. “One of the things that makes working with any wild animal so interesting and humbling is that you have to interact with them on their terms. Often they are quite forgiving of our bumbling attempts to connect in a proper and dignified way, in wolf terms. It could just be that the wolves interpret humans howling as an invasive threat from another pack. So the wolves want to advertise that this territory is already occupied.”

Do wolves ever just sing to make music, as we do?

“One of the most intriguing elements of wolf howling is what scientists call social glue,” Grimaud explains, adding, “This spreading of good feeling like humans singing around a campfire, feeling closer to one another—it’s that same idea: you howl or harmonize and so reaffirm your social bonds with one another. That’s not surprising. Any pack animal really depends upon the others to survive.”

Certainly, humans are social pack animals. We are also profoundly moved by music, especially by making music together. That’s why the word harmony relates both to music and to relations between people and groups of people. When we hear human music, we physically attune to that vibration; when we sing together, we blend our voices, matching thirds and fifths and sometimes deliberate, clashing dissonance. We try to fit and find our part in the greater chorus.

Wolves actually harmonize their voices with ours. “Have you noticed,” Grimaud asks me, “that when a human—who is less naturally gifted in that wolf language—joins in a howl and his pitch lands on the same note, the wolves will alter their pitch to prolong the harmonization? It’s very interesting. If you end up on the same pitch as a wolf, he will scale up or down, modulating his voice with yours.”

Does this mean that animals also seek to blend with or are attracted to our music?

“When you practice your piano,” I ask Grimaud, “do the wolves join in your music by howling along?”

During the seasons when Grimaud lived next to the WCC in upstate New York, she didn’t notice any exact correlation between the wolves’ howling and her piano. “Their howling was random, coincidental with my playing,” she says with a laugh. “But there was one foster wolf pup who seemed to react to violin music when she heard my recordings. She’d come out of her den and raise her head and howl along to the violin strings. There definitely seemed to be a relationship there.”

“If you were going to compose a concerto for a wolf audience,” I ask Grimaud, “would it be a love song, a requiem?”

I am thinking about the elegy a composer might create for the Judas wolves, those solitary survivors of lethal hunts who are repeatedly radio-tagged and then targeted again to betray the location of their next family for a kill. Imagine surviving so much loss.

“I’ve never been asked that question before,” she says. Grimaud is silent for a while, then adds pensively, “Probably I’d choose music with a sense of longing. That’s always what I think when I hear wolves howling. Endless longing.”

Published in The Morning News, excerpted from Wolf Nation by Brenda Peterson