Selected Writings

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.”

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

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.”