How will you live your one wild and precious life?

As I further advance into elder years, I have more appreciation for this poem by Mary Oliver.

"The Summer Day"

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean--

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down --

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Her question, "Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" has been something I have been trying to answer for most of my life, and at times during that quest my endeavor has been perilous to the wild.

Such as...

The Crazy Lady up Bird Creek

When I pushed into the dark room I could hear critters scurrying through knee deep litter.

We found the cabin fall of 1976 when an ex boyfriend and I were cutting firewood. It sat in a clearing on a knoll, front door ajar and all the windows shuttered. I thought: Perfect! I can live here. My ex thought I was nuts. It sat on 320 acres of private land, an in-holding surrounded by the Lolo National Forest.

I found the owner through courthouse records and she sent her son to meet me. I ended up renting it for $10 a month – rustic living for me, my son, our dog and cats, and my horse.

I was a US Forest Service helitack fire crew member and enlisted their help: removing the heavy window shutters, scoop-shoveling the critter litter and burning huge piles of debris. That first winter my son would ski or hike the two and a half miles to catch the school bus and locals wondered about the "hippies up that Forest Service road". The following spring the first local I met said, "So you're the Crazy Lady up Bird Creek."

When I met the owner's son that fall of 1976, he told me of an encounter with a black bear "maybe 12 years ago." He was standing uphill from the cabin when a bear tried to get inside. He fired his .22 rifle and thought he had shot the bear in the head but it ran off.

In 1977 a large black bear visited the cabin, attracted to the bird feeder my clueless son and I had hung on the porch. I still remember seeing that bear and hearing it pushing against the door. And to further our cluelessness, when my ex was bear hunting and came for a visit, we placed his cooler of food outside the door. Of course the bear tried to break into the cooler and cabin. When my ex shot "his bear" we cleaned the skull, and wow...There was a hole in the top and a small caliber bullet lodged near the jaw hinge.

To this day I cringe at my cluelessness, downright carelessness, at making food attractants so easily accessible for that bear. Yes, I did many things wrong in my attempt to "live in the wild." But I also learned resourcefulness and proper conduct with and true appreciation for wildlife. And through my later work I've been incredibly fortunate to have seen and experienced truly wild places: with the US Forest Service on three different Ranger Districts, National Park Service in Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks, and US Fish and Wildlife Service on various National Wildlife Refuges.

So what is "wild?" In one of my previous "A Place for All" writings I expressed perceptions of what is wild from several different friends. Some indicated a clear separation between humans and wild. But I believe humans have always been and always will be an integral part of what is wild, with no separation. It's how we choose to be that inseparable part that is critical. Now, well into my elder years, I realize just how important it is that there be no distinction, no separation between us and the Wild.

And that aging thing? I sum it up with three points:

Resistance – "I look through young eyes at old hands and wonder where the time went." Heard on a Canadian radio station through a battery operated radio while at that remote cabin and so relevant now. I'm not aging gracefully.

Acceptance – Of my aging body. It can still paddle a kayak and hike in the wild every day with my elder canine kid, Arrow.

Reconciliation – I have seen and done much on my wild Road Trip. I've lived and worked in, experiencing first hand, some of the most dynamic and dramatic landscapes in the US. Since what is behind the Ranges may be that ultimate destination, I'll allow myself a meandering path as I continually ponder what to do with my "one wild and precious life."