It’s cold out when I reach a position away from street lights, walking the bike trail alongside the Great Miami about 2:00 A.M., unable to sleep, so isolated from others I pass Carillon Park and my perceptions become dream-like, somewhat distorted, the houses of the city surrounding me hidden by darkness, distance, hills, and trees.
Coyotes wake me out of this trance-like state, howling on the cemetery bluff above the river. They’re not rare in Ohio but not often heard around here, more often seen. They’re over half a mile away up a steep incline whose western side was mined out for gravel and sand, leaving a huge cavity you can see from the freeway. The coyotes are persistent. Their wild song seems to echo, but I think there are two of them, mates singing a duet, responding to each other, each poised head stretched high on a separate point jutting out from the hilltop. I search for them in my mind’s eye, climbing the hill, using the branches of trees to pull myself up, feet anchored in roots, breathing hard as I ascend the steepness until I can see them. Then I’m in between but below them, staring up at one then the other glowing in moonlight, silvery ghosts.
The moon seems as full of light as a 100-watt bulb in a small closet. More than one person has walked on that surface, and I’ve sort of met the first man to do it. Sold him a cord of wood for his fireplace for 35 dollars. I turned in his check of payment to the Lebanon Jaycees and lost a signature worth big money today. I have regretted that lack of foresight, but now I’m wondering if Armstrong was tempted to raise his head and howl at the blue earth that was so far away from him during that visit. I can understand a human’s instinctive adoption up there of the small wolf’s habit of howling.
I prefer to think their arias mean the coyotes are celebrating, insisting we know they are here, among us, above the roaring traffic of I-75, returned after being extinct in this place. They not only survive but moreover prosper despite guns and poisons. They’ve won defenders in animal rights groups. They haunt the city’s wild oases, vacant lots, steep wooded hillsides, shrubby floodplains, areas humans neglect, including the night.
So I feel elated and retreat back home behind the flitting images of furry, shrewd life, which tell me that my world is so rich, the most unwanted still can survive. Their music comforts me and will bring sleep. As will thoughts of the others, the badgers reported living in the farmers’ fields around here. The deer that populate the small city parks and brushy lots. The Canada geese that honked past in migrations during my childhood.
We share more than location, unless you think of location as the world, the earth, this planet, Turtle Island. On nearly a molecular level, we all are related. Everything has a soul according to Miami Indian lore. We all arose from atoms and pass back into atoms. The dirt we walk through includes the remains of whatever came before us. The wilderness lives in our bloodstream.
I am what I am. No one needs to divorce me in court or denounce me in public, but I can accommodate anyone’s need to do either one. The one who can’t abandon me is myself. A canine on a crag who howls at the moon and hears in his own sound an answer.
# # #
Bill Vernon served in the United States Marine Corps, studied English literature, then taught it. Writing is his therapy, along with exercising outdoors and doing international folkdances. His poems, stories and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, and Five Star Mysteries published his novel OLD TOWN in 2005.
Photo credit: Terri Malone
