Only once in my life have I ever woken in the middle of the night and walked, as if tugged by some invisible pulley, to look out a window. I was in high school at the time, living in an attic room in my parents’ narrow, creaking house, located a few blocks from the largest urban forest park in the United States. Had I heard something outside? The question was dwarfed by the certainty of my instinct: Look. It was just after 2 a.m. The street outside was still at night, and the tinny pools of streetlight gave it a stage-like quality. Those days I watched the street with a self-indulgent melancholy. I'd put Garden State on my iPod shuffle and stare at the street, waiting for any tremor of change, to the world, or to me.
Now, beyond the cool, brittle glass, I saw a coyote. Had I heard a sound? How had I known she would be there? She sailed silently through the center of the road. Though I had never seen one this clearly, I felt certain. Her tail was bushy, her reddish coat thick, her ears two small satellites in the night. I peered up and down the street, confirming that, yes, every house was dark. No dogs barked. The hour was hers, and now—unknown to her—we shared it.
She moved down the hill like one of the older neighbors, pausing every now and then to peer at a house, a squirrel, a car. I knew coyotes lived in the park, but I thought of them as distant and unknowable, the kidnappers of people’s cats, who necessitated the rain-stained MISSING posters on so many telephone-poles. I did not think of coyotes as creatures with their own interior lives, I thought of them as threats to our 18-pound family dog.
Now the coyote's tail flicked the air. Why had I never understood this road was as much hers as mine? A part of me longed to follow. To tiptoe down the stairs and trail her into the night. To watch her hunt, to see where in the forest she kept her den. I was curious, yes, but also selfish. I wanted a photo, a story to bring home and tell. I wanted to fall into the sinkhole of another’s life. But her shadow was already shrinking. By the time I got down to the front porch, she would be gone. The only thing I could learn from her, now, was through my distant gaze.
In On Looking, essayist Lia Purpura quotes her friend, a former nun, who uses the phrase “custody of the eyes” to describe the practice of training oneself to focus only on what is present before you. To hone this vision, it seems to me, you must fight the creep of past—that overlay of expectation that can blind us to what is really occurring—as well as future, with all its projected worries and wants. To focus exclusively on the sensory, physical world can feel like animal cosplay. Like an obliteration of the human mind. “When we look at something, we decide to fill our entire existence, however briefly, with that very thing,” wrote poet Ocean Vuong. A minute ago, I had been asleep. Now—pushed by a lever I could not see—I felt like a coyote.
As a teenager, I felt little urge to rebel in physical ways. Only once had I conspired with my sister to stuff two pillows under my comforter and sneak out of the house to meet a boy. But I longed for attention, which is to say, connection. I wanted to be seen. Not for what I was in my gangly, frizzy-haired form, but for what I could become. We had just learned about the “iceberg theory” of Hemingway’s prose in English class—the idea that only the “tip” of his stories appear on the page, with the rest subtext—but it felt like an apt description for teenage life. We bobbed along, ever obscuring this and that part of ourselves, devastated when we were misunderstood, or, even worse, when what floated beneath the water was never imagined at all.
There’s a German word, umwelt, environment, used to denote what an animal can sense about its surroundings. Inherent to the definition is both knowledge and limitation. To glimpse a coyote through the glass is to spy an iceberg in the sea. For those few seconds that I gave the coyote the entire custody of my gaze, I filled my entire self with her, and still, I saw but a slice of her being. I had never studied coyotes or their role in cities; I did not know, in a technical sense, what I was seeing. Was she hunting? Going to her den? Was the coyote even a she?
At the time, the limits of my knowledge felt like a locked door; only now do I see the sighting cut a door from where before there had been only wall. I had never looked at a coyote this way, but now I wondered how old she was, where she had come from, where she was going, who she had eaten, how she would die. I wanted more. The encounter had “changed the granularity of my perception, which had been pretty ‘low-res,’” as Jenny Odell writes in How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. I was no naturalist, I would never even have self-identified as an “animal-lover,” I was just a watcher, an amateur, a teenager trying to figure out how to grow into someone else. It would be years before I learned the Latin root for amateur is lover.
Recently, I read that the population of monarch butterflies has decreased 90 percent since I was a child in the 1990s. I was surprised less by the statistic than my own lack of awareness. I'd always marveled when I saw monarchs in Portland. Shouldn't I have clocked their dwindling? To see or listen across species, is “a transformative and revolutionary resource that requires quieting down and tuning in,” writes Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. The late naturalist E.O. Wilson coined the term ‘Eremocine’ to refer to the era we are living in, an age of loneliness, because watching other species die is a sad place to be—but only if you know you are witnessing decline. For the first decades of my life, I was afraid of a worsening future, but I was not lonely. I did not mourn what I could not see.
Over the last few weeks, whether doing interviews to promote Wolfish or just leaving my desk for one of the many mid-email-writing walks around my block, I have been thinking about the act of watching animals. About how too often we feel like we don’t know how to “do” it, or what to say, or if we “get” it. I was just invited on a paid press trip to attend a birdwatching festival in eastern Oregon, and I couldn’t attend, but I was very delighted, and still a part of me felt like—Me? Ever bashful about my middling grades in high school science classes. Falling again for the lie that a bird is not worth looking for if I do not yet know its song.
And then I think back to that teenage night. How a girl—unsure of so much—was sure she should get out of bed, go to the window, and look. As the coyote faded into shadow, I was surprised to feel a part of me going with her. Like a comet, she had fallen through my night, traveling at a frequency I could not meet, but my own curiosity now blazed behind her, a glowing tail that would linger, faintly, long after the morning came. The coyote, of course, would never know. Her residency in my brain mattered nothing to her animal self.
This was the moment I learned that to be seen was not the same thing as being understood, but also that to be inscrutable—my iceberg-self, floating through the high school hallway—was no great tragedy. The tragedy was when, faced with a lack of knowledge or a lack of certainty about how to feel, a person chooses the easy path: to see another being, and then to look away.
Wolfish enters the world on Tuesday. Here’s a photo of me at the very beginning of my research, standing above Hells Canyon in eastern Oregon. I’m 21-years-old and you can tell how bright-eyed and optimistic I am because it’s breezy and I’m in shorts:
It’s very strange and scary to push a book into the world. This one—which Scientific American (!!) just reviewed, calling it an “unorthodox” animal book (#goals) with me a “skillful guide” through its wilds—has been recommended by places like TIME, Vulture, Salon, the Rumpus, Literary Hub, Powells Books, Reader’s Digest, Goodreads, Bustle, Book Riot, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Dallas Morning News, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Bethanne Patrick at The Los Angeles Times said it “should be required reading” which is so nice I’m not sure I’ll ever recover.
Thank you to those of you who have preordered the book, which is so helpful in signaling support to my publisher. I am stupendously grateful. It’s also not too late! Preorders “count” until Monday at midnight. Order a personalized copy from my local indie, or a copy from Bookshop.org, or from your local indie, or request your local library stock it.
Other things:
Here’s me on a Slate podcast talking about fear and true crime and what Little Red Riding Hood tells us about who gets to be the victim.
Here’s a booklist I curated for The Rumpus with writing that looks kaleidoscopically at place.
COME HANG OUT: Starting Tuesday the 21st at the downtown Powells…I have events in PORTLAND and SEATTLE and the BAY AREA and MINNEAPOLIS and BROOKLYN (tickets required) and MISSOULA, and then back to the east coast in April (Boston, Providence, D.C.—stay tuned). I’d really love nothing more than to see you there. Detailed schedule here.
Okay, that’s all. Thanks for reading!
Happy Friday.
Erica