Two Dreads: Cat Country (I)
I’ve been dealing with a lot of fear this summer. Anxiety, stress, worry: dread. That is the word for it. Dread. The thing about dread, for me, is that it is nearby. It is not something I am in, so much as a force, or void, I feel next to me. It threatens; it hovers; it wants my attention. Do you remember that strangely charming fungus-monster from the Lamisil commercials, who talked like a New York City construction worker while prying up toenails and crawling under? I picture Dread as that guy, but dressed in high socks and a headband, like Michael Cera in Juno, mooning and grinning and wiggling his bottom. Doing jumping jacks—preparing to terrorize me.
(Why am I making dread sound funny? There must be something funny about it. “Death hilarious,” Cormac McCarthy says in Blood Meridian, describing a Comanche warband riding up to slaughter.)
Or you could say that dread is like standing in the shallow end of a pool. Everything is fine in the shallow end. Your feet touch bottom; little ripples lap at your belly button. But by a gradual slope, shallows become deep waters. And this pool has a hole in it: at the far corner, a kind of drain or maw. From where you are standing, safe and sound, you can sense an undertow, like gravity. A certain subtle sucking.
The phrase “deep waters” always calls Psalm 107 to my mind. Psalm 107 depicts dread, in a way. Verses 23-26, in the King James version, go like this:
I know this Psalm because of my Uncle David, my dad’s younger brother, a ship’s captain lost at sea in June 2010. Uncle David, his life and passing and family (my cousins) are another story. He belongs here because, at David’s memorial service, a glass marker bearing the lines of Psalm 127 was dropped into the ocean off the coast of Ft. Lauderdale, where he lived. The words stuck with me: the strangeness of King James language. Going down, business in great waters, “their soul is melted because of trouble.” Psalm 127 makes me want to say that dread is an experience of the cavernous in nature. You enter, are surrounded and swallowed by, waters that make around you a cave, so much higher and lower are they than you. Hokusai’s Great Wave. Jonah and the whale.
The Psalm touches another poem in my head, Dylan Thomas’s “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” This is a haunting, Halloween-like song of death and zombie afterlife, which says:
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again
Of course the last line speaks of drowning and dread. I am also bewitched by the straightening power of Thomas’s missing punctuation. In the first line: not “dead men, naked,” as most of us would think to write it, but “dead men naked.” Somehow, the third word seems worse a fate than the first. The indignity of dying naked, the way we are born. The flimsiness of “dignity,” a concept living humans invented, which animals and the dead don’t know about.
There is a strong unifying movement in the poem, too. Thomas says that in death, we will “be one with” all manner of eerie supernatural forces. “Be one with.” Then he presents the case more forcefully: when your very bones are no more, you’ll be a constellation. To have stars at elbow and foot makes me think of the great Greek heroes—Orion and Hercules, the Twins and Pegasus and whoever else is up there—as one of those cartoon characters who gets electrocuted, and for a moment we can see their bones. And it makes me think of my own dead family as star-figures, watching from the night. In Norman Rush’s Mortals, Ray Finch says that according to Botswanan folk legend, “the stars are the campfires of the dead,” while Modest Mouse says the stars are projectors, yeah, projecting our lives down to this planet earth.
Speaking of skeletons: recently I learned the name for the woman people paint their faces to resemble in Dia de los Muertos celebrations. Her name is La Catrina. My favorite depiction of her I found graffitied on the underside of a bridge in Athens, Georgia a few years ago. Here she is:
I love her; she is my phone background. The huge flowers; her mangy black hair, as if caked in sweat. Like Uma Thurman, buried alive in Kill Bill: Volume 2. And her eyes are crying or bleeding a kind of yolk. Which I connect to the word at the bottom of the portrait: Focus, we are instructed. (“Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,” Thomas writes in another poem.) Focus, like a title or caption or even the artist’s name, begs the question: on what? La Catrina doesn’t answer.
Well, this has been an ungainly quantity of other people’s poetry. I was talking about dread. I think these poems came up for me, in that connection, because they communicate that the universe is wild. Cavernous, as I said. To feel dread is to know, deep down in your soul, that we do have something to be scared of. “He is the wildest being in existence,” Wendell Berry wrote, speaking of God. “This world is painted on a wild dark metal,” wrote Peter Matthiessen, the last line in his epic Shadow Country. (There again, carried off with other people’s poetry.)
Two things, lately, have been driving my dread: mountain lions, and the clutch on my car. I’ll only talk about the former here, leaving the latter for another day.
I saw a mountain lion once, about three years ago. I'm almost not even sure of that anymore. The image, a split-second remembered, has frayed at the edges to such a degree that it now seems more like fragment or figment of fading dream, than reality. It was evening, late April 2020. I was approaching the crest of a steep butte I'd been hiking up for about forty minutes. In the valley below was a government bunkhouse where I would be living that summer, my first as a wildland firefighter. I was hiking to get in shape for the season, which was soon to begin. There was no clear trail. It was not a place humans regularly visited, other than hunters for a few weeks in the fall.
The steepest part was over. Up ahead, sagebrush gave way to a grove of aspens, fresh with small new leaves, where I intended to turn around. Then, looking uphill, I saw: head, front of chest, upper part of front legs. All at once, and that was all. I don't know if it ever saw me, though it must have. They are stalking animals—generally a cat catches onto your presence, and follows you, without your knowing. Had we managed to surprise each other?
When you see a mountain lion, the thing you’re advised to do is get large. If wearing a jacket, hold it up over your head, like the dinosaur in Jurassic Park that flaps open its ruff before spraying Newman from Seinfeld with toxic ink. Keep your gaze on it. Slowly back away, bearing in mind that you must stay facing the animal, not turning your back, not panicking, or fleeing—not acting like prey.
Well, I did not do any of that. I panicked, and fled—my body just started going down the trail. It seemed to me that I could get the hell out of there—while also keeping eyes up, on the ridge, or the boulders which blocked the ridge from view. I envisioned the cat perched up there, waiting in silhouette. I picked up a rock to defend myself with. I would bash its head in, if it attacked me.
Would I be able to do that?
My only reference point for answering that question is that I grabbed a squirrel once. In high school, I was walking by a tree planted in the center of a circle of exotic tall grasses, and I saw, by the swaying of the grass, where it must be, and, without thinking, just on adolescent whim, reached in and picked it up. The squirrel was shockingly strong: all rubbery muscle. It bit the shit out of my finger, and in pain I threw it straight up in the air. When the poor thing hit the sidewalk it bounced. Then it ran into the woods and died. (This is another story, but we found its body later, and out of boredom and curiosity, I skinned it, and got in trouble when teachers discovered me doing so on a pizza box at my desk.) That squirrel weighed maybe two pounds, and still its wiry strength overmatched me. The unmediated ferocity of a living wild animal. What would the bite of a beast sixty times as large be like?
It would kill me, obviously.
The footing was terrible. Shattered rocks and loose scree everywhere. So I had to look down. But the cat. So I had to look up. Strangely, what I remember is not blur, but clarity. Sometimes, in the evenings, when the light softens on a long trail run, and I am tired, I feel very clear. Briefly, the endless, incontinent mind-chatter which separates me from my life quiets. My mind produces thoughts still, but they occupy a more equable place in the hierarchy, just one more piece of data, like smells or sounds. For a time my vision feels burnished. So it was on that evening. Again, it was not that I stopped thinking—rather, adrenaline allowed me to act and think with pounding hereness.
What was I thinking? The same instructions, over and over: don't start narrating this. Don’t think “this is crazy. I saw a mountain lion. It was only for a second; we must have surprised each other . . .” Stay here. Not here, but “here.” You're not safe until you're home. I suppose it was surreal. And how remarkable: 1) that my instinct to narrate situations, placing myself at a remove, imagining forward to when I would tell about them—that habit was so entrenched that it kept up even while I ran for my life; and 2) something wise in me sensed that such thinking would be what got me hurt.
I never saw the mountain lion again. But ever since, I've been scared of cat country. This is where dread comes in. A few months ago I was in southern California, running in mountain ranges where cats are known to live. One day I was out for about three hours, and saw a lot of droppings, which I later confirmed were cat shit. I spent the entire run wallowing in a delirium of what-if: where is it? Is it right up there? Could it jump out from behind there? No—well how about there? What about now? All afternoon, I battled fear. I pretended not to be afraid. I counseled myself as to why it was really okay, and I didn't need to be afraid. But man, I was so scared.
Though they had a shared trigger, the fear I felt on the run was different from the fear I felt when I saw the mountain lion. The second fear made sense, and served a purpose. It was self-preserving. But the kind of fear I feel when I don’t see a mountain lion . . . what is that about? It doesn’t seem to be helping in any way.
I’m not alone in struggling with this. My best friend from high school likes to go on river trips. This spring he floated the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in a pack raft, a little vessel like a kayak, but collapsible, so that you can hike into or out of remote spots with it on your back. It was his first time navigating the rapids of the canyon by himself, not in a larger vessel with others. We spoke about the fear. I was entranced by his descriptions of running rapids. It provides a set of analogies.
First, we are often scared in situations which we ourselves have engineered. Nobody forces my friend to run these rapids, nor me to go on long runs in cat country. We do it, not once but over and over, as if we are deluded about what it is really like. As if it seems like one thing, before, and proves to be entirely different, in reality. Is there something in us willfully blind to the underside of the experiences we purport to love?
Or is it that this underside is the secret heart of our love?
Once you are there, the current pulling you toward the rapid: dismay. Grovelling. My friend would beach his craft upriver, getting out for a look at the section of boiling river he was about to navigate. This was to prepare himself. Yet it could not have provided a better vantage for inducing fear: sweating, dumping fear, the kind that tickles your throat and coats your stomach and makes you need to pee. Like Mr. Orange says in the best scene in Reservoir Dogs: “every nerve ending, all my senses, the blood in my veins, everything I am is screaming Take off, man, just bail, just get the the fuck out of there. Panic hits me like a bucket of water: first there’s the shock of it, Bam, right in the face, I’m just standing there, drenched.”
So there you are. Surveying the thing which you do not have to do, which promises to eat you. Before is worst. Once you are inside, it will be better—though that does not help you get there.
In college, I used to have the same experience of nerves before track meets. I ran the 800 meters: two laps in two minutes, roughly. Not quite a dead sprint, but close, and strung out over a distance just a bit too long to maintain such a pace for. The result was an extremely compressed experience of destruction.
We were fit: the first lap, in fifty-nine seconds, was quick but doable. It was on the second lap, trying to keep pace, that time began to melt. On the backstretch of the second lap, with five hundred meters done, three hundred to go, I had a little check-in I’d do. If I began to feel pins and needles in my finger tips just then, quickly growing to cover my fingers, palms, and whole hand, then it would be a good race. I think what I was feeling was the body’s inability to deliver oxygenated blood to extremities. I assume it was a matter of priorities: shunting scarce resources to lungs and legs. So here was a delicate balance. I was attempting to completely exhaust myself with five meters left in the race. Do that, and I could stumble the last few steps to a fast time. But on either side of this tightrope was failure. If I held anything back, I’d not run as fast as I possibly could, out of cowardly precaution. If I really went for it, on the other hand, and emptied the tank too soon, I’d slow down—I wouldn’t be able to help it—and my time would suffer. A simple, perfect test: a gauntlet. I want to say it’s not possible to completely meet your potential, and at the same time have any fear.
I have a favorite example of this gauntlet. At the 2015 U.S. Track & Field Championships, a great 800-meter runner named Duane Solomon self-destroys in glorious, horrific fashion. Solomon is an elite athlete: he took fourth at the 2012 Olympics, and is the third-fastest American in history over half a mile, with a personal best of 1:42.82 (that’s fourteen and a half seconds faster than my best result—an acre of time). He is very, very, very good. For this race, he is so confident that he declares his intention to run world-record pace through 600 meters. No one will be able to go with him, Solomon reasons, and if they do, they’ll suffer the consequences.
So Solomon does just this, and for a long time he looks unbeatable. Over the entire first lap, and well into the second, everyone is strung out in a line behind him, just trying to hang on. But on the last turn, having run an incredibly fast first six hundred meters, there are still a few runners near him. They are hanging on. And as they enter the final straightaway, the announcer says, “Solomon looks like he’s been handed the piano . . . I don’t think he’s going to make it to the finish line.” I love that. It’s an incredible bit of commentating. First, “handed the piano” is a great phrase. Imagine someone with a crane, lowering a Steinway on a winch into your arms. Solomon crumples. His legs are ceasing to function. Never having run that kind of pace myself, I still can imagine: it must be what drowning feels like.
The second remarkable thing is, the announcer does not say he doesn’t think Solomon is going to hang on for a victory, even though he has the lead with 710 meters done and barely 90 to go. The commentator says he doesn’t think Solomon will finish the race. And he’s correct. Solomon slows to a jog. The other runners streak past, a little guy who ran in last for much of the race coming from behind for the win (he is the crafty veteran Nick Symmonds). Solomon lowers himself to hands and knees, chest heaving, gasping. Eventually, more than a minute later, he gets up and jogs it in.
Solomon’s run is a moving example of 1) running without fear, and 2) why fear is prudent. It calls to mind the nickname ski-mountaineers have for death by avalanche: meeting the big man in the white suit. That stomach-curling encounter with our breakable bodies. The animal root of fear. Just as I will never forget trying to get down the hill and away from the mountain lion, so I will always have, printed in my brain, a memory of running the backstretches of an 800, the fleet slap of spikes on spongy salmon ground, the labor of breath. Hanging on. Trying to meet the moment.
So, dread, where do we leave each other? In a truce, it feels like. I respect you. I’d like to leave you out of my life. But keep stalking, if you must. Only don’t pounce.
On that Malibu long run, the only critter I ended up meeting was a small rattlesnake. When first I saw it, my body knew what to do, and lightly lept back, defter than my planning mind. I grabbed a thin stick and nudged it, trying to get it to shimmy off the trail. It declined to shimmy anywhere, and instead, the more I poked, raised up into its flickering, menacing dance. Exciting. Once I’d established that further nudges would only further piss it off, I took a few steps back, trotted forward, and jumped as high over it as I could, landing safely on the other side and continuing on my run, the sound of the rattle quickly fading.