Although the title of this blog* bows to the influence of the urban, my efforts skew toward accounts of the wild. This is by design, since the preoccupations of everyday life have a way of steering our attention toward human (aka urban, in my scheme of things) concerns: social interactions, commerce, politics, and all the stuff of our built environment. I have a significant editorial bias against references to current events, too, which seems fair enough given that online spaces are so amply supplied with news from, commentary on, and triggering pertaining to such concerns.
I like to try to distribute some perceptual ballast toward the less-peopled world by way of writing about plants and wildlife and weather and rocks. If there’s an idealistic tint to anything I do here, it has to do with advocating for attention. I aim to single out the particulars of this thinly populated rumple of the central Rockies because they’re at hand and they delight or amaze me, but the subtext is that attending to the natural world has taken on fresh urgency in our tech-addled era. The purveyors of digital “content” would like to persuade us to keep our eyes locked on screens, but our societies and economies function within a wider and wilder reality. We are, all of us, suspended between urban and wild.
During my unplanned hiatus (which will be, presumably, brought to a close with these words), home served as more refuge than muse. This might sound cozy and reassuring, and it was at times, but the narrow scope of my attention also made me feel passive and self-indulgent. I slipped into a habit I once vowed I would never indulge in: regarding my surroundings as mere scenery. Successfully projecting my desire for serenity on these rocky hills, I shut down every other possibility they held for me.
Realizing this fired up my determination to get back to this, my home work, which was great. That the energizing surge occurred in the depths of winter was rather less so.
January at our elevation and from our exposed position makes for unkind outdoor conditions. As I write today, for instance, we are experiencing a daytime high temperature in the low teens with gusting windspeeds in the mid-thirties. Snow that fell night before last is airborne, swirling up rather than drifting down. When I went out to hang haynets for the horses, Harper—who is normally aloofly bossy—expressed her anxious displeasure with a string of plaintive whicker-whinnies, the likes of which I’d never heard her utter before. If I had a translate button, I wager that the transcript would read Wh-wh-h-hh-y-y-y-y? Wh-wh-h-hh-wh-y-y?? On the way back inside, I detoured to retrieve the snow shovel I left leaning next to the door yesterday. The wind that had sent it skidding across the driveway proceeded to snatch it back out of my hand.
This weather calls for indoor pursuits: a book or a fire or a book in front of the fire. You might think it would be a good day for writing, but my office is perched on the top floor of the house, where it takes the full brunt of gusts revving up the ramp of the slope below. The north-northeast wind shuddering the wall six feet behind me is impossible to ignore. The noise doesn’t distract so much as it takes up residence in my skull, disrupting my concentration at a cellular level. My synapses refuse gentle musing, firing nothing but snarling complaint.
In the spirit of getting back to work while excusing myself from any obligation to go outside, I’ll note here that during the interval when this site languished, static, it also passed a milestone. My first post on Between Urban and Wild (The Blog) went live on November 7, 2013. I set up the website to coincide with the release of Between Urban and Wild (The Book—which can still be ordered here or from your favorite bookseller). I’m dismal at promotion, never mind self-promotion, so it’s doubtful the blog ever did much to drive sales, but over time I discovered other benefits.
There was, first and foremost, the incentive to get outside and look at, and for, interesting things to share. Beyond that, though, I discovered I actually quite liked blogging*. I’m neither prolific nor particularly diligent, obviously, but I appreciate the quiet persistence the form encourages. I’ve produced enough short essays that, were I to compile the more substantive posts into a single document, they would add up to a respectable book manuscript. For many writers this rate of production over more than a decade would be laughable, but I’m stubbornly unambitious as well as being a very slow writer.
Given that, the discipline required to complete each step in its turn—conceive, draft, revise, format, proofread, publish—is good for me. The form urges concision, encouraging me to curb my habitual long-windedness. The extent of my editorial control is both heady and intimidating. I’m free to follow my whims in this little backwater of the internet, but I’m simultaneously responsible for drivel and typos. Since my outputs are, theoretically, at least, visible to the world, I try not look like, or be, an ass.
And so: back to work.
Back to watching the ravens, trying to think of fresh ways to account for their contortions on windy days, twisting skyward like broken black umbrellas. I’ll obey the sharp chirps of the juncos and throw them some birdseed; once we started feeding them in winter, our interactions have become unambiguously transactional. I’ll look for the cottontail rabbit who lives under the horse trailer, leaving trails of dimpled tracks beyond its wheeled hatch cover, evidence that he or she has not yet become owl bait. When I pause to take in the igneous stain of sunset while feeding the horses, I’ll remind myself to think of it as a provincial representation of our collective ride on the solar system’s merry-go-round.
I’ll wander over the grasslands or down a timbered slope, looking for something I haven’t noticed before.
After the wind quits.
* How I dislike this term. Onomatopoetically, it sounds like the slow accumulation of dreck in a sink drain. But you know what I mean when I use it.