The Buddha Vs. Lady Gaga

I've spent the last couple of weeks in the serene presence of Bisou's litter-mate, Theo, the black-and-tan Cavalier puppy who went to live in Montana with my daughter and her partner shortly after we got Bisou.

Theo has saved me from going into acute dog withdrawal while we've been in Missoula.  Two weeks is a long time to be away from one's dogs, especially for someone with my monastic existence, who worries if she's out of the house for more than four hours.  At the same time, Theo has prompted much philosophical reflection on nature, nurture, and the mysteries of dogs in general.

I'm a little worried that, having experienced the ultimate Zen dog, I will not find it easy to readjust to his red sister's frivolities and intensities.  As I write this, Theo is stretched out in the arm chair that has been consecrated to his use, with his chin resting on his little blue stuffed lamb.  He is not asleep.  He is gazing at me.  But it is a calm, accepting, present-in-the-moment gaze that says "you are there;  I am here;  all is well."  And so I am able to continue writing.

If his sister were on that chair, awake and by some miracle lying still, it would be a very different story.  For one thing, the lamb would have long ago been torn to shreds.  She too would be gazing at me, but there would be no calm or acceptance in her gaze.  Instead, it would be full of frantic hope and attachment to worldly outcomes.  I would see this out of the corner of my eye, knowing that if I looked her in the face she would catapult out of the arm chair and run to the back door and pant and moan and befoul the glass with her nose.  And if I managed to ignore her she would leap up on the sofa and squeeze herself under my elbow, causing many typos, before subsiding with a great guilt-inducing sigh.

It's not easy to write with a dog under your elbow and waves of guilt engulfing you. My Muse is leery of dogs--my dogs at least.  But she's not afraid of Theo, which is why I've managed to do a lot more writing (not just on this blog, but on my CFS manuscript as well) in Missoula, Montana, than I normally do in West Pawlet, Vermont.

Bisou, Bisou, why can't you be more Theo-like?  Your father Denzil, whom unfortunately you've never met, covered himself with glory on the agility field.  To do that you have to be able to stop thinking about yourself all the time and pay attention.  You and Theo both have his genes.  Fling, your mother, who for good reason growls at you whenever she sees you, gave you and Theo the same responsible upbringing.  So why the difference?

Some have thought that it's the color of your hair that makes you the way you are, but that seems a little, well, racist.  That leaves one major variable:  me.  All the dogs I've ever had, no matter what breed, have been intense.  All the dogs I've ever had have interfered with my writing.  Which leads me to speculate that I have caused my dogs be to intense and demanding in a twisted ploy to keep myself from writing.

But you won't get off the hook that easily, Bisou.  These days with Theo have shown me that it is possible to get quite a bit of writing done in the presence of a dog.  So hurry up and calm down, and stop scaring my Muse away.

Notes From Yellowstone, Part The First

(I'm posting these after our return to Missoula, since we didn't have internet access in Yellowstone.)

June 9, 2012

It took us three days to fly to Missoula—about as long as it would have taken to drive there from Vermont. When we finally landed yesterday, Missoula looked a lot like where we'd just come from: chilly and rainy, and bright green.

Today we drove to Yellowstone, to the Lamar Valley off the northeast entrance, a place known as “the Serengeti of North America.” This is where people come who want to see charismatic mega-fauna: grizzlies, bison, and (please God) wolves. Incredibly, it is much less crowded than the areas near the west entrance, where the geysers are. Me, I would much rather see charismatic mega-fauna than a geyser, no matter how faithful.

The Yellowstone landscape looks oddly manicured. The mountains and the meadows are covered in an even blanket of short green grass or gray sage. The pines rise straight up from this, each one outlined against the background with as much precision as the cedars in a Mediterranean cemetery. There is no underbrush.

Little streams crisscross the meadows, which are dotted with large brown rocks. Every once in a while one of these rocks staggers to its feet and begins to browse the bright green grass. The bison are rejoicing in this cool, wet spring. And behind every meadow and every hill rises a tall, jagged, snow-covered mountain, just like you the ones you see on calendars.

We stopped several times to let big herds of bison cows cross the road. Beside or behind each shaggy, dread-locked beast trotted a calf, short of neck and long of leg, wearing its brand-new, light-orange coat. Amazingly, the calves were all the same size. They must have been born on practically the same day. That must have been quite a day in those meadows. (And the day in the fall when they were all conceived must have been something too.) As a former dairy-woman, I checked out the cows' udders. Since bison are not dairy animals, their udders are small, and you have to look closely to see them under all that fur. I'm sure that they don't have any of those problems with ligaments that torment their high-producing Holstein cousins.

Our lodge is just outside the park, at the foot of a really tall mountain. There are a couple of friendly dogs—a chocolate lab and a beagle--that run around on the grounds. There are a couple of bison bulls who hang out in the area too, but we've been warned that they are “ornery.”

I remember the first bison I ever saw. It was in the Barcelona zoo, and I must have been four years old. It was lying down, but its head and shoulders towered over me, and I remember thinking that it must be a mountain. But then I saw its moist little eye peering at me, and I knew it was alive.

We've been told that this is a banner year for wildlife. Sightings of wolves abound. Wish us luck tomorrow.

June 10, 2012

Have I ever been this cold before? It's windy and snowing, and because we didn't want to check any bags on the airplane, we did not bring a full complement of winter gear, which we badly need.

Drove off in search of wolves in the afternoon, and kept stopping at the pull-outs beside the road whenever we saw people with spotting scopes trained on something. Sometimes we would be the first ones to stop (what's that black spot up there just below the tree line?) and get out of the van and set up our scope, and pretty soon cars would be stopping alongside us, and people would be asking what we were watching. We did this many times, alternately freezing and thawing out.

In this manner we saw: a horned-owl nest high up in a tree with a gigantic, fluffy, ghostly baby in it;  more bison—the cows and calves in companionable bunches, the bulls in pairs or in splendid isolation;  a black bear or two;  a mountain goat or two;  and, our eyes alerted by a running antelope, a grizzly lumbering along parallel to the road. We did not need scopes or binoculars to see that particular bit of charismatic mega-fauna.

We did not, alas, see a wolf. We were told that in this kind of weather they stay inside their dens. That is how cold it is.

Tomorrow we'll get up at the crack of dawn and try to spot a guy in a yellow SUV who supposedly lets people tag along on his wolf-spotting expeditions.  (To be continued.).