Cabin Journal

The Deliberate Lives of Animals

Last summer I was hiking in the mountain parks west of Boulder when I heard a cacophony of crows. I’ve learned enough about animal behavior to know there was a reason they were raising a ruckus. Often times, it’s because they’re taunting a hawk or owl, trying to chase it from their territory. But this time the reason was on the ground: a bobcat that seemed to be polishing off a meal.

If I hadn’t paid attention to the birds, I never would have seen the bobcat, even though it was just a few feet off the trail. But its mottled coat blended in with the ground, and it was holding fairly still.

Having a wildlife encounter means being alert, but also realizing that there’s a reason for almost everything an animal does. I’ve been reading “Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival” by Bernd Heinrich, a naturalist/scientist who is naturally curious about everything in the natural world. On his walks through the woods near his Maine home, he reads the landscape and notices things that most people wouldn’t.

In one spot in the woods, the tops of the young balsam firs were missing and on the ground were tracks of red squirrels. From this he deduced that the squirrels, which normally are nourished in winter by sugar maple sap, were feasting on the buds of the fir because there were no sugar maples around.

I sometimes see what looks like the tips of fir or pine trees scattered on the ground and wondered about them. Now I know that an animal, most likely our chickarees (gray squirrels, above) are eating the buds and discarding the twigs, letting them fall to the snow.

From reading Heinrich, I’ve come to see that little is random in nature and that animals act in deliberate ways, usually based on survival: finding food, avoiding predators, staying warm in winter.

I might notice that a flock of chickadees is hanging out with some juncos and assume they get along, maybe enjoy each others’ company. But it’s not camaraderie but survival that’s at stake. Heinrich explains that different species of birds who flock together provide more eyes to see predators—the most alert can warn the others—but togetherness also provides more eyes to see berries or nuts. Even though that means the birds have to share the berries or nuts, the rewards are greater than going it alone.

I might think that a coyote (left, almost camouflouged in the grasses outside my cabin) pouncing on the snow is having fun jumping around. But Heinrich says that foxes and coyotes can hear their prey (mice, voles, etc.) under the snow and are trying to break through.

There’s something appealing about animals’ lives where every action matters, so no effort is wasted. Animals are constantly calculating if an action is worth the effort: Is it worth expending energy to try to catch its prey or climb the tree to get more seeds?

What if we lived our lives more like animals?—to be aware of everything we do, our senses constantly alert to everything around us, to decide constantly whether our actions are life sustaining or unnecessary and then act accordingly. In a culture where our daily lives are consumed often by trivial decisions, it might be a good thing to be a bit more hungry and ferocious about life.

Meditations on Fire

Now on these winter nights at the cabin, I often put my book down and let myself be mesmerized by the flames in the woodstove speaking an ancient language, unintelligible but soothing, something about comfort and heat on a cold night.

When I first bought the cabin, I had some romantic notions about building a fire in the woodstove, including the Zen qualities of chopping wood. But it’s proved more difficult than I thought. Trying to split a large piece of wood with an axe takes a lot of sweat and frustration before I find that spot in the wood where it lets go, easily splits into two.

Perhaps because my woodstove is small, it takes a long time to get going, requiring just the right size and amount of wood. And the fire needs my attention constantly, so I’m jumping up every 15 or 20 minutes to rearrange the logs, throw another one on there, along with some pine needles. Now I know why, in the days of the English ruling class, footmen were needed to tend the fire throughout the day.

But the rewards of a good fire are immense. Thoreau (in a journal entry for Oct. 20, 1885) talks about the pleasures of finding your own wood (rather than buying them from the local farmer). “Each stick I deal with has a history, and I read it as I am handling it, and last of all, I remember my adventures in getting it, while it is burning in the winter evening. This is the most interesting part of its history. It has made part of a fence or a bridge perchance, or has been rooted out of a clearing and bears the marks of fire on it.”

I like to think about the firewood that was once living, part of a tree that could have started its life 100 years ago and is now changing from matter to energy in front of my eyes. Brown fibers of wood become blue and orange flames, quickly passing from one form to another, while providing some warmth, the tree’s last gesture, and a gift.

But it’s more than warmth I crave. Last week, I did a two-day meditation retreat at the cabin. After some time had passed, watching my breath go in and out started to feel labored, and I felt sick of my thoughts. So I dropped all the effort and let myself just stare at the fire, let my thoughts dissolve into these flames.

It’s the perfect meditation because it gave me something to watch when my own thoughts became tedious: blue, yellow and red flames licking the wood in a ghostly dance around the edges of the logs or smoldering in red embers. It’s as mesmerizing as watching water flow, although the flow is upward instead of down.  

There’s enough going on to keep my mind concentrated on the present but not enough to start a new conversation in my head.  And if, by chance, my thoughts do start to stray, there’s always the pop and crackle, which brings me back to the fire and the present, to me basking in the light and warmth of the fire while the winds pummel the cabin surrounded by these dark and somber mountains.

 

Let the Sunshine In

During most of the summer, my goal is to stay out of the sun, which feels too hot and too brazen. But in winter at the cabin, I’ve learned how to harness solar energy to stay warm.

In these cold days of winter, the temperatures at night at the cabin plunge below zero, so everything freezes (thank goodness I don’t have plumbing). In summer, I love that there is little separation between me and the outdoors. But that lack of insulation in winter means the cold spills in between the cracks in the walls and up from the floorboards.

When I arrive, the cabin is usually colder inside than outside, because the sun heats up the outdoor air, while all the drawn shades prevent the sun from delivering its warmth inside. If it’s 36 degrees outside, it’s 23 inside. In the kitchen, all the water in the jugs—some for drinking and others for washing—are frozen.  The cans of soup and beans in the cabinet are frozen, and the olive oil has congealed. The cold even penetrates the inside of the refrigerator. In my first winter at the cabin, I found exploded Coke cans, and now I’m careful what I leave here in the winter.

If all this frozen food and water shows the strength of cold, I’ve also learned the power of the sun. The table next to the window faces east, and once I open the shades and the sunlight starts streaming in, the cabin starts warming up, with some help from the electric baseboard heater.

Everything I think I’m going to need for the day I put on the table to start thawing out in the sun, so the table is soon covered with water containers, olive and safflower oil, and cans of vegetable soup thawing out. Although a whole day of heating the kitchen barely begins to melt the solid block of ice in the water container, if I put the container on the table, within a few hours, the sun has melted enough water to boil on the stove for doing the dishes.

The sun works on me the same way.  When I first arrive, I bundle up in my sweatshirt, a hat, and fingerless gloves while I work at my computer. It can take about two to three hours for the temperature to warm up to 60, even with the portable heater next to me. But the sun feels good, and I’m like a cat basking in its warmth. It feels like life, like a soft thaw of everything. I remember a song my parents sang to us when we were children: “Let the sunshine in, face it with a grin. Open up your heart and let the sunshine in.”

Accepting the Weather

I spent my first 30 years in Colorado being disappointed in the winters on the plains: the lack of snow and the brown monochromatic landscape. February has always been my least favorite month, because, even though it’s the shortest, it seems to go on forever in its monotonous palette of every shade of brown, with no interruption of a good snowstorm.

I grew up in the Midwest where, through the hazy recollection of memory, my childhood winters were full of snow that lasted from November through March.  We spent winters ice skating, tobogganing and sledding, and built igloos and snowmen in the back yard. I fondly remember the big snowstorms that closed school for several days, especially one that almost left me stranded at the Marshall Field’s department store, where I worked in high school.  I was saved by my father, who drove us home in what took more than 2 hours for a drive that usually took a half hour.

Living in Colorado, I’ve had to suffer through many mild winters like this one, where there’s little snow and the days are mild and full of sunshine, where you can sit at an outside café in December, hike in a light jacket, or play golf. Even at the cabin, there's only a few inches of snow on the ground and lots of bare places where the wind has blown it away. Where’s that big storm that dumps 2 feet on us, shuts the airport and most city streets, lets me walk out my back gate and ski in the fields behind my house?

But this winter, I decided to accept the weather, to greet each day with no expectations; let it surprise me: in mid December, rain at the cabin so the snow was slush when I went for a walk, a sunrise that filled the whole sky and painted everything at the cabin pink (above), winds strong enough to open the back gate and pull the clouds into long streamers,  still open ponds where I can find green-winged teals and red-tailed ducks, fields of tall grasses that haven’t yet been pushed down by the snow (left).

And just when I was starting to enjoy the warm days, what blows in from the north but a blizzard. I love it.