ESSAY: Wolves in the Great West

The western landscape compels me endlessly.  I was a fine American history student, and how I now prize the unsolicited  gift I received from my mother, when she chose to move West.  I think she saw one too many orange crate art labels and Southern Pacific ads in winter Iowa as a child, a version of Okie-Dust-Bowl covered wagon American transience/transcendence.

The choice made to leave the childhood place cleaves one from one’s own intimate past, leaving ashy nostalgia.  But another past compensates, of sage-burning Chumash Indians, naive missionaries, conquistadores, toughened ranchers, railroad barons, orange groves:. The Pacific Coast recasts all, because land’s end is so near.

When I travel in the West, a borealis of writers flares for me.  Wallace Stegner’s When the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, Annie Proulx, and Joe Henry’s Lime Creek are tagging me up as I hike and fish. Partly because of them, we went to Wyoming in September, 2009.  How lyric the mountains’ names are to me:   the “Wind River Range, or “the Winds”, east of Jackson Hole, and near it, the Absaroka, our destination.

On the plane that morning, The New York Time’s editorial was titled, “Wolf Season Begins”. So I knew even then that the wolf would be the spirit animal that paced invisibly beside me on this trip. While at the lodge, at dinner we met Jim and Jamie Dutcher, well-known to Discovery Channel watchers as Emmy-winning documentary film makers, for Wolves at our Door.  

Their experiences in establishing a compound to study wolves in the wild made for compelling reading and an expanded perspective on the animal.  Surprisingly, it neutralized somewhat my existing “pro-wolf” views, as I sought to understand the issue.

Jamie told me about one rare experience she had:  she was able to crawl into the mother wolf’s den to visit her new pups.  Jim had worked on the ranch as a teenager, saw his first wolf there, and still returns every year for an autumn visit.