The Bear Necessities of Life Will Come to You!

Bear 399 is the most photographed grizzly bear in Grand Teton National Park. And, finally, today, after three long years, I still did not take her picture. Some people near me did, though. : ) This is a very interesting bear for two reasons: one, she does not mind people too much (not necessarily a good thing, mind you! And she has the ear tags to prove it.), and two, she has successfully brought up three big healthy-looking cubs mostly in sight of the road. The cubs are entering their third year now, though they still are noticeably smaller than their mother. We watched them rest and play and fish (and swim when they fell through the thin ice!), and even, incredibly, saw 399 nurse her nearly full-grown cubs! I was amazed to see that--even after two winters with their mom, the cubs still get some comfort, and probably less nourishment, from their mother's milk. Of course it is wonderful to watch a mother bear nurse cubs (even three enormous ones as these), as they are a bit like humans in the way they behave. The mother sits up or rolls onto her back and pulls the cubs toward her with her forepaws and snoozes and nuzzles their heads. Indeed, it is amazing to see such a massive, powerful animal touch her babies so gently with paws ending in four inch claws! She also paused to play with the cubs a few times, even doing several somersaults in the snow.

All in all, it was a wonderful wildlife day--two pairs of common loons, five red-breasted mergansers (fascinating to see the young males, still mostly in female-like plumage, but with perfectly round green spectacles and goatees, and very messy "hair"), a young male common goldeneye, a Northern goshawk (my first positive ID of an adult!), pelicans, swans, ducks of all kinds, my first Northern rough-winged swallows of the year, and my first barn swallow of hte year, Audubon's and Myrtle warblers (both technically yellow-rumped warblers, but only the former breeds here), dueling sapsuckers (hee hee--by the way, kind of dirty joke: if a female is a hen sapsucker, what do you call a male?), bald eagles on a nest and an osprey dive-bombing them, turkey condors (I'll explain that someday I'm sure..."vultures" for those of you who are familiar with them), including one on an elk carcass (amazingly, the first time I've seen a "vulture" on a carcass! Though, he/she couldn't get anything out of it--I may explain that another day too...), muskrats (I do love muskrats...), ground-squirrels (I have a huge soft spot in my heart for squirrels...), and, the strangest thing I'd ever seen in just about my whole life: eleven beavers sitting in a huddle on the ice, with green leaves and twigs around them, snoozing against and on top of each other in broad daylight, completely exposed. I'm sorry they were too far away to get a picture of, though it was absolutely amazing. In one fell swoop it was more beavers than I'd ever seen in my life, and just sitting there! Apparently the bears had broken into their lodge and some coyotes had killed one or two. I guess they felt safer in the frigid air than in their breached fortress! They looked all right, though, just a little chilly and sleepy. They will rebuild when the ice melts, I'm sure. (Yes, amazingly, it's May, almost the second week of May, and the river is flowing, of course, but the lakes and oxbows are still frozen (though not solid), and there is still a large amount of snow on the ground. It snowed in the mountains today, but rained down here for the first time this year!) A picture of the snow (taken near String Lake) next to a scowling person for scale. (That's my dad, actually. No idea why he looks so annoyed!)

But the really exciting thing that happened was Tom Mangelsen took a picture with my camera!

Um...yeah. Well, on this scale, you see he does have an eye for framing and balancing light and dark. Of course the horizon is not straight and those four blurry brown dots on the snow are the bears. I guess even great photographers sometimes take terrible pictures. OR maybe it's the camera... ; D

Anyway, one of the reasons I love living here is you do run into people like Tom (and have nice long chats with them sometimes too). (Tangent: You should see the picture my dad took of Henry Holdsworth at the Swan Roundup last year...Oh yes...The Swan Roundup, another Wyoming kind of thing. I'll write about that probably after this year's happens in June. Yeah...taking candid pictures of professional photographers with stunningly beautiful young females in their laps is another perk of living here!) ANYWAY...Tom took a bunch of pictures of us (including one with him, although of course that was taken by his "assistant slash girlfriend" (Tom's words), who's also named Susie.). I don't think they'll be available for purchase at Images of Nature. At least I hope not! Today was also laundry day for me and I hadn't taken a shower...Of course Tom himself was pretty dishevelled, as they've been following 399 around for a week now. Tom is a great conservationist as well as artist and I wanted to share a few things he said (though I'm afraid I'm getting pretty tired. It's 10 already!).

I really appreciated his comment about wildlife in general. He said, "you can't hate wolves and love moose and elk. You can't pick some animals and call them 'good' and label the rest 'bad.' You have to take Nature in its entirety," because of course, that's what it is. There is no good and bad. Things, Life, People even, only ARE. (I was thinking about that yesterday too...How even actions you think are good will hurt somebody. How nothing exists in a vacuum; how nothing can thrive without something else declining. But that's for another day.) Tom also shared his version of the story behind "High Noon On the Oxbow Bend" which was even more amazing than the story I'd heard at the gallery. It's his story to share, though he thought I should write a book about a similar story my folks witnessed. It's a thought... : ) Anyway, the point of the story, I guess, is that great photographs, like so many other things, involve staying around when everyone else has given up and an extraordinary amount of luck. And I find that inspiring. I also find it inspiring to know that I'm not alone in the world in caring about animals and Nature and wilderness. And a lot of those people live here.

--Susie

P.S. No, I didn't write today! At least I did a lot yesterday, and I'll get some done tomorrow. But you know...it was Wednesday. : )

My brain is running on empty...

Did you know that Amazon only lets you post in their forums (fori?) if you're a customer? Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but if you have something to add and don't want to use, say your mother's account to post because it's the only one you know, not having one yourself...not that I would have tried such a thing...Did I say my mother? See, I have this friend...Really, totally, completely separate person from myself, in fact friend is a strong word--I hardly know myself, um, I mean, her... ANYWAY...It's just if you actually know some information that would help the other customers, doesn't it seem wrong to restrict you? Ah heck, maybe I should do it anyway...or not...Maybe I can use someone else's identity...I mean, um...I take the Fifth...

So, I actually did 2,436 words today! The weird thing about writing is that you are sitting at the computer the whole time, not doing any physical work really, yet you come away from it utterly exhausted. I am pretty tired of writing now, actually, and I don't know what to post about, but I didn't want to miss another day. : ) The weather has been changable today, but it's still warmish. It's starting to seem like spring. The daffodils are all exposed now and have buds, but no flowers. Weird. I'm beginning to think I'll have roses by the time they bloom! (Not really...but choke-cherries, perhaps...)

I was thinking a bit about my friends from high school since I found two online yesterday. Of the four of us girls who ate lunch together every day, two are graduate students working toward Big, Important Things, one is contemplating getting a graduate degree, and the fourth dropped out of college during Sophomore year. Three guesses which one I am, and whether or not my life is significantly worse than theirs because of it. I don't even know. I feel pretty happy, though the forum on Amazon I was reading was the Fantasy one and the writer (just yesterday! I really wish I could've replied!) was saying how hard it is to find fantasy books with a kind-of New Age kind of spin. Another poster mentioned the difficulty in getting such things published, as I know first hand. Not that I would describe my work as "New Age," though I've certainly been influenced by the movement. But seriously, who publishes environmentalist, feminist, pagan literature?? : ) All of the main characters in my current project are male--do you think that will make a difference? The women are not wall-flowers either, of course, I'm writing it after all! But this project has the added drawback of being particularly dark and having the sensibility of a Greek tragedy--the main character basically destroys his own life through the mis-use of magic, and his family and world suffer the consequences for generations. OK, it's a saga...it's looking a bit like Gabriel Garcia Marquez actually (One Hundred Years of Solitude, I mean...not that it'll merit a Nobel Prize...though that might be nice...). Oh dear. I should probably stop now.

--Susie

A Miscellany

It's been a long time since I've posted! I got along just fine without blogging for years, and now I seem a little addicted...I have so much I want to talk about, but most of it will have to wait. I'll try not to let this get too long. First, some corrections: I've lived here for more than three years now; I'm entering my fourth year in this valley. I swear, I was always good at math! Since I left school, though, the years really seem to just run together. It's a little embarrassing. I still haven't gotten used to my new age. I'll blame that. ; D

So, this week's crossword (see this post for an explanation of why I do the Sunday New York Times Crossword on Wednesdays). Well, the whole thing was lost on me. I have always been a terrible speller (I'm sure it's because I don't read enough). I tried rewriting all the words several ways, and I couldn't even always tell what was the correct way to spell the word. I knew that "supercede" was wrong because I'd just used it in a blog post! So I guess doing this is useful after all, and I still often think the puzzle is exceedingly stupid. This one was very quick, though.

I spent the last four (was it only four?) days out of town and busy with houseguests and then slowly recovering. I've been trying to rearrange my schedule so I can get everything done I want to do each day in a timely manner. So far it has not been working, though this week should be much less busy than last week. I have not written today yet (though I absolutely will, darn it! It's very bad of me, I know...), and yesterday I was so tired and uninspired I only wrote 600 words, and those were not even directly related to my Current Project. I'm a bit superstitious about my work. I told our friends a little about the story, and they thought it sounded very intriguing and wanted to hear more...and I haven't written a word since I told them about it. Gaah! I will force myself back into writing this evening though (it's already after 3!), and next week should be more normal. (Ha! As if my life is ever normal!)

On a related note (what I've been up to), I got up at 4:45 a.m. on Saturday to go to the sage grouse lek. It had snowed several inches overnight making for a pleasant walk out into the sage (no roots to trip over--the snow was still unbelievably, unusually deep), but the temperature was around 9 degrees F and only about fifteen male grouse were out dancing. One female flew in late (nearly 7:00 a.m.), but didn't stay long. Then we say two females by the side of the road near the airport. It was a great wildlife day in all, with 25 moose, many deer, some elk and bison, as well as a snipe and a Northern shrike and many ducks, including what I thought might be a female red-breasted merganser. In the afternoon I napped for more than two hours (a very rare occurance for me--I've almost never been able to nap since I was three years old), then I had to rush to make some bread (a really delicious white yeast bread made with orange juice and zest and eaten with a mixture of butter and orange marmalade) before heading out to dinner. I had to finish the bread after dinner, actually (I let it go through its final rise in the refrigerator while we were out, which worked beautifully), then got up early again (7:00 a.m. this time) because:

The West entrance to Yellowstone National Park (at West Yellowstone, Montana) opened last week, I believe, but our convenient South entrance isn't scheduled to open until May 9 (assuming all the snow is gone!). So, we drove over Teton Pass into Idaho and up to West Yellowstone. On the way, we saw a pair of white-faced ibises (yea!), many snipes, yellow-headed blackbirds and more and arrived at the Park for lunch. We spent one night in Gardiner, MT and two half-days driving along the Northern tier road in the Madison, Gardner (not misspelled), Yellowstone, and Lamar River valleys. We saw only one grizzly bear on the first afternoon (eating an elk carcass). She had a radio collar and two ear tags, often a sign of past run-ins with human beings, unfortunately. We saw several coyotes, scattered elk, but depressingly few bison (don't get me started on that again. Sigh.), no wolves and no black bears. There was still a huge amount of snow in the Lamar Valley. Two years ago at this time, it was filled with animals, including a number of pronghorns. I was actually disappointed by the trip on the whole, animal-wise, though we saw some wonderful things, including the bear, which was the closest I've ever been to a grizzly in the Park.

Exciting birds included red-breasted mergansers in the Madison River. Actually, that's about it. We saw one distant immature golden eagle, some bald eagles singing and a willet at Blacktail Ponds, buffleheads (a sure sign of spring perhaps?), two species of goldeneyes (common and Barrow's), a pair of blue-winged teals, ospreys...The Uinta ground-squirrels are also awake at last and chirruping, and we saw a white-tailed deer on the banks of the Yellowstone River. I'd never seen one in the Park before, though they've been around for decades. Also numerous baby bison, which I'll talk about another day--two sad and long stories about that, actually.

Yesterday was altogether more satisfying bird-wise (and that's an understatement!). I've heard the kingfishers on our local backyard pond, but haven't seen them yet, the wood ducks are back, and on our pond have been four pelicans, a loon (!), a horned grebe (! And a first for me), a lone male canvasback, a pair or three individual red-breasted mergansers (I guess I didn't have to drive so far to see them after all...). Someone else has seen other grebes and cormorants, but I haven't yet. The loon was gorgeous. They are some of my very favorite birds and rarely seen out here, though I did worry that this one might be lonely all by herself. Maybe she (he?) has a mate waiting somewhere. I just love their tortoiseshell patterned black and white backs and their saber-like bills and their pearl necklaces. : )

Also, cinnamon teals are back on Flat Creek, and many green-winged teals and gadwalls. No blue-winged teals down here yet for me, but I did see a lone (no kidding!) solitary sandpiper in the mud by the side of the highway. They are common migrants or vagrants I believe. I've seen them a few times in the region only, and my birdbook is marked with two exclamation points next to the picture (I have a very elaborate series of symbols I use to mark species I've seen in my birdbook...Very cryptic...) ; ) and it was familiar enough to recognize almost immediately upon viewing it, without looking it up. (I checked the book later, of course, but they're pretty unmistakeable in the region)

Whew! And then, yesterday I listened to PotterCast, as I do every week and Melissa especially, but also John and Sue, brought up something that I've been thinking about a lot. It relates to my last post, and gets at something I've been trying to say. I know my posts are long and thoughtful and sometimes meloncholy, but I'm actually doing it on purpose. Part of my deciding to talk about the things I talk about has to do with my disgust for the current short attention spans of modern humans these days. My loathing of Newsweek (see the first link on this post) is directly related to this, and I never read popular magazines, if such they can be called. What can a thoughtful, intelligent, discerning adult read these days? Good luck trying to get a balanced and accurate account of the news today! I stopped watching the "news" on TV when I was a child, or perhaps young teen because I was already disgusted by it. And don't get me started on purveyors (That took a while to find! Dictionaries are only useful when you know the first four or five letters of a word for sure...) of so-called popular science. The culture of "infotainment" is pervasive and (I believe) destructive. I have seen first hand how influenced subconsciously I am by what I read, so reading things that are simply wrong, misinformed, or incomplete can indeed have a detrimental effect on one's understanding of a situation and the world in general.

So, that is why I write long, thoughtful posts on varied subjects. I have wide interests already, but everything is more interesting when it can be studied in depth. Not watching television and spending as much time as I can observing nature has lengthened my attention span considerably. I can sit and watch a flock of juncos for an hour, and in so doing, learn so much about the world I live in, and through that understanding, come to better understand myself. And shouldn't that be the goal? (I've also learned that linking between your posts can increase visitors to your blog, journal, or website. Can you tell?) : )

So much more to talk about: art, language, fortune cookies...but they will just all have to wait for another day. It's good to be home and blogging again!

-Susie

Sighs of Spring

It is currently snowing. A lot. We have about two inches now at 7:40 p.m. and it shows no sign of letting up any time soon. It is starting to stick to the road and has already thoroughly covered all the ground that was bare two days ago. Two years ago (three Aprils) at this time, we had heavy rains for about a month and incredible flowers by the end of May. Last year the daffodils were already finishing, the ground was completely bare and the mule deer fawn (picture) was still very fuzzy as he competed with rosy-finches for birdseed in some friends' yard. Who knows what this weather will bring. Three years ago (four Aprils) there were snow flurries on Memorial Day. As I enter my third full year living here, I feel like I really don't know this place at all, even though I know it very well. I was thinking this morning about connectedness with nature. Human beings have a tendency to take familiar things with them when they travel, including outmoded attitudes toward living. Resources that seemed inexhaustible in one place are treated as such in the next until they are, indeed, exhausted. Animals that have been feared and hated continue to be so, even in the very last place on Earth they still exist. I came here seeking wilderness, beauty and contentment in nature. Naively, probably, I thought this place could be a place where I could be perfectly happy. And I did find all those things I was looking for, and a little less than I'd hoped for. But I've also seen deeper prejudices and ignorance and pure idiocy than I expected. I don't want to get into this now, but I will just say that dogs and cats and humans may exist happily anywhere, while wolves and bison and grizzly bears literally have no place else to be and no room left to roam.

Only 1200 and some words today, but I did come up with some names for my characters that needed names and I think I've finally established what my story is about, that is to say its theme, its moral even. And I like it. And I cleaned out my desk finally, because an organized workspace is helpful to an organized mind. And just as fresh snow leaves room for fresh tracks (marten this morning), it also gives room to fresh thoughts. So, despite my nagging self-doubt and my sadness over the continuing loss of wild things and wild places, I am content this evening, in my work and in myself. Darn it! Snow makes me philosophical, too. And the snow is slowing down now and the sky is looking a little bluer...Hmm...maybe it's Spring after all...

We have a view!

"To be great is to be misunderstood." I don't feel misunderstood at the moment, actually, nor do I feel great, but I do feel pretty good. Firstly, I've been reading Emerson. I hadn't really before and I don't really know why, because I really like his view of the world. It is similar to mine, in that I believe that everything is connected, "beauty is its own excuse for being," the search for truth is the greatest search of all, and the individual is important, not only for its own sake, but because it is a part of a perfect whole. And yes, over all I think the Universe is as it should be. Certainly, we can do a lot in our own lives to make them and the world around us better, but I really do believe the system works, if that makes sense. For example, I like gravity. I think gravity's a good idea. And I like life. I think living is a good idea, too. I think squirrels are just as important as mountains and God encompases all things, positive and negative, great and small, good and bad, such as they exist. I'll probably talk about all this again, because I spend a lot of time, well, thinking. What can I say? I'm a writer. It's not as if I have a life.
Because of whatever strange involuntary process by which my brain functions, whenever I hear the name Emerson, I think first of the word "transcendental," which immediately causes me to start humming "All My Exes Live in Texas." Verily, the mind is a strange place...Since I've been reading some of Emerson's writings, however, I have been struck by a thought which must be extremely obvious to everyone else in the world--that Emerson is undoubtedly the direct inspiration for the wonderful characters of Mr. Emerson and Mr. George Emerson in E.M. Forster's magnificent A Room With a View. I love Forster too, though I've only read three of his novels (though I expect they're his three best. The other two are Howards End and A Passage to India. The former totally changed my way of thinking about the world and the latter I just loved, but they and their author deserve a post of their own). And all this makes me think of George in the fabulous 1985 movie version climbing in a shrubby tree "yelling his creed." And that always makes me smile.
Anyway, I'm especially at peace with myself this evening because of my own writing. First, I've been working for two days on my latest project (which has very rudely superseded the other two novels I've been working on--ideas do that to me sometimes, but this one I'm determined to finish rapidly) and already have more than 5,000 words. So, I should have 50,000 words in only eighteen more days, right? Ha! I wrote two chapters yesterday and only one today, and I'm not going to be able to get any work done for a few days next week, plus I'm fairly certain this project will be much more than 50,000 words--after all, The Splitting of the World is 90-some thousand and this project is looking like a trilogy...Sigh. Oh well. But, as I often do when I've just started a project, I think this one has real potential. : )
The other thing was a poem. I've been working on it for a contest since the first week of April and have two very different versions of it now. I think I've decided on the version I like better and have perfected it now, though I think I'll wait to send it in until tomorrow. I will definitely post the version I didn't choose and discuss it in more detail when the contest is finished. So, that's something to look forward to...
Meanwhile, going by the dictionary definition alone, Transcendental Idealism sounds related to Monism...Here are some more quotes from Emerson for you: "character is higher than intellect," "the office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances" (I think Cala would like this Emerson guy...), "We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more," and my favorite "the soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose."
And also the wonderful new verb: "to Shakspearize" (he spelled it that way). I do that sometimes...
-Susie