LONG READ: Time on Earth / For Earth Day
It's Earth Day! Here's your second long read for April. In it, you'll experience vignettes from my time on our beloved planet.
Time on Earth
Author: Nicole Qualtieri
I’m driving down Highway 12, heading south from Missoula. Summer is settled deep into the curves of the highway and the Lochsa River at its side. The sky is deep blue at the edges of the trees, white blue above, sun holding court.
This particular stretch of highway sits at 134 miles, and it loops through ponderosa and cedar pine forests. At one point, you can walk among 2,000-year-old western red cedar so gargantuan you might squint and think you’re looking at redwoods. How many people have these trees sheltered in these years of biblical proportion, I wonder as I walk among them.
This grove is named for western historian Bernard DeVoto 61 years ago, less than 3% of one of the coniferous elder’s lifespans. De Voto spent the majority of his years far from these trees, educated in fine East Coast institutions, then tucked into an apartment in New York City.
Arm out the window, I can feel my skin boiling over to a mahogany brown. I look at my other arm, pale tan, and wince. But, there’s no rolling up the window on a day like this. I’m bound to meet my sunnier friend Kym in Stanley, Idaho to romp around hills and swim in Redfish Lake. It’ll even out.
I also have to pee. Real bad. I pass junction after junction, little brown Forest Service vault toilets, gas stations, and bushes just the right height to run behind for quick relief.
The Lochsa is low and punching at a normal summer weight. Liberated teens jump off rocks into deep glacial blue pockets, adrenaline junkies kayak through rougher parts, anglers on the fly do their ribbon dance between water and air. Along this crystalline waterway are little beaches with soft river-scrambled sand reminiscent of ocean sides.
I’m looking for that sort of sand on my stop. Perhaps I can close my eyes and hear ocean waves in the river.
I’m about to burst. I turn a corner and a small stretch of beach is cornered with that brick-brown building promising relief. Border collie on heel, we run to the vault. Then, to the beach.
For the moment, I have the sandy break to myself. I throw off my Tevas and dip my toes in the sand. I imprint my footsteps across the shoreline. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a single word written in the sand. I toe over to read the writer’s work.
There, with the river lapping against the edges, my name is written in large capital letters: N I C O L E. Two footprints sit against the edge of the capital E, child-sized.
I do what I can. I stamp my own feet on the opposite end, at the N, then sit and watch as the river erases a two-for-one Nicole back into its grip.
***
Driving to help out with one of my girlfriend’s classes at a horse show, I get a call from her on my way out.
“A cow is giving birth, right near the roadside, before you get to the showgrounds!” Kristin is an E.R. doctor, no stranger to the medical life, but her excitement feeds mine.
The tension builds as I get closer to the show. My eyes are peeled against the long lines of fence where the cattle graze and await their fates. As I turn the corner on the road that leads to the show, I wave at a farmer heading out of one of the fields. He nods, a grimace on his face.
I look in my rearview mirror, and there, a black Angus cow slumps dead against the flatbed of his truck, head lolling over the truck edge, tongue out, eyes wide.
I hold my breath, my heart, my stomach. I don’t tell Kristin when I get to the show.
***
I’m not much for swimming in the ocean, at least any further than I can touch. And that’s just what I do on a 92-degree day in Edisto Beach, South Carolina.
The dance I love is the one where you go from towel to ocean, towel to ocean, until you simply can’t stand the turn from wet-to-dry anymore. Hot then cool, pruny then salt-sticky. I try to tuck in between people who look reputable, families with sand castle molds or older folks with umbrellas who might say something if someone tries to swipe my bag while I’m in the water. I smile and wave at my neighbors politely as I set up my spot. Safety in recognition and numbers.
I sidle in, up to my armpits, where I can swim, float, and dive under with the promise of sand not far from toes. The water is murky, warmer than I expected, and full of action.
A little bait fish jumps directly in front of my face, and something bigger swipes against my leg in the chase. If I stare across the top water, I catch schools of tiny fish jumping and running. The angler in me wishes I had a rod; bigger fish are most certainly moving the smaller guys around.
I stand on my tiptoes to watch for fish in the waves as they roll in. After a few minutes, not eight feet away from me, a 6-foot spinner shark jumps straight up into the air above the ocean, baitfish snapped in jaws, his tail clearing the water with room to spare. The power of his spin sprays water over my sun-baked face, and his bellysmack back into the water sends a second splash.
Wide-eyed, I look back to the beach. Eyes in books, hands building castles. This moment seems to be mine and mine alone. I tread back a couple feet, but stay in the water until I’m cooled out, eyes trained east so I don’t miss the show.
I tumble back up the beach, splay out on my towel, begin slathering myself in SPF.
“That,” the white-haired epically bronzed gentleman to my right says, “was a pretty close one.” He speaks without lifting his eyes from the book, turning the page, then glances over.
We meet eyes and laugh. Over the next few hours, spinner sharks revel in the abundance of the running minnows or mullet, hovering over the water for elegant and whirling split-seconds, within touching distance of the families at play. I stay and watch until I can no longer bear the heat.
***
I was nearly back to my car and the way back from a hike to St. Mary’s waterfall in East Glacier. The water rolled far enough behind me for the roar of the falls to have softened. Through the tall pines, the towering peaks of the park took up the edges of the sky. At my feet, dried rocks the color of pale jewels dot the dirt path.
My failing knees force me to look down as I hike. I’m watching for roots or rocks that, in a misstep, could jam the bone spurs of my joints against raw spots of soft tissue. I am focused on the trail to avoid the jarring pain. In this sort of noticing, I see that people have built little cairns along this trail, and it’s driving me insane.
I kick them over as I go. The trail is inherent and easy; the cairns serve no purpose. The National Park Service forbids their being built on trails such as this, as it disturbs the natural fall of rocks and soil, and at scale, it causes erosion. To me, these are tiny towers of willful ignorance every few feet.
Why, I think, why why why.
I come across a cairn that is massive and intricate, three times the height of the others. A castle, more than a cairn. Still looking down, I knock it over with gusto. It holds the same pleasure as knocking down something made of building blocks. It’s a starting-anew.
I feel eyes. I look up for the first time in a long time. I stop dead in my tracks, the destroyed cairn at my feet.
There, about fifteen yards in front of me, is a man of a size that is worthy of an NFL linebacker. He is broad and bucking-bull-shouldered, with jet-black hair, skin clear and the color of raw sandalwood, and a look of steel that permeates me to my core. He’s blocking the trail.
A girl stands behind one of the pine trees on the trail, a few feet from his protection. Her left side is facing me, and she must be 10 or 11. She is his child; it’s evident. She too is broad, a small carbon copy, but feminine. A shock of long and thick black hair covers her round cheek. She hovers behind it; she is intentionally not making eye contact with me.
Frozen in place, she holds a pocket knife parallel to the ground. She is and was clearly carving into the backside of the tree. Her second hand is cupped around the knife, but it’s visible. The gig is up.
I take a deep breath, and I’m suddenly overwhelmed by an all-encompassing shame.
“I’m sorry,” I say, sheepish, quiet. I break eye contact and smile out of trained feminine deference as I make a motion forward, waiting a split second. The man steps aside, but his eyes don’t leave me. I walk past. I don’t look back but I do look up. I can almost see the parking lot from where we are.
Four wheels carry me out of the splendor of Glacier National Park into the hills of new-growth pine forests that buffer it. I trade one defined federal border for another. I head east through the Blackfeet Nation — a foreigner on forced, sacred, and sovereign lands — just passing through.
***
I’m in my round pen with my new filly.
She’s big for her age, a bright gold buckskin winter coat is growing in. She’s not yet a looker; she’s in what I’d call ‘growth proportions’. At two years old, she’s somehow gangly and stout at the same time.
She’s a young mustang off the White Mountains WMA in Wyoming. Historically, the herd reaches back to the U.S. Cavalry’s stout old -style Thoroughbreds, Standardbreds, and stock horses. She looks all of the above, with thick bone in her legs that is somehow not unrefined. Appaloosa blood definitively courses through her veins, her white-rimmed eyes and high-contrast striped hooves a dead giveaway.
She was started at the Honor Farm, a Wyoming correctional facility that teaches inmates different sets of life skills including colt starting. They have a lauded horsemanship program, but most of the inmates are beginners. So I’ve decided to go back to basics with Seven, as I’ve called her.
Round and round she goes. She turns her head to the outside of the fence, arcs her body away from me. She tries to stop at the gate. Her jaw is tight, her head high. She’s telling me the following: I don’t want to be with you. And I’d like to leave this round pen.
So I stop asking for movement. Most horses will lick and chew at this point, releasing their tension. She holds tight, a distant cold look in her eye, her head cocked away from me.
I step forward towards her. She swings her head in my direction, like my older mare does to her and the red colt in the field. I step back, like she does when asked in the same way.
I am listening, I tell her with this step back. I won’t put pressure on you that you can’t handle.
I step forward again. She swings. I step back.
This time, her eyes change. She looks at me. I see a sparkle of recognition. I do it once more.
On this step the little gold horse takes a deep breath. She cracks open her mouth, yawns, and shakes the tension out that’s been riding on her neck.
I step back even further, all the way back to the edge of the pen, releasing any ounce of physical pressure I can muster. She follows me for the first time. When I stop, she presses her head into my chest, deeply breathes in all the static energy between us, and then sighs it back out in a billowing cumulonimbus cloud that rises, grows, and towers thousands of feet over us in the big blue Montana sky.
The storm releases entirely from both her wild golden mind and her growing golden chest. She hasn’t swung her head at me since.
***
I’ve been in Todos Santos for a few days now, staying alone in a hostel tucked deep into the back edges of a neighborhood where mutts without collars nap luxuriously in front of homes they may or may not belong to.
My Spanish is passable, enough to get by. I can go to the neighborhood mercado and buy fresh chicken, tortillas, avocados, limes, and rice. And this is the dinner that I cook for myself over and over again in the shared kitchen. Simple, easy, good enough for me.
I play a game of barefoot soccer with kids in the street and our laughter breaks the silence of the midday heat. I walk backroads to the nearest beach, where I whisper hellos and how-are-yous to an obese bay horse tied to a palm tree, nickering at me across the brush. I sit at the beach, empty of tourists, and the waves roll so heavy and vengeful against the berm of sand I hardly get my feet wet.
Swaying in the hammock, reading a book, I’m interrupted by a mariachi band in formal white embroidered dress. They walk the street playing their lilting melancholy harmonies and land in the house next door to the hostel. I roll out of the hammock and peer through the fence, enamored by melody.
On another walk around town, I run into a couple of people I met at a dinner hosted by the hostel’s caretakers. They invite me to dinner with them, which leads to a movie screened outdoors on a rooftop, which means I’m then walking home at 1 am on a Saturday night and the town is thick with alcohol and the hazy tensions that intoxication ties into the air.
I’m nearly home, just a few blocks away, and a rowdy group of younger guys is on the sidewalks looking for any kind of time. I can hear words that I barely understand and they begin to worry me, but I have to keep going. Suddenly, the words turn to no words, and my hand breezes over something slick and soft.
I look down and at my side is a stark white bully dog with a head the size of a pumpkin. His back stands tall at the base of my swinging fingertips; he’s at least one hundred pounds, not an ounce of fat on his muscular body.
More importantly, he is matching every step to mine.
I rest my hand on his broad, muscular back. People step aside as he escorts me through the throng and around the corner to the other side of the street. I reach down to pet him and thank him for the walk, but I touch only air.
I turn around. I peek down the alley, through the leaves of palms that skirt a restaurant’s patio, down the street, back up again.
He’s gone.
***
Five miles into Yellowstone, it’s a clear-as-glass day up Slough Creek, where the glacial water is numbing cold, even in mid-July.
I’m standing waist-high off the creek’s edge, thinking about the big native cutthroat trout I see under the towering rock about 20 yards from me and how I might catch them. I haven’t rigged my fly rod, but I’m planning on it. My friends are fishing upstream from me and they seem to be locking into a few.
This is the longest hike I’ve done since having four knee surgeries that ended up with two fully bionic implants. The heat in my joints is still present, even a year later, but I feel good if not out-of-shape for the 10-mile day, only half-finished. Soaking in winter’s excess certainly numbs whatever heat is circulating in my new knees, anyway.
Above me, a bison walks the cutbank of the river. The big bull stumbles down an eroding ledge with zero grace, where he takes a long drink while simultaneously pissing in the water. I’m downstream, but on the opposite bank. No warm spots via bison over here. No drinking this water without boiling it, either.
Below me, two minuscule parr fry (baby trout) begin a game. Sitting in the current, one races over, touches my leg, and bounces back. Then, the other does the same. I grin at this spectacle, remembering games of bravery tag played with my own little sister.
After a few minutes of this game apparent, the two minnows are chased off. Two larger juveniles swim over, a little more brazen, swim through my legs, bump against me, swim away, then back.
The curiosity of this new and current-breaking structure in the water pulls the fish in, the bigger trout chase off the smaller trout, and after a half hour of total submerged stillness from the waist down and at least a dozen trout bouncing off of and around my legs, a 14-inch cutthroat saunters over and makes a new home between my ankles, staving off the current, the weave of her body touching my own every now and then.
After an eternity, she chooses to leave the safety of my ankles and elegantly glides back under the rock, swimming in place with her compadres.
I step out of the glacial pool and my legs nearly collapse, numb from the water. I’ve been in for more than 40 minutes, enthralled with this weird and curious sport of cutties.
“Are you going to fish?” My friend Elise calls from the other bank, the bison long gone.
“I don’t think so. Not today.” I reply, leaning back, closing my eyes, laying into the heat of the summer sun.
On the hike out, the first smoke of the summer rolls in over the Gallatins, the Absarokas, and the Beartooths. It sets so heavy into the sky that we lose the edges of the mountains by the time we get back to the cars.
Over the next few weeks, the water temperatures rise so quickly and devastatingly across Montana that I choose not to fish for the rest of the summer. The smoke sticks around until the depths of September.
***
I am not an exceptional swimmer, but I’ll snorkel all day. And with fins lazily lolling, I make my way toward Isla Espíritu Santo, and slowly into a cave that our tour guide has pointed out.
The water is crystal blue once inside, quieted from the currents, about 25 feet deep. And just as I think nothing is going to happen, she is gliding with her back against the sand below me. I am now near the back of the cave, and I turn and she turns with me.
She begins to rise, her eyes infant-like in their enormity but child-like in her mischief. She blows giant bubbles that hit me in the face, rise up like the foam of a freshly-poured Guinness, and then she is right there, below me, belly up, matching my pace. I could reach out and touch her, but I am floating, watching, waiting.
The young sea lion is who I came to visit, though I didn’t think it would happen like this. A few bigger adults had danced around us below the water, but this is different. She rolls away from me, and begins darting around like a puppy with a tucked butt, ready to rip and run circles until exhaustion hits.
As I exit the cave, I feel pulls on my flippers, the same weight I feel on my snowshoes when my border collie gets tired and tries to melt into my heels as he does on hiking trails.
My compadres beyond the cave are laughing. She’s now riding my slow current, trying to hitch a ride on my plastic flippers. She finally spins off them, makes one smirky turn below me, and darts off back to the island, to safety, to whatever it is she must do with the rest of her time.
***
I’m sitting somewhere in eastern Montana when a friend sends me the story, a 9000-year-old hunter has somehow finally absconded from our ‘hunting has always been a male domain’ assumption and a group of archaeologists have deemed her both a woman and a decorated big game hunter.
Hallelujah! I think as I look out across the landscape. I knew she was out there, my 19-year-old Andean friend. What was life like for her back then, high in those mountains?
I know how cold mountain air feels in my lungs, thin and crisp. I’ve stood on the edges of peaks in the Rockies, stared out over the heights, sat for hours in wait, lost patience, and busted all the animals that were more patient than me. I’ve watched white rumps leap across the land, disappear into a crevice, never to return.
I’ve stood on the other side of a copse of young lodgepoles while elk sung lofty songs, while a coyote passed by, while a family of ruffed grouse puffed and huffed in feathered cloaks. I’ve watched hunters that have never seen me, likely been spotted by mountain lions that I’d never seen either. Been surprised by black bears and scared by grizzlies.
The findings of the archaeologists meant that they’d gone back and reanalyzed older data, meaning that more women were identified in the process. More like me than not like me. More than 30% of the skeletons turn out to be female.
It all makes me chuckle, really. I shed my identity when I enter the present moment. She must have, too. We are wired that way, us predators. Our eyes dilate, our hearts rise in our chests, our body prepares, and we disappear into instinct. Become invisible. Melt into stillness. Move with the earth rather than against it.
9000 years and I don’t know what her life was like, but I know something of it. The rocks beneath me become too hard to bear, so I stand up, impatient as always, and keep hunting, keep pursuing the unknown, onward through the sage.
***
I leave the horse show, thinking of passage and piaffe, of Kristin’s big stately horse Commander.
I've hacked him on trails in his winter fluff near her home, but at the show, he is body-clipped in entirety. Before her class, we pick at the pale tan of his fresh-shaven bay coat till he’s clean as a whistle. My fingernails are dyed black at the edges from untangling the minutiae of his glorious tail, banged straight across the edge for clean lines, thick with shining agents and black pigment to stamp out the sun-bleached hairs.
The poofy portly gray-browed teenager of our trail ride steps into the ring and becomes air, light, and wind. His toes spend more time in suspension than the sand. He is elegance afoot, sleek and smooth, a visual balm of sienna and coal-black in motion against the bland winter grey of the day.
They’d taken second place in the Grand Prix level of dressage, the highest any dressage rider can aspire to. It’s Olympic-level riding, a partnered progression over years of discipline. The next day, they’d win it — my friend looking lithe and professional in the saddle and at the reins of her long-time partner.
My stomach sunk as I left, heading toward the corner of birth and death. I passed horse trailers, fussy women picking and prodding their own giant warmbloods to perfection, white-britched girls running together for the snack trailer, their Welsh ponies left behind, tied and waiting.
I passed barn after barn, then a giant grass-green field filled with cross-country jumps that varied from brushy bush jumps to giant logs to creative and colorful builds aimed at testing courage.
The farm turns itself over to cattle country at a single fenceline, and I pass the herd of expectant mothers at round bales and resting. I hold my breath and jam my sadness into the bottom of my guts.
Then, on the lip of the hill, round-bale bound, I see them.
A big, beautiful, broad-backed black Angus heifer. A wet, wobbly, onyx shadow of a calf on her heels. He’s teetering to keep up with her slow, intent pace.
Just a few hours old.
Thank you so much for reading and subscribing however you came here! Currently, all I ask of subscribers is either $5/month or $50/year to help support writing as art.
I’m currently working on the long-term goals of The Westrn, and big plans are coming. Stay tuned, I hope to update everyone soon on what these plans are evolving into.
Any comments, bring them on!
xoxo
Nicole
What wonderful writing and scenes you have given us. The words and painting of the happenings place me right there in the present and in the past. Thank you. So much is right out of my own life. Thank you for the photo of Montana. I miss her.
Thanks Nicole, stellar as always!