I once spotted a huge bull snake that was sleeping inside of a window well on my grandparents’ farm near Oakland, Iowa. My father captured the animal using a bucket and a rake. This snake was furious, its tail whipped against the sides of the hot plastic bucket in a robotic fury. Being an imaginative boy from Sioux City, this exhilarating sound opened my mind to the possibilities of a wilder Iowa, a place beyond the feedlots, fields, and stock pens that I was accustomed to.

After capturing Spike, who became the prized exhibit in my seventh-grade science classroom, my curiosity concerning the other Iowa—the untamed Iowa—grew into an obsession.

Owen Cardwell, my four-year-old nephew from Denver, now attends “farm camp,” as I did, on the land that my family has worked for over a century. He’s fascinated with machinery, livestock, and the people who farm western Iowa. I sense that his curiosity is similar to what mine was; I hope that he too will spot a stealthy coyote slipping between the corn, scare up a badger in an abandoned outbuilding, or have an encounter with one of Spike’s relatives.

I'm soon leaving for Africa. I’m glad that I still have the passion to seek out wild animals in their wild places. Going to farm camp in Iowa gave me a practical, informed sense of nature and its animals; some make great pets, others can hurt or maim you, but, above all, some of them make a great pork sandwich.