Knees Shook

Jennifer R. Hall, Lovilia 

A few years ago, much to my delight, my updated biographical information appeared on the rosters, along with my classmates’, in the Alumni Bulletin magazine from my college.  The two entries directly before and after mine said “he is a sports information assistant at the University of Massachusetts,” and “she is a senior operations analyst at Con Agra Foods in Omaha.”  My entry said, “she considers herself to be a naturalist, living in a cabin without running water or electricity in Weller, Iowa.”  Why the word “is” in the other entries was replaced with “considers herself to be” I’m not sure.  Maybe since my occupation per se was not labeled by a corporate power, the editor decided it was a figment of my imagination rather than a reality.

When this bulletin hit the mailboxes, I heard through the grapevine of a conversation about my entry.  One classmate said, “What’s the deal with ‘naturalist’? Why is she living in a cabin?”  Another alum answered, “That’s the difference between being a hippie and just camping.”  To be sure, I am no hippie.  By ‘naturalist’, I meant that I enjoy nature; I live in it, I try to consider my actions’ effects on the planet.  In the terms of some circles, I “rewilded” myself.  This process has been a long one, and it is still ongoing.  By telling my story, I hope to show others that “rewilding,” or becoming wild for the first time, is possible, especially by finding one’s own story. 

So how did I end up here?  I grew up in a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri.  Fortunately, I had a small creek and a pretty good sized swath of old farmland adjacent to my subdivision.  The neighborhood kids referred to this area as “the trails.”  Well worn paths wound their way along the creek, past the swamp, and up to the spring.  I had my own little place to be wild out there.  It was only in the past few years that I realized these mysterious trails were cowpaths, and that the strange rock formations in the creek were a crude bridge and low-water crossing made out of rough concrete by a farmer. 

As I grew older, the trails were bulldozed for more houses; I was spending more time studying or hanging out with friends.  I went to college, graduated, and held several different jobs, until I settled down somewhat at a department store in the mall. I had a management position and spent 50-60 hours a week under the fluorescent glare.  I lived with my high-school sweetheart in a third-floor apartment, and assumed we’d get married eventually.  One day he never came home from work.  I soon found out he was never coming home again.  In a strange accident at work, he had died.  My whole future, all my plans, died along with him.  What could I do to heal myself but get back to work, right?  I had the busy holiday season in the retail business ahead.  Six days a week, at least ten hours a day.

Finally, I got a break for vacation.  My good friend Joe, an Iowan, suggested we go crystal hunting at the quartz mines in Mt. Ida, Arkansas.  Before my boyfriend died, we had all planned on this trip, so I decided to go anyway.  I had a wonderful time in the big pine forests, picking up crystals from the old mines, and washing the red clay off my hands in the fiercely cold streams.  I felt rejuvenated.

After ten days, I had to return to my old life- my stuffy apartment, the mall, traffic.  One day back at my job told me I had to get out of there.  I realized my life had been boring me to death, and I needed to recover from the loss of my boyfriend. Joe agreed that I should come up to Iowa and move into his cabin with him, just temporarily, just as friends, until I figured out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.  Four years later, I’m still here.

Whenever I say “cabin”, the first thing people envision is Little House on the Prairie.  Actually, it is like a little house, 500 square feet, three rooms, two woodstoves, no running water or electricity.  That means no TV, no dishwasher, no vacuum cleaner, no bathtub.  Here I was, a scrawny little suburban girl, out in the middle of nowhere, presented with a life much more wild than I ever could have imagined.  I didn’t have to work at the mall to survive.  I had to start learning to work with nature.  At first all I did was sleep; my city life had exhausted me.  Little by little, I learned the routine of keeping the cabin going.  How to make fire in the cookstove, how to bathe without a faucet, how to sweep the rug with a broom.  As I began getting accustomed to the cabin, Joe showed me all the places outside where I could wander.  So much was new and exciting to me.  I was like a little kid—everything was a surprise. Antlers fell off the deer in the spring! Who knew!?  I was learning to connect with the world in a way I had forgotten.  I was healing.  I was rewilding. 

So that’s my story.  It isn’t my only story though.  I have dozens of others—other stories that help me define my relationship to nature.  In our modern society, most people are so isolated from nature that they have no wild story to tell, only domesticated ones.  People don’t mind destroying the natural world because they have no connection to it whatsoever.  I feel that people must have a story that places them as a part of nature, before they can ever really go about helping this planet. 

Many indigenous societies have a tradition of giving their children a name that relates them to the natural world.  In The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems from the Swampy Cree Indians, the translator Howard Norman describes how a child may be given a name, such as Loud Lynx, in which the qualities of that animal are (hopefully) transferred to the youngster.  In other instances, the name may be earned by the child through some event or habit, usually associated with the natural world.  These names are not always stereotypical Hollywood-style names, like “Walks With Bison”.  They’re often more vague, such as “Who Called the Mud Places” or “Always Surprised”. In one poem, “Eyebrows Made of Crows”, the naming story describes how a boy had eyebrows that were so expressive they flew up and down on his face.  People worried that his eyebrows would fly away, so they stuck them down with sap.  The name would conjure up the story, as if the person’s name was the entire tale.  These names formed a lasting bond between the child and nature. 

Now take our society’s modern naming customs, especially those of the last twenty years.  Children legally must be given a name at birth, and often that name is taken from a historical or political figure, or even an urban area.  Names like Dallas and Boston are now fashionable.  I suppose if parents are hoping to bestow the traits of these places upon their children, the names could be translated into “Many Electrical Wires” and “Concrete Slab With Hole in Middle”.  If we allowed our children to earn names, we might find kids called “Cell Phone Stuck to Head” and “Eats Many Twinkies”.  If we adopted the Inuit tradition of changing our names in adulthood, we might meet “Many Parking Tickets” and “Shouts at TV”. 

Go to any national park and you’ll see how we’re expected to relate to nature.  There must be an intermediary, whether that be a camera, signposts, or a concrete walkway.  Granted, I would feel sorry for the person named “Boiled in Hot Spring”, but in some instances the devices meant to guide us through nature are just too much.  By separating ourselves from our natural surroundings, we’ve lost the instincts and common sense that would have kept “Boiled in Hot Spring” from jumping in.

Unfortunately, it may be too late for some people to get back to the wild.  For some of us, especially the children whose little brains aren’t too wrinkly yet, there’s still hope.  By allowing children to go out into nature on their own terms, rather than taking them on a guided “nature walk”, that child has the opportunity to connect with the wild in a natural way, rather than a regimented, domestic way.  Let’s face it, “wild” Iowa is not nearly as wild as it used to be.  Children, if they’ve been brought up around nature, will have the instincts enough to keep themselves safe.  I’m not recommending turning a child loose in the Tetons whose only contact with nature has been their pet hamster.  Maybe you remember the news story a while back when two young girls lost in the woods did not have the sense enough to follow the creek they’d been trailing upstream back downstream. 

If a child’s only contact with the natural world is through a proscribed activity with an unwild adult, that child can never have the chance to find his or her own story.  The story will be the same as Mom or Dad’s story, which is likely to be a very domesticated one.  Take for instance the typical son’s first deer hunting trip with Dad.  What does the son learn about his place in the wild?  He learns to have an intermediary to communicate with the deer—binoculars, game cameras, grunt calls.  He learns it’s best to have a powerful gun to blast the deer, so he doesn’t have to get too close to it, and so the deer is less likely to run away injured.  If it does run away, he learns it’s best to drive the ATV through the timber to go find it.  Once the deer is tagged, he learns to honor and thank the deer by driving around town with it in the back of Dad’s big diesel truck, showing it off to friends.  When the deer is finally butchered, he doesn’t have the chance to learn what the meat tastes like, since it’s mixed with pork into sausage.  Okay, so I’m exaggerating somewhat. I don’t apologize. 

In contrast, what does the child who is allowed to hunt on his own learn?  He learns to respect his weapon—he knows what it means to see the light in the deer’s eyes go out.  He takes care to aim properly to as not to see a wounded deer suffer.  He learns to keep his presence hidden, quietly treading with a light foot.  He reads the wind, follows tracks in the creekbeds, and watches the thickets for signs of movement.  He learns to be still, blending in with his surroundings.  He values the cycle of life because he understands he is part of it.  His name-story might be “Killed Deer by Cottonwood”.  He would never want to see that cottonwood cut down to make way for a shopping center because it had become a part of him, a part of his story.

Adults who can manage to find a scrap of wildness left inside may be able to shed their domesticated names and adopt wild-name stories.  This should come from real interaction with nature, not just by watching a PBS documentary, or attending Earth Day celebrations.  At a recent symposium on wildness, Joe scribbled a note to me.  “This is like a funeral where the preacher never knew the deceased.”  Most of the panel members could spout off facts and figures they had read in books, but not one person told a story of what they had personally witnessed in the natural world.  They mourned the wild, but had never seen it. 

When I first moved to Iowa, I blundered around in the timber, constantly getting lost.  I wore out flashlight batteries scanning the darkness, afraid of every little sound outside the cabin.   Joe allowed me to find my way back; he allowed me to be scared of a crunch in the leaves.  He gave me space to be a wild child again, and this is how I got my name-story.  Of course, I could have a dozen other ones, but this story helped me get over my fear of “interspecies communication” as Mark Edwards called it.  I talked to nature, and she talked right back.  Here’s my story, in the form of a Swampy Cree poem:

KNEES SHOOK

She was out looking for antlers with Joe,

When she saw a dark raccoon face

Peering at her in the tall grass.

She stood still, and made chirping sounds

With her tongue, and spoke softly, saying

“Hello raccoon, how are you raccoon?”

Chirp, chirp, chirp.

The raccoon came out of the grass.

It very slowly crept RIGHT UP TO HER.

Joe was a long way off, and could see her

And the raccoon standing there.

But he stood still, too.

She was so nervous and scared of

ONLY A RACCOON

That her knees shook.

That raccoon walked around her feet,

And it touched her pants leg

With it’s long claws, and looked up at her.

Joe said, from a long way off,

“Don’t touch it.”

She did not want to touch it,

But it kept touching HER!

Joe walked over to where they were standing,

And the raccoon went back to it’s spot

In the tall grass.

It growled a little when they walked too close,

So she and Joe left it alone.

            After I found this name-story, I excitedly told it to several neighbors.  To my chagrin, most had a perfectly unwild explanation.  One person said the raccoon must have had distemper, and Boy! Wasn’t I lucky I didn’t get bitten!  Another said the raccoon must have been “drunk” from eating fermented grain (nevermind there’s no grain being stored near there).  Still another explanation was that it had been a pet, dumped when it got too big to keep in town.  Nobody said, “Wow! Wasn’t it neat that a curious raccoon would have the courage to investigate you?  Maybe it didn’t know if you were a human or an animal.”  I knew there was nothing wrong with the raccoon.  I wasn’t threatening in any way, so maybe he did just want to see what I was all about.  What I knew to be true from my own personal experience was discounted because I didn’t have a socially-accepted higher authority to validate what I had seen. 

A few years ago, I went outside late at night when nature called.  The coyotes were yipping and crying like they usually do.  Out of the darkness came the most lonesome wail; a long, quavering howl that made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up.  I RAN inside and said “Joe, there’s something out there, and it ain’t no coyote!”  I already knew what it was, even though I had never heard one before.  Joe stood on the porch listening, and said “That’s a wolf.”  Maybe it’s instinctual, but a human, and probably any other animal, knows a wolf is a wolf.  I didn’t need anybody to tell me what I heard.  When you’re hit by a bus, you know it.  You don’t need the Department of Transportation to tell you so.  Incidentally, several neighbors claim to have seen two different wolves, one light, one dark, in the past several years. We’ve not heard the howling again.

My point to this story is that in experiencing wildness, a person must be allowed to use his or her own senses to interpret what they’ve encountered.  Wildness happens on an instinctual level, when we “communicate” with other species.  When I read a signpost on a nature trail telling me I’m looking at a Shagbark Hickory, that sign may be communicating something to me, but I have no opportunity to respond.  I’m not forming a relationship with the tree, I’m forming a relationship with a guy at the DNR who gets paid to make signposts.

Finding wild places in Iowa is difficult, nearly impossible.  Even our state parks and public conservation areas are mostly reclaimed farmland, abandoned strip pits, or manmade lakes.  May I make the radical suggestion to get out of Iowa to get in touch with the wild?  Some of the old farmers around here have never been out of the state—even never out of the county!  How can children (or adults) ever be expected to preserve wild areas, or re-establish wilderness now that there’s little wild land left, if they’ve never had the chance to see the real beauty a wild place has to offer?  Stephens State Forest in Southern Iowa may seem pretty wild, but upon further examination, one finds garbage everywhere, old dilapidated farm buildings, dirt roads that have been mangled by mud trucks, and plenty of barbed wire.  I should hope that’s not what conservationists mean by “wild”, but unfortunately that’s what our children see.  Try getting lost in the desert of Arizona, as I did, then maybe you’ll have an idea of wildness and it’s sheer enormity.  By taking our children to places where wildness still exists, we can give them and ourselves and opportunity to bring that knowledge back to Iowa, and use it to benefit conservation efforts in this state.

To get anywhere in this struggle to save wildness on our planet, we must strive to seek out the wildness in ourselves.  We have to find our places in the cycle of life.  We must accept what we know of wildness and allow that interspecies communication to flow freely.  Young children still have vast spaces inside them to be filled up. If we let them fill up those spaces with wild stories, we may have some hope for this world after all.

"Knees Shook" grew up in Lee’s Summit, MO, and moved to Weller, IA, in 2002.  She loves to hunt mushrooms and antlers, go fishing, work in the garden, and cook on the wood stove.  Her current obsession is quilts and quilt history.  She just finished her second crazy quilt.