Wild Animals Taught Me to… Run!

Peter Frick-Wright:

Hey everybody, a quick content warning: Today’s episode contains references to trauma and abuse. So please use discretion if that’s not for you.

From Outside Magazine, this is The Outside Podcast.

The defining moments of your childhood, the things that make you who you are, are never really clear until way later. The full impact, the ripple effect of those moments, might not be fully clear for decades. I’m not sure that the ripple effect ever truly stops.

One of my defining moments happened in Canada.

It was the summer between 4th and 5th grade. I was on a canoe camping trip with my family and another family we went camping with a lot.

We were about a week into a 10-day trip, which is a long time when you’re between 4th and 5th grade. In fact, a 10-day camping trip is a long time for anyone. I would argue it only stops being a long time if you get a job you don’t like. That you don’t want to go back to. Soon as that happens, ten days gets real short.

Anyway, this trip was a 75-mile, lake-to-lake route, in the mountains of British Columbia. We carried our boats and gear between lakes. Sometimes that was 75 yards, sometimes that was half a mile.

Except this one lake that was connected to the next lake over via a bog, a marshy area with one thin channel of water just wide enough for a canoe, just barely deep enough to paddle.

The problem was, when we got to this channel that day, we found it blocked by a big bull moose.

If you’ve never seen a moose in person, the first thing that strikes you is their size. These things deter predators just by being big. Like land-whales.

And as a summer-of-fourth-grader, I had never seen anything quite as big or intimidating as a moose already standing where I wanted to go.

He wasn’t standing directly in the way. He was maybe 25 yards off to the side, chewing on marsh plants, pausing every 10 or 20 seconds to look around, and listen. And when he saw us, he didn’t seem to mind that we were there, but he didn’t make any space for us, either.

Here’s what I knew about moose, back then. I knew they were big, I knew they were territorial, and I knew that they could be aggressive. I knew that when you’re that big, you don’t have to be that aggressive for it to be a big problem. All a moose had to be was lightly annoyed and he might knock us around a little bit, kick one of us in the head by accident.

In North America, the deadliest, most dangerous place to see a moose is from your car. Turns out, colliding with a moose, usually after dark, usually in winter, is by far the most likely form of moose-involved death. But even if you look just at moose attacks—being trampled, stomped, gored, or kicked—moose are still one of the deadliest animals in Canada. And we were in Canada.

A gun advocacy group recently tried to make the case that guns were safe by pointing out that moose kill more people each year in Canada than law-abiding gun owners. But it’s close.

Which meant that we were essentially going to be paddling our canoe past a 1,000 pound, territorial, unpredictable, loaded gun.

My dad was in the back of the canoe. The middle of the boat was filled with camping gear. For some reason we had packed up that morning way faster than the rest of our group, so we were way out ahead, by ourselves on the quiet, glassy water.

We were just staring silently at the staggering size, the rippling muscles, the way its back was wet even though it wasn’t raining, and how the wet fur caught the sunlight. We sat there a long time. The moose just kept eating plants. And standing there. We paddled in little loops, waiting for the moose to move along, pick a direction, give us an opening, do something. Usually, when you want to signal to an animal that you mean it no harm, you look and walk away from it. Avoid eye contact, move to the side. Game recognize game.

But, unless we were going to camp here another night, there was nowhere for us to go except through this narrow channel and towards a moose that hadn’t moved all morning.

Every few years, I ask my dad if what happened next really happened. I have a crystal clear memory of it, but I was 10 years old. And it sounds like the kind of story a 10-year-old kid would make up about his summer vacation. No one else in the group saw anything. They were too far back. If it did really happen, we did not acknowledge it properly at the time. And we do not talk about it enough, now. But he always says the same thing: it happened.

We paddled towards the moose slowly, and it hardly blinked. Then, when we were maybe twenty feet away, about one and a half moose-lengths, it raised its head and took a few steps away from us. Then, a moment later, when we were perfectly alongside, it charged.

My dad yelled “paddle!” cause it was coming straight at us. I dug into the water with every bit of 10-year-old strength that I had.

And let’s not draw this out any more than I already have.

It jumped over the boat, right behind me, in the front seat of the canoe, right in front of my dad, in back. I didn’t know it jumped until the thundering, sloshy footsteps suddenly went silent because the moose was hovering above our boat, legs outstretched like the Jordan logo.

It landed  just a few inches past our boat, with a thud that I can still feel in my chest. It was not a sound that I heard in my ears. I felt the vibration in my lungs.

But, because nothing happened, because it missed our boat and it ran off to the other side of the marsh, that was it. An explosion of power and water and then just the sound of our canoe gliding through the water and a moose-shaped memory taking root. My dad and I said “wow!” and then I don’t remember. We probably talked about other stuff.

But because I was 10 years old, and 10 years old is the year you learn what’s normal and what’s not, the lesson I learned from that experience was that’s what happens on camping trips in British Columbia. For an embarrassingly long time, probably till my early 20s, I walked around kind of thinking that this was a normal thing to occur between 4th and 5th grade. I’ve hardly ever told this story, because for the longest time I didn’t recognize it as a story. I thought there was a moose jumping over a canoe somewhere in everyone’s memory.

You can’t appreciate the parts of your childhood that make you who you are, until you realize the ways that your childhood was different from everyone else’s.

But I actually think everyone does have a memory like that. Everyone has something that you thought of as normal as a kid, but which you find out as an adult, maybe wasn’t so normal.

Which brings us to last fall. I was invited to a storytelling event in Utah called Coyote Tales, where performers gather and tell stories, live on stage with no notes. One of the performers was a musician named David Lindes, and I just really liked the way he told his story, about meeting his half brother in an airport. The day after the performance he did a lunchtime show where he paired his stories with songs, and that was even better.

So I asked him if he had any stories about the outdoors, if the wilderness had meant anything to him at any point. And he said yes, in fact, he had a story about a moose.

That story, and song, after the break.

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Peter: David Lindes is a storyteller and musician from Guatemala, now living in Salt Lake city, and he performed this story in front of a live audience in Ivins, Utah.

David Lindes: Let’s do this!

[applause]

David: Fish are so dumb, that even some vegetarians are willing to eat them. Can you imagine that? One of the most compassionate strains of humanity thinks it's okay to eat you for meat because you might not really notice. Don't kill the cow, save the chicken, the fish, whatever man.  That is how dumb fish are.

Yet, even fish are smart enough to flee from predators. This is a story about how I am not.

A few years ago I was hiking up Mill Creek Canyon, just east of Salt Lake City. And it was fall, so the aspens were doing their ‘We are golden and beautiful’ thing. And the sun was setting. And I was jogging downhill, pretty good pace, when I hear a large branch snap to my left. And I look up, and just behind some brambles, I see the antlers of a massive bull moose. He was ten feet away, tops, and he had a cow moose with him, and, thankfully, they were ambling in the opposite direction up the trail instead of down. So I turned to continue going down when, behold, a baby moose, cute as a malnourished hippo, right there, on the trail, blocking my exit.

Public service announcement.

If you ever find yourself in this predicament, do you know what you should do? You find a large tree,  and you get right next to it, and you put that tree between you and the moose. And then you wait until they move on with their humongous, muscular, over 1,000 pound lives.  But I didn't know that was the thing to do that day, so I looked at the bull moose and I looked at the cow moose, and I looked at the baby moose, and I looked away from all of them, as if to make them disappear.

It worked, for a second.

And I stared at the beautiful valley below and froze.  I was terrified. Absolutely nuts with fear. And I could not get myself to move. I tried telling my legs it was time. They were not responding. Fear was overwhelming all the systems. And I felt totally disconnected from my body.

Now, I used to freeze up a little like that in high school.  When like, big dudes came at me and like, pushed me around and made fun of me. Look at these glasses, right? Where do you get those? The Harry Potter store? Middle school, too, right? I knew the fear of being smaller than the next guy.

But, the one time that I could remember being as  terrified as I was with this family of moose was  much earlier.

As a little boy, at home. Being beaten by my adults.

It was commonplace. And it was brutal.

Years later, I would write a song comparing the pain of those beatings to my body catching fire and burning down. To ash. But never once did I think I could flee. Or run away. That was where I learned to freeze.

I would escape my body and flee into my mind. And my knees would crumple, and I would watch the beating happen as if on a screen.

And the thing was, I couldn't blame my adults.  It would make things worse. The only person safe to blame, safe to be mad at, was me.  And I wound up blaming my body.

Arms, legs, back. How could you do this to me? How could you cause me so much pain?  I don't want to be around you anymore.

My body and I had a falling out.

I never tried soccer. I never got good at basketball. I don't even dance. I'm a brown guy who doesn't dance. There's a disappointed mother somewhere in the world. Baseball, don't even mention baseball. I'm terrified, to this day, of baseballs. I mean, they're hard as rocks. They hurtle through space at totally unreasonable speeds. And you're telling me I should move towards these? Because, don't worry, don't worry, I'm wearing a scrap of leather on one hand.  What about the rest of me, man?

I didn't know there was a word for the silent treatment I had given my body until I started therapy in my late thirties.

It's called dissociation.

And it's one of the most common symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.

So decades after these beatings, my body and I  began to make peace. My therapist suggested awareness walks. They are exactly what they sound like. These walks where you take, you pay special attention to what you see, what you hear, what you feel. And you do it by narrating in your mind.

So, I see a bird. A spruce. A car.

I hear  my own breathing. My footsteps. A dog barking in the distance.

I feel the wind on my face. The sun at my back, my shoes hugging my feet. The idea is that you're practicing using the senses instead of shutting them out, and it's actually a lot of work. But it also relaxed me,  and it helped me start noticing things I had not noticed for a really long time.

And these awareness walks turned into awareness hikes and into awareness runs. And pretty soon, I was coming home after dark, and I was exhausted, and I was sore. So sore, I started to wonder if there was a problem. After those long, long hikes, my hips, my knees, my Achilles’ tendons would just kill.

And it wasn't the first time I'd noticed, you know, it had been a couple of years maybe I was noticing this pain. But I thought, welcome to 40, right? That's just how this works. I'm gonna be alright. But this time I decided, no, I'm gonna listen to my body. I think my body's telling me something. I'm gonna go to physical therapy.

It turns out I have been misusing these babies for a long, long time. I had bad form when I walked, let alone when I hiked or ran. I had bad form when I went up or down stairs.

So they taught me some stretches. They gave me some exercises. And they taught me how to do the biped thing better. And so I practiced the biped thing up beautiful Mill Creek Canyon.

Enter a family of moose.

Far too close for comfort on a crisp fall night. I am looking away from all of them to the beautiful valley below me. I am talking to my legs. My heart is in my throat. My hands are sweaty. And I know that standing there for one more moment could be a terrible mistake.

Just then, I hear hooves hit the ground hard.

Boom!

And I am sure I'm about to die. I am positive the bull moose is gonna charge me.

But that's when the magic happened.

The thousands of conversations with my senses, the relearning to walk, to hike, to run, added up.  And I found something solid in there. In the ashes of abuse and dissociation, courage enough to turn my head and at least watch my killer come at me.

And when I did, I noticed that the sound of hooves hadn't been the bull moose charging at all. It was the bull moose mounting the cow moose.

Yeehaw!

I have never been happier to catch two gratuitously unattractive creatures in the very act.

Seeing as they were busy, I saw my chance and I got myself out of there!

It was a special, special moment.  I didn't run, mind you, uh, because I didn't want to attract too much attention to myself and because the baby moose was still where the baby moose was. But did you know that Guatemala, my home country, has one Olympic medal to our name?

Yes.

It is a silver in speed walking.

I am not kidding. You think I'm kidding.  My legs came to my aid right when I needed them and carried me far, far away from all that nasty moose lust.

But also far away from fear.

And into a life where when danger threatened to overrun me, I knew how to leave.

This song is called “Gold in the Ashes.”

Two stones, a flicker, a gust 

I felt my own muscles combust 

And once every bone had burnt down 

Once I thought every bellow for help had been drowned

I saw gold in the ashes 

Glint in the smoke 

Gold in the ashes 

The burning gave birth 

A flash like the face of the sun 

The child I had been running from 

Harmless, wide-eyed, and unbound 

What the fire was searching for, the fire found

I saw gold in the ashes 

Glint in the smoke 

Gold in the ashes 

The burning gave birth 

Show me your knives

Revealing flame 

I’ll bear my neck 

I’m not afraid 

I saw gold in the ashes 

Glint in the smoke 

Gold in the ashes 

The burning gave birth 

Gold in the ashes 

Gold in the ashes 

[applause]

Peter: David Lindes. Find more of his stuff at DavidLindes.net. Thanks to Victoria Topham, who organizes Coyote Tales in Ivens, Utah. It’s a great event.

This episode was written and performed by David, with editing and production by me, Peter Frick-Wright. Music and sound design by Robbie Carver.

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