Serotiny

I visited my home area last month. It’s the second year in a row that I’ve timed a sojourn back to Gardiner and its environs for September, and it’s a tradition I’m inclined to keep up until I get the opportunity to set up shop somewhere out that way for good.

It’s funny because it’s not exactly a dreamy time of year to be around a Yellowstone gateway community — not anymore at least. There isn’t really a distinct transition between peak season and shoulder season for tourism like there was when I was growing up. Plus, the scale of “peak season” when I was a kid was probably closer to the true carrying capacity for visitor accommodations in my hometown. Nowadays, the hotels, shops, restaurants, and raft companies in Gardiner are operating with probably less staff than any year in recent memory, and presumably dealing with more people than ever since Yellowstone had the busiest June, July, August, and September on record.

To make matters worse, there are less businesses overall these days to distribute the impact across, and the few that are operating have to do so for more weeks on both ends of the summer since it’s becoming clear that people pretty much don’t stop coming to the Mountain West as long as there are services. Even without Montana’s brutal Delta wave that doesn’t seem to be letting up, the yearslong residential housing blight in Gardiner, and what I think has been most effectively posited in this interview as a nationwide unorganized labor strike across the service industry, it would be a veritable hellscape. It’s rough to witness.

One unexpected upshot of this whole disturbing trajectory — and a big reason why I think I will return to my home area every September until I’m back there for good and as long as I have work that I can do remotely for one or two weeks at a time — is that it’s made me conscious of the significance of memory. And by that, I don’t mean nostalgia or sentiment at all. I mean merely remembering how we got to this place and recognizing what and who is still around after all this time.

In Yellowstone’s Northern Range, for example, the elk rut has coincided with September for as long as I’ve been alive. That hasn’t changed. The range of where elk tend to congregate for their cranky breeding rituals has expanded so as to make all the gravel roads around Gardiner that I depend on for punishing, long runs a little dicey. But if that’s the cost of maintaining genetic diversity for certain megafauna and the many plant and microbe species whose survival depends on a mostly intact ecosystem, it’s a small price to pay.

On the synthetic side, despite the rampant brand of Mountain West gentrification that’s been operating at full bore in Gardiner since pretty much my last summer as an NPS seasonal in 2014, the most prominent structures from any kind of bird’s-eye view of the town aren’t the new ones. In fact, I’m pleased to say the feature that stands out the most when descending upon the town from the southeast, high above where the Gardner joins the Yellowstone River, is a smokestack that’s part of the concessionaire’s warehouse complex near the north entrance station.

Those seasonal markers of biological activity as well as the built environment remind me that, even as my concept of home evolves, the physical space that still somewhat defines it for me will be at least recognizable in my lifetime — but only insofar as I can remember. And I really feel like the act of remembering in this case is predicated on having been a witness to a prior state, then growing into somebody curious enough to independently learn the history surrounding that state and earlier ones. Because in my experience, the context does alter how I experience somewhere or something that is otherwise familiar.

I experience this phenomenon a lot on one of the gravel roads that’s in my rotation of running routes when I’m back home. It runs from Gardiner to Mammoth and most of it is sited quite close by, but just out of sight of the current two-way paved road that connects the north entrance station to the concessions and administrative headquarters in upper Mammoth and the residential areas in lower Mammoth. The road is not always open to motorized traffic, and when it is, it’s open to only one-way, northbound traffic. On foot, it’s a roundtrip of a little over 10 miles with just under 1,500 feet of elevation gain, so I reserve it for when I have the time and wherewithal to move and hydrate accordingly, which has become more often as I’ve aged and come to accept that I’m like a Blue Heeler in that I need extensive stimulation and challenges built into my routine to stay coherent and stable.

I’ll admit that there are some perks to when that road is open to traffic. Even if I come across five vehicles over as many miles in one direction, it’s still pretty peaceful, and I don’t have to be nearly as vigilant and loud as I am when the road is closed. Nonetheless, there’s something strangely cleansing about how alert I feel I have to be when I’m moving at a certain speed without encountering another anthropoid back there. Whenever it’s notably quiet (except for my own obnoxious vocalizations and claps and the slosh of water in my hydration pack), I feel as though I’m rehabbing my sense faculties. It sounds fanciful, but some of the discreet things I notice under those conditions make me think something like that is really going on.

One time a few years ago, I remember hearing a yelp in the brush somewhere below me on my way back down to Gardiner. I caught a glimpse of some movement and dutifully stopped, hoping I might avoid startling a critter before it was too late. When I looked closer at where I had seen movement, I spotted a coyote tending to at least four restless pups, pseudo-sheltered beneath a stand of gnarled juniper and sage. I watched them for a bit from the unimposing distance of the road and then buggered off, feeling strangely privileged as I always have to spot other-than-human beings with their young.

Returning to that idea of context altering how I experience something basically familiar, I feel like I can completely understand why it’s natural to feel as I did in that scenario with the coyote pups. As I’ve learned more about how unlikely survival to adulthood is for most mammals — especially if they’re scavengers like coyotes who have to compete with much larger mammals for prey in most ecosystems — it makes sense that it feels like a privilege. The rearing period for any animal is highly vulnerable and pretty short-lived. Maybe one or two of those pups will survive to reproductive age, which is about a year into life for that species. Who knows how many of those little bastards are still at large. I hope at least one is.

I was in Gardiner earlier this year back in June, and another version of this played out, but with three raptors that were feeding on a deer carcass in a drainage abutting an otherwise level section of that same road — probably less than a mile in from the northern end because landmarks around Gardiner were still visible. The carcass was fresh enough that I wouldn’t have smelled it and it was concealed enough that I might have missed it entirely at that point if I hadn’t seen the bigass birds launch from it as soon as they sensed me approaching.

The birds were all similarly sized. Two were uniformly dark and one was easily identifiable as a bald eagle. Their circling overhead for what had to be at least 10 minutes after I had passed by the carcass had me feeling pretty fucking sheepish for disrupting their feed, and more than a little concerned that I might run into other critters coming to join them. They were still circling the area when I was on my way back down, mostly further from the road. But I still made a point to not look too interested in the carcass as I passed by it again. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know until I was back at my mom’s place later and consulting the oracle (Google) that the two dark raptors were almost certainly juvenile bald eagles. I never knew those fuckers grow to about the same size as their parents before their first winter. I know it’s mundane shit that’s going on all the time, whether we’re paying it any mind or not, but I can still trip out on this stuff when I learn it.

In what I’d consider an even more mundane episode from my latest visit in September, the road was closed for my third or fourth time out there over a two-week period. The conditions were suspiciously perfect. Things had cooled down for a few days thanks to a rainy cold front that had brought snow — nature’s great flame retardant — to the higher terrain of the Gallatins and Absarokas. The pockets where I had frequently sighted a few dozen elk with some ornery, semen-crazed bull in their midst were vacant (a goddamn relief). But then I rounded a curve that opens to a small wetland where I usually just see waterfowl. This time, there was also a lone bull bison, plodding along the road above, heading the same direction as me with its uneven gait. Bushwhacking a detour around him might’ve been a sound option if the terrain had been a little different and if prickly pear weren’t so abundant. But I ruled that out as probably more likely to freak the guy out. And so began a slow haul of following this bloke at a safe distance until he was ready to get off the road.

I stopped to give him what I hoped was enough time to clear a curvy section with tree coverage while I tried to find higher ground and gander at his progress without causing him undue stress. I swear he sighed after pausing and looking back at me for a brief moment. I probably looked like a fool all the while, but I feel solid about erring on the side of prudence since my experience growing up around bison has been that the adults are always stressed out of their goddamn minds — and probably for good reasons. Surviving is hard enough in any epoch, but I suspect bison have inherited an acute predilection for stress from their ancestors.

Something that I’ve learned about in the past year, or maybe just paid more attention to when people bring it up, is this idea of epigenetic changes. The CDC has a pretty accessible way of describing epigenetics: “the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work.” That is, without our DNA sequence having to change at all, our genes can function in different ways that are heritable, meaning these changes can be passed down and present at birth for the next generation.

I’ve heard epigenetic changes cited, for instance, in reference to the high prevalence of diabetes in certain populations. This came up in a presentation I watched over the past year. It was one in the Yellowstone Gateway Museum’s series about the Anzick site, where in 1968, the remains of a Clovis child were discovered on a family’s property near Wilsall in the north end of Park County. To this day, it’s the oldest-known human burial site in North America.

The series featured several presenters who were involved in various ways with the archaeological study of the Anzick site, the DNA research confirming that the boy’s family are direct ancestors to almost all present-day Native Americans, and the ceremonial reburial of the boy in 2014. In one program that was focused on DNA research, Shane Doyle mentioned that the epigenetic changes that may explain the high prevalence of diabetes in Native American communities can occur after a single starvation winter, particularly for children who experience famine in utero. If somebody were to research the DNA of various tribes of the Northern Plains today, Shane suggests that we’d almost certainly see epigenetic markers from the starvation winters of the 1880s that their ancestors (including his own) had to survive.

It’s fascinating (albeit depressing) stuff, and it also seems to track with a lot of what I’ve been learning about the generational nature of trauma and the way our bodies “keep the score” as it were — remembering on an epi-conscious level things we may have no memory of, or things that may not have even happened to our own corporeal bodies. For me, it’s hard not to think of that in reference to what I recognize as the characteristic stress level of mature bison.

This is yet another case of the context and learning gained in my adult life transmuting the initial impatience I felt having to follow that lone bull at slow clip for 25 minutes. At the point where I’d moved to higher ground to watch him clear some trees at a glacial pace, it occurred to me that it’s a wonder he and his ilk are still kicking at all. Much as a certain generation of (mostly white and male) conservationists and historians like to tout to the “restoration” of Yellowstone bison as one of two great GYE comeback stories (the other being the reintroduction of wolves), the narrative that a lot of us Yellowstone gateway kids were fed from a young age tended to keep the focus off important details on why this species — some version of which has roamed the Great Plains of this continent since the last ice ages — was ever on the brink of extinction.

Those starvation winters that Shane cited weren’t solely the result of brutal storms. Something was notably absent from the landscape already. That’s because part of the federal government’s concerted strategy to eradicate Native people of the Northern Plains was eradicating the bison. Keeping with this country’s tradition of brutal imperialism carried out by the military, the US Army was the entity charged with leading this extermination campaign. And it was quite successful. By 1902, Yellowstone’s herd was reportedly reduced to two dozen animals. That’s not a new datapoint to me, but it’s still hard to comprehend when bison are among the most abundant mammal species found in and around Yellowstone these days and have had a continuous presence in the region since fucking prehistoric times.

Private herds had to be invoked to help reestablish a Yellowstone herd, so who knows how many bison roaming the plains these days are direct descendants of those last free-ranging bison from the 19th century. Maybe none, maybe a bunch, maybe all of them. If there are any at all, I don’t think it’s nuts to suppose the function of their genes as well as those of the people who relied on them have been altered from surviving genocide. I guess what I’m trying to say is it would be interesting to go back in time and observe a free-ranging bison before white Europeans came anywhere near them, just to see if they were as chronically stressed then as they are these days. Maybe there’s a lot more to the stress of bison that I’ve interpreted as just part of their nature.

I definitely wasn’t thinking about possible epigenetic explanations for temperament when I was waiting for my travel companion to move on from the road. But I was thinking about what an underhyped miracle it is that encountering bison is so mundane, and has been for as long as I can remember. It’s an animal that people built lives around for millennia. That it’s still here, let alone thriving after the last 150 years of human activity in its native habitat is kind of a great middle finger to the settler project. What’s more, it’s great evidence of the inevitable failure — in spite of all the harm it’s done — of the capitalist agenda of extracting resources and labor to the point of eradication. A lot is gone, but so much of what many anthropoids have tried to wipe out is still here in some form. Maybe I’ve been waking up on the right side of the bed lately, but I’m finding it easier to center the miracle of that rather than the seeming inevitability of full-on ecocide for a change.

It’s hard not to want to ally yourself with the miracles in mundanity. And I guess it makes sense to me that it’s easy to feel a sense of solidarity with that stuff because it underscores the value of an ordinary life, and certainly makes me feel a sense of belonging just by virtue of being here to participate and bear witness to it all. It reminds me of something poet Kaveh Akbar said in a conversation with Lauren Korn for Montana Public Radio’s The Write Question:

There was a moment where your mother had two complete skeletons inside of her. Your mother had two beating hearts inside of her. Just because it is common doesn’t make it not a miracle. It’s nuts! There’s a star that lives 93 million miles away and it sends its light to Earth and plants turn that light into sugar, and all life on Earth is predicated on [that]…I can trip out on this stuff forever.

In the case of that coyote with pups I saw on that hot dusty long ago (of probably 2018), she had no less than five complete skeletons and hearts inside of her at one time. That wild shit is entirely worth tripping out on IMO. And to be honest, I think maturing into my full-fledged Marxist adult plumage has made it easier to.

It’s easier to see what I think we overlook when we’re programmed to comprehend our world in terms of product and profit. It’s easier, I think, to remember as well — or, at least to learn what the collective memory, our bodies’ memory, and genes’ memory have to tell us about how we got to where we are. It’s also easier to imagine what life beyond the extractive framework could be like when you can see and remember and parse through the bullshit.

If the emphasis on wealth accumulation and monetizing everything went away today, there’d still be people who build and repair shit, heal sick people, grow our food, make beautiful art, etc. And sure, there will probably always be some willful, double-crossing assholes, but our synthetic economic and political systems don’t have to reward their greed and violence. I guess it’s just easy to see how things could be if our regressive systems that have endangered so many of us just burned down. Maybe they’re already doing the self-immolating for us, and the violence of it all feels particularly relentless at the moment because this is the last gasp. I hope so.

For folks who don’t know, I’m roundly obsessed with the natural phenomenon of serotiny. That obsession feels preordained in many ways. For one, I am a Sagittarian, which is the mutable fire sign. I was also born and raised in Montana, where the most abundant tree species by sheer number of trees (though not total biomass!) is lodgepole pine, which have serotinous cones — meaning that their opening to release seeds is induced by some kind of environmental disturbance, usually fire.

The fact that an extremely common tree’s regeneration is predicated on cataclysmic disturbance is another one of those mundane miracles that I’ll never get over. And I guess as a creative person, it’s hard not to want to emulate that — to try to release seeds and build something in the wake of trauma, stress, endangerment. It makes me think of a Rilke quote:

Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

It would be simple and, frankly, a little cruel to say that the most substantive stuff emerges from the worst conditions. Nonetheless, this is almost always the case with the stuff and people I find most admirable and inspiring. Some of my most worn-out talking points these days have to do with how this has borne out in labor history. With a place like Butte, for example, I think we’re all pretty inspired by the fact that mining was a closed-shop industry there by 1887. What I never hear from people who recite that factoid, however, is something that potentially makes it all the more remarkable: how many different languages were likely spoken by the workers who pulled that off.

We know that “No Smoking” signs underground appeared in at least 15 different languages in Butte’s heyday of copper production. Who knows if that tracks with the composition of union members at the end of the 19th century. Regardless, there were clearly a lot of people with different backgrounds working and living in shitty conditions they did not create or choose who felt they had common cause with one another. And not just the miners. Brewers, teamsters, blacksmiths, construction workers, musicians, theatrical workers, waitresses, bartenders, typographers, newsboys — they all organized. And we still call Butte the Gibraltar of Unionism because of it.

As a rule, I think we can always find much more to be proud of when we understand our history as one of shared struggle and resistance against dispossession and extraction. And it’s certainly easier to feel a sense of solidarity in this fight when we understand ourselves and other beings as survivors, as collaborators, maybe even as family. What the Butte Miners’ Union pulled off makes me think of serotiny — this idea of releasing seeds and building something as a collective (like a full stand replacement) in the face of suffering. I’ve started to think about that in the context of places like my hometown and others throughout the Mountain West that feel like they’re under constant siege.

One thing that’s been missing for so long, I’m realizing, is a foundational sense of solidarity. But, at least in my hometown, I think that’s starting to change. People are starting to question the conditions they’re living under and getting more bold about naming the folks who have had an outsized hand in creating them. It’s a step. The next in the progression is getting communities hip to the larger system of inequality and exploitation that’s enabling the bad actors. In her exceptional book about rural gentrification, I think Ryanne Pilgeram has made this point deftly:

By framing the process of development as the result of a bad actor or a consequence of unresponsive and under-resourced bureaucracies, the larger system of inequality and exploitation remains invisible…It is vastly easier to blame some person or group of people for one’s loss of power. It is much harder to acknowledge that the very system in which you have built your community isn’t designed to allow them to exercise power. And in the rural West, it is next to impossible to articulate how you fit into a long history of exploitation that never intended to build sustainable communities for ordinary people in the first place.

I think one key to bucking that trend has to do with exposing the extant systems and policies, and doubling down on the ones that people as neighbors, voters, and taxpayers can organize to change. And this bit actually relates to the latest rapid shift in my evolving concept of home. It is still somewhat tied to landscape for me nowadays, and certainly to memory. But more and more, I feel like home is a place I have to actively manifest. Maybe that sounds like a lot of responsibility at best and corny as hell at worst, but it’s kind of a liberating proposition to me.

As somebody who’s always struggled with feeling a sense of belonging — even in my adult life, and particularly in the developed world — it’s affirming to think that we all have the ability to release seeds and help build a place where we can belong. It makes sense to me now that home was never meant to be a place that already existed, that someday I would find.

As somebody who also finds a lot to admire now in the fire-induced regeneration of the lodgepole forests I grew up around, I have to believe there’s some wisdom in being part of the brood that releases seeds in places that are under siege. Symbiosis is certainly important — where you build and release your seeds does have to sustain you in the ways that are vital. I believe that. But I think what’s been missing from my concept of home until recently in my adult life is this idea of it being a place that you feel a responsibility to, learn from, and take an active role in shaping and supporting.

I recognize that places that I care an awful lot about throughout the Mountain West have become magnets for newcomers who don’t exactly think that way. But I’m choosing to believe that most folks still in these places are the human equivalent of lodgepoles. Maybe they’ve weathered a stand-replacement fire or two and they’re tired and stressed, but they’re not going anywhere. They’re thinking and acting with subsequent generations in mind. They know that very few people are really profiting off of this current iteration of rural gentrification. They’ve been through it all and know we can all do better by each other. If no one else will, they’ll endure my tangents about epigenetics and how eagles inexplicably get as big as their parents by their first winter.

As long as there are enough of us like-minded weirdos in the mix, I think we have shot at building a place where all but the willful assholes among us can belong. That’s what I’m working toward. In the meantime, I’ll continue to decry the extractors and trip out on the completely mundane reproductive phenomena of trees and animals.