Letter from the Editor A Note from Associate Editor Jason Kirkey “When you’re finished up there I want you to come to our coordinates. There’s something I want you to see,” came the voice over the radio. We had just finished measuring an aspen stand so thick that our feet barely ever touched the ground for all the downed trees and debris that littered the forest floor. It was tough bushwhacking through grizzly habitat, especially when you’re trying to thread a measuring tape through the thick branches as straight as possible. We followed the GPS to the coordinates we were given. I couldn’t tell what it was lying there on the ground when we first broke through the trees into a clearing from a game trail. A layer of fluff covered the ground around which the rest of the field crew was gathered. As I got closer I recognized it as fur. There was a pile of it on the edge of the clearing and a trail of it leading deeper into the stand. It hung like cobwebs from twigs and the low lying branches of shrubs. Closer still and I could make out a leg, a paw, and finally the remains of a jaw. It was the carcass of a coyote, lying on its back, its hide completely intact but its flesh and bones removed with almost surgical precision. Looking down at the animal I could see that it had been lying on his or her back when it was killed. The throat had been ripped out; the body left to decay until a grizzly—most likely—happened upon it and dragged its flesh away. There are wolves in this system and they don’t get along with coyotes. They routinely rip their throats out and leave them to rot. Like a Tibetan Buddhist depiction of a wrathful deity, sometimes wildness doesn’t give a shit about your plans to stay alive. Days earlier we had a more gentle reminder of the wildness of this ecosystem. We were measuring plots deep in a thick aspen parkland which had burned a few years earlier. Fire changes the chemistry of soil, causing aspen to shoot up at an increased rate. The thick understory provides perfect cover for elk cows to bed down their new-born calves while they forage. Standing several meters from the center of the plot, waiting to reel in the transect tape, I heard an alarmed voice, “there’s an elk calf over here!” A crew member had almost stepped on her. She didn’t run—at that age they can’t move very nimbly and so their defense against predation is to just stay still and hidden. We lowered our voices, photographed the calf for documentation, and moved on before her mother came back. That’s the other side of wildness. It can be remarkably vulnerable. Wildness encompasses the whole spectrum of nature—from what we find traditionally beautiful and awe-inspiring to its violence and decay, its vulnerability, playfulness, and defenselessness. In this issue of Written River we celebrate the theme of “becoming wild.” When I returned from my trip to Canada I had a lot of ideas running around in my head about wildness. My work as an ecologist explores this and my research indicates that wildness requires three functioning processes to maintain ecosystem structure: predation, disturbance, and migration. But there is a still-deeper kind of wildness that is more like the Chinese concept of the Dao—ultimately there is no diverging from it. Even that which seems the most domesticated, or the most artificial and contrived, is still subject to the shaping and evolutionary patterns of wildness. Like a dammed river, that which holds wildness back is—on a geologic scale—merely temporary. The final lesson of this wild landscape of grizzly bears, wolves, coyote carcasses, and elk calves is that every place is a wild place when you get right down to it. The real question is whether or not we’re willing to go along with that wildness and let it enact itself both on our environments and on ourselves. Here is a journal full of writers, artists, and photographers who have let themselves and their words be shaped by wildness. Such work gets to the heart of what I think eco-poetics is all about: becoming more wild through the process of engaging with a more wild language. I hope that these words and images help you rediscover some deeper wildness within you. Yours from the mountains, Jason Kirkey
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