During the hour of wine and cheese before dinner, all the donors and writers milled about the main hall of the museum, talking. Being no good at milling and talking, and noticing a corridor off the main hall with no people in it, I sneaked off to explore it. First I found the bobcat (who must wake up now and then, though so far I have only seen him asleep). Then, getting farther away from the chatter of my species, going farther into dimness and silence, I came on the lynx.
He was sitting gazing out into the dimness and silence with his golden eyes. The pure gaze of the animal, Rilke called it. The gaze that is purely gaze: that sees through. For me, at that moment of feeling inadequate and out of place, the unexpected, splendid animal presence, his beauty, his perfect self-containment, was refreshment, consolation, peace.
I hung out with the lynx until I had to go back to the Bandar-log. At the end of the party I sneaked back for a moment to see him again. He was sleeping majestically in his little treehouse, great soft paws crossed in front of his chest. I had lost my heart for good.
I saw him again last year when my daughter Elisabeth drove me around eastern Oregon for four days (a grand trip, of which I hope to put a record in words and pictures on my site, if Elisabeth and I can goad each other into getting it together). She and I saw the displays and the otters and the owls and the porcupine and everything else at the museum, and ended in a long contemplation of the lynx.
And last week, before the reading, while Roger was doing all the hard work getting the books to sign into the museum, I could spend another half hour with him. When I came, he was pacing about, very handsome and restless. If he had a tail that was worth lashing he would certainly have been lashing it. After a few minutes he vanished through a big metal cat flap into some kind of back room not on view to the public. Fair enough, I thought, he wants some privacy. I went on to look at the live butterfly exhibit, which of course was lovely. The Oregon High Desert Museum is one of the most perfectly satisfying places I know.
When I came back down the corridor the lynx was sitting quite close to the glass, eating a largish bird. A grouse, was my guess. At any rate a wild bird, not a chicken. He had a tail feather hanging down from his chin for a while, which might have reduced his dignity in the eyes of beholders, but he does not acknowledge beholders.
He worked at his bird with diligence and care. He discussed his bird, as they used to say of people eating lamb chops. He was quite absorbed in discussing it. Lacking all four fangs, he was pretty much in the position of a human lacking incisors: he had to go at it sideways, with his molars. He did this neatly. It slowed him down, I am sure, but he never grew impatient, even when all he got was a mouthful of feathers. He just put a big soft honey-colored paw on his lunch and went at it again. When he got seriously inside the bird, some children who came by squealed, “Eeeyew! He’s eating the insides!” and some other children who came by murmured with satisfaction, “Oh look, he’s eating the guts.”
I had to go away then and do the reading and signing, so I could not see him finish lunch.
When I came back after an hour or so for a goodbye glimpse, the lynx was curled up comfortably asleep in his treehouse bedroom. One wing and a beak lay on the dirt near the glass wall. On three tree stumps, the servants of the lynx had laid out three dead mice—an elegant dessert presentation, as the fancy restaurants say. I imagined that later, when the museum closed, when all the primates had finally gone away, the big cat might wake up and yawn, and stretch himself lithely down from his treehouse, and eat his desserts one by one, slowly, in silence, all by himself in the darkness.
There is a connection that I am groping for, a connection between the resorts and the lynx. Not the noodly streets that took us from one to the other, but a mental connection that has something to do with community and solitude.
The resorts are neither city nor country; they are semi-communities. Most of their population is occasional or transient. The only day workers are gardeners, janitors, people doing upkeep. They don’t live in the nice houses. Most of the people that do are there not because their work takes them there but to get away from their work. They’re not there because they have common interests with others there but to get away from other people. Or to pursue sports such as golf and skiing, which pit the individual against himself. Or because they long for the solitude of the wilderness.
But we aren’t a solitary species. Like it or not, we are the Bandar-log. We are social by nature, and thrive only in community. It is entirely unnatural for a human being to live long completely alone. So when we get sick of crowds and yearn for space and silence, we build these semi-communities, pseudo-communities, in remote places. And then, sadly, by going to them, swarming into the desert, all too often we find no true community, but only destroy the solitude we sought.
As for cats, most of their species are not social at all. The nearest thing to a cat society is probably a troop of active lionesses providing for the cubs and the indolent male. Farm cats sharing a barn work out a kind of ad hoc social order, though the males tend to be less members of it than a danger to it. Adult male lynxes are loners. They walk by themselves.
The strange fortune of my lynx brought him to live in an artificial environment, a human community utterly foreign to him. His isolation from his natural, complex wilderness habitat is grievous and unnatural. But his aloofness, his aloneness, is the truth of his own nature. He retains that nature, brings it among us unchanged. He brings us the gift of his indestructible solitude.
Notes from a Week at a Ranch in the Oregon High Desert
August 2013
THE HOUSE WHERE we stay is on a small cattle ranch, in the valley of a creek that comes energetically down off a mountain, cutting a winding oasis of willows and grass between very steep ridges topped with basalt walls like battlements—rimrock. Across the creek is the ranchhouse under a huge old weeping willow. The eastern ridge rises immediately behind it; immediately behind our house, the western ridge. Level, grassy pastures fill the narrow land between; the steep slopes are sagebrush, rabbitbrush, bare dirt, rock. Far up the long valley, most of the ranch stock are still in summer pasture. It’s very quiet around the house. The nearest town is three miles to the north. Its population this year is five.
On the First Day
Five swallows sit the near wire.
A fiercely agitated flicker lights on the other wire, then follows its own crackling cry.
Rain hangs in the overcast, heavy above the ridge.
A hen has laid an egg: outbursts of proud contentment. Two roosters crow, competing.
The peacocks make their gallant, melancholy, meowing trumpet call.
Soon the sun will break above the rimrock of the ridge, an hour after rising.
Flights of blackbirds pass in the cool, shadowed air between the eastern and the western rimrock, dozens at a flight, each flight a sound of many wings, an airy throbbing rush and thrill. The creaking whicker of wind in feather, now and then. Now and then a chirp.