“We have a lion problem in Spring Canyon,” my neighbor Keri says to anyone who will listen -- neighbors, strangers, wildlife officers. We do not have a lion problem. We are blessed with the presence of mountain lions in the canyon behind our houses. It’s a fairly deep canyon, 200 feet, and two miles long. There are plenty of deer in the canyon, the forest, the farmland around the canyon, for the lions to eat. I’ve hoped to see a mountain lion each day of the fifteen years I’ve lived here, but, though I’ve seen a few tracks and some scat, an occasional kill along the driveway or in the woods, the blessing of seeing an actual lion has been denied me. Until recently.

zoom photo of 'my' lion

The problem with telling people you’ve seen a lion is that the news spreads; before you know it the state bounty hunters will come running with their dogs to tree the lion, and their guns to take it out. I saw two lions last month, but I haven’t told many people. Meanwhile, holding my joy close, I’ve heard four accounts of different sightings since then. A neighbor to the south, Pete, drove a young lion out of the field when he was cutting hay. I heard about this one first from the ditch rider, Tom, who also told me the same neighbor accidently mowed over two spotted fawns while cutting Tom’s hay. 

It was awful. Tom had seen the doe get up from the field when Pete started cutting at the top, and he’d walked down to see if there was a fawn, but he missed them. The first few days they’re hardwired to stay put no matter what the threat. The mower decapitated one and mangled the other. “The only bad thing about haying season,” Tom said. He found them later in the day when he saw the doe sitting back out there, grieving. He moved them down to the edge of the canyon, knowing something would come take them. The next day one was gone, the other a few days later. 

I heard about the same lion sighting from Dave at the Post Office, who lives up here too. “It was a big one,” he said, his eyes wide. “Our neighbor called to let us know, so the kids don’t go playing in the woods alone.” “That’s a good idea anyway,” I said, “you never know when they might be around.” Then I added something about how it really makes you feel alive to live where there are lions, but he got a dark look on his face and moved on to the next customer.

Tom told me a couple of weeks later that a woman across the canyon had called a rancher down the road in a panic because a lion had killed a doe in her field and “What should I do?” The rancher told her to stay away and let the lion finish eating its kill. That was a relief, not something you expect to hear from a person who routinely complains that any deer a lion takes is one less for the hunters. 

A few nights ago at a dinner party the hostess told us she’d seen two lions on her road in the past week. Her response was mixed between awe, delight, and fear that they’d get into her husband’s herd and take a cow. By any standard since I’ve lived here that is a lot of lion sightings in one month. Then I heard just this morning that Albert, who lives up canyon, saw a lion a couple of weeks ago. Albert was sitting on his patio in the morning drinking coffee, with his dog lying beside him. All of a sudden the dog was on point, and a lion came up over the rim and stood looking at them. Albert stood up, the lion lingered, then turned and sauntered off. Casual and calm as could be. 

During this month, I had been watching a nest of redtail hawks fledging in the canyon. I’d tried shooting a few videos but they were always on the other side of the canyon, always a little too far away for the camera not to shake on full zoom. That morning my cousin Melinda, visiting from Kentucky, suggested “Don’t you have a tripod?” I do have a tripod. I was just too lazy to dust it off and carry it down to the canyon. So she carried it. 

At the rim, I spotted one of the young hawks, set up the camera on the tripod, and lost the bird when it flew across and into some brush. I was searching with my binoculars for a long while, then lowered them and rested my eyes by scanning back to the north along the canyon. There on a big rock ledge I saw two figures walking side by side, one just slightly ahead of the other. “Dogs? Coyotes? Lions!” went my mind, and I whispered “There’s two lions,” to Melinda just as they disappeared into the oaks. She got up from the bench where she sat with her binoculars and strode to the edge -- “sssshhhh! Don’t move!” I hissed. She froze. I turned on the camera though I could no longer see the lions, and stood to join her a few feet away. Somehow the lions crossed an open expanse without our seeing them, but the dog uttered a low guttural noise unlike anything I’d ever heard from him. “Sssshh,” I whispered to him, “it’s okay.”

Then another noise, a mewing cawing yowlish chirping noise, and we saw the second lion, rounding the far edge of a bunch of oaks, heading downhill, talking. I moved back to the camera. They saw us. They were both under the oaks near the edge of the creek, looking up at us. The talking lion stood frozen, looking up; the other lion already lay behind, in dappled shade, looking up. I found them in the camera. Here, after fifteen years of longing, were not one, but two lions, and I had a camera, and I had a tripod. The standing lion stood for awhile then lay down, never taking its eyes from us. Everyone who has seen the video agrees, this front lion is a young lion. The back lion’s age and gender remain in dispute. Some “experts” believe it is a sibling to the first, some argue based on possible differences in appearance that it is the mother. The truth is, it’s hard to tell. Being there, in the moment, I’d say they were identical. In the video, the rear lion looks a little heavier, a little darker, and could be an adult. At the time, I told Melinda they were last year’s cubs, striking out on their own.

Melinda, the dog, and I watched (and filmed) the two lions for about twelve minutes. Then, it seemed, we had mutually evaluated each other and concluded there was no threat. Honestly, I was hungry. I suggested to Melinda that we move along and get breakfast. At that same moment the young lion turned its head, then shifted its weight, got up, turned, and walked away through the oaks, as if in agreement. 

I wasn’t only hungry. Melinda had said, about halfway into this experience, “My question is, where’s mama?” I replied with unwarranted confidence, “Oh, she’s over there somewhere. She’s not over here stalking us, I’m sure of that.” For the next six minutes or so, I mulled that over. I wasn’t sure of anything. Perhaps she was over here stalking us. The uncanny calm of the two lions below got me wondering, where is mama? 

“And later,” Melinda added a minute or so after asking about mama, “we need to talk about mountain lion etiquette.” “Yes,” I replied. And we did, later. I told her, “Whatever you do, don’t run. Make yourself big, pull your shirt up around your shoulders, make noise, shoo it away. DO NOT TURN YOUR BACK. Do not run. Call the dogs.” Mountain lions tend to attack from behind, with wild speed and silence. Their teeth and jaws are perfectly adapted to separate the vertebrae of their prey, severing the spinal cord swiftly. 

It’s one thing to know, theoretically, that you live where there are lions. I have known this since I moved onto this rugged land. It is quite another thing to have seen them, calmly watching you from 150 feet away. “Too calm,” said one friend when she saw the video. After hearing of all the other lion sightings in the area this summer I know what she means. Those lions we saw were too calm. All these lions are misbehaving. If they do not develop a reasonable fear of humans, they are done for.

Can you believe there are actually still bounty hunters in the American West? Is this an archaic concept or what? Humans have encroached so mercilessly on the habitat of our planet’s top predators it’s a wonder you don’t read about it every day: “jogger attacked by mountain lion,” “hiker mauled by grizzly,” “man loses arm to alligator,” “toddler bitten by fox,” or wolf, or tiger, or shark. Come to think of it, you do hear about a fair number of such unfortunate encounters, unfortunate for both participants, as whatever the outcome for the human, the wild animal usually gets killed one way or another. Whence derives the mentality that presumes humans matter more than other species? What entitles us to build and pave, build and pave, over acres, miles, of territory that’s been wild for untold generations of other species?

It’s bad enough that we encroach, destroy, gobble up. Then we send the big guns, the bounty hunters, after the new keystone species, when they cross the line. (The old keystone species had other criteria, primarily of sensitivity to our handiworks.) Now our science has finally figured it out: if you protect the large predators in an ecosystem, to the point that they (appear to) have genetic viability as a species, i.e., they won’t interbreed or otherwise drive themselves to extinction, you also de facto protect all species upon which they depend, plant and animal. 

If these lions that are gracing our neighborhood this summer do get out of hand, if they actually attack a human, I might concede that “we have a lion problem.” I can see both sides. Would I sacrifice myself or my dog to a lion if it would ensure survival of their species? Absolutely. Would I sacrifice my child, if I had one? Doubtful. We know there is not just one lion at large, for I saw two at once. There could be three, or four, even more. It feels as though they’re all around. As I said, it’s one thing to know, theoretically, and it’s another to have seen them, to feel them in a visceral way, to know you are potential prey. 

The next morning Melinda and I walked the dogs as usual, and the next. She was leaving in a few more days. She said, when we talked about the lions the next day, that because we’d been out looking for birds, because we’d been looking at and for and talking about birds since she’d arrived a week before, when I said “there are two lions” she thought I must be using some shorthand for “lion hawk,” or “lion sparrow,” or “lion wren.” (I especially like the last one, lion wren. The idea delights me.) So she stood up and walked to the rim with her binoculars expecting some new bird. While the significance of the encounter enveloped me in the first second, it took minutes and then hours to really dawn on her. 

I could not shut up about it. “Lions…” I’d breathe every so often for the next few days, “mountain lions… two of them…,” and so on. I was high as a kite, high as a soaring redtail, high as a lion wren. Still am, weeks later. Whatever the outcome, this was the gift of a lifetime for me: not one, but two, and the camera, and the tripod. And we were all so calm, so present, so connected in the moment. While my cousin was beginning to wonder “where’s mama?” i.e., what is the threat to me?, I was still simply breathless at their beauty, and utterly focused on them, on watching them, and keeping them in the camera. 

The third morning after, Melinda slept late. I had to face the canyon, walk the dogs, alone. I could have waited for her, but I wanted to get back on the horse. In a few days she’d be gone. If I didn’t go back to my usual routine, my fifteen year long routine, going out alone every morning with the dogs, I thought I might get yard-bound, stay in the fence, think too much about those powerful paws. Though I doubt I’ll see them again. Why should today be different from any other day of the past fifteen years, when I have known, theoretically, lions live here, and I have not seen hide nor hair of one.  

When I saw those lions last month I had not heard of any of these other sightings. Now I am sore afraid for the lions. Is our young lion in Spring Canyon the same one that Pete spooked out of the hayfield a couple of miles south? The same one that panicked the rancher’s wife, that greeted Albert over coffee? Are these the same two lions Sam and Betty saw ten miles away? Certainly they could be; lions can have a home range of more than 30 square miles. Or, they could be seven different lions, all moving through, all miles away by now. But my question is, why are we seeing so many lions this summer?

Human trespass was rare in this canyon until all those new houses were built three years ago. Lion sightings were rare until this summer. Did our reverent observation that morning, our communion with the two lions, deceive them about human nature? Were they already that bold, or did our calm encourage them to be unwary? Or is this a case of self-fulfilling prophecy? Has Keri, walking, stalking up and down the canyon now for three years with her pack of dogs, slashing and burning native cover, cutting trail wherever she pleases without regard to people’s boundaries, or lions’, acclimated them to humans and dogs, so that now we do have a lion problem? Or is it simply that it is a good year for deer, and therefore a good year for lions?    

I did not tell the dinner party about our two lions, or Dave at the Post Office, or Keri. Since our sighting I have shown the video to a handful of people, all sworn to secrecy. “Lives are at stake,” I said. Despite my utmost precautions, however, these lions might do themselves in through being too bold, too fearless, too calm. It’s out of my hands. All I can do is watch and wait, keep my secret from my neighbors, and count my blessings.

ADDENDUM

A Month Later

All this previous philosophy is dependent on one thing: the assumption that the lions are sane. A new report comes today of three more sightings in the past two weeks, in one of which the lion appeared to be mad. Some ranchers to the east saw two lions at once about three weeks ago; a man across the canyon had one of his lion hound pack pulled out of a collar off a chain and eaten; and a couple a mile south of here sleeping on their porch were awakened by their dogs when a lion began hurling itself at their fence. They watched for 35 minutes as the lion continued to pace and lunge, and the way I heard it, the lion was foaming at the mouth and dripping six inch strings of drool. Of course, the “rabid” lion might simply have been poisoned, too. Anyway, way too many lion sightings for comfort for a six week period. They’re going to get themselves in trouble. 

I still walk the woods, go irrigating, and work in the garden. The only differeince is that in my garden basket with my notebook, cameras, glasses and sunscreen, I’ve now added my gun. Just in case. 

The other day I saw a boy rolling across a parking lot on those sneakers with wheels in the heels. He was loving it, taking a few steps to get momentum then gliding forward with his right leg in front, a few more steps, a glide leading with his right. I watched him cross in front of me and smiled at his pride and delight. But I wanted to catch him and say “You need to switch your lead from time to time. You need to use your body the opposite way and not only the way that comes naturally.” I have long lamented the fact that nobody ever taught me how to walk, that nobody teaches children the mechanics and symmetry of their bodies, that children who do not do sports in school can end up virtually crippled by middle-age, simply from lack of balance and symmetry in the way they use their bodies.

I spent most hours of my childhood years curled in a chair with a good book. I always sat the same way, with my knees bent and legs pulled up to my left side, torso twisted the same direction to see the book that rested on the knees. Nobody ever said, “Hey, that’s going to make you cockamamie, sit the other way now and then.” Or better yet, “get up off your bottom and run somewhere.” In the past 15 years, with the assistance of various teachers including yoga and Brother Psalm, I’ve become gradually aware of how crooked I am. Brother Psalm used to walk around the town where I lived with his hands pressed together in Namasté, bowing to people he met or embracing them on both sides. He preached the benefits of “right-side-left-side” casually when someone offered to shake hands, and from the pulpit with his poetry at open stage. For Brother Psalm, the right-handed left-brained dominance of the military-industrial complex, which he called Babylon, could be mitigated by everyone using both sides equally.

Like any spiritual path the road to health and healing requires both discipline and acceptance. I’m not good at either, but I did hear the wisdom in Brother Psalm’s words and actions, and began to explore using my left side equally with my right. Ever notice how almost everyone reaches into a hug toward the right, putting left shoulders and cheeks together? We are a right-handed culture. We drive on the right and hug on the right. I started small, trying to hug to the left, brush my teeth and write with my left hand. I became proficient in the latter but only if I wrote cursive backwards, so that it could be read through the back of the page or in a mirror. It took many more years of noticing the subtlety of my right-sided dominance before I became aware that it was nearly impossible for me to sit with my knees bent toward my right side.

I’ve suffered chronic pain for years. I’ve tried purification diets, Tai Chi, and yoga off and on for years. Tai Chi helped, there’s no doubt about that, but when my teacher moved away I lacked the discipline to find another. Yoga means unity, we are taught, and perhaps it has been my lack of discipline in not doing a daily asana practice that has caused me to still have daily pain. Yet yoga remains a steady source of comfort and has kept me from feeling worse than I do, while the diets, which always feel terrific, never last. I am a carb junkie and I love a martini in the evening. I also enjoy cannabis more than I ought, and have suspected for years that it might be contributing to pain in my joints (no pun intended). Chinese and Ayurvedic traditions would likely concur with this hypothesis. Most major joints on my right side and some on the left have swelled, ached or been incapacitated at some time over the past 35 years, and my right hip has been giving me fits for the past three. Intuition suggests that the source of this problem originated, or the first symptom appeared, in my right ankle when I was 14 years old and trying out for the track team.

A sharp persistent pain accompanied by stiffness was diagnosed as osteochondritis dessicans by a Greek doctor who prescribed a cast to the knee for one month, followed by a permanent excuse from all P.E. classes through the rest of high school and college. A small triangular tip of bone in my ankle was dead, he said, and showed the gray spot on an x-ray. It did not get blood supply. Why, I wanted to know. It just happens sometimes, was his answer. He said, “If you overdo with this ankle the bone will break and you will have to have surgery to have it removed, and your ankle will be weak forever.” For seven years I favored that ankle. I quit running and jumping and I danced only cautiously. I didn’t roller skate or ice skate with the other kids. I was gleefully relieved at no longer having to participate in field hockey. Of course, the irony of his prescription was that it made my ankle weak forever anyway, and my whole right side even more out of kilter. But I did not begin to understand this until recently.

Ten years ago at the age of 38 both my knees blew up to the size of a football two days apart. The first knee I took to my friend the doctor, who drove me to the ER and drew off 80 cc’s of fluid, then x-rayed it and told me I had the knees of an 80-year-old. The next day the right knee blew up. I iced it and stayed off it for a week, then spent the next six months learning to walk again. For awhile I went up and down stairs on my ass. Later I carried lawn chairs out into the woods so that when I walked the dogs I could stop and sit every few hundred feet. A few sessions of PT taught me that I’d been hyper extending my knees during an assiduous program of forward bends, but at $6 a minute I quickly let go of the PT and turned back to yoga to strengthen my quads. It worked. It helped, anyway, and my knees became functional again.

Since then I’ve been told by various therapists, yoga teachers and doctors that: my lumbar curve is backwards, I have a touch of scoliosis, there’s a little arthritis in my hips, my thoracic curve is backwards, my right leg is a little longer than my left (and that it isn’t), my left hip is canted back, and several other malfunctions I’ve forgotten. A massage healer and friend I used to see sometimes pointed out that the tissue of my right thigh felt distinctly more dense than that of my left (which I had noticed), and (which I had not noticed) that I did not swing my left arm when I walked and that I stood always on the same leg when doing dishes. I began to consciously swing my left arm and to stand on each leg alternately or on both while at the kitchen sink. Now I can’t remember, was it the left leg or the right leg that held the weight for all those years with the opposite hip cocked out?

Still, despite a conscious effort to practice right-side-left-side for more than a decade, I am plagued with the pain of asymmetry. I offer these tiresome details only in the hope that they may mirror someone else’s and thereby be of help. I’ve been on a discouraging odyssey of doctor visits and medical tests for the past year, after yoga and valium failed to solve this persistent hip pain. Every doctor wants a patient’s problem to be his or her own thing – until it isn’t. They’ve all said “I think it’s X, let’s try Z.” Nobody suggested “It could be this, or this, or this, or this… let’s explore all the possibilities.” I saw Dr. J in the local clinic in the summer of 2005, and she said “Take it easy for a few weeks.” She gave me Vicodin for the pain and Valium to make it possible for me to back off the gardening I was so intent upon accomplishing. It got better. I went back to gardening. It felt like joint pain, so I pursued it with my yoga teacher, whose instruction helped alleviate the discomfort. I thought I was on the right track, but it came back. It diminished and increased, seemingly according to which yoga postures I emphasized.

A year ago I went to see Dr. D, an osteopath. Five treatments and nearly a thousand dollars later he asked me the question that severed my relationship with him: “How many days a week are you in pain?” On the surface, a good question, but since I’d filled out a 12-page intake form detailing location, intensity and frequency of daily pain, I lost all faith in him. Having broken with Dr. D, I went to an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. K. Dr. K recommended an MRI right off the bat. The MRI revealed nothing wrong with the structure of my hips besides the beginnings of arthritis, but did show ovarian cysts. Dr. K couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. “I don’t know anything about these internal things, I’m just a bone doctor,” he said, and recommended Dr. M, a gynecologist. An ultrasound and a blood test later she offered a hysterectomy. I had high hopes that surgery would solve my hip pain.

“A hysterectomy for hip pain?” you may ask, incredulous. Only surgery could confirm whether or not the cysts were cancerous (which they weren’t), but Dr. K, who’d requested the MRI, two other doctors I haven’t even mentioned, and lots of hits on the internet suggested that women with back and hip pain often find relief after a hysterectomy has been done for some other reason. Dr. M was happy to report in the recovery room that my left ovary had been fused to my left pelvic wall, “and that,” she said, “could have been the source of your hip pain.” She never had gotten quite clear that the pain was in the right hip. But maybe that was the source, I encouraged myself; often back pain on one side is caused by a problem on the other. For the first three days after the surgery I was ecstatic. I had no more hip pain! Then I started cutting back on the codeine and discovered that indeed, my hip still did catch when I stood, hurt when I walked, ache when I slept.

I was again discouraged, and fear came back into the equation. My mother died of a rare brain disease which causes multiple system atrophy, meaning all the muscles shut down, from the limbs to the esophagus. Most patients die of this disease from choking on their food or saliva, or from starvation. Others from injuries sustained in falls. The cause of the disease is unknown, but it has a genetic component. My mother also suffered from chronic pain in her right “flank,” as she called it, and I never bothered to dig into exactly what that meant to her. My right hip began to hurt the autumn I was helping her to die. I could have the gene that predisposes to this disease. Her flank pain could have been a symptom of it. My friend Darlene kept attributing her shoulder pain to a fall she’d taken, at first insisting it was from the impact, and when time ran out on that reason she decided it was from something being torqued out of place, a muscle or vertebra… turns out it was a tumor wrapped around her spine. She was dead three months later. Why should I not worry when I cannot identify the source of this chronic right hip pain? When I begin to think like this I mix another martini and try to forget.

Six weeks ago, lifting a giant tortoise to carry him outside, I felt a twang on my left side. This developed into sciatica. My one good side was gone. I was truly at the end of my rope. It hurt to sleep, it hurt to wake up. It’s hard to want to get out of bed and face the day when it hurts to move. Last week, having hobbled to the health food store to order dog food, I ran into a woman I hadn’t seen in years.

“You look great,” I said, and she said “I feel terrific. I discovered this book and I’ve been doing these e-cises forty-five minutes a day for five weeks. My shoulders don’t slump anymore, my back doesn’t hurt….” She went on about this program and her radiance persuaded me to look into it. I ordered the book, Pain Free: a Revolutionary Approach to Stopping Chronic Pain, by Pete Egoscue. Egoscue believes that almost all chronic pain can be attributed to musculoskeletal misalignment, and that the human body evolved to move, in bilateral symmetry, not to live the sedentary life of the 21^st Century. In our early years as a species, when we wanted food we had to spend the day hunting and gathering it, not get up from the couch, take ten steps to the fridge, pull out a bowl of mashed potatoes, and flop back down on our butts in front of the TV. He didn’t say it quite like that.

After all these years of sensing that the source of my pain lay in asymmetry, trying to decipher and link symptoms, I may have found the key to correction. After four days of practicing Egoscue’s e-cises, the sciatic pain has all but disappeared, the tendonitis in my right elbow acquired last spring during forced labor on the irrigation pipeline is just a twinge, the ache in my left shoulder from sitting at the computer is minor, and the chronic pain in my right hip is much improved. Already getting out of bed is no longer a challenge. If this program of e-cises does solve this hip problem, I will be even more infuriated at the amount of money spent, time compromised, and anxiety wasted over the past three years working within bounds of the medical system. And I have to wonder, if Egoscue’s method works so well, why is this book, this practice, not a staple for every doctor who deals with muscular and skeletal pain and dysfunction? Perhaps because then hip and knee replacements would become rare, arthritis drugs redundant, rotator cuff surgery obsolete? Insurance companies would go broke if people could treat themselves at home for free. The medical industry would collapse.

And all those questions the doctors couldn’t answer: What caused the lack of blood flow to that little piece of ankle bone all those years ago? Was it sitting curled always to the left in my childhood, pinching that right groin and restricting blood flow into that right leg? Did I sit always curled to the left because it was uncomfortable to sit curled to the right, perhaps because my little growing ovary was even then fusing to my pelvic wall on the left side? Who knows. Did wearing a cast on that right ankle and favoring that leg for years cause misalignment of my right knee and hip, lumbar spine, left shoulder, right elbow? Or is the source of my hip pain not my ovary or my ankle bone, but that I spent most of 1988 driving around the country in an automatic car with my left foot braced out the window? One thing is certain. The ankle bone’s connected to the leg bone, the leg bone’s connected to the hip bone, the hip bone’s connected to the back bone… I’ve been crooked for nearly 50 years. I think I may finally be straightening out.

***

So it was after Day 4 of e-cises. (Egoscue calls them this because they are more passive than we generally think of exercise, and because it’s his system and his name starts with E.) All my aches and pains were diminished and getting out of bed was easy. But on Day 5 I had some soreness in my low back. By Day 10 it hurt to move again. What was new about this pain was that it was evenly distributed. Both sides of my low back hurt equally. A lot, but equally, “right-side-left-side.” I chalked this pain up to my body adjusting to its new alignment. I have kept at the program of e-cises – discipline at last – for at least an hour a day, usually two. Now, on Day 16, I wake and walk easily, bend to load the woodstove easily, and the aches and twinges that come on me don’t last long. I have a new appreciation for the importance of motion in moving through a day.

I’ve begun to incorporate yoga back into my program, and find my downward dog is longer, both in stance and duration, and easier. I can sit lower in Virasana than ever before. In addition to pain-relieving routines for every joint pair in the body, Egoscue prescribes specific routines for peak performance in many sports and a daily maintenance routine that incorporate some of the yoga poses I’ve been doing for years. It seems that the release on my right side and the apparent realignment derived from his pain-relieving program have enabled me to deepen my experience of yoga postures. I see now that my yoga teacher asked me over the years to do some of the very same things outlined in the Pain Free routines. Somehow I was not able to accept their benefits in the same way. Egoscue offers a “supine groin stretch” that he encourages you to hold for as long as an hour if you are in severe pain. I did this on the second or third day, and I am convinced that this did more than anything else to restore balance to, to open, my right hip. Not only did the groin pain diminish dramatically after that first one hour stretch, but at last I could actually feel my right heel press into the floor.

In standing poses yoga teachers always say “press into your back heel,” and I could never feel it on my right side. My ankle did not bend enough, my calf did not stretch, and even when standing straight in Tadasana I could not feel my right heel pressing into the ground. I feel my heel connecting now in all these poses. When I walk, climb stairs, bend to reach for something on the floor, my right leg feels different, straight, right, as though for years one part of it hadn’t been working at all and another had been locked in the wrong place. Perhaps it is this quite literal grounding that makes my spirits soar this morning. There is nothing like waking up without pain to give a body energy for living.

I finally feel like I’m a real Coloradoan. I looked at myself the other day, just before Thanksgiving when we hadn’t gotten much snow yet, just cold enough to build a fire in the woodstove: I sat outside with morning coffee watching the dogs play. Patches of snow remained from a shower days earlier not melting, just subliming away, the dry cold bright air sucking the moisture right out of it. The front and back doors were open, the window cracked to let the music out, and a merry fire in the black, windowed stove kept the house warm. Fresh fall air mixed between the doors with the sweet warm air inside, music wafted out to where I sat on the patio, layered in silk longjohns, socks, slip on boots, a sweater and a down vest. I suddenly felt like one of those real Coloradoans I met when I first visited Colorado decades ago, those hearty young athletic party animals I knew who left open the doors of their tiny mountain houses in Grand Lake or Crested Butte to let the dogs or the fresh air or the neighbors run in and out freely, all the while with a happy fire in the woodstove.

It’s cold in here, I’d say, and they’d say, Yeah, but it’s warmer than outside. They were layered in silk and nylon and wool with down booties and vests and often a tasseled hat or just a cap on their hip young heads. Well, I’m not necessarily hip and I’m no longer young in quite that way, but I’ve finally simply found myself now in that situation that was both alien and envious when I first encountered it. A lifestyle, perhaps, more than a situation. Just this morning I was over at Suzi and Geoff’s house for coffee, breakfast, a puppy play date, and a hot tub. The night before a bunch of us had driven home in several cars from a concert in town 20 miles away through a blizzard.

The concert was fantastic. I don’t go out much, but when a group this fabulous comes to town I don’t want to miss them, and the weather seemed to have cleared by the time I picked up everyone to drive in for dinner. We ate at Eleni’s Greek Restaurant, an intimate dining room, hot sweet potato French fries with garlic aioli and an Aegean Platter for appetizers, genial conversation among seven friends, visits from Eleni, warm out of the kitchen and jovial despite her sorrows, and perfect timing to depart for the show down the road. The theater was packed. Feast is a popular chamber music quartet with an electronic twist. They dazzled us, took us on a world journey and a wild ride, seduced us with samba, performed Enescu and Freddy Mercury with flawless technical finesse and unbridled delight. The audience both laughed and sat rapt, leapt to their feet more than once for a standing ovation. The men on stage behind the cello and the drums were mild and dignified, the two women in red sparkled. No one could take their eyes for long off of the former Miss Alaska in her red sequined slip of a dress as she burned the bowstrings on her virtuoso violin.

This group has ties to our town and plays there a couple of times a year. Their reputation is growing around the west, and locally it was a sold out standing room only show. Tyme and Kathryn Mientka brought a new level of classical performance and teaching to the town some years ago, and now they’ve spoiled us for anything less than world-class classical in our venues. (Or our veins.) David Alderdice, the dreadlocked drummer, makes magic with his percussion kit. And slender, alabaster Audrey Solomon simply shines with true star presence. Their music defies description, other than to say it moves people to leap out of their seats when it’s over and beg for more. It moves people. It makes us laugh and catch our breath.

Out of the warm packed theater buzzing with goodwill we streamed into a slanting icy snow that had already coated roads and cars with sticky slush. I discussed our route home with my passengers: the highway we decided would carry too much potential for risk from other drivers on the ice. We took the back road. There we decided the slightly longer route with more curves was preferable to the route with the short steep hill that led to the other highway. The amiable banter among my friends was a great steadying comfort to my nerves as I pursued the road home. Snow came in blinding sheets truly horizontally most of the way. Visibility was almost desperate at times. I could feel the Blizzack snow tires losing their grip now and then. I crept home at 25 or 30 mph, blazing the trail through inches of unbroken snow and slush for miles. A car behind us kept its distance, then turned off – our friends Ruth and Jeff, so we knew they were safely home. I delivered two companions to their house, and the road from there to Crawford was nearly clear – wet and slushy but visible. I dropped another two off in town at their car, and turned toward home. By the time I got to the edge of the canyon, two blocks through town, snow was coming down hard again. Another car was ahead of me going down the canyon, and for a short way I had their tracks to follow. Then the hail opened up, with a lightning blast that whitened the entire sky and seemed to come from nowhere. By the time I got to the curve in the bottom of the canyon and could see the taillights that I hoped were Geoff and Suzi’s climbing the other side, I could no longer see their tracks on the sheet of white pellets covering the road.

The steep hill up the other side would have worried me had I not known that just five minutes earlier it had been pretty clear. My little Honda with the kickass snow tires made it easily and I caught up with the other car in time to flash goodnight as it turn down my friends’ road. Visibility was about 20 feet the rest of my drive home, just a couple of miles. In my own driveway I released my seatbelt and heaved a sigh. I hate drives like that. I make it a point to avoid them. I’d rather stay home than drive in that kind of extreme for just about anything. But I was calm and happy. My friends in the car had kept up a light conversation, about the music, about pets, about sunny California, every now and then thanking me: I’m so glad you’re driving, one of them said, You’re our hero, said another, and sotte voce one or another checking in with How are you doing, Reets, you OK? Yes, thank you, I said, and the surprising thing is that I was. If I’d been making that drive home solo I’d have been fist-clenching anxious about it, close to panic, not knowing at its worst if it would get even worse, if I’d have to pull off and wait, imagining scenarios of sliding off the road, coming upon an ugly accident, all the worst that could happen in a blizzard miles from home on a dark back road. The Not Being Alone gave me tremendous calm, and their sincere confidence in me, in my extreme-weather driving, bolstered my own. We all agreed to check in by phone when I arrived home.

I let the pack of dogs out into the blizzard and picked up the phone to let John and Ellie know I was home, then checked on Phillip and Pamela who’d had farther to go than I. They were in and their dogs were covered in snow as mine were within seconds of going out. Then I double checked with Suzi and Geoff though I was pretty sure they’d turned ahead of me. I couldn’t quite ID the car though, in the snow, just see that it was turning. We were all home, my whole pack was safe for the night. I know myself. I know that in previous winters a drive like that would have had me reaching for the bottle the minute I walked in the door to take the chill off the stress. Last night after tucking in my friends and wiping off the dogs I poured a glass of water and lay down on the couch to breathe. I let the memory of that fabulous music wash over and through me, and wrapped myself in the warmth of my community – that larger group that swelled with joy at the concert, and the smaller group of travelers through the blizzard who had all, together in our separate cars, gotten us all through it safely.

I don’t know yet if everyone who was out that night in our villages got home okay. If any of our friends slid out on the ice or crashed into each other or into deer or elk, plunged over ditches or lost their lives. I held thoughts for all the travelers away from that little paradise of music and light into the storm. I know that this morning, when Suzi woke me up with an invitation to watch the sun come up from the hot tub, I couldn’t say no. The sense of being close, being watched over, being part of, carried me back out into the snow. I drove through the dazzling clarity of the uncloudy day to the pleasures of coffee, raspberry pancakes, bacon, recollections of the concert, and a long leisurely soak noticing snow defining new ridges on familiar mountains. After breakfast we sat on the porch sipping more coffee, warmth from the tub and the food and the friendship sustaining our conversation on this cold and perfect Colorado morning.

I suspect he may have changed a little, but what’s really changed is my perception of him. When he whisked that calico cat away from me fifteen years ago, and said as he was turning his back, “She needs an enema, call me this afternoon,” I was stunned. No further explanation, no chance to say goodbye to my kitty, and he was gone. I stood around for a minute then left. Once I picked up the cat that afternoon I didn’t go back to him for six years. I found another vet ten minutes farther away. She was an excellent vet, and I was very happy with her care of all my animals for years.

Then one night the old knobby-headed dog was stricken, bloated tight and crying under the stairs, and my vet didn’t answer the phone. I called the next vet down the valley, and rushed the dog there at 10 at night. He said “Your dog is fine. Whatever it was is over.” That was a relief. But it was wrong. The ailment recurred a few months later. I tried my usual vet, who once again wasn’t home. Believing knobby-headed dog would be fine, I walked him around the yard for hours, but his pain increased. Finally, at 3 in the morning with much trepidation, I broke down and called Dr. Vincent.

“Bring him in right now,” he said. When I arrived half an hour later he was waiting for me with The Book open on his table. He showed pictures of a dog’s stomach twisted over on itself. “Gastric torsion,” he said. “This is what it was last time. Occasionally taking a dog for a car ride will create just the right conditions for the stomach to untwist. It usually requires surgery to fix it, and even that might not work. In 20 years I’ve done ten of these surgeries. Five dogs have survived. He might make it through the surgery and die in the next week from the systemic toxins created by the torsion.”

He took the dog back to the surgery room and gave him a sedative, then stuck a tube down his throat trying to relieve pressure and get the stomach to untwist. It didn’t work. By now it was 4 in the morning. He said “You’ve got three choices. You can take him home and hope it corrects like it did last time; I can put him down; or I can do the surgery.”

I tried to say “Put him down.” The dog was 11 years old, and while he had been an excellent companion and protector, he’d also been a trial. For starters, he always tried to kill any non-human creature that was bigger than he was. The flaws and strengths of that dog’s character are too numerous to go into now, but the part of me that wanted an easier life opened my mouth to say “Put him down.” Instead, out came “Do the surgery.”

“He won’t be the same dog,” cautioned Dr. Vincent.

“That’s fine,” I said with some relief. He gave me two more chances to change my mind and each time my mind said “Put him down,” but my mouth said “Do the surgery.” I left and drove to a friend’s house to sleep for a couple of hours. Knobby-headed dog not only survived the surgery, but a month later he brought down a fawn in the front yard. He was the same dog. After that experience, after Dr. Vincent’s gentle and informative explanations of the problem and possible solutions, after his obvious concern for both the dog and me, not to mention his total lack of irritation at being waked in the night, I liked him a lot. Knobby-headed dog lived two more years, and while he became rapidly more mellow with his advancing years, he remained a pretty scrappy hound.

Fortunately I did not have too many occasions for a vet for the next few years. When I did I spread the wealth between the two or three nearest vets. We’re fortunate where I live that there are half a dozen fine vets within less than an hour, all of whom help out with strays and broken wildlife as well as paying customers. I take the old dog to a holistic vet an hour from home because diet, homeopathy and supplements work better on renal failure than standard treatments. But ever since Dr. Vincent solved two diagnostic mysteries on two dogs in less than a minute each, I pretty much converted completely.

He’s been my primary vet now for 7 years. He has never been brusque with me again, and he has unfailingly explained in detail what is wrong and what I need to do to help my pet. In short, he has taught me. He makes jokes and laughs readily when I tease him. He offers options when they exist, and confidence when they don’t. With each visit to him I learn something new about how to treat an abscess, or how a stool softener works and why it doesn’t mix with oil, or when a cat’s lip might need to be cut off.

The old calico I first took to him died last year. Three days later I was out in the garden and I heard a strange sound. I thought at first it was some unusual bird, but as my ears sorted it out I realized with dismay it was a cat crying quite nearby. I found him under a tree not 20 feet from the calico’s grave, a tiger tabby with a bloody mouth and bloody paws. I scooped him up and held him to my chest. It was love at first sight. It’s impossible to articulate the feeling that passed between that cat and me in those first moments of holding him. I didn’t even take time to call. I rushed him to the car and, murmuring reassurance to him all the way, drove him up the valley to Dr. Vincent’s office. I needed a name to murmur. “Vincent,” I said, “it’s ok, you’re going to be fine.”

At the clinic Doc came out from emergency surgery during his lunch hour and said “What have we got?” “He’s bleeding from his mouth,” I said. “I just found him. If you can fix him I’ll keep him. Please fix him.” He whisked him into the back saying “Call me in three hours.” That was the sum total of our exchange. I realized then that his haste with me that first visit had been solely a result of an emergency situation. For six years my knee-jerk emotional reaction had kept me from knowing and learning from this extraordinary doctor and teacher.

I called him in three hours. “It’s calicivirus,” he said, “a respiratory virus that has ulcerated his tongue. If I can save the tongue I can save the cat. A cat can’t survive without a tongue. He needs it to drink. I’ve seen it before but I’ve never seen it this bad.”

“You better save him,” I said. “I named him after you.”

Dr. Vincent laughed. “Well I’ll have to save him then,” he said. “If he makes it over the weekend I think he’ll be fine.”

Monday morning little Vincent emerged from the back room looking like a new cat. “He’s a remarkable cat,” said his namesake. “I just gave him an anti-inflammatory. He did the rest. Really, he’s a special cat. You can take him home tomorrow,”

“Only I can’t,” I said. “I leave home for a month tomorrow. Any chance you could keep him for me until I get back?”

“I don’t see why that would be a problem.”

A month later I returned to the clinic to pick up my new cat. He was the darling of the staff. He came into my arms as though he’d known me forever. The doctor charged me a pittance for everything. But this is what he would do for anyone, for any cat. He’s a small-town vet who works all hours for the valley’s pets. He donates and discounts his services for the local animal rescue group. He works in a room open to the front desk and the waiting area. I never mind waiting my turn, watching and eavesdropping in fascination and admiration as he diagnoses, treats and explains each patient in front of all the rest.

A few months after acquiring little Vincent I took in one of the dogs and Doc asked after his namesake. “He’s great,” I said. “He is so smart. Sometimes he’s so smart I call him Dr. Vincent.” The real Dr. Vincent almost blushed.

Vinnie goes back to his vet every now and then when he gets in a fight outside at night. Last week he went in for an abscess on his tail. This week for a fecal blockage, the same condition that introduced me to Dr. Vincent fifteen years ago. “This is too far up for an enema to do any good,” he said. “We’ve got to approach this from the other end.” He gave me a week’s worth of stool softeners with a pill plunger to get them down. “These pills are bitter, they’ll make him drool. Don’t be alarmed. Keep an eye on that cat for me, I mean it.”

Today, rather than phone, I dropped by when I was in the neighborhood to get a report on blood work for one of the dogs. The parking lot was jam packed. I stood in the center of a hubbub of ailing kittens, nervous dogs, and their people, watching and waiting until he had a chance to talk with me. I watched him take a phone call while he turned off the lights and looked at a cat’s injury with his eye scope. He took his time with me between patients, explained the blood work and discussed options, then patiently heard my report on little Vinnie’s progress. I walked out of the chaos of the clinic calm, informed, and, as usual, a little bit enlightened. I hope he’s not planning to retire any time soon. I want this vet to keep tending my pets and my education for many years to come.

The other day I called a childhood friend I’d located on the internet. I left a message at his work. The first day, after I left the message, I imagined a lot of scenarios. He’d call me back or he wouldn’t, he’d say this, I’d say that, this or that would happen down the line… I busied my mind with possibilities for awhile in my excitement to have found him. Doing so, I began to wrack my brain to remember how and why we had lost touch with each other. Then I was overtaken with a sickening feeling as all that emerged from my memory was a big black hole around the middle of high school. Now the imaginary scenarios shifted from the future to the past. What had happened?

The first-day scenarios ranged all the way from I’d called the wrong man to we end up lovers for life. I admit I called him partly because his resume, which was one of two things I’d located online, stated his marital status as single. And one reason I’d been thinking of him was that I’d been examining my life, my own marital status, my current relationships, and some unproductive behavior patterns. I’m not happy with myself right now, for a lot of reasons. One is, I’m finally lonely. Or, I’m finally admitting that I’m lonely, that might be more accurate. But I have serious trust issues (some might say “intimacy issues”). And in reflecting on the nature and origins of these issues, I fell to pondering men in my life that I have trusted, with whom I have felt completely at ease. There aren’t many. Out of the depths of memory swept this scene of a bike ride, and then a flood of feeling for that boy who was once my best friend.

Let’s call him Paul. Paul was one of my best friends in junior high. My first reaction when I found the link to his bio was pure delight. Only long after I’d left the message did I begin to ponder what had happened. My second-day scenarios took an uncomfortable twist as I wondered: Did we slide out of each other’s lives simply from the passage of time? Or, and here’s where it got really sickening, had I hurt him? Had I done something that ended our friendship? Had he become interested in me in a way that I did not reciprocate and I broke his heart? (This speculation tells you a lot more about the subsequent course of my life than it does about who I was at the time.) Or, had he hurt me? Had he chosen another girl and broken my heart?

If he should ask me today why I called I’d have to say I’m making amends. I’ve been rash and heartless with a few friends, I’ve been thoughtless or careless with many more. I wanted even more to reconnect because, when I realized there was a big blank at the end of our childhood friendship I feared I had hurt him – rejected him, judged him, in some way severed the friendship of my own volition. I’ve done it before and since and usually regretted my haste. Since my mother’s death from a rare brain disease, I have been noticing my own memory lapses with a different perspective. There’s no time to keep making clumsy mistakes with people. If I have hurt people in my past or present and I can apologize now is the time to start. If I’ve done damage of any kind and I can make it right, now is the time to start. I don’t know how much time I have.

I have remembered all along the sense of being with Paul. He has come to the forefront of my thoughts from time to time, though through many years he never occurred to me. But when he does occur to me, always, it is with regret that I do not know what happened to him, that somehow that innocent, trusting friendship we had as children has disappeared. Vanished into the vast past, even the memory of our friendship has drowned in the flood of experiences that came on top of whatever we were in that long-ago slice of time. We rode bikes sometimes, saw each other outside of school even though we lived a long way apart and our parents had to shuttle us to play with each other. I remember one bike ride in particular, coasting down the paved bike path of Four Mile Run, trees arching over the path, and Paul and me laughing, a lot. I can see him laughing now, clear as day.

But what prompted me to call? I’ve been thinking lately, wondering at my aloneness, in this hermitage I’ve set up for myself on this mesa, in this forest, in this mud hut where I live with lots of animals and which I rarely leave. Why indeed would a big city professional want or need a friendship with me? Why would a man who was once a boy I knew bother to call back to see who I am now? On one level, I am simply curious about how he has grown up, who he has become. Is that arrogant of me? And on the other end of that spectrum lives the romantic fantasy of childhood sweethearts hooking up again at their 50^th high school reunion. I’ll never get a reunion with Paul, we went to different high schools. If I was to ever know anything about him I had to track him down myself.

I keep avoiding the real issue, though. Which is why did I really call him? It was impulse, to be sure, under some influence beyond my control. Here is the truth of it. I have known a lot of men since I was friends with Paul. And from this vantage point, in that span of time, I have never been as comfortable with any of them as I was when I was a child, riding bikes and laughing with my friend. I remember his happiness during those short young years we were friends. I have pictures of him at parties at my house. I do not recall too many specifics, but I remember feeling safe with him to be myself. People and relationships are fraught with tensions and threats, but in that happy young friendship I remember neither.

I have felt safe a few times with some of my lovers, but that feeling has never lasted. I have subsequently molded myself to the needs and desires of whatever man I’ve been with, giving up my self to be a couple. I’ve been verbally abused by my father, my brother and most of my lovers. The one lover who did not abuse me with his words was the cop who cheated on me. I do not trust men. I’ve made a string of bad choices. I’ve learned a lot of lessons, most of them more than once. I know I’ll never make some mistakes again. I think from time to time of that boy Paul that I knew and I remember a boy who was kind and funny and smart, with whom I could let my imagination, my laughter, my intellect, simply be. We were friends when we were children, untarnished by life’s deceptions, intrigues and betrayals. Before we knew we had issues. I wonder what kind of man he has become.

What happened? Why is there a big blank? Did I hurt him? Did he hurt me and I’ve forgotten? Either way, if it was a bad scene it’s a good sign that I can’t remember: I’m famous for holding grudges, but thirty years would be a little long even for me. It’s possible I misremember. It’s possible in the years of high school and beyond, whatever happened that we fell apart or grew apart, I made up some story about how we’d been such good friends. Maybe I was never anything to him. I’ve hardly been anything to myself. And now we’re down to the real nitty gritty. As usual. Who am I? Who am I that he would want to be my friend, some boy I knew 35 years ago who has had lifetimes to forget me, to forget that boy, to build his own rich and fascinating story woven full of women and men, joys and griefs and experiences uniquely his own. Who am I to such a one?

I’m someone new each day. I don’t have a steady job, so I am not defined by my career. I don’t have a husband or a lover so I’m not defined by a partnership. I have no claim to fame. What is the essence of me that I have to offer? In another scenario, I congratulate Paul on his accomplishments in the medical field, and I am forced to confess I have not lived up to my own expectations of my intellect. I may have satisfied my soul, but I certainly did not live up to potential in anyone’s eyes who knew me as a child. For crying out loud, I live in a mud hut in the woods with a bunch of dogs and I rarely leave home. I wallow in introspection, I tell Paul in this scenario, so I guess that makes me a poet.

But now it’s after nine on the third day, and he has not called. Perhaps he is out of town and he will call another day. Or, he will not call. He does not remember me or he does not wish to reconnect with me. I’m sure he has his reasons. And I’ve lost nothing with the venture. Imagining Paul has given me all I could ask for from him, a jumping off point to once again attempt to get to the root of the question that plagues me daily: Who am I?

Now, a week after leaving the message, I sit down at the computer today to polish off this meditation on speculation, memory and identity, with more unsaid in it than said, having concluded, once again, the usual conclusions: the past is gone and the future unknown, and neither is worth too much attention. I may never know the present of my old friend Paul, or if he remembers me, or what transpired in our past, and these mysteries I must let be. Whoever I am in this present moment, let me be present and kind and unattached to outcome. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. There’s the phone, let me get that – well!

It is Paul. The Paul? I ask. The Paul who was my friend when I was a child? And he says: Still is. My heart fills with joy to hear these two words. I feel wildly happy. His voice has grown up but the warmth and humor remain. He remembers me well. We fall to talking and he tells me he lives with a gentleman, has for years. Damn! It figures. The most comfortable man I can remember in my life and he turns out to be gay. No wonder I never felt threatened. My enthusiasm shifts, my voice falters. A fleeting disappointment dissolves in recognition, relief. There is no sordid past to rectify. There is no other woman to object or be jealous – we are free to rekindle our friendship. My delight at having found him burgeons. Of course he is gay. I have known this somewhere all along. There is so much to say. But he’s at work. He gives me his home number. We exchange promises to talk more and get together, and these promises feel true and happy to me. I have found my friend again, and these 35 years have all but disappeared.

Still I am left with questions. Whatever happened, I did not understand it at the time. There was something, some scene, some uncomfortable conversation, I feel sure of it. The sickening feeling returns. Did I have feelings for him that were not reciprocated? Did I press him? Did I judge him? Did he tell me he was gay and I walked away from the friendship? Or did he not tell me, did he not know, could he not say, and I just didn’t get it? The end of our childhood relationship remains a blank. Perhaps these questions can be answered now that I’ve found him. Perhaps they don’t matter. And, knowing better than to anticipate outcome, I (whoever I am) imagine welcoming him and his partner to my home, can see them arriving through the gate, can feel me wrapping them both in hugs with a heart wide open to a new, grownup friendship.