Omnia Flux

There were three deer in the field behind the house this morning. Three young deer, all yearlings by the look of them, and we stood at our window in the early light to watch them, my wife, myself, and our young daughter. It’s always a delight to see wildlife, and as I trained a spotting scope on them I could see in vibrant detail the shaking of their white-flag tails, the twitching of their coal dark noses, the breeze in their fur. They were divided by our new fence, two just beyond along the old stone wall, and one within; it must have jumped the line farther down its length, the box wire being only four feet in height and not much obstacle for an agile doe. We watched the deer for five or ten minutes, sipping our coffee, our morning routine enlivened by the visitors. Then, the two deer beyond the fence line turned and wandered down towards the stream and the forest beyond. The remaining loner watched them depart through the wire, and then, after a moment and with barely an effort, hopped casually over the fencing and followed the others off into the woods.

We won’t see many more deer here. We won’t see many more bobcats like the one I spied last week, or families of bears leisurely poking along our treelike like we observed last spring. They’ll still be in our area, Ive no doubt of that, but they’ll steer clear of our field, fence or no fence, once our dogs take up permanent residence here at the end of the week. The dogs are Great Pyrenees, three of them, one old lad and two younger siblings, a boy and a girl. They have been living for all their lives down the road at my farm, guarding chickens and causing mayhem, but now the farm is coming to an end, and the dogs are coming here, to our smaller homestead. The fencing is new, and we’ve only been waiting for a shed to be delivered so the dogs would have shelter, and the great ivory mutts will be relocated once and for all. I suspect the local wildlife won’t care for the new intruders. Yet change is coming, in fact all life is is change, and so our little backyard safaris must give way to barking dogs and domesticity. The dogs will come first, then we’ll have ducks, and hens in the spring, and a few goats, and sheep, and then a couple pigs, and a handful of turkeys and roasting chickens for autumn slaughter. If the dogs do their jobs, they’ll be nary a bear or bobcat in sight.

It saddens me, to think of losing that connection to wildness. For the nearly two years we’ve had our house, I’ve been able to have the best of both worlds, with a working farm less than a mile away to feed us and a fourteen acre slice of wooded stream valley at home to offer up something a tad less tame. The farm is winding down though, the land up for sale, and providing food for my family still remains of paramount importance to me. It’s regrettably time to un-wild our land and turn it over to our modest sort of agriculture. It’s anti-NIMBYism: yes, in my back yard. If we’re to eat ethically, and locally, it’ll mean in part giving up our little deer viewing parties. We can watch goats and chickens roaming the field instead, yes, and while that will be quite pleasant speculation in its own right, it won’t be quite the same.

The last year has been one of learning to live with change. Rapid change, unplanned change, often unwanted change, and not just for me and my family but for the world. The pandemic forced us all apart and into our homes, and our country only continued to further fracture and warp under the burden of lies, violence, and irresponsibility. Personally, I’m undergoing a massive life shift, the biggest in a dozen years at least, as I give up not just a career but an identity and struggle to figure out just what comes next. I’m still working on it, and, much like many others, I’m taking life as it comes, day by day. Change is coming fast, but it isn’t always for the worst, and there is always more of it. It was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who said that everything is change, everything is flux (and he who remarked that one cannot sep into the same river twice), and that concept more than anything rings true for me today. Changes, large and small, are coming, every minute of every hour of every day, and it is incumbent upon us to adapt to them. The changes for me, here and now, are small but incremental: a new fence, a few dogs with a new home, a few acres put back into use after sitting untouched for years. But each change has a ripple, and I’m keenly away that those ripples add up to waves if you’re not careful. One day I’ll gather eggs here with my daughter, but I won’t show her deer tracks. We’ll pet our dogs, but we won’t watch bears lumbering across our lawn. We will be happy and a bit more self-sufficient and a little less wild. It’s change, change I’ve committed to. The deer can always leap the fence and vanish away into the woods and be content there. I’m the one who now has to live in their absence.