As children, unbeknownst to our teachers and parents, we played in the vast canyon behind our elementary school. A high-walled and densely wooded ravine situated between suburban streets, it contains a surging stream flowing into Burns Bog, the 5000-year-old domed peat bog that acts as the lungs for the lower mainland. Like monkeys we scrambled down the jagged cliff face, rappelling on roots to the very bottom. Free from parental eyes we roamed, hunting dragons and trolls, scaling logs and fording rivers, daring each other to run through the huge caverns of the metal drainage culverts, footsteps ringing in the dark. We slogged through mires of the blackest mud, viscid swamp that sucked off your shoes and left you sinking in socks amongst the waxy leaves and cadmium flowers of the skunk cabbage, the stink burning your nose. Only later did I learn the dangers of that mud. In 2006 a wayward mountain biker had to be plucked from the freezing waist-deep quicksand by a search-and-rescue helicopter after being stuck for almost two hours in the bog, just before his cellphone died in the dark.
As teenagers we smoked pot and took acid trips down there, built bonfires on the edge of the black wood, danced and fucked in the shadows. We followed the train tracks through the trees, clambering onto the stopped cars and jumping off when they started rolling again, dared each other to stay pressed against the raised concrete supports under the bridge as the trains roared by just two feet from our faces—oh the horror if you were to slip or freak on acid—and ran howling through the night, a pack of wild juvenile wolves. One summer afternoon we stumbled across a ragged couple living in a shack, some sort of crazy bog people surrounded in stacks of used tires. “Whatta you kids doing out here?” the woman croaked at us through a mouthful of brown teeth. “Careful of them coyotes out back, took down one of my dogs last month.” I stared at the three or four mutts snapping and leaping about the campfire, muscular wiry dogs almost as big as me. We never went that far in again.
I’ve always been drawn to the wild spaces that border civilization. Now as an adult I’m called back to the trails, not to throw rocks at trains or dance down salmon streams (although some secret part yearns for those carefree delinquent delights), but to do something almost as exhilarating—to run. Near the home where I used to live sprawls a 10-kilometre stretch of greenbelt; a series of wood-lined arteries flowing from the heart of suburbia, intersecting streets, crossing streams, and meandering through parks. Essential for our cities, timberland corridors protect salmon stocks, preserve air quality, and provide an oasis for wildlife. Birds, rabbits, raccoons, rodents, and skunks all make their homes here. Even the coyote, that magical trickster of mythology and strongest of the urban dwellers, thrives in this fringe environment while remaining elusive and hidden.
Weaving through the bustle of dog walkers, I traverse the greenbelt daily. Like millions of others, I love to run. Like millions of others, I hate to run. Runishment. It’s not so much the running I hate, but the enormous motivation that it takes to actually do it, the icy mornings freezing your cheeks, the stitch burning your side, the growing numbness in your feet, the never-ending hills. But against all these obstacles, I crave the feeling of running, the elation of pushing my body, of breath coming deep and muscles quivering. And when it is over, even though my flesh is aching, screaming sometimes, I revel in the satisfaction of having done it.
It may be that this need to run is innate, programmed into our DNA—the persistent hunting theory of evolution, the idea that humans evolved by chasing down prey until it dropped exhausted in front of us. Our bodies are built for motion—arched feet, strong Achilles tendons, powerful hips and thighs, and a nuchal ligament at the back of the neck to keep our heads still while moving. Running makes us feel good, floods the endocrine system with endorphins. It becomes addictive, a natural drug. The runner’s high they call it—that magical moment when you hit your stride and experience what psychologists have termed the flow state, when signals from the sense organs bypass the cerebral cortex and connect directly to the muscles. This allows the body to function without consciously thinking about its movements, and thus the mind is free to enter a meditative state. And that is what exactly why I trail run, to reach that meditative state in which I can witness the patterns of life ebbing and flowing around me.
Nature connectedness describes an individual’s understanding and relationship to nature, even the parts that may be frightening. This innate phenomenon is the result of occupying the majority of our evolutionary history in the natural environment. With most of us today spending up to ninety percent of our time indoors, access to urban green spaces is essential, as studies show that when we appreciate the natural environment we become more inclined to protect it. Being in nature makes us happier and kinder too. I am steward of this space, stopping mid-run to pick up wrappers and cans (a fad now called plogging), preventing garbage from entering the stream, moving fat slugs off the path with a stick, watching for dog walkers to clean up after their beasts.
In the leafy embrace of the trail I attune to the changing of the seasons, witness the rhythms of life and death. Watch the spring shoots grow longer each day, inhale the scent of summer rain, feel the crunch of leaves underfoot. Relish in the miasma of matter breaking down, summer green sliding into winter brown. Spy mushrooms sprouting from decomposing logs—variegated puffballs, chanterelles, and fly agarics, spotted red caps gleaming with poison, hallucinogenic, dangerous. I long to pick them. One spooky morning dew clings in the air revealing hundreds of spider webs lining the bushes, radiating spokes with enormous arachnids hanging in the centers, eyes glittering. Here a battalion of ants teem on a mound; there a garter snake wriggles in the grass, and scores of rats and birds rustle through brush.
From my runs I drag home feathers and flowers, fall leaves and chestnuts, new mushrooms to identify from my books. Treasures on the trail, each new find giving a secret thrill. Cracked robin eggs and a finch with a broken wing that later dies in the backyard, mouth open and closing in little miserable bleats. Back to be buried in the same earth; I tried. My tears go to the trail too. When I’m stressed or angry I work out my concerns through running, in moving meditation I let the woods diffuse my woes. There I connect to the inner seasons of my psyche, shifting moods that echo the weather patterns and the cycle of time.
In the brush I discover old bones and dead birds and gingerly carry back the pieces, wings and claws and skulls to desiccate in shoeboxes of salt and Borax. It preserves them, dries the flesh, kills the bacteria. I am a bone collector of old. I would love to find the skeleton of a deer, soak the skull in a stiff bucket of hydrogen peroxide, use the thigh bone as a beater for my drum, but alas the deer are long gone from my bone orchard.
I could handle a squirrel though. Remove the fur with a skinning knife, scrape the hide, boil the bones, reassemble the skeleton with wire. Or try my hand at taxidermy. There was an old taxidermist by the mall who I’d always planned to visit, but the man died before I could meet him, and his secrets of stuffing and mounting went with him into the earth.
A squirrel, but nothing larger. Even if I found a dead coon or possum I couldn’t deal with it, bring it home and skin it on the kitchen table, drain its fluids in the bathtub, boil up the bones on my stove. My partner would freak; I would freak. Not in this cramped urban lifestyle. I need a workshop, a laboratory, a mad scientist’s lair where I can bone collect in peace. At the very least, a shed.
I consider the things that I bring home gifts, organic fragments that connect me to the whole of nature. Sometimes the gift is not a physical thing but rather a flash of inspiration, a brilliant idea, the right words, a connection to the cosmic flow. Sometimes even more.
My first time on the trail I saw two them standing in the morning mist—shy, majestic, sagacious. The coyotes. A feral canine, the coyote is a hybrid beast, not domesticated like a dog nor as wild as a wolf. They thrive in semi-populated areas, feasting on rabbits and rodents, house cats, lost dogs, garbage, and roadkill. They make their dens in the wooded thickets of the greenspaces, roaming the corridors between civilization and the true wild. In mythology, Coyote is a powerful spirit associated with the deep magic of life. To see one reveals the truth behind illusion and chaos, a playful trickster who brings a dawning awareness of the darker aspects, the death and transformation that finds us all in the end.
One of my ex-boyfriends had Coyote as his power animal. Thinking back, I think he was first trans partner, a feminine spirit with long blonde hair, the light shining out of him. But I was uncertain what to do with all that light; o for the dark delights I have tasted since, and my body burns in regret. Long lost to me now, not even the Gods of Facebook can find that wandering soul. Strangely, magically, I dreamed of him the night before I saw the coyotes on the trail. It means he is safe and running free, I think.
I have not seen the coyotes since. On each run I scout for them, but it’s been four years now and not a flash of their fur. I hear them yipping in their packs at midnight, see their woolly droppings dotting the trail, find a few clawed tracks, but never the beasts themselves. Their howls play through the darkness, tease me as I lay in bed. I long to go down to the woods and run the trails at nighttime to find them, but I am afraid.
Fear often creeps in around the trail. A dark side to all things, a taking for the giving, and death is part of it. Wild spaces, like the shadow thoughts of the subconscious razoring through the civilized mind, bring us face to face with this darkness. Crystalline shards of frost killing new shoots, the fox pouncing on a squirming mouse, deadly jack-o-lantern mushrooms masquerading as tasty chanterelles. Try as we might to distance ourselves, to neutralize the nightmares of our evolutionary dreams, the primal fears of the wild are real—swarms of wasps, maggots wriggling in rotted flesh, jagged rocks to fall on, rabid dogs to tear us apart.
In the bog, my friends and I often climbed the clay wall, a tall embankment of grey slippery mud. It was a delight to dig in, slide on, rip down the side like a surfer shooting a wave, but one day it gave way, collapsed and became a landslide of sluicing ooze. It took one of the twins, whipped her from her feet, pushed her down to the bottom of the ravine and buried her deep.
Everybody screamed; her scream was cut off by all that mud. The frantic scramble to dig her out, head submerged and unable to draw a breath. Scraping the clay from her face, fingers fishing it out of her mouth and throat, coaxing her to cough and spit, her skin as grey as the mud. She almost died that day, and our parents never knew. The first taste of fear in wild spaces.
I’m a medium pace runner; I do speed bursts, but I’d be easy pickings for a hunting pack of coyotes or a rabid, running dog. And that is a deep fear, rounding the trail into the path of a snarling canine. It barks and lunges. I flinch, cower, cover my stomach and groin—my most vulnerable bits—with my arms. Maybe the owner will appear and call it off. Maybe I can use the mace in my pocket. Maybe I can kick its vital areas—eyes, mouth, ribs, groin, no one likes their balls punted. Dogs watch a person’s hands, that’s where the pats and food come from, but they are unprepared for your feet to react. If it grips onto my arm, use my other arm to press down on its head and fall with my weight against its body, twisting hard to the side, breaking its neck.
I have only come across nice dogs, or mean dogs with muzzles, on my runs. But like the archetypal pages of Grimm’s fairy tales where predators lurk around every tree, fear follows you in the wild. The children’s song warns us not to go out into the woods alone. For us kids in the bog, the big bad wolf was Clifford Olson. A serial killer roaming the lower mainland in the 80s, he tortured and killed young children. The fear ran rampant then. I remember the notice on the yellow paper from school, my mother warning of what could happen to young girls playing alone. I shivered in my bed that night, unable to fully imagine what those things could be.
Yet I still went down to the canyon as a child; I could not stay away.
Once a woman stopped me on my running trail. “Do you run here often?” she asked, scanning my face with worried eyes. “Is it safe?” I assured her that it was. “I guess the creepers don’t know about this place,” she replied. We ran on our separate ways, me heading into the trail at one end, she rounding down the other side. As my feet pummeled the wet earth, her words wriggled in my head, slimy nightcrawlers of fear. Not creeps, but creepers. Creepers who lurked in the thicket and scuttled out, creepers with talons that swiped at my ankles, creepers who hungered for something more, something I am unable to fully articulate here.
And then I did not see her again. I should have met the woman on the other side of the park, passed her on the trail with a friendly wave—see, nothing to fear, no creepers here. I saw the man with the jumping boxer again, but not her. Where did she go? Did creepers get her, drag her off somewhere?
One fall day I rounded the trail and stumbled upon a man stopped in the middle. With his shaggy beard, dirty jeans, and worn boots he was not a runner, but he chucked something into the bushes and took off. I saw what could have been the handle of a knife sticking out of the back waistband of his jeans, but I wasn’t sure at all. I slowed for a long while, let him get far ahead, but still, I continued my run.
It’s rare but it happens; sometimes the big bad wolves do bite. But just because there might be dangerous beasts does not mean we have to be prey, innocent red riding hoods, victims. In Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, she uses fairy tales as tools for empowering women. When women remember their wild nature, she says, when they claim their own inner wolves, they become strong and powerful. The wild woman howls inside each one of us, pushing away fear, setting boundaries, protecting our territory. We trust our intuition and instincts, sharpen our own claws and fangs.
I met an old woman walking on the path who carried a stick as tall as her. She swung it, showed me how she would use it. She didn’t look frightened at all. Her wild woman instincts were strong, fangs deadly, connected to that cunning inner place, where intuition and power make you bold. I too am developing my instincts. On the trail I can hear things before they appear, smell people as they pass—their soap and hair products, deodorant, or the stink of cigarettes. Once a herd of high school boys loped by like antelopes, legs pumping in baggy shorts. I heard them snorting and grunting long before they came into view, felt the ground shake, and I pressed tight to the bushes as the odours washed over me—sweat socks and perspiration, acne medication and hair gel, the tang of hormonal flush and raw citric nervousness.
My senses are attuning. I hear faint rustling, see the movement as it happens, an awareness of the endorphins rushing in. If it’s a bird that skitters past, I can identify it. If it’s a biting dog that leaps out, I know how to aim the mace. If it’s something else of a different skin, I’m ready to fight hard, won’t get taken to that secondary location. Claws out, teeth bared for the throat, the kneecap, the groin, even on big bad wolves the vulnerable bits are the same. I trust my instincts, fight or flight decisions made on the spur of the moment.
If we let fear take us, keep us bottled inside our houses or running only at gyms, then what are we? Not wild women for sure. My partner asked me why I didn’t turn around when I saw the man with the possible knife. I’m sure my mother would be horrified to know that I didn’t stay out of the canyon as a child. All I can say is this—that if I allow myself to feel fear, to drink down even one debilitating drop, I will never return to the wild spaces, and that is the most terrifying fear of all. And the man was running from me, from my fangs and claws.
Last week during a morning jog, the sun streaming down, the new green of spring bursting from shoots, I finally saw it. Silently stalking on the hidden path that runs through the brush inside the main trail, a flash of mottled grey. Always it is on the secret paths where we find the magic, and so close I could’ve almost touched it. And I realized with a jolt that I was not running with the wolves, those beautiful creatures of the true wood; no, it was the thrivers of the wild spaces, the magical adapters, the tricksters of life and death that I’d finally found, for I am a woman who runs with the coyotes.