Bring the Wilderness Into Your Life
There’s a reason we’re drawn to the wild, especially when it feels far away
One morning on a hike in my neighborhood, a massive gray bobcat emerged from the bushes and onto the trail in front of me. I dug my heels into the ground and tugged on my dog’s leash, but she was too busy sniffing a rock to notice. Some bodyguard.
The bobcat stared back at me with wide, yellow eyes, like a startled housecat. I took a step closer, but a voice snapped me out of it. “What are you doing?!” my husband whispered from behind. “We gotta get out of here!”
It’s not uncommon to see wildlife where I live, in a woody neighborhood right outside of a big city. Mostly, it’s hungry coyotes on the streets. Maybe the occasional bear in someone’s backyard jacuzzi, which always makes the evening news. But the bobcats had been coming out more lately. My husband had seen another one, but it was lying limp on the side of a highway among discarded soda cans and fallen hubcaps.
You see this in a lot of cities. Two summers ago, on a drive to my parents’ house from the airport in Houston, we passed 10 dead deer in 20 minutes. There were so many, it almost felt like a warning. How tightly can we squeeze the land around us before we destroy it all? And maybe even ourselves in the process?
