Will The Wolf Survive?Wolves are not our brothers;
They are not our subordinates, either.
They are another nation, caught up just like us
In the complex web of time and life.
-- Henry Beston 1888-1968
*****
I was recently on some business out Sour Lake way, and as I was coming back into town on Highway 105, something I did not understand at the time compelled me to turn off the highway onto Keith Road and drive through the rice fields out that way. Occasionally driving around the farm roads out west of town has been a lifelong practice, or at least since I got a drivers license. As kids, we found that area of sparsely populated farmland and lightly traveled roads a great place to take a date parking at night, or just to drive around and drink and listen to the radio. The rice field roads continue to draw me to them in my adulthood, I think because, for some reason, I just find it calming to drive around out there.
I remembered the other day another reason I am drawn out that way from time to time; something I thought I’d almost forgot, an incident from back when I was 18 or 19. Like happens sometimes, thinking again about this long ago and odd and seemingly random occurrence caused it, at first fuzzy, to become crystal clear in my memory again. And, although I did not realize it fully at the time it happened, I know now this seemingly trivial event would end up having long-lasting resonance in my life.
*****
My cousin and I were out riding around one afternoon in his pickup truck, around the rice field roads out west of town, drinking beer and listening to an Astros game. We liked to do that. There was something so peaceful and calming about riding around those empty two-lane roads, some of them barely paved, some of them no more than caliche and dust, riding around on the front end of a buzz and listening to the game. We would do that for hours. Out there, we were just outside the city limits; so we didn’t have to worry about cops, and there was just enough rural-ness about to make it seem like we were really out in the country, even though in most places we were no more than ten to fifteen minutes from town. Still, sometimes we could ride along for miles and never see anything but levees, irrigation canals, rice fields either flooded or fallow, rows of tallow trees along the fence lines, and every so often a collection of farm buildings and a house. I suppose the lack of visible clutter lent to the calming effect, that and the cold beer. But the Astros announcers – Gene Elston and Dewayne Staats on that particular day – lent to the good feeling, as well. We’d been listening to those guys broadcast Astros games on the radio, in one configuration or another, since we were kids.
*****
One of my clear childhood memories is of being eight or nine years old, lying in my bed one night and listening to Elston and Harry Kalas and Loel Passe broadcasting a game against the Dodgers. I was listening on this Philco radio I had, larger than a transistor but still a portable, listening under the covers with it turned down low, because it was past my bedtime. It was late in the game and the Astros were down by a run. They were up to bat, and had made two quick outs, but then had got a man on. And up to the plate came Jimmy Wynn, The Toy Cannon. He was the Astros last, best hope, for that game anyway. It seemed like Elston’s play-by-play during Wynn’s at bat, and the commentary from Kalas, just heightened the tension of the moment. The entire time I lay there with my fingers crossed on both hands, and my toes crossed on both feet, hoping against hope that Wynn would get hold of one and really drive it. I was giving it everything, everything I had, as I am sure Jimmy Wynn was. . . but, alas, on that night it wasn’t to be. Wynn went down on a weak pop up; one could sense the disappointment in Gene Elston’s otherwise even tones. Dangit! The Astros were on their way to another close loss.
Of course, had I been more sensible back then, I’d have realized that the late, dramatic home run was pretty rare, probably a silly thing to wish for. But I wasn’t that sophisticated in those days. Had I been, it might also have occurred to me that baseball was full of disappointments, particularly if one was an Astros fan. But I didn’t realize that yet, either; and in retrospect, I am kind of glad I didn’t. Most of life’s disappointments were still ahead of me, and I was always naïvely hopeful when it came to the Astros. Good for me.
*****
Now here we were, a decade later, all-knowing teenagers driving around drinking beer in a pickup truck. Still listening intently to the game, creating our own mental images of the action to go along with the commentary, as the countryside passed us by. I have often felt that one of the only true connective threads running through my by now pretty long and often turbulent life is my affiliation with and affection for the Astros. It is poignant to me to think that all along, no matter how fucked up I or my life was – or how un-fucked up, for that matter – I always kept up with the Astros, made as many games in person as I could, listened to the broadcasts when I couldn’t. Those days in the rice fields are just one example.
On that particular day, a gloomy Saturday afternoon and drizzling rain where we were, the Astros were taking on the Cubs, I think at Wrigley. The game had been going along for awhile, and it was tied or maybe Houston was behind by a run. We’d been through most of a six-pack and were coming around a ninety degree turn on one of the farm roads in the rain when the back tires skidded across the pavement a little and the truck spun out and ended up nosed in against a barbed-wire fence, facing across some guy’s field. It wasn’t any big deal, we hadn’t been speeding or anything. I think the beer and a preoccupation with the game on the radio had caused my cousin to forget to compensate for the fact the asphalt was wet and slick, and we sort of gently skidded partway off the road.
We sat there and collected ourselves for a moment and kind of laughed; a moment of quiet before my cousin would put the three-speed in reverse (three-on-a-tree, remember?) and back us onto the roadway again. He was about to do just that when we saw it. Out across this field we were facing, almost all the way to the back of it, was a gray wolf, standing there in the straw, looking over to see what the commotion was.
I’d seen red wolves before, out duck hunting; but they were pretty small, and very elusive. Pretty much the most I’d ever seen, in the half light, was the ass end of one as it disappeared over the side of a levee and off into the marsh. But this was a big wolf, and gray, no doubt about it. I don’t know what the hell it was doing out there – I don’t think big wolves have ever been indigenous this far down (I’d seen signs of them around our place in Tyler County, in the Piney Woods, but never on the coastal plain), and this was pretty close to the city, which wolves generally avoid. Anyway, it didn’t really matter, it was an amazing sight. My cousin and I sat there for several seconds, mesmerized. Then before we knew it, the wolf was gone; and almost immediately we went about trying to confirm with and affirm to each other what had just happened. I don’t know why, but we were almost giddy about it for awhile. Eventually, though, the moment passed, and we got back to our beer, and the game. The Astros rallied late that afternoon, and pulled another one out in the end. Fuck the Cubs.
*****
I never told my cousin, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that wolf, for a long, long time. How he was free, but not really. He was being fenced in, and he was probably not long for this world. But he had it in him to be free, he knew what it felt like. I couldn’t get over that. I kept thinking if I could have just looked into his eyes for a few moments longer, I would have been able to feel what that felt like, too. Ridiculous, but that is what I thought. For many years, on the odd occasion I had to pass by that field, I would stop my vehicle and get out and look. I didn’t really expect to see a wolf again. But sometimes I would see one, just as it turned from looking at us, not caring at all, and then loped off across a field and faded into the brush, as the pipes and flares from the Mobil Chemical refinery rose off in the distance, through the gray and misting rain, beyond the rice fields.
Maybe it was the ghost of that wolf I saw. Or maybe I was a ghost of myself, back to see that wolf again. I’ve never been able to work it out, and after awhile I get really confused trying to. But, God. . . I am haunted by a wolf I barely saw, thirty years ago. I am haunted by a freedom I never had, was never meant to have, never will have. And, I think, I am haunted by the scariest ghost of them all. That being myself.
*****
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