Wildness

Mother Earth is wild. She tells me this, and few humans, upon reflection, would argue that she is not. We are a part of her; we too are wild. If we cannot gain the wisdom to do it ourselves, she will move to return us to the wilderness where our origins, and our future, lie. What, for humans now, does being wild mean? As with any human answer, even from those who hear Mother Earth, its most important element is the response, “I don’t know.” Most of Mother Earth’s wild creation is beyond me and all humans, because we can experience very little of its totality. I and other Angelinos are also limited by our dominant culture, which has rejected wildness for many generations past. However, what we can see and learn about wildness is vital to our rejoining, as willing and eager participants, our Earth’s vast and wondrous life.

Generally speaking, to be wild is to be able to begin – for us, to be born - thrive, develop, unfold, interrelate, mature, reproduce if you are a life form, be transformed by the greater wildness – a transformation which includes what we call death – and begin, in new roles, again. All of this is done without tools, and the social product of tools which we call civilization. Indeed, wildness has typically been represented as savagery, the opposite of civilization, not only primitive – with few or no tools – but also violent, cruel, vicious, and brutal. However, Mother Earth has seen and felt, patiently, the dangerous savagery of human civilizations increasingly possessed with destructive tools, and has finally decided to end this unlively progression, reworking its substance into a healthy part of her. In doing this, she would still make a place for human communities, vigorous and self-motivated, energized by an understanding that wildness, hers, our own, and that of others with whom we share her surface, is peaceful, nurturing, disciplined, respectful, enriching, challenging, changing, endlessly varied, beautiful beyond description, and with wonder which far exceeds our most ambitious imaginings. It is an ultimately unrewarding, insatiable pursuit of tools, designed to obtain and increase without limit our power over wildness, a pursuit to which our dominant cultures, by definition and with misguided passion have committed themselves, that has brought us to our present untenable position. Part of that terrible journey in Los Angeles has been the imprisonment of her waters here, and this will soon end. Another story in that journey, one which is not so easily redressed, is that of the Los Angeles grizzly bears. This story I did not hear from Mother Earth, but from the writings of William McCawley and John Robinson. She has, however, told me how to understand it. The grizzlies are now extinct here. Prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, grizzly bears were abundant in the San Gabriels and in Los Angeles’ other high mountains, and they were greatly venerated by the most populous people native to Mother Earth’s L.A., the Gabrielino/Tongva (their neighbors in the region, the Serrano and the Cahuilla, occupied the foothills of the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains). William McCawley, in an extensive study titled The First Angelinos: The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles, reports that grizzlies, along with ravens and rattlesnakes (“snakes”), were seen by the Gabrielino as the “wise ones of the world” who, below Chengiichngech (one of their premier gods), “rule the world.”[p. 146] McCawley notes that some of their greatest political and religious leaders were believed to be able to transform themselves into grizzlies at will, and this was taken to be an expression of their rightful power to lead. Since the Tongva typically maintained summer camps in the mountains and hunted deer and other less potent animals, fished and gathered nuts and berries, and maintained trade routes through the mountains, they were clearly successful not only in venerating but also in living with the grizzlies. The Europeans who occupied Los Angeles, enchanted by their more potent technology, saw the grizzly as their enemy and their sport. One of Robinson’s early references to the bear, in The San Gabriels (1991 edition) is the following: “In the early 1800s the sport of bear-bull fighting became very popular in the Pueblo of Los Angeles. Fearless [sic] vaqueros stalked, lassoed and captured grizzly bears in the Arroyo Seco, Big Tujunga and other mountain canyons where the beasts were numerous. The enraged behemoths were then dragged into the bull ring in Los Angeles to participate in the brutal bear-bull contests.”[p. 11] Once the Americans arrived in the 1840s and 1850s, hunting, though not for food, became the favored approach to the grizzlies. One early settler, John Brunk, is “said to have been a crack rifleman and killer of grizzly bears which infested the mountains then.”[Robinson, p. 29] In the late 1800s, “Hunting parties traveled the primitive trails on horseback to back country camps…and returned a week or two later loaded down with their kills. The Pasadena Weekly Star of July 23, 1890 reported that ‘A man passed through town from Switzer’s [a popular camp on the Arroyo Seco river in the southwest San Gabriels] with the skins of four bears in his wagon. He was on his way to Los Angeles to get them stuffed. They were all that was left of one grizzly and a black bear and two of the latter’s cubs, which were killed in the Barley Flats neighborhood by T. Wood and a man named Thompson, of Los Angeles.’”[p. 24] Robinson cites another hunting story in greater detail, as told by Walter Richardson of Pasadena about an event in 1892: “While Len Smith went up the stream to do some sketching I took my rifle and went down stream. About halfway to Alder Creek I found fresh bear tracks leading up the canyon. Following the tracks a short distance I found where he had been eating on the remains of a burro, no doubt killed some time before by [mountain] lions…. “I went back to our camp and waited until nearly sundown. Then I decided to go back near the bait and hope for the bear’s return. I hid about 30 yards away where I could see through the brush and boulders. I did not have long to wait. Soon a big grizzly stood on a little sand spit and began to chew on what was once a burro. I took careful aim and could hear the impact of the bullet as it tore through the bear’s shoulder. He was mortally wounded but let out a great roar and made a rush in my direction with the grey hair standing up on his back. I had another cartridge in the chamber of the rifle by the time he had covered half the distance to me and put another shot in the opposite shoulder which dropped him in his tracks. As I approached I put another bullet through his head for safety. He was a large male grizzly and had a good pelt. “Richardson took pains to preserve the skull and pelt of the animal, and years later, presented them to the California Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley. Today, they comprise the most perfect specimens of the California Grizzly in existence.”[p. 24] Robinson supplies other references to the massacre of grizzlies. One tells about a singular achievement of, “Perhaps the greatest hunter to stalk game in the San Gabriels…Charles Tom Vincent….[whose] cabin was a veritable trophy house, filled with the heads and skins of animals he had slain. “Perhaps Vincent’s most amazing exploit occurred when he encountered three grizzlies at one time on [Old] Baldy’s north slope. As reported in the Los Angeles Times of October 6, 1888, Vincent and a companion named DeLancey were tracking big horn sheep when they suddenly encountered three angry grizzlies in the brush. The first grizzly charged DeLancey and was only a step away from the frightened hunter when Vincent managed to send a 50-calibre slug through the bear’s head and neck, dropping it in its tracks. Immediately the two other grizzlies charged, one toward Delancey and the other at Vincent. Vincent was able to down one of the beasts with a shot through its chest just before it reached DeLancey. Upon turning around, the last grizzly jumped on Vincent, knocking him down. As man and beast grappled on the ground, Vincent pulled out his knife and plunged the blade into the bear’s neck, just as DeLancey jammed his rifle against the bear’s head and fired. The grizzly dropped dead atop Vincent, who was badly scratched but not seriously hurt. Afterwards, the hunters skinned the bears and carried the three hides, complete with claws and heads, to Vincent’s cabin, where they hung as trophies for years.”[p. 26] What angered the grizzlies Vincent and DeLancey killed that day was not reported. It didn’t seem to matter. This wonton slaughter finally overwhelmed the San Gabriel grizzlies. By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, they were gone. In similar campaigns, they were also eliminated in the San Bernardinos and San Jacintos. The Gabrielino/Tongva’s rulers of the world, and Mother Earth’s guardians of the Los Angeles mountains for thousands of years, were dead. Less threatening, and less interesting as sport, the ravens and the rattlesnakes remain. The vicious, brutal, unrestrained savages in this history were not the wild grizzlies, who had lived in harmony with the Gabrielino/Tongva for many generations. The savages were the European-derived humans, pursuing their technical dreams of dominance over nature and even themselves, hoping to not simply postpone but banish their own deaths. We are still on this path. In truth, the whole notion of a dominant species is alien to wildness, a fevered invention of tool-driven human culture. The grizzlies were – and are, elsewhere, where they have survived in the wild – large and physically strong animals, omnivores, and not easily killed by any other species in their territory. Except for humans, they might have been characterized as the dominant species in Los Angeles. But it is nonsense to suggest that they sought or achieved control over the survival, behavior, or interactive place of any other species, never mind the land itself. They sought rather to meet their needs and express their unique personalities, as did every other part of the wild region in which they lived, including the native humans. Among these needs were eating appropriate plant and animal material, and therefore killing that which they ate, protecting their young against being eaten, and avoiding injury or death. To interpret their success in this pursuit as dominance, even if they responded to imminent threats by attacking rather than fleeing, is a terrible injustice to grizzlies and to wildness itself. The essential goals of the grizzlies were the same as those of all species who accept the wilderness, and they were no more or less successful than any other which survived, from bacteria to oaks. Mother Earth tells me that our lonely, foolish, pursuit of true dominance may not continue. For most of human history, before the advent of tool-based agricultural societies and the other inventive cultures which followed, to our present DNA manipulating, thermonuclear empowered arrogance, we were not this foolish. Because of our prior tens of thousands of years as Homo sapiens sapiens hunters and gatherers, living not only cooperatively among ourselves, but with the rest of our wild environment (including in Los Angeles), Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin argued in their book Origins that we can recover a “sympathy, and harmony – and humility too – with the planet on which we so recently evolved.” [p.256] Certainly Leakey was not suggesting, nor does Mother Earth today ask, that we become completely wild, since tool-less, our weaknesses would likely lead to our extinction. Nor does she now expect us to seek to live with precisely the tools which the Gabrielino/Tongva employed 300 years ago. What she does require, I hear, is that we abandon our pursuit of dominance, unlimited power, and immortality; that we recognize our character and seek our place within her wildness, and among her other creatures in this region, embracing humility, grace, and life; and that we come to see acceptable tools as gifts from herself and extensions of our own small part in her great being, rather than as means of conquest or escape. Doing this calls us to wildness, in ourselves, and others, as an incredible adventure extending further into the past and future than we can conceive and in which our role is insignificant and at the same time far more than our tools, unbridled, can begin to give us. This new and ancient path will begin with freedom for our rivers and streams. If we are lucky, it may also bring us, again, the company of grizzlies. Bill Luttrell, one voice of Mother Earth