We are never alone
Our trailcam is trained on the enclosure in the upper field where we bury our compost. Every night it records the presence of coyotes, sometimes one, sometime a little pack of three sibs, munching away on banana peels and carrot tops and onion skins. Whoever believes that coyotes are strict carnivores apparently forgot to inform our visitors.
In addition to the coyotes there’s the occasional family of racoons, an opossum or two, a bunny, a feral cat, a tiny scurrying mouse and once, spectacularly, a swarm of slithering river otters. There were about eight of them, coursing over and around the frame where the compost is buried. They didn’t linger—there were no fish to be found.
When I walk up the hill to bury the compost I never see any of these critters; their feedings are strictly nocturnal. They have no interest in seeing how their nightly meal is delivered, but the avocado pits and trimmed broccoli ends and rotting head of cauliflower that was hidden in the back of the vegetable bin scattered across the lawn testify to their activity.
The webcam recordings make me think of other unseen things that have occupied the same space I do. For example, our usually mute driveway eloquently speaks to us after it snows. It tells us about the coyotes on the way up to their snack bar, and of the over-wintering geese in search of the sparse supply of grass. And the revealed tire tracks inform us that someone got lost driving down Manual Road and ended up in our driveway, only to turn around and continue the search for their destination. Surely all this activity goes on even when it hasn’t snowed, but we have no inking of our myriad visitors.
I expand my time frame to consider visitations in the more distant past. We live on land that was occupied by Native Americans for thousands of years. Indeed, a small remanent of their long-term presence is the Suquamish Tribe Reservation just across the bridge. Since a creek borders our property and flows into the bay, our back yard must have been a frequent gathering place. When I mow the lawn I’m undoubtedly walking through the exact same space where families sat in a circle and ate roasted salmon and wove cedar baskets, and where kids piled up oyster shells to see who could build the tallest stack. And when I paddle my kayak around the bay I’m almost certainly crossing the paths of innumerable canoes setting out on fishing expeditions or carrying people to the mainland.
Going even further back, I read that Columbia mammoths, American mastodons, and giant ground sloths inhabited western Washington. They may well have trudged up and down Manual Road, munching on leaves, succulent grasses, tree bark, and the sedges lining the shore. It’s amazing to think that when I’m driving my old green truck up the road to drop off a package at UPS I’m traversing the same space that these ancients once occupied. Fortunately it’s quite unlikely that I’ll run into one.
Then there are the things that simultaneously occupy the space that I do. Obviously, the air I breath and the sunshine I bask in. But a frightening proliferation of electromagnetic waves are also pulsing around and through me—Verizon and T-Mobile; 98.1 FM; 444.475 MHz, the frequency of our local ham radio repeater; innumerable microwave communications; cosmic rays arriving after a trip of hundreds of light years; and who knows how many encrypted messages and drone signals and radar waves.
The things I’ve mentioned so far are all subject to documentation through camera, snow prints, some sort of detection device, or an historical or fossil record. But what about presences in the space we occupy that aren’t so easily verified? Our Suquamish neighbors certainly experience the immanence of their ancestors, as well as other beings, both animal and supernatural. Other traditions recognize a wide variety of occult entities, some benign, some not so much. For example, many people are aware of angels, always nearby, who guard and protect and guide them. And there are those who believe that we regularly rub elbows (or whatever appendages they might have) with unseen aliens of various origins and motivations. Who am I to say that none of this is so?
Surely then, even when we think we’re experiencing solitude, we’re fooling ourselves—we are never alone. We’re always sharing the same space with a multitude of entities, past and present, potentially detectable and not. And undoubtedly, in ways we’re unaware of, we’re affected by these presences.
On some mornings I grab the compost bucket and walk up the wooden steps to the upper field to bury the contents. I taste the crisp air and tune in to the big cedar’s gently waving branches and, above the branches to the slowly streaming clouds. Then I look down the hill to the brightening bay. I feel peaceful, and alone. But if I reflect, I realize that I’m not alone at all. I’m with animals, signals, and spirits of all sorts. If I pause my digging and lean on my shovel I can feel them. Then I look up and see the coyotes—noses furiously twitching, eyes scanning the horizon for friend, foe, and food. And I smile in their presence.