Field Notes, June 9

Pancreatitis, LA Riots, and the Birds of Western Montana - Just another day.

It feels like a summer morning. I wake up early and the sun is already coming in the windows in long, warm shadows that dance on the walls in the shadowed shapes of aspen leaves and pine branches. My dog Acre, who has had a rough couple days, lays between my wife and I and for the first time in a few days, is relatively relaxed on his back, paws up, already staring at me when I open my eyes. He’s always watching.

It’s warm in Montana and our days our long. The creeks and rivers are slowly starting to slow down. The rocks that lead to the island where I go swim every morning are slowly emerging like turtle shells again so I can hop my way across. There is still a little snow up high, but it is quickly retreating; you can almost see it disappear by the minute and our telltale western smoke is hinting as it seeps down from Canada.

People new here sound an alarm at a hot, dry day, and double up when smoke rolls in. I don’t like the smoke any more than anyone else (though it does make for fantastic photographs) but I’ve also been here long enough to know that the West gets dry, we have a ton of forest, and fires happen. It’s ok to get a little bummed, but I’m not willing to go along with the alarm. We have, in my opinion, too much alarm lately. Everyone is alarmed about everything. It’s clearly a symptom of too much media. The media sells alarmism because it holds attention and attention equates with dollars. Alarmism = Dollars. It’s basic math. And when you spend enough time off your phone, you can’t help but see it glaring in your face in pulsing LED lights when you turn the device back on. Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee it. But it also surprises me how many people seem to fall for it. There are things that warrant an alarm from time to time, but at this point the effectiveness of alarmism is being dampened. I have an annoyance with the current state of alarmism that I’ll air and move on from. I’m tired of the nationwide babysitting that has resulted from this ever state of heightened alarmism. A hot day now means that someone at the National Weather Service is going to post out that we need to be sure to drink water and find shade. Heavy rains results in our local city leaders issuing alerts and actually making signs to post at trailheads to “be prepared for mud.” I wish I was kidding. I’m not. It’s getting out of hand.

But it’s a beautiful morning, and my dog is doing a bit better, so I can’t help but be happy. And in the sense that this Substack is really a place where I’ve carved out the ability to talk about just about anything, I’ll tell you a bit about my dog for minute, not because he is particularly special (though he is) but because I think most dog owners are much like me… very attached to their dogs.

Dogs, as any dog owner knows, don’t live long enough. And that brevity is perhaps what makes us cling to them so much while they are around. I grew up with dogs and have been fond of nearly every one of them, though some more than others. But in my twenties I got two dogs of my own, and attached to them perhaps ridiculously so. I rarely was without them. We were a pack. One of my dogs got Addisons disease when she was about years old and lived out a long happy but also heavily medicated life. Seeing a dog get sick is the worse, and as someone with kids, I can say that a big part of the challenge, and difference, is that dogs, unlike kids, can’t tell you what is wrong.

So last Wednesday Acre woke up feeling off. My only clue was that he ate the chicken from his bowl without touching anything else. Acre has bougie food. It’s a Canadian slow dried, fancy kibble, and every day he gets it with chicken and pumpkin and blueberries on top. It’s a diet that has served him well and he’s fit as hell. But that morning he plucked a few pieces of chicken out, and quit. That was sign one that something was off.

I noted it, but we went to the creek in the morning as we do every morning, and while he seemed noticeably a little slow, he was excited to see some of the dogs he regularly sees, and jumped in the creek to swim. It’s not totally unusual for him to have a bad belly, it happens every once in a while, and I’ve assumed it’s from eating unmentionables as he does occasionally, being a herder. But honestly, I’ve seen him eat unmentionables plenty of times and not be sick, so I assumed perhaps he went overboard. He skipped dinner that night.

But then Thursday I noticed something different. He kept not moving. And when he did he looked wildly uncomfortable. And then he’d freeze. Just frozen, as if in pain. He’d try to lay down but only get halfway there. He’d try to stand but freeze. I felt around his belly to see if there were any sharp points of pain but he revealed nothing, but then I’d look over and see him halfway up/halfway down, and kind of frozen. Something definitely very off. No pukes, no bad bowels, but something very off.

It turns out that this frozen, front half down, back half up is fairly common indicator of pancreatitis. At the vet he got the full work up with x-ray and blood work, which showed that his pancreas was inflamed, and we were sent home with a quiver of medical remedies, but not any good answers as to why or how he got it. And after reading all weekend and getting a good number of messages from people here and on IG, I’ve come to realize, there just isn’t a ton known about it other than in some dogs it’s related to heavy fat foods, especially ones that get table scraps and are overweight. Neither of those are true for Acre, and his food isn’t considered high fat, so we are left in the category of the unknown, which as someone that likes to fix things, I detest.

I’m a fixer. I don’t fix things that don’t need it, but when something of my breaks I don’t hesitate. I don’t like having a broken car, I don’t like having something broken on house, and I certainly don’t like a broken dog. And then coming to find out that the position he was freezing in was such to relieve the pain of an inflamed pancreas, well shit, I definitely don’t like that. Here he was telling us and we didn’t even understand.

Dogs are better than us in this regard. There I was poking and prodding his belly, which surely hurt like hell, but he never once hesitated in trusting me. He didn’t nip, he didn’t yelp, he’d just look at me.

Luckily we have some great vets in Missoula, and he was on painkillers by Thursday night and seems to be on the mend. He’s hungry. He’s running around the yard at least a little. But he’s also sticking incredibly close to me which tells me he’s not quite there yet.

Dogs. We don’t deserve them. Be sure to be nice to all the ones you encounter.

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The day goes on. Heats up. I can smell the faint hint of woodsmoke in the air. There have been years when June has been full forest fire mode here, and while we have a few small ones simmering around the state, for all practical purposes, its a win to not have big ones going. I’ll take the win.

Meanwhile I just opened my phone to X for a few minutes. Holy crap. I didn’t realize. In keeping my head away from corporate news as much as possible, seeing what is going on in LA was a total shock to my system. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on what is going on, but I am pretty knowledgeable in one other aspect of major events like this… Funding. Large events like this are rarely just pop up, organic events. It takes planning. It takes money. And that is always my first question… who is funding this? I’m about as pro-free speech as you can find, and absolutely am against censorship. But I’m also a firm believer in an orderly society in which I can protest something I disagree with but still allow you to pass and go about your day, and that clearly isn’t what is going on here. This is wild. And I hate to see it. I want for all of America an order and civility that allows people to enjoy where they live. LA has some issues right now. And it’s wild. But as I said, I’m not following this enough to speak much on it. My current roll in life is raising my kids into their adulthood, running a business, and trying to eke out a few books along the way. And while I firmly believe everyone should be involved in their local community, I think there is point in which people try to pretend they are more connected to distant events more than they actually are. And this all goes back to the massive dopamine magnet that is social media and “news” which tries to ever lure us into believing we are part of stories that we have nothing to do with. I can be sad about distant tragedies but there is point in which we are absolutely inundated by tragedy we simply lack the capacity to keep up with. We are meant to be localized creatures. The internet tricks our brains into believing we are part of and can affect any and everything around the globe. The simple truth is we can not. We can empathize, but we have to recognize that if we let too many of these stories inundate us too deeply, we eventually become burdened to the point where we are frozen in our own landscape, which is the only one we can actually affect and interact with. When we focus too much on what lies beyond our own horizon we neglect that which is lies outside our door.

So I’m not trying to sound unsympathetic about what is going on in LA, but to a degree, the people of LA are going to have to figure it out. In the meantime, wow, the optics are stunning sad and wild. And I get why people are worried… will this sort of thing happen where you live? And what caused it? We are, by our nature, fixers. But often we can not fix what is directly in front of us, let alone what is going on thousands of miles away. I can’t help but think of Acre… If I can’t fix his pancreas, how can I expect to fix Las Angelos. I can’t. I close the app, and it all vanishes. Not for those there. But for me it does. I’m back on the porch. My tired dog laying in the grass, a little happier and more relaxed than yesterday, but still not himself. Meanwhile the world burns, and nothing new under the sun. Etc. Please don’t judge, I’m just making notes from the field, filed for those that are interested in what’s going on up here.

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I had to get a little work done. I’m back. I make another coffee. Hoping to send this out today with more in the pipeline. I was on a bike ride up above town last night on a ridge at sunset. The early summer flowers were in full bloom, both on the ground and in bushes. Everything is lush right now. The sun shining through the mountain air at a low angle made for beautiful orange light, and being in motion, heart rate up, climbing my bike up and up the single track trail, nothing in my ears except the sound of a raven, a western tanager, a pine siskin, and a ruby-crowned kinglet. My mind is racing through ideas I’d like to write, and I stop towards the top of the climb to pause and write a few of the ideas in my notes, but then I hear this raven making his burbling sounds and it’s too much, I have to just sit down a minute and listen. That’s when I start to hear the others and I don’t know what birds they are, but a friend has turned me onto a bird ID app and shown me enough birds recently that I’m curious to learn more, want to know which call is which and what their story is. These birds inhabit the same mountains I inhabit and basically are my neighbors. I’d like to know more. So I use the app to record them and sure enough it picks up on all the ones listed. Now I scan slowly, walk away from my bike for a few minutes, still catching my breath but looking up in the trees and finding the birds making the noise. And that raven…. While they tend to be one of the most blunt birds around, I find them to be one of my favorites, and when they are up circling the ridges of these mountains, they seem to increase their talk and chatter. And it’s very much that, talk and chatter. Not just squawks and caws, but blurbs, burpts, and burp sounds. Almost like a beep, but more throaty and deep. Then you hear one in the distance. They are clearly talking.

When I get back on my bike, hoping some of my ideas will come back to me as I increase my heart rate again, I hear them, and they seem to be following me up the ridge. When I finally come to the highest point I climb off my bike again, and lean against a tree and watch them. They seem to know I’m here. Is this a show for me? It kind of feels like it. It feels like they are watching me as much as I’m watching them. That’s the thing about ravens… they seem to be very human aware. I had the same sense of this when I worked in fire towers. The ravens wouldn’t just come flying around the lookout every day, they seemed to be visiting. Checking in. Then eventually moving on until the next day. The other birds seem far less aware or interested in my presence, but the ravens very much seem to interested in people.

I get home and have forgotten almost all of what I’d planned on writing. Gone. Vacant. Vanished. But my mind does feel good. Exercise will do that. The moon is coming up. It’s so lovely when it sits in the cradle of the ridge the way it does right now. The shape of our surrounding hills are soft and round and the moon hangs above them just so.