The Dark Beneath the Stairs

For as long as human beings have gathered in groups, and been able to communicate beyond the most elementary expressions of pleasure, anger, fear or instruction, we have told stories. Storytelling, though often associated with entertainment and frivolity, like play amongst children, has a far deeper social connotation. Over time, as stories were passed between generations, they became folklore, inextricably embedded in culture, and, although it may have been inadvertent at first, they developed as a means of recording history. Before reading and writing became basic aspects of many human societies, it was the spoken word that recorded our past. In times before the present myriad of highly advanced forms of entertainment and long-distance communication, people gathered in order to communicate through word of mouth. From the earliest of times, when we had learned that safety lay in numbers, we developed retaining a need to gather where there was warmth and light and the security of the presence of others known to us, with whom we could be safe. And here, thus emboldened, we could rise above our basic primal fears, and create legends and heroes. Folklore.

Storytelling and recording has often been the responsibility of select individuals, while, at another level, most members of societies indulged in the creation and maintenance of folklore. Folklore does not begin as such, but merely as stories that develop into lore over time; we do not consciously create folklore, but, rather, it is the natural storehouse to which a story may inevitably progress. The Elysian Fields of a well-worn story, are attained through its inevitable transcendence into legend or myth, and the inseparability of legend and actual history found in some societies, such as Greek, Italian and North American Indian. It is human nature that stories are generally told with a certain degree of license, insofar as they are often exaggerated. While the first teller of a story may embellish in order to enhance their role in a particular event, it is easy to see how altered a tale may become after generations, or even centuries. Thus legends are born, and often from simple events. We know of this phenomenon in our own time; "the one that got away", the biggest fish, having escaped, where the teller of the tale of the epic catch, although suspect, can never be fully discredited. It may be sport, speed, power, depth or height, in almost every category of life or interest, particularly in the realm of the uncommon or exceptional, we enlarge on our experiences. In doing so we initiate rumor, and rumor, as it grows venerable, becomes legend.

In time long past, somewhere in the foothills of the Pyrenees, a shepherd brings his flock of sheep to fold, in the early twilight of a winter evening. As he gathers them to the safety of lower pasture, he is aware of wolves, almost indiscernible against the trees, moving silently in the gathering dark, vigilant for a laggard ewe. This shepherd, and his forefathers, had wrested a place for their homes and livestock from the wilderness, where every ounce of comfort, every hour of warmth, and each morsel of life-sustaining food, was won through toil and sacrifice. Why would he view the encroaching night and its inhabitants with any of the balanced objectivity we can afford today? To that shepherd, probably born into uneducated peasantry, those wolves could have denied him all he knew of food, warmth, comfort or wealth. Later, in an inn, or round the family hearth, where the sound of the wind and the howling of the wolves might be heard beyond the light of the candle and the warmth of the fire, how likely would that shepherd be to simply moderately mention having seen wolves? Of course, on occasion this may have happened, but what he and so many others like him did was tell a tale that bore little relation to any reality: Thus we created monsters in our imaginations, fiends howling in the dark, waiting to steal our children, something to be feared and fought, necessitating a continuing struggle to civilize the wild, and to give us identity. Could we have wondered that we might not have needed to create these monsters just to give ourselves purpose?

The bear, like many other large animals, particularly those that are predatory or which can, at least, be dangerous to us, has also found its way to legendary status. In a global sense, many of these largest animals are scarce now, tigers, the Florida panther, wolves, panda bears, brown bears. Hemmed into tiny vestiges of their former ranges, the relic populations of these species are on the brink of extinction, in terms of evolutionary time. In the modern urban society, where most of the human population knows very little about these creatures, we live entirely separately from them. In our world of economy, development, safety, suit, compensation and recreation, there is no place for them, but it is interesting that, nonetheless, they universally capture our imaginations. Much of what we do and think suggests that wilderness and animals within it that are more powerful than us, and which we may believe can do us harm, are the antithesis of modern human society. And yet, from the familiarity and security of our largely urban lives, we cloak ourselves in their identity, almost as a last ironic twist in the story of our intolerant and disdainful association with them. Clothing, shoes, fuel, snack foods, vehicles, nick-nacks of every description, often at the basest and most demeaning level; in every way that is remotely conceivable, we scrape the last modicum of identity from the skeleton of reality, for fickle economic ends. From our cities, resorts and cars, our insulating capsules of security, we want there to be monsters, and for our economy, our identity, and as a compensation for the banality of much of modern urban daily life, and simply due to our lack of understanding, we will create them.

Even in the early stages of our development, the intelligence of the human brain, especially when unfettered and untempered by intimate reality or science, made it a fertile breeding-ground indeed for legend and lore of fantastic proportions. In this nether world of fractional reality, we have made a space for all the biggest and fiercest animals, whether they be polar bears, lions, tigers or wolverines. Curiously, they have become so entrenched in this fantastical mental world that we know more about their legendary status that we do of their realities. No creature has a less enviable place in this mire of confusion than the grizzly bear, and it's name is an absolute testament to that. However, despite this, it is the wolf, now eradicated from most of a planet that it once occupied almost all of, that found the securest niche in our psyche, and, ironically, it has held on there with the same tenacity that it holds on with in the real world. Peter and the Wolf, Little Red Riding-Hood, the tale of The Wolves and the Sleigh, from Russian legend, where the ravenous pack gradually devours each horse cut from the traces of a troika, until there is only one left; these tales are legion. The wolf captured our imagination to the extent that we integrated ourselves with it: We created wolfmen and werewolves, an epitome of what we could fear, and the bear was not regarded much differently. In fact, an animal's status in legend and lore is almost directly proportional to its size, strength and potential ferocity. Manhood was gauged against encounters with bears, just as, in other societies, it was against lions or tigers, and many cultures have held association with the spirit of the bear, in great esteem. What warrior worth his salt would be associated with a mouse or a rabbit, and why would the shepherd returning from the hills tell tales of encounters with small creatures who gave no cause for fear, and over whom our mastery was not in question?

In some cultures and societies, ancient legend is still a part of life in the modern, rational, objective and scientific world at the beginning of a third millennium. In many groups that we tend to refer to as indigenous, legend often still exists as the basis of modern life, unquestioned alongside the use of vehicles, electricity and television. In much of what we call Western Society, we may feel that we have rationalized legend and consigned it to its rightful place, but, though we may not be aware of it, we may actually need it as much now as we ever have. We need the woods to be dark and deep and mysterious; a place can be beautiful in terms of topography and morphology, but how much more can it mean to us when we consider the wild residents of its forests and valleys' To those who understand something of wildlife and wilderness, there is an overt appreciation of such things, while appreciation on the part of those who have no understanding of them, rather than being absent, is subliminal.

To most human beings in the modern Western World, ensconced in our cities, working in shops and offices from 9 to 5, wilderness, or what we perceive it to be, is something we seldom understand, so removed are we from it. And the bears and wolves and the other large predators that live in it are, if anything, generally less understood by us than they were in the past. People returning to the town from a wild place often talk in superlatives, and it is amazing how quickly we find ourselves ultimately threatened or challenged: The bear we saw by the creek, the wolf we heard howl, often we exaggerate these things in the same way the European peasants of the middle-ages did. Somehow we want the bear to be fifteen feet tall, we need it to be the biggest, the strongest, the most savage and dangerous; like parasites, we draw vitality from that. And yet, at the same time, we want it to be approachable and benign; we want to wear it, eat it, drive it?be it! We seem not to be able to accept its reality. In our national parks, we don't just want to see a porcupine or a fox, we want to see a bear, and not just a bear, but a grizzly bear, because that, to us, is the ultimate association we can make with the wild. We are thrill- seekers who have no idea of our addiction. We watch horror films to be scared, while also being safe, and in so-doing are no different to the listeners huddled around the fires of old. For all our society does to eradicate the wild and the animals that live within it, particularly the highly vulnerable large predators, we need, and more than that, we crave, the knowledge of their existence.

As a child, like other children I invented ghosts and demons, which populated ruined buildings, woods and any dark nook or crevice that seemed an appropriate place for them. Though frightened alone, I was brave in a group, and would dare close to such places, or run past them, or throw something into them, though even the idea of finding myself alone in them was anathema, and yet how dull life would have been without those places. And later, gathered in safety, we would tell our tall tales of what we had seen; hags, witches, red eyes glowering from the dark; all manner of fantastic things. And we believed them, even believed ourselves, and so we created our legends, legends that often prevailed and grew, over the years, to irrefutable stature.

Human beings have striven against wilderness and wild animals since the beginning of our time, and, in the past, we have either been incapable of wiping whole species out, or, at least, we have not been aware that we had the ability to do so. While much of our identity comes from the things we have striven with most, whether animal, or more abstract, such as remoteness and climate, we did not question what life would be like without them, and whether we would actually want a benign existence, even if it was obtainable. The times of being able to strive continually against anything that challenges our existence and livelihoods are gone. If we are at all conscious, we must be afraid that we could now achieve that which we have always striven for. Is it possible that we can live in the mountains and raise fruit or cattle and actually want to get rid of, or be responsible for the getting rid of, the last of the bears and of the other predators? Could we knowingly destroy what is left of what gives us so much of our identity? What would ranching, farming, or just living in, the Mountains be if the most fundamental aspects of life and identity there, were gone?

Nature's elasticity has been significantly diminished by human beings; in the short-term, the ability to rebound against our depleting has been compromised, and we can no longer rail against her without the awful threat of victory. If we wish to tame the wilderness, and to sterilize it of all that can do us harm; the bears, and the wolves and cougars, now we can achieve it ? achieve an utterly banal existence where there is nothing left to challenge us: Clinical white, sterilized, 70o in all seasons, technologically stimulated; the journey's end. And how odd it would be that it was only in that bleak arrival that we would know what the journey had been worth. This must be a time of conscience, a time when we transcend the legend making of childhood or ignorance, and recognize that the shadows in the twilight beyond the fold can be lived-with and, not only that, but that we need them. The bears of the forest or the tundra are as much residents of our imagination as of the physical world; and only when we accept our need for their presence, will we make an effort not to lose them.