Wisents and Wiseacres

Ruminations on the passage of time

Years ago, a friend and I, flashlights in hand, entered the cave of Altamira, just a few miles from Santillana del Mar, Spain. As I tend towards claustrophobia, I held my breath for a beat or ten. I also held onto my friend’s arm. Then I breathed in the cool musty air. The guide pointed his flashlight to the ceiling. There above me, I saw one, then many more buffalo. It reminded me of a flipbook: the buffalo seemingly ran across the ceiling. Our tour guide said the paintings might be up to 35,000 years old. I couldn’t do the math to figure out how many generations of humans ago this might have been. But the guide said that the people who painted these beasts probably lived migratory lives following the bison from place to place. I couldn’t really imagine what that would have been like, other than cold, wet, and often scary.     

Buffalo/Bison at Altimira captihttps://www.wmf.org/blog/new-project-launched-document-cave-art-altamiraon...

How far we’ve come from the days since we made bison art. Now it’s prepackaged bison burgers for an easy, nutritious, and maybe even sustainable dinner! But few of us see bison, or cows for that matter, on a regular basis. We don’t look into their eyes, watch them eat, smell their coats, feel any sense of connection to them.

Two or three years ago, when I first started writing Stumbling Blocks, I was trying to jog my memories of the town of Berleburg, where my dad was born. I hadn’t visited for over two decades. I pulled out old photos and I searched for the town’s homepage. Of all things, the town’s logo depicted a bison.

From the Town of Berleburg Homepage

Huh? Had they just discovered paleolithic cave paintings in the area?

After a bit more googling, I found out that the previous prince of Berleburg started a project to re-wild the near extinct European bison, also known as the wisent. In 2013, NPR’s Soraya Sarhhadi Nelson reported that Prince Richard planned to release a bull, five cows, and two wisent calves somewhere on his 30,000 acres (in a 220-acre enclosure). Sarhhadi Nelson interviewed several locals about the proposed wisent release. They sounded a lot like Montanans in that same year. Both were concerned about the transmission of disease to cattle as well as bison wandering into backyards. Happily, these days, both Montanans and Berleburgers seem to embrace bison. They are good for tourism.

A Nord Rhein Westfalen tourism webpage

The word wisent tickled me because I could remember my dad saying, “Stop being a wiseacre!” when he thought I’d taken a joke too far. Wiseacre and wisent sound like kissing cousins though they do not share the same etymologies. Wiseacre is from an old Germanic word meaning wise, whereas wisent comes from a root that means musky.

Dad surely could have come up with a joke about a wiseacre who should spend more time bathing lest she smell like a wisent.

Then again, Dad’s car always reeked of manure because he never took his work boots off when he got in. Once a wiseacre…

As we approach the September equinox, I can’t help but reflect on this third act of my life. I’m not as strong nor do I have the same endurance I did a decade ago. I can see the trend line. Of course acknowledging the finiteness of one’s life is not the same as the finality of a extinction.

Human callousness to the other species on our planet (not to mention other humans) is a tragedy. Technology is not a substitute for compassion nor is it a foregone conclusion that technology will be able to fill the vacuum of species we kill off.

As Joni Mitchell famously sang, “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” I heard that her song Big Yellow Taxi was about a 1969 revolt by UC Berkeley students and the general Berkeley community over the university’s wish to “pave paradise and put up a (faculty) parking lot.”

Arriving in the Bay Area in in 1982, and moving to Berkeley in 1984, I was eager to learn more about the famous town and gown conflict. I expected People’s Park to be an urban jewel like Golden Gate Park (which even has a buffalo enclosure close to its western edge).  Disappointingly, I found a small park with scruffy grass, large patches of dirt, and clusters of young and not so young men with backpacks or shopping carts and nowhere to go.

I followed the seemingly endless litigation between the City of Berkeley (for a while my employer), community groups, and the university. As the court challenges mounted, no one seemed to tend to the park beyond picking up trash. Meanwhile, the number of homeless in Berkeley (and beyond) continued to rise.

I just found out that People’s Park was not Joni Mitchell’s inspiration. She wrote the song on a visit to Hawaii, gazing out her hotel window to find a parking lot between her and the ocean.

And, that the decades long city-citizen group-university impasse may finally end! All legal challenges to the university’s most recent plan to create “student housing, housing for the unhoused, revitalized public park space, and (a) commemoration of the site's history” seem to be exhausted.

Not that I expect to walk through People’s Park any time soon. Last January, the university ringed the park with shipping containers stacked two high.

My hope is that we humans can follow Henry David Thoreau’s advice from going on 200 years ago. He wrote,

We need the tonic of wildness…We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the seacoast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Perhaps if we spend a bit more time re-wilding ourselves, we’ll get over the need to kill anything we don’t understand, don’t like, or find just a bit threatening. Not that I’m suggesting we migrate with the bison… That would be dangerous.