A Coyote's World
A Contemplative Ride Off the Beaten Path
“This is the coyote’s world!” I yelled at him through labored breaths. Dodging branches and hurling my bike through tall, knotted grass down a nondescript path, I see him look back at me and mutter something, but it’s impossible to hear over the echoing gunshots. I know we’ve been biking towards the sound for a while, but just now I heard the chk-chk of a shotgun. They must be right on the other side of Onion Creek. We are on public land, in Onion Creek Metro, but this is also Texas so that doesn’t mean we won’t get shot.
We pause, and I tell Clayton quietly, “this is the coyote’s world. These trails- this is how they get around.” He nods at me, but both of our ears are perked towards the gunshots.
“Should we keep going or find a different way?” he asks.
“Well, today feels like the kind of day we could absolutely die, so let’s go back.”
Just a couple hours earlier, we emerged from a ligustrum forest and turned a corner onto a weird section of misplaced asphalt- a road that appeared to come from nowhere and definitely led nowhere. Clayton just warned me that this was the biggest encampment he’d ever seen, and our strategy was to bike through as quickly as we could. Neither of us anticipated dogs. A black pitbull hurled out of a hidden tent barking maniacally and lunging towards our legs. Pedaling was difficult, as I interchangeably lifted one leg and then the other to (hopefully) avoid his bared teeth sunk into my calf. Ahead of me, a larger pitbull came hurtling out of the woods towards Clayton with a terrifying bloodthirst. This dog could kill a person, both our bodies knew that. Clayton pedaled harder and cut left, making as wide of a circle as he could. The pitbull lunged towards him, snarling, and right before his teeth made contact he was thrust backward by a chain attached to his neck. As I biked past in a wide and fast circle, he lunged towards me over and over, choking himself and foaming at the mouth. We flew down the hill without looking back. When we rounded a corner and both dogs were out of sight, I got off my bike, heaving and trembling like a deer who came within inches of a mountain lion’s jaws open wide.
These trails, comprising the South Austin Trail Network, are bizarre, and that’s saying nothing of the woods encompassing them. You get the sense you are biking through the underbelly of Southeast Austin, through a parallel universe. For instance, we traveled from our home nestled off Menchaca in South Austin to Onion Creek Metro and back with our tires hardly meeting asphalt, all the while hugging various creeks and passing through tunnels, cars whizzing over asphalt above us. To drive would have taken us fifteen minutes, but we spent hours on our bikes getting there. The unpredictability of the ride is novel, perhaps especially to me, as this was my first time making this trek.
Biking on these trails with Clayton, I get a sense of how incredibly varied the landscapes are. I see the way water changes everything- making friends with cypress, sycamores, willows– meeting their many needs. I see how invasive ligustrums threaten to suffocate entire ashe juniper groves and the accompanying patches of prairie grass, transforming spacious, diverse woods into a stifling, overcrowded monoculture of thick, bamboo-like shoots. I see how the seeps and springs along Onion Creek support towering groves of cedar elms and pecan trees- the likes of which you’d never see near our house.
We bike past one of my acquaintances, a particularly massive pecan tree on the riverbank that I’ve come to recognize from my past walks with our dog here.
The very first time I walked past months ago, I first noticed it’s barky girth at eye level, and let my eyes slowly wander up, up, up– soaking in how thoroughly the canopy blocked out the punishing sun, transforming the sky from blue to a dreamy, dappled green. Following its uppermost branches out, I realized that even standing seventy five feet away, I was covered still.
The past few summers here have been hellish, anyone can tell you that. In fact, in Austin from May-September it’s pretty much the only thing anyone talks about. The sun has become an enemy, threatening to melt or singe anything in its path, which really gives you the feeling that trees are on our side. And this particular tree had my back, without me even realizing. Except, standing there completely still, I did realize, absolutely filled with gratitude, with awe. I made a pact to notice every time after that too; to slowly back up to the plumb line underneath the furthest tips of it’s branches, and marvel. So, bike tucked between my legs and drenched in sweat, I marveled.
Photo by James Cleaveland
It feels more wild, more human, moving in these ways through the backcountry of our city, following the water. These are after all largely deer trails, compounded by bike tires.
In fact, these kinds of well-connected preserved areas are exactly what urban wildlife require. This interconnectedness of wild spaces is turning out to be of more importance than the amount of land itself: even with so many acres of wildspace available, where are the mountain lions to go when conditions change, or they need to find a mate? Luckily, waterways provide just that: interconnectedness- insisting we build around or above creeks and rivers, lest our houses or bridges be whisked away in the next flash flood.
Driving, or even biking, exclusively on roads suddenly strikes me as incredibly insulating. Roads are the epitome of convenience and efficiency, all an homage to the business of arrival. And arrival is fine, but we have become rather addicted– so much so that we’ve lost touch with the beauty and necessity of process; of feeling ourselves on the way. Which is a travesty, considering a human life is composed almost entirely of process, arrival rarely showing his face. Teilhard de Chardin says it best.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown, something new.
Accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
Having grown accustomed to highways slicing through our landscape, we lack the imagination necessary to consider any other way of interacting with this world and we have no idea what we’ve lost. The environment- the air and water- of course bears the toxic scars of our obsession with efficiency, but most of us are far-removed from the cost we humans have collectively paid, as we’re not aware of any other way we, or our world, could be. We have not yet befriended a slower pace and necessary limitations on our movement. These trails exist, though, and that reminds me that perhaps some of us less domesticated humans also require an interconnectedness of wild land, when conditions take a turn for the worse and we’re left feeling trapped within the air-conditioned comforts of our own homes.
Biking through a sea of ragweed and poison ivy that disguises any notion of a trail, seeing a massive hawk silently glide inches above our heads, and then abruptly popping up onto a sketchy trail alongside the rush of traffic on I-35– it’s a lot to wrap my head around. I feel myself swelteringly hot, unsheltered. Wiping the sweat out of my eyes, I marvel at the cars absolutely flying past us, oblivious to entire worlds that exist beneath them.
I’m not sure why I’m so dumbfounded- of course these remaining pieces of land not yet subsumed by oceans of concrete are here, throbbing with lives complete and concealed. It is gorgeous that a few humans felt inspired to patchwork together this untamed, subversive network of trails. It exists as an overgrown middle finger to civilization and convenience- opting instead for the itchier, sketchier, more cumbersome path from Point A to Point B. Prioritizing process over arrival. Prioritizing being somewhere, over getting somewhere.
Perhaps that’s why biking these trails, I feel most alive– the land itself requires more attention, more of me, to move through it. I am alive to the distance we are traveling, made evident by the drastic changes in landscape along the way, not to mention my burning hamstrings. I am alive to the wild creatures who, in a kind of necessary defiance, still inhabit and dominate these besieged forests. I am alive to the untamed and unpredictable. I am alive to the wildness in me– the wildness that carried me through childhood, and isn’t dead yet.