Edgelands

It was the summer after spring when the flood carried away the road to the home where I had slept in the gun closet beneath the fly-tying desk. Where I had been happy as a child. It was the summer the scream of emergency alerts clawed the steel and the soft ears held in city subway cars, warnings to what we already felt, to what some perhaps, already knew.

It was the year I woke in the night to leave my body behind. The year I slept on cold earth and watched Orion topple off a red stone cliff, only to reappear the next night with a garland of thorns balanced on his shoulder. The year I stared too long into darkness and became blind to what had once been called by the name of beauty. The year I wondered until, forgetting all that of which I wondered, I lay upon the ground and wept into the navel of the earth.

It was the time of the great unknowing, and it was not so long ago.

In those days, we strayed far from the honesty of that which is known in bones, and so we did not have time to waste with such things as conversations with the wind, or to pause to listen to the strange cry of coyote on the berm outside of town, the way ravens and magpies had begun to argue, or the deathly silence of what had once been a river. We did not have time to listen, and so we did not hear. We did not have time to look, and so we did not see. It was a time of great forgetting, in which we came to believe that the only truths were our own, the only prayers those spoken in the human tongue.

Still, in this time, the wind sang old songs, a rising dust bowed to no one.

Messengers & Promises.

From the series What Roots May Clutch, Owl Creek.

Silver print from negative.

Rounding a sharp bend, our headlights raked across a broken mess of talons and wings flapping awkwardly in the road up ahead. We slowed to a stop some distance away, and watched as a great horned owl struggled to move, launching into the air, flapping once and tumbling off the road embankment and into a ravine. Stopping the truck and crawling down into the brush along the road, I sat down some ways away from the owl, watching as it tried to fly, then tucked and sorted itself into a defensive position in the brush, its gaze never leaving mine. I spent an hour with the owl there on the side of the road, watching the yellow fire smoulder behind its darkening eyes, searching for a way to help. Only after a series of phone calls with Fish and Game (‘Yeah, with a broken wing we euthanise 99% of those’) and raptor rehab centre answering machines, did I walk away, leaving the owl to die, if not in peace, at least in its own private way. As I rose to leave, I made a photograph of the owl as it looked up at me, broken but poised, willing me to leave. To cease my human meddling. It was a look that seemed simply to say: ‘I am not yours to fix’. Though I did not know it at the time, this encounter with the owl, and the image that came from it, would continue to both haunt and guide me, serving as a totemic reminder of my place in something greater, a world where the limits of human power – both to heal and to harm – are finite.

The title of this image comes from the essay ‘Why Look at Animals’ in which John Berger writes that animals first entered the human imagination not as a source of food or material for human consumption, but rather as ‘messengers and promises’.

Eventually the howling gets to you. Fear or anger or wonder lead you out the door, out into the edgelands. For me, it led into physical landscapes that might offer clues, psychoecotones half domesticated and half wild, but, in the end, wholly unknowable.

I set out to understand the violence wrought against the land, against each other, against ourselves, pulling at long threads of story that found me in old caves where figures scratched on walls shed blood, harvested animals, watched the sun and the moon dance, and disappeared. I wandered along the strange steel tracks of empire. Floated and crawled through their bowels only to emerge befuddled. I consulted ravens and wind and an old man in a dark pool who was not of this place. I drifted on rivers, through canyons of ancient red mud, mixing blood and sweat and tears with excrement and bones on the edge of places where the water flows no more. I tried to help after the fires and the storms came, and as the dust began to rise – but always I arrived too late.

I slept in the land that was broken, and that land was also me.

I am walking madness. I am twisted barbed wire. I am river without water, I am sky without clouds, dog without claws, throat without voice. I am yellow medicine, wounded by mortality, the suffering of gentle earth that knows no rain.

We are dust rising.

When I woke the ravens stood over me, watching, and told me it was time to leave. This broken land is not for this time, not for this life. Go and see what is beautiful still – go and see what is free. The beauty of it is too much, I replied, knowing full well my lie, that the raven was death’s beauty in disguise. Into the caves then I crawled once more to watch the shadows dance the wall from afar. Later in the waking sleep to stir the fire, and join the shadows in their dance. Illusions and figments of our own waking trance, melted back into the owl, the weeping wall and the laughing spring. What secrets hold the underworld, what secrets hold the edgelands?

A hand placed, dry against a wall, red ochre blown through time. This hand, your hand, this hand, my hand, this hand, all hands. In time. In time, to emerge and walk again. knowing what simple kindness dwells in darkness, what memories gnaw the marrow, what shadows walk this wind.

Last night I heard the coyotes crying in the faded light. One alone stood on the forgotten haybale in the field where the pavement turned to dirt. Frozen for a moment in the swing of lights, head cocked, curious, upright, proud. Then gone.

Days shorten. Abruptly. The ghost of summer whispers from some far off place, coaxing bare feet out of caves and onto the faint worn path through crowsfoot. Unfamiliar lights in the night.

There were things I wanted to tell you of, things which now passed me by. The return of thorns, bright green eager shoots through the dark loam of fall’s last day. Many things I wanted to show you, had not the daylight gone. Small steps through oak leaves, to the purple blooms by the creek, a red frog, maybe the same one I stood on my head to see, all those years ago.

Many things I hoped we might still feel, as the callouses of the world grew thick, and we drank with our eyes from the bellies of clouds and shivering leaves by the light of a morning star, familiar myths unbound from text.

I would never have believed it was anything but a dream, had you not seen it too.

Dark Mountain: Issue 28

Our Autumn 2025 special issue on Uncivilised Art celebrates the work and practice of artists in a collapsing yet still beautiful world

 

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