by David Koehn
The log at the base of the hot-air-balloon-sized live oak next to me shifted, collapsing with the particular sound of wood separating from wood. Something had dislodged it, and it rolled over with the familiar pop of wood freeing itself. The live oak next to the campsite was massive, measuring approximately fifteen feet in diameter at the base. In its wake, I’d pitched my Lanshan and rolled out my Enlightened inside. Sitting on my little hand-cut foam square as a sitz platz, dinner was done. Chewing on nasturtium and tumbleweed, the bitterness still coating my tongue, I rinsed my bowl with a splash of water. I drank my monk’s tea, also known as the rinse water—standard practice for anyone who has walked mindfully any distance.
A log doesn’t move on its own. I looked up and saw nothing. In my mind, nothing matched up with the sound. Backpackers crash and clank enough to spook birds and scatter deer, sometimes to draw in bears nosing for an easy meal. That was the range of my imagination. Not this. A shape undissolved itself from within the civic twilight—a young cougar, maybe eighty pounds, tail as long as its body, balanced not ten yards from me. Out of the twilight, the cat appeared—slow, dissolving into shape, then whole. It wasn’t looking at me. It was looking up into the live oak. The cougar had been readying itself to spring into the tree—but why?
Cougars lack both the traditional and contemporary mythology entwined in cultures around the likes of bears, eagles, salmon, ravens, and buffalo—so many encodings reach us. Manufactured mythologies are often distilled to look unlike their indigenous origins. Think simply of the commercialization of the Kokopelli. One might ask the question: how have cougars so quietly escaped the larger trappings of mythology? The jaguar has its fair share of rightfully earned myths. But our shy cougar? Even the early recorders of colonization do not fear them, but can make little of them.
Data lives in the head. Fear rises from the limbic system. I knew the numbers; puma attacks in California were rare—none fatal in over a decade. However, I’d been reading William Brewer’s “Up and Down California in 1860–1864.” In his account of the Whitney Survey, his crew seemed to lose a man to a grizzly bear, with frequency, not far from where I sat: “the loss of sheep by wolves, bears, and rattlesnakes is quite an item. We are in a bear region.” Camp No. 29, Jolon Ranch, on the San Antonio River.
In the same letter, he mentions cougars: “Less common than bear are the California lions, a sort of panther, about the color of a lion, and size of a small tiger, but with a longer body. They are very savage, and I have heard of a number of cases of their killing men. But don’t be alarmed on my account—I don’t court adventures with any such strangers.”
For me, the wave crested before I had any chance to level it. I didn’t reach for my phone. Instinctively—you know, bear country—I grabbed the pot and banged it with the metal mug. A metallic staccato echoed off the brush. Probably not the recommended method—I didn’t know any better at the time.
The noise was sharp enough. The cat flowed backward, visually ascending into the oak’s crown. The clinging had sent the young cat and its long, counterbalancing tail sliding back into cover. I learned later from a ranger that this section of the East Bay parks—specifically, Sunol and Ohlone—supported nine known pumas over roughly four square miles. A detail that a wiser soloist might have known before departure.
The trail to Maggie’s Half Acre from Little Yosemite in Fremont looks tame enough. The Ohlone Wilderness Trail runs twenty-eight miles from Del Valle to Mission Peak. However, I was only hiking the eastern section: Little Yosemite in Fremont, to Maggie’s Half Acre, then up to Rose Peak. Twenty-one miles, 3,300 feet of elevation gain. The language and lifeways of the Chochenyo-speaking Taunan people—the original Ohlone inhabitants—shaped this land long before it was given its current name.
On paper it’s a simple, single overnight. I was fifty and hiking alone, which changed the math. Numbers measure distance. They don’t measure how your body feels carrying itself through country where, maybe, you’re not the only one hunting. The Ohlone Wilderness Trail gives more than most bodies could want when your body is the marker on the map.
When the second juvenile quietly descended from the live oak, my question about why the first seemed obsessed with the upper reaches of its canopy were answered: This pair had blundered into my overnight, and the one that had chased its sibling up the tree had been dissuaded from joining by my startlement.
Bookstores disappear at nearly the same rate as indigenous rites. Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino started Cafe Ohlone as a pop-up. I ate with them in the back of the now-defunct, but legendary, University Press Bookstore. The mak-‘amham blew my mind.
From the Cafe Ohlone Newsletter:
…courses include Black Oak Acorn Soup, created during a six-month process; gathered espresso-like Bay Nut Truffles with California strawberries on a leaf of Indian Lettuce; Stinging Nettle and Bay Laurel Tea–Soaked Quail Eggs with a dollop of Smoked Sturgeon Caviar and Watercress Microgreens. The menu continues with a multitude and abundance of dishes: a colorful and stunning Ohlone salad, full of native edible flowers, locally gathered greens, native berries and nuts, rare seeds, and dressed with blackberry, smoked walnut oil, and bay laurel; crispy duck-fat roasted Indian potatoes; caramelized umami-heavy chanterelle and morel mushrooms; seasonal young growth, spiral-like fiddleheads; flash-charred Indian onions; a delicate springtime bisque of dandelion greens; allium-heavy California hazelnut flour biscuits; locally sourced mussels, clams roasted in a kombu seaweed and duck fat broth, with acorn flour and sourdough bread to soak its juices; Dungeness crab with a tart gooseberry cocktail sauce; rich cuts of grilled venison backstrap. Dessert includes valley oak acorn brownies with handmade Zapotec chocolate and gathered East Bay salt, as well as rose hip jam tortes with a California hazelnut crust…
The language in the Cafe Ohlone passage delights, and you may well find the writing the most exciting passage in this entire sojourn.
This experience introduced me to the joy of eating wild while backpacking. My attention trained to listen for animals’ walking, birds calling, and insects’ trilling, converted its sensuousness to the shape and feel of coyote mint, tumbleweed, nasturtium, bachelor’s button and clover, yerba buena and acorns or filberts or yarrow or chickweed (not spurge—yuck!) or mustard or chicory or marigold.
I’ve made monk’s tea that was so exotic to that moment and place in time, it’s hard to imagine any other human, maybe different than the Ohlone, that might have drank such a tea at any time in human history. But perhaps this is a limit of my own imagination, as we occupied our lives foraging as tribes for tens of thousands of years—one might say we have spent ninety-nine percent of our time here on earth making monk’s tea.
In medieval and classical folklore, a panther is said to emit a sweet, honeylike scent—an allspice—in some bestiaries based on the ancient Philologicus text. This aroma—this oud—lures creatures toward it. In a world of reversals, my allspice tea lured in our juveniles. Does the tea’s aroma trigger some part of their long-term memory?
Don’t let the impending foil fool you. I aim not to contrast my eating of the edible wildflowers and other flora on my hike with the cougar’s eyeing me up as potential prey. There is risk in hiking alone, eating wild plants, and sleeping alone on peaks in the dark in the cold; but when I eat my next Big Mac, drive three hours to work, sit at a desk for eight hours, and hold calls ’til midnight, that is what fills me with fear.
I drop a piece of wild fennel in my morning coffee. I’d been listening to Dylan’s discography for the entirety of the hike. I’d never listened to every single one of his songs in one long listen. In my ear, Emmylou Harris and Bob Dylan; now I am soft and aching, and my soul stirs for the long descent from Maggie’s into Del Valle. I have two cougars in the cosmology of my imagination. One hangs out in the canopy of the live oak above me, the other in the brush at the edge of camp.
“One more cup of coffee for the road / One more cup of coffee ‘fore I go / To the valley below”
This is really a story about the unloved and the isolated and some version of hope that leaks into life in the form of surprise—in my case, two juvenile cougars.
David Koehn is the author of three poetry books: Twine, Scatterplot, and Sur. His poetry and nonfiction have been published in journals including The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, North American Review, Lana Turner, New England Review, The Rumpus, and ZYZZYVA. He holds a BA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from the University of Florida, and he teaches at San José State University.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 