Trails, Paths, & Multispecies Memories
[Image description: A narrow wildlife trail snakes into the horizon away from the viewer in an open landscape of dried grasses and sagebrush. The trail contains a dusting of snow, while the snow is absent or patchy in the rest of the frame. The sun is about to go down behind a jagged mountain range in the distance, and the scene is shrouded in the day’s last light.]
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I wondered back then why following wild paths (multi-species trails made over time) felt like what I wished religion was. It felt like the warp of connection, with living bodies the weft—it felt like the burnished gold catching the light from that tiny stone window. My attention is always drawnattention is always drawn back to the interplay between absence and presence in tracking and trailing, and it’s a theme that’s well known in the study of the eerie affect of byzantine icons—my other love. When we see the signs of absence mixed with presence, it does something to this ecosystem of nerves that we are—it lights a smoky fire in the horizon of us. It beckons our souls to move whether our bodies are able to or not.
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In the winter, when the first dustings of snow cling to the ground, especially in the hollows and low points shaded by sagebrush, more paths pop out of hiding like veins of opal lit up at dusk. Trails are microclimates, you see. They are, as one of my mentors told me, an entity in and of themselves—distinct from (but still connected to) the animal(s) who made them. These paths always ride that line between seen and unseen, that’s just what they do, that’s what they’re supposed to do. When I stand upon a multi-species trail, noticing how subtle but powerful their presence is—like campfire embers on a moonless night—I wonder if this what haunting felt like when we weren’t scared of ghosts—before ghostbusters became our heroes. Walking one of these beings—or, as I often find myself saying, being walked by them—was like reading a thousand journal entries, from many individuals over many lifetimes. A line collectively etched onto the landscape by hundreds of hooves and pads, and no less by muzzle and musk—a social media we have yet to approximate. A sacred memory, like the pathways of emotions that evolution has etched into our nerves, older than our own species, but in us, nonetheless.
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Our human-made roads, even of concrete, can have this quality too. I notice they do in some post-apocalyptic stories. The overgrown highway, abandoned by cars but not by feet, is iconic in this genre. When a path demands to be walked only by foot, horse hoof, or slow-moving wheel, it gets way more personal, fast. It becomes an entire dimension of time and space. This is where I circle back to a confluence of these two trails I follow that we get tricked into thinking are distinct things (the spiritual and the ecological). Old worn signs lie at this intersection that we can barely read. Beyond lies an a single trail, a mother trail, where every organism is a pilgrim. Where wayfinding (actual movement or ability notwithstanding) is just what we living things do. And I shy from the term “non-living,” but I know that the abiotic beings way-make and way-find too, in their own way.
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Needless to say, I stopped listening to the voices that say paying attention to the things people call sacred doesn’t matter to science, a long, long time ago. At this point, they’re the rumble of an old paradigm that I hope, for the sake of life, for the sake of someone’s survival (whether they’re human or not) we’re leaving behind.
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#biosemiotics #movementecology #trails #paths #trackways #mobility #apocalypticecology #anthrozoology #religiousstudies #environmentalsurrealism #biosurrealism
