This story was published in the 2023 Climate Fiction Anthology Into the Unknown Together.
I rock back and forth in a woven hammock in my backyard, looking out at the cholla field beyond my fence and the snowy Jemez mountains in the distance. I watch the sky overhead turn from salmon orange to dusty red with the last stain of sunset. It’s so quiet, I can hear my heart pounding in my chest. I flutter my eyes closed and fill my lungs slowly with air.
As I exhale with a soft sigh, the first notes of a familiar siren song pierce the silence. Auu, eeeeee, oooooo! Auooouuu! Weiee yeiip! Aeeooo...!
The wails are coming from the south, to my left. They sound quite close. Before I can turn my head toward the sound, a chorus of overlapping yelps and yips erupts from the other side of me, from the north. My pulse quickens. Then, a warm, delicious nostalgia seeps into the muscles of my heart, and I relax into the omniphonic harmony. Back and forth, I rock gently in my hammock. Back and forth, the voices of my coyote neighbors sound off.
As the dueling bands keep up their call and response to either side of me, the shrill bark of a lone dog chimes in to try and subdue the chorus. Hearing the bark, both packs of wild ones escalate their volume in unison, yelping, cooing, crooningcareening louder and louder into the crisp desert air. They don’t know that I’m here, but their song makes my body tingle, makes my heart feel at home.
I’m reminded of hearing the vibrations of coyote songs often as a young child, from the deck of my house in Tesuque. Gazing up at the cosmic streaks of the Perseid meteor shower on warm August nights, their crooning chorus cutting through the darkness provided the most perfect soundtrack to the epic show of falling stars.
I’m reminded of a calm afternoon after a summer monsoon at age ten, when my brother and I set out on an adventure in the arroyo nearby to find the end of a rainbow. Instead of a pot of gold, we came upon a band of ten or twelve healthy coyotes, whoand cried out in protection as my half-wild rescue dog Pepper wove in and out of their shape-shifting formations. It was the closest we’d ever been to the magnetic canines. We stood there stunned, watching them jumping and bounding up and down the edges of the dry river bank as Pepper taunted them, attempting to reclaim his wildness. They nipped at his heels as he bolted through their midst, grinning ear to ear. Upon seeing us, the whole band paused for a moment, giving us knowing looks before sauntering away down the dry stream.
I’m reminded too of many nights driving home late in high school, my clothes smelling of piñon smoke from bonfire parties in the sticks, having to break my curfew because a coyote crossed in front of my car and stopped to stare me deep in the eyes from the middle of the road ahead.
These moments with these beings, like their song, were not to be easily forgotten.
Survival
I left the desert at eighteen, bound for the city. For the most part, the brilliant human stew that makes up urban areas held me for the next eighteen years. As I hopped from New Orleans to Suzhou to Sao Paulo to San Francisco, I fell in love with the art, the music, the food, the diversity of human life, the spontaneous and strange moments of creativity that sparked up on random street corners. But I quickly learned that as hard as it is to find water in the desert, it’s even harder to find silence in a city. I missed the quietude of my birthplace, and started to realize too how much I’d taken for granted my ability to have relationships with the animals in the desert, with wildness.
In cities, I always made it a priority to to seek out animal kin, - making trips to Jean Lafitte swamp to hang out with gators, befriending squirrels in Parque Ibirapuera, taking the F train to gawk at the sea lions with tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf. Lying in bed in my apartments, siren songs from cop cars and fire trucks (if they were far enough in the distance) always reminded me of the croons of my childhood coyote friends. And I never stopped dreaming of the desert where I grew up, where it’s impossible to not be woven into the daily lives of the more-than-human.
Desert creatures, infrom my experience with them, have evolved to survive in two ways: sSpikes and& venom, or a pack mentality. My relationships with the former type have not all been rosy, but they have certainly made their impression. I’ve been bitten by centipedes, had close encounters with rattlesnakes, and sat on more hidden prickly pear and cholla prickers than I care to admit. The desert is a place where water is beyond precious in its rarity, so one of the options to protect your supply is a sharp spine, sting, or bite. I don’t by any means blame those that choose this route.
The other option, I’ve seen, is to join forces, and to let yourself be known. Coyotes, cottontails, jackrabbits, bobcats, and deer mice know this strategy well. Looking at life through the eyes of these high- desert mammals, we can see the deep value of community, of family, in the face of scarcity. And coyotes, our infamous and beloved tricksters, are great at showing us the power of uniting our voices, weaving them together into the tapestry of a song. They are aware of the power of their siren song.
A Dream
A few years ago, I was at the end of my time living in urban California. I had no idea that I would soon be moving back to the land where I was born, to the ancestral territory of the Tewa and Tanos people, to the vast starry skies and the call-and-response songs of my long-lost canine loves. It was 2019: Donald Trump had just gotten impeached but maintained power as the president of the US, mass shootings and police brutality were becoming daily headlines, the Amazon rainforest and California wilderness were both on fire...and I was at home with a new baby.
For the last few months of my pregnancy and the first month of my child’s life, Oakland was blanketed in a haze of toxic smoke, originating from the massive Camp Fire in Sonoma Ccounty.
It was one of the largest wildfires in US history, caused by California’s largest electrical company, PG&E, which’s neglected to to maintain its power lines. For months surrounding my daughter’s birth, we stayed inside with windows closed, ran air filters, and wore N-95 masks whenever we went outside to walk the dogs. We sent money and supplies to rescue efforts up north, and packed bug-out bags with respirators and protein bars in case the fires were to come any closer.
During the contractions and expansions of becoming a mother in this apocalyptic political and ecological climate, I had a dream.
In my dream, I was home in New Mexico. I was strolling alongside a wild mountain stream when I heard a loud bang. I looked up to see a volcano starting to erupt. Watching the ash fall through the sky above me, I looked around to see who could help, who I could find shelter with, but no one was near. I scanned the horizon, and saw two big cities in the distance built atop two neighboring mountains, two mesas. I started to look for a spot to cross the river so I could head toward civilization. But right at that moment, amidst the already fiery sky, bombs started launching from one city to the other. Natural and man-made explosions filled the sonic landscape.
I remember the palpable feeling of defeat. The earth was burning. The people were fighting. There was nowhere to turn.
I sat down by the stream and started to weep. The water bubbling over rocks comforted me in its consistent rhythm. I lay down and breathed with the ebb and flow of the river for some time. Before too long, I started to hear other voices blending in with the babble of the creek. High and low pitches, whispers, clicks. Thinking I must be hallucinating, I wiped my tears away and sat up. Right in front of me, a cottontail rabbit was leaning out over the river, where a rainbow trout had swum into an eddy. The two creatures seemed to be speaking to each other. I leaned in to listen, and heard words that I couldn’t make sense of in my mind, but that I could understand in my cells.
From behind a giant opuntia cactus, two baby rabbits hopped out to join the council. Behind them jumped a rabbit with horns, their dad, a jackalope. As they arrived atto the bank of the river, more fish arrived in the eddy, and the sounds of their voices grew. Upon receiving theirthe messages, the fish began to swim upstream.
I followed their scaly movements and gazed upward, noticing that scarlet- red birds had started to soar overhead toward the river. Glancing back up to the horizon, it looked to me like they were flying out of the sun, bringing with them warm, iridescent light. The fish were jumping out of the water, bringing the messages from the furry beings to the winged ones. They swam up and downstream, again and again, with a sense of urgency and purpose.
As I watched this network of interconnected beings in true awe, I started to perceive softer sounds all around me. Sounds from branches of trees, from the riverbank, from tall grasses, from deep underground. New voices, from all directions, were joining in the chorus of the wild. It started to get loud.
Just then, I woke up.
The next day, I bought a canvas and started to paint.
A Call, and a Response
A few months after I had this dream, Covid had erupted in the US and started to spread rapidly. When the global lockdown was announced, I found myself driving across the Mojave with my half-finished painting and all of my stuff strapped to the top of my car. After eighteen years of city life, the interconnected ecology of humanity and a spiky supervirus catalyzed my return to the desert.
We landed in a rental guest house at the end of a dirt road on the outskirts of Santa Fe, and I got down and kissed the dusty earth as soon as I stepped out of the car. My dear ones and I were lucky enough to spend the lockdown of society getting reacquainted with red willows, green caterpillars, Rrufous hummingbirds, and tangled calabasas in a deep, winding, and alive arroyo. I dragged my easel outside next to a big ponderosa to finish my painting. And although the animals and plants around me were not mythological creatures like those from my dream, I could see that they too were carrying messages, creating myths and stories of interdependence in every direction, every moment.
My daughter, who is now four, knows the siren songs of our coyote neighbors, and loves to howl along with them. She has befriended the desert stink beetles who stick their butts up to the deep blue skies, and the sphinx moths who pollinate the brilliant magenta cholla flowers in the summer. She knows the bull snakes that burrow deep in holes outside our fence. She knows the raven family thatwho nests in the pine tree in our front yard, and the quail family who scuttle across our driveway from their home in the tall blue spruce. When it snows, she sees the footprints of jackrabbits, cottontails, ground squirrels, mice, and mystery animal neighbors. With curiosity, we follow the tracks of their intricate web of life, of their relationship to the earth, to this place.
It’s now 2023, and the crises of the world have certainly not lessened in their intensity. Donald Trump is no longer president, but the daily headlines are still filled with deadly earthquakes, mass shootings, police murders, corporate greed, and massive chemical spills affecting the water supply. The other night, as I lay in my hammock, I was looking out at the mountain sunset with that wrenching, palpable feeling of defeat I had felt in my dream. Some days, it’s really hard not to feel this way.
But sometimes, lately, when the coyotes fill the desert silence with their soulful call-and-response, sending siren songs to each other through the dusky- rose skies, I’ve been listening. And while I can’t translate their yelps and howls into words in my mind, I feel their message, deep in my cells.
Theirs is the same message that the jackalope and rainbow trout and phoenix from my painting were speaking to each other in my dream, with such purpose and urgency:
We are in this together.
We may not be born of the same band, the same pack, or even the same species, but we are all born of this earth.
We must use our voices to call to each other, and to respond to each other in kind.
We may not always agree on the best path forward, but we must keep weaving together the truths that live inside each one of us.
We must weave these truths into a song, a chorus, where every voice matters. And if someone barks at us in fear, or attempts to subdue us....we mustn’t stop singing. We must get louder.
A siren songis not easily forgotten.
