The Story of Wild: My Coyote Life
The Story of Wild: My Coyote Life
Dreams are made of mountains, stories, wild coyotes.
The coyote stares me down. My dog stares back. Yard dog vs. wild dog. The coyote is thirty pounds of solid muscle and fight. My dog eats Taste of the Wild and pumpkin twice a day. But dog food is not the same as the wild tastes that the coyote consumes. My dog is twice the coyote’s weight. Finley eyes the coyote but does not bark. He knows this wild ancestor on some primal level. They stare across the large cold desert of Death Valley. In summer, this is a furnace, but with the influx of rain, it’s damp and cool and the salt flats are a lake.
A writing camping trip is a luxury compared to my early beginnings. I grew up walking the line of yard dog and wild dog. I lived in a cult in Southern New Hampshire where we trained for the End of Days. We camped in tents in the woods and practiced survivalism. Once we set up camp, we walked the perimeter. We called it the Reconnoiter. Looking for danger. Bears, mostly.
When I hear people who are nostalgic for living off the land, I suspect they have no idea how to raise their own food. If you are used to shopping at Whole Foods or Erewhon and you think living off the land would be fun, you’re like a well-fed poodle who thinks being a coyote would be good times. At the cult, we raised our own food, canning and freezing for winter, storing the root vegetables in cellars, making cider and carrot juice. There wasn’t time for much else.
When I moved to LA, I kept rabbits in the backyard. I slaughtered them and ate them just like I had at the Farm. My first husband talked me out of it. “This is Los Angeles. People frown on killing animals in your backyard,” he said. He was right. They do indeed. Now, I keep chickens. I eat the eggs.
When I was at the Farm, they liked to tell us the story of the Children of Israel and how they had to walk across the desert for forty years to reach Canaan. We received little education, but we did briefly touch on American history. I raised my hand and asked about the three to six months it took to cross America by covered wagon, roughly three thousand miles. I asked what happened out there in the desert. Did they need a map? Did they get lost? It was less than five hundred miles. It should have taken three weeks. For this, I was sent to a room without food for days. I was missing the point. We, at the Farm, were going to suffer for forty years to go to heaven. Give up your life now, heaven later.
I didn’t buy it. I wanted a thinking life, an adventure life. What makes me able to feel the world is that I think for myself; I raise chickens, grow a garden, walk in the woods daily with my dog, see the coyotes lurking, write on camping trips in places like Death Valley and remember my coyote life.
The story of wild is my story. My kids went on so many tent camping trips, that, as adults, they love camping themselves. When they go on vacation with their spouses, it’s usually a camping trip. We all find refuge in books. We all find a home in stories, and we are all storytellers.
I grew up climbing mountains, and every year of Red Hen Press and my writing life feels like one more mountain to climb. Some of us are willing to stay still. The rest of us journey to find our place of joy. At Red Hen, we have built a great press of the West Coast, and I am building a great writing life for myself. Both seem difficult, perhaps unlikely, and like the climbing of any mountain, the building of the press, the building of my writing life, are worth it no matter how long they take. It isn’t the destination; it isn’t the journey. It’s the person you are becoming along the way, and the company we keep.
When I grew up, the things I hated the most were weeding, caring for chickens, working endlessly in the fields. I preferred caring for horses. I live in Los Angeles now. I am the publisher of Red Hen Press, an indie publishing house. I have always had a garden. Sometimes I grow herbs, sometimes tomatoes, sometimes lettuce, but always, there is a garden.
I am not the person who left the Farm. That girl was afraid of failure. Since then, I have been through fire and water, and it has changed me. They say we learn nothing from success, everything from failure. If that is true, then I must be wise. I have failed spectacularly and have learned from my mistakes and kept going. The question is not, did you screw up, but did you keep going? With our brilliant staff, with my amazing family of six, I kept going. Leading the press into its next thirty years and my writing life are my current goals—and staying in touch with my coyote self.
Now, when I feel attuned to someone, it’s because they nurture their wild self. When I was growing up, we didn’t have to ask who we would be at the end of the world, because we were already living as if the world had ended. Going off-grid would have been nothing new; we were already there. Who am I without Instagram? That’s me right now. Off grid. Writing. My dog is checking the perimeter for coyotes. He’s ready to reconnoiter. I’m on alert, but I’m moving forward. Working on a new book. Dreams are made of mountains, stories, wild coyotes; it’s believing that whoever you are, you can get to the other side.
Dr. Kate Gale is Publisher, Co-Founder, and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press and the Editor of the Los Angeles Review. She teaches Poetry at Chapman University.
She is the author of seven books of poetry, including THE LONLIEST GIRL, THE GOLDILOCKS ZONE, and ECHO LIGHT. Her debut novel, UNDER A NEON SUN, debuted in April 2024. Her memoir, SWIMMING THE MILKY WAY, is forthcoming with Zando.