Merle - desktop/tablet version

MERLE

My wife Jennifer has the most extraordinary gift.  She can walk up to a complete stranger and within minutes she's made a new friend. I’ve witnessed it more times than I can count but it still amazes me. On our most recent trip through Canada she made friends with a couple from Israel, a pair of Austrians, a New Zealander, and two Japanese tourists who spoke no English at all but communicated by smiling, nodding and pointing a lot.

I've never been nearly as good at meeting people. My job on most of those interactions is to smile, shake hands, and play security. I stand behind Jennifer looking just ominous enough so that no stranger tries to offer her candy and take her away.

This morning she didn't budge when I tried to wake her at dawn.  We’d been up late solving the world's problems over coffee with our new Israeli neighbors.  So while I would have loved for her to come along, I didn’t work too hard at it.

I decided to drive to the Kananaskis wilderness area just south of Canmore, Alberta.  We’d already visited two Canadian national parks and while the scenery was breathtaking our wildlife encounters have been limited mostly to deer and squirrels.  We saw two bears lumbering in the distance one morning and we’ve spied our resort’s resident herd of deer but that’d been about it.  So you can imagine my surprise when I rumbled down the mountainside and came across a whole herd of Rocky Mountain big horn sheep strewn on and around the road.  I slowed down and let my own dust cloud overtake me as I crept slowly toward them.  Attacks by bighorns are virtually unheard of but I stayed in the car anyway. They were so close I just stuck my camera out the window and shot away.  

Majestic.  That’s a word that might come to mind in a wildlife encounter on a remote mountain road.  Majestic they were not.  While you might imagine bighorns as large muscular creatures heavily covered in white the group I saw was nothing like that.  They looked more like the remnants of a rained out Grateful Dead concert:  dirty, disheveled, hungry and slightly shell shocked.  This was my vacation and we’d driven over half the continent to see this?  These raggedy, homeless looking creatures?  

I continued on my way south traveling through screen saver worthy country past mountains and lakes, and mountains perfectly reflected off lakes -  multiplying the beauty.  Eventually I stopped at a remote trailhead and parked the car.  Jenny would be getting up soon and she’d wonder where I was.  I like to think I have a pretty good imagination but I can't compare to her.  She’d wake to dreams of some bear making a meal out of me.  I turned back and a short time later was back with the bighorns.

Apparently they’d been harried by several cars while I was gone because this time as I approached they immediately fell in to line like soldiers - or school children - walking single file along the side of the road.  They were getting back to the work of survival.  I stopped to snap a few more pictures.  We don’t have bighorns in Wisconsin.  We have plenty of cows but no bighorns.  

As I slowly drove away from the herd I realized that I’d missed something when I came upon them the first time:  tenacity.  Bighorns spend most of the year clinging to the mountainside trying not to fall off and die.  They live off whatever grows at higher elevations which isn’t much.  They’re under constant threat of becoming a meal to predators or a hood ornament to some speeding jackass in a SUV.

 By the time I’d come across the herd they’d somehow managed to survive another brutal winter living on hope and not much else.  Last fall I'd quit a teaching job I held for years.  Though I hadn't spent the past year like they had  it had been a rough winter for me too.  But even after all they’d endured here they were seemingly content to lick salt off the road and eat whatever weeds managed to sprout along the side of the road.

When I got back to the resort Jennifer was awake.  She asked me about my morning adventure.  I showed her the pictures I’d taken and told her about the bighorns.  I shared close ups of the haggered creatures and joked that I’d named one of them Merle after the country singer Merle Haggard.  Over the course of our trip we visited five national parks across the U.S.and Canada.  We met people from all around the world, but one experience I won’t soon forget is learning a lesson in tenacity from a haggered bighorn sheep named Merle.