Blog Post #4

For our next blog post I want you to write a This I Believe essay. Here are some examples. Here are some tips for writing. 250 words due before class Wednesday.

Please comment on at least one post. And remember to add a recognizable photo to your profile.

And here is my take on the assignment.


I believe in coyote.

I was raised outside of Wichita, Kansas. Coyotes were just another part of the landscape in my childhood. At dawn, from my front porch, I could hear the yips and yaps of coyotes calling to each other. Throughout my life coyotes have been there and I believe have helped guide me.

When I got to high school I started withdrawing to the small elm and cottonwood lot behind our house. School was a social animal that I would never tame, but the animals outside my door were much easier to understand. I spent hours learning the birds and lizards and snakes I encountered. I would see coyotes off in the milo stubble often, but they were weary unlike the birds I could get close to with my binoculars. One morning a storm had brought a large amount of migrating birds into our back lot. I had gotten up for school and heard the chips and zeets of warblers outside my window. I ran out to the trees to see what I could find. It was still raining lightly, but there were birds everywhere. I found a place to sit and watch. I was completely still with my binoculars at my eyes. They were coming so close I didn’t want to move. I had sat for so long my leg had started cramping. I started to shift when I noticed, not 10 feet away, a coyote. We looked directly into each others eyes. My heart was off the charts. What to do? I just sat there completely confused, but in awe.

When I’m driving and see a coyote, I pull over, get out, and belt out a few yips and yaps. I’m not sure why I do this. They usually take off in that lazy loping way, but sometimes they just stare, probably thinking, “what is that crazy fleshy pink thing up to?” I suppose that morning I encountered the coyote I bewildered him as well. I think about that morning often.

Now that I’m in Chicago I still see coyotes. Once along the lakefront while I was out birding I saw one on the ice. I also have a friend who ran into a family, pups and all, in a cemetery on the north side. I saw one cross the road late at night.

Coyotes still have bounties on them in some western states. They’ve been persecuted by the government and livestock men as long as there have been those kinds of things. And still they persist.

I believe that their survival means our survival, that trying to learn what that mystery between us is, will help us live and I believe that I am following in coyote’s footsteps, that we are brethren, and will continue to learn and live together. And that if I could I would follow them completely, but I can’t and that is sad to me, that they are “the other” and I am “the other.” But that morning, when I was cold and wet and immersed in birds, I felt something that can’t be quantified, that can’t be caught, and that is what I believe in.