Coyote songs

are the only sounds I want to hear

Many of us may have just survived another round of tables laden with food, or a few too many hours spent with fr-amily, or days of frantic shopping in a traffic-choked metropolis. I know when I overstuff and overstimulate and overtire myself, how the whole body and mind feel icky, and I just have to wait it out. But if I can manage reasonable portioning, along with not-too-much-but-just-enough wine, and a regular dose of the fr-amily, and avoidance of crowds, I will return home feeling not just the Goldilocks level of “just right,” but physically healthy. Energized. Peaceful.

Do you know what I mean? Now take that sense of contentment and apply it to your soul. That’s how I felt exiting Yellowstone after five full days of no cell service. My sense of self felt more complete, more at ease. The experience was restorative in ways I had not imagined going in.

Stand around. Munch plant stalks. Menace with the eyes. #buffalolife

I had wondered how long the detox would take and estimated 24-48 hours of feeling anxious and unhappy about the decoupling of my normal brain activity (and hand activity too, always with the phone in it) from that vibrating line of information nearly always available. As it turned out, I was already fully detoxed as I left service at Gardiner. To be sure I’d left the OOO autoreply on every email and told anyone who might notice my absence via text, so leaving felt very safe.

Truly, I did not miss any of it. For the five days we wandered the Lamar Valley, I used my phone only to take pictures and make audio recordings. I didn’t pine for email or think much about what others were doing during that week. I focused on the present, the group I interacted with, placing one foot in front of the other. I looked at animal tracks and strained my eyes to spot a moose hiding behind a lodgepole pine.¹ I shared the Cree word for coyote with a new friend and rubbed my face on a snowy rock recently burnished by a buffalo.

My girl singing her song.

Emerging from all of it on Friday, I felt good. Healthy. Admittedly also pricked with dread at the onslaught I foresaw when I’d switch off airplane mode in Livingston, but overwhelmingly like this experience is one I’d like to repeat, and soon. Resisting the way the consumerist world wants us to live challenges us to find value in our own selves, our own lived experiences.

To slow. To sit and be without the noise of the digital world. To crunch the snow underfoot, hear only the bark of a coyote or the wind rustling winter cottonwoods. To feel the bite of superchilled morning air and be overtaken by a shimmering dome of stars.

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Yellowstone soundscape: bus interior, marching through snow to the bath house, snow falling, buffalo hooves clattering across a bridge next to the bus, coyote howling.

1. which they can totally do because moose are magical