I had a moose curse
and now it's so broken
Mycelium are tiny threads that allow trees to communicate with one another under our feet as we walk through a forested area. Trees can send out distress signals in case of poor health or other threat, and baby trees receive sustenance from older trees through this network. Mycelium are truly astonishing, yet unsurprising.
It was a quiet, extensive network like this, I imagine, through which for years, all the moose everywhere relayed my whereabouts to each other to sustain my Moose Curse. Most people who knew me during this curse, aka my entire adult life, knew about my absolute inability to view a moose. Having never seen one, and moose being kind of common in Montana, many found it surprising that someone who has lived here this long had managed to avoid them.
Well. They were clearly avoiding me. Let me provide so many examples.
There was that one time when the kids and I traveled to Salt Lake to see a concert. Driving that way takes you right by the Red Rocks Lake National Wildlife Refuge, where I was told in very certain terms by a friend that moose are always there. Always, he said. The detour added a couple of hours to an eight-hour drive, but…moose. So we went. After hugging the beige lakeside for miles, casting about for something dark and gangly, finally we got hungry. We pulled over for a picnic. The car a minute or two behind us stopped and the driver called out, “Did you see the moose? Yeah, a mama and twin calves crossed the road right behind your car!”
See what I mean?
A couple of years later when my daughter became old enough to drive, she was ferrying herself and brother to school when they passed the bus stop and spotted two moose right there. Right at the bus stop. Where I had sat waiting literally hundreds of times. Where was I? In my classroom, of course. Those moose knew.
I became obsessed. I signed up for a grueling challenge hike thing at Snowbowl1 because the t-shirts had moose in hiking boots on them. I commissioned a moose running in sneakers for fundraiser shirts on behalf my nonprofit, Spring House. My incredible artist friend Leah came through.
People sent me every sign of a moose they saw: Moose in the Rattlesnake? Send it to Anna! Moose on Mount Jumbo? Send it to Anna! Moose on a friend’s street in Ronan? Send it!! The only one of these I actually went after was the one in the Rattlesnake. (Unsuccessful, duh.) There are dozens of moose posts on my facebook feed from friends who saw them, or who saw them in a news story, or something. One of my favorites was a video of a young moose in the pools at the waterpark in Butte.
My girl Starla drove me up and over the Rock Creek road in one all-day excursion because she’d never not seen moose there. Guess what happened when she brought me along? Streak broken. Moose quest foiled. They had heard I was coming.
Finally, we managed to outwit those wily moose. I say “we” because it was a full community effort on that summer day in 2018, when I left my home at 5 am and sped all the way to East Glacier. Everyone promised to keep quiet during the moose meetings so they wouldn’t know I was coming. I hiked along the Two Medicine Lake, then advanced up the path all sneaky like, looked off to the right….and yes. A cow and calf moose! I took 1,000,002 pictures.
Reporting in: the moose curse remains snapped. In late March 2020, the kids and I sought to escape lockdown by heading to Freezeout Lake to watch the snow geese migration, and we spotted a cow and calf crossing the road by Lincoln.
Then, the other day I was out and about and detected this little lady munching some bushes near a pond. I executed a quick three-point turn and parked over by a fence. She was very curious, came out and watched me, walked toward me, circled around, then faced me again. I was quite a ways off, very safe, and enjoyed watching until I realized I was agitating her. So, back to the car. I sent a video to Starla (of Rock Creek and Snowbowl hike fame) and she said, “Girl, that curse is so broken!”
I’m not tying all this together in a deft observation about life. It’s just a story of a girl and her moose quest.
ski area in Missoula. Not for the weak during either summer or winter.
I hereby DEMAND deft observations about life.