Embracing Caution

"Bright Angel Trail" by Tom Tackett

Here's the introduction to my National Park Collection:







Embracing Caution
When I was growing up in Southern Michigan I roamed the ravines and woods around our house without fear; observing the seasons, enjoying the wildflowers, thrilled with the wild creatures. As I became older, my life definitely became one where I spent nearly all my time indoors, first with school and working and later adding a family that kept me confined in the house with chores that consumed my free time. It got to the point where the only significant amount of time I spent outside was watching the kids play sports and the occasional family picnic.

So, a little over twenty years ago when we finally got the opportunity and time to begin exploring the national parks, it felt like I was coming back to my true nature. Unfortunately, it was a more cautious nature than I remembered.

When Tom and I put together a book of his photos and some of my writing in 2009, a friend read my essays about travelling with my family and mentioned that she liked the image of me standing vigil over the children while we were in the wild. When I reread my own writing with her comment in mind, I see that she was, of course, correct. Each essay I wrote about travelling with any of my children is filled with the ghostly presence of me, hovering, ever vigilant, as they navigate the wilderness.

I’ve been reading the work of Terry Tempest Williams, a naturalist and writer who is my age and lives in the one place on the face of the Earth, besides Michigan, that Tom and I have taken into our hearts – the red rock canyons of Southern Utah.

She writes about hiking into the distant canyons, barely escaping flash floods, boating on the Colorado River, bathing naked in warm mud pools, all while fighting the good fight to save these wild places. She is spiritually connected to the land and the mystical beliefs of the native people there. Although we have only met through her books and we live nearly fifteen hundred miles apart, I feel we are almost kindred souls.

Almost, except for one major difference – although she also has been married for a long time, she made the conscious decision to not have children.

While she devoted her life to nature and spiritualism, I made a pact with a different kind of muse – the kind that delivers mounds of laundry, fussy babies, worrisome teens, empty bank accounts. And, like a mother bear protecting her cubs, caution was woven into my soul, and there it stays.

When I wrote a poem for this collection called “Boys on the Edge” about two young men acting foolishly at the Grand Canyon and my gut reaction when I saw them, I found myself thinking later about how Terry would have reacted to the same scene.
Without that maternal quirk ingrained in her nature, would she have felt as protective? Or would she, a woman who has taken a few tumbles into canyons herself and lived to write about it, think that they had the right to enjoy the canyon as they wished, no matter how dangerous?

So, I'll continue my journey to explore and absorb the mountain and canyon country that’s so different from this place where we choose to live. I’ll do this despite all my limitations which include: being from the Midwest, having tricky knees that keep me firmly on main roads and trails, but most of all, having an over-riding sense of caution in a place that’s still wild, still dangerous.

I know with all my heart that there’s room for both of us: Terry, the thoughtful, adventurous, naturalist; and Denise, the slow, careful, observer. And we can meet in the middle on the page, where we both write about the land we love.

Denise Kalin Tackett
March 16, 2010