‘It is one of the great unspoken facts of America that the land of the free largely belongs to the state,’ LOCATION: 86
Who hasn’t prepared a welcome? Set flowers on a nightstand for a returning hospital patient? Festooned a living room for a returning soldier? Stocked a refrigerator, washed a car, laid out towels? All of this is a kind of hope, a tune without words. Hope that the beloved will arrive safely, that the beloved will feel beloved. LOCATION: 159
To live for a minimum of seven years with a minimum of seven kids in two hundred square feet with no toilet paper or Netflix or Xanax requires a certain kind of imperturbability. LOCATION: 207
All four objects sit mute in front of me – points of light dredged out of the shadows, incapable of testimony. What lasts? Is there anything you’ve made in your life that will still be here 150 years from now? Is there anything on your shelves that will be tagged and numbered and kept in a warehouse like this? What does not last, if they are not retold, are the stories. Stories need to be resurrected, revivified, reimagined; otherwise they get bundled with us into our graves: a hundred thousand of them going into the ground every hour. Or maybe they float a while, suspended in the places we used to be, waiting, hidden in plain sight, until a day when the sky breaks and the lights come on and the right person is passing by. LOCATION: 251
It’s not that the stuff is still here. It’s not that the house still stands. It’s that someone keeps the stuff on shelves. It’s that someone keeps the house standing. LOCATION: 258
‘Boxes. Moving, dying, breaking up. All life’s great tragedies are marked by the appearance of those goddamn square cardboard units. Such an ominous shade of brown.’ LOCATION: 281
James got into bed and put his arms around her. He’d come to tell her that he was leaving. It seemed rather impossible now – the telling, not the leaving. LOCATION: 318
Like Don Corleone, he had always enjoyed receiving visitors, especially family members, as opposed to just greeting them, like a normal person. LOCATION: 331
He saw, in them, all the couples of the world for whom the past held more promise than any potential future. Relationships based largely on reminiscence of things past. Was this what it meant to be rested, content, settled in love? Or, were the old hippies, and all others like them, just wound-up machines running on memories? LOCATION: 379
To James it was fairly clear that men of a certain standing in Texas needed to own ranches. They needed to have a man like Karl on the payroll. It’s what separated them from the citified businessmen on the coasts. During the week they might sell and trade commodities but on the weekends they were ranchers, desperately. How else to justify their existence, if not by holding themselves to a moral code developed in large part from watching John Wayne movies as boys? LOCATION: 546
And, I’m going to do you a favour here and tell you what I tell all of them when they get a little drunk on the last day of their vacation and start in about how they want to come down here and buy a little ranch and just leave it all behind. Do you know what they say in the bar at closing time?’ ‘What do they say?’ ‘You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.’ LOCATION: 585
Cut a woman ass to belly to mouth, and connect all the holes and what you have is meat. In this world, she is either meat or knife. Or meat that carries a knife, that sleeps with one under a pillow, grip ready at the switch. You asked for it, dead girl. LOCATION: 687
She doesn’t have a story because everyone else has one, has too many of them. LOCATION: 769
There’s a line no one can cross. That she won’t cross. And nothing will happen to her. She won’t happen. She needs a line that stretches out, forward, and doesn’t double back into a knot. In this line no one loves her or knows her. And that is a relief. No one loves her or knows her. That is a loneliness. LOCATION: 822
‘No one really knows Marcus’s deal,’ says Deen. ‘Saw him here the last two summers. Hitch-hikes in. Hitch-hikes out. He’ll be back, unless he ends up in a ditch.’ ‘Wasn’t he fired?’ she says. ‘He never gets fired.’ ‘He took her money, didn’t he?’ ‘Even worse,’ says Deen. ‘He didn’t take nothing.’ LOCATION: 878
Nerves and muscles twitch. Stand, they twitch, when she rests. Rest, they twitch, when she stands. Sleeping is more work than working. To sleep is to unlearn. Uncut every cut. Unknife every knife. Unline every line. Unmouth every mouth. But not everything can be undone. LOCATION: 891
assimilation begins from the bottom: you never really ‘belong’ to the country except as a labourer. LOCATION: 1013
I wonder, too: maybe we have lived lives of struggle and so have become good at violence. Violence is often thought of as the absence of culture, or its opposite: something that happens when societies fall apart. But perhaps violence is like everything else – something we learn, something we practise and something we can become good at. It is, for some of my tribe, their only marketable skill. LOCATION: 1018
More than a painful life, more than a member of a culture that has perfected living through violence, making it a virtue because it is a necessity, more than a meanness or a willingness to sacrifice oneself, what I felt, what I saw, were Indian men and boys doing precisely what we’ve always been taught not to do. I was seeing them plainly, desperately, expertly, want to be applauded for their subversive talents and hard work. LOCATION: 1121
to have those echoes multiply and fill the woods with circles of dilating sound, LOCATION: 1375
I remind myself when I reach the pond at sunset how far water reveals itself by night, as the moon shimmering across the surface, tightens into a pyramid of light that points to me, that points me out indeed and, in the same gesture, also burns the crests of small waves with flames I thought at first were fireflies. We do not habitually live our lives in full; we do not fill ourselves sufficiently with blood. Even so, as they creep close and closer still to me I see those flames increase, so many broken fragments of the moon they seem more intense than the moon itself, until their brightness makes me turn away, and wish for company to share my task of looking, and the light complete. LOCATION: 1399
Nothing less wild, nothing more suggestive of wildness: the electronic trace of a hidden wolf. LOCATION: 1486
All of it is wolf country; nowhere is a wolf to be seen, but they are here, an under-presence, a concealed otherness and a hidden dominance. LOCATION: 1495
Wolves have become the great meaning-vehicles of the American West. LOCATION: 1497
wolves ‘belong’. A landscape without wolves is incomplete. LOCATION: 1498
They are the ‘keystone predators’. Without them the arch of life, in its many trophic levels, is not only broken but insecure. Wolves should be thought of not as parasitic on the animals that sustain them but in some ways the creators and governors of the world they dominate. If the wolves are absent, the arch beneath them bulges and distorts: too many elk and deer, too much uninterrupted browsing on trees, a diminution of bird habitat, no cooling shadows for streams, no beavers, fewer fish. A fractured universe. LOCATION: 1499
Why do wolves have this grip on the modern rewilding imagination? Perhaps because they seem like the best possible vision of how we might be if we were ever thrown back into the wild. Maybe, if we dream right, we might in fact be wolves. Wolves seem as capable, as self-sufficient and as imposing as the best of us. LOCATION: 1502
Barry Lopez, the Bella Coola Indians thought that a great shaman once tried to change all animals into men but the only things he succeeded in making human were the eyes of the wolf. LOCATION: 1506
Looking down on the territories of these packs, each covering about 150 or 200 square miles, not that different in size from the cattle ranches which overlie them, I couldn’t help but think of them as little fiefdoms, the great estates of the wolf-earls, alive with questions of dominance, rivalry, calculation, loyalty and struggle, an ancient, co-present, parallel world to our own. LOCATION: 1520
the mortality tone beeps on in the headphones, an insistent anti-heartbeat, LOCATION: 1532
an animal killed not because it was a real threat, nor because it was wanted for its meat or skin, but almost certainly because of its metaphor, because it was unwanted in the rancher’s world. LOCATION: 1533
this landscape was coloured by a conflict of inheritances and a clash of nostalgias. LOCATION: 1536
Below us was a battlefield of competing griefs. LOCATION: 1545
Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wolves were exterminated in the whole of the United States except Alaska and a small sliver of Minnesota, with the explicit purpose of making the country safe for cows. LOCATION: 1554
‘One of the penalties of an ecological education,’ Aldo Leopold wrote, ‘is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is invisible to laymen. An ecologist … must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.’ LOCATION: 1581
‘The cowman who cleans his range of wolves,’ he wrote in A Sand County Almanac, ‘has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dust bowls and rivers washing the future into the sea.’ LOCATION: 1584
is a wooden anti-wolf shelter designed for children who need to wait for the school bus without being eaten by the wolves around them. You LOCATION: 1598
‘the ecology of fear’ LOCATION: 1618
Some eco-theorists have linked this ‘ecology of fear’ to what they also call the ‘geography of hope’, the possibility that in wildness, as Thoreau wrote in his famous essay ‘Walking’, ‘is the preservation of the world’. Fear makes for a redeemed ecology, one into which the reality of violent death injects a kind of health and vigour. LOCATION: 1623
The spaces between the stars I know from home are filled here with a kind of star-rubbish, a star-smear, as if someone had forgotten to sweep up the floor of the night sky. LOCATION: 1754
perhaps this unmediated profligacy of the universe was what men used to see. And that one of the purposes of wilderness might be to take you back to how things were, not to something simple but to something complex, the too-much of the world, the net of intricacy we would see and know if the reductions and definitions of modernity did not prevent us. LOCATION: 1759
It was a slow single voice, proprietorial, low then lower, asserting its dominance over the coyotes in the night, all the power, and you could say the humanity, of it in the dropping of the pitch, more animate than the wind could ever be, more meant, a statement from the bass line of the world. LOCATION: 1770
Grandma got me back on my feet with pearls of immortal wisdom like, ‘Pull yourself together.’ LOCATION: 1880
Grandma said, ‘When you were a little boy, I thought you would be president of the United States.’ I got that odd shrivelling feeling I used to get when my parents couldn’t handle me and she would have to come to our house. LOCATION: 1957
She thought about how, when Greg moved in, his things would mix with her things until they forgot who owned what. LOCATION: 2246
He acted more in love with her than ever, and so it felt like much less. LOCATION: 2328
Robby and I used to joke about her vanity; now it seems a generosity, not easily maintained, to look a way that doesn’t frighten children. LOCATION: 2809