US 160 through downtown Trinidad is deserted at 5:30 a.m. Pedaling east in the chilly pre-dawn air, the quiet metallic purr of my bicycle chain softly serenades me as the work warms my muscles. A hundred yards in front of me, Dave looks like a shadow in the darkness as he pedals, lit now and then by a passing car, silhouetted by the faint light building along the early dawn horizon.
Our ride today will traverse a beautiful high prairie, where the high desert of eastern Colorado rolls down toward the sweeping prairie of western Kansas. A land with great open stretches inhabited very sparsely by desert grasses, pronghorn antelope, and people steeped in toughness. I find it easy to love a place like this.
I’m not the only person who’s been smitten by the beauty of the high prairie. Many readers will smile and nod as I talk about the magic of the open land and expansive skies. Those who are smiling and nodding probably grew up on the prairie, or spent formative years there. Their journey through life took them to the prairie at some point, and held them there long enough for the endless sea of grass, the big sky, and the restless wind to weave enchantment deep into their souls.
The open prairie emerges in front of us, deep crimson dawn dripping across it. Ghost-like forms of old deserted homesteads take shape now and then along the horizon to our north and south. The magic of early dawn draws us down the ribbon of highway, the open prairie I call home singing me into its heart, tickling my wanderlust, caressing my thirst for adventure.
About 40 miles east of Trinidad, we hit an intersection with SH 389. From behind a deserted building, a big black dog comes galloping toward us, indicating that someone must live close by. Unlike the desert dogs back in the Mojave — the ones for whom I represented blood sport — this guy is clearly curious about us rather than threatening. Dave is 50 yards ahead of me, and I watch the dog watch Dave pass, then stand in the middle of the road staring after him. I make a little sound so he hears me coming, and he turns to watch as I approach. I have some friendly words for him, and he wags his tail. As I pedal past him, he casually turns in my direction, and begins to lope along beside me as I ride.
It’s wide-open and lonely out here on the high-prairie where this guy lives. I expect he’s pretty happy to have visitors come by at a pace he enjoys. It could be that he’s a ranch dog who’s used to riding with horses, and our bikes seem like odd horses to him. Whatever the reason, he decides we’re a good pack to run with for a while. I expect him to drop off after a few hundred yards, but the further we go, the more comfortable he seems to feel beside us. The little headwind has us rolling along at an easy 12 miles per hour or so, which must be a comfortable pace for him, allowing him to fall into an easy galloping rhythm.
I’m delighted and fascinated with our new friend, and at the same time worried. He floats back and forth from one side of the road to the other, sometimes running along on the pavement right beside me, and sometimes dipping down into the ditch beside the road to run down there. While the traffic is extremely light, there is a pickup now and then that comes along one way or the other.
I feel the joy emanating from our friend as he runs with us. While I don’t know the factual story of this dog, I make up a story as we sojourn together. I figure he lives on a ranch nearby, and he knows the lay of this land pretty well. Had we been cycling past his yard, he probably would have had to chase us off with a bit of growling, barking, and snapping, but since we were out in neutral territory, he’s just trying to figure out who we are and what we’re up to.
We look a little like a pack he might run with. Maybe it’s been a while since he got to be part of a pack, to run with a pack, and scrounge with a pack, and hunt with a pack. He loves his job on the ranch, but misses the community of the pack. My friendly words as I pedal past push him over the edge. Yearning for that community, and without thinking about it, he drops into an easy gait alongside me.
Part of the pack.
The fulfillment of the community of the pack overwhelms him, and he’s happy to take flank duty as we range our way down the highway. The day’s not particularly hot this early in the morning, so he figures we’ll be able to keep this pace up all day. A nice breeze blows in his face, and he smiles broadly as we make our way down the road.
The Pack. The joy of The Pack. The synergy of The Pack. Life is good.
A couple miles down the road, we curve off to the north a little bit, putting the wind slightly behind us, and our speed picks up a few miles an hour. Our friend drops back with our increase in speed, eventually pulling up to a stop at the side of the road, watching us disappear down the road in front of him. I look back several times as we continue to move down the road, and feel some sadness as he grows smaller and smaller along the side of the highway stretching out behind us.
We’re all designed to fit within some sort of fabric. Wild dogs exist all over the world, and evolved to have a strong need to be a thread within the fabric of a pack. Different sorts of wild dogs, from wolves to coyotes to hyenas, have each evolved their own pack texture. As scientists have studied wolves, and come to understand the dynamics of the pack, they’ve been surprised to learn just how complex the fabric can be, and how much the survival and health of the animals within the pack depend on the weave and texture of the pack they live in.
In the last few thousand years, dogs have adapted to humans as humans have adapted to dogs. The “design†of the domestic dog has evolved, and domestic dogs attach themselves to their human family as a sort of pack in many ways. Dogs have learned to survive and thrive as a part of a human tribe or family. A pack.
What’s the result on the well-being of the dog, I wonder? How much survives of that deep instinct to weave themselves into the fabric of a pack? Is this a strong drive deep inside the wiring of a dog? Do they feel a gap in their lives every day, an emptiness they can’t understand well?
What about us, people in our culture? Are there threads that our deep wiring needs us to weave into a fabric someplace, and our inability, failure, or lack of opportunity to weave those threads into a fabric has created the same sort of gap in our lives?
It’s easy to look around and see folks in our culture today, and guess that we’ve probably lost touch with some of those sorts of threads. I watch people around me willing to give themselves to a job for ten or twelve hours a day, shoveling their kids off to the nanny or the babysitter for 90 percent of the child’s early life, knowing in their heart this is wrong, but somehow not able to find a way to re-prioritize their life and put things back in the right balance.
When the President of the United States shows this kind of dedication to his job, I’m grateful. That’s important work, and lots of folks depend on him getting it right. When a talented surgeon spends 12 or 14 hours a day saving the lives of people in need, I admire that. Many dedicated folks do important work upon which people’s lives depend.
However, most of us aren’t protecting the free world, or saving lives with our talented hands. Most of us are simply delighted to spend hours in meetings that aren’t well-run and don’t need us there anyway. We’re happy to spend days on internal presentations to explain things to other folks within our own company, most of whom really don’t need to be involved with the issue anyway. We’ve created ways to make a lot of jobs seem important enough to sacrifice ourselves for. But if we really look at the value the world derives from the work, it’s a bit shameful.
For this, we sacrifice what we say is most dear to us.
I’m not pointing fingers from afar; I’m as guilty as the next guy. I gave way too much of myself to my “job†in the early days, and not enough of myself to those closest to me. I get it. It’s the same missing fabric issue I’m projecting onto the story I’ve made up about our furry friend this morning.
I could probably pick out a dozen ways to see this same disconnect between what we say is important, and how we live our lives. I’m just picking on one I understand well.
Dangling around us in life are threads we’re wired to weave into a particular sort of fabric. We’re living lives that either keep us from seeing the threads, or keep us from understanding how to weave them into the kind of fabric we need. We end up doing certain things, or living certain ways, and missing the important threads in life. Our disconnected lives are a symptom of that dissonance. Most of us feel the dissonance in our lives and in our culture, but what are the real root causes?
Around each one of us are tiny threads that need us to take hold of them. The fingers of our hearts long every day to feel those threads, and the eyes of our souls long to see the pattern that is revealed as we weave those threads into a the fabric of our lives. It’s the thread and the fabric I wish I could understand better.
I’m pedaling along, doing something I love to do, long-distance bicycling. When I’m doing this thing, I nearly always feel a great sense of satisfaction. There’s surely a certain amount of “drug effect†from the endorphins that saturate my body when I’m riding long and hard days, but I think it’s more than that. Something about this activity I love so much feels like those threads. The road and the journey feel a little like the fabric.
Christopher McDougall was a writer and a runner who wrote a book called Born to Run. He believed that our evolution as a species was driven, in large part, by our unique development as an endurance machine. He provides a good deal of evidence that characterizes the modern human as a species bred to run ultra-long distances.
If there’s some shred of truth in the ideas that McDougall and others put forth about humans being “born to run,†it explains some of the joy I get from long-distance cycling that requires a lot of endurance. This might be one of the threads I’m looking for, though I suspect it’s only one of many.
Our dark-furred friend seems to have found a thread this morning. Dave and I must feel like a pack he can run with, and running with our pack weaves a thread into a fabric that feels good to him. It seems to be scratching an itch that’s deep inside. Sure I’m anthropomorphizing here, but the joy in his gallop and the smile on his face are unmistakable.
