A Wolf At the Door
I’m collecting anxieties. As the years pass, and especially now that I have children, I can name any number of ways that everyday activities can go sideways.
Liz Sarb
The twigs crack under my feet in the cool morning air. The hill is ahead, all is still. And then: WOLF. Like a glitch in the matrix. It’s standing in the middle of the road, wild body in profile and head already turned to look at me. It saw me coming.
You never forget the first time you see a wolf. “I just saw a WOLF!!” I shout, panting, to my roommate as I launch myself into our apartment after sprinting home through backyards and overgrown paths. “You didn’t see a wolf,” the woman from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources says calmly when I report this critical information. “It was probably a coyote or a large dog.” I hang up, chastened but steadfast. I know what coyotes and large dogs look like. And now I know there’s a wolf out there.
I encountered the wolf in Madison, Wisconsin, where I worked as a writer at a large software company. Once a month, all 5,000 employees were required to attend a two-hour All Staff Meeting. We’d sit in the dark auditorium and half-listen to presentations that I cannot begin to recall now. What I do remember clearly are the dispatches from the company’s CEO, an eccentric woman who built the company from the ground up and now had free reign to entertain her captive audience however she pleased.
The talk I remember most fondly went something like this: the CEO steps onto the stage and clicks her remote, projecting a picture of a cougar (the large cat, not the predatory older woman, though I assure you that joke was done to death at the time) onto the massive screen. “The other night, during my drive home, I saw an animal run across the road. I am here to tell you that it was a cougar,” she says in a solemn, amazed voice. (Remember, thousands of people have cleared their schedules to attend this meeting.) She uses her laser pointer to trace the features she recognizes – the curved tail is a dead giveaway, she asserts. Perhaps she and I have had similar experiences with the Wisconsin DNR. New conspiracy theory alert: the Deep State doesn’t want you to know that metro Madison is absolutely crawling with apex predators!
The CEO was sure of what she’d seen and felt compelled to argue her case. And I get it – when you encounter something truly wild in the midst of a domesticated life, it stays with you. You become a sailor from the 1400s, scrawling Here Be Dragons! on your parchment-paper map.
I ran that wooded path many times after seeing the wolf. But the innocence of it was lost. Instead of a peaceful morning workout, each run became an exercise in my animal instincts. Every snapped twig sent my head spinning, sure I would turn to see the bared teeth of a wild canine lunging toward me.
I’m collecting anxieties. As the years pass, and especially now that I have children, I can name any number of ways that everyday activities can go sideways.
Recently, I sat on a bench in downtown Chicago, straining to catch a glimpse of my 5-year-old as she ran through the play structures at Maggie Daley Park. The structures are almost impossible for adults to enter or see into; the park also contains multiple play zones that are connected by winding paths and not visible to one another. One zone is a literal hall of mirrors. I was on high alert. “Anyone could be up there,” I thought to myself as Paige disappeared into a four-story wooden tower. And as it turned out, anyone could: a week later, a man was arrested for luring girls to the top of that very tower and exposing himself. (There’s a reverse Rapunzel metaphor there, but I don’t have the energy for it.)
A month later, Paige and I meandered down Halsted Street after procuring enormous chocolate chip cookies. As we crossed an alley, a man emerged and walked toward us, screaming in the violent language of the unmedicated, severely mentally ill. I grabbed Paige’s hand and moved faster down the empty sidewalk. He followed faster. “Paige, we have to run, ok?” I said, making the split-second decision to dash across the busy street in an attempt to put some obstacles between us and him. Miraculously, the cars stopped, and so did he, and soon we were on the other side. I was vibrating and she was quiet. “That man wasn’t angry at us, honey,” I said. “He yells at everyone. He’s just not well.” “Ok,” she said, accepting my explanation with no further questions. We walked until we couldn’t hear him anymore, then sat on a bench to eat our cookies, my adrenaline still pumping. The sunny summer air now contained a threat I couldn’t shake.
You know how in movies with an amnesia plot, there’s a moment when the protagonist begins to remember his violent past? The images glitch into his mind with that sharp violin soundtrack. He jerks and trembles and then it’s over: he’s just a guy again, now a little more on edge than he used to be. That’s how my brain stores my wolf sighting. Every now and then I’ll be going about my day and that darned WOLF will flash behind my eyes. FUCK, I’ll think to myself: Wolves exist! What the hell am I doing?? This is not my beautiful house!!
A few weeks ago, I stepped out of my front door and saw a coyote jogging down the street. My body barely reacted. “Oh, that’s a coyote! How interesting!” I thought, taking a couple steps back. It stopped, glanced at me, and then continued on its route down Wolcott to Roscoe to Ravenswood, where it presumably hopped a Metra train and carried on to the next town to find work that would feed its family. That animal was to the one I saw in Madison as Wile E. Coyote is to a Direwolf. The coyote made the wolf real.
I once told my therapist, “I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop.” She replied, “What if there’s no other shoe?” Hours later, I accidentally set a pan of nachos on fire in the oven, filling our home with smoke and displacing us for a week while it cleared. That very morning, with the specter of that other shoe hovering over me and that wolf flashing in my brain, I had told my husband where the fire extinguisher was: “In case we ever need it.” I had also said, “We should test the smoke alarms to make sure they work.” It was as if I was planning a minor arson and setting him up to save us. And he did save us—because he knew where the fire extinguisher was and because the smoke alarms went off. In another life, and I can see it so clearly, the flames consumed the kitchen and the house burned to the ground.
It is a strange blessing to know that the worst thing to ever happen to you has not happened yet. I know there are people who move through life unencumbered by this knowledge, but I am not one of them. Instead, I scan the treeline for wolves, scan my body for the lump that will turn into cancer, scan the crowd for a man in body armor. There’s always another shoe.
This morning, I am scanning the news for the latest death toll in the latest war. I think back to the full-body realization, when I saw the wolf all those years ago, that I was its prey. What is it like to live every day with that knowledge? To not just imagine the wolf around the corner, but to know that it is hunting you down? By some trick of luck and fate, I don’t have to know yet. As I sit writing in the peaceful dark, the city wakes up around me. The wolves outside my window retreat to their dens for one more day.
