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It was a hot August morning in 2017 when I finished packing everything I cared to keep into my blue Forester (including cat, dog, and the few boxes of things I hadn’t sold or given away) and left Milwaukee. The sun was just starting to heat the tarmac of the city. I glimpsed the stretching blue of Lake Michigan a final time before taking the exit for I-94 West. I was twenty-nine. The three years I’d spent in the city had gutted me—my four-year relationship had unraveled, I’d hit what alcoholics call rock bottom, and my estranged father had finally drunk himself to death at the age of fifty-six. 

On that August day, I was almost a year sober and I had hope: a new man and a new life chapter waited for me on the other side of the country. No one from this point forward would know who I’d been. It took three caffeine-addled days for the patient dog, the restless cat, and me to reach the remote mountain town of Marblemount, Washington. Population 250. Gateway to the North Cascades National Park.

I was here to live with a man, Jon, whom I’d only known a few months and spent only a handful of days with. The town that would be our new home together was little more than a curve in the road. As I slowed my car, I noted two dim gas stations, a diner advertising homemade fruit pies, and a log lodge favored by fishermen from out of state. I would later hear a local describe the town as an end of the road for the end of the roaders. The place was populated by isolated off-gridders, homesteaders and squatters, some families who’d been around for several generations, and a few communes of aging hippies who came up in the 1970s. There were also a handful of twenty- and thirty-somethings who worked for the national park or a local environmental nonprofit and cycled in and out of the area seasonally.

Jon was one of them, but he lived there year-round; he’d just bought a small piece of land with a rough, makeshift cabin on it. This is where we would live. Jon was outgoing, physically at ease, and, above all else, adventurous, with a history as a canyon guide and big wall climber. In him, I saw a life I didn’t have but wanted—a life in the mountains, closer to the land, writing in a cabin near the Skagit River, running in the alpine, learning to climb up granite rock faces. These worlds beyond and above the ones I knew. 

I wasn’t the only new arrival that summer. In June 2017, a local man spotted a lone gray wolf on his property near Marblemount and reported it to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW). Biologists from WDFW set traps and deployed trail cameras. They captured the wolf—a young, lean adult male—and fitted him with a GPS collar. Though wolves are native to the region and once flourished here, this was the first confirmed wolf sighting and capture west of the Cascades in over ninety years. Genetic tests showed he was a gray wolf, most likely dispersed from a pack in Canada or northeastern Washington.

Trail camera images later revealed that, by late 2018, a second wolf, a female, had joined him, forming what became known as the Diobsud Creek pair.

In the first photo I saw of the male wolf, he’s standing in tall grass on a farm just off Highway 20, a two-lane road that winds through the Cascades. The image was taken only a few miles from the cabin where Jon and I lived. The wolf is dark gray, almost black, facing the camera, with his body angled to the side, as if he’s undecided whether to stay or retreat. 

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Jon and I were on the precipice of wilderness, semi-homesteading where the road was swallowed by the northern end of the Cascades, near the Canadian border. The one-room cabin we lived in was cobbled from salvaged materials, with a big oil-drum wood stove and an outdoor shower. It was rustic, quaint, and precarious. Once a week, we drove an hour to the nearest sizable town for groceries and other supplies. 

At first, his optimism was intoxicating. He would wake early, make coffee and fried eggs for us while humming. He had visions for everything—the land, the future, the life he assumed we’d build, though I was still just regrouping. Sometimes I felt out of breath, as if some outline of myself as an independent person was thinning. On hot afternoons, he crossed the highway between our property and the Skagit River and dove under seamlessly, while I stood on the sandy bank, testing the glacial temperature of the river. Later, a friend told me his manic energy made her nervous. We fell into a life together quickly. Both of us poised for something committed, substantive, part domestic and part wild, the nature of a true-life project with another person. 

Living there with Jon, the idea of “wilderness” began to shift for me. My understanding had been shaped years earlier by William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” which I’d read and taught while living in Alaska. Cronon argues that wilderness isn’t something “out there” but a construct of the human imagination—a mirror for our values, fears, and histories. This myth of separation between humans and nature, he writes, deepens the damage we do to our home and the systems that sustain it.

I’ve spent most of my life in internal worlds. I grew up poor in rural Virginia, the second of three daughters of a busy, single mother. I was left to myself and embraced an inward turn; self-sustaining and imaginative in a way that comes from learning mechanisms of survival very young. We didn’t have much, but we had the land around us. I spent long hours exploring the deciduous forests, roaming dairy farm fields and the ruins of barns and silos, needling the banks of creeks. Wildlife and animals were constant: box turtles hidden in tall grass after rain, the family border collie asleep in the sun, my mother’s hens hurrying across the yard, white-tailed deer the boys at school bragged about hunting, coyotes at the tree line, water moccasins twisting through shallows, black bears seen only a handful of times in the distance. Toads under the porch. Catfish in slow rivers. It was a world crowded with other lives, each one shaping me in ways I didn’t recognize at the time.

When I was seventeen, I left the town where I grew up. I like to think I knew then, even if I couldn’t articulate it, that though this place formed me and would always be a part of me, I was meant for a different place. I would not return.

Growing up, I loved the idea of wilderness—open land sparsely populated or altered by human infrastructure—especially in northern climates. Wolves were my favorite animal, even though I’d never seen one. Perhaps this had something to do with an ecologically rooted escape fantasy, longing for a context so diametrically opposed to the one I was in.

Living in remote Washington, where wolves actually were, I started to comprehend that they were a species outside of, indifferent to, my imagined ideas of them. They have their own ecology and evolutionary history. Simultaneously, we (humankind and wolfkind) are entwined, even if distantly, through complex and often invisible systems—a lively paradox. In all of our human suffering, it is good to know that these other beings carry on in their own umwelten. How many worlds are overlaid with the one we perceive.

As I settled into my new life in Marblemount with Jon, who was still very much a stranger to me, I watched tensions about the wolf play out in real time—locals arguing over the animal as a threat to be eradicated, environmentalists celebrating its return. The wolf was less a creature than a fault line. No other animal in North America provokes quite the same reaction. In this way, they remind us of the harm we’ve done, how unnaturally we’ve tried to separate ourselves, entanglements we deny. What we have pushed to the margins, and what might return if we let it.

Jon and I roved those mountain trails and logging roads. I looked and listened for the wolves every time, but they evaded us.

That first year was the best, I think. Jon and I sketched plans for a house we could build on the property, talked about getting married, having a child. Why not imagine this chapter with this person in this place? He had a life there, friends, a job in the park, climbing partners, a rhythm. Most days I was alone in the cabin, working and writing, trying to breathe inside a life that felt more his than mine. I couldn’t see it yet—how my life was becoming eclipsed by the supporting role it played for someone else. We got baby chicks and a new black cat with a crumpled right ear. He planted orchard trees, hemmed in a vegetable garden, and constructed a coop. We built (well, mostly he built) a drier, brighter one-room cabin and slept in the loft. The lunette window on my side looked out over the Skagit River. I worked remotely and wrote from that cabin, while he spent his days working at the environmental nonprofit in the national park. We were happy because he was happy. 

The history of wolves in the Pacific Northwest is one of violence, the human kind. By the 1930s, wolves had been systematically eradicated from Washington through bounty hunting, poisoning, and state-sponsored extermination. Unlike in Yellowstone, there was no official human reintroduction here. They came back on their own, dispersing from British Columbia and the Northern Rockies. A self-return. Against odds, against harm. An ordinary kind of miracle.

I knew something by then about surviving violence, about what it means to come back. But what I really want to name is this: mildew and rust. Decomposition as a kind of return. The twisted tongue calling you home. The blade of a shoulder, petaling open, as he turns away from you in bed in morning light.

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Here is one memory. Jon and I are hiking up the backside, lesser-known route, of Sauk Mountain with a friend. Our dogs find a particularly rancid, large pile of animal shit. We study it. It is tapered and thick with animal fur. Wolf scat, we tentatively agree. Later, I email a state wolf biologist, who comes up to investigate. They can’t confirm or deny the continued presence of the pack. They’re seeing the wolves less and less frequently on the game cameras. As that second winter approached, I felt a growing fear for the wolves, but I couldn’t say why. Wolves come and go; the story of their return to northwestern Washington would be long and punctuated with failures and false starts. 

What I was learning, slowly, was that the eradication of wolves hadn’t just been about protecting livestock. It had been about power—control in response to what we can’t contain or don’t understand. The myths of conquest, manifest destiny, the machinery of unchecked industry. Wolves threatened all that simply by existing. They have their own roles on the land, and they are in a war they never consented to joining.

I began to ask questions. What is a wolf, really? What do they mean to a landscape, to an ecosystem, a watershed, a mountain range? What did they mean, specifically, to the upper Skagit River, and to this place where I was trying to build a life?

When the second winter came, our friends who worked seasonally in the park moved west, closer to the coast. I was more isolated than I’d ever been. I started to feel trapped by all of it. I asked him if we could move somewhere else where I might find community, my own footing and story. But he was committed to the land, what he’d begun before I arrived. It took me a while to see it, but we weren’t always co-creating—in some ways, I was being slotted in. The unstated reality was a betrayal, confirmation of a suspicion I held then that even the men drawn to my independence wanted to harness it, to fold it into their own story. My resentment grew a life of its own. Another year passed. I realized I didn’t want to marry anyone, let alone be a mother. 

I could have left many times before I did. He did not keep me there. 

When it came later, my parting might have seemed sudden, but really, departure is quiet. Over months, over years, I removed my heart from him piece by piece. There are a thousand apologies that could be named between us. 

The myth of wilderness is embedded with another: the idea of the frontier, a distinctly masculine idea of land for the taking, a place for men to test, prove, and find themselves. A promise of adventure, a life less mundane. By my late twenties, my life had already been marked and measured by men—what they’d given and taken, done and undone, claimed and abandoned.

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I spent four years of my life with Jon. Before him, I spent four years of my life with Scott. I was with Scott when I first heard wolves. 

On a road trip during what I think was the summer of 2013, Scott and I were on our way back from McCarthy to Chitina, Alaska. The McCarthy Road follows the historic railbed of the old Copper River and Northwestern Railway. It is a sixty-mile rutted gravel road that takes hours to travel by car, free of cell service and gas stations. We’d counted eight moose and a mother black bear with two glossy cubs on the drive down from Fairbanks to McCarthy. We were both eager, greedy for more—a roadside grizzly sighting perhaps? Living in Alaska, one becomes possessive, drunk on distance, all that space we perceive as human-free. 

It was nearly midnight but still light out, a hazy, pre-dawn feeling. I pulled our dusty Subaru Forester over and we stepped out to empty our bladders and unkink our washboard-road weary knees. We stood on opposite sides of the Subaru, each scanning a separate valley. 

To his left, a high-pitched, uncanny howl, familiar, yet not quite, sidled through the black spruce. Scott whispered that it must be a dog.

“I don’t know any dog that sounds like that,” I said, feeling the moment expand. 

We heard it twice more from the same direction, each time like a question becoming more muffled. I climbed on top of the car to get a better view. Then silence settled. Just when we’d given up, just as I turned to climb down, a second sound ripped through the night in the valley right below me—raw, hair-raising, certain: a wolf. A stone’s throw from us, just inside the tree line, answering the call of the first.

What I wrote, over a decade ago, about that moment, which part of me is still standing in: You remember that night just as vividly, don’t you? We never saw them, but how we stood between their voices, even if it was just for a moment.

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North of our property lay the Noisy-Diobsud Wilderness, and beyond that, the Mount Baker Wilderness. To the northeast stretched the North Cascades National Park—unbroken country all the way to the Canadian border. To the south ran Highway 20, climbing into the Cascades before crossing the dry interior of eastern Washington and continuing to Idaho.

Near our property, across the highway, runs the Skagit River. Route 20 hugs the river as it flows out of the mountains, westward toward Puget Sound. To follow the highway east is to follow the river in reverse. Yet, at all these intersections of movement, it felt somehow like I’d stepped out of time, into a side life, for a few years while I lived along the river.

Two miles east of our place, Diobsud Creek, the creek the wolves were named for, crashes down from the mountains and under a bridge on Route 20, where it meets the Skagit. The creek rises from glacial melt below Bacon Peak, fed by the Diobsud Glacier. Designated in 1984, the surrounding wilderness stretches roughly fourteen thousand acres. Near milepost 109, you can turn left off the highway and wind up the gravel-and-dirt Diobsud Creek Road, past a scattering of rural houses and cabins, then up through the trees, into logging lots and alpine terrain.

Jon and I used to run up that logging road. One time, I went alone with one of our dogs. Not long after passing above the treeline, I felt that familiar, but rare, sensation of being watched by something that could kill me. It was the distinct feeling of a cougar nearby (different, I’ve learned, from the feeling I get when a black bear or grizzly is close). I’d learned, by then, to turn around when I had the inkling of that feeling. A lesson from the landscape.

I don’t know what it feels like to be watched by a wolf out there—or if I was, I never knew.

If you know where to look, there’s an unmarked trailhead on a forested curve of the road. Locals maintain it quietly. The Diobsud Creek Trail is brushy and half-lost, absorbed by a forest of cedar, hemlock, and fir. It winds a few miles down to the creek. There’s a hidden beach there where Jon and I swam once. I still have the photos he took that day: in one, I’m ankle-deep in the sun-flecked water, pulling my wet hair into a bun.

I read that the trail once led all the way to Bacon Peak. It’s listed as a way trail—one not maintained to hiking standards, more memory than path. I dream of it still. Season of mildew and rust. Our season. Season of woodsmoke and wilting rosehip. Every year, every version of myself has felt strange to me. And then the past becomes stranger still.

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The actual area where Jon and I lived is a patchwork of human designations and tensions; the North Cascades National Park Complex, national forests, Department of Natural Resources lands, state parks, Seattle City Light’s hydropower corridors, and tribal lands. The borders overlapped in ways that never quite made sense on the ground, a map of competing claims laid over one small place.

This area is also the ancestral homelands of the Upper Skagit, Sauk-Suiattle, and Methow peoples, who moved seasonally through these valleys and mountain passes for generations before the park or the road existed. The idea of wilderness displaces the histories and futures of Indigenous stewardship that have long shaped these ecosystems. In fact, these nations maintain ongoing relationships with these lands today, despite the constraints of settler-imposed boundaries and management regimes.

The U.S. Wilderness Act of 1964 adds another layer of contradiction to this already tangled landscape of ownership, belonging, and meaning: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” How can humans be considered visitors to the very ecosystems we are part of, depend on, and continually alter?

The first and only time I’ve seen wolves, I was with Jon. We went to Yellowstone National Park in December of 2020 with the goal of finally seeing them. Before anything, we had to get there. Five mountain passes in the growing dark—Snoqualmie, Fourth of July, Lookout, Homestake, Bozeman—snow striking like sparks against the windshield. I drove until my mind veered into shades of twilight and black, the lonely arch of highway lights unspooling ahead. In Livingston we slept a few hours, then rose to drive again, east into Yellowstone, where the temperature had dipped to eleven degrees below and the wind bit clean through our coats.

We were not alone. A quiet huddle of parked cars marked the place, photographers setting up their scopes in the hush of early light. Jon and I joined them. When the sun began to rise, the Wapiti pack revealed itself in a corner of the valley, gathered around what was left of an elk cow. Through the sharp camera scope of a generous stranger I saw their fur, thickened for winter, and their maws and chests darkened with the elk’s blood. Jon took pictures with his phone through the scope. I still have them. In one image, the wolf’s breath is rising like steam off metal.

One large white wolf—muzzle rimmed in red—lays in the center of one of the images. This wolf may have been a descendant of the White Lady, famed white alpha female of the Canyon Pack, found mortally wounded inside Yellowstone in the spring of 2017, the result of a poacher’s gunshot. Rangers determined the injury was fatal and she was euthanized. Studies show that once Yellowstone wolves leave the park, human-caused mortality rises sharply. Montana Free Press reports that “from 2009-2020, about 4.3 wolves from Yellowstone were killed legally by hunters and trappers each year, according to National Park Service data. From 2021-2024, that number nearly tripled when an average of 12.75 wolves died annually, according to Yellowstone Wolf Project data.”

When we left the wolves and drove east, elk turned their butter-yellow rumps away from us. Bison tangled in ice fog. A moose and her calf postholed through drifts near the Beartooth Range.

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What does it mean to be chosen but not really seen?

I was lonely and felt the old asymmetries taking shape again. I’ve known some version of this imbalance, gaps in emotional awareness and uneven distribution of labor and care, in all of my relationships with men, not just romantic. I know that pattern is as much about me and my history as it is about those men. I’m still working my way down this particular way trail, its switchbacks sometimes startlingly familiar. What if to stop being angry, I just have to stop being angry?

But something was happening for me in those years I lived upriver, under the shadows of the mountains, the dams, the wolves, the man. I was writing, thinking, and exploring. There is so much life there, so many beings and intersections, from stoneflies clinging to the undersides of river rocks to the Diobsud pair living unseen but textured lives nearby, each being and species playing out their own dramas, bound to cycles of emergence, hunger, mating, migration, death, and renewal.

I came to know many river bends, trails, corners, precipices, and copses intimately. I realized that my interests in ecology, conservation, the myth of wilderness, and human–wildlife interactions were not hobbies or escapes. They weren’t separate from my writing, my lifework. They could be just as much a part of it as the previous writing territory I’d claimed—my childhood, my family, the violences threaded through them. What I’d thought of as parallel interests were, in fact, the same story widening.

I applied for and joined the Washington Wolf Advisory Group, a citizen stakeholder group which works “to promote equitable, inclusive, and respectful dialogue and decision-making among diverse people to foster durable peace by transforming the root causes of social conflict and providing high quality recommendations on wolf recovery, conservation, and management.” I was motivated then, under the sinister beginnings of the first Trump administration, to put whatever skills I had toward a future that felt increasingly at risk. Through this work, I became invested in the uneasy, maybe impossible, idea of coexistence on the landscape, not just among species, but among competing needs and claims, and the goal that we might learn to live in better relation with each other and other species, even considering past harm that can’t be undone. I am still a part of this work. 

I left Marblemount for good in 2019. The truth was simpler and harder than I wanted it to be: our visions for a life together were not compatible. Jon and I parted ways in 2021. I haven’t seen him in many years. I fear I will never be wanted like that again. Never have that kind of adventure, that wildness. But, even if I could undo it, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t choose another mix of hope and suffering. What he offered—it was as good as any. No, I mean, it was the one I wanted to be intimate with. The weird sacredness of this particular shared life.

The Diobsud Creek Pack, those wolves I lived among but never saw, failed to breed. Eventually one wolf, I think it was the female, disappeared—died or dispersed. In subsequent years, 2019–2022, only a single wolf was ever confirmed in the Diobsud territory. I felt sympathy for both of the wolves, the one who left, the one left behind. State wolf biologists don’t know why they didn’t breed. Sometimes, one of the wolf biologists told me later, it just doesn’t work. As of December 31, 2023, the WDFW states that Diobsud Creek is no longer considered a pack in Washington. 

But they were there, at least for a time, not imagined, two lives crossing in that landscape. As real as you and I.

 

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CAITLIN SCARANO is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. Her second full length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize, won the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She was a 2024-2025 Watershed Fellow with the Public Humanities Collaboratory in Oregon. She was selected as the winner of CutBank’s 2024 Genre Contest in Poetry and won LitMag’s 2024 Anton Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction.

 

Featured image by Milo Weiler, courtesy of Unsplash.