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.…
I have never stopped thinking about that pair of wolves.
As someone who has been focused on writing and teaching poetry, it has been years since I finished a lyric essay, though I often think it might be the form that most reflects how my mind works. It is the form that holds the most aesthetic appeal for me and supports the most complexity and argument.
This essay started as a pair of linked poems within a longer poetry manuscript in progress about the Skagit River watershed. One poem is about the arrival of the wolves in Marblemount and one is about their departure. Earlier this year, two poets from my MFA program and I began exchanging work on Zoom. I shared the wolf poems and explained my fascination with the parallels between arriving in a remote place and beginning a relationship the same summer a wolf pair established themselves there for the first time in nearly a century. One of the poets said, I would love to read an essay about this.
Many ideas began firing in my mind. The parallels were metaphorically rich, but in this essay I am interested not only in metaphor but also in interrogating what exists beyond symbolism. What are the lives, histories, and futures of the elements (the wolves, the river, the wildness of the region, the half-forgotten way trails, etc.) that drive metaphorical thinking and personal change? I wanted to show that the ecological web and richness of life in this place far outstretched the drama of two human lives that unfolded within it for a few years.
Trying not to create a hierarchy among beings and subjects in the essay was one of the biggest challenges I faced. Another challenge was compressing the complexity of the region’s wolf history, the thorniness and awe that the idea of wilderness holds, the competing land claims and designations, and the tensions between human industry, Indigenous knowledge and ways of life, and wildlife needs.
The essay is also about remembering, and how our memory of a place or experience evolves and develops its own life over time. I was interested in how we come to narrate certain chapters of our lives, and the different choices we made as the years pass. For example, I would have written this essay very differently two years after I left Marblemount, or even five. Writing now, with eight years of distance, allows for a distinct kind of clarity.
And with that distance, what I see is that although the relationship was formative, what fascinates me most is the question of how to live and love in a changing landscape where things are constantly arriving, shifting, departing, and becoming something else—including myself.
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.
