In 2021 and 2022, the peak COVID years, I found myself awake, too many mornings, at 2:00 or 3:00 AM. Sometimes, with great effort, another round of sleep would find me. Too often, I’d go through my day with 3 or 4 hours of sleep.
The last week of December, 2021, was like this. On December 28, nearing the welcome end to an unwelcome year, I leaned into it.
Insomnia and I went for a walk at a local creek, despite the cold and my general thread-bareness. You’d think insomnia would be a boon for a birder, taking me out with the owls and the other night birds. No. It wears and drains you until even a short walk is Odyssean.
So these morning walks were becoming rarer and rarer. But the creek called me. I’d visited a few weeks prior and thought that it seemed right for the local Bobcat that I’d seen reported on Nextdoor. The creek was overgrown, with wild plums, willows, and chokecherry. The thickets were deep, deeper than most in the over-developed neighborhood.
Tired, bitter, joyless, I headed to the creek. The first traffic light that stopped me was broken. The crossing traffic’s green light flickered madly, a strobe light cutting through my mood. It felt like a visual poem of insomnia – the anxiety, the wear, the edginess around sensory input.
The creek, however, was relief. I walked slowly, deliberately, looking for tracks, scat, any sign of a Bobcat. The slowness helped.
Attending to these signs is not unlike engaging in a mindfulness activity. One opens ones attention, giving it over to the act of noticing. When I’m able to engage it in deeply enough, my mind inches toward clear.
Though the trail itself was empty, signs abound. A tuft of fur on the spine of a wild plum. Clawless tracks, of the kind that a cat leaves. Deep in a plum thicket, yellow eyes in my headlamp. Raccoon? Bobcat? The thicket was too much itself to know.
I lingered through sunrise, staring into a grassy field near the creek, ripe with bluestem and switchgrass seeds. They caught me because native grasses are an uncommon thing in the old pasture fields around Denver. Most — the fields, the native grasses — have been overtaken by invasive bromes.
Then, as I turned to head back to my car, an enormous house cat balancing in a small tree across the field. No, not a house cat? That was my mind, wasn’t it, never having seen a Bobcat, struggling to process the shape?
No, not a house cat. A Bobcat!
A Bobcat?
A Bobcat!
A bobcat, a bobcat, a bobcat!!!
I wanted a better angle for a photograph, so I crossed what I took for iceless rocks on the iceless creek Only rocks in an iceless winter creek are colder than the water itself. A sheen of ice, which I had looked right through, took me.
I was crawling across the creek. Insomnia joined me, both of us coursing (cursing?) with adrenaline. By the time I crossed, my gloves were damp with winter water.
The Bobcat that I might have carefully watched from the drier side of the creek was gone.
Doubling back, colder and wetter now, I went through it all. Fits of laughter, cut by dry sobs.
I was undone by sleeplessness, by the anxiety it soaked me in. By the worry that a new year was arriving, and I still felt a bit broke.
I was undone by my stupidity. My absolute beginner status with Bobcats led me in the exact wrong direction to closely observe it. It drove me closer, closer, when farther, farther, is closer still.
I was undone by having misjudged the creek and, at a sleepless 40 years old, found myself crawling across rocks.
But mostly, I was undone by the Bobcat, by the sheer dumb luck of standing in the right place at the right time, turning back again at an even righter time to glance at an even righter place.
Surely, the creek only did what the Bobcat asked of it: to bring this awed and worn-out human, approaching, to his knees.
Featured Photo by Eddie Black on Unsplash
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