“Jacob!” my classmate whispers from behind the rocks. “Look!” My eyes shift from the pristine white elk skull a few yards away to a being farther down the glen. There, rearing its head, a buffalo lies peacefully in its wallow. Within seconds my classmate and I are back to the rocks from whence we came, the happy creature none the wiser to our brief presence. From high above, we observe the buffalo continue to twist and turn in its wallow amidst the bright Yellowstone afternoon.
A day later, with our camp packed and burdened on our shoulders, I lost sight of my bare feet into the cool waters of Hellroaring Creek, trying vigorously to keep my dangling boots from taking a plunge. As the stream soothed my several mosquito bites and small cuts, I realized that this was the last creek I was likely to set foot in during my time on course. For the rest of the walk back to the van, I chatted with my instructor Liz about the few streams I could remember from my childhood in Southern California, all dwarfed by this tributary to the Yellowstone River.
Going into this course, I expected that the latter topic, water, would encompass my interest in the many sites we visited. While this was largely true—from building beaver dam analogs to talking with ranchers about drought to camping by pristine wetlands—I also came to appreciate the role of buffalo on these landscapes and their troubles. These interests coalesced during our Yellowstone backpack. I felt similarly immersed in the presence of the buffalo and the flow of the stream, temporarily relieved of the complex management questions that surround them both. With both, I felt joy and fear at the power yet unpredictability of the buffalo and the comfort yet peril of the swift stream.
This course has taught me that embracing our emotional reactions to landscapes deemed worthy of restoration is just as important as an understanding of the physical and management questions at hand. Both water—streams, groundwater, the precious rain that arid landscapes like Montana receive in thunderstorms—and the buffalo deserve to be appreciated beyond our society’s ability to describe them. Each of us affected by or involved in these issues should examine our relationships to the phenomena themselves. That will make our attempts to comprehend and tackle the hard questions all the more genuine.
