A Moose Is Not an Axe Murderer

High Times in a Pandemic

My small second-story West Seattle apartment feels palatial. It has big west-facing picture windows and a disproportionately large deck and a beautiful view of the Puget Sound and Blake Island, which is riddled, I am told, with raccoons that run the joint like baby-fisted mafiosos. Partially cloudy evenings produce sunsets unpaintable; on clear summer days, I am treated to views of the Olympic Mountains, the perpetually snow-capped mounts Brothers and Ellinor and Washington rising in the distance and, were it possible to get up high with the occasional Bald eagle and ubiquitous seagull (there are nearly ten species in my area, but they annoy me such that I shall deprive them of their individuality), views of the coveted Mt. Anderson. There is a western red cedar just to the north of my apartment, home to a multi-generational family of western gray squirrels; they taunt me through my sliding glass door as they eviscerate bags of Kingsford Match Light charcoal, the sturdy paper of which they use to line their nests. The tree is close. Its branches feather my deck, and the big trunk is near enough that I can spit water on it. The targeted squirrels, however, are quick like, well, squirrels. The tree itself lilts with the wind funneled through the narrow walkway that separates my building from the vacant house next to it, its upper deck at eye-level to me. Once I was washing dishes at the kitchen sink and a juvenile Cooper’s hawk landed on the railing across from me, staring at me through the window like I was the concave side of a Golden Corral sneeze guard. I gingerly stepped out onto the porch to take a picture; the hawk buzzed me with the audacity of youth, leaving me with a camera phone image of what was quite mistakably a wingtip. In short, my apartment is Eden in 850 square feet.

That is, of course, in non-pandemic years. In 2020 my apartment is a veritable prison, though a good one as far as prisons go, a place Martha Stewart might be banished to, occasionally furloughed in order to indulge in shrimp & pork wontons from Dumplings of Fury or complain – politely, as this is still West Seattle – that a highly contagious virus should not necessitate closing of the Whole Foods Hot Bar. Where, she might ask, is the humanity? My own humanity remains inside my apartment. Though I sleep in my room and exercise in my garage, the remainder of my life is spent at my kitchen counter. I prepare coffee on one side and drink it sitting on the other; I prepare food on one side and eat it sitting on the other. Here I do homework, read, write, and do work. I conduct conference calls from here, looking at the wall when I need to focus and then spinning around 180 degrees when the call has bored me and I want to look through the big windows at the life I used to have. I am the last man on earth. The world outside is nearly Armageddon, my figurative LoJack a combination of Covid19 restrictions and King County’s decision to close the West Seattle Bridge, the by-far-quickest way to get from West Seattle to regular Seattle, due to a “sudden change in crack growth rate”, which must be a confusing agenda item at urban planning meetings. It is as if Elon Musk has chosen my neighborhood as the experimental group for his Simulation Theory. And I in particular am the experimental group of the experimental group, as I occupy the middle floor apartment of what was once a three-story house. I can hear my upstairs neighbor stomping around like she’s the night watch at Riker’s Island; occasionally she waters her outdoor plants as if to drown them, the overflow coming down on me in a flash monsoon. Hearing her sliding glass doors triggers me into snapping shut my laptop and cowering under the roof eave. My downstairs neighbors are loud in a different way. They are ostensibly a couple. Her voice is shrill and grating, while his must be deep and tormenting, as I can only hear her steadily elevated responses that usually end in some version of “I (expletive) HATE YOU!” Later, through the floor vent, I can hear them reconcile, their consummation consummated by his deep, apneic snoring. They should probably choose different life partners, but I suppose that is up to Elon.

This is my life in late July when I decide I have had enough. There is a world to see, and in my humble yet eminently qualified opinion most of the best parts of it exist between the Pacific Ocean and the west side of the Continental Divide. I am going to see it. Or see it again, I suppose, and more specifically those parts of it I have not seen before, (mostly) those accessible by dirt roads and two-lane highways with narrow shoulders, where permits and reservations are less necessary and parking is free or cheap and I am less likely, I naively believe, to see a Sprinter van. I scour the internet for a rooftop tent (I find a Smittybilt Overlander shipped to me from a 4WD club in Stockton, California), buy literally the last bike rack in West Seattle (truth), and over-engineer a plywood and hardboard truck bed organizer. I cover the 3/4-inch plywood deck in discount outdoor carpet from Home Depot, then customize the interior with a place for a 20-gallon propane tank and a used Coleman stove; a compartment for a cast-iron skillet and a Dutch oven; and a longer section for fly rods that by cosmic luck perfectly-yet-unintentionally fits four six-packs of Georgetown Brewery’s incomparable Bodhizafa IPA stacked lengthwise. And then I decide to invite my ex-girlfriend along for the ride.

“Ex-girlfriend” doesn’t capture the essence of our relationship, but that is an adventure tale for another time. As a cross-country co-pilot, Elon himself couldn’t have designed one better. She is exceedingly entertaining, brilliant, adventurous, and unfamiliar, if I might embellish (despite risk of bodily harm from her quite capable hands), with the culture and ways of the wild American west outside the East Bay of northern California, a community she once described to me as her “small town” (her brilliance does not extend to population density assessments). I pick her up at the SeaTac Airport with my truck fully-laden, and from there we begin our drive to stop number one: Glacier National Park.

Our late start necessitates a stopover at Idaho’s Blue Anchor RV Park and Campground, an ominous beginning for the rooftop tent. We take a lap around the paved loop to find far more RV than Campground, an amalgam of decades and socio-economic groups; many have “Utility Task Vehicles” parked alongside, five-figure masculinity deficit machines that I had hoped, impossibly, to neither see nor hear for the next three months. Some RVs have picnic tables between them and their neighbors, elaborate Adirondack chairs and fire pits and Edison lights strung above them, and I wonder if I should have waited out the pandemic in my apartment. Upon returning to the entrance we are greeted by a very sweaty, shirt-unbuttoned, maskless, and – I don’t want to sound too judgy here – likely intoxicated gentleman who leans his head well into the passenger side of the truck. Like ostrich at a roadside safari park and I have the bucket of ostrich trail mix on the driver’s side far into the truck. Ex-girlfriend is holding her breath. The man assures us we can park anywhere and pay in the morning. We do not pay in the morning.

*****

As Covid has prompted every couch-loving, The Voice watching, suburbanite dweller to also go mobile, Glacier is booked for camping. We are instead headed south of Glacier, to Hungry Horse Reservoir and Lid Creek campground. Lid Creek is on the south side of the reservoir in the Flathead National Forest in Montana, home – to quote Recreation.gov – to “lynx, grizzly bear, and bull trout.” Lid Creek is far from the highway and, like most of Montana, disarmingly beautiful. We pass few cars on the long dirt road, the reservoir occasionally discernible on one side of us as we drive through a dense forest of cedars, hemlock, and pine. The sun is bright and the air is clean and quiet. In addition to lynx and grizzly bear, Glacier National Park and the area around it is “home to at least 1,132 species of vascular plants” – those with water and nutrients – as well as “804 types of perennial herbs.” Our reserved campsite is in-between two empty sites, separated by trees and a lovely trickling creek and surely several hundred varieties of the aforementioned greens. I back into the campsite, remove the tent casing, then use the attached ladder as leverage to unfurl the tent in all its glory, an obnoxious, accordioned, ripstop flag marking my occupation. I CLAIM THIS LAND FOR ME.

A rooftop tent is a glorious thing. Ostensibly invented in Australia, land of all things venomous and ground-dwelling, in reality it was invented 300,000 years ago when a man realized he could claim to be protecting his family by taking them to higher ground when all he really wanted to do was to feel superior (this was before UTVs). There are benefits, to be sure. It saves space. You don’t have to roll up your tent and sleeping bag every morning. The views are ridiculous. You are also potentially eye level with a moose.

I drift to sleep with the darkening sky and the moderate drop in temperature, contemplating the integrity of claiming this as Night 1 of Rooftop Tent rather than last night’s stay at the Blue Anchor RV and Campground (I did not pay, I decide, therefore it did not happen). Ex-girlfriend does not, apparently, drift off to sleep, as I am awakened by a whisper of some urgency: “Someone is outside.”

I do not believe this for an instant. Kind of. “It’s an animal”, I assure Ex-girlfriend. But my 300,000-year-old man’s instinctual hypervigilance to danger has also kicked in, because what if someone is outside. I keep my eyes closed, but am now coming awake and listening.

“How do you know,” she asks.

“Because we’re in the middle of the woods.” This is an unsatisfactory answer to a previous dweller of the East Bay.

“What if it’s an axe murderer?”

“Yes,” I tell her. “It is an axe murderer. He drove 32 miles from Whitefish, parked his car before he got to the campground, and stomped loudly through the woods while bypassing several other campsites to murder us – with an axe – in our rooftop tent.” She shushes me: There it is again.

I hear it. It seems uncomfortably close. I do not admit this. “It’s an animal,” I assure her.

“WHAT FUCKING ANIMAL IS BI-PEDAL”, she asks. I’m inclined to remind her that as a human, any axe murderer is likely to be both bi-pedal and an animal. I think better of it, but she’s also shaken me a bit. It does, in fact, sound bi-pedal. And it has now bi- or quad-pedaled its way closer to the tent; it is close enough that we, with held breath, can hear it breathe while it chews.

*****

In addition to lynx, grizzly bear, and bull trout, moose also exist in some abundance in and around Glacier National Park. The moose is the largest animal of the deer family, as well as the largest antlered animal in the world. It can weigh as much as 1,600 pounds, is a terrific swimmer, and can run up to 35 miles per hour. Goofier looking than a giraffe but less so than a camel (both one and two humps), the moose is also the only North American animal scientifically labeled, as a species, as “cantankerous” (trust me). They are herbivores, and eat leaves, bark, twigs, and underwater vegetation, and it is this knowledge that has emboldened me to declare that because our visitor, bi-pedal or otherwise, sounds to be absolutely devouring the life-sized terrarium we have chosen as a campsite, it is definitely not an axe murderer.

“It’s a moose”, I say.

“Didn’t you say they were cantankerous?”, she asks. I make a mental note to get a new word to describe a moose. I also offer that we are safe in our rooftop tent.

She counters. “Aren’t we at about its height?” We are, in fact, right about at the moose’s height. “It’s going to charge the truck,” Ex-girlfriend says.

“It’s not going to charge the truck.”

“Its head is going to come right through this window right here.”

“Its head is not going to come through the window.” I am now on high alert, because I know that a) a moose is, in fact, cantankerous, and b) its head could, in fact, come right through this window right here. At 6’ or 7’ feet at the shoulder, the moose – if it is a moose – could jut its protubering lips through the window and rest its flabby dewlap right in-between our two sleeping bags. We both are now staring hard out the window towards the sounds of uprooting and chewing. I decide to shine the flashlight to confirm our visitors’ mooseness, and there it is: a grainy, photo-negative black and grey outline, eyes reflective, ungainly head with lips churlishly moving laterally with every smack and gnash of vascular greenery.

“Oh my God,” says Ex-girlfriend. “It’s a moose. We should call 911.” She is serious.

“And tell them what? That there’s a moose in their national park?”

“Someone should know,” she declares. She is momentarily distracted by the fact that she doesn’t have cell coverage. She is genuinely considering calling 911. I need to pee, for which I must, of course, descend the rooftop tent. She is having none of it. “Isn’t your sleeping bag waterproof?”, she asks, not without condescension. “It’s like a giant diaper. Just use it.” I shine the light again on the moose to distract my bladder, but also to admire this beast, just a thin layer of canvas between it and the two of us. It pulls giant bunches of plants. We breathe. It chews. We lean closer and share an occasional whisper. “They really do look like the drawings on Moose Tracks ice cream,” she says. “Which would be amazing right now.”

We are quiet again, listening. On this rooftop tent, with its astounding views and self-indulgence and implied superiority, we feel small and insignificant and lucky to be a part of this cantankerous animal quite patiently sharing her meal with us. We watch, noses pressed against the window netting, hands under chins on our pillows in an elevated bed.

A few more moments of silence. Then the moose, head down and still eating within the glow of the flashlight’s nimbus, takes a half-step towards us. We are entranced, but her movement is reminder of this animal’s sheer size and potential power. “Do you want to share your almond butter with the moose?”, whispers Ex-girlfriend. “Because I don’t. Turn off your flashlight.”

So I do. We fall asleep staring through the tent’s roof windows, a Big Sky worth of stars above us, the sounds of smacking moose lips nature’s white noise. Eden comes in many sizes.