![]() Then there is his deeply held belief that he is a sort of Dr. The silky curves of women, skylines, rivers. He loves the basics, the way they ignite his senses: The procurement of food, shelter, warmth. ![]() On the other side of the Continental Divide he found the kind of unfettered topography that he needed-for he’s a man who is happiest when ambling over great stretches of soil or stone. After college, Herb left Michigan for the West and never looked back. He would fumble in the doorway for the porch light, two-stepping with the returning dogs, and there, his sleep-riddled mind would already be drawing conclusions so swiftly it would feel, he would say later, like pure instinct.Īnd here I should point out that my husband, despite his profession, is a man who could have been born into the Paleolithic-the kind of guy who has built a life sustained by wildness more than any other element. Herb would hear the screams then, the desperate cries for help. They would make it halfway before stopping dead in their tracks and high-tailing it back to the porch. Two aging Aussies and a half-blind border collie mix would spill out into the dark yard and charge toward the goat pen. In the mudroom, he would stumble through a sea of writhing canines, pull on his boots with one hand and turn the knob with the other. Their frenzied barks, their teeth gnashing against the glass of the back door, would draw my husband out of bed and into his jeans in a single motion. As if the natural order of things-like the age-old relationship between predator and prey-could flex into a new arrangement altogether. ![]() As if values-like the presence of all colors in relation to the sheer absence of them-could be so pliant. ![]() And through that reduction, he would come to see how things that lurk too starkly, even at opposing ends of the spectrum, can shift. on an uncharacteristically cold and moonless night in late spring, even he is reduced. My husband, Herb, is a lawyer, the kind of man who has been trained to think before he acts-to examine all angles and consider complexities. From an evolutionary standpoint, this kind of rudimentary thought process might be a most valuable survival skill-the kind that allows a body to respond to threats even in a state of half-sleep. In the dead of night the human brain is most capable of distillation-of boiling things down to basic black and white. ![]()
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