The Call of the Wild

August 17, 2020

When my next door neighbor Mike started baying at the moon a couple months ago, I thought he was a drunken fool. But he wasn’t alone in what became his nightly ritual. Other neighbors answer back with their own anonymous yelps, and one person sounds an air horn blast to contribute to the cacophony. Local dogs and coyotes may be chiming in as well for all I know; I can’t distinguish humans from animals in these primal roars.

And maybe that’s the point. There’s something primitive in these plaintive calls and responses, similar to owls calling to each other late at night and early in the morning to announce to one another, “I am here.”

It turns out that Mike and company aren’t wailing at the moon. I probably should have just asked Mike what he was braying about each night at 8 pm, but I was reluctant to reveal my true feelings on the subject, which are that I would prefer that he shut the flock up and crawl back under his rock. So I took the less confrontational approach and consulted my electronic oracle Ghoulgull, where I learned that my neighbors are part of a nationwide trend that started in Colorado on March 27 with a Facebook group called “Go Outside and Howl.” Apparently the 8 pm howl originated as a tribute to pandemic healthcare workers, but it has morphed (degenerated?) into a cathartic release from the shelter-in-place coronavirus blues.

As much as I value peace and quiet, I can’t really blame my yahoo neighbors for unleashing their pent-up frustrations, whether or not that liberating is fueled by alcohol. Well, OK, I do blame them, but I won’t dwell upon my self righteous judgements. Rather, I will acknowledge that sometimes we humans need to vent our frustrations and feelings of isolation by raging at the winds of political, economic, social, and pandemic upheavals. The poet Allen Ginsberg expressed his apocalyptic despair in his angry rant Howl, and Shakespeare showed King Lear voicing his madness by shouting his angst into the stormy night.

Venting may be therapeutic, at least temporarily, but it’s not a good long range strategy. Even Allen Ginsberg and King Lear calmed down eventually. Fortunately for me, the nightly vocalizing of my neighbors is brief and good natured, an understandable (if mildly annoying) expression of a desire for connection and community.

I’m more concerned with the mental and emotional well being of young people these days. I’m currently interviewing teenagers and their parents by phone for a smoking and health study being conducted by my research employer on behalf of the federal government. I’ve known some of these families for several years because I’ve visited them in person each year, but now the Covid 19 pandemic prevents me from going to their homes. Until recently I would hand my laptop to the kids and let them answer the health questions privately, but now I’m required to read the questions to the teens and record their answers.

It’s never easy being a teenager, but I’ve been surprised by the amount of stress that the coronavirus is causing some of these kids. Not only do many of them experience anxiety about the health risks of the virus, but their high school and college schooling has been severely disrupted or curtailed and their access to their friends greatly limited. Add to those concerns the economic and political chaos in the United States, and my heart goes out to them. I wish I could offer them more encouragement than I do, but I’m required to be neutral and professional as I administer the survey, and the telephone is a poor substitute for an in-home visit.

Almost all of these kids have social media accounts, but Facebook and Instagram are no replacement for human touch and in-person comraderie. And some social media interactions are negative and even toxic, leading to teen suicides.

We live in a time of increasing alienation for adults and especially for teens, a time made worse by our culture of individualism, competition, and materialism. But I hope that our social and climate change upheavals will eventually lead to an awareness that we are all in this together, and that we need each other.

In our local author Jack London’s classic short story, The Call of the Wild, the canine protagonist Buck suffers great tribulations before joining, and becoming the leader of, a pack of wolves: Buck’s “great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.” The call of the wild is the song of the pack. In our case the pack is not tribal, but the entire human race, and the planet upon which we all live together.The song of our pack is a song of grief, anguish, and torment, but also a song of oneness, joy, and belonging to something greater than ourselves.

May our journey of disintegration lead to a call of awakening, reintegration, and celebration.