Once there was a guardian of the wolf world. He was my husband, and father to our three children — a man who dedicated his life to the restoration of an animal that civilization tried to erase.

An endangered species biologist, his bare hands scruffed the pungent fur of wolves while operating deep inside the viscera of a controversial predator restoration project. Each day presented a renewed opportunity to offer his rough strength and playful agility to both physical and political challenges of his work — but as thirty years of dedication approached, his once strong body began a sudden and relentless decline. His life, his joy and his fatherhood dismantled in a neurodegenerative storm which terminally dissolved his motor nerves, robbing him of his ability to walk, swallow and speak over the course of one short and terrible year.

We raised our children on a small homestead surrounded by coastal plain farm fields under the migratory path of swallows and swans. Our gardens buzzed in hummingbirds and honeybees and our freezer was stocked with venison Chris hunted each fall. We kept goats for milk, chickens and ducks for eggs and meat. We worked hard to feed our family healthily across the years, growing and hunting for our table by our own labors, on our own land, free from pesticides. We nevertheless found ourselves troubling, suddenly and at random intervals, over mysterious, puzzling livestock deaths. Stargazing goats, circling, blind and drooling. Strange twist-necked ducks corkscrewing into collapse before dying. Necropsies were sent to veterinary labs but were always inconclusive.

As Chris’s motor nerves died a little more each day before the eyes of his children, we already understood it wasn't a stroke of random misfortune that had caused this disease to show up in his body and our lives. Surrounded by endless industrial wheat and corn, pig feedlot runoff and miles of stagnant drainage canals, the coastal plain waterways that surrounded our home — where our children played, and where Chris tracked and trapped wolves — was a hot spot for cyanobacteria. Normally harmless, the blue-green algae metastasize to deadly levels in the presence of agricultural fertilizers and industrial animal feed and waste runoff, releasing a phantom neurotoxicity into the air, drinking water, and bodies of edible fish. Two years earlier a neighbor within earshot of our home died of ALS. We were living in a disease cluster.

What causes a civilization to dismantle nervous systems and destroy waterways, families, neighbors, wolves and fathers?

Chris and I were witness to the tragic consequence of a wrong tale told about a species. The wolf, brought to roam the world by design, known to us as prudent and cunning in it’s avoidance of humans, is prejudged still as an unquenchable blood ravener — justifying bounty, continued fear, bullets and poison, exterminated by farmer, trapper and government alike. The same imagination that crafted the razored tooth and claw of wolf nature, has been crafting similar stories about human nature for three thousand years, prohibiting us from imagining the generatively of our own vision and creativity, our rightful place as guardians and protectors of our own lives, our own labors and our children’s futures. Men are swallowed into their graves poisoned and dismantled as nameless barnyard goats stargaze strangely before laying down to die. What engine burns all this alive as fuel, leaving widows and orphans as it’s by-product? And what stories does it tell itself so it can keep running on like this, despite the evidence, and the cost?

In search of answers, I've been reading the West's three thousand year cosmological record the way a biologist tracks an animal.

Across a mythic terrain marked by ruin and resilience, stagnancy and survival, I have sought our imaginal inheritance — found it trapped from it’s origins, bound in service to an endless appetite, a machine of merciless metabolism. If you are feeling scarcity in your soul despite a storehouse of abundance — if the anxiety in your nervous system has no name and won't leave — you too are feeling the runoff.