by Morgan Meis
We were speaking of wolves. I don’t remember how the conversation started. Maybe the thought of wolves comes naturally when you look out across the Hudson River and see the tree line of Shodack Island. There are no people on Shodack Island, no structures. On Shodack Island, the trees and the plants and the animals get to do it however they like. When you look out at the tree line of Shodack Island you think, “There could be anything on the other side of those trees.” In fact, there are no wolves on Shodack Island. There are no wolves to be found for thousands of miles from here, here being twenty miles south of Albany. The wolves were killed off long ago. It was one of the top priorities on the civilizational list. Kill the wolves. It has to be done. For the wolves are terror.
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Driving out to Albany Airport (a regional airport if there ever was one) to put Shuffy on a plane to visit her mother in Las Vegas you exit the NY State Throughway and get onto Wolf Road. There is a Hampton Inn on Wolf Road. There is a Holiday Inn on Wolf Road. There is a Moe’s Southwest Grill on Wolf Road. The Cheesecake Factory can be found just off of Wolf Road at the Colonie Center Shopping Mall. There are, needless to say, no wolves on Wolf Road. But there must have been once. Albany was founded in the 17th century. It is a very old city by American standards. On the Department of Environmental Conservation website can be found the sentence, “The Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies waged war on wolves in 1631.” It was a successful war. Now, there aren’t even any memories. The wolves were eradicated so quickly that they are not part of the story.
That is something Shuffy brought up one morning while we were sitting on the deck of the second floor of my sister’s house in New Baltimore. The sun was coming up over the trees across the water on Shodack Island. We were drinking coffee from steamy cups. Steam was lifting off the surface of the Hudson River too. Or mist. Physics that morning was acting on the coffee and the river water in the same way. I was musing about how wolves seem to haunt the European imagination. It goes way back, I was speculating. All those old forests. The wolves were always lingering there at the edge of civilization, nipping at its heels. When European civilization wasn’t doing so well, when its defenses were down, it would be time for the wolves again. They could get the taste for human flesh. A frenzy is begun, wolves eating men and men killing wolves. That’s probably where the idea for werewolves got started, I was thinking aloud. There is a line in time and space where the margins of human living and the margins of wolf living overlap. That overlap marks a spot for violence. The distinction between wolf and man blurs and everything collapses into a mutual killing. Is there repressed guilt about that killing in the stories of werewolves? Man kills wolf just as mercilessly as wolf kills man. Does the lingering guilt come back in the idea of the wolfman, the human creature who becomes wolf in order to balance the scales, to do the work of the absent wolf?