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We talked through the afternoon, and eventually I turned off the recorder. After dinner, and after going with him and his wife to a reading in town, I returned to spend the night in the cabin. There, I fell asleep listening to the rustling of the stalks in his garden. About three, a cock began to crow. I shut the window and covered my head with a pillow to stifle the noise, then fell back asleep.

The next day, riding the ferry back, I stood on the bow and watched the houses float by on islands like so many pieces of beached wood. I wondered how much this trip had really helped. I had no need to be convinced of the metaphorical efficacy of listening to the natural world. The mess of houses, seaplanes, and boats—never mind the floating styrofoam and tiny oil slicks—were sufficient evidence that we’re not listening. But this had more to do with listening to our own detritus.

None of this is to diminish the importance of listening as metaphor. Nor is it to diminish the importance of listening to our trash, which clearly is just as crucial to our survival. If we were paying any attention, would we be making plutonium, jet skis, mink coats, protein drinks, breast implants, satellite surveillance systems?

The problem with viewing this metaphorically is that metaphors don't take down dams. Metaphors are not inescapable. "That's a nice metaphor," says the vivisectionist, the politician, the factory farm owner, the scientist, "but you're wrong."

"It's a nice story," say the rest of us, "but now it’s time to get back to work."

I went inside the ferry and sat down. I was no longer that interested in the question of my own sanity. Compared to what we've done, and what we continue to do, even to this little corner of the planet, the whole notion of making a deal with coyotes no longer seemed so crazy. Questioning my own sanity amid all the unspoken insanity of our culture seemed like the craziest idea I'd ever heard.

Of course I also realized I was making an unfair leap of logic: the fact that some people make satellite surveillance systems doesn't mean coyotes understand a damn thing. They might, but there's no connection.

I went back outside, and found the fins of orcas gliding above the Sound's smallish waves. At first only a few people saw the black triangles, but more and more noticed, until virtually everyone was leaning against the ferry's railings, gasping in unison as we saw the black and white and black of their bodies, all of us straining to see this bit of nature gliding through the pollution of this well-traveled stretch of water.

Most everyone I know speaks openly about the clear and present collapse of industrial civilization in one-on-one conversations. This is true not only for my friends, who are mainly writers, activists of one sort or another, or revolutionaries, but also for people I encounter on buses or planes, in airports, and so on. It's also true that almost without exception the people I know most intimately speak of the certainty that unless it is stopped, our culture will destroy every living being on the planet. Once again, they say this only in private.

I once stood behind a woman and her little boy in line to board an airplane. He looked up at her. "What if the plane crashes?"

"Shhh," she said, "we don't talk about that."

There is a sense in which Nollman was right. The price of admission to public discourse is an optimistic denial pushed to absurd lengths. I live less than three miles from the Spokane River, which begins about forty miles east of here as it flows out of Lake Coeur d'Alene. Lake Coeur d'Alene, one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, is also one of the most polluted with heavy metals. There are days when more than a million pounds of lead drains into the lake from mine tailings on the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River. Hundreds of migrating tundra swans die here each year from lead poisoning as they feed in contaminated wetlands.