“What on earth is all that racket?”
I muttered.
“In here or out there?” Linda asked.
Addy, our Chesapeake/Lab cross, was growling and spitting, hackles raised, her nose pushed up against the glass patio door. Linda and I were standing on either side of her peering out onto the ice with our noses also pressed against the glass.
“The noise inside is kind of obvious,” I said, scratching the trap door of my Stanfields and squinting out the window.
“Look out on the ice and see for yourself,” Linda said. “It is two in the morning but it’s as bright as day out there. It’s the night of the supermoon.”
“I can’t see anything except a dark blob on the ice,” I said.
“Best get your glasses, old man,” Linda said. “What’s making the racket is as plain as the nose on your face, and we all know the Webber nose leaves nothing to the imagination.”
I stumbled back to the bedroom to look for my glasses and rejoined Linda and Addy at the patio doors. Out on the snowy ice, illuminated by moonlight that made it seem as light as day, was a quartet of coyotes standing shoulder to shoulder, gazing up the hill to our house. They were yodelling their fool heads off in four – part harmony but it sounded more like a mass choir of a hundred.
Suddenly, the four coyotes stopped yodelling, milled around, sniffed one another and attempted to wag their tails off. Then they bunched together again and began caroling us with even more vigour. The show lasted another five minutes before they trotted off for the island across the lake.
“I have never seen a performance quite like that before,” Linda said.
“Neither have I,” I said. “It must have been the supermoon.”
We live on the shore of Lac La Hache, a magnificent Cariboo lake that is 16 kilometres long and about three kilometres wide. It is usually frozen over from the end of November until the end of April. Once frozen over, all the activity we normally enjoy watching on the lake greatly decreases. The one thing that can change all this is a clear night with a full moon. On those nights, the frozen lake surface seems to become a magnet for coyotes, foxes, otters and even wolves. On occasion it brings out other intoxicated wildlife on screaming Ski – Doos, which kind of ruins it for the more respectable residents. But mostly, it’s just us furbearers.
I’ve often wondered what it is about clear, moonlit nights and coyotes. It seems to have a real spooky effect on them. We have all seen the pictures of a coyote howling at the moon. And it doesn’t get more moonlit than during a perigee – syzygy, which if you are not an astronomical nerd is simply called a supermoon. A supermoon is one of those infrequent times when the moon is closest to the earth in its orbit and at the same time full or new. Astronomers tell us this results in a moon that is up to 14 per cent larger and brighter than an average full moon. A supermoon has been blamed for higher tides, increased earthquake activity and even increased baby births. Any spooky effect the moon has on coyotes has got to be greatly increased during a supermoon.
Or does it? Animal behaviourists studying coyotes and the moon have discovered that the only real effect moonlight has on coyotes is that since coyotes are nocturnal, they rely heavily on visual cues for navigation and yip or howl a lot to coordinate group hunting. So if you dial up the intensity of moonlight, you get more coyote activity, especially hunting activity, and hence more coyote yodelling.
Why is it that we humans so quickly speed shift to the paranormal and the supernatural to try to explain things like coyote howling and such? We seem to have a fascination with the mystical, metaphysical, telepathic, psychic, clairvoyant; stuff like ghosts, spirits, UFOs and such; anything that can’t be explained by science or natural observation and yet holds out hope of a spiritual experience. Even our veterinarian, a young man I greatly respect, the other day after examining our dog’s dislocated knee said, “I am amazed, I wouldn’t expect to see one of these every five years and this week I have diagnosed two of them. It’s gotta be the supermoon.” I think he was jesting. However, within hours of the 8.9 Japanese earthquake on March 11, which happened within a couple of weeks of the supermoon on March 19, cyberspace was inundated with cybernuts going off about how “certified professional astrologer” Richard Nolle’s predictions of a whole host of natural disasters with the coming of the supermoon was bang on.
This preference for the supernatural, paranormal and metaphysical; this new mysticism (or is it spiritualism?) seems to me to be on one hand a demonstration of a great thirst for a god and on the other hand a huge stumbling block to actually finding one. Many people today crave the mystical and spiritual while at the same time are repelled by the reality of the God of the Bible who becomes flesh, lives among us, saves us from sin and requires of us to become like him in the living out of our lives: “… to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with (our) God” (Micah 6:8).
At a wedding a while back, an acquaintance with whom I studied forest ecology in another life cornered me to talk about spiritual things. She wanted my opinion about trees in old growth forests that she experienced were talking to her. I didn’t know what to say. What seems to be craved is an otherworldly spiritual possibility and experience that carries few down – to – earth ethical or moral requirements.
And so the night of the supermoon has me thinking: How do I go about talking about Jesus who is so down to earth and real in what he offers and in what he requires, with folks who are so infatuated with the otherworldly that offers nothing and requires even less? I really don’t have an answer, only an observation. When I have dared to tell my story about my journey with Jesus, people have generally listened. I am not sure they have believed me, but they have listened. I think it is because it is my true to life story, not a second – hand story; not something filtered through theology or philosophy; not an attempt at preaching or teaching; just my story with Jesus. People still seem to honour one’s story with at least a listening.
