Art is the Weapon, Against Life as a Symptom

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

retrieval team for objects in the backseat

custodian of the parking garage tickets

"All clear my way"

en-route dining concierge

Dunkin to the right

Here I am

Okay. cracks knuckles. I was exaggerating a bit about falling in love, what do I know about the internal experience of the octopus? But it was fucking cool as hell. This is what happened, as accurate to my memory as I can manage.

My family was visiting Australia for about a month, in Northern Hemisphere summer/Southern Hemisphere winter (June/July?) of like... 2013? I think it was just before one of my years of law school, or right before law school in general. We spent a week of this visiting Sydney, where we stayed at a place right on... Manley Beach? Is that something? I'm not looking it up, so if that's not a place name, that's just my memory failing me.

It was winter but the weather was gorgeous and we decided, fuck it, let's go swimming. The water was Ice Fucking Cold. This wasn't a huge problem given the warm weather. I was submerging slowly in the rocky area, like, down at the left side of that stretch of beach? Left side when you're facing the ocean. It wasn't just tide pools, it was pretty deep, up to my waist. The bottom of it was large rounded rocks with some vegetation in between, the occasional fish. The water was also super clear.

I was kind of bouncing around in the water when I felt something wrap around my ankle.

Knowing Australia's (we're not going to debate about whether it's deserved or not) reputation for horrifyingly deadly wildlife, I yelped. My mom was close by, and she was like, what is it, and I conveyed the situation to her. She said that it was just seaweed, don't be silly.

The next time I felt something curling around my ankle I actually saw it. It was an octopus with a body bigger than a baseball but not much bigger -- what's slightly bigger than a baseball? A mango? And its tentacles were like a foot to a foot and a half (1/3 to 1/2 meter) long. So it was little, and it was scooting away across the seafloor, and it was clearly tentacled, and right in front of my eyes it turned into a damn rock.

"That was NOT seaweed," I remember saying.

I kept still, and the rock uncurled a tentacle and then another, and it crept back across the rocks towards me. At this point I could see it really well. It reached out to me again, and at this point my curious ape tendencies took over and I reached into the water when it reached up to me. Its tentacles wrapped around my hand and fingers. It's so hard to describe. It was almost velvety, if rubbery ocean skin could be velvety. Its little suction cups were so strong and they were moving, they were alive. The whole tentacle felt like pure muscle. This was all fucking wild. And I was by far not the only one in this rocky area -- there were my two parents, there were some other people further in. This octopus was clearly curious about me. It was tasting and thinking and then it played a little tug of war with me.

Someone yelled something about 'does it have blue rings' which it did not. I had no idea how good that was at the time. Except for the size, I just think it matched what a Pacific octopus looks like, which is to say: it had no color, and it was grey, and it was all colors.

Some dudes were nearby and I think they had a camera on me? And they were like "How are you not freaked out, I would never get in the water again" and I was privately thinking this is so fucking cool I'm having a cosmic experience but what I said was "DO I NOT LOOK FREAKED OUT." So I guess I was also a little freaked out.

I went over on a solid rock ledge and sat up out of the water and it attached itself to the vertical rock surface under the water and reached tentacles up and out of the water for me, like "where are you going???" So I held its tentacles some more.

At this point, my mom tried to take some pictures. They look like me with some plain boring rocks. You cannot see the octopus in a single one of them.

Eventually we had to go, but like. Holy shit. The interaction was so clearly sentient that I have not been able to even consider eating octopus since. It wanted to know what was up with me and hang out. It was detecting something about me that was interesting that was not apparent to anyone else there, so its senses must be wildly different.

Insane happening.

The dumbass conclusion to this story (not that dumbass because it involves an artist getting Cash Money) is that my father, in his infinite wisdom, decided to spend Two Thousand American Dollars on commissioning a wood sculpture of me with the octopus from the artist James Phillips.

AND THEN HE JUST LEFT IT WITH ME.

Please note I was not a child but a whole ass adult for this. I sent the artist a description of what happened and this explanatory drawing: