When we were wolves

"If you could have been around a hundred and fifty years ago, and passed through the landscape as a beaver-trapping tough with Jim Bridger or Jedediah Smith, before coal barons, before soda ash and oil, before Mormons, before you could stand outside and watch satellites pass through the night sky or silhouettes kissing in warm apartment windows, when this history was wild and new, you could have just pointed and named something of permanence, a mountain, a river--at least a creek--after yourself. Or they would have named it for you, a permanent mark, just for being here."From a new talent…