Returning the Spirit of Hal to the Wilderness
Monuments (1-6)  (7-12)  (12-17)   (18-24)

Monument #18 Cork on Footbridge
location: Briarcliff Peekskill Trail, Briarcliff NY

This cork is attached to a stick so it doesn't roll away.
I had finally reached the Briarcliff Peekskill trail which goes deep into coyote territory.

Monument #19 Fordham Train Pass on Trail Sign
location: Braircliff Peekskill Trail

The BP trail works on a blaze system (you can see the green blaze on the far tree). I got lost a few times. Here, I believe is my first real hard first hand evidence of coyote. I had seen some more tracks that I wasn't sure about, but finding this dead deer was exciting, albeit in a gruesome way, because I knew coyotes in the area had either had a hand in killing it, or, if it died from other causes, they wouldn't let the meat go to waste.

Monument #20 Poem
location: Teatown Lake
One idea was to give all of the gifts to people. I have found though, that in many cases it is more difficult to give something to someone than to ask for something. On a hiking trail, people are a bit more open to things like this. This mother and daughter read the poem and liked it, but would not take it, so I put it behind a sign, for the next person.

Monument #21 Snack Bar at Croton Dam
location: Croton Dam, NY
This was my lunch. I should have eaten more, but it was good and I was rushing. I had reached the Croton Dam.

Monument #22 Japanese Snack Candy in Mailbox
location: Colobaugh Pond Road, Croton-on-Hudson
In general coyotes do their utmost to stay away from people. In suburban areas where they become accustomed to the presence of people (and especially if they receive handouts) they can lose their fear of people and there have been isolated incidents of coyotes attacking small children.

Monument #23 Rabbit at Blue Mountain Trail Junction
location: Blue Mountain Reservation, Peekskill NY
The spirit of Hal has been returned with this final monument. I know I've gone through a lot of places coyotes live from talking to people and from seeing signs around me. I can't imagine that my route is the exactly the one Hal took, but I wouldn't be surprised if he followed a few of the same paths. This final offering was the rabbit in the sky for Hal to be eternally chasing. Now I would just have to get into Peekskill, and of course the trail disappeared and I got lost again, this time in the rain, but I made it to a road eventually. 66 miles in three days.


Hal is a problematic character to think about. He induced a primitive fear as well as inspiring a wave of admiration in New York City. In general man thinks of himself as separate from nature. We have a nostalgia for "living in nature", but we realize our bodies aren't equipped to live without tools. With the goal of mastery over nature seemingly achieved in many ways, we now feel excluded from it. There is no doubt that animals have a form of intelligence that exceeds our own in some capacities, but we are the possessors of a unique self conscious. We are able to abstract, to write, and to plan a subtle and complex society that creates a buffer for our response to physical events and allows us not to constantly live in fear of where the next meal will come from, or who will eat us.

To show that we buy into this system and are entitled to its benefits, we work. It's been said that the salvation of man is work. Bertrand Russell talks about all of our work boiling down to either moving objects, or telling other people to move objects. It seems dismal to think of our civilization as a system to create a surplus for the sake of the system of creating surplus. As I walked, though, it seemed that this is the trade-off we must make. We still receive the great benefit of not "being animals".

Something else occurred to me though, while walking- another way to think of it, and that it is - with our surplus and leisure time, we all have been and will be allowed to sharpen and refine subtle, meaningful gestures of love or respect for each other and for our home.

Monument #24 London Guardian in Train
location: Peekskill NY
Ah! One more... What would it take for a coyote to get into London?

THANKS: Matt Levy and Dave Herman at the City Reliquary, Kay Turner from the Brooklyn Arts Council, Jeff Main with Westchester Parks, Jon Glick for geographical assistance, Elizabeth Carrion for fitness advice, everyone who came to the event or contributed a gift!

"Coyote was going along..."



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