We all are capable of experiencing moments of wonder. They are not reserved solely for creative or religious people. Moments of awe cross the political spectrum. They cross the livelihood spectrum. Awe is a positive force that can be felt by everyone.

Nonetheless, I carry a fair amount of skepticism around with me. It’s a journalistic thing.

Like. I tend to think moments of awe actually happen with ho-hum regularity. It’s since we’re humans – distracted, in our heads, with dulled-down senses, that we miss them. When we do witness awesome moments, it’s because that moment occurred just when we happen to be particularly present and tuned in to our surroundings.

I mean, how often to you find seaglass or a shard of old Indian pottery when you are not intentionally looking for it?

How do you hear the ‘drink your tea, tea, tea of a towhee (the bird in our logo) if you’re not listening?

Most Awe, Nice! interviewees tell me they experience moments of awe all the time. Yes, cool things are happening all the time, but these folks, these interviewees see them because they’re kinda special in a 21st century way. They’re quiet and connected, with their senses that is.

Occasionally with this project, I share a few mini-moments of awe. My nickname for these segments - cringe away! – is Mini-Awe-Polis.

Mini Awe Polis is a bundle of small wonders that have collected in my noggin. Kind of like the hay in my jacket pockets.

Since we working our way into the dog days of summer, I wanted to give canines some attention. While dogs sure can wreck nature sightings – because they tend to investigate eagerly and like to eat or chase things that you might want to see – they are also good at helping you discover things you might have otherwise overlooked. So I try to pay attention to them. When we’re working cows, for instance, they alert me to things I should be paying attention to all the time. Cows can hide. I know this may sound silly, but in big country, they can tuck in under scrub oak and you can ride right past them. Of course, this doesn’t happen if your dogs are with you.

In the fall, we bring cows off of the National Forest and down to winter pastures. It’s a week of long days and, after a summer of moderate work, the dogs are primed and I feel like they take this week seriously. One day, in the middle of the day, I watched my dogs Monty and Tina over several hours as they helped move cows up a gully and across a big meadow, bordered by scrub oak and Ponderosa pines. I knew they were thirsty, but they are so dedicated to the task that they won’t leave the cows. So I developed a command, ‘get some water’ so that they can essentially give themselves permission to drink.

On this day, I saw a drainage and told them to get some water. They heard me but still took turns. Tina went for water. Monty stayed with the cows. When Tina came back, Monty went for water.

On the next day, we had more interaction with other help, folks with their dogs and horses. We got the cows to their stopping point that evening, a high desert grassy area with a pond, and settled them in. The dogs knew we were done for the day. I watched as almost all of them seemed to let down. Most of them peeed and pooped. Some starting playing. They had punched their time card and were headed for the tailgate party.

My mom told me many times: a productive life is a happy life. Sure, maybe she was telling me to work hard, but she also felt this way – passionately - when it came to dogs. I do think that my dogs are happiest when they are working.

But what do I know?

I developed AweNice with the notion that we all are capable of experiencing moments of wonder. They are not reserved solely for creative or religious people. Moments of awe cross the political spectrum. They cross the livelihood spectrum. Awe is a positive force that can be felt by everyone.

This project specifically seeks out interviews with those who work outside and work with animals, people I feel aren’t heard from often and whose daily life is relatively quiet and disconnected. I should qualify that: disconnected in the mainstream, digital sense. I’m finding, though, that they are deeply connected in other ways, to other things.

So, anyway, I want to share a few mini-moments of awe that I’ve experienced.

Get ready to cringe all you listeners! This is the first segment of Mini-Awe-Polis. Mini Awe Polis is a bundle of small wonders that have collected in my noggin. Kind of like the hay in my jacket pockets.

There is a big, solitary, feral cat that comes around at night, especially in winter. I’ve named him Dana because I’m not sure if he’s male or female, but I’ll call him a him. Dana is fat and smart and friendly, which I think is a pretty unusual combination for a feral cat.

Because he is not stupid, Dana knows he can handle one dog, but probably not more than one. My dogs are not warm to cats, so, not surprisingly I rarely see Dana during the day.

But at last call (sometime between 8 and 11 at night when I check the horses and take a little walk with the dogs), I can sometimes spot him.

More than once, he’s crouched in the scrub, a hundred feet from the house, and watched as the dogs, clueless, go streaking by. I think Dana has us pretty well figured out. It’s fun to consider how he considers us.

And speaking of cats.

I was helping gather calves on New Year’s Day last year. I had two dogs with me and was riding my grey horse, Ray. The country was rough, full of piñon, juniper, and scrub oak. I was sussing out a small, narrow canyon alone.

When I say sussing out, I mean that I suspected the calves were down in the canyon, grazing their way east, and I was zigging and zagging, trying to find a way down to them.

But the sides were steep, mostly unpassable, and I was having to back up and turn around a lot. My dog, Tina, jogged across this giant boulder jutting out over the gully and I took a picture to capture how frustrating the going was. We paused and listened for animals moving. Then I look across and watched as an adult mountain lion strode up the other side of the canyon, some hundred feet away. She

walked with purpose but not urgently. She was large and lanky and graceful, and powerful – I remember her tail, which seemed as long as her body. I soaked it in, not taking my eyes off her, not moving or reaching for my phone. Then I saw another one, a juvenile, following her at a distance.

I’ve lived in cat country for more than a decade and I know well the feeling - in your bones and in your mind - that you are being seen by them. But I’d not laid eyes on one until now. Stay safe, Dana.

AweNice welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us here. AweNice also welcomes your support. You can find a donate button on our about page.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

This week, I interviewed Andrew Clements, of Cortez, Colorado. Drew works for the state, but the program also does work for the US Forest Service in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah. Here, he shares an encounter with a grizzly bear in the Yellowstone National Park, while he was part of a team collecting forest health data near the confluence of the Thorofare and Yellowstone Rivers.

Drew told me that a fair amount of logistical work goes into planning for his field season. He tends to hit locations of lower elevation early, then chase the snow up to higher plots before being pushed down lower, again, by the snow, in the fall. Drew figures during any given year, he hikes four to seven hundred miles and is hoping to keep on keeping on until his knees give out.