No, there hasn’t been a sudden influx of wolves or a sudden increase in coyotes in west county over the last week. That howling you’ve been hearing every night around 8 p.m. is part of a safely distanced, social solidarity movement — a primal howl, recognizing the continuation of life and existence in the face of the coronavirus threat.
There’s a Facebook group devoted to the practice, called “Go Outside and Howl at 8 p.m.”
Sebastopol resident Sarah Field said she started howling at 8 p.m. about two weeks ago.
“I think howling is a way for us to come together at this time and give our appreciation to the workers and to let others know that we’re thinking about them and have them in our hearts,” she said. “For me, it’s also about an overall acceptance of the situation. I think sharing that experience and hearing others howling is really comforting.”
Fields, who considers the wolf to be her spirit animal, said “It fills me with joy and excitement when I hear it coming from other houses and from dogs too. It’s a way of gathering, just not physically.”
Fields isn’t the only one enamored with nightly howling.
Denise Meier, who lives at Two Acre Wood, a co-housing community in Sebastopol, has been howling nightly for about a week.
“We each stand in front of our houses or out in the street,” Meier said. “It’s exactly at 8 p.m. for only a couple of minutes.”
Meier had read about the howling going on in Mill Valley last week.
“Then last Thursday I was on a Zoom call trying to schedule a future meeting, and when we picked 8 o’clock, one woman said ‘Well, we’re howling at 8 p.m. here in Fairfax, so I’ll be a few minutes late,’ and I thought, ‘Hmm, it’s spreading.’”
Meier and several people from the complex decided to give it a try.
“Someone else here had heard about it and suggested we try it here,” Meier said. “After a few nights, we began to hear howling from down the street.”
“When we first started doing it, it was certainly nice to know other Two Acre Wood people were also going to howl,” Meier said. “Many people might need a bit of a critical mass (i.e. hearing others first) before making their own first howl attempt.”
Steve Einstein, also from Two Acre Wood, said he started howling to thank all the unheralded frontline workers like grocery checkers, delivery people and others, but he said he thinks that many people are just doing it as a form of cathartic release. (He has recently switched from howling to blowing a shofar, a ram’s horn trumpet at 8 p.m.)
Meier said howling really resonated with her “because at Burning Man, there’s a tradition of howling when the sun slips down behind the hills, and it’s one of my favorite things there.”
“I love it. It’s cathartic and strangely soothing to howl, and it gives a sweet sense of community during this weird, weird time,” she said.
“Some people say it’s for health workers or other frontline workers; I think that’s great; it can mean whatever one wants it to. For me it’s a sort of primal, we’re-still-here statement to each other that works without words,” Meier said.
