Packs Of Urban Animals — Houston, Texas
The howls and yips suddenly pulsate wildly through the air, pushing through the empty tree branches reaching toward the gray winter sky and out to the wide jogging path next to the Porsches, the Ford F-150s, the Nissan Altimas with paper plates whooshing aggressively down Memorial Drive, chasing each other through the late rush hour traffic, the whump-whump-whump sound of someone’s discarded rear bumper being endlessly run over in the left lane.
It’s dusk on the Seymour Lieberman walking trail, Friday, January 21, 2022.
I look around, trying to catch the eyes of other joggers, people walking their dogs on the trail. Most have earbuds in, or are deep in conversation with each other. One or two people slow, half-glance about as if to almost awaken, then quickly resume their pace.
Memorial Park is on the edge of Houston’s downtown, surrounded by endless ribbons of concrete: IH 10, Loop 610, the autobahn of Memorial Drive.
Most Houstonians aren’t aware that it’s roughly one hundred acres in size, much of it still relatively undeveloped. Buffalo Bayou slices through, providing an east-west travel way for wildlife into downtown and surrounding gentrifying neighborhoods, as well as into the fossilizing ornateness of River Oaks.
It’s definitely a pack of coyotes. You can play the video I took. Unfiltered, unedited. And substantial to hear live. I don’t know how near they were.
Coyotes often bark, howl, yip at sunset. Why? It’s thought they are creating acoustic bonding rituals, representing, making themselves sound bigger, a close-knit group. These aren’t pretty bird songs. No meter. Rhythms? Staggered. Loud. Raw.
A quick search through NextDoor — arbiter of lost pets, suspicious vehicles, botched home improvement projects — reveals surprise at the Inner Loop’s coyote sightings. (It’s great that a lot of Houstonians don’t go to bed at sundown. Or midnight, for that matter.) I mean, pets’ fates are involved here and there. Still, there’s also a definite projection of Inner Loop coolness, street smart adaptiveness, straight-up defiance that the NextDoor messagers laud in these urban apex predators.
The Urban Animals were a punk-influenced boisterous pack of roller skaters inside the Loop in the late 1980s here. I was too young to drink then, but I had an Exacto-bladed fake ID from a University of Houston architecture student. I remember being agog with curiosity and awe when the Urban Animals swept through the subculture dive bars I frequented in search of a sense of belonging.
You’d know they were there by a sudden stir at the corner of your peripheral vision; a swell in the noise level, laughter, shouts of camaraderie. People stepped aside as they came in: they were always the alpha customers at the bar, bigger than life on their skates, mohawked helmets, eponymous shirts. And, just as suddenly, they would sweep away, remnants of conversations hanging in the air as they vanished into the night.
They skated in the downtown parking lots, the emptied streets, during the same hours as the coyotes whose descendants live in Memorial Park today. And the skaters jousted — they JOUSTED!-too, in DIY attire, fashioning battle gear from everyday objects. The group came from all walks of life; artcar creators, musicians, office workers, and more. Look! Here’s a 1980’s Houston Foley’s department store TV ad featuring the Urban Animals. Lovingly bizarre!
It’s hard to think of nature’s wildness happening here — packs of wild coyotes inside the vast concrete car-heavy ribbons. But, like our pack of world-renowned punk street skaters, many of whom are now in their 70s, they’re still all around us, influencing our world in ways we cannot always see.
They’re both icons of cool, a specific Houston cool. They’re the elusive lure of hidden wildness, chaos, bonds of like-minded souls, in a liminal space where the standard rules don’t apply and maybe never should. They remind me that not everything is knowable. And you know what? Sometimes, it’s better that way.
Houston Coyotes At Dusk — Video
Memorial Park Conservancy Coyote Tweet June 2021
1980’s Houston Urban Animals — Foley’s Department Store Ad — Video
