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“The last time my dad and I went out to breakfast together, just before he died, we got into a conversation with an old man from North Carolina who claimed he found a musket ball in a snapping turtle from the civil war.”

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Fishing A Filthy River

By Joe Weil

This afternoon, after seeing what the recent deluge had done to my garden, and realizing once more how weeds have a much better sense of gratitude for rain and sun than flowers, I rigged up, and went down to the river to fish.

We are talking the Susquehanna here, one of the two great rivers of the North East (the Delaware is the other).  It is also, at least from Philadelphia on up to Binghamton, one of the most contaminated rivers in the North East. The filth of industrial cities, and the run-off from fertilized farms and sawmills, have made certain areas of the river dirty since the 19th century. This is not a new filth. We seem to think all-out worst transgressions happened since the media caught wind of ecology and Gary Snyder started writing about ecosystems, but the fishing in the Susquehanna, at least in the urban areas, is probably better than it’s been in decades: all those closed down factories, the loss of farms to suburban development, and the outlawing of pesticides in the ’70s has helped bring back the bird population as well as the fish. The river which once ran heavy with America Shad, giant sturgeon, and even Atlantic salmon, and then ran heavy with chemicals, is now home to fish more adapted to its murky waters, “junk fish” such as forty to fifty pound carp. The shad still thrive in places, but not up this way. Up near Binghamton and further Northwest, the river has a good healthy population of small mouth bass (introduced to the river – not native) as well as Walleye (considered by some to be the best eating fresh water game fish), northern pike, and Muskelunge. Fish native to the river include White cat, various types of bullhead cat fish, the prehistoric bowfin, yellow perch, and pickerel.

Of these fish, I know my chances are better than even that, given the recent rains, and the muddy conditions, I am going to catch some nice-sized brown bullheads and, if I am lucky, a channel cat or walleye (walleyes have eyes adapted to turgid and dark waters, thus making them a night fish except on windy and rainy days – days when we have what the fishermen call a “Wally chop”).

I am not using the heavy sinkers and ten to 20 pound test most serious fishermen on the river use. I am using a single split shot – less than a sixteenth of an ounce, a hook just large enough to bait-hold a baby night crawler, and six pound test, more of a trout stream set up, than the kind of gear you use on a wide and slow-moving river. Given the strong current of a post-rain storm (the usual sand bar I fish from is two feet underwater), my rig promises to call for maximum skill on any fish bigger than a pound.

Why am I doing this? Most of my friends are poets, and radical blue-staters, and question my behavior along the lines of suspecting me of joining the league of Sarah Palin and men who sit in bad bars all winter, eating pickled eggs and telling dirty jokes (translation: those people, those white trash people). Yes I have read Proust, and more importantly, Annie Dillard, and, I have been known to attend a poetry reading or two – but I never liked dabbling in semiotic consistency.  More importantly, when I was a child, and terrified, and my mother kept having minor heart attacks, my father took me to a filthy river – usually at night – and we would sit for hours, mostly catching very little, talking. This was the late ’60s, the pesticides still legal, the rivers and lakes so filthy the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire (and our own Elizabeth river often flowed a bright pink, compliments of some unknown industry).  So we never saw an egret, a heron, or even a muskrat along the river. Once, a giant snapping turtle rose up and bit off my line, and my father and I talked about that turtle for years – its ferocity, the way it rose out of nowhere to show who was boss. One year the snapper was the size of a bicycle tire, but in a few years’ time, it had grown to 18-wheeler proportions. Somehow, I remembered it has having bit through one-hundred pound test line, and as having dozens of fishing lures dangling from its jaws and its carapace. The last time my dad and I went out to breakfast together, just before he died, we got into a conversation with an old man from North Carolina who claimed he found a musket ball in a snapping turtle from the civil war. He further asserted that a snapper contained every type of meat and sea food there was: pork, beef, game fish, lobster, depending on how you cooked him up. “Yep,” the old timer said, “seven kind of critter in that snapper, and I’ll tell you something:  you can bathe a snake bite wound inside a snapper’s shell, splash the shell water on the wound, with some tea and baking soda, and it’ll heal the snake bite – least the water moccasins, and them moccasins… well, that’s another story.”

Stories moved in free flow, partly from what we have seen  both with the optic and the imagination’s eye, and partly out of some inner necessity to set that story down in our lives and let it roost among our joys, and fears.

Yesterday, at 6:30 in the morning, I saw a wild turkey hen and her long-necked chicks moving over the flood wall. I saw a red fox, two herons, an egret, and then, yesterday afternoon, just before a major downpour on the river, I spied a bald eagle circling high up over the island just up-stream. There had been an enormous moth hatch along the river the night before (I was fishing then, too), millions upon millions of moths heading east, their white wings slightly glowing in the dusk, and this had led to the fish rising – nice sized fish, just big enough to attract an eagle. I didn’t believe my own eyes till my friend, Mark Elder, a carpenter, Onondaga Indian, and hunter/fisherman confirmed it. “Yep,” he said, “that’s an old baldy, and I’ll tell you what – they say they’re not along the river here, but we’ve seen it with our own eyes, and there’s cougar, too. Don’t care what the experts say. I know they’re up there in the mountains and come down into the deep woods. I’d bet my life on it. They’re coming back. Just wait. The wolves, too.”

I don’t tell Mark this may be wishful thinking, but I understand his yearning. If you can stand within spitting distance of a major highway and watch a bald eagle glide above a river that is considered one of the filthiest in the East, anything is possible. Mark talks of the wolves. He is only 25, a high school drop-out who has been making his own way through life since he was 12. He works 96 hour weeks, repairing houses, and running heavy equipment. He can fix or make anything. He knows how to hunt and fish and track, and I think he loves the animals far more than those who cluck their tongues at hunting and fishing ever do.

In his company I remember things I’d forgotten I know: how to skin a catfish, and leave no bones, how to know which rain is good for fishing, and which is not. There are different rains, different colors and flavors to the rains and winds. I am not a nature boy. I don’t understand why certain folks want to purposely suffer in the wilderness when they could be comfortable.  Makes no sense to me. I worry they are using their knowledge of the eco-system as a status symbol, a form of station identification. This is why the hunters and fishing folk often take a dim view of the neo-hippies: Puritanism. Nothing is pure in the woods, and no animal, worth its salt, will purposely do things the hard way just for the sheer challenge of it. This is the folly of sports hunters, and also eco-hippies. Nature does not exist to please us or challenge us, or for that matter, to tire itself out. It exists to survive us and, perhaps, eat us. And we, being part of that world, try to do the same. I ask Mark: “Why don’t the regular people up here like the eco-kids?” He says: “Because them kids think they know everything, and the first rule of the woods is you never know nothing, even when you do.”

So Mark is waiting for the cougars and wolves to come back. He and his enemy have a lot more in common than he’d admit. I heard one of the food co-op kids on campus one day, a confirmed green lifer and vegan speaking about the return of the wolf and the cougar. The distances in education and money are narrowed by the organism’s need to wonder and await some imminent return. In the meantime, Mark works 96 hours a week to make ends meet. The frackers offer him a job driving heavy equipment at fracking sites in Pennsylvania where a worker can make 80 to 100 dollars an hour, money not too far removed from the eco-kid’s lawyer father. In the meantime, I know, fishing or not, my father is not coming back since he’s been dead these thirty something years, but he’s part of me as I wade out to where I stood two days ago.  I cast my line only 20 feet, remembering the steep drop off. The water is the color of dark orange clay. I don’t flip the bail until the line stops playing out in the strong current, and my sinker is at or near bottom. In less than a minute I hook into a 3 pound catfish. He and the current fight me for fifteen minutes – loosening my drag, moving back toward the bank, slowly reeling him into the shallows where I can grab him rightly under his white-gold belly, avoiding the spiny fin that could give me a nasty gash on my thumb.

I remember night fishing with my father 35 years ago, two days after my mom went into the hospital, this time for the mouth cancer which would kill her. As usual, he warned me to watch for the bullhead’s thorny fin, then as I reeled in what was, for us, a big catfish (maybe ten inches), he forgot his own advice. The fish gashed him deep, inspiring a series of goddamns, and another cigarette. I remember shining the flashlight on his bloody hand. This catfish here and now is far bigger. My father would have been delighted. For a moment, the pain in me is so strong, and the anger, too. I think of Mark, who never knew his father. I want to tell him nothing comes back – certainly not the father, and, perhaps everything they make us love and yearn for is suspect. Even if things return, we are not the same person who receives them. The river relentlessly devours shore lines, and, in floods, whole towns, but every second of every hour, it devours itself, disappears into its own effacement.

On my third cast, I catch a third catfish, and then on my fourth, a turtle – a snapper as big as the one me and my father hooked into. It is big, but nowhere near the size of a tire. It grabs hold of my line. This time, it does not snap it. It merely lets go, and sinks back into the muddy water from where it rose. The need to share this with my father is so deep that I feel nothing but a dull but nagging sense of “so what?”, a sense of having lost my pack, those who would have admired my story because they shared in it. This grief is like a body caught in a swirl, a double current. Whenever I think my grief is gone, it resurfaces, if only for a moment. I sit on the gravel bar, and I speak to my father: I am sick of missing him. It has grown old and tired, redundant. I don’t want to miss him or anyone or anything else. It is like a song you dislike, but, every few months, it comes back to you unbidden  as you drive down a highway and you don’t know how or why it is usurping your brain, forcing you to listen to what you would not choose to hear. I know this grief will sink under the weight of the present. I’ll go home and tell my wife about the snapper. But, as much as I love her and want her to enter the story with me, the groove of my telling will be mere information – not story. For a story needs its pack, its tribe. No story is alone when it howls at the moon. If it is, like all the millions of bits of information, it soon vanishes and dies. We wait our whole lives, not only to tell a story but to find the true scene, the full ground of our being in which  the other may enter and truly be part of the story with us  We have brief moments when this seems almost possible.  Those moments will never be enough, but they will have to do.

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Joe worked as a tool maker and labor activist for over twenty years, then became a university poetry instructor in 2006. He has played piano professionally, and read with such poets as Allen Ginsberg, Gerald Stern, Patricia Smith, Jan Beatty, and Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn. Weil’s latest book, The Plumber’s Apprentice, recently was published by New York Quarterly press. Joe moderates a popular poetry show on Facebook, and is very active in promoting poetry and poetry events whenever and wherever he can.

Photo: Mike Foldes

Threatened with extinction: The idyllic family farm

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For McLovin

Our food, and what we can do about it

CNF Editor’s Introductory Notes:

Rebecca Young’s take on the current food production processes in the United States, and her personal quest to become informed about them and to make daily life choices based on that information, is a quest that many of us share.  As Young writes,  “I am not a scientist or a philosopher or a defined activist of the environment or animals. I am a conscientious consumer trying to educate herself. As such, I am working out a more coherent philosophy for myself about food.”  While not strictly a literary piece, Young’s work fits in the non-fiction tradition represented by writers like Michael Polan and Barbara Kingsolver who have written convincingly and lyrically about our food and where it comes from and what the implications of our food practices are — for ourselves, for the environment, and for the animals we eat.  Young’s piece represents her attempt to work out a “coherent philosophy,” and she takes us through the steps she has followed in doing so.  Her sources, and the way she does this work, stand as a point of departure for the philosophies each of us must craft for ourselves.  I have chosen to include Young’s list of sources so that readers wanting more information can go to the sources themselves.

— Leslie Heywood, CNF editor

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I had to meet McLovin. Hearing about his affectionate antics for weeks had finally prompted the road trip to Bethel, NY. At Fairytale Farm, McLovin had earned quite a reputation and a fan club committed to telling his story. When I arrived, he welcomed me — this inquisitive intruder — with enthusiastic greeting. If a companion animal is part of your family, you know the greeting I mean: the ooh, where have you been, what’s that new smell, let’s play forever kind. I kneeled for a proper hello, committed already to learning what he offered.

This turkey had been purchased as a chick to be raised for Thanksgiving dinner. As I observed his behavior over the days of my visit, I learned why Jennifer, a hobby farmer of produce and poultry, had befriended him instead. McLovin had insisted on gaining her attentions. From the moment she stepped outside each day, he would follow her about her chores, content to amble along and watch. Occasionally, like a dog or a cat, he would rub against her leg or push his head into her hand, urging a pause in her work to give him some love. If Jennifer wasn’t around, McLovin was known to stroll up the hill and visit neighbors — ironically, the family of a retired NYC butcher — out working in their yard. That’s how this turkey earned his name — and his life.

At the time of my visit to Fairytale Farm, I was engaged in personal research about animals we raise for food. My ultimate personal conclusions about eating meat are my own, and I do not ask you to share them. Your participation in the context with which I frame the decision process is what I ask in this paper. Before we go further, I should mention that I am not a scientist or a philosopher or a defined activist of the environment or animals. I am a conscientious consumer trying to educate herself. As such, I am working out a more coherent philosophy for myself about food. As Donna Harraway, professor in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, remarks in When Species Meet, “outside Eden, eating means also killing, directly or indirectly, and killing well is an obligation akin to eating well. This applies to a vegan as much as to a human carnivore. The devil is, as usual, in the details” (296). The details, for me, come down to acknowledging and claiming all aspects of the process. This means taking ownership of our choices about eating food with honesty and self-awareness and responsibility.

What I wish to claim here and what I ultimately support represent two distinct food production paradigms occurring in our country: the agribusiness model and the ecological agropastoral model. I propose a shift from current industrial agribusiness practices to a modern approach that thrives on the artistry of responsible farming and food education; this shift is essential to reforming an ethos that has contaminated both our personal and social health.

What is our currently prevailing ethos? Relatively inexpensive, amazingly varied, and unbelievably abundant commodities exist for the typical American consumer. Food is cheap and plentiful. Advanced medical technologies and drugs are available for practically all ailments. In any media we desire, entertainment and information are immediately accessible. For a price, everything is ready and convenient: we are shamelessly spoiled. And the price of this luxury is detachment — consumers are so flooded by what we can have that we’ve lost sight of what we should have, or of what having means. We need to come to terms with and claim responsibility for our wonderful smorgasbord. In the United States we are losing control of our basic health care because we more often seek the remedy to illness rather than the means to health and well-being. Perhaps we’ve lost the knowledge to do so in our astonishing detachment from food sources and production methods. We do not need to know the nutrient value of our food because we can easily access what we need in conveniently packaged supplements. We no longer understand the function of the vitamin or mineral our body craves but we know where we can purchase it. Proponents of the current industrial paradigm call this progress. What we as a culture must acknowledge before we can change, is that America’s dominating large scale agricultural models for plant and animal based food sources have purposefully and successfully distanced consumers from the realities of their processes. Although we listen as they proudly tout the solution to the world’s food problems, the cure for hunger, the cushion for a population rapidly rising, we must also claim their consequences. Our reality is that these systems offer primarily chimerical solutions while existing under an industrial paradigm that condones systematic destruction of the natural environment and the rampant abuse of sentient beings that inhabit it. In truth, their version of progress comes with a price: the sacrifice of morality, decency, and sustainability.

The instructive nature of literature, as is often the case, frames this “price” best. Margaret Atwood’s cautionary tale Oryx and Crake presents a dystopian future built on a paradigm we recognize and practice today. Atwood’s vision of mindless consumption detached from individual responsibility exposes a frightening ultimate reality. Protagonist Jimmy finds himself alone, the only human survivor in a world that has been destroyed by human exceptionalism — a belief that supports unlimited human entitlement due to the unique moral and cognitive capacities characterizing the species. This world — eerily similar to our own — offers a pill or treatment solution for every problem. Satisfying human demand in their society leads to indiscriminate bioengineering of animals to support medical, nutritional, and emotional needs. We should recognize our own conscience in Atwood’s protagonist as he faces the consequences of a food system that mirrors our CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations):

At the bonfire Jimmy was anxious about the animals, because they were being burned and surely that would hurt them. No, his father told him. The animals were dead. They were like steaks and sausages, only they still had their skins on.

And their heads, thought Jimmy. Steaks didn’t have heads. The heads made a difference: he thought he could see the animals looking reproachfully out of their burning eyes. In some way all of this — the bonfire, the charred smell, but most of all the lit-up, suffering animals — was his fault, because he’d done nothing to rescue them. (18)

In fact, these animals are being destroyed because a threatening disease has infected the species (a very real threat to our own factory farms). Jimmy is a child and certainly not directly responsible. Nevertheless, by recognizing his role in the system that necessitated this slaughter, Jimmy feels guilty. His part is the same as yours and mine —consumer. Behind our smorgasbord of food and medicine and entertainment burns a bonfire of victims: animal, human, and environmental.

What follows from Jimmy’s recognition of this complicity is a story of humanity’s undoing. Now called Snowman, he is a human living among the Children of Crake who inhabit our devastated world. Crake, Jimmy’s once best friend responsible for his current fate, genetically engineered these “children” to survive in the aftermath of the human extinction he initiates. Snowman, who survived because Crake secretly selected him as their protector, is both annoyed and sympathetic toward their ignorant innocence. In the exposition of the novel, they are described as inquisitively presenting him with items they have collected: “‘Oh Snowman, what have we found?’ They lift out the objects, hold them up as if offering them for sale: a hubcap, a piano key, a chunk of pale-green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean. A plastic BlyssPluss container, empty; a ChickieNobs Bucket O’Nubbins, ditto” (7). Snowman’s response informs us of their complicated antecedents: “Snowman feels like weeping. What can he tell them? There’s no way of explaining to them what these curious items are, or were. But surely they’ve guessed what he’ll say, because it’s always the same. ‘These are things from before’” (7). The not-so-innocent items within their detritus illustrate ultimate outcomes of commodity-driven lifestyle, indicating that Snowman’s world is a futuristic vision of the reality toward which we are approaching.

One facet of this reality is the fast growing world-wide demand for meat. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) supply the majority of neatly packaged, affordably priced beef, veal, poultry, and pork in the United States. As the name implies, CAFOs are not traditional farms where animals enjoy pasture, fresh air, and animal companionship; they are factories, huge concrete and metal structures that confine thousands of animals at a time for the purpose of feeding and growing them as fast as possible and in as cheap a way as possible. Some capitalists might call this genius and, from a financial perspective, it may seem so. Ethologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall in Harvest for Hope describes them as farms of misery, relating the food production paradigm they represent to vending machines: “The Industrial model of factory farming simply doesn’t find it efficient or profitable to consider animals as sentient beings. Instead they are treated as mere machines, turning feed into meat or milk or eggs” (69).  As animal scientist Temple Grandin reminds us in Animals Make Us Human, we “have to recognize that an animal is a conscious being that has feelings” (166). But our sensibilities cringe, so the live animal in our minds is forgotten as clean cellophane packets are casually tossed into our carts. We pile meat, not flesh, onto our plate.

Imagine the reality animals face in a factory setting that prohibits them from knowing grass or sunlight, fresh air or leisure. In Animals Make Us Human, Grandin bases her discussion of animal welfare and well-being on neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp’s work on core emotions and primary process systems (which he identifies in all capital letters). These systems are the same in humans and animals; Grandin explains them in effort to describe the behavior and emotions of animals we keep as pets, visit at zoos, raise for food. In her commentary on farms and slaughterhouses, she focuses on the importance of environment and the consequences for animals not permitted to perform their natural behaviors. She says “the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary” (3). Animals, like us, are motivated by SEEKING and PLAY; a proper environment, therefore, means that the pig should be offered stimulating toys and puzzles that entertain and challenge, cows should be given space to graze and be part of a herd, chickens and turkeys need earth in which to forage. None of this natural behavior is possible in factory farm conditions; instead, the animals endure PANIC and FEAR because of restrictive confinement, excessive crowding, and excruciating boredom (Grandin).

Another reality of factory farming is callous human behavior. Myriad cases document cruel abuse toward animals raised unnaturally in factory settings, often mirroring the horrible work conditions employees themselves suffer. In Animals In Translation, Grandin explains the cause of electric prod abuse in moving animals to slaughter: “Handing stockpeople an electric prod to carry around goes against everything scientists know about positive and negative reinforcement. . . . Every time a stockperson shocks an animal that’s not moving, something bad (a balking animal) goes away (the animal starts moving). The more a worker uses the prod, the more he will be reinforced for using the prod, and so his use of the prod escalates” (192).  In one example of this tendency, Grandin describes how “workers had about a hundred pigs piled up squeeching and flipping over. Electric prods were being thrown into the squealing pile-up like harpoons, retrieved with an attached wire, and thrown again” (193).  Public awareness of industry abuses, prompted by outrage at images of downed animals being dragged or electrically-prodded to the kill floor, has led to recent legal changes. Similarly, minimal improvements have been implemented due to several animal activist organizations’ exposure of cruel confinement systems for pregnant sows, veal calves, and chickens. However, the abuses that go undiscovered—abuses that are industry standards—are most disturbing. Take, for example, the report described in sanctuary founder Gene Baur’s book Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food: “. . . two employees quit their jobs at Smithfield’s Circle Four farm in Utah and related what they had seen there to the Salt Lake Tribune. The paper quoted the pair as saying that ‘if a piglet did not weigh at least five pounds after a week, it got ‘knocked,’ a euphemism for ‘beaten to death.’ . . .’ The most common ‘knocking’ method was to grab the animal by its hind legs and slam it into a wall or concrete floor” (133). The fate of baby chicks is very similar and for spent laying hens, Grandin describes shameful common kill practices: “Some of the farms were just throwing the hens, when they were old ladies, into the dumpster alive. Others get rid of their spent hens by sucking them up in a vacuum truck that is used to clean sewers” (211).  These are not isolated examples but common practices perpetuated in the name of profit. Consider this final point from Grandin’s lifetime of work in the industry: “My last recommendation is that farms and slaughter plants should have glass walls. I tell executives, ‘There’s this wonderful technology you can use to improve animal welfare. It’s called glass. It’s called webcam.’ People need to see what’s happening on farms and inside plants” (228). Grandin argues for a more humane, symbiotic relationship with the animals we raise for food; she is not suggesting we adopt vegetarian diets. She supposes that there is a way to raise animals for meat that honors the emotions and behaviors science proves they have. Current practice is the industry’s response to a growing demand for meat. Treating animals like machines makes corporations rich and provides consumers with cheap meat. The unacknowledged price—the price confirmed and documented by numerous reputable sources—is much higher and I have to wonder if it is our lack of awareness to blame or the conscious, collective effort to ignore it.

The impact of factory farming on the environment and your health is alarming. In Jonathan Safran Foer’s memoir Eating Animals, this popular novelist describes the practical problem of factory farming apart from its aesthetics. As you might imagine, these “farms” are well-hidden for a reason — we sensitive types would probably never eat meat again if we had even a glimpse inside one of these operations. What they cannot hide, however, is the waste produced — waste that overwhelms and threatens our environment. As Foer explains:

The problem is quite simple: massive amounts of shit. So much shit, so poorly managed, that it seeps into rivers, lakes, and oceans — killing wildlife and polluting air, water, and land in ways devastating to human health. Today a typical pig factory farm will produce 7.2 million pounds of manure annually, a typical broiler facility will produce 6.6 million pounds, and a typical cattle feedlot 344 million pounds. . . .  All told, farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population— roughly 87,000 pounds of shit per second. The polluting strength of this shit is 160 times greater than raw municipal sewage. (174)

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Despite well-documented health and environmental impact, the industry continues to be irresponsible in its management of waste. Imagine one of these operations in your own neighborhood. Until the industry can no longer reap profit from its methods, they will proclaim CAFOs as sustainable and safe. Consumers enjoy the economic benefit at grocery stores but only delay the ultimate cost of conscience, health, and ecosystem.

Considering the hidden costs of meat consumption, what if we all became vegetarians? We cannot turn to produce to clear our conscience and improve our health and habitat; abstaining from meat only means support of another harmful industry. Since shifting to monocultures in this country, we have relied on chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep up with production demands. If you’ve ever tended a vegetable or flower garden, you may be familiar with the happy results these toxins can provide, toxins to the tune of “three million tons” that have been inflicted on the earth (Goodall 41). Relying on monoculture and poison to grow our foods has obvious consequences, but most consider it progress because it allows farmers to focus on particular crops and yield high production. In fact, because this system is not natural for the environment, it leads to harmful dependence on a few main crops and depletes the natural nutrients of soil. Reliance on basic varieties of plants that grow well drives this model at the expense of losing varieties that are not immediately gainful. The result, according to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, is that “America’s principal crops are impressively uniform, and impressively vulnerable” (qtd. in Goodall 40). Without variety, we are susceptible to permanently losing particular seeds if they are not resistant to changing weather patterns or insects. Another variety of a crop, for example, may not grow as fast now but may fare better under future conditions than the crops we purposely limit ourselves to; because we are not valuing these other varieties, they are disappearing for good (Goodall).  As with factory farm waste, the poisons required for current production rates within the monoculture system significantly affect the health of humans and animals as well as the environment. An alarming fact is that “farm chemicals kill off as many as 67 million American birds each year” (Goodall 42).  If this does not alert your regard for bird species or the environment, consider the statistic in terms of what it might mean for human health.

The effects of pesticides and fertilizers are more difficult to document in humans because they occur over a longer period of time, yet chemical pesticide exposure has been linked to “various forms of cancer, as well as Parkinson’s disease, miscarriages, and birth defects” (Goodall 42). Negative effects on cognitive processes, particularly in children, have also been documented including “poorer memory skills and stamina,” tendencies toward “physical aggression and angry outbursts” and “less sociable and creative” play (43). Although journalist Tom Standage discusses the benefits of chemicals in the ironically termed “green revolution,” of the 1960s and 1970s, he also acknowledges in An Edible History of Humanity the price humans have paid for higher crop yields due to artificial fertilizers and pesticides:  “According to the World Health Organization, pesticides cause around one million cases of acute unintentional poisoning a year and are also involved in around two million suicide attempts, leading to some 220,000 deaths a year” (230). Fertilizers and pesticides have had their place in our agricultural history. Indeed they have contributed to higher produce production in many parts of the world. However, we are now more aware of the long term effects of these short term gains. As with any public health issue, when we have the knowledge and data necessary to reevaluate our processes, survival obligates us to do so. The research is overwhelmingly available but no one should have to convince you that poison in our food might be a bad thing; would you knowingly ingest even a teaspoon of the stuff?

Directly or indirectly we are responsible for the food system because, like it or not, we are its patrons. It is a simple connection, really: buying equals culpability. If we don’t want to find ourselves as Atwood’s Snowman did, helplessly thinking back on our own complicity, we must reform attitudes driving the current industrial food model in this country. A transformative ideological shift can be accomplished in two bold steps: First, as a nation we must give farmers a make-over. Essentially, this means valuing farmers (and not corporations) for the important position they hold as stewards of our environment and providers of our food. Second, we must reestablish for our youth the physical connection between land and food as well as animals and food through targeted education programs. That’s it. What seems boldly radical is basic and essential. In light of what we now know about factory farming and chemically manipulated land and food, maintaining the status quo is radically irresponsible.

Reinventing the farmer means just that; we are not returning to traditional farming practices as a way to combat industrial ones. Obviously, we must do more than suggest going backwards if we hope to compete with current production. This reinvention, however, starts with farmers who recognize the potential of the natural environment to sustain itself and produce food without toxins. It starts with farmers who recognize the inherent threat of current practices to our personal health, the health of our environment, and the welfare of our animals. Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface, Incorporated’s “Farm of Many Faces” in Swoope, Virginia, is one such farmer. He introduces his most recent book, The Sheer Ecstasy of being a Lunatic Farmer, with this important call to action:

As the industrial food system lashes back with innuendo and pseudo-science against the ecologically based food system, I think it behooves all of us to examine the differences between these two camps. People wonder how I can be such a happy farmer. The stereo-typical, unhappy farmer unfortunately is true much of the time. I hope this book will put in clear detail the depth and breadth of the difference between the chemical/industrial/ global approach and the local/biological/ecological approach. (xvi)

Throughout this book that reads like a best-selling page turner, Salatin documents the ways we can heal land devastated by generations of improper farming practices and use ecologically-friendly, sustainable methods to grow an abundance of natural food and raise happier, healthier animals (who do not require abusive regimes of antibiotics, as in the factory system). He promotes his farming model which thrives on the interaction of plant and animal species to nurture production while making a profit. Yes, a profit. Apparently farmers like him can live off the land and still sleep at night. They can bring integrity to farming.

Importantly, they can also reintroduce this country’s animals to pasture. As I said, I am not a farmer so I will not attempt to explain Salatin’s processes in this short space. Put simply and briefly, the system of farming at Polyface relies on the symbiotic relationship between land and animals. Each animal on the farm benefits from the land and from each other; in turn, the soil and grass benefit from the cyclical pasturing of animals raised: cows, chickens, and pigs in this case. Ultimately, humans — who have cared for the land and animals or supported those who do — benefit in the form of healthily, environ-mentally and humanely produced food (Salatin). As I read about these idyllic and quite natural relationships, I wondered if this system could sustain current demands for food, specifically meat. As Salatin asserts, the answer is yes:

Everyone needs to understand that radiating out from every single confinement animal operation, whether it be poultry, pork, beef, dairy, or guinea pig, an entire unseen land base supports it. You don’t see the corn fields. You don’t see the corporate offices. You don’t see the manure hauling trucks and the acres on which the manure is spread. Our pasture based model actually takes less land than the industrial model. (41)

In the memoir Righteous Pork: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms, environmental activist and former attorney Nicolette Hahn Niman confirms this in her description of Iowan hog farmer Paul Willis:

. . . Paul has eagerly sought the latest research on the care and feeding of pigs. But he was never interested in putting them in metal buildings or funneling their manure into cesspools. His animals have always lived on pasture, eaten a drug-free daily ration, and have never spent time in metal crates. Paul grew his own feed corn and soy, rotating his pigs and crops yearly on various fields, which benefitted from the nutrients in the pig manure. Paul’s decision to stick with the traditional methods of raising pigs has allowed him to keep his costs low and be profitable. He never had to take out the large loans needed by confinement operators for capital-intensive structures. (120)

Now a cattle rancher married to Bill Niman, owner of the famous “all natural meat” Niman Ranch, Nicolette also has asserted the viability of living off the land’s natural resources:

. . . Other than that bit of hay, our cattle live entirely off this land. They simply eat the vegetation that occurs here naturally. We do no plowing, planting, irrigating, or harvesting. We use no fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides. Our only manipulation of the land is the way we manage the grazing of our cattle and some limited, targeted mowing. The cattle drink water that comes from our reservoir, which is a catch basin for rainwater we collect and store year-round. (170)

Part of the problem is that farmers like this are not popular with predominant agribusiness. Threats to profitability, they are often shunned by corporations and made out to be “lunatics” (hence the title of Salatin’s book). How did we get to a place in our society where people who respect the land and its creatures are seen as lunatics and corporations that comprehensively destroy every living thing they touch are financially supported by the general populace?

In The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, philosopher Peter Singer and writer Jim Mason explore underlying issues of the eating habits we have created. In their complex review of food and ethics, these environmental and animal advocates question the ideologies that drive consumption and ask probing questions about past, present, and future practices. One of their closing arguments considers the philosophical argument over meat consumption and our sense of entitlement regarding it:

It might be argued that food from animals is a central part of the standard Western diet, and important, if not always central, to what people eat in many other cultures as well. Because animal products are so significant to us, and because we could not buy them as cheaply as we can now without factory farming, factory farming is justifiable despite the suffering it inflicts on animals. But when cultural practices are harmful, they should not be allowed to go unchallenged. (244)

For example, Frank Reese, the “first and only rancher authorized by the USDA to call his birds ‘heritage’” (qtd. in Foer 234), is perhaps the last poultry farmer raising turkeys that have not been genetically modified to grow bigger and faster. He speaks out strongly against “unchallenged” practices in our system and makes clear our consumer responsibility: “Most of the folks who buy my turkeys are not rich by any means; they’re struggling on fixed incomes. But they’re willing to pay the real price. And to those who say it’s just too much to pay for a turkey, I always say to them, ‘Don’t eat turkey.’ It’s possible you can’t afford to care, but it’s certain you can’t afford not to care” (qtd. in Foer). Cheap meat for human consumption does not justify the suffering of sentient beings. Acknowledging this truth requires that we transform current culture that supports it by making more informed choices.

As Salatin explores in a chapter called “Relationships,” there is a fundamental reason why we should care about choices regarding the origin of our food: “When people know their farmer, they connect viscerally with what is before them on the plate. After all, dining is a fairly intimate experience. Next to the act of marriage, eating is one of the more intimate things we do as humans. We take in this food, right into our bodies, and it becomes us. Flesh. Blood. Being. Mind” (253). His point is well-taken on multiple levels. Knowing our farmer attributes a recognition and respect of the important role they play in our lives. We should care about how they feed us. We appreciate their work by valuing the food we purchase and paying a fair price for it. How wonderful it would be if through “our” farmer we supported local agriculture, humane, and environmental consciousness all at once. This food, as Salatin points out, “becomes us.” It becomes us in a way that defines our physical, social and moral health. It defines us perhaps more than any other choice we make. Salatin’s sentiment echoes important conclusions in Donna Harraway’s When Species Meet: “there is no way to eat and not to kill, no way to eat and not become with other mortal beings to whom we are accountable, no way to pretend innocence and transcendence or a final peace” (295). Wherever or however we view ourselves in the chain of being, we cannot deny our fundamental responsibility to protect the welfare of each other, of other species, and of the environment.

Elevating agropastoral farming to a respected profession demands that we also reeducate youth about food issues, our second bold step. In Why Our Health Matters: A Vision Of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future, Andrew Weil, M.D., reports that “America’s obesity rate is the worst in the world and is almost universally believed to be a major predictor of future illness, particularly diseases that are most difficult and costly to manage: diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer” (15). Weil makes an interesting comparison of American crowds in images of the 1930s and 1940s to now. Despite limited knowledge of nutrition, people simply weren’t fat then. There are obviously several possible reasons for this, but a glaring factor of guilt lies squarely on our dinner plate (if dinner plate is even a term we readily use in this fast-food grab and go culture).

As Weil notes:

The most significant change in our eating patterns since World War II is our greatly increased consumption of the processed, refined, and manufactured food that has displaced whole, natural food in our diet. . . .  Instead [families] mostly buy and consume manufactured food, much of it made with ingredients that are new to human diets, such as highly refined vegetable oils and starches, high-fructose corn syrup, and innumerable additives. Modern food technology has drastically altered the foods that nature provides, all too often reducing their nutritive qualities and increasing their potential for harm. (154)

Incidentally, we need not rely only on images from history. If you’ve ever traveled abroad (and I mean pretty much anywhere outside the U.S.), you’re sure to have noticed a distinct lack of fatness. Indeed, I’d venture to guess that most obesity you did witness presented itself in the form of American travelers. It’s quite embarrassing and not a little shameful considering one avowed goal of big industry: to fight hunger and poverty.

This leads us to transforming America’s understanding about food. In particular, we must promote an improved food production paradigm by fostering food awareness among our youth. This effort must include information specific to nutrition and health as well as ecological and animal welfare issues. In the chapter “Called Home” of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life author Barbara Kingsolver considers how agricultural knowledge has essentially disappeared from our culture, noting that “we also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn’t too important. Consider how Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools, alongside reading and mathematics” (9). This is a fair question which reveals the priorities of our culture. In our effort to move from rural, labor-dependent agricultural models, we have lost very basic knowledge about food production. Worse, we have lost respect for those who seek it.

On reflection of Kingsolver’s question about agricultural education, I cannot think of a more pertinent subject for our youth to study. Certainly we are not all going to be farmers, but agricultural education would inform our daily eating decisions—arguably our most important ones. As pointed out in Why Our Health Matters, other countries are way ahead of us on this. Weil notes that “Germany, for one, is starting a $47 million dollar program to encourage healthy eating, including improvements in school lunches, and is urging makers of unhealthy foods to curtail marketing to children, in part because studies indicate that banning fast-food advertising to children could reduce the number of overweight kids by as much as 18 percent” (193). With public funding cuts to schools all over our country, physical education courses are rapidly dropping from school programs. A mandatory course of study in food nutrition could help curtail the consequences of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle by improving awareness about healthful food and lifestyle choices. In the introduction of Jamie’s Food Revolution: Rediscover How to Cook Simple, Delicious, Affordable Meals, author and chef Jamie Oliver gives us an excellent reason why we should get involved with his movement — Pass It On — and begin sharing healthy recipes and nutrition information with each other:

The reality is that we are in the midst of one of the worst food-related epidemics that this country has seen. And I can assure you it’s not through lack of food this time, but because we’re consuming far too much of the wrong stuff. According to the Institute of Food Technologists, Americans spent more money on fast food in 2007 than they did on education. We’re not talking about gourmet French cheese and expensive cuts of meat here. . . we’re talking about French fries, pizzas, burgers, and other food that is absolute garbage. (14)

Nothing could be more relevant than an educational program that empowers Americans to eat well. Nothing could be as impressive as children who believe that, as Alice Waters— famed creator of California’s Chez Panisse — asserts, “How we eat can change the world” (qtd. in McNamee xiv).

The ecological impact of food choices should be a focus of such education and would therefore include information about local, humane, and organic food movements. Al Gore’s conclusions in Earth in the Balance: Ecology And The Human Spirit reinforce Salatin’s and Harraway’s points about relationship to our choices and indicate the importance of understanding these relationships — in this case, to food, animals, health, and environment:

I believe also that — for all of us — there is an often poorly understood link between ethical choices that seem quite small in scale and those whose apparent consequences are very large, and that a conscious effort to adhere to just principles in all our choices — however small — is a choice in favor of justice in the world. . . . Both in our personal lives and in our political decisions, we have an ethical duty to pay attention, resist distraction, be honest with one another and accept responsibility for what we do — whether as individuals or together. (368)

Imagine a mandatory education course specifically designed to inform students about the ecological and health choices they make every day. Imagine age-specific programs that empower children and teenagers to make better decisions for themselves, their community, and their environment. Even more exciting, imagine an education that invites stakeholders from individual communities—from farmers to chefs to scientists, engineers, and health professionals — to participate in the development of  programs specifically targeted at ecological sustainability methods for their own community issues. I want to take these courses. I want to understand how my choices affect the location I call home, and to appreciate how those choices translate for the environment as a whole.

Through education we must redefine farming as a professional career so that young people see value in pursuing it.  According to researchers reporting on The Role of Economists in Animal Law, “There is increasing urgency to chart a new course. Our energy, water, and climate resources are undergoing dramatic changes that, in the judgment of the Commissioners, will require agriculture to transition to much more biologically diverse systems, organized into biological synergies that exchange energy, improve soil quality, and conserve water and other resources” (23).

In other words, our new education program should and must encourage the type of farming Joel Salatin, Paul Willis, Bill Niman, and Frank Reese practice and advocate. I’m not suggesting their methods are perfect; indeed, there are criticisms to be made of each. They face enormous obstacles in fighting industry practices, and we can learn from both their missteps and successes. To support them, we can develop education reform that inspires innovation. Our communities need educated, thoughtful people who understand the complexities of modern ecological farming practices.

Another crucial aspect of education reform will be the hands-on application of skills that support modern ecological practices. As a community service, this program would involve students in efforts that support local food production (food preparation where or when production may not be possible). A student’s participation would be driven both by personal interest and available community resources. For example, students might help to raise and harvest crops or learn the basics of farm animal care. They might work with nutritionists to determine healthy meals that rely on local food sources or learn to cook with area chefs willing to promote healthy food options. Students could study with scientists to determine environmental impacts of food production in their area or consider the efficacy and economy of local farms; they might be asked to develop recommendations for sustainability or profitability. Still others might become involved with marketing of local food sources or nutrition information. Working together based on talent and interest, students would share knowledge and experience of various food-related issues. Community members and area businesses would benefit from student services and would be contributing in meaningful ways to education.

Perhaps the most beneficial outcome of these partnerships and long term educational goals will be the improvement of social communities. Through cooperation with each other, reconnecting to our food sources — land and animal — will impact the way we interact with one another in very positive ways. In Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond, documentary writer and producer Meg Daley Olmert explores the history and biology of human and animal interactions as well as the evolutionary and social benefits that came of them. In reference to agropastoral practices of the past, she notes that “the care of plants and animals once caused us to settle down, learn to live together, and think of ourselves as caretakers and citizens.  For twelve thousand years, we sacrificed self-interests to the care of each other, our crops, and our animals” (198). In a society where “self-interests” have become paramount, we ought to take note of the cultural changes that allowed this shift in priorities from social to individual welfare. As Olmert explains, the reality of this transformation can be found in our unprecedented abandonment of animal agriculture:

In 1920 a third of all Americans—32 million of us—still farmed the land. By 1950 that number had slipped to 23 million. Forty years later it was down to 4.6 million—less than two percent—and a third of those farmers didn’t even live on the land they were farming. By 1993 farmers were so rare that the United States Census Bureau stopped counting. The family farm was extinct. (198)

With this extinction we sacrificed not only agricultural knowledge but also the bonds created through farming with animals and each other. Industrial factory farmers cannot bond with their thousands of confined animals. And indeed, working conditions more often promote hostilities between employees rather than cooperation. In her book Olmert asks important questions about humans trying to live without animals and points to serious implications in the loss of our bonds with them. I suggest that it is even more dangerously complex: we are not only trying to live without animals, we are trying to live within a system that marks animals as unfeeling machines. We may not agree with this philosophy, but when we fail to consider consequences our food choices create, it is the one we support.

A return to more traditional land and animal care practices indicates positive outcomes for individuals and society as a whole. Exploring the consequences of America’s farming transformation, psychiatrist Aaron Katcher fears that “we broke the bond with animals that had helped to make us civilized human beings. Katcher sees the fallout from this sudden interspecies divorce every day in children who are too wild to participate in polite society” (qtd. in Olmert 180). His research about children with ADHD, the most common behavioral disorder in America, promotes the success of animal therapy in place of drugs to treat the condition (181). In Animals In Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, scientist Temple Grandin asserts biological similarities shared by humans and animals as explanation for various behaviors (ours and theirs). As part of a fascinating discussion about the co-evolution of wolves and humans, Grandin refers to research scientist Robert K. Wayne who explores social behaviors humans learned by interacting with wolves. Unlike early humans, wolves “had complex social structures” and “loyal same-sex and non-kin friendships” (304). As Grandin concludes, “all animals make us human” (306). Biological and evolutionary evidence suggests the wisdom of our continuing to learn from them.

Horticulturalist Charles Lewis’ work revealed similar cooperative benefits through “the palliative and socializing effect of tending plants” (Olmert 153). As Olmert describes in Made for Each Other: “In the 1960s [he] used it to ignite a sense of community in the midst of poverty and rubble. He helped clear patches of NYC’s Spanish Harlem to create neighborhood gardens. In precincts rife with crime, the police were amazed when these gardens were respected and allowed to grow. They were even more amazed to learn the vandals had become guardians of these tiny Edens” (153). Interestingly, his work in Chicago demonstrated the aesthetic concern adopted by people caring for these neighborhood gardens. As a result of their project, building appearance improved as people painted and cleaned surrounding areas: “Lewis concluded that gardens make good neighbors. Growing beautiful and delicious things where nothing existed before brings people together and gives them a sense of control in their lives” (153). Imagine the combined result, therefore, of school to community programs that encourage student involvement with both animals and the land. Imagine the bonds developing between young people who feel a sense of accomplishment for improving the way their community interacts with each other and contributing to better food production and preparation practices. Feel their sense of pride for educating others based on these experiences.

As ethologist Marc Bekoff asserts in The Emotional Lives of Animals, “the phenomenon to which “morality” refers is a wide-ranging biological necessity for social living. Just as emotions are a gift of our ancestors, so too are the basic ingredients of morality: namely, cooperation, empathy, fairness, justice, and trust” (87-88). To acknowledge and claim food choices, Americans must come to terms with what we take for granted. We must understand the moral issues that underpin our everyday choices concerning what we put on our grocery lists and what we put in our mouths. We must recognize the complexity of consequences that exist behind these decisions, decide to what extent we are responsible, and act to affect positive change. The outcome, if we don’t, might remind of us of Jimmy’s reality soon before humanity is destroyed in Oryx and Crake: “Next they went to NeoAgriculturals. AgriCouture was its nickname among the students. They had to put on biosuits before they entered the facility, and scrub their hands and wear nose-cone filters, because what they were about to see hadn’t been bioform-proofed, or not completely” (202). Ironically, this is pretty much what it takes to visit one of today’s CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations). We know what happens to the animals of Jimmy’s youth but the animals he visits in this description are not really animals at all. They are chickens (remember the ChickieNobs Bucket the children of Crake find?), but in Jimmy’s adult world, chickens have been engineered to grow popular food parts without developing into a whole chicken. This eliminates controversy over animal emotions since, as Jimmy is told, chickens with no heads cannot think or feel. In our world, we’ve successfully engineered what scientists call the “Enviropig” because the waste of our pork consumption is too much for the environment to handle. In our world, we’ve created turkeys like McLovin, who happened to find sanctuary at Fairytale Farm. In the industry, under our support, this would have been his fate:

Today’s domesticated turkeys are anatomically manipulated to be so heavy and large-breasted, because breast meat is the most desirable and therefore commands the best price, that they are now incapable of breeding naturally. Practically all of the turkeys raised commercially in the United States are the result of artificial insemination (AI). Their abnormally configured bodies, as well as their intensive confinement, result in health problems, including painful leg and joint disorders, lameness, heart disease, and weakened immune systems. (Unnatural Breeding Techniques and Results in Modern Turkey Production)

If we permit this because we want more breast meat, are we really so different from Atwood’s description of a culture that breeds chickens with no heads? After a brief but beloved presence on Jennifer’s farm, McLovin died because his body and heart could not support his unnatural weight gain. Is this what we want?

Bekoff’s concluding argument advocates our improved treatment of animals, sentient beings that deserve our compassion and protection: “We know that the results of scientific research (all those facts) should influence how we act in the world; otherwise science becomes a meaningless exercise. And we also know animals feel emotions and suffer at our hands, and they do so globally. Ethics, with a capital E, needs to have a place in our ongoing deliberations about how we interact with other animals” (135).  Our environmental and social well-being, as well as our individual health, deserves the same deliberations. I argue that we become a culture that validates ethical and ecological farming and supports, through education reform, a youth prepared to confront our current food crises.

It really is as simple as that.  And everywhere animals like McLovin, cognizant and full of feeling from the day they are born, will thank you.

About the author:

Rebecca Young is a native of Sullivan County, a stronghold of the local food movement in the heart of the Catskills. She currently resides in Elmira, New York, and is an International Baccalaureate Language A (English) instructor and examiner.  As a teacher, her interests include education reform that fosters individual responsibility and promotes social activism. She is pursuing a PhD in World Literature studies at Binghamton University.

Sources for Further Reading:

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. United States of America, 2003. Print.

Bauer, Gene. Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008. Print.

Bekoff, Marc. The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why They Matter. Novato: New World Library, 2007. Print.

Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources. Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States. The National Academies Press. Web. 5/1/11.

Dougherty, Charlotte P., Sarah Henricks Holtz, Joseph C. Reinert, Lily Panyacosit, Daniel A. Axelrad, and Tracey J. Woodruff. Dietary Exposures to Food Contaminants across the United States. Environmental Research Section A 84, 170}185 (2000). Web. 5.1.11.

Fearing, Jennifer and Martin, Robert and Newman, Mathew. The Role of Economists in Animal Law: A Report of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 2009. Web. 5.1.11.

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Eating Animals.  New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009. Print.

Gay, Kathlyn. Superfood or Superthreat: The Issue of Genetically Engineered Food. Berkeley Heights: Enslow Publishers, Inc., 2008. Print.

Goodall, Jane. Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating. New York: Warner Wellness, 2005. Print.

Gore, Al. Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. New York: Rodale, Inc., 2006. Print.

Grandin, Temple. Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals. New York: Houghton Miffline Harcourt, 2009. Print.

Grandin, Temple and Johnson, Catherine. Animals In Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. New York: Scribner, 2005. Print.

Harraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007. Print.

McNamee, Thomas. Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution. New York: Penguin Group, 2007. Print.

Niman, Nicolette Hahn. Righteous Porkchop: Finding A Life And Good Food Beyond Factory Farms. New York: Harper Collins Publisher, 2009. Print.

Oliver, Jamie. Jamie’s Food Revolution: Rediscover How to Cook Simple, Delicious, Affordable Meals. New York: Hyperion, 2009. Print.

Olmert, Meg Daley. Made for Each Other: The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond. Da Capo Press, 2009. Print.

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Print.

Research Reports: Unnatural Breeding Techniques and Results in Modern Turkey Production. Farm Sanctuary. Web. 5/1/11.

Salatin, Joel. The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green, 2010. Print.

Singer, Peter and Mason, Jim. The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choice Matter. USA: Rodale, Inc. 2006. Print.

Standage, Tom. An Edible History of Humanity. New York: Walker & Company, 2009. Print.

Weil, Andrew, M.D. Why Our Health Matters: A Vision of Medicine That Can Transform Our Future. Hudson Street Press, 2009. Print.

Works Consulted

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff and McCarthy, Susan. When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals. New York: Dell Publishing, 1995.

Salatin, Joel. You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Start and Succeed in a Farming Enterprise. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea, 1998.

Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Consciousness: Core Emotional Feelings in Animals and Humans. Science Direct, 2005.

Chris Mackowski photos

Mount Desert Island across Frenchmen’s Bay

My Coastline

By Chris Mackowski

………………………………………

Introduction:  In “My Coastline,” Chris Mackowski perfectly blends human affect with the meaning of place.  Place, quite simply, is where you live, where human neurology, memory, and meaning is shaped by the landscape and the people you interact with there.   As Mackowski shows, as much as we now like to live inside with our technology in hand, our most powerful experiences take place in the natural world, providing one of the few contemporary contexts in which we are connected to our evolutionary roots and a much longer history than that of our lifespans.  Mackowski’s Maine coast is the source of his deepest emotional currents, and his piece brings us into them, lets readers experience their specificity and source that resonates with the specificity of our own.

— Leslie Heywood, CNF Editor

As empty as I've ever seen Sand Beach!

But it’s early March. Those throngs of visitors are months away. Memorial Day Weekend typically opens the floodgates and then the visitors will come and come and come. And they’ll come through those high months of summer. They’ll come into September and well into October, the leafpeepers who will want to see the blazes of color splashed in among the dark stands of evergreens.

In 2009, 2.5 million visitors came to Acadia National Park. But even in the harsh heart of winter, for which Maine is so legendary, “no one” still means around ten thousand people a month. Most of the Park’s roads, unplowed, remain closed. Most of the Park’s hiking trails, iced over, remain inaccessible. Most of the Park’s seasonal programming, suspended, remain unavailable. And still some ten thousand people visit.

I’m here not as a tourist but because I consider Maine “The Homeland.” My family moved to the state when I was three, and I’ve lived here, on and off, ever since — nearly forty years. My mom left; my father stayed. Growing up, I spent summers and holidays here. I attended two years of high school here. I attended graduate school here. My daughter was born here.

But that’s not why I think of Maine as “The Homeland” — not really. Rather, the pink-granite cliffs and gnarled spruce forests of the coastline are, literally and spiritually, my touchstone, and I return as often as I can.

I didn’t make it to my father’s for Christmas this year as I usually do. The resultant yearning grew strong enough that I decided to take time for a visit over Spring Break. So here I am in early March.

And here I am on this coast on a day that could not do more to cast itself in desolation. A thick cloudcover, sweeping in ahead of a low-pressure system, has grayed the late-afternoon sky. Temperatures hunker down in the mid-twenties, but a wind blows in from the sea, adding a dash of nip and salt. The landscape exists in a pallet of shadowy browns and grainy blacks and cold, cold whites. Vast dunes of snow top the beach and cluster on the sides of the nearby hills.

Sand Beach runs in a shallow east-west crescent for 290 yards, with steep cliffs at either end. Spruce trees rise spire-like from nooks and crevices along the cliff faces. In today’s dim light, it looks like fire swept through them and left everything black, but I can still see the full branches, which needle away the illusion.

One January after I was married, two of my fraternity brothers came to Maine to visit, and the three of us decided to climb the western cliff. “Swing the car around from the parking lot and meet us up along the Park Loop Road,” I told Heidi, who stayed at the foot of the cliff with one of my brothers’ girlfriends. I didn’t know at the time that the number-one cause of death at the Park came from falls while people are hiking and climbing. We knew only what our young testosterone-fueled bravado was telling us: Icy slopes be damned! We’re young, fit, and invincible!

We somehow made it to the top without dying, even Dorfman, as roundly out of shape as he was. From the beach, Heidi captured our invincibility in a photo: my brothers and me standing at the top of the cliff, side by side, arms crossed, silhouetted against a white sky. “Yeah,” it says. “You got business to take care of? Talk to us.”

* * * * *

View atop of Cadillic Mountain

Normally when I return to The Homeland, I pilgrimage to the top of Cadillac Mountain, named for the same man who founded Detroit, Antoine Laumet, who had given himself the title Sieur de la Mothe Cadillac shortly after coming to the Maine coast from France in the late 1680s. At 1,530 feet above sea level, Cadillac stands as the highest spot on the island, and it’s one of the first places in America you can see the sunrise. From the sea, Cadillac looks bald, a pink-granite desert of a mountain from which the island, Mount Desert Island, gets its name.

For four years, I worked as news director at a radio station in nearby Ellsworth. On slow news days, I’d drive down to Cadillac over my lunch hour. I’d find a spot at one of the pullovers and eat my salad. Sometimes Heidi would add a bowl of Jell-O. I could watch the streams of cars, sunlight glinting off their windshields, snake up and down the mountain road, three and a half miles from the spruce and cedar forest at the foot of the mountain through the Krummholz zone of stunted shrubs and gnarled bushes that stretches to the top.

At Cadillac’s summit, I can watch the boat traffic leave little white wakes across Frenchman’s Bay. As the tide goes out, I can watch the sandbar materialize between Bar Harbor and Bar Island just a few hundred yards off MDI’s northeastern corner. On summer afternoons, I can watch the thick cotton fogbank come in from the ocean. Long tendrils on the fog’s leading edge leap up and over the islands in the bay, pulling the rest of the fogbank behind them until it blankets each island out of existence, rolling northward over everything. From above, it looks like virgin snowfall.

Another favorite spot along the Acadia coastline is Schoodic Point, a peninsula some four miles across Frenchman’s Bay as the seagull flies. By car from Bar Harbor, it’s a circuitous forty-five-mile drive. Because of its relative remoteness, Schoodic gets far fewer visitors than the parts of the Park on MDI. The tip of the peninsula faces the open sea, so it affords one of the best spots for watching storm waves pound in from the open ocean, wild, spectacular, raw.

Schoodic Point.

My dad and stepmother got married at Schoodic — a wedding my brother Matt and I were not allowed to attend because my mother still harbored storm-powerful bitterness toward my father following their divorce. My dad still loves Schoodic, and on days when he ventures from the farm in the direction of the coast, he makes his way to the peninsula.

Heidi and I used to escape there, too. We’d sit and watch the waves crash in, sometimes moving close enough to feel the sea spray on our cheeks. In the parking lot one day, we fed part of a loaf of stale bread to the gulls. They plucked scraps from my hand until I ran out of bread, then turned all Alfred Hitchcock on me. While the birds dive-bombed me, Heidi laughed and took pictures. We threw ourselves into the car for safety and, together, laughed loud enough to drown out the sea.

On the forest-covered edge of one of Schoodic’s cliffs, we made love one afternoon. On a later trip, I went back and took a photo of the sunset from that spot. I had it enlarged into a poster and framed, and I gave it to her for a birthday present. For years, it hung in her office at work until she changed jobs, and then she hung it in our kitchen. I don’t know where she has it now.

* * * * *

Sometimes I go Downeast — that stretch of Maine coast that runs northeastward from MDI to Lubec at the state’s easternmost tip. It was my dad’s adventureland when my brother and I were kids. We camped on the beach at Pembroke and dug clams at Marlboro. We watched the reversing falls at Dennysville and watched whales off Eastport. After Heidi and I got married, we went on many of those same adventures; after Stephanie was born, she came with us.

I particularly like Jasper Beach south of Bucks Harbor, a half-mile beach consisting not of sand but of tumbled stone. There are a million million stones at Jasper Beach piled in a great crescent-shaped dune. The rocks, bigger than fists and potatoes near the top of the dune, and smaller than a thumbnail near the low-tide mark, have all been worn smooth by the sea. When a wave rushes through the stones, the water hisses as it withdraws. Heidi and I used to spend hours walking the beach, studying the stones, each a self-contained galaxy of color and pattern. We collected those that struck us, only a handful or two, and kept them in a tabletop fountain at home.

Quoddy Head light.

Sometimes I’ll go to the very tip of the country, to Quoddy Head State Park, the easternmost point in America, where I like to watch the sun rise. It lifts itself, face flushed red with the effort, up out of the sea. The granite bluffs at Quoddy Head rise straight up out of the sea, too, tall and lonely.

I don’t have the time on this Spring Break trip to venture Downeast, and even Schoodic is too far for me to go this late in the day. The road to the top of Cadillac is closed at this time of year. Sand Beach will do. I’m overdue for a visit.

The Park Service normally collects a $20 entrance fee, good for a week’s worth of access—but when I make it to The Homeland, I can only ever visit Acadia for half a day at most, so the access fee rankles. As someone who works for the NPS, I believe in its mission, and in particular I believe in preserving this park, but I don’t believe in price gouging. But at this time of day, at this point in the season, I knew the tollbooth along Park Loop Road would be closed.

I’ve never had Sand Beach to myself before. Today I share it only with a wind-eroded snowman who sits just above the high-tide line. He has dried seaweed for hair and driftwood twigs for arms, outstretched wide to embrace, to defy, the winter wind blowing straight in off the sea.

In the second year I was married, Heidi and I came down to the beach on a March day much different than this one. It was a Saturday, so we were both off work. Temperatures flared into the upper seventies. We bundled up our five-month-old daughter, grabbed my acoustic guitar, and drove to Sand Beach. We walked through shin-deep snow to get from the parking lot to the granite stairs and down onto the sand.

The beach itself was clear that day, and the breeze hardly noticeable. We shed our shoes to feel the warm sand as we walked to the beach’s far end. There, we made a little camp for ourselves and I got out the guitar and played the three songs I knew over and over. Our daughter, Steph, sucked her binky and wondered what to make of us, young and foolish in love and sitting on the beach in March. In photos from that day, she’s all bundle and blankie and big eyes and binky. It was her first time there.

Heidi and I had a tradition when we visited Sand Beach: I would walk, barefoot, a few feet into the surf and face her, arms outstretched to say, “Here I am!” and she would take my picture. For years, a collage of those photos hung in our bathroom.

Waves crashing.

Today, my photo goes untaken. I briefly consider peeling off my shoes and wading into the water and striking my pose, just for old times’ sake — but decide not to. It’s too cold, I convince myself, although I know the real reason is that it will depress me. I know this because seeing the snowman in that same pose of outstretched arms has already stirred feelings I’d rather not feel. If I stood in the surf, I might melt away as surely as the snowman would if he stood there instead.

* * * * *

While I have the beach to myself right now, bootprints in the sand indicate someone had been here not long before me. The boots made deeper impressions than mine. A dog’s tracks wind back and forth across them. Like me, the person walked in more or less a straight line from the granite steps down to the water. The way the rising tide erases the bootprints, it looks like their owner simply walked in an unbroken stride down the beach and into the surf. The return set of tracks tells otherwise, but I wonder what it would take for a man to walk out into that surf and never return. On a day like today, on a beach as desolate as this, who would ever even know?

The water is far enough down the beach, away from the high-tide mark where the snowman stands vigil, that I know the tide has only just turned. It rises and falls as much as twenty feet along this stretch of coast, taking about ten hours to rise or fall.

Rather than follow the bootprints back up the beach, I decide to walk along the crescent to the beach’s far end. In the dim light, the sand looks the color of stained parchment. I stay within fifteen feet of the water’s edge, where the wet sand remains packed down and paper smooth, awaiting the writing of my footprints. Further up the beach, where the sand is dry, my steps would leave indeterminate craters, but here each footfall leaves a firm, distinct impression. Yet when the tide rises, the clearest record of my passing will wash away.

There are few sand beaches like this north of the midcoast region. That’s because, in geological terms, the coast of Maine is so young. As recently as ten or twelve thousand years ago, what’s now the Maine coast had been an interior range of hills. Then a downward shift in the earth’s crust submerged the edge of the continent. In a way, then, the old weathered rocks that look like Time itself actually represent the fresh face of the planet. In ten thousand years, the surf has simply not had enough time to pound the rocks into stones and the stones into sand. Erosion happens on a tinier scale than that: a chip here, a chip there, ground together into smoothness under the tumbling waves. Sea currents then move that sand around, up and down the coast, in and out from shore, tumbling, tumbling, smoothing, smoothing.

View from Otter Cliffs, looking toward Sand Beach.

The protection offered by the cliffs on either side of the cove makes this an ideal, if rare, location for that particulate to come to rest. The waves constantly deposit sand and scoop it back up again. The churning water is alive with sand.

That metaphor’s not much of a stretch, I realize. It’s hard to see now in the late afternoon gloom, but a handful of sand contains a million traces of life. Mixed among the tiny crumbs of granite and quartz are purple flecks of mussel shell and greenish flecks of crab shell, pieces of urchin spines and crab carapaces, and miniscule chips of bone.

The sea has heaped the sand into a dune that stretches yards beyond the normal high tide mark, clearly identified by the necklace of dried kelp and rockweed that’s been pushed as absolutely far up as any wave can reach. The string of aquatic jetsam runs the length of the beach. On a warmer, friendlier day, I might walk its length to see if I might find any treasures: a crab shell, a mermaid’s purse, a strand of welk’s egg casing, although I might be more apt to find a plastic soda bottle, a six-pack ring, or a chunk of Styrofoam lobster buoy.

Behind the dunes, alive in the summer with beach grass and wild peas, a freshwater pond stretches out to the north. There’s always beaver lodge or two, great mounds of sticks that poke out of the water like heads, and at times I’ve caught glimpses of the beavers V’ing across the water. The pond freezes over in winter, but during the summer, the sun warms it like a cup of tea, an illusion made complete by the tannin from the surrounding evergreens, which stains the water amber.

Water drains from the pond through a shallow stream that cuts a course through the sand at the beach’s far eastern end near the base of the eastern cliff. One afternoon, as Heidi and I approached the stream, we came across a father and his two young sons playing along its edge. The water cut into the bank and a hunk of sand, like a miniature shard of glacier, broke away and crumbled into the stream. “Erosion!” shrieked one of the boys. “I see erosion happening!”

Heidi and I waded into the stream, which came up past our shins. Nothing lives in the stream this close to the sea because so many people tramp through it in the summer, so we didn’t have to worry about crabs biting our toes or anything like that. We sloshed upstream, past the boys and around the bend toward the pond. “Hey!” the shrieker called after us. “Do you know beavers pee in that water?”

We didn’t have to travel too far upstream before we felt like the only people on earth. We might’ve heard the shrill cry of kids playing on the beach beyond the dune, but the wind and the waves suppressed most of that ambient noise. Instead, we could hear—if such a thing is possible—the sunlight reflecting off the pond. We could hear the green of the marsh grass and the wide blue of the sky. We could hear our own breathing and the beating of our hearts as we stood there holding hands.

* * * * *

I must at least touch the sea. If the coastline is my touchstone, I must also touch sea.

Coastline is, by definition, the demarcation of land and sea. But the boundary remains in constant motion, shifting as the tide rises and falls, rises and falls, rises and falls. In that zone, land and sea exist together, never apart.

I walk into that zone, gauging my approach carefully, reading the sea, studying the height and strength of the waves as they roll in. I study the beach, too, to see where the water comes up farthest and where it hangs back. Finally, when I feel the sea’s same rhythm, I move down to the water’s edge as it moves up to meet me. I bend over and we touch, the sea and I. We touch.

Even in the summer, the water here seldom warms beyond fifty-five degrees, but that’s not what sends a chill through me. It’s an unknowable mystery allowing me to get close, for just an instant of an instant.

I say, “Thank you.”

I take a step back, then another, so I don’t get caught by any especially ambitious waves. A wet foot now would ruin what’s left of my day. But I don’t want to retreat too far. I feel too much awe to ever just run away. The ocean is so much.

What’s one little touch but everything and nothing at all?

* * * * *

The snow on the cliffsides glows translucent blue in the twilight. It’s time to go. I take one last look upstream in the direction of the frozen beaver pond, then one last look downstream toward the sea. Where the stream drains into the ocean, a cluster of rocks, like a colony of craggy-shelled turtles, hunkers in the waves. The rockweed that beards each rock flagellates in the currents that can’t seem to make up their mind if they’re coming or going.

I know the feeling. It’s time to go, but I want to stay. Even though I shall again take part of this place with me, part of me wants to stays. Part of me always stays.

I wonder how much I’ve left behind.

About the author:

Chris Mackowski is an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at St. Bonaventure University. He blogs for Scholars & Rogues <www.scholarsandrogues.com> and writes Civil War history for the National Park Service. His latest book, “Chancellorsville: The Battle and the Battlefield”, will be out later this spring.

Vignettes

Introduction

Michael Parish’s series of vignettes on our strange contemporary relationship to the natural world — and the way our daily consumption habits and practices transform it and ourselves — provide a bit of a Brechtian alienation effect that lets us stand back and see ourselves in action.  The everyday activities of work, eating, and landscaping are shown in a kaleidoscope that the quirky narrative voice guides us through our activities and makes them momentarily strange — and therefore able to think about doing them differently.

— Leslie Heywood, Creative Nonfiction Editor

By Michael Parish

On Picnics

To picnic is to party, in a field, in the woods, under the sun. Bring a blanket, some wine and cheese, and don’t forget the bread that crunches like the sound of leaves when we break it. Picnicking combines two of the simplest pleasures in life, being outside and eating, and though I’d like to partake in both everyday, most days, I have to go to work.

I sit at a desk in a room that has no windows. As I program, my mind runs the same track over and over again like a toy train racing around a Christmas tree. If the time is 11:34, I think 7:34; I add eight hours because in eight hours I am guaranteed not to be at work; I will be at the supermarket or eating dinner or out on my porch reading the book I have been reading.

During lunch, I sit in my car with the windows down; it is impossible to find a place near work to eat at outside. The nearest “natural space” is a playground/park with a backstop and a soccer field where in place of the grass, something else exists. The stuff is like a carpet, like the floor of every miniature golf hole that’s ever been putted on, and sometimes, I squat and move a flat palm across the top of it, trying to figure out what astroturf smells like.

It doesn’t smell like a picnic, I can tell you that.

On Buffets

The all-you-can-eat buffet is a simple solution to a complex problem. It would seem like providing a person with an almost unlimited amount of food choices come mealtime would make things easier when trying to solve the Western dilemma of eating three meals a day and deciding what exactly those meals should be. But this is precisely why buffets do not work: special occasions aside, eating should never be treated merely as an excuse to stuff our faces, and food should not be treated as an abundant, homogeneous commodity that can be purchased for a flat price (say, $9.99 per person). Yet so many of us fork over our ten bucks so that we can eat until we are unable to move. When we eat at buffets, we sacrifice sound food choices for the sake of convenience.

Treating food as an unlimited resource breaks down our connection to its provenance and production. At a buffet, our knowledge of how the food underneath all of the red heat lamps got there is limited to an occasional glimpse of the dolly heaping with trays that is periodically trucked from the kitchen to the food bar. The country of origin, the specific variety of the fruits, vegetables and meats that comprise the ingredients ^[1], the date the food was harvested and who did the picking, when exactly it arrived in the kitchen of the restaurant, and how many times it was processed before it arrived in our mouths, are all details that are rendered invisible through their anonymous presentation.

To most buffet enthusiasts, none of these details matter. All that is important is 1) being hungry, 2) eating as much food as possible to ensure you get your money’s worth, and 3) being hungry. In America, the one price, all-you-can-eat buffet seems like a setup, a con or trick combining one of our basic needs (the need to eat) along with our thrifty, “consumer values” (the hunger for a bargain). We’re duped into overeating because we can’t resist a bargain.

At an all-you-can-eat buffet, faced with mounds of fried and fast foods, the feeling that pervades the atmosphere is that food can be wasted without consequence, either by sampling small portions of every entree and trashing the leftovers or by eating healthy portions of everything in sight. The first is downright wasteful – throwing away good food simply because it is extra – while the second is a bit more covert. The two main reasons to eat are for energy and pleasure, and the best method usually involves finding the most agreeable way of combining the two. To force yourself to eat so much that you feel like you’ll lose it in the backseat on the car ride home is just excessive. It’s also insulting to your internal organs, to farmers, to plants and animals, to people waking up in other parts of the world who worry not about eating, but about whether they’ll live through another day.

I’m not saying when we get together with friends for a potluck or a holiday that it’s wrong to enjoy ourselves. Such events celebrate life and the joys of eating and, every once in a while, there is something very satisfying about overstuffing yourself. But most of us attend buffets without considering the huge amount of labor that goes into amassing such a bounty of goodies. If we had to grow, harvest and prepare all of the food, would we ever come up with the idea of putting together a buffet ourselves?

Perhaps I have been a bit harsh in my assessment of buffets, but the following anecdote may help illuminate why. When I lived in Albany, my friends and I frequented the lunch buffets at the Indian restaurants downtown when we wanted a break from eating on campus. There were times when we ate so much that I thought I would never eat again. We would leave the restaurant and walk a few steps to the park and beach ourselves on its knolls like whales, our bloated stomachs becoming sunburned in the afternoon sun. As we gradually passed out, people dropped change on us, mistaking us for derelicts because we were muttering obscenities to ourselves and farting loudly in public, drunk from having eaten too much food, rolling around in the grass, pressing our faces into the earth, our brains eventually induced into a coma state because it was the only way to save us, system capacity breached, system failure, system shutdown. And there were weekends where we never learned any lesson, waking up on Sunday morning bright-eyed and recovered, ready and willing to do the same thing to ourselves that afternoon.

If our Rome ever falls, it wouldn’t surprise me if the all-you-can-eat buffet has something to do with it.

On Walks and Walking

Leisure walking, perhaps the simplest and most enjoyable activity known to man, is becoming extinct. Humans have walked since long before they were called Homo sapiens; anthropologists thank evolutionary ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis, for foraying into bipedalism. As the earth flew around the sun, we became a race of runners, (pun intended), who chased down prey at a steady pace over the course of many days, tiring it to the point of defeat and exhaustion.

Today, due in large part to our big brains, we no longer have to run after anything. When we do see people running, usually from the air-conditioned cockpits of automobiles, it strikes us odd why anyone would willingly put themselves through that.

But forget running. Most people don’t even seem to walk anymore. We’ve become a culture of sitters.

With a laptop computer and a helpful relative ready to fetch the occasional meal, splash of water, bedpan, etc., it is possible for one to lounge in bed all day and still participate in the 9 to 5 workweek. A respectable standing in social circles can also be maintained from the bedroom command center, and up to the second local and global news is always on tap. Movies, music, shopping, dating. All can be delivered instantly. Why go anywhere if it can all come to us?

The world we now experience is one experienced by proxy. It is an endless stream of images and information, floating past our eyes and unable to be accessed without the aid of a computer. It is a world we cannot touch and the world we seem truly invested in. We are literally detached from it yet call ourselves “connected.”

One wonders, then, how to get closer, how to get inside the machine. Advances in computer generated images could possibly dictate the future of the human relationship with computers. The only question that remains is: how many terabytes will you take up?

What makes walking so appealing is that it is something that can be done now. One has everything they need from the moment they push themselves up from the carpet as a baby. There is no need for special devices; one’s own sense of accomplishment comes from oneself. And just like runners, who run to achieve the euphoric rush known as runner’s high, walkers, too, benefit from endorphins flooding against the blood-brain barrier.

There are some that say walking is boring. To this I say there are a lot of boring people out there, ready to let the world be imagined for them. The world is always outside, waiting to be explored.

So start walking. Any direction will do. Look around, listen. Feel the rhythm of footsteps, watch the thoughts come and go. Focus on every breath, for in every breath lies the secret to discovering the world anew.

On Convenience

In the modern world, convenience is king. Often, the quickest, cheapest and easiest way of getting something done is the most used, sought after and marketable. Humans are inherently short-term thinkers; having evolved from a hunter-gatherer mentality, we only realized the benefit of planning ahead when we started planting our own food some 9,000+ years ago. Prior to that shift, a lifestyle of living on the run had been wired in us for millions.

We engage in convenient behavior because it satisfies our immediate needs. Rather than take some time to cook our own meals, it’s a lot faster to hit the drive-thru at any burger joint, the awnings of which are red and yellow because those colors induce hunger. When convenience is on the line, it starts to seem like the whole world plays on our instincts and desires, inviting us to spend our money and consume.

While some decisions we make on a daily basis, such as ones about what to eat, are convenient on the short-term, many bring unexpected consequences. For instance, during the early 20th century, a pair of scientists discovered a way to synthetically produce nitrogen as a means of creating explosives. The Haber-Bosch process, as it has come to be known, has proved to be a decisive creation; in addition to its wartime uses, the process can also be used to fix large amounts of nitrogen, an important element in plant growth, into the soil. Basically, the same stuff we once used to make gunpowder is the same stuff now used to fertilize crops. As a result, the human population on earth since World War II has skyrocketed.

While the immediate result of using synthetic fertilizers is beneficial, (more plants = more food = more people), these fertilizers actively destroy the environment. Decades of concentrating such a powerful substance over the same area wears soil out. The Midwest, home to some of the best topsoil the world has ever known, is in the middle of one of the biggest wash-aways due to erosion, effectively dumping its fertility into the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River. Nitrogen fertilizers, while convenient on the short-term, are changing physical aspects of the environment that can never be recreated. The toss up is that right now we are experiencing food booms and an increase in population, but somewhere down the road, someone is going to face the adverse effects.

Of course, this is only one example of convenience. There are many aspects of convenient technology that benefit mankind. Air travel, cars, fast food, microwaves, computers, cell phones, GPS, the Internet: all of these things make modern living a breeze. But each do come with hidden costs that aren’t always considered on the short-term.

The question of whether life gets better with increased convenience is a sticky one. It matters during what time period the word “better” is defined in and whose life is being taken into consideration. If one day, convenient aspects of our lives were suddenly to disappear, I’d like to know I’d be okay living in a world without them.

On Lawns

What the hell is a lawn, anyway? Who came up with this notion of having millions of tiny blades of grass surrounding one’s domicile? What does it do? Surely, it must serve a purpose. Or do lawns just “look nice”?

It turns out that modern lawns originated with our Medieval brethren of the 14th century. Castles were the epicenter of feudal life and for good reason. They were a controlled structure that could keep who you wanted in and who you didn’t want out. Lawns aided in this purpose.

Imagine a castle. In your imagination, what is the castle surrounded by? What does the landscape look like? Most likely, there may be a few streams and some happy little trees, but what you’re probably seeing the most of is a field of green.

That’s right. Castles were home to the largest front, side and back yards known to man. The reason? To keep on the lookout for invaders.

It’s pretty easy to spot an approaching army of thousands of marching men if all they’re marching across is grass. Flash forward to a few thousand years later. Though the scale has changed, the layout has pretty much stayed the same.

The mailman is really our only potential adversary: Jehovah’s witnesses are pushovers. Imagine having a front yard that was completely wooded, that was so dark on a sunny day that when you looked into the trees, you saw nothing but black. Anything could pop out: a cool breeze or the sound of crinkling leaves. While most of today’s visitors are harmless, if anyone appeared on your doorstep out of a darkness like that, they’d probably scare the shit out of you.

Lawns are another one of these outdated practices/activities that humans still participate in despite having any good reason. Sure, some people derive pleasure out of lawn care, but the whole idea of what lawns are has become completely convoluted. Some use a lawn’s health as a status symbol; they hire troves of Hispanics to do all their hard work. The landscaper armies must really be raking it in.

Lawns are one of nature’s last hold outs. It’s as if we’re paying homage to Pan by worshipping a patch of grass. Keeping a lawn trim and proper is the goal to be achieved, as well as very, very green. I find it interesting how right angles don’t exist in nature, but that’s all we humans tend to make, perfect squares or rectangles or rhombuses to showcase our appreciation of grass.

If I’m ever lucky enough to own my own house, I’m going to let the grass grow wild. I want it so tall and thick and nappy that animals and small children get lost in it. Once in a while, I’ll get out the scythe and do some pruning, (to work out my arms, mostly); let the tumble weeds roam the neighborhood as they might. Or maybe I’ll just light my lawn on fire every couple of months, like the blazes of the great Midwestern prairie during electrical storms, tell the neighborhood kids ghost stories around it and roast marshmallows on it with them at night.

On Garbage

Garbage is everything and nothing at all. Everywhere we look, garbage can be found, in our streets, in our homes, in our hearts. Thoughts can be garbage and nearly everything we touch will some day become it, thrown out by ourselves or trashed by somebody else, maybe on a Monday, Tuesday or Thursday morning.

In nature, there’s no such thing as garbage. There are cycles of growth and decay and the two are not separated. But in fall, some people maniacally rake leaves, bundle them in black plastic and toss them on the curb. Tossing black plastic on the curb is the international sign for garbage, and like magic, this black plastic disappears.

While perfectly manicured lawns “look nice,” what would be best for lawns would be to let the leaves disintegrate and recycle back into the soil. Recycling exists in nature, but as far as making something disappear completely, that’s simply impossible.

New York City alone produces 24 million pounds of garbage each day and all that garbage needs to go somewhere. Most of it is shipped out on cargo trains and buried in Ohio or Pennsylvania or some other less populated state willing to store it.

In a lot of ways, garbage is like memories we don’t want to keep. Garbage is like a past we can’t forget. Garbage is what you get when you need a new cell phone every month and garbage is what I will get if this essay becomes anymore cynical.

Our sense of worth gets distorted when we view everything as garbage. We can never really value anything. Rather than try and make and buy products that will last, we are content with buying the cheapest pieces of garbage on the market and then throwing them out and replacing them with more cheap garbage after they become what they inevitably were in the first place: garbage. Garbage, garbage, garbage.

Some of the things on the curb are garbage: stuffed animal race car chairs for children, plastic dartboards, furniture once the wood finishing strips peel off to reveal the pressboard underneath, light gray and squarish computer mice from the 1990s, the headphones that you use for free on an airplane, microwave cookbooks and ab rollers, just to name a few. But some things, like old fans and lamps and other household appliances, can easily be recycled back into their constituent parts.

One idea would be to pass a law that requires everything that a company makes, once it’s past its prime and ready to be thrown into the trash, to be returned to the company for a specified amount of cash or for a voucher good toward another item made by the same company. The companies themselves would be responsible for taking apart and reusing what they created and would be required to accept all returns. If products were made and disposed of like that, there’d probably be a lot better products out there and a lot less garbage.

What happens when one item turns into a massive amount of garbage instantaneously, when one technology supersedes another, like the millions of VHS players sitting in hot attics this very moment?

Garbage is something we will always create but never something we will want to keep. The only keeping involved is in keeping it far, far away.

About the author:

Mike Parish, a graduate of Binghamton University,  gets his car crashed into in Queens, NY. His first chapbook of short fiction, You Can Finish This Later, is available through On Lives Press.

C-130J Hercules on takeoff/USAF Photo

Flight of Bumblebees

Outside, C-130 cargo planes performed “touch and go” maneuvers.  The massive planes would lumber in from the east, graze the runway long enough to leave small bits of landing gear behind, and then rise to the west as though weightless.  I remember thinking that they looked remarkably slow, seeming to float lazily, cavernous, hollow machines almost hovering.  Then a puff of smoke from the tires as they scrubbed the tarmac, then a sudden rumble of engine noise, and then their slow, smooth ascent.  I couldn’t reconcile the physics of it.  The sight of them airborne baffled me.  I thought of bumblebees, how they have been said to defy their own aerodynamic imperfections and fly when flight should be impossible.  And yet they do fly, some say because no one told them they couldn’t.

People in scrubs came and went, stopping only long enough for the elevator door to open and take them away.

While I waited in a cramped hallway outside the big doors to the delivery room, my parents stood off quietly.  Their occasional muttering between themselves became lost behind the great rumble of the C-130s.  I knew what they were saying, even though I could not hear.  They did what they always do, what they still do to be the best for their children they know how to be: they wait, they offer their presence, they avoid intruding, and they let us find our way.  Particularly my father, although I don’t know how he learned this.

***

Without the example of his own father, who left during the Great Depression when dad was an infant, my father always seemed to know exactly the right thing to do or to say.  In fact he was his best when circumstances were worst.  Growing up, we had some neighbors, the Harrisons, who lived across the street and who found the rest of us on the block to be beneath their station.  If a ball landed in their yard, Mr. Harrison would pounce upon it, holler at the kids playing, and sequester the offending thing in his garage where it would remain forever.  No amount of wheedling ever convinced him to relinquish his prize, and the more the kids pleaded, the more surly and intransigent he grew.  This went on for years.  Once, there was a knock at our front door, and when my mother answered, Mrs. Harrison stood on our porch and asked my mother what kind of a failed role model she and my father thought they were, questioned how she could look herself in the mirror when her children — nine of us, the worst specimens on the block—ran out of control and unsupervised, and suggested that our father, a Highway Patrolman too for God’s sake, should hang his head in shame for the pitiful example of decency and citizenship he set.  Meanwhile, Mr. Harrison stood thirty feet back on the sidewalk, his arms crossed, nodding in agreement whenever the intensity of his wife’s invective seemed to peak.  When Mrs. Harrison had expended herself, my mother, dumbstruck, said, “I’m sorry you feel that way,” and closed the door.  My mother cried.

When dad got home from work, mom was still in tears.  “What happened here?” he said, his face purpling.  When she told him, he went silent.  Still in uniform, he bolted out the door and across the street, and from our kitchen we heard him pounding on the Harrison’s front door.  Time may have embellished this part, but I swear dad didn’t wait for them to answer before stomping into their house.  For the next forty minutes, those of us who were home to hear it and all the neighbor kids on our block listened as my father excoriated the Harrisons with combinations and variations of “If you ever…” and “How dare you…” and “There will be a day of reckoning if…”  We rode our bicycles up and down the block to get a better listen.  My brother, the one whose football had sparked this conflagration, alerted the kids three houses down so they would not miss the event of the year: Mr. Benton’s tearing into the Harrisons!

Within the month, the Harrisons sold their house and made preparations to move.  At one point they had a garage sale, and the neighborhood kids were allowed, if they wanted, to buy back every baseball, football, Frisbee, or knot of kite string that ever found its way over the fence and into the Harrisons’ yard.  Today, if you ask him about the Harrisons, my father will only say, “I shouldn’t have worn my uniform,” but to me, that was the day I learned how a man does a hard thing when it needs doing.

***

I noticed odd things while waiting in the hospital at Travis Air Force Base for word of our first child.  The floor tiles were mismatched, creating by their random arrangement a kind of visual white noise.  Some tiles were speckled with blue highlights, others were speckled with tan, some with green, and some had a multicolored marble pattern.  I wondered if the installation crews had done this as a matter of conscious design, but finally decided that they were indifferent to the inconsistency of military aesthetics.  Indifference explained the way the electric outlets seemed to pop out of the wall at random distances from the floor, or the way the baseboards were either three inches wide, or four inches, or five, depending on their color.  Some of the baseboards peeled slightly from the wall, and I could see the smear of yellow adhesive flaking from the backing.  Even the light fixtures, dissimilar in color and length, came from mixed batches.

***

When we were growing up, my brother and I raised pigeons.  Not for racing, but just to do it.  It started out with one ring-necked dove, which we soon traded for three ordinary pigeons.  At first we kept them in a wire cage, but we knew right away that this was a temporary solution, and that we would need to build a coop of some kind.  We got a book from the library, found a plan for a small six-foot by six-foot structure, and we scavenged nearby construction sites for the building materials we hammered together.  In all, the finished product served us well for a summer as our stock of birds grew.  Eventually, though, we needed a larger coop.

Dad decided to help.  He was trying to lose weight that year, and his doctor, in a misguided fit, had him on some kind of amphetamine concoction that kept him up for days at a stretch.  To fill his time, he drew up elaborate plans for our new enclosure, designing a gravity fed water system, an automatic seed feeder, a tongue-and-groove floor, raised foundation, and a plastic window that could be raised in good weather and lowered in bad.  It had two doors, a wall of nesting boxes, perches of varying lengths and heights, and it was tall enough that an adult could stand inside with plenty of headroom.  It was four times as large as our first version, and took a couple weeks to construct.  Once we got the site leveled and measured out, we set out the foundation and built the floor, framed the walls and the roof, attached the plywood sides, built and mounted doors, wired up the window openings, and hooked up the water lines.  Sometimes dad forgot himself and it took the neighbors’ pleading to get him to stop hammering and sawing past 11:00 p.m.  He was more proud of the coop than we were, even after he went off the diet pills.  That summer I think my brother and I grew about as close and involved with our dad as we ever were.

***

Why hadn’t anyone thought to put chairs out for family?  For all the machinery, accommodations, piping and wiring, the furnaces and laundry systems in the basement, the elevators and their maintenance schedules filed in a cabinet in an office on the fourth floor somewhere behind a locked door barred to any but one civilian crew member unknown to anyone else in the building, or the piles of memos, their edges curling beneath a phone parked on a steel desk with one drawer that hasn’t worked since the before the Korean War, infrastructure, rooms of patient records lined up in neat rows of color-coded file folders shelf after shelf, each one the minutely detailed record of men and women in scrubs annotating in code and scrawl for purposes knowable and unknowable the sound of bowels awakening, the heat of the body fighting itself, the time of day, food consumed, quantities of saline and soap, records of visits, names and opinions in blue and black ink, in service to some mother’s son or daughter and their collective waiting to be healed while the miracle of levitating a C-130 cargo plane goes on outside as if it were no more surprising than the hum and swoop of a bee accidentally spreading pollen among the streak of orange poppies blooming along the fence line, how was it that a chair to relieve the choked impatience of it all failed to make the list?

I regretted not bringing something to read.

Disconnected phrases repeated themselves dumbly while I listened to huge planes performing their “touch and go” exercises: “premature,” “distress,” “emergency surgery.”  These words, as they drifted in my head, sounded flat, lacking connective tissue.  They blended into the planes’ swirl of noise, the fluorescent lights’ hum, elevators rising and falling, my parents’ compassionate muttering, the swish of scrubs passing, until the patternless hubbub absorbed the passage of time.  This is how one waits.

The broad doors to my left swung open.  Four or five people in scrubs and facemasks rushed past without speaking and disappeared into an elevator that closed with the ringing of a soft bell.  The trailing nurse turned to me from behind her mask and said, “He’s pink,” and then she too disappeared.

In one end of the hospital our new son lay in a plastic bin, taped and stuck, strangers washing his frail frame and monitoring his heartbeat with machines.  In another end of the hospital, while his mother slept, surgeons stitched up a long gash in her hollow belly, strangers monitoring her pulse and respiration.  This cruel symmetry blended with the thump of dissociated phrases, the hiss of air conditioning fans, aircraft engines straining to lift their impossible payloads, all blending to white noise so that I could wait some more.

***

As a rookie CHP officer, my father rode motorcycles in East Los Angeles in the late 1950s.  He also had other duties as a rookie.  Over the years we have tended to live separate lives, crossing paths occasionally, crossing political swords frequently, though we have always understood a deep affection between us.  Several years ago, my father and I took a drive from Sacramento to San Francisco to watch a football game.  For some reason, we took an unnecessarily long route on this trip, but during the extra time together, I came to know my father and his history as if for the first time.  Perhaps he came away from that day with renewed understanding and respect for me too, but if he did he has never said so outright.

We talked of many things: football, Christian Brothers, family history, the Harrisons….  I drove.  We crossed the Altamont Pass between Tracy and Livermore where the hills south of the highway remain as green and unspoiled as they did a century ago, at least if you discount the stand of windmills spinning lazily into the distance.  Traffic along this stretch of highway is maniacal, so I had to concentrate on the road rather than uphold my end of the conversation.  I listened while he talked.

“I got assigned to the Coroner’s office one week,” he explained of his other rookie duties in East Los Angeles.  “My job was to take pictures of the bodies.”  He turned his head to watch a pair of bikers in leathers pass on our right, the big V-twin engines snarling.  He took a heavy breath and continued: “They had this ladder on wheels, about six-feet high, and I stood up there with this big camera.  The coroner would wheel out the gurney with the body covered with a sheet, and he would arrange a lettering board with the person’s name and ID number.  I would focus the camera on the name, he’d say, ‘ready?’ and then pull back the sheet.  Snap.”  He let the silence hang for a moment, as I balanced the spacing of our car within the swarm of those whizzing around us.

“It was routine after a while,” he said flatly.  “I’d stand up there and wait for the gurney, focus the camera on the board while the coroner arranged the letters.  He would pull back the sheet real quick, just long enough to snap the picture, then cover them right back up.  There wasn’t much time to think about the person under the sheet.”  I was doing my best to maintain roughly equal spacing between our car and the riot of machinery swirling along, but I started to imagine each driver’s face as it would look through the lens of a big camera.

“So here comes the next gurney,” he said, “and the coroner says, ‘ready?’ and he pulls back the sheet, and I damn near fell off the ladder.  It’s a boy —maybe six or seven years old, car versus bike—and if I hadn’t read the name on the board first, I would have sworn it was you.”

***

Someone came into the hall and asked for “Mr. Benton,” and when my father did not answer, it came to me only as a delayed afterthought that the man with papers in his hand was looking for me.  I signed the document; I have no idea what I signed.  I was aware of the pitiful quality of this vending machine coffee I held in my hand, but while I waited, I drank three of them and made a careful study of the various shades of white paint that patched the irregular wall surfaces.

After running out of odd things to notice about the architecture, I turned to the doctors and nurses and cultivated a kind of sympathy for them, knowing that, like my father, they managed human crisis for a living.  I imagined them facing an endless parade of the worried, the pale and gaunt, people perspiring because they hold back crying, people who plead silently with involuntary facial twitches.  I imagined women and men in scrubs, driving away from this place at the end of their shifts, exhausted and eager to get to that Salisbury steak they had stashed in the freezer, or the date they had planned with that dreamy guy from the lab, or the beer waiting to help them mute the memory of having to tell a woman bad news about her husband’s kidney failure.  Perhaps the people in scrubs had husbands or children of their own, on whom they relied to suture their hollow wounds and to raise their heavy humanity against its own gravity so they could suit up and return the next day.  Contemplating the banal lives of these critically important, ordinary people gave me blunt comfort for a time.

***

From 1976 until the end of 1980 we lived in San Francisco, mostly on Haight Street across from Buena Vista Park, a few blocks from Ashbury Street.  Those years stand out in my mind as among the happiest of my life.  We were newly married, beginning to create a family.  I was in the last two years of my enlistment in the Navy and everything about our lives was potential.  I would soon leave the military full to bursting with brash confidence in my ability to succeed at any job I chose to accept.  I was studying music and poetry, spending time at City Lights bookstore in North Beach, hoping for a glimpse of the local literati.  We listened to stand-up comics at The Other Café, on Sundays and sometimes saw them performing the same routines on The Tonight Show by Wednesday.  We could spend the afternoon listening to Jefferson Starship play in Golden Gate Park one day and Andre Watts and the San Francisco Symphony at the Opera House the next.  We saw plays by Jules Pfeifer, and attended album release parties for Patricia Hardin and Tom Russell, whose first two recordings, signed by the artists, remain today tucked in a safe place.  I once watched Jackie Gleason exit a pink limousine outside the Orpheum Theater, and a few weeks later I stepped on James Coburn’s foot as we waited in a doorway on Market Street for the rain to clear.  Our extended families lived more than a hundred miles distant, and everyone we knew at work or in the neighborhood occupied a potential life, just like us.  As I said, I remember those years as among the happiest of my life.

I don’t know why.

During those years, we had car trouble almost constantly.  My mother-in-law had divorced her husband, who was sinking into bitter alcoholism, and my wife and I took in her seventeen-year old sister who sought refuge from the chaos of their fractured home.  My first job after leaving the Navy was a brief disaster as a shipyard electrician where my co-workers made at least three attempts to kill me through their carelessness, and my second job was as a bill collector where I was routinely threatened, once by a mad woman brandishing a knife, and another by a man who informed me he had a gun and an anger problem.  My wife endured three Cesarean deliveries, an ectopic pregnancy, and a partial hysterectomy.  Four days after our first daughter, Jennifer, was born, the apartment directly above ours caught fire, displacing us for a week while the building underwent restoration.  Once, my brother came to The City for a visit and had five-thousand dollars worth of camera gear stolen from the trunk of his car.  Six weeks after our second daughter, Michelle, was born, I found Jennifer, who was then only a year old, blue and convulsing in her crib.  I could not revive her.  Had it not been for our neighbors who came on the run and snatched her from me after hearing my wife’s screaming, she would have died in my arms.

And still, when I think about those years, I first think of the cool air, the shafts of rose-colored light through the curtains warming our living room, the music and literature, and the indomitable sense of potential that informed every day of our lives together.  We — my wife and I — might have been a few years late for the infamous Summer of Love by which our old neighborhood still enjoys defining itself, but somehow its legacy persisted through a strange osmosis into the lives of those who, even for a transient moment, chose to call that odd, corrupt and wonderful place home.  Somehow we have allowed the romance of the time and setting, along with our youthful ignorance, to absorb those awful difficulties and setbacks.

The mind displaces its great fears with trivia.

***

Soon enough, a man in scrubs came to the cramped hallway where I waited without a chair and asked for “Mr. Benton.”  This time I did not hesitate.  We walked into a small, dimly lit room where we sat down across from one another, knee to knee.  He told me that our son had died and that while he had tried to breathe, his tiny lungs were underdeveloped, more like raisins than grapes.  He explained that while some premature infants of this age can survive, their lives are often — usually — marked by severe mental and physical impairment.  Their limitations — his limitations would have been impossible to overcome in the long term.  Our son had lived three hours.  We named him Michael.

The man was sorry of course, but he had some questions.  Did I want to be present when he told the child’s mother after she emerged from anesthesia?  What were my wishes with regard to the body?  This question staggered me only for a moment, because the man in scrubs continued talking, blandly offering me several possible options.  I could take the body and make private arrangements for its disposal.  I could leave the body in the care of the hospital and they would either bury it or cremate it as I instructed, though there would be no information about the whereabouts of his interment.  In the alternative, he explained, I could donate the body for scientific research, which required only my signature on a form.

I became acutely aware of my wife asleep in another room, unaware and unable to help with this irrevocable decision-making.  Much was a matter of logistics, the moral consequences of which we could bear over time and reconcile if need be, so I chose with what I hoped was the same dispassionate practicality I had observed in the man in scrubs, my choices guided by a need to avoid prolonging the pain of saying goodbye.  The risk of choosing poorly haunted me.

Then he asked, “Do you want to see him?”

What species of question is this to ask a twenty-two year old?  Of course I wanted to see my son.  I wanted to hold him.  I wanted to take him home and watch him grow into a man.  I wanted to burn the image of his face into my memory to remember it for his mother, who would never see it for herself.  I wanted to breathe for him and ask his forgiveness for having brought him to these fitful hours of suffering and fear.  I listened to the sound of C-130s performing their “touch and go” exercises and thought of bumblebees lifting off against their impossible flaws, wondering whose forgiveness — my son’s or his mother’s — would be harder to endure.  I thought of the Harrisons, and our old pigeon coop and told the man, “No.”

About the author:

James Benton lives in Sacramento with his wife of thirty-four years.  he received his MA in creative writing from California State University, Sacramento, where he studied poetry with Joshua McKinney, and prose with Peter Grandbois and Doug Rice.  He recently has published poetry, fiction, and reviews in “Oregon East,” “Convergence,”  ”Raintown Review,” “RATTLE,” and “Word Riot,” with work forthcoming in “New York Quarterly.”

Fingertip

“Well, you’re all set,” she says.  “Would you like to keep your finger?”

The nurse stands beside a garbage can, holding her coffee in one hand, and my crushed finger in the other.  She places both down on the countertop, opens my chart, and makes a note.  She passes off the file to another nurse, and checks that the jar, which holds my finger, is sealed.  Then, she turns to me.

I look down at my hand, which is swollen and wrapped in layers of gauze.  I shift my weight in the bed; then pause, and hope it won’t collapse beneath me.

“Sometimes people want to keep them,” the nurse explains as she dangles the container.  “Women who get mastectomies… sometimes they like to keep their breasts.”  She pauses, waiting for my response, as I consider what it might be like to keep an amputated breast in a jar on a shelf in my home.

“No,” I reply.  “I don’t want to keep it.”

The nurse nods and turns towards the garbage can, swinging my finger’s jar between her own fingers.  The patient who was treated in this room before me, whose fingers were ravaged by a snow blower, left the hospital empty handed.  I wonder if the amputated parts of his fingers are in this same garbage can.  I imagine them floating in their own container as my finger’s jar falls next to them.  I wonder if they will connect somehow, as if they are fish in two separate tanks, gazing with awe at the other.

“Wait-“ I begin, my voice shaking.  “Can I see it first?”

“Sure!” She exclaims, and smiles.  I shake the sheets from my shoulders, and sit up in the bed.  She places the jar down in front of me.  I cradle it between my surviving fingertips, and peer inside.

I hadn’t planned for this to happen.  I expected to spend this Wednesday as I did every other Wednesday this semester: three classes, two meetings, and tired.  It was the middle of another hectic week, another round of Biology labs I tried to like, but didn’t; another round of meetings and activities that drew too much energy for me to actually enjoy.  My calendar dictated my every moment, and Wednesdays were the pinnacle of my scheduling obsession.  It was the busiest, most draining day.  I didn’t live on Wednesdays.  On Wednesdays, I was a machine.

We tend to feed machines selfishly.  I’ve come to this conclusion now.  We eat, sleep, speak, and give enough to keep the machine moving, to keep it producing.  We’ve learned how to program ourselves.  Some mornings, too rushed to prepare and enjoy a real breakfast, I’d pack two granola bars with my schoolbooks.  When my stomach grumbled, I’d eat one – not to enjoy it, but to quiet the awkward roar inside.  If it wasn’t for the noise, I may have just waited for lunch, whenever I found time for it.

On this Wednesday, I woke up and began to neglect myself.  I got five hours of sleep and skipped breakfast.  It seemed to be the start of a normal Wednesday, until I looked outside.

Snowstorms were a blessing in childhood, and college hadn’t changed that.  Snow, like Disney World, seems to make childhood come alive again, no matter how old you are.  On this Wednesday, I didn’t want to plan, to study, to rush.  I wanted to play.

When we found out that classes had been canceled, my friends and I jumped and screamed — and decided to go tray sledding.  After lunch, we snuck our trays out of the dining hall, and went back to our rooms to change.  I slid into my ski pants, draped a scarf around my neck, pulled a hat over my head, and zipped up my jacket.  Last, I pulled out my gloves, those not-every-day gloves that I used for shoveling the driveway, cleaning my car, and playing in the snow.   They were durable, and warm.

On my way out, I caught my reflection in the mirror.  I was so bundled up, nearly every inch of skin covered.  I wondered if my thighs – which were covered by both sweatpants and ski pants – would fit on the dining hall trays we had stolen at lunch.  I reasoned that, if they didn’t, I would just roll down the hill.  At least my butt would be warm. 

I moved closer to the mirror, and examined my face.  With my right index finger, I traced the deep circles beneath my eyes, the constant reminders of my self-neglect.  I touched my palms together, let my fingers fall between the empty spaces, and squeezed.  I always did this when things felt out of control.  It reminded me that I could keep myself together.  Maybe I could manage an extra hour of sleep tonight, I thought.  I knew I needed it.  Almost immediately, though, I changed my mind.  I remembered I had a paper due on Friday, and wouldn’t have enough time on Thursday to finish it.  I turned away from the mirror.  I’ll have fun with my friends, I reasoned.  I’ll meet them outside, stay for twenty minutes.  And then I’ll get back to work.

I met my friends outside, in a hill adjacent to our building.  Instantly, I felt the familiar rush of frost.  Snowflakes peppered my face and I stuck out my tongue to catch them.  I tried just one more time to touch the tip of my nose with my tongue, my childish ambition.  No luck.   We spotted friends at the top of the hill, who yelled down at us to join them.  As we raced up the icy hill, I slipped.  I don’t know why I looked behind me, but when I did, I saw a pile of broken trays, with splinters of plastic spewed across the snow. 

At the top of the hill, we met up with a large group of other friends who lived nearby.  We tossed snowballs at each other and posed for a picture.  In the photo, we hold up our trays and smile, our cheeks flushed red from the cold.

We wandered around for a while, trying to find a hill with the right incline, the right amount of snow, the right conditions for a perfect, joyful ride. 

“Hey, over there!”  Some guy shouted at us, dragging his snow-filled tray behind him.  He pointed.  “That hill there, it’s insane.  You gotta try it!  We must’ve gone down a dozen times.”

Emily, Liz and I looked at each other, and shrugged.  We were up for anything.

“Sure!”  I said, “Thanks!”  And we followed him to the hill.

I went down with Emily first.  I glided across the snow, my tray spitting frost all around me.  I screamed and laughed, and Emily did too.  When we landed at the bottom, we said, unanimously:

“That was awesome!  Let’s go again!”

And we did.

This time, we got Liz to join us.  She was worried that it was unsafe but, since I had already gone down, I assured her that it was fine.

“Don’t worry!  It’s so much fun!”  I said, placing my tray at the top of the hill.  I sat down on it, and looked up at her.  “C’mon Liz, join us!  Let’s all go down together.”

Reluctantly, nervously, she placed her tray next to mine. 

“I promise you’ll be fine,” I said, as we crept closer to the edge, and prepared to kick off.  “You’re gonna love it!”

And with that, we fell.

I was falling, laughing, falling, screaming, falling, until suddenly… I felt it.  A tiny snap.  Almost unnoticeable, almost unimportant.  When the tray settled at the bottom of the hill, I almost didn’t look.  I almost picked up my tray for another run.  But I didn’t.  I looked.

I slid off my glove, and saw blood.  It wasn’t until this moment, after I landed at the bottom of the hill, brushed the snow from my knees, and caught my breath, that I realized my finger (or at least a part of it) was gone.  My bone stuck outwards like the steel of a collapsed building.  Blood, which dribbled through my leather glove, was everyplace where skin was supposed to be. 

Everything around me – every voice and sensation—fermented into one thick, snowy haze.  I heard Emily and Liz laugh, then quiet as they looked towards me, and realized.  I gasped and dropped my glove, my finger still inside. 

“Marissa?  Marissa are you OK?”  Emily asked.  She hadn’t seen my skinless, nail-less, crumbled finger, or the part that still hid in my glove.  I could barely comprehend, even less articulate, what my hand looked like.  I wanted to scream no, wanted to cry, wanted to take back the last moment and fix myself.  But I could do none of that.  I especially couldn’t scream.

My knees shaking, I stood up.  I stepped over my glove, lifted my boots from the thick snow, and ran inside. 

I stumbled through the doors, up the stairs, and to the door to my room.  Fingers trembling, right hand growing numb, I tried to find my door key, but couldn’t latch my left fingers onto it.  I dropped everything – my wallet, keys, and hat — front of my door, and ran.  Downstairs bathroom… Sink.

I looked behind myself, and saw a trail of blood.  For a brief moment, I considered that I might be bleeding to death.  I rushed down the stairs and fell to the bathroom floor, my knees and calves against the cool tiles, my right hand extended over the sink, dripping. 

Liz and Emily caught up to me, and I heard Liz yelling into the phone:

“Her finger its…. It got cut off!”  She says.  “We need an ambulance.  She needs to go to the hospital!” 

I rested my head on the cool porcelain.  Ignoring everything around me, I focused on my breathing, and whispered aloud to myself:  I’m gonna be OK, it’s all gonna be OK…

“I don’t know how much, but there’s blood everywhere and…”

I’m not looking at my finger… I’m OK… I’m going to be fine…

She came into the bathroom.  “Marissa,” she said delicately, “Did you wrap your finger in something?”

Breathe in… Breathe out…

“No,” I whimpered, “I can’t…”

Breathe in… Breathe out…

“I’ll get you a towel.  I’ll be right back, OK?”

Fine… I’m going to be fine… In… Out…

My mother always said that the body is sacred. 

“I’m not smart enough to make my own rules, so I follow the bible,” she’d shout over the kitchen sink, as she scraped ketchup and peanut butter off a plate and forced it into the dishwasher.  “We don’t desecrate the body.  God made us this way.  That’s it.”

She told me this when I was fifteen, and wanted to color my hair.

“The body is sacred.  Judaism is against desecrating the body.  Plus you can’t put chemicals right on your scalp.  You’ll get cancer.  You’ll die.  Right, Howie?”

My dad opens his eyes halfway, then closes them again. 

“Yea…” He mutters, drifting back to sleep.

“But my friends all have pretty highlights.  I just have this black mop.”

“Well they’re stupid, they’re all going to get cancer,” she says, as she adjusts her blanket to cover her body.  She asks my dad to pass her the remote.  He opens his eyes, passes her the remote, and closes them again.  “When you’re on your own, you can color your hair.  Then you won’t be under our insurance.  But for now, every mistake you make we have to pay for.”

When I lost my fingertip, I wondered if my body has lost its holiness.  I wondered if I was still sacred. 

Emily called my parents from the emergency room.  Initially, they thought she was joking.  I reassured my parents, later, that I would never joke about amputating my body.  I told my mother this as she reminded me, not so subtly, that the body is sacred.  My parents were billed for the amputation.

Before my amputation, I seldom associated myself with my body.  My personality – my likes, dislikes, fears, experiences — that was me.  My skin was just a coffin that restrained me.  I knew the body was important (I couldn’t live without it, after all), but I had only superficial expectations of it.  In my hometown, the body was a reflection of wealth, of ideals of beauty that I never desired to emulate.  I remember sixteen-year-old girls who got liposuction, and various other cosmetic surgeries.

As I grew older, hit that cherished 18^th birthday and began making some of my own choices, I realized that the body could be a means of expression.  The body is your easel, I thought.  I got piercings, dyed my hair, and began to dress in a way that expressed my creative self.  I began to see the physical as an expression of the emotional.  The physical on its own, however, I didn’t care so much about.  Sure, the body was sacred, but more importantly, it was mine.  And I could use it and do with it what I pleased.

My ex-boyfriend, Jason, stood by the front door.  Liz had run into him upstairs, and asked him to watch for the ambulance.  He leaned alone against the door, his back arched awkwardly, his left fingers wrapped around his right wrist.  He turned to look at me, but said nothing.  Our eyes met for a moment as my friends rushed around me, until he turned to look outside again, and I turned to face the wall.

As people gathered around me—my friends, my roommates, my boss— all I heard was Liz’s voice, shaky, but assured, directing the action; all I saw was the thick opening in my skin, and the blood flowing from my finger to the floor.   

I stumbled into a cluster of couches near the main hallway, collapsed into the cushions, and wept.  As my blood rushed from my right hand, I twisted my neck away and rested my head on my left shoulder.   My heart pounded, and my head felt light.  Alone in this tiny alcove, away from the chaos of the hallway, I could hear my inner voice again.  I dropped my forehead to my knees, and sighed in relief.  As long as I could hear my own voice, I knew I was still OK. 

I coached my breathing until the paramedics led me outside, when my pulse returned to normal, and I was sure I wouldn’t faint.

I didn’t learn until later that after I left in the ambulance, and my friends left to meet me at the hospital, Jason picked up Lysol and a towel, and cleaned my blood off the floor.

Jason lived next door to me freshman year.  We had many common friends, and a similar sense of humor.   When we felt a mutual interest in one another, we called ourselves a couple.  But Jason and I were both insecure about dating and, eventually, became uncomfortable around each other.  Whenever Jason leaned forward, trying to kiss me, I turned my face to the side, and leaned my chin down.  I didn’t want to kiss him.  Jason was white and Jewish — exactly the type of guy my parents expected me to date, the type of guy I once imagined myself with.  He was smart, quirky, kind.  Still, I couldn’t connect with him.             

After three months, I ended our relationship.  We tried, uncomfortably, to be friends.  In the months before I lost my finger, we smiled an awkward, obligatory smile at each other, in passing.  When he knelt on the floor and washed away my blood, we hadn’t had a conversation, or any true connection, in nearly a year.

My friend Jamie stayed with me in the room during the surgery.  She looked on as the doctor took skin from another part of my hand, and sewed it onto the skinless parts of my finger.  He was thoughtful and kind, with a strange accent I struggled to understand.  As he stitched the two skins together, and bandaged my hand, I discussed the benefits of this situation:

“Well, I now have a fabulous topic for my memoir class,” I said, in between wincing from the pain.

“’Every cloud has a silver lining, right?’”  I continued.  “And there are a ton of clouds in Binghamton.”

The surgeon finished, wrote me a prescription for Vicodin and antibiotics, warned me about yeast infections, and left me with the nurse. 

Inside the cool glass, my fingertip floats among melted ice chips.  I wasn’t sure what I would see when I looked inside, but I somewhat expect to see an ordinary fingertip: nail intact, skin a likely peach.  But, floating in the container, it looks more like a mutilated fish than a human fingertip.  Its edges, my skin, flare outwards like fins.  It had lost its rosy pigment; instead, it is a deathly alabaster, floating among the ice chips meant to preserve it.  With a casual smile, I pass the jar back to the nurse.  Inside, I am crying.

For the first few days, I anchor myself to my bedroom.  I pile thick blankets over my body and lay there, quiet and still.  Each night I grab two pills from my bedside table and swallow them, sucking down a gulp of water.  One night, in the hallway outside my door, some guys bounce a ball.  At one point, it smacks against my door, shaking my walls.  I hug my blankets and dig my head into the pillow as deep as it can go.  I hold my bandaged hand close to my chest, and fall asleep that way. 

Initially, I can barely look at it.  My entire finger, even the healthy parts, is wrapped in several layers of gauze.  Still, small droplets of blood soak through the thick dressing.  It disgusts me.  I shy away from mirrors and showers, afraid to see my eyes, afraid to see my skin.  I believe that no matter what I do, with whatever force, I will fall apart.  I believe I am no more durable than a paper doll.

I had seen what my body looked like underneath, and it terrified me.

I figured saying I was on Vicodin would lighten the mood.  It’s hard to find a line to follow “I cut half my finger off,” but mind-altering drugs tend to be a crowd pleaser among college students.  I was right.  The admission of Vicodin eased the horrified look on people’s faces.  It changed disgust to amusement in seconds, giving me the opportunity to laugh, and reassure people that I was OK.  Acquaintances joked that they were jealous, remarked that it was “awesome” that I had them, that I was lucky. 

“Vicodin?”  They’d exclaim, after I said I lost my finger, and was taking Vicodin to manage the pain.  “That’s awesome!  Are you selling?”

“No!”  I’d exclaim, embarrassed, as I sat on duty in the RA office.  “I am not selling drugs,” I said.

One afternoon, while I was hanging out in my friends’ room, an acquaintance from the building knocked on the door, and asked if he could buy some pills from me. 

“I’ve got this awful headache,” he whispered.  “I tried Advil, and Tylenol, but nothing works.  I need something stronger.”

I just stared at him.  He seemed embarrassed, and retreated.

“Hey, I’m just kidding!”  he exclaimed, chuckling as he fidgeted with his keys.  “Forget about it!  I’m just gonna… Head back to my room.”  He moved away, then faced me again.  “Don’t mention this, ok?”

I nodded and he walked away.  But I knew, if I hadn’t needed those pills so desperately, I could have been a drug dealer. 

Until I lost my finger, the most powerful pill I had ever taken was Tylenol.  I soon realized that Vicodin was nothing like Tylenol.  Vicodin lifted me from the ground, from my place of pain, but from my footing as well.  It made me feel like an imitation flake in a snow globe, floating in random patterns, doing ballerina whirls in an artificial sky.  Everything I knew — my balance, my shape, my hold on the world — disappeared.  As I curled beneath my covers, fearing the winter outside, my mind floated like a snowflake. 

Amidst the Vicodin haze, I started to relive my ride down the hill.  I imagined what might have happened, what couldn’t have happened.  I wondered what I was thinking about in the moment it happened.

Meanwhile, Liz, who rushed outside in the snow to gather my glove (which contained my severed fingertip) in the frantic moments before the ambulance came, was still shaken up.  We sat down together in her and Emily’s room, and tried to piece together the events of the day before.  She did most of the talking, as I laid, listening, on Emily’s bed.

“I was on your right side,” she said.  “I might have run over it with my tray.  I keep running the scene over in my mind, but I can’t remember if I did.”

I closed my eyes, and remembered.  Remembered reassuring her, placing my tray on the top of the hill, looking up at her, urging her to come down with us.  I remembered where she placed her tray – to the right of mine—and when we kicked off and fell.  I remembered falling, laughing, screaming, falling, and maneuvering my tray to avoid a tree.  I remembered the snap.

“Even if it was you,” I said finally, looking down at my bandaged hand.  “It’s OK.”

I’d never know what was beneath the snow at those exact moments, or remember if Liz’s tray did, in fact, run over my hand.  It didn’t matter how it happened.  The important part was that it did.

A couple days later, I went to class.  I forced myself from my bed, swallowed two Vicodin, pulled my arms through my coat, and walked outside in the snow.  I left my room twenty minutes early for a class five minutes away.  I tiptoed the entire way there.

Other students took notes and listened intently; I stared, desk empty, at the wall.  When the student to my right leaned forward, then pulled her textbook from her backpack, I jumped.

What if she hits my finger?… Maybe it’s not stitched together… Will it break off again?

I left class and walked to the bathroom, needing to splash some cool water on my face.  My finger hurt.  I wanted more Vicodin.  I would have abandoned class at that point, if it had not been for the professor who was teaching it.  As much as I loved the class topic, I wasn’t present enough to enjoy it.  Truly, I realized then, I just wanted to talk to him. 

After class, after most students had shuffled out, I walked to the front of the room.

“Al?” I said to the professor, my eyes already filling.  We left class together and walked outside.

“I’m sorry,” I said, after telling him my story.  “It’s gross, I know.” 

“You shouldn’t feel embarrassed,” he said.  “You didn’t do anything wrong.  It isn’t gross; don’t feel ashamed.  People care about you, they want to help you.  Let them.”

Later that night, I was eating dinner in the dining hall with a group of friends.   One of them commented on my eloquent eating habits:

“You’re sticking your pinky out!” he said, pointing to the thick dressing, which forced my finger to stand erect, rather than fold with the rest of them.

We laughed and continued eating, as I sat up a bit taller in my seat. 

Shortly after, a guy who lives nearby, Oliver, who is well-liked in the community, but also known to be obnoxiously inappropriate, walked over to our table.  Oliver noticed my bandage and asked what happened.  When I didn’t answer, someone else did:

“She cut off her finger,” someone said.  “Cool, huh?”

This comment must have belittled him.  Or, it encouraged him.  Whatever it did, it somehow evoked his next remark:

“Well,” Oliver sneered, running his fingers through his shaggy blonde hair.  “I still have all of my parts.” 

For a moment, all was quiet.  The people sitting around the table turned to look at me, and shifted uncomfortably in their seats.  Finally, they chuckled a little, which eased the awkwardness.   If it had been from someone more intelligent, the comment might have hurt.  True, he was physically whole –minus a brain anyway– whereas I had lost a part.  My hand was bandaged in a thick dressing, while his looked normal.  I didn’t take the time to consider what he said, what it means to be “normal” — or to be whole. 

Instead I shot back, “At least I’m emotionally whole,” to which the table burst into laughter, and Oliver shrugged and walked away. 

Ok, not the best comeback, I thought, even as everyone laughed.  I’m not emotionally whole, not yet.  Is anyone? 

People judge people.  We do it loudly, and we do it all the time.  It’s woven so deeply into our character that we’ve come to expect it.  When people take us at face value — take what we tell them, and accept us, without judgment — we’re confused.  We don’t know how to respond to acceptance. 

I expected Al to be disgusted by my finger.  When he wasn’t, something in me changed.  Why was the image of a finger, crushed and severed, not disgusting?  I had grown accustomed to laughing at my injury, not because I thought it was funny, but because it lessened the shock value.  I laughed because it quieted other people.  I joked because it made me feel normal.

But Al wasn’t disgusted.  He was kind and sympathetic.  He told me to reach out, to accept other people’s help, and not to accept blame.  He told me that it was OK, and I realized that I didn’t have to be.

I wasn’t supposed to remove my bandage until my first appointment.  But, it had gotten wet, and it was bloody and uncomfortable.  And I just wanted to see what it looked like.

I tugged at the bandages and winced.  My blood had soaked through them all, and crusted over.  It glued the gauze together; I peeled it off slowly, removing a bandage from raw skin. 

Finally, I freed my stump from the bandage, and turned to look at myself.  My finger – my pinky—was swollen blue, the size of my thumb.  I wondered for a moment if it might explode.  Thick black stitches surrounded my new skin, a barricade between healthy and healing. 

I stroked my finger the way a mother might caress her premature newborn: with just one finger, just one tip.  It was too small, too delicate, to fully embrace.  I feared hurting it, disturbing its sense of peace.  I thought, you are torn and bloody.  This wasn’t what you were supposed to be.

I traced the edges of my skin, the parts that hurt, and the parts that didn’t, and cried.  I soaked a hand towel in warm water, lathered it with soap, and began to scrub.  Delicately, I washed away the browned blood and yellow stains.  When it was clean, I let it breathe for a while.  When I felt I had loved it enough, I prepared fresh gauze, and bandaged it again.

Over the next several days, I started to have momentary sensations of tightness in my finger.  It was a brief moment of intense pain, and then nothing.  I began to imagine that this pain was my body stapling itself together.  So, whenever I felt it, no matter how much it hurt, I smiled.  I imagined that my body was healing. 

Two weeks later, another storm coated Binghamton with snow.  I retreated to the comfort of my bedroom, and watched the snow from my window.  I attempted to fix my gaze on one flake, hoping to follow its journey as it floated to the ground.  But the storm’s breeze tossed the flakes furiously.  In one gust, it snatched dozens of them, forcing them in every direction, in mysterious shapes that my eyes couldn’t follow.  It seemed there was some secret they all shared, some recipe in which each flake settled in just the right place, creating a smooth winter blanket on the ground.  I tucked myself in my blankets, and settled into the cool sheets.  I fell asleep to the screams of students outside, sledding.

I returned out to the hill where I lost my finger for the first time that week.  I stood at the doorway, arms wrapped around each other, for a while.  Slowly, carefully, I walked forward.  I climbed over the channel of rocks, and made my way to the grass.  I walked higher and higher on the hill, and then turned to face the building.  I sat down on the grass, in the same place where I had reassured Liz, where we all had kicked off and started sliding.  I sat down in that space, and cried.

One month later, I stood naked in the center of my room, surrounded by piles of stuff.  My entire room was torn apart, every drawer opened and empty, my bare hangers in another pile on the floor.  Item by item, I tried on all of my belongings.  What fit, I kept.  What didn’t, I donated.  I picked up a sweater to try on, and walked over to my full-length mirror.

Before I pulled the sweater over my head, I caught an image of my body in the mirror.  Curious, I moved closer to the glass.  I hadn’t looked at myself, not really, since my accident.  I hadn’t wanted to.  When I thought of my body, I thought of blood.

I first noticed rolls.  There was extra skin in places where there hadn’t been a month ago.  I had gained weight, it was obvious; yet, for the past month, it hadn’t bothered me.  I enjoyed feeling substantial, enjoyed squeezing the extra bits of my stomach and thighs.  When I felt delicate, my flesh reminded me of my substance.  It had made me feel whole.

But now, something had changed.  I now viewed the extra weight as I did my unused clothing: as clutter.  As unnecessary.  I didn’t loathe the new weight, just as I didn’t loathe my unused clothes, but I knew I didn’t need it. 

I laid down on my bed, and ran my fingers over my stomach.  Immediately, I felt the cool steel of my belly-button piercing.  For the last year, this hardened steel in my belly had reassured me.  Friends were always surprised to learn that I had a belly-button piercing—done on a whim with Emily—and this excited me.  I enjoyed touching it.

Now, as I unscrewed the tiny ball, and gently pulled the piercing from my skin, I felt a sense of loss.  This piercing had become a part of me, a recognized bump, a familiar sensation.  But after losing my finger, the thought of having a piece of steel stuck in my belly disgusted me.  I gently laid my hand on my stomach, my newly-smooth skin, and smiled.  It felt unfamiliar, but it felt right.  I smiled.  I placed the ball and piercing on my bedside table.

When I awoke the next morning, the jewelry was gone.  Later that afternoon, I swept my floor.  When I threw out the dust, I likely threw out my jewelry too.  I don’t miss it.

I began dating someone new that spring.  I hadn’t been looking for romance… Not at all.  But some of the best gifts come as surprises, and our connection was a surprise to us both.

One night, Hemed knocked on my door, as planned, for our date.  Before I opened the door, I removed my watch, and placed it down on my counter.  My wrist felt free.  I didn’t know where he was planning to take me, or when we’d be back, or anything.  It made it more fun not to know.  But, before we left, I had one place that I, as a surprise, wanted to take him.

“I want to show you something,” I said, taking his hand and leading him outside.  We walked through the door – the door I had stumbled through, bleeding, three months earlier—and I smiled at him.

“This is my hill,” I said, extending my arm, as if unwrapping something.  “This is where I lost my finger.”

I don’t believe in accidents.  When people ask me about my finger, I blame “a sledding accident.”  But I don’t believe my amputation was an accident.  On that winter day, in that particular moment, the stones and ice and tray were placed just right, the wind propelling my body at the perfect angle, and my hand in just the right location, for my fingertip to be crushed.  I didn’t mean for it to happen, but that doesn’t mean it was an accident.

There might be some magical force that pulls at us, or some spiritual being, or nothing.  Maybe some accidents are a combination of factors: an uneven sidewalk, an icy road, a missed bus.  Things happen.  We don’t mean for them to happen, but they do.  We break things.  We mess up ourselves. 

We stretched a blanket over the thick grass, and crawled down next to each other.  We laid – backs down, bellies up — breathing.  I noticed the tips of the trees and the stretch of black, and nothing else.  I felt the bones in my back settle into the ground, as if the dirt beneath me had molded to my body.  I felt as if nothing in the world could hurt me.  I felt that I was floating.

“It might sound weird,” I said finally, leaning my body to look at him.  “But it feels like I was reborn here.”

He nodded in understanding.  “It’s amazing that you can feel so peaceful,” he said finally.  “So peaceful in the place that hurt you.”

I smiled and took a deep breath, drawing my lungs full of the crisp night air.  I closed my eyes and imagined that day, that moment, when my life changed.  The day I lost a fingertip — one of the most sensitive human places — but began to live again.  I thought about Hemed, and about Jason.  I thought that I was never able to connect with Jason in the way I’ve now connected with Hemed. 

I turned to look at him, and saw him writing on a rock — the only rock beside us on the hill.  He finished, placed the pen down, and smiled at me.  I looked over at the rock, and saw one word, written across the center of the rock, in thick bold ink, with a line drawn underneath:

Rebirth

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “I know this is your hill, but that just felt right.”

“I love it,” I said.  I took his hand, and held it tightly.

We laid there, hand in hand, on my hill.  He runs his fingers along my palm, tracing the natural cracks in my skin.  He taps each fingertip on my left hand, and makes his way to my right.   Then, at my right pinky, he stops.  His fingertip touches mine, and he holds it there.

“It’s so tender,” he says, stroking it.  “It’s an amazing part of you.”

When our hands loosen and part, I reach for his arm.  I run my fingers along the smooth underside, brushing just my pinky against his cool skin.

CNF Editor’s Notes

Lucy Wilson Sherman’s “The End” is aptly named, a story about the second law of thermodynamics — entropy.  Her love of the life force, especially the way it is manifested in animals, motivates the collection she assembles at Grey Ghost Farm, but she soon finds that exuberance is always tempered.  “Life runs downhill,” the “phenomenon of irreversibility in nature” — the chaos, the falling apart, the loss of life that Sherman’s narrator does her best to fight off and restore each day — isn’t a principle any of us can fight.  Sherman’s attempt to come to terms with this, in her life, her work, her writing, makes for a piece that is full of black humor, sadness, and resignation, but that nonetheless stands as its own mark against entropy, the writing, the record, that is one of the few possibilities homo sapiens has for leaving something of this kind of perpetual motion behind, and giving it a meaning, and thereby a life force, that others can discover and hold onto themselves.

– Leslie Heywood

THE END

“The most that any one of us can seem to do is to
fashion something — an object or ourselves —
and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it,
so to speak, to the life force.”

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death,

We’re down to five goats, two dogs, and four cats, now, but at one time our farmstead supported a full complement of pets and livestock—24 animals in all, if you counted the nine hens.  The newest additions to the menagerie were a pair of husky/hound dog puppies, given to us by our neighbor Sal two summers ago.

“How’d you like to step back in time ten years?” Sal had called out the window of his car as he drove up to where my husband, Henderson, and I were stacking wood.  We walked over to the car to see what he was talking about.  The puppies were entwined in a big cardboard box on his back seat.  I lifted first one and then the other, and melted.

Same thing ten years ago: big box on back seat, me goo-goo eyed over the two German Shepherd puppies therein, whom we named Fanny and Teddy.  Toby, our Labrador retriever who has since died, was elderly, but we didn’t need three dogs then, and we certainly didn’t need four dogs now.  But I’m a sucker for a puppy face.  Caramel-colored Dalton, with his blue “watch” eye, and his sister, timorous gray Waverly, came on board.

With their addition, the accumulation of animals at Gray Ghost Farm ended and the long attrition phase began.  I had to face a fact that had somehow escaped me until then: With 24 animals under our care, all 24 would die on our watch.  Either that, or we would die, and who knows what would happen to the animals.  Or, some of them would die under our care and then we’d die, and then, eventually, the rest of the animals would die.  In any case, as much as there had been lots of life on our farm, from then on there would be lots of dying.

I did not expect it to begin so suddenly.  That spring, Dalton discovered he could squeeze under the fence that surrounds the dog yard.  In a burst of adolescent exuberance, he ate his way through the entire brood of hens.  Each day for a week I found newly mangled bodies scattered about the upper yard and into the woods, their stomachs rent.  I could peer into their bellies and see already-formed eggs, shells and all.

Each time I found a dead chicken, I walloped Dalton, but because I never caught him in the act of murder, his eyes seemed to search my face in bewilderment.  A local farmer said to tie a dead chicken to his neck.  I did this.  Dalton flattened himself against the ground and accepted this fate with what seemed like genuine remorse.  Then he liberated himself by biting through the baling twine.  He wagged his tail and pranced about, eager to regain my approval.

It was difficult to stay angry at so otherwise simple and guileless a dog, but in order to kiss a face that had killed chickens, I had to fashion a philosophic attitude by ranking the two species by preference.  Which did I feel greater kinship with—canis or Gallus gallus?  All the chickens were dead by this time, so the point was moot.  I believed Dalton would outgrow the habit.  It never occurred to me that he and Waverly would take on larger game.

That March, as we were loading the car for a weekend out of town, Dalton and Waverly slipped out under their fence again—a fence we had repeatedly patched, you should know—and they streaked off toward the woods.  I called them back sternly.  I called them again, using my most imperative tone, but they merely paused, looked back, consulted each other, and agreed, “Nah, she’s not serious.”  Dalton was the ringleader.  I could almost hear him call back over his shoulder to Waverly, “Psst, Wave, quick.  Follow me.”

We knew they’d return home eventually.  All we were worried about, at that point, was that harm might come to them in our absence.  We were gone only overnight, and when we turned into the driveway the next evening, they crawled out from under the porch, wagging and wiggling and twining themselves around our legs, and we greeted them with relief.  Mature Teddy and Fanny were wiggling and wagging, too, from behind the fence.

The next morning, I looked out an upstairs window into the goat yard.  Capricorn, our 12-year-old buck, was lying on his side motionless on the cold ground.  His head lay in a small rivulet that had been released by the spring thaw.  “Sleeping,” I hoped for a fleeting moment.  Hardly.  A goat would not rest his head in water.  Capricorn had been losing weight for months and was hobbled by arthritis in his back legs, but he enjoyed my daily brushing and, aside from his obvious discomfort when walking, still seemed interested in living.  I did not think it was time for the vet.
As I approached his body, I saw tufts of hair and hide scattered on the ground around him.  His groin, the fastest way to his entrails, had been chewed.  I don’t think it was the chewing that killed him—the skin was abraded but not ripped open.  I think the cause of death was a heart attack brought on by the terror of being selected, taunted, chased, and inevitably run down; a heart attack because he was an old goat, crippled and in failing health; a heart attack because he was forced, in those last moments, to comprehend the inevitability of the hoof prints on the wall.

But even after this, I didn’t turn against the dogs.  “Capricorn would have died soon anyway,” I told Henderson.  “Dalton and Waverly merely culled the herd.  It’s in the nature of a hound dog to hound and dog a weaker animal.”  The puppies wiggled and waggled and licked my hands and face, and again I discounted their dark aspect.

A few months later, though, they struck again.  They’d gotten loose, but this time we were home, pruning some pine trees below the house.  Suddenly, we heard loud, anguished cries that we recognized immediately as the blatting of a terrified goat.  The dogs had cornered GG in the orchard, one on each side of her, barking.  She had stumbled, trying to face both attackers at once, and fallen.  She was struggling to rise, and she was bellowing.  It’s not a sound you can easily forget, and it’s not a sound you want to hear on your farm—the sound of one of your beloved goats being bullied by your sweet, now vicious, puppies.  It did not take a full minute this time to know which species I favored.  Dalton went to the pound the next day.

I spared Waverly because she was an ingratiating omega to the older, alpha dogs, Teddy and Fanny.  I figured that she had merely succumbed to pack mentality.  If separated, probably neither of the dogs would have attacked alone, or the one more likely to would have been rough-and-tumble Dalton, not my sweet, shy Waverly.

***

That November, Henderson’s uncle died.  When relatives phoned Henderson’s father to tell him that his brother was dead, they got no answer.  The phone rang and rang and rang.  Finally, they drove out to the house and banged on his door.  Still no answer.  One of the men climbed in through a window and found Alexander dead on the living room floor from a heart attack.  The coroner said the brothers had died on the same day.

In February, my 61-year-old sister Julie, twin to our other sister, Penny, was diagnosed with ALS, the wasting disease Lou Gehrig died from.  She first noticed something wrong when she found she needed to reach around with her left hand to help her right hand turn the key in the car’s ignition switch.  Now, a year later, her right arm flops at her side—she can’t wash her left armpit, can’t dress herself, can’t wipe herself.  With her left hand she can still spoon food into her mouth, but she can’t fold laundry, pare vegetables, wash dishes, carry a cup of coffee or a glass of wine across the room.  Her legs are going, too.  There is not a chair in her house she can get up from without her husband’s assistance.  She’s had to retire from a long acting career at Theater Three on Long Island, where she played lead and supporting roles since graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in the same class as Robert Redford.  She can’t turn the pages of a script.

The usual course of this disease, which has no known treatment and no remissions, is progressive muscle weakening leading to death in two to five years, making it likely that Julie will not reach 66, the age at which our mother died of cancer.  In all likelihood, Julie will predecease our 90-year-old father, whose heart, despite a stroke six years ago, steadily sloshes blood to all the necessary organs without sign of fatigue.  Paralyzed on his left side and wheelchair-bound in a nursing home, Daddy keeps eating the three servings of unidentifiable mash they put in front of him each day, vowing to live to 100.  He survived Mother’s death by 22 years.

I was surprised when Mother died, then angry at myself for being surprised, for being so naive at age 33 to think that all the deaths I’d heard about on the news had nothing to do with me.  How could a piece of me still think my loved ones and I would get out alive?

Now that I’ve let death in, everything else I hear or read tears the membrane further until death is everywhere.  It lurks under every moment.  But I know that spring is just as true as death.  In a few months I’ll be mowing the lawns and weeding the gardens, performing the ultimate betrayal—exercising my muscles as Julie’s are atrophying.

***

In April, 12-year-old Teddy stopped eating.  The vet drew blood, diagnosed him with extensive liver damage, and didn’t hold out much hope for the antibiotics he sent us home with.  Teddy, thin and very sweet, slept most of his final days.  His back legs wobbled when he stood up, and his body swayed.  Shortly, his legs would buckle beneath him.  All day Sunday and Monday I read beside him while he lay on his side, occasionally lifting his head with difficulty, looking at me.

When he could no longer stand and everything had shut down—nothing in, nothing out—we put him on a quilt in the back of the Subaru and drove him to the vet.  Henderson told the receptionist we were in the parking lot while I waited on the tailgate beside Teddy.  Tailgate euthanasia means less hoisting and schlepping of the ailing animal.  It means not having to walk in through a crowded waiting room with a live dog and then walk out, a few minutes later, with a dead one.

After a time, the vet came out with the equipment.  The previous week, Teddy had bolted when the same vet inserted a needle to draw his blood, and we’d had to hold tight to keep him from squirming off the table.  One week later, he didn’t even raise his head as the catheter entered his ulnar vein.

The vet asked me if I would like to inject the serum.  Yes, yes, I would, I said.  Two syringes were to be emptied into the catheter.  The first, a tranquilizer, slowed Teddy’s breathing perceptibly.

Then, weeping steadily, I kissed the side of Teddy’s long nose and told him how much we had really loved him.  I slowly pushed in the plunger of the second syringe, which was filled with a cheery, Pepto-Bismol-pink serum.  He was gone instantly.  We brought him home and placed him in the deep grave Henderson had dug on the hill above the house.  As the sun set, we filled in the hole and drank to Teddy, Capricorn, and our first dog, Toby.

***

September 15: GG, the goat, can’t stand up.  It has nothing to do with the dog attack.  For weeks, she’s not been eating her grain.  She’s been losing weight, and now her belly is bloated.  She has collapsed on her side in the barn doorway.  I tried lifting her front end, but her back legs don’t work, and she’s too heavy for me to lift both ends at once with my arms around her middle, sling-like.  For now, I take a lawn chair and a book and sit beside her.  I wrap my vest and windbreaker more tightly around me as I stroke her bony head and neck.  The autumn breeze is brisk, and when the swift white clouds scuttle across the sun, the temperature drops noticeably.  I zip up my jacket and keep on stroking.

Although GG is not one of my favorite goats, she has an agreeable, if bland, personality.  She’s a follower—somebody has to constitute the herd.  She’s prone to bloat each spring after eating the bright green, protein-rich shoots of early grass, and to relieve her, we stick a fat syringe in the side of her mouth and squirt mineral oil down her gullet.  I massage her belly, the way Henderson and I do for each other, encouraging the gas bubbles around, down, and out.

September 16: Yesterday, when Henderson got home, we made a temporary sick bay by enclosing one corner of the barn with upended pallets.  GG can’t rise even to evacuate, so after a day of her lying in her own urine we must drag her out, sponge her off with warm water, and prepare another corner, Cloroxing the concrete floor in the first.  Her urine is foul-smelling and caustic, probably the result of ketosis, a byproduct of starvation.  We roll GG onto a large piece of cardboard to use as a sled.  Her belly, taut as a tick’s, doesn’t collapse to the down side, as it normally would, but stays mountained up.  Her eyes bulge and roll back into their sockets, showing mostly white; her mouth drops open, exposing her bottom teeth; her tongue lolls out.  I think she is going to die here and now.  The pain of being moved must have taken her breath away, for she doesn’t utter a sound.  I quickly douse her belly with warm water and roll her back.  We haul her into the new corner so she can dry on a thick blanket of hay.   GG’s rumen must be filled with tiny gas bubbles that she can’t belch up, and spasmodic dry retching has failed to bring up her cud.  Her digestive system is kaput.  To Henderson I say, “Enough.”

September 17: The vet has come and gone.  He brought his pistol, he told me, in case I preferred that method.  If we went with the poison, he said, we’d have to bury GG at least three feet under.  Buthanesia is so virulent and long-lasting that it could kill any wildlife—or our dogs—if they dug her up and ate her.

Until now, I’ve enjoyed the idea that all the animals will be buried up on Hoof Hill, but it’s a romantic notion and something of an indulgence.  Because I don’t have the strength in my arms and shoulders to dig a deep grave in our rocky soil, Henderson has done it while I de-rock the hole with my hands, but it’s not considerate to give a man such a chore when he comes off an eight-hour shift of heavy lifting down at the recycling plant.  So, because the grave could be shallower, I considered the pistol method.

“You’d put the gun right next to her temple?”

“No,” he said, “into her eyeball.”

“Oh,” said I.  “Let’s go with the poison and you can take her body and cremate it.”

***

The vet and I enter the barn.  Belinda, Ivy, Rosemary, Daisy, and Sweet William come to greet us.  In her pen, GG raises her head, her ears twitching forward with the curiosity so characteristic of goats.

I went to a livestock auction once.  When the gate between the holding pens and the bidding arena was opened, the first group, the sheep, huddled in a logjam in the doorway and had to be prodded forward.  But when it was time for the goats to be auctioned, each one trotted forth smartly into the arena, curiosity and perhaps an inclination to trust humans overriding caution.

I kneel down beside GG in the hay and cradle her head in my arms, gently pulling it up and toward me so that the vet has a clear shot at her jugular.  I press my cheek against her nose and softly croon good-bye.  In the seconds it takes to empty the syringe, her head slumps in my arms.  The membrane separating life from death is so very, very thin.  There are final spasms and exhalations, but the vet assures me her brain is dead.  If you can put your finger right on the eyeball, he says, and the animal doesn’t blink or pull away, she’s dead.  The other goats are milling around, munching hay, untroubled.  I like to think of GG meeting up with Capricorn at that great grain bin in the sky, as Henderson calls it.

The vet delivers a cursory post-mortem diagnosis: caprine arthritis encephalitis—goat AIDS.  Joint swelling and pain, loss of appetite, and wasting are symptoms.  As we’re no longer selling their milk or breeding the goats, we’ll be their rest home—they’re all over ten years old.  Knowing that their ends will likely be as swift and painless as GG’s, we can enjoy their remaining years without a cloud of worry over their final days.  I dearly wish we could say that with certainty about our human loved ones.

In fact, I would prefer death to come to all of us from the tip of a needle, a toxin-filled needle that, ideally, I administer myself.  So far, no vet has agreed to slip me a few prefilled syringes for home use.  Buthanesia (a barbiturate given in overdose amount) is a controlled substance for good reason.  If I ever get my hands on a vial, I’ll put down my husband, when his time comes, and if my time comes before his, I’ll put myself down.  I’m going to figure out a way to do it, anyway.  Watch me.

***

So we’re down to five goats, and, from the looks of it, going down fast.  The very next day after the vet left, Ivy began favoring her left leg.  I checked to make sure there wasn’t a stone between her toes.  There wasn’t, but she’s been limping steadily.  And Sweet William spends too much time on his bent front knees, as if in prayer.  His legs must be arthritic and, given his great hulk, standing must be painful.  It’s as though once recognized and named, this virus has gained more than a toehold.

I’ll be sorry if Ivy should go next—before, say, Daisy.  Daisy has a vanilla personality stippled with black moments of sheer meanness toward the other goats and toward Ivy in particular.  She’s nice enough to me—I have a photo of Daisy and me stretching our noses toward each other, practically kissing, that was taken by my sister Julie when she visited a few years ago.  Daisy has the most perfect breasts, a full, pendulous udder with firm, symmetrical teats that are squeezably, milkably soft, delightful to handle.  And Daisy is Henderson’s favorite goat, perhaps because she’s not my favorite.  He had to stake his claim somewhere.  But if she and Sweet William were to die, I’d still have my three favorite goats: Ivy, Rosemary, and Belinda.

Typically, the goats gather around me when I come through the gate, but if I make a sudden move to stroke their noses, they jerk their heads away, indicating that they’re not like dogs, slavishly groveling to be petted.  They come to me and, gently, I can go to them, but sudden moves and great demonstrations of affection are politely discouraged.  This is true for all the goats except Ivy.

Here’s a video of my relationship with Ivy: I am striding across the hayfield, home from my morning walk with the dogs.  The goats are browsing in the orchard, under the apple trees.  As I move toward them, they look up and acknowledge me with soft guttural hums.  Then, one goat separates herself from the herd and begins trotting toward me across the field.  It is Miss Ivy.  The morning light diffuses, the image blurs, violins commence a tremolo.  We are that romantic couple in the commercial of a man and a maiden approaching each other in slo-mo from opposite sides of the screen through the lilies of the field.  It is Ivy and I, running toward each other—at any minute, I think, she’ll grow alarmed as my size increases and will veer off—but she keeps trotting toward me, her flanks bouncing like saddlebags.  I fall to my knees, spread wide my arms, and throw them around her neck as she runs into them.  She stands there, panting, while I stroke her and hug her and kiss her in the hollow between her eyeball socket and her ear (my favorite place because, being out of the way, it’s less likely to be dusty).  I kiss her cheeks and she whispers in my ear that she could stand like this forever.

Rosemary, the goat I nursed, I mean bottle-fed (close enough)—Rosie’s been known to get up on her hind legs and point the top of her head (where her horns used to be) at you, which is not a friendly thing to do.  She did it once to guests who were house-sitting and several times to Henderson.  She’s never done it to me.  I can’t blame Henderson for cooling toward her after this, though I suspect he was never going to love her because she was “my” goat from the start.  I think Rosemary still considers me her mother.  She plunks herself down beside my lawn chair and lets herself be gently petted, but I have to tame my ebullience with Rosie; I can’t lovingly manhandle her the way I can Ivy.  But of all of the goats, Rosie’s still seated at my side when the others have moseyed on to lusher grass.  It’s not the high romance I have with Ivy; ours is a natural blood bond.  Or we’re an old married couple, so grounded in love that we don’t have to display it by running through the fields.

The herd queen, our first goat, is Belinda.  Each morning, Belinda sets out from the barn on a foraging trip up the hill, leading her family single-file into the meadow for browsing, her alpine nose thrust forward, her lean, strong body graceful and deliberate.  She leads with purpose, as if she knows exactly where the grass will be most nutritious on that particular day.  After an hour or so, she lifts her head and, with equal certitude, leads them back to the barn to digest in the shade.  It’s easy to imagine Belinda as a grand dame, a lady.  Never silly or frivolous, never begging for attention, she stands soberly beside my chair allowing her nose to be petted.  If I stop, though, she moves in closer and hangs her head into the V of my open book until I’m reading Belinda.

I’ve noticed a mean streak in Belinda that I tend to forget when extolling her noble attributes.  She has it in for Ivy, her one remaining daughter.  She seems to look for opportunities to ram Ivy in the side, and Ivy, defenseless and perhaps not very bright, is invariably caught completely by surprise.  I scold Belinda and swat at her, but she smartly ducks away.  I vow to carry a fly swatter with me to extend my reach, but I don’t.  I’m trying to allow some aspects of nature to take their course.  Besides, do I really want Ivy’s welfare to depend on my intercession?  I’d have to be in the barn 24/7.

Including this prickly characteristic in the mix that is Belinda gives me a different take on her queendom.  Perhaps she’s not even aware that the herd’s following her.  Perhaps, in fact, she doesn’t give a damn.  She’s not “leading her family”; no maternal instinct here, just total concentration on her own gastric needs.  She’s taking herself up the hill to greener pastures.  If the others follow, so be it.

This makes me wonder if, over the years, I myself have become like Belinda, if my fierce independence isn’t more a certain ruthlessness.  I’ve noticed in the last few years that I lack generosity, lack the interest I had in saving mankind.  My days could be characterized by a narrowing of focus, and in that way I am like Belinda.

Each morning I awaken impelled by a feeling of urgency, a powerful sense that time is running out.  I don’t waste it.  I march through life as though there were a deadly seriousness at the heart of it, as if it really mattered that I milk some satisfaction from each day.  It does matter.  It really is time-limited, life.

The ruthlessness, if that’s what it is, conceals what I’ve always known made up my gelatinous essence—wobbly self-doubt.  Yet, even about my own neurosis, I lack generosity.  I can’t be bothered trying to recreate dark childhood incidents that would explain a lifelong commitment to self-criticism.  Even if I could, my allotment of insecurity would probably turn out to be no greater than yours.  My parents were happily married for 41 years.  I grew up in material comfort with intelligent people who deliberated their decisions regarding our upbringing and provided us with consistency and stability.

Daddy was charming, courtly, agreeable, funny, Harvard-educated.

Mother had a bristly personality, but I alone of the three daughters reacted poorly to it.  I, alone, felt undermined by her judgments.  Maybe she judged only me.  Maybe she was a different person by the time I was born.  Raising twins for six years could change a person, knock some of the patience out of her, sharpen her personality.  Who knows?  All I know is that by the time I was on my third or fourth psychiatrist, I was able to articulate my deep conviction that I had done something dreadful as a child.  Killed another child.  I’ve gone through life believing, as I know many people do on some level, that if “they” really knew the truth about me, I’d be in for the full-scale condemnation I surely deserve.

After reading hundreds of memoirs, my complaining about Mother’s domineering disposition and her subtle censure sounds like whining.  She had a personality, is all.  I reacted badly to it.  If I developed corrosive self-doubt, well, I had to acquire some sort of personality as I grew up, and this is the one that evolved out of the particular alchemy of me in our family.

Besides, how could the message that it is unwise to show vulnerability have been grooved so deeply and as early as infancy?  And has all the growing up I’ve done since been merely to calcify scar tissue over an original wound?  Could it be that I haven’t transformed any of it into wisdom but merely buried it in layers of personality?  Are we all permanently skewed by parental misdeeds in the first few years of life, living out the rest of our days as our branch was first bent?  The inexorableness of this, not to mention the inevitability that my own mistakes as a parent have indelibly scarred my daughter, is overwhelming.  It’s enough to make me think about putting a pistol to my eyeball.

***

How is it I can speak so easily about killing myself when, on a bright fall day like today, I am so very pleased to be alive?  Because if I were to kill myself it would be on a rainy day, not on a day like today.

Then I realize that if I were dying, I’d be dying on the glorious days, too.

***

Every death takes a bite out of you until, by the time you’re old, you’re emotional Swiss cheese.  Death is the dirtiest trick in the book, and frankly, it gives me pause about life.  It makes me loath to play the living game if these are the rules.  Of course, most of the time you wake up and find that you haven’t died, and that nobody you know has died, which lulls you into the false impression that it’s an ordered universe and that you’re in control of your life to some measure.  And that is not entirely untrue.  You do postpone your death by taking care, fastening your seat belt, looking both ways before crossing, not running with scissors, etc.

But to be sure the end of my life is under my control, a subterranean part of me considers killing myself now.

So here’s a video of my relationship with death: I am running just a few steps ahead of death with a knife in my hands, ready to plunge it into my heart the moment death signals me.  I turn and taunt the cloaked shape behind me.  “Aha!” I grin.  “You thought you’d get me.  Watch this.  Watch this.  I’ll get myself!”  (My life’s metaphor—say all the bad things I can think of about myself before anyone else can, inoculating myself against censure.  Immunity, after all, is a kind of control.)

So there I am, and death is marching toward me.  I’m holding the knife high over my head, ready to thrust it into my abdomen.  Death marches on, inexorably.  Death seems to be looking at me, but in fact he’s looking at the person just over my left shoulder, and there I am grinning madly, the knife trembling in my hands.  Death picks up speed, now, and dashes toward me, and just before he veers off to tap the person on my left, I plunge the knife into my belly with triumph.  As he scurries past, he gives me a look that says, “Jeez.  What a loony!”

***

In Intoxicated by My Illness, Anatole Broyard quotes Ernest Becker as saying that we achieve immortality by being “insistently and inimitably ourselves.”  I don’t know if immortality is achieved, but when we are our most essential selves, we are most fully alive, and that, at least, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from death.

Belinda is insistently herself.  It may be comfortingly anthropomorphic to imagine her as the herd mother—we want our mothers to have our best interests at heart—but it is probably more accurate to see her as an individual committed to her own interests.  To my sometime distress, Mother was insistently herself, too.  It was difficult to be the daughter of someone who was insistently herself, but perhaps because of Mother’s example, I am resolutely drawn to become my own inimitable self.  What I call ruthlessness in Belinda and in myself instead may be a sort of whittling away of what is not-us, a paring down to our very pith—stripping away distractions, killing off occasions for trivial emotions.  What’s essential to me now is very simple—walking with the dogs and sitting with the goats, soaking up the colors of one more autumn, reading, and writing my self into existence.

Here’s what I picture: Becoming as concentrated as a diamond.  Lest that call to mind immoderate self-regard, the word nubbin is as graphic.  After all the fluff’s gone, I’ll be a kernel, thoroughly myself through and through, reduced to my least divisible self, an adamantine core.  All that can be divided has been divided and what is left is the number one—the irreducible I—the only thing with which to assert life against the bleak inevitability of death.

***

You wouldn’t expect to receive one of life’s great lessons during a regular dental prophylaxis, but a few months ago I found myself in the dentist’s chair, my mouth open, tears leaking into it.  My hygienist was describing the recent death of her beloved dog.  It was the same week Teddy died, so my tears were ready.  For weeks after putting down her old dog, my hygienist had grieved.  Then one day, her husband, a police detective in a small city outside of Binghamton, New York, a man with uncommon perspicacity, brought home a puppy.  His wife reached out eagerly to accept the wriggling Springer spaniel.  Her husband held the puppy back for a few seconds and looked into his wife’s eyes.

“There is a beginning and there is an end,” he said gently.  Then, placing the plump ball of flesh and fur in her arms, he said, “This is the beginning.”

About the author:

Lucy Wilson Sherman is the author of the memoir “Laying Foundations: A Year Building a Life While Rebuilding a Farmhouse­,” the story of an unlikely couple—mismatched intellectually, socially, racially—who renovate an abandoned farmhouse in northeast Pennsylvania. She is also the author of Uncommon Appetites, a collection of personal essays.  She holds an MFA degree from Goddard College. She lives with her husband on the farm they rebuilt in Susquehanna, PA, where, after twenty-five years of nearly continuous home improvement, they are launched once more on a whole new renovation project.

Leaving Lamu

I wake up at 4 a.m. It’s December 29^th, the day I leave East Africa. I’m at the end of a disappointing exhausting writers’ conference. I expected white sand beaches and superb seafood. I hoped for a tranquil transforming experience.
After five days on Lamu Island I can’t wait to leave. At 2 p.m. I’ll be on a dhow headed for the airport. Ten hours is too long to wait. I want to go now.
I’m exhausted, soaked with sweat and irritable. My $50.00 tomb-like room is unbearable. I feel trapped in its dark close dinginess. Dead insects are stuck in the grayish mosquito-netting enclosing the bed. There’s no closet. The bathroom is narrow and minuscule.
The shower worked when I first arrived, a trickle of cool water against the stone walls. There’s been no water in my room for three days. There’s been no power in my room for three nights. Without electricity the fan doesn’t work. One small window opens in the room.
There is another window in the bathroom but I leave it closed. A local family lives on the roof just outside the window. They cook, do chores and sleep there. They talk excitedly and laugh a lot.
The two adult men look like father and son. They wear white kanzu robes and kofia caps. The three women are swathed in black bui-buis. Only their eyes are visible. The barefoot children wear western shorts and tees. Several donkeys share the living space. They wake up before dawn, braying. Everyone seems happy.
Lamu is a Muslim city. People are religious. One of the many mosques is across the alley from my hotel. The mosque is shabby with crumbling walls. The call to prayer is haunting and beautiful.
My hotel was arranged by the conference. I’m in Old Town, miles away from the air-conditioned expensive resort hotels, surrounded by looming coral-block buildings with peeling paint and narrow muddy alleys. This was a mecca for the slave trade. Now tourism supports the island.
Before we arrived the conference staff told us the island was like going back in time. That during the ’60s and ’70s, it was a hippie refuge. There are still some long-haired weathered men hanging around, especially at Petley’s bar, drinking beer and negotiating with the teenage prostitutes.
Lamu’s streets are winding dirt paths. The intricate and old sewage system drains into them. Donkeys with carts are everywhere. On the shorefront donkeys walk alone and at night sleep unattended in the dirt. There is no escaping the donkeys. Donkey shit is everywhere. So are hovering glistening flies. The smell is nauseating.
My first night at the hotel the donkeys scared me. I had no idea what the sinister, distressing, discordant sounds were. The donkeys’ braying is why I’m awake so early. That and stomach problems. The cramps and diarrhea started after last night’s lobster dinner. It was supposed to be a celebration.
I ate with Ellaraine, a poet from Sunnyvale, who traveled with me from San Francisco.
“To my sister survivor,” she toasted.
“To surviving,” I said.
Then we parted and I left for my inland hotel, carrying a flashlight in the dark, heart pounding as I fearfully navigated narrow alleys, rushing by shadowy robed men hovering in entryways, until I arrived at Janat House, my hotel with the attentive staff and picturesque roof terraces, proudly promoted pool and bar, but horrible room.
I check the time again, 4:30 a.m. I’m facing thirty-six hours of traveling.  My stomach’s messed up. I rip aside the mosquito netting and rush to the bathroom. I need Imodium. The toilet doesn’t flush. When I try the sink there’s no water.
I’m having breakfast in the hotel dining room. It’s a lovely open space overlooking a garden. But with no electricity the fans don’t work. At 8 a.m. the air is already oppressively hot and humid.
The staff person assigned to me is inordinately cheery. Habib cleans my room, cooks and serves my breakfast. He’s young and constantly smiles. I tell him I just want tea and toast today.
“No omelet, fruit?” he asks. He reminds me there is gas to cook the eggs with. “Doesn’t matter the power is out,” he says.
“My stomach,” I tell him, shaking my head.
I’m already packed and ready to go. To lighten my luggage I’ve decided to leave things I don’t need behind, to let Habib have them. My gym shoes encrusted with mud and donkey shit, bags of peppered cashews from Nairobi, sunscreen, body lotion and insect spray. I leave my loose Kenyan change on the table.
After breakfast I go to the hotel desk.  “I’ll be checking out this morning,” I say.
“But you must wait for the porters,” the receptionist tells me. She wears slinky silky western dresses and has long braided hair.  Like all the hotel staff she works twelve hour days. “They’ll be here for you at 2:00pm.” She smiles a lot too.
“I can carry my own bags. Besides, I want to leave earlier. The dhow leaves at 2:30 p.m. I don’t want to miss it.”
“No, it’s been arranged by the people you came with.”
Arguing seems pointless. I leave my bags and tell her I’ll be gone a couple of hours. I head for the shorefront. I’m sweating. My clothes are already wet.
I stop at Bush Gardens Restaurant and take a table by the street. I’m the only customer. There are several men behind the counter but they ignore me. After what seems like too long a wait I go to the counter and ask for service.
I don’t know why I’m being ignored. Does my tension show? Do they think I’m strange, an aging wrinkly woman with a gold nose ring and burgundy hair, wearing a black camisole and yoga pants?
Twenty minutes later I order a banana shake, hoping it will settle my stomach. It takes almost an hour to prepare. I tell myself I have nothing else to do. I’m better off killing time here than at the hotel.
I stare at the Indian Ocean. Now that I’m leaving I can admire the brightly painted red dhows, small children playing in indigo water, the sound of an unseen woman giggling, the pungent smell of cumin and sewage. I try to take it all in, figuring I’ll never come back.
I want to be positive but a lot of this trip has been hard for me. I feel old and tired. I’m not as flexible as I used to be.
When I traveled to Israel in my twenties everything was an adventure. I met a brown-skinned sabra whose family came from Yemen. I didn’t care that he gambled away my money. We slept on the beach in Eilat. We had exciting Dexedrine-fueled sex and guzzled Maccabee beer. Sometimes we smoked hashish or opium. I lived on falafel sandwiches and Turkish coffee. I lost weight and loved being skinny.
When he left I should’ve been devastated but wasn’t. Thirty years ago, with my life ahead of me, it was easy to be flexible. Now I’m more rigid and need control. I don’t have time for misery or mishap.
I don’t notice the waterfront hustler until he’s standing by my side. Uninvited he sits across from me.
“I have a special for you, special for ladies staying at the Lamu Palace,” he announces with a suggestive smile.
The Lamu Palace is one of the fancier waterfront hotels in Old Town. It’s where several people from the conference stayed and for the extra $15.00 per night I was sorry I hadn’t.
“I’m not at the Palace,” I say.
“No problem. You want massage?”
“No.”
“But this is special massage. You understand, just for the ladies?”
“I’m not interested,” I tell him. “And I don’t want company.”
“No problem. Don’t worry,” he says, and saunters off.
He’s young enough to be my grandson. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry but I’m glad this is my final day in Lamu.
When I pay the bill it seems like the waiter is leering at me. I feel myself flush with embarrassment. Then my stomach cramps and I don’t care.
“Where’s the toilet?” I ask. He directs me to the rear of the restaurant, across an open storage room. The toilet is clogged and the floor is wet. I have terrible diarrhea.
I leave the restaurant and head one block inland to the main street, hoping to find a drugstore. After walking up and down the crowded alley, jostled by donkeys and strolling three-abreast men, I find a pharmacy. The clerk takes me to a side room and reaching into a large bin shows me a handful of capsules.
“For your stomach,” she says.
When I ask what they are she shrugs.
“Do you have anything in a sealed package?” I ask.
She takes me to the main part of the store and brings out a local equivalent of Imodium. “This is more expensive,” she says.
I buy the medication but don’t take it. I don’t know what it is. I’m afraid of the side effects. I’m afraid, period.
By the time I return to my hotel it’s noon. Habib is waiting for me with the receptionist. They both seem upset.
“You left your belongings,” the receptionist says. “We need the room.”
I look at Habib.  “What’s left is for you. Take what you want and throw out the rest,” I tell him.
He doesn’t thank me. He doesn’t smile. His face is a mask.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” I say.
I’m embarrassed by my thoughtlessness. The cliché Ugly American, assuming he’d be grateful for my garbage.
“I’ll get the things from my room,” I tell the receptionist.
“Habib will do it,” she says. Her voice is cold.
“I’m sorry,” I say. My voice is shaky.
Their eyebrows lift with mistrust. Their smiles are gone. They disappear behind the receptionist’s counter.
With the conference over, the hotel has emptied out. I wish I’d left the day before, with everyone else. But a few of us had flights scheduled a day later.
With no place to go I head for the pool. A man and woman who arrived last night are the only ones there. They’re in their thirties and wearing full safari gear. Her large silver hoop earrings have turned her skin black. I wonder if she knows. They both look hot and uncomfortable. The pool-waiter brings them a menu and they decide on spaghetti.
I call the waiter over and order a glass of white wine. It takes a while. When I drink it my stomach feels better. I order another. I feel light-headed. I can’t wait to leave.
At 2 p.m. I go to the hotel desk. There’s no one to take my bags. I decide to carry them myself.
“No, the porters are coming for you,” the receptionist says. “No reason for worry.”
I’m too tired to argue.
Ten minutes later two porters arrive. They’re streaming sweat. They take my bags but say we have to wait. The couple by the pool is coming too. They pay for their spaghetti. They go to their room. I’m afraid of missing the boat and. pace anxiously around the courtyard. Finally at 2:20 p.m. they’re ready.
The porters put our bags in a wheelbarrow and we leave. The porters are jogging, telling us to rush. By the time we get to the shorefront and the dock we’re all dripping and breathless.
A crowded dhow is at the floating dock. We rush down a rope ladder to the boat. The porters come too. “For your luggage,” they say.
There is one person from the conference on the boat. I don’t see Ellaraine who’s also leaving today. We speed along the water getting sprayed as the boat tilts from side to side. Finally we arrive at the Lamu airport.
The porters insist on carrying my bags. The dirt road is hot and dusty. When we get to the outside waiting area one porter asks for 500 shillings. When I give it to him he wants another 500 for his friend. I don’t see the couple from my hotel paying but hand over another 500 shillings. It’s only fourteen dollars. I don’t want to argue. I just want to leave.
I finally see Ellaraine arriving. Her fancier hotel had a private boat. I’m the only one from the conference flying Air Kenya. The others are on Safari Link and go to a different area, leaving me alone.
Chattering vacationers surround me. One middle-aged woman is covered with mosquito bites. Others look tanned and relaxed, dressed in expensive resort clothes.
My stomach cramps. I go to the outside toilet. I’m dehydrated but afraid to drink. I have a headache. Probably the wine wasn’t a good idea.
The waiting area has narrow wooden benches and an open thatched roof. I hear people talking about the weather, saying the heat is unusual.
“Thank god for the hotel air-conditioning,” one man says. He has a British accent.
“That’s so,” his friend answers. “Old Town was hard hit. No power to most places, rolling blackouts at best.”
“Why we never stay there,” the first man says.
I didn’t know the weather was abnormally hot. Would I have felt better, knowing? The staff at the hotel, the waiters at the restaurants, the shopkeepers…were they all suffering too? While the resorts used up their power. Didn’t the locals care?
What do the Muslim families think of the tourists who vacation in their city? Do they resent our money and privilege? Flaunting our wealth, buying clothing and trinkets we don’t need. In and out of the main street stores, bargaining over pennies, buying, buying.
Before giving up on shopping I went to Ali’s, the most popular store for clothing. A musty cubicle of bright fabric crowded with western women waiting for the handsome young proprietor. He had curly hair and wore a black Rolling Stones t-shirt with gauzy white pants. He smelled of cigarettes and sweat.
“I make you Swahili dress. Sexy, beautiful,” he told a well-preserved American blond.
She ordered four dresses in sheer gold-threaded fabrics—turquoise and scarlet stripes, purple, emerald and lime. She took a handful of his cards.
“I’ll give them to my friends,” she said.
He shook her hand and smiled. The two older men sitting in the shop nodded. Were they his relatives? Or maybe the real owners, watching the charismatic Ali work his magic.
I bought two shawls I didn’t need. I felt nauseous from the heat. The big toe on my right foot was blistered. As I left I heard Ali and the old men laughing.
My whole time in Lamu I felt sorry for the locals. I pitied their poverty. But maybe I was wrong. Their families are intact, they have religion and tradition. They seem content, even happy. Maybe they felt sorry for me.
Perhaps with time I’ll think about this trip differently. Without the blinders of culture shock, be able to appreciate the place and the people. Maybe return someday, with the confidence of a returning visitor.
But I’m not there yet. I won’t be for awhile. I can’t wait to leave Lamu.
When the plane arrives I want to scream with joy. Instead I get my bags and cross the dirt field to the plane. I can’t wait to be home. I’ve had enough adventure.

About the author:
Myra Sherman was a finalist in the 2006 SLS-Kenya Fiction Contest and the 2006 Moment-Karma Short Fiction Award. An excerpt from her novel in progress, “Mother Mary”, was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Best Start 50 List for June 2009. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies, and her non-fiction in Ars Medica and JMWW.

Missing the Mark

* * *

It was clear to me from a very young age that I would bond with my father by hunting.  He took no interest in dance recitals or even softball games.  I would come home from practice or a game and he’d nod absently with a faint smile while I demonstrated a shuffle step or told him about a caught pop fly.  My mother once said that when I was born, my father told her that he had raised the three boys; it was her turn to raise me.  She said this matter of fact, without pursing her lips or frowning and without a faint smile to let on that it was a joke because it wasn’t.  My brothers were all in high school when I was born and well out of the house and into their own lives by the time I was in grade school.  I heard stories about Dad as the scout leader, Dad taking the family on camping trips, even Dad’s larks exploring for gold along the Gulf coast and drilling for his own oil pipeline but those days had all passed by the time they had me, their “happy accident.”  My parents had mellowed and aged when I came along.  Dad’s thinning hair and growing waist on his short frame had left him a bit hunched and Mom had begun giving up on dying the grays and struggled to keep up with taking me to my scheduled activities.  But if Dad wasn’t interested in my world, I was still welcome to enter his.

Growing up in my family meant that we would spend almost every weekend from September into January with my father at the deer lease.  For over thirty years, my parents leased hunting rights to a six hundred acre cattle ranch near Cuero, Texas.  My family usually used less than a third of it, hunting only a few choice fields, fence lines, and pastures where the cattle weren’t feeding.  The land was rugged and filled with mesquite scrub brush, with feathery bunches of leaves hanging from spiny, thorned limbs; bunches of cacti with prickly pear; and scattered cattle with the occasional Brahma bull.  Against the back fence line, the hunting cabin sat with a pitched corrugated tin roof, knobby posts holding up a small porch and mismatched white vinyl siding.  Before hunting season he made the four hour drive to prep the cabin, fill the deer feeders with corn, and get the stands ready; but once season hit, it was to hunt.  Dad always drove a little faster on the highway from October to the end of year.  Then he’d patiently wait through the holidays to begin preparations for turkey season in the spring.  Summers were brutally hot in central Texas but he still found projects to pull him back to the lease.  Mom was a casual hunter.  She would go along, read some good books, and let Dad take over the schedule for the weekend.  When he would get up at four a.m. to prep for a morning hunt, she’d roll over and snuggle into the covers perfectly happy to walk out around nine to see whatever luck would have it or even to stay in bed and just look out the window from time to time.

I was free to enter Dad’s world but I had to earn it.  He would spend hours with me while I trained the end of a bb gun on my mark and tried again and again to hit it.  He was patient when he taught me how to line up my shot, safely load and unload my weapon, and spend time with me, teaching me and talking to me.  When he thought I was ready, and old enough at ten, he gave me a Winchester .22 mag.  It was a lightweight rim-fire rifle, illegal to use for deer hunting because without a strong shot to the heart or head, the deer wouldn’t fall.  Since he had given it to me, I never thought I should use a bigger gun or that I was breaking the rules by not using an approved center-fire rifle.  I only knew that the bullet was the width of my pinky finger and the small shell that tapered with a tiny copper end was much different than the longer cartridges that my mother and father ejected from their guns.  Dad knew that it was light enough that I could steady the thick stock in my fingers and maneuver the rifle easily.  I could snug it to my shoulder and handle the recoil without wincing like I did after trying my mother’s .244 bolt action.  But he made sure I could make a kill shot over and over before I actually got to try.

Even after a full season of target practice, I knew his eyes followed the clumsy movement of my thumbs when I loaded the small rimfire shells into my .22 mag and listened to them slide until they clinked together, stacked neatly in a row within the chamber.  After I loaded my gun, he moved behind me and waited for me to adjust my eye to the scope and locate the target in the field.  I leaned against the rusty hood of the Jeep that we used to get around the lease and shifted the small sand bag under the end of the barrel before taking a breath and slowly pulling on the trigger until the echo reverberated against my eardrum and I blinked involuntarily.  Then I lowered the hammer and shot again and again until I had used all of my bullets.  I straightened and left the gun lying on the hood.  Dad was standing behind me and still looking through binoculars at the target.

“Not bad, we’ll go down and look in a second.”

His voice was tinny and muffled through the ringing in my ears and heat flared in my chest for a minute.  I knew I had hit the bull’s-eye twice and that two more were still in the red.  Only the second and fifth shot had strayed an inch or so from the center.  At fifty yards it was not just “not bad” but pretty good.  He rarely told me it was good, always leaving me a bit more to work on, and I always kept trying.  Target practice was something I had to master on my own.  The rest I could learn from going with him as long as I could stay quiet while we were in the stand.

Saturday mornings Dad would have us up by four-thirty, wanting us in the stand and silent by five-thirty.  We’d leave the cabin and I’d stumble in my too-large rubber boots, the beam of my flashlight bouncing.  The morning was full of rustling trees, twigs breaking, things moving in the brush.  I huddled close, trying to keep my .22 mag rifle from swinging on my shoulder.  Dad was stocky but he could dance across dried crackling leaves and broken twigs invisible in the dark without a sound while I clomped behind trying to place my feet carefully, rolling heel to toe, walking in cattle ruts, hoping to slip through the darkness quietly.  The wind cut through my layers of long johns and sweats.  He stopped in front of me, listening.  I would try hard to hear a noise, perhaps the sure steps of a buck walking ahead of us.  Later, Dad explained that he often stopped not just to listen but to imitate the careful starting and stopping of an animal.  When we reached the clearing, I climbed the flimsy ladder into the small stand.  I sat down on the hard surface of an upturned bucket, propped my rifle in the corner, and scanned the darkness, waiting for light to help Dad get a buck.

I had earned the right to hunt with him, to sit next to him and wait for my chance to prove myself.  In the beginning I could only watch for bucks, then I was allowed to bring my own gun.  By the time I was twelve, he had promised me I could take the shot.

At first I was eager but after three weekends of hours sitting on hard plastic in the stiff cold, I was weary of waiting and spent more time reading my book than watching for my chance.  Besides, I knew that Dad was alert.  Midmorning, chilled and sleepy, I jumped when he nudged me and tilted his head.  At the edge of the trees next to the fenceline, a buck slowly picked its way down.  Still a couple hundred yards away, it stopped every few feet, sniffing.  I was afraid of knocking the gun over and shooting a hole through the stand, but I reached out and wrapped my fingers around the smooth barrel and pointed it through the window, inches at a time, until metal scraped against the ledge.  The buck paused facing us.

“Freeze,” Dad whispered.  I held still.  The buck came closer, now fifty or sixty yards away.  I pulled the gun to my shoulder, fingers rigid and tight against the wood stock.

“He’s coming ‘round.  Find him.”  Dad’s voice was steady and gentle.  I slowed my breathing to match his as I looked through the scope.  Only black.  I adjusted my head and pulled back from the scope.  The circle trained on the tree, the feeder.  Antlers came into view:  eight points.

“Aim for the front shoulder.  Just in from the neck, up from the stomach, through the heart.”

I followed a shoulder of brown fur through the scope and fumbled with the safety; it clicked loudly.  The buck’s head turned, then it sniffed the dirt.

“Slowly now.  Don’t jerk.  Slowly pull the trigger.”

I started to squeeze, tense.  I carefully curled my finger towards my palm until the gun recoiled against my shoulder.  The jolt of the shot jerked my head away from the scope and I focused my eyes on the spot where I had just aimed to see the buck race into a thicket.

“Did I get it?” I asked, excited but anxious I had missed.

“You got him,” he said, taking off his hunting cap and running his fingers across his bald head.  “Great shot.  Now we wait.”

“Why? Can’t we go and see?” I stood and stared intently at the brush where I had last seen the buck.

“Just sit back down and wait a sec. He could still be running, and we don’t want to chase

him or we might not find him.”

I sat on my hands and rocked a bit on the bucket.  I had put meat in the freezer, had my own antlers to put on the wall.  Best of all, Dad looked proud.  He looked at me with a smile, sitting with his back straight and his shoulders square and nodded once, then chuckled.

“You did good.  Let’s get this stuff together and ready to climb down.”

My father’s office at home is covered with trophies.  When someone enters there is usually a sharp intake of breath –appalled shock from a nonhunter and awe from someone who appreciates size, variety, and rarity in mounted specimens.  There are a series of mounted whitetails of course, the thick necks stretching out from the wall holding up heads with serene looks, wide set antlers stretching up towards the ceiling; nothing that would make the Boone and Crocket record books here, but still solid racks, points, and tines.  A fourteen point and a couple twelve points, each large enough to hold a ring, but most points which curl around the buck’s head are thicker than my fingers.  There are two plaques of feathers, tom turkeys that my dad got, the frayed, coarse beard of the turkeys protruding the middle of the arranged and shellacked feathers.  Three boars’ heads are on the next wall.  Two fierce-looking javelinas, their short stocky heads framed by their dangerous tusks, and the third, a huge black Russian boar.  The boar mount dwarfs the others, sticking out a solid three feet of all head, tusks, and bared teeth.  The coarse hair is jet black and I won’t leave my eyes on it long.  It is intimidating even in death.  Then there are axis deer, fallow deer, and other exotic mounts he took from special hunts and ranches.  It is his display of skill, manhood, and even wealth, as each mount must have cost at least five hundred dollars or more just for the taxidermy, to say nothing of the money for the hunts themselves.

Underneath these imposing mounts and on a shelf, there’s a picture displayed prominently of my first buck.  It’s in a faded cardboard frame, never removed from the free gray Kodak outline that it was slid into when it was developed.  I am twelve, wearing a bright red shirt and blue jeans, and facing the camera, my left arm extended to my fresh kill.  My hand is wrapped around the small rounded horns and I tilt the heavy head towards the lens making sure that the eight points can be seen.  My skin is flushed and ruddy and I’m glad the picture was taken when we got back to the cabin and not at the kill site when I almost threw up.

When we climbed down from the deer stand after I had killed my first deer, I rushed over to the tree where the buck had been when I hit it.  Small drops of blood spotted the dirt.  We followed those tracks thirty yards into the brush to where the buck was tangled in the air, its front hooves hanging from vines where it had kicked and thrashed.  Dad pulled out his buckknife, cut it loose, letting it drop to the ground, then motioned for me to step closer.  The deer had long lashes and a beautiful face, but its tongue hung from its mouth caked in dirt.  The buck’s rack was small and curved, eight points.  It was young, only a few years old.  I felt guilty, but Dad was beaming, his cheeks screwed up and crinkling his eyes like I imagined a proud papa would look when handed his newborn child for the first time.

“Good shot,” he said. “Most boys don’t even get a buck the first time out, much less an eight point.”

Dad knelt down and handed me the knife, pointing to its neck.  “One side to the other.  Get the windpipe.”

This was the way it was done.  Cutting off any last air, letting it bleed out.

“You do it, Dad.  I’ll watch.”

“If you want to be a hunter, you learn how.  Next time you might be on your own.  You can wait to gut it, but not to cut the pipe.”

I sighed, dropping to the ground.  I poked the blade into the skin and missed the windpipe, the blade slicing out of the skin easily.

“Watch that other hand!  You’ll take your fingers off.”

I moved and tried again.  The blade struck something stiff and I jerked it through.  Blood pooled on the ground and clotted with hair on the blade, and I rolled onto my feet, stumbling back.

“Good ‘nough.  Come on, let’s drag it out to the road so we can gut it.”

I reached out and grabbed one hind leg while Dad took the other.  We hauled the deer towards the road, its head flopping in the grass.

When we stopped, Dad moved to the end of the deer, spread its legs, and deftly split its belly with his knife.  He sliced the skin easily, pulled it back, then dug his hands in, emptying the gut.  A ripe, sour scent filled the air as the stomach splashed onto the ground.  Bile rose in the back of my throat and I swallowed it back down, pulling my coat over my nose and mouth.  Dad was working intently, his arms streaked with blood as he dumped the large intestine onto the ground, then reached up into the deer’s throat and ripped out the windpipe.  I backed away as the steam rose off of the guts lying on the ground.  I stood behind him, out of sight, and stared at the dirt while I focused on the saliva in my mouth, my tongue flat against my teeth and the sudden tightness in my throat.  Dad rubbed his upper arm against his face, trying to get the beads of sweat from his eyes.  He wiped his hands with a small rag, then stuffed it in his back pocket.  Then we loaded the carcass onto the back of the jeep and headed back to the cabin for Mom’s photo op.

I was part of the club now, an official member of the Grimes family, since I finally had a story of my own about my first deer.  I had gotten a buck on my first kill, something that I began to proclaim loudly to other hunters after hearing Dad mention it so many times.  My friends at school weren’t hunters and I never got the same effect telling the story to anyone but my family.  I would bring it up often, then ask Dad to tell it instead so I could enjoy it over and over.  It would often lead to other hunting stories; depending on the season, it could turn ugly.  Dad and my brothers would taunt each other relentlessly about a bad shot in the gut or even the ass of the deer, which would waste the back strap or the best steaks.  When one of my brothers came home with a spike, they called him “baby killer” until he gave them something better to talk about.  I only had one story so far but it was a good one and I knew that, in that comparison to my brothers, I had held my own, even one-upped them.  Dad mounted my small horns on a plaque and gave it to me.  I held it up to the dusty mounts on his wall where it was dwarfed and then hung it above my dresser.

Sometimes we’d take family drives around the lease, always “looking for deer” but effectively road hunting on the lease, something that I later learned that most avid hunters think is unsporting.  I can’t actually remember a single time that we took a deer in that manner and we were often lucky if we glimpsed one escaping to the other side of the fenceline.  Our deer lease vehicle, the thirty-year-old open jeep with rusted floorboards and folded down windshield ,meant jaunty treks down winding paths, under low branches and sometimes even over small trees while I tightly gripped the roll bar in the back, my feet braced against feedbags of corn.   A long drive would take us past the back and front feeders, through several wire and post fences, past the fenceline and hillside stands nicknamed Slaughterhouse and Waldorf for their kill sites and outfitting respectively, and around the small pond.  We’d patrol the lease in the jeep with a loaded rifle riding on the front hood within easy reach, held steady by an old rug so it wouldn’t slide around.   It was my job to watch for movement as we made the rounds.  I was good at spotting animals, a flicker of tan in the brush, a flash of white tail, or just a moving shadow in the trees.  Of course, I’m sure there’s many times I led us down a longer way just to extend the ride, enjoying the dust kicked up by the tires and the wild landscape around me, while tossing out kernels of corn behind the jeep to draw animals towards our overgrown roads.

Once, when we reached the bottom of the hill, Dad saw deer tracks following a cow trail.  He turned off the rutted path and began following the animal trail instead to see if he could set up a new stand or see where the deer were crossing from one property to another.

He started slowly, squeezing the jeep between mesquite trees and straddling cacti while he and Mom grabbed the front branches and pushed them out until we were past.

“Larry, do we really need to follow this now? Can’t you walk it tomorrow or something?” she asked as she caught another branch just before it whacked her in the face.  Dad was stubborn and she had learned that if she posed a question, she got farther than if she just said what she thought.

Dad muscled the wheel as the jeep slid through muddy ruts without responding.

“We’re getting all scratched up,” Mom complained again.  “Look,” she pointed to a scratch on her arm.

“You tired of these mesquite trees?” he asked as he gassed it straight towards a small one about three inches in diameter.

I gripped the bar tightly and gasped.  “You’re going to hit it,” I told him, secretly thrilled by the thought.

He laughed as we struck the small tree at about fifteen miles an hour, the front grill of the jeep cracking against the wood, breaking the trunk easily thrusting the tree forwards and sideways as we easily cleared it.

“You happy now?  No more trees hitting you from the side.” He yelled as we plowed into another small mesquite.

“Ok, Larry, you’ve made your point.” She said.  “Watch it!” she yelled as she reached out to grab his arm.  I braced my body tightly between the roll bar and seat, my thighs flexed against the jeep’s lurching.

We hit a third mesquite tree, this one much more solid.  Its base had sprouted several limbs forming a disjointed but wide trunk supporting three seemingly separate trees, each growing up and outward.  The jeep hit the tree with a jolt and slowed as Dad shifted into a different gear and pressed his foot to the floor pedal, refusing to be beaten by a tree.  The end of the jeep pitched upward, the front tires losing footing on the ground as the jeep pushed against the side.  Mom gripped the tattered edge of her front seat while I held onto the metal seat in the back.  Dad stopped, reversed, and we sighed.  Then he laid on the horn, laughed, put it in gear, and floored it, ramming the jeep into the tree.  We crested the top of the truck and the front of the jeep hung for a moment in the air, tires spinning, before the base of the tree cracked under the weight and the grill pitched downward again, the wheels finding purchase as we raced forward and Dad guided the jeep back between the trees.  Mom and I leaned inward, so we wouldn’t be scraped, and she didn’t complain again but Dad, having proved his point, quickly turned us around and headed back to the cabin claiming the tracks had disappeared.  I sighed and settled back onto the corn, both relieved and disappointed that it was over.

There was always anticipation on weekends at the deer lease, the suspenseful tightening of belly muscles imagining how many deer or what kind we would find, what type of wildlife would spring from the bushes, what discoveries we would make.  From the moment the car turned onto the gravel road, my anticipation would begin building as Dad maneuvered the car’s wide tires in and out of the formed grooves of the rutted road between fence posts and cattle guards on the way to the cabin.  When we weren’t out in the jeep exploring or sitting in the deer stand, Mom would take me exploring.  We rarely took guns with us, though she might take her camera, and I followed her lead as we wondered behind the cabin and past the first fence to the  washed out gully and sand pit.  One end of it had been transformed into an old dump.  There were the remnants of an old metallic Christmas tree, scattered pieces of wood, and bits of scrap metal, anything too big for a barrel or that couldn’t be burned.  Further up the gully, the wash out turned from mud to pure sand dappled with rocks, tracks and discoveries.

As we made our way up the sand pit, she let me collect rocks, petrified wood, and, if we were lucky, sometimes an arrowhead or fossil.  I could bring back the things I had found and show Dad once he woke from his nap and before we went out again.

“What do you think that is?” she asked me, pointing to a thin row of scratches close together.

“An animal?”

“What kind?”  She motioned me over and we squatted down next to them.

“A bird,” I declared and she nodded

.           “Remember the roadrunner we saw on the way in?”  she asked with a smile.

This was our guessing game as we walked the sand pit.  Armadillos, roadrunners, rabbits, skunks, foxes, deer, cattle, and various birds would leave behind tracks, scuffs, or sign and Mom would help me identify it so I could report back to Dad.

She’d also test my ability to identify deer scat or “sign” as she liked to put it, which always reminded them of a joke they both loved to repeat.  Apparently Dad had brought a customer and his wife up to the lease one weekend and the man convinced his wife that deer shit, the tiny bulbous drops scattered around on the ground, were called smart pills and were just little berries and if she ate one, she’d get smarter.  Dad swears that she did and then gagged and spit and the man laughed his ass off saying, “Look, you’re smarter already.”  I always wondered if it was true, and if it were, how that woman could possibly have stayed married to such a man or how my father could stand there and watch him do that to her but he never talked about that part of it and I never asked.

Mom and I would return from our walks by two-thirty or three when Dad liked to get ready to go out for the evening hunt.  Although some hunters, including my brothers, would sit in the stand most of the day, Dad had decided that lunch, an afternoon nap, and a more relaxing schedule would still let him be in the stand at the most promising times of the day – just after sunrise and before sunset.

Dressing for the hunt would later remind me of preparing for a game.  The weather in Texas in the fall was unpredictable and one day I might wear a pair of old jeans with a ratty shirt and the next I might be layering long johns under sweats to try to stay warm.  Regardless of the clothing, there was a uniform to hunting.  Mother insisted on bright clothing over camo for safety.  Deer are color blind so blaze orange or even red or pink will stand out against the birch and mesquite to a hunter but not to a doe or a buck.  Each layer of clothing, the belt with extra bullets, my flashlight and bucknife, my rifle, brought me one step closer to hunt and excitement would build as I patiently prepared and wondered what I might find, dreaming of walking up to see trophy bucks grazing in the field like someone scratching the thin film of a lotto ticket and hoping for matching symbols.

But I was always scared of the dark.  When I hunted with Mom or Dad the fear abated because I had protection but now that I hunted alone, I dreaded the darkness.  Mornings alone, I rushed through the woods, carelessly noisy, hoping to scare away any unknown creatures lurking in the woods.  I was fine with scaring the deer, boars, or even rabbits away.  They could come back in the daylight.  In the afternoons I tread quietly, hoping to see wildlife before twilight so I could bleed the deer and be in before nightfall.  In the dark, the beam of the flashlight was my only guide, a twig snapping that wasn’t my own would prick the hair on my neck, tense my fingers against my gun, and call up a prayer from deep in my bones that if I heard another sound it was a small rustle moving away from me.

Morning was my favorite.  Tucked up in the stand safely, there was nothing to do but wait for the first graying of the impenetrable darkness, the rat-a-tat shudder of the feeder slinging corn, and enough light to see if deer were eating below.  Once the glow of the sun crested the trees, I enjoyed the shrill caw of a crow, the coo of doves, or even the noisy antics of an armadillo below the stand.  Sunrises and sunsets were appreciated in quiet meditation as I waited with nothing else to do but enjoy the color bursting across the sky, my senses heightened yet calm.  A cardinal’s flurry of wings as it alighted on a tree, a squirrel’s chatter, or a raccoon’s bumbling waddle across the dirt were all entertainment that I rarely had the chance to enjoy in the world outside of hunting.

In the kitchen of the cabin Dad had tacked various pictures of hunters in orange on the wall.  In one, a hunter’s legs are spread as he pisses behind a tree while a large buck picks its way behind his back.  In the second, the hunter is asleep, his head tilted and tucked against his shoulder while the deer walks directly in front of him.  I often wondered as I sat on the rickety chairs waiting for dawn to break, fighting the heavy weight of my head and the cold in my fingers and toes, how many times before others had fallen asleep.  Often, though, I was awake and alert, excited to see what the day might bring.

When we got back to the cabin after hunting, Dad would go to work on skinning and quartering any deer we had killed or, if we’d all come in empty handed, he’d cook for us.  He’d make S.O.B. (or shit on a biscuit) his old army standby for breakfast or stack the grill with downed mesquite and smoke steaks and tin-foiled baking potatoes for dinner and we’d play cards or sit around the table and talk while Mom settled into the battered yellow recliner and read a romance novel, enjoying the rare break from the kitchen that she only got at the lease.

I brought in a couple of does to help fill the freezer over the next few years, each with a solid shot, but I was fifteen before I got another buck and my first trophy.  I sat in the hillside deer stand alone staring into the last hour of darkness.  When I’d climbed into the stand, I had briefly used my flashlight to set up everything within arm’s reach.  My loaded two-twenty-two rifle on the short ledge to the right, my thermos between my feet, and to my left my backpack holding some saltines, a paperback, and a buck knife.  The two mile hike from the cabin had stirred my blood; only my hands and feet were cold in the near freezing temperatures.  I blew on my fingers, then reached between my feet and quietly unscrewed the thermos.  Steam trailed out of the small opening as I poured myself a cup of hot chocolate and took a sip.  It was scalding; I ran my tongue against the roof of my mouth, feeling the new raw spot.  At least it kept my hands warm.  I settled back into my chair as the wind blew against the slats in the stand, whistling and rattling.

Light crept in.  The black mass to my right became an oak with long tendrils of Spanish moss blowing in the sharp wind.  The clearing in front of me revealed mesquite trees and cacti.  I could make out the treetops, then the feeder.  Usually, it was a safe bet to see deer down this hill.  Tracks and rubs surrounded the feeder, in the brush and by the pond.  I scanned shapes in the brush, watching for shadows to move, to change.  A few crows and a squirrel scavenged.  This was my favorite time of morning.  The promise of daylight brought with it the chance of a twelve or fourteen point buck, a suitable trophy for his wall.   

The sun was showing on the horizon, and the frost on the ground shimmered.  A spider’s web in the corner glistened like a kaleidoscope.  I sipped more cocoa and shifted in the ratty swivel chair.  I had a novel in my pack, so I could escape into adventure while I sat in the wooden box, high off the cold ground, but it wasn’t light enough to read yet.  Twigs snapped, branches swayed.   A crow cawed and ventured down when the feeder whined, corn striking its metal legs.  The sudden silence after the whirling startled me.  I shifted and looked into the clearing.  Some doves flew from the brush, drawing my eyes to the left.  I waited quietly until a small cottontail hopped from the brush, then shifted my eyes to the open field before pulling out my book.

As long as I stopped every few pages to slowly scan the trees, I didn’t miss anything.  Besides, I was always listening.  I stopped my book in the fifth chapter and saw a bobcat walking underneath my stand.  The cat was the size of a thin cocker spaniel and had a beautiful coat, speckled brown and black with golden undertones.  Pointed black fur lined its ears and thin black stripes rippled through its fur.

My breath caught in my throat as I thought of the trophies in Dad’s office.  Coyote skins covered the sofas like quilts.  Boars, turkeys, and fallow deer lined the walls.  I thought of Dad displaying the cat, bragging to his customers about his daughter.

My torso remained still while I stretched my arm out for the rifle, the same .22 mag I had used for three years.  The bobcat, now thirty yards away, picked its way through sparse grass.  I clicked the safety off and looked through the scope.  The cat stopped momentarily, listening; it was still, ears perked, front paw still off the ground in mid-step.  I breathed quietly.  The bobcat stepped into a half crouch, shoulders tensed, its head scanning the ground.  I waited. The cat still faced away from me.  Through my scope, I ran the crosshairs from its tiny stubbed tail up to the perked ears, thinking it would turn broadside.  A crow flew by the stand, its shrill caw fading.   The cat took a hesitant step, then started on its way again.

Ease back on the trigger, keep it steady, snug to shoulder.  I couldn’t aim for the heart because it was in line with me.  Instead, I aimed for the base of the neck, a tough, narrow shot.  At fifty yards, I pulled the trigger slowly.  The gun recoiled and the bang reverberated in the tiny stand.  The cat fell, clawing with its front paws, tearing the air.  A shrill cry punctuated the pain of dying.  It writhed on the ground and began convulsing.  I chewed on my lip, thinking it would only take seconds for it to stop breathing, stop that noise.  The crying went on, piercing, like a baby’s tremoring wail.  My chest tightened.  I wished I could take it back, let it walk past.  I looked through the scope, thought of taking another shot, but all I could do was shoot it in the head.  I gathered my rifle and bag, afraid of watching any longer, and made my way down the ladder.  My boots clomped across the dirt at an even pace.  The cat had stopped crying, but its body shuddered.  I stepped closer as its head lifted, and it mewed, eyes wide.  Placing the tip of my rifle close to the base of its skull, I fired and it was still.

I reached down and smoothed my hand across the limp body.  The cat bled only a little from its back but I found only one exit wound through the chest.  My first shot had lodged too low into the spine, making the second necessary.  I gathered its legs and hefted it onto my shoulders, surprised by its light weight.  It was warm against the cold air, and it buffered my neck and shoulders from the wind. The trail was two miles back to the cabin.  I adjusted my sling underneath the cat, the rifle wedging it against me, and started in.  My neck and shoulders quickly grew sweaty during the hike and the bobcat’s hair stuck to my skin.  After the first mile, I stopped, shifting it from my shoulders into my arms, cradling it like a child.  Its fur was coarse, but the coloring was stunning.  If it hadn’t walked across a frozen field, I never would have seen it in the autumn leaves cluttering the brush line.

When I got back to the cabin, Mom and Dad were both out hunting.  I draped the small body on its side across our picnic table.  If I stood a few feet away, it looked as if it were still alive, maybe sleeping.  I was shocked at how much it resembled a house cat.  I smoothed the hairs on its coat, feeling the muscle and bone underneath.  Its paws were callused on the bottom, claws thick and sharp.  I sat down on the bench and stared at the tiny hole in its neck.  The blood had clotted into thick clumps caking the fur.  I rubbed one between my fingers; it left a small smear across my finger and under my nails.  This was a true hunter, living off what it killed.

It was still early and I turned and hiked back to the stand to wait for deer, knowing that was what Dad would expect me to do.  Thirty minutes after I climbed back up the ladder, a large four point strode out to the feeder and I shot it in the heart.  It dropped to the ground and I approached it carefully, then slit its neck and windpipe and walked back in again for help.

He was proud.   I think they both were, although perhaps Mom felt bad for the animal that was killed for the sake of killing.  Dad immediately called the taxidermist and found out how to preserve it for mounting.  I got to pick the shape of the cat.  They could fix it in various poses, fighting with teeth bared, perched over a dead bird with claws extended, or leaping through the air.  I choose a simple walking pose.  It sits on top of a bookshelf at home collecting dust just like any other trophy.  Every time I look at it, I imagine it walking by me beneath the stand and picture myself appreciating its grace and movement, savoring a momentary glimpse of the wild, without the shot, without the blood, without this furry shell.

I never asked Dad to put it up in his office and, perhaps because he thought I wanted it for myself, he never asked to have it.  Another time, my brother killed two bobcats at once and had them mounted, then loaned them to Dad to display.  They are displayed in the middle of a ferocious fight, one frozen in midair leaping onto the other from above.  Now it strikes me that perhaps no one wants the cats.  Coyotes are still treated as a nuisance; the hides still looked at as a blanket or a drape.  Turkeys, deer, even wild pigs are all used for food.  But the bobcats are killed for the pleasure of the kill, nothing more, and I think maybe I’m not the only one a little uneasy with having the cat’s dead marble eyes staring back at me.

Of course there are plenty of other reminders of those days scattered about.  There is a dark watercolor which Mom painted that has the cabin cast in shadow against the faded light of the sky.  To the left is the windmill, fenceline, and oak tree, where I swung from a tire and played countless afternoons.  Their photo albums are filled with pictures where deer carcasses are lined up on the ground with my dad and brothers smiling next to them.  In another, Dad is standing next to the deer hanging from the tree, ready to be skinned and quartered.  Some of the photos have captured memories that aren’t even mine, yet I still look at them with nostalgia.  I miss those times with my family; I want to sneak back across property lines and trespass my way in to see the cabin but I know I can’t go back.

Around the time I graduated from high school, the owners of the ranch, Leroy and Lollie Angerstein, were put into a home.  As their children took over the ranch, my parents noticed the cattle growing gaunt, their skins stretched taut over protruding hipbones as they’d run at the sound of our car, hoping for more food, some salt or hay.  My parents couldn’t stand to see the cattle and the ranch go this way, so they let the lease go and started looking for their own land to hunt.

They settled on 58 acres outside of Nixon, less than an hour or so from the original lease, where it’s still good whitetail and turkey land complete with a small creek. The first year Dad cleared trees, set up a small camper and watched closely for deer.  He saw lots of does but few bucks.  He decided to let them breed a bit before hunting them out.  Within a couple years though, there was a game fence nearby, the creek dried, and after ten years there has still yet to be a deer taken from the land.  I was off at college and unwilling to spend Christmas hunting when I could see my old friends.  The real reason though is it was never the same.  There wasn’t the boundless land that went on and on.  I could walk to the fenceline in ten minutes instead of it taking hours.  There is still a certain rawness to the new place but it is closer to town, other families, and the call of the land is mysteriously absent to the rest of the family.  My parents go alone to hunt or my brothers will stay for the weekend with their friends.  At most it is used a few times each season.  It is no longer our family place, built out of the old stories and memories.

There are still ways for me to hunt.  I could get a license and try public land but I’m too worried about the dangers of drunk hunters I don’t know and even getting lost on the unknown land.  In my new home 1500 miles from my parents, I have a few friends with land choked with deer but neither my husband nor I want to skin the deer, chop up the meat or even gut the animal.

My father no longer hunts either.  A few years ago he had an accident with a saw and severed three of his fingers from his right hand.  The index finger remains but is so badly damaged it is immobile and he’s unable to pull the trigger on a rifle without moving it off sight and making a poor shot.  We’ve all tried to give him a variety of tools to help him adjust to his disability but he chooses to go it alone and muscle through what he can with his mangled hand.  Now he’s resigned to watching out the window when he goes to hunt and signaling my mother when he sees something.  It is rare.

Now that we no longer hunt together, our conversations are framed by Happy Birthday or Happy Father’s Day, a short conversation about the weather or home improvement over a family dinner.  He often falls asleep in his chair while watching the news.  Sometimes I will buy him Doe in Heat deer urine for Christmas or a new turkey call as a way to bridge the gap, give us something to discuss or to prompt a memory.  I still bring him trophies—degrees, new stories, and pictures of my new house—but I’m always met with the old faint smile from the days of dance recitals and softball games and nothing has ever joined or replaced the picture in his office.

Years ago my mother started a painting of me based on a picture taken at the deer lease.  In the photo, I am young and in a field of bluebonnets, centered in the frame, bundled flowers clenched in my left hand as I bend over and reach for another with my right.  Our beagle, Peppy, stands next to my knee, alert for bugs, squirrels, or armadillos rustling in the field of flowers.  The wind is blowing my hair a bit; a few strands sweep across my face and I am caught, frozen, in my quest for a larger bouquet.  In the painting, the blues are slightly more muted than the photo; dappled cornflower blue is tapped around the base of the canvas with sprinkles of white as my mother tried to capture the indigo petals swaying around me.  Peppy’s brown and white frame is drawn with tight, sure lines.  She has rendered my loose cotton pants and t-shirt, my dirty blond hair dusting my shoulders, but my face is a blurry oval.  She painted it several times, putting it away for awhile then returning.  Once she thought she had it figured out.  My nose was crooked in the painting, my head at too odd of an angle.  After she discovered this I thought she might return to it, sketch in my features, give me eyes and a determined smile.  Instead the painting is stacked with other discards in the attic, with a pale ghost child picking pieces of blue.

Christine grimes has published in Big Tex[t], Harpur Palate, Permafrost, and Passages North. She was a finalist in Gulf Coast’s Fiction Contest and in the Association of Professors of Creative Writing Graduate Fiction Contest.  Her work is included in From Where You Dream, a collection of lectures by Robert Olen Butler.   She received an M.A. in English from Florida State University and an M.F.A. in fiction from Texas State University.  She is a doctoral student in Binghamton University’s creative writing program.

A Note from the CNF editor on March-April contributions:

     This edition of Ragazine features the work of poet and ecocritic J.D. Scraffenberger, whose piece “My Few Experiences of Mountains” reflects upon the different psychological states conjured by different geographies, and the way those geographies reflect our relationships and life patterns.  For Schraffenberger, a mountain is a vertiginous place that reminds us of our own precarious positionalities, the fragile surfaces of our lives that can turn and dash us down at any moment, a place of extremes that invokes the similar possibilities of our emotional makeups.  Getting older, now settling in with his own family, he finds the rolling plains of Iowa a better fit, where “we see things coming, we brace ourselves, we get ready. Iowa is a place untroubled by mountain wilds, where no one seems to panic and it’s easy to be in love, where the deep quiet at night is only matched by how calm and far away the horizon convenes with its sky.”

     In “The Wrong Season for Survival,” Mark Montgomery, a poet and creative non-fiction writer, similarly explores the emotional extremes of place with a tale of his survivalist father, who drags his children and friends into the California wilds on a he-man quest of self-reliance in the 1970s, inspired by Euell Gibbons and the later twentieth-century version of environmentalism.  In his story we see the limits of a quixotic quest for self-reliance, and an eerie foreshadowing of some of the struggles that await us if the dovetailing crises of climate catastrophe and peak oil manage to topple our twenty-first century technological prowess and send us all “into the wild” without a Walmart in sight.  Taken together, Schraffenberger and Montgomery provide a reflection on landscapes that terrify, inspire, and sustain us, leaving each to calculate and settle in to his or her own circadian and other kinds of rhythms with an ear always turned toward whatever blindsiding changes might come.

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A Note from the CNF editor on January’s contributions:

A native of the Southwest, Jose Rodriguez’s “Burning Garbage” explores the theme of American consumerism from the outside—the perspective of a young child born in what in a material sense would be construed as poverty in Mexico, but whose migration to Texas brings a sense of deprivation of another sort.   The categorical arrangement of people according to status, with distinct valuation being assigned according to what one has or doesn’t have, is bewildering to Rodriguez’s amazing narrator, who nonetheless appreciates whatever small beauty comes his way.  Finding pleasure in a toy car wheel he plucks from a heap of burning garbage, lyrically reflecting on the existence of spaces like garages and furniture like sofas, the story provides a whole new perspective on what most of us take to be commonplace.

Reflecting on our situatedness  in relation to the natural world in a different way, James Guignard’s “What Would Rachel Carson Do?” takes place during a long bike ride in which the narrator imaginatively converses with Carson and David Gessner, author of Sick of Nature and Return of the Osprey.  Guignard uses his response to the nature around him and his imagined conversation with these two luminaries of environmentalism to try to figure out what his position as an English professor who teaches environmental literature might really mean and what its possibilities are.  The dialogue vividly articulates some of the current themes of and stereotypes about what it means to be an environmentalist and have a relationship to nature in the twenty-first century, presenting these ideas with rare humor and verve.  Taken together, Rodriguez’s and Guignard’s stories allow us to think about place, our location in the world and our responses to that world, in highly original ways.  Enjoy!

My Few Experiences of Mountains

… The most powerful human emotion is fear, which is what I felt tightening inside of me from the base of my spine to the roots of my teeth as I drove …

          I know I shouldn’t count driving through mountains because that’s not really experiencing them, at least not in that feet-on-the-ground, nose-to-the-wind kind of way, but years ago those wild Kerouacian embers of cross-country road-trips were still glimmering like poetry in my brain. I was driving west on I-84 through the Columbia River Gorge toward Portland to visit a relocated friend—all my cool Louisville friends were moving to Portland back then for its music scene—and I think I had what you’d call a real experience of the mountains in my old-but-new-to-me Volvo station wagon. I don’t remember where exactly on 84 we were—my then-girlfriend Tara was dozing beside me in the passenger seat—but I do recall a steep, winding ascent from the oranges and browns of the high desert and the equally steep descent into the lusty green of the Oregon rainforest.

          I think I’m making some of this up, or my memory has smoothed out the edges, as memory tends to do. It’s not like you’re in the desert and then BOOM! you’re in the rainforest. Or maybe it is like that. It’s been awhile. And I haven’t been back since.

           The experience I had wasn’t of the mountains themselves. It was inside me. (But then, where do we experience experiences if not inside ourselves?) I’ve heard some otherwise intelligent people claim that love is the most powerful human emotion, but that’s a bunch of sentimental nonsense. The most powerful human emotion is fear, which is what I felt tightening inside of me from the base of my spine to the roots of my teeth as I drove through these mountains, where the North American Plate meets the Pacific and Juan de Fuca Plates. These were the Cascades. What a lovely name for mountains, derived (ultimately) from the Latin cadere: to fall. And that’s what I feared, falling, and dying, as I climbed and climbed and climbed. My bad dreams have always involved falling from some height, veering off into a black void, losing my grip, plummeting. It’s a beautiful kind of fear, though. Maybe back then it was akin to the still-fierce grip of love I had for Tara. Maybe love compelled me to face my fear in the first place, bid me drive on, go west, young man! be on the road in love! Maybe love is more powerful than fear. 

          You think about mountains and you see a single thing in your mind, a discrete unit called “mountain.” This is how you learn what a mountain is. You draw a triangle with a zig-zag line near the tip to represent the snow line. You think Everest. You think Vesuvius and Rainier, both of which are volcanoes, too, but that’s a different drawing. You think a mountain is like a volcano without a hole in the top. You draw some puffy clouds and a few birds, maybe a semi-circle sun in the corner with straight-line rays beaming down. You think you have a handle on what a mountain is, but you don’t—any more than you have a handle on what love is by drawing hearts.

          I thought I understood something about Pine Mountain from the stories my grandpa would tell of growing up in Jenkins, Kentucky, a dusty little former coal-camp town on the Virginia border. Pine Mountain was where people hid their moonshine stills. Pine Mountain was where the outlaw-hero Devil John Wright lived. Pine Mountain was where my grandpa went as a kid to teach himself to play guitar, like some Pentecostal mountaintop guru communing with the God of the Lonesome Pine. Pine Mountain was also the location of Raven Rock, a locally famous overlook point, where you could take in all of Jenkins below. I’ve only been to Jenkins a handful of times. A few years ago I went there to have an authentic experience of Pine Mountain so that I could write about that experience and then possibly publish what I’d written. But that kind of thing hardly ever works out. Or you end up writing fiction or poetry and wishing it was what you’d actually experienced.

          I’d seen pictures from the 1920s of men gathered on Raven Rock smoking pipes in their Sunday best and posing for group portraits, and I’d read so many references to it in the town library’s archive. I knew it was a single thing, a distinct place called “Raven Rock.” You could plant a flag and point to it and say you were there. But when I stumbled through the trees onto what I assumed was Raven Rock, I wasn’t sure. The view was breathtaking, but not in a beautiful way. From this rock ledge you could see the long narrow valley that was Jenkins, Elkhorn Lake to the southwest, the new golf course to the north, but you could also see all the strip-mining going on around you, what some call “mountaintop removal.” You could see big patches of white and brown where there should be green, and plumes of gray smoke rising in every direction, like a bunch of little bomb sites, which they are in a way. 

        Raven Rock is what you’d call a “crag.” I’ve always loved that word. I’m not sure if it’s an actual geological term because I associate it with Romantic poetry. Like Wordsworth’s “narrow girdle of rough stones and crags” or Byron’s “crag-cover’d wild” or Keats’ “Crag jutting forth to crag, and rocks that seem’d / Ever as if just rising from a sleep.” It’s a rigid and insistent word. It sounds like one of those nonsense rhymes you invent as a kid while running through the alphabet: vag, spag, frag, crag. The word “crag,” and not crags themselves, may be one of the reasons I became a poet. I like Williams’ famous axiom, “No ideas but in things,” but for me it’s “No ideas and no things but in words.” Or even, “No ideas, no things, no words but in sounds.”

         I scooted to the edge of this crag, this Raven Rock, and peered down the side at the tops of trees. That old familiar fear tickled inside. I stood there alone with my fear for a few moments. If I fell, no one would know, no one could help me, and I’d probably die, so I backed off and sat cross-legged to smoke a cigarette. I wasn’t having the experience I’d hoped for. For one, I was hungry and felt stupid for not eating lunch. It was already late in the afternoon, and I was running on coffee and cigarettes. I was also not dressed for any kind of climbing or hiking in my dress shoes and khaki pants and camelhair sports coat. I was supposed to have interviewed the mayor earlier in the day about the history of Jenkins for my writing project, but he wasn’t in, so I stupidly went tramping up some old logging road toward what I hoped would be Raven Rock and a real experience of Pine Mountain. But now I couldn’t tell where Raven Rock began and where it ended. The ledge, the crag, just kept going in either direction. Here I am sitting in the “crag-cover’d wild,” not sure if it’s the right crag or some other crag, and all I can think is how much I’d like a grilled cheese sandwich with a pickle. All I can think is, “Jesus, these shoes. These shoes are absolutely ridiculous.”

          I wished I could look around me and name the names of all the plants and geological formations around me. I’d write a poem. I’d savor words like escarpment, chokecherry, kudzu, white pine. That would’ve given me some comfort, I think. I followed the crag southwest looking for its end, but Raven Rock just kept going. I backtracked and followed it northeast, but it still kept going. Sometimes I had to leap across gaps in the crag. Sometimes I had to duck back into the trees—were they white pines?—before I emerged again onto the rock. Eventually I found a shallow cave, but it wasn’t what you think of when you say “cave.” I want to call it a gully, but that’s not right. And neither is gulch, but both are good-sounding words. The cave was a big black V etched into the side of the mountain, a pitched rift in the rock that I had to clamber down about twenty feet to enter. I was surprised not to find trash or graffiti or a blackened circle of ash from an old campfire because you always find that kind of thing in caves like this. It was a perfect place for teenagers to get drunk or high or have sex. But all I found there was a big sleeping box turtle. Had I been on some kind of vision quest, or if I were the kind of person who looked for omens or signs from above, I might have attached some kind of personal significance to the turtle, but it was just a turtle. I patted the turtle shell, and it didn’t do anything. That was good enough for me.

          Not surprisingly, I almost fell while climbing up out of the cave. There was a moment when I knew I would have to let go of one hold to lunge at the roots of a bush—maybe it was a chokecherry?—so I could pull myself up. I thought about that line in The Dharma Bums when the narrator realizes that “it’s impossible to fall off mountains.” I beg to differ. It may have been like cool wild jazz or an angelheaded epiphany for Kerouac bounding down some mountain or other in the Sierra Nevada. But neither jazz nor epiphanies will keep you from smashing your skull on the rocks below, or breaking your leg at least. And then what? Then you’re helpless and hungry with only this completely indifferent turtle to keep you company as you writhe in pain and die alone. I became seized with a quick terror, clinging desperate and frozen to the rock. Maybe all my dreams of falling had been prophetic after all. I was experiencing what you would call “panic,” another lovely word, meaning “pertaining to Pan,” the Greek god of, among other things, mountain wilds. What broke the panic was my own sudden, uncontrollable, and ridiculous laughter. Then Pan loosened his grip inside me, I let go, lunged, and pulled myself up, skull intact. For the Greeks, Pan may have been the erotic half-man-half-goat god of mountain wilds blowing on his pipes. But to me Pan is cool indifference. He’s all turtle.

          Here’s the thing. I didn’t have an epiphany on Pine Mountain, and the experience hardly qualifies me as a naturalist or outdoorsman, much less a “nature writer,” whatever that means. As much as I might admire them, I’m no Barry Lopez, I’m no Aldo Leopold, I’m not even Bear Grylls. I’m too much in my head all the time, thinking, wanting to know the names of things, what they mean, and what might rhyme with kudzu. What I did come to understand, at last, up there on the mountain was that there’s really no such thing as “Raven Rock” because it goes on and on and on, one long crag of cresting and receding limestone that runs the length of the entire mountain. Maybe it juts out more or less here or there. Maybe it disappears into the earth in one place before popping back out in the other. But Raven Rock is Pine Mountain. And Pine Mountain is the Appalachians. And the Appalachians are…Well, you get the point.

          I’ve spent time among other mountains: the Devil’s Path range in the Catskills, some of the Adirondacks, the Berkshires, the Endless Mountains in northeast Pennsylvania. And I could imagine them connected to Raven Rock. But now I live far from the promise of foothill and crag in the vast windy recline of northeast Iowa, in what Michael Martone calls “the flatness,” or more familiarly “the flyover.” People back east ask me how I like it here, and I say it’s all corn and soy and pigs, but it’s also an easy place to live, by which I mean the cost of living, the friendliness of the people, its relatively progressive politics, and other “quality of life” indicators. I think I also mean that Iowa isn’t a fearful place. Sure, we have blizzard, drought, tornado, flood, but there’s no place to fall from, no place to lose your grip, not really. We see things coming, we brace ourselves, we get ready. Iowa is a place untroubled by mountain wilds, where no one seems to panic and it’s easy to be in love, where the deep quiet at night is only matched by how calm and far away the horizon convenes with its sky.

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J.D. Schraffenberger is the assistant editor of the North American Review and the author of a book of poems, Saint Joe’s Passion (Etruscan 2008). His other work appears in Best Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa and is currently at work on a book-length study of the Iowa farmer-poet James Hearst.

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The Litchfields – Lynda Barreto

The Wrong Season for Survival

home movies

Greg Roberts stands behind me with the barrel of his Winchester prodding me forward. He leads me into a hollow before a lava-tube cave[1] where I join my cousins, who are being held there. Standing before the mouth of the cave, we look like prisoners of some giant sea conch, captive adolescent boys armed with high-caliber rifles, assembled here to carry out its evil plan. Dave Borup appears in the entrance, at the edge of the camera’s lens. He stands taller than the rest of us. He has a thick chest for his age and a quarterback’s jaw, so he’s in charge. I am being led here for questioning. Things will get ugly. Borup takes me by the collar and jerks me toward him, where he mouths angry questions down at me. I play tough. He’ll never get a word out of me. I’ve been through this before. Do what you will. I won’t crack. Besides, I know my gang lies in waiting. What follows is a bloodbath.

 “captain I don’t want to kill another man. he ain’t done nothing to me…”[2]

Such scenes, common in my childhood, appeal to what some adolescent psychologists — at least the one who my 14-year old son visited — claim is an “intrinsic fascination for violence and conflict” present in adolescent males. Prior to having children, I would have – quite often did — dispute such gender distinctions. One boy and two girls later, I’m more in agreement. However, more than my predictable acceptance that boys will be boys, I’m struck by our paradoxical relationship to violence. What I know of violence, really know, I learned the day I had to slaughter a steer named Moonshine. I say “had to,” but that’s not really true. The whole thing left me sick, but the part that’s really hard to stomach is that I think I really wanted to do it, wanted the act to validate me, serve as a kind of rite of passage, i.e., killing will make me a man.  So, if that’s true, who taught me this? I could say television or my father or the movies etcetera, but that would only partly be true. So what, then? Why did I kill if I really didn’t want to?

 Growing up with hunting dogs, I‘ve often wondered about the relationship between hunters and their dogs. Some of the most passionate dog-lovers I know are hunters. So, how is it they come to make killing other animals a similar passion? Conversely, how is it that my own son, who backs away the moment a dog bounds toward him—pockets his hands rather than reach to stroke its muzzle — finds the thought of hunting/killing another animal totally repulsive?[3] How is it that when I was 12 I begged my mom to let me sleep in the garage with our Brittany Spaniel, Mando, who had her litter out there, yet in the same year wanted nothing more than to kill a deer, skin and tan its hide, then have my grandmother fashion a hunting vest out of it ?

To expand, how is it that in the 6^th grade I’m moved to tears at the sight of the new kid sitting alone in the cafeteria eating his sad hamburger, but won’t think twice about killing a fellow creature for meat?[4] What kind of species is this — capable of such grotesque contradictions? Naturally, great thinkers have explored these questions for centuries, so my asking it probably seems tired. Then again, second-rate minds don’t have as many answers, so I’ll keep asking.  

suburban arms race

In 1973, my father — already well equipped to hunt anything from small birds to hoofed game — begins collecting a serious cache of weapons. His goal, he claims, is to arm his family — or at least his three boys and maybe a handful of neighborhood kids — and train them to survive in the wild. He brings home handguns and shotguns and high-powered rifles; He buys gun-cases and displays his revolvers and carbines, bolt and lever-action rifles, automatics, pumps, over-and-under barrel shotguns, even a muzzle-loader. He brings home a thirty-ought-six for Robert since, at 15, he is the oldest and can handle its kick.[5]

He brings home twin 30-30 Winchesters for my brother Boz and me. They may not be as powerful as my brother Robert’s gun, but Pop says they’re still big enough to drop a running mule deer at 250 yards. I pick mine up and try to shoulder it. It’s too heavy. I can only hold the barrel up for a few seconds before it dips toward the ground. Pop tells me not to worry, that I’ll grow into it, so I try again. I press the buttstock to my shoulder, hold it steady this time, but I still can’t reach the trigger.

Boxes of ammunition follow. Then scopes and straps and rifle bags. He sets up reloading equipment in the garage — boxes of empty cartridges and primers, bench-top presses, heaps of buckshot and gunpowder stocked in tubes of canvas like sandbags. We look like a regiment of the National Guard, preparing to shore up the flooded levees and hold off looters in the bargain. When asked where it all comes from, Pop tells us he has a “private dealer,” which we’ve learned  means “out of some guy’s trunk in West Oakland.” [6]

Next comes the fishing gear and the endless supplies of canned and dried foods, and gallon jugs of water, bags of oats and flashlight batteries. When my mother asks him what on earth he’s planning, he sums it up in a word: “Survival.” 

survival

Inspired by the naturalist author Euell Gibbons and that famous Grape Nuts commercial, in which he asks, “Ever eat a pine tree?”, my father buys the author’s best-selling Stalking the Wild Asparagus, from which he memorizes the recipes for dozens of edible species. His final inspiration from all this is to take his three sons, my Uncle Rich and his two boys, plus a handful of neighborhood kids into the wilderness for two weeks—without food or their mothers—and teach them to live off the land. He believes it’s his mission in life to expose kids to the wilderness. He says, “Most kids these days don’t get out of their living rooms, away from the boob-tube long enough to even know where their food comes from. Kids today think their food comes out of a can or a box. Now, that’s just nuts.” He begins making this speech regularly at house parties and little-league games. Whenever possible, the talk turns to survival and his planned adventure.

target practice

My brothers and I stand next to the outdoor grill on our backyard patio holding shotguns. Pop has us stand in a straight row, like a firing squad, and take turns shooting at anything that flies. Earlier, he loaded “dummy” rounds for us to shoot, so they won’t travel too far, make much noise, or actually hit anything. Robert shoots first. His gun goes pop when he jerks the trigger, and a fuzzy wad flies and then falls well short of a fluttering bluejay.  We take turns shooting and reloading for a half hour. When there isn’t anything flying, we just raise our barrels and fire into the open sky. Pop says we need to get the feel of our guns. He walks around us adjusting our stances and hand positions. He doesn’t say a lot. He watches us the way someone assessing thoroughbreds might. But if such a drill being performed next to a backyard basketball hoop makes my father out to be a kind of Great-Santini hardass, I’ve mislead you. Pop is most often described by my 5^th-grade friends as “totally mellow,” which is true. He’s not at all the strict, ex-marine type. He had been in the service, the Canadian Air Force allegedly, [7] but he rarely spoke of it. The only evidence of his service was a framed photo of him in a sort of air-force cap that my mom kept on her nightstand. That said, Pop’s calm direction is more like that of a yoga instructor adjusting postures than that of a drill sergeant.

transpeninsular

This isn’t the first wilderness trip we’ve taken. There have been several others, the grandest being our off-road trip across the Baja Peninsula. On that trip, there were 14 of us (4 adults, 10 kids) stuffed into a VW bus, a Willys jeep trailing 3 motorcycles, and a Ford Bronco towing a dune buggy. “Baja,” my father explained at the time, “is the last frontier. It’s like the Wild West was 100 years ago. And we’re going to travel the full 1000 miles without once touching blacktop!”[8]

Today, I would never allow my son to go on any of my father’s adventures. Back then I lived for them. 1974 was a more relaxed time, to be sure. That was before child carseats and bike helmets, when our pregnant mothers drank martinis and chain-smoked Virginia Slims, but I’m still amazed that people who were little more than neighborhood or little-league acquaintances let their kids go with us.   Pop’s ability to make people quickly trust him was his gift.  I’m still not sure what his motive was. Maybe he really did fear that our friends suffered from some form of what today would be diagnosed as Nature-Deficit Disorder. But, the cynic in me doesn’t completely quite buy this.  Pop was too busy running a business and planning trips or taking up hang-gliding or racing hydroplane boats to seriously concern himself with parenting.

Near the beginning of our Baja trip, we spent three days broken down in the border town of Mexicali after the clutch went out in our souped-up VW Microbus. My Uncle Rich and Pop both ran transmission shops, so they could fix anything, anywhere — provided they had the parts, or something out of which to fashion them.[9] Being pre-NAFTA Mexicali, and with no Napa Auto Parts chain in sight, these parts would be a few days. During the three-day waiting period before they arrived, the men, who were busy “fixing” the bus, were rarely seen. The rest of us spent our time either watching Spanish-dubbed episodes of “Kung-Fu” or “Happy Days” in our motel’s lobby, in the bathrooms of our rooms dealing with “Montezuma’s Revenge,” or simply wandering the streets of Mexicali. For some, this was the most memorable part of the trip. And why wouldn’t it be? A Mexican border town in the 70s ranks pretty high on the scale of exotica. To begin with, you could buy anything—fireworks, switchblades, Chinese fighting stars, all sorts of handmade toys and puppets. And food — sweets galore, and chicle, and tamales, roasted fish on a stick. Mike Higgins, who was 15, walked right into a bar and bought a six-pack of Dos Equis, which he drank with Robert. After sharing the beer, they got mugged while trying to buy something (they wouldn’t tell). They lost all their money and the new pair of platform shoes my brother had just bought. Two kids ended up in the emergency room getting stitched up after falling into a construction ditch — or so they claimed. My cousin, Joe (13), spent a night in a holding-cell for stealing a golfcart.

So while the men took their food, drink, and entertainment down at the Mexicali Rose Cantina, where they caught whopping hangovers and god knows what else, we ate all our meals from street-vendors — which left most of us sick for the rest of the trip — and nearly lost fingers playing with our freshly-purchased switchblades and blowing off cherry-bombs. I don’t know if it was a conscious parental strategy or neglect. I suspect the latter, though it taught me a thing or two. I learned how to swing nunchucks like Bruce Lee, and why it’s sometimes important to boil water.

After three days, the men emerged from the cantinas and fixed the clutch. Then they paid the doctors’ bills, bailed out my cousin, and bought us all half-gallon jugs of Milk of Magnesia.

survival preparations

I pull open the top drawer of the tool box and fish out the ratchet. Then I find the socket, snap it on the end of the tool and hand it to Pop. “I don’t understand,” I ask. “Why don’t they join the Boy Scouts then? They do wilderness stuff.”

 I’m helping Pop put air shocks on the van and complaining about his inviting half the neighborhood to come with us on our survival trip.

“It’s not the same.”

“Why not?”

“The Scouts are okay, but they don’t really fend for themselves,” he says. “Everything’s done for them, you know, and everything’s prepared—food, campsite, firewood. Nothing’s at stake.” He removes the bolt from the upper shock mount and sets it in a red cloth rag.

“Pop?”

“Yeah?”

“Could we really starve to death out there?”

“Naw, we’ll be alright?

“But we could?”

“I suppose. Look, sometimes you need to test your limits, that’s all. This is one of those times. We’re going into the wilderness to test our limits, find out if we can survive.”

I stare up at the van’s undercarriage and think of all the ways I’d rather not be tested, how it might be nice to camp out like the Boy scouts, build fires with twigs and flint, roast marshmallows, sing songs.

“What would that be like?” I say.

“What would what be like?”

“You know, to not have food — to go a long time without it?”

“You mean to starve to death? How should I know?”

“Have you ever been hungry before — I mean starving hungry?”

He takes a slow drag of his Marlboro and looks at me. He doesn’t usually stop in the middle of doing something. He doesn’t usually stop to look at me. It’s awkward, but I like it.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve been real hungry before.”

“But you didn’t starve?”

“I’m here aren’t I? Now quit being morbid. Give me that.” I roll that floor-jack over to him, and he pushes it under the bumper. “We’re going to pump this thing up.”

I watch him. He places the jack’s lift plate under the van’s frame and steadies it with one hand. His other hand reaches for the handle of the jack. He begins to pump. All the while he whistles through his teeth. The vehicle rises effortlessly, I think, with such ease.

departure. reno

On the night of our departure, Pop gathers us together to explain our plan. It’s pretty straightforward. We trek into the Modoc wilderness without store-bought food.[10] We’ll be equipped only with camp-gear, guns and ammunition, fishing rigs and the basic cooking utensils. We’ll also each be allowed one canteen of fresh water and a bag of sunflower seeds. We’d load everything into and on top of our modified 1971 VW Campervan; then, we drive to the edge of the wilderness, as far as the dirt roads would take us; from there, we hike deep into this remote area and camp for 10 days; once our vehicle crosses from asphalt to dirt, we will not be allowed to eat or drink anything that we don’t personally gather, pick, trap or kill.  

Our California/Nevada wilderness trips always began with a stop in Reno. This trip is no different. In Reno, the men would stuff us with all-you-can-eat buffet food; then leave us parked in the van to sleep it off while they hit the casinos. As soon as the men were out of sight, we’d emerge from the van, head for the streets of Reno and, basically, relive Mexicali. Of course, Reno has casinos, so we run in and out of them sneaking coins in slot machines and finishing half-drunk cocktails. After harassing waitresses and getting chased by casino security guards for a few hours, we’d return to the van and crash as though nothing happened.

I’m awake and sitting in the driver’s seat when the men return from the casino. We are in the parking garage of Harrah’s. My Uncle’s watch, which is always slow, reads 4:00 am. He and my father support the large frame of our neighbor, Mr. Roberts, who is stumbling drunk. He is drunk and he isn’t wearing his glasses. I’ve never before seen him without his glasses. They swing open the van’s double doors and push him in. Sleeping boys groan and wiggle as he clambers over their ankles and slumps his enormous body down, closes his eyes and groans.

My father sits in the driver’s seat and eyes me in the rear view mirror. “You awake, Kid?” I nod.  “Get up here, then.” He pats the top of the cooler that rides between the van’s bucket seats. I tiptoe over the sleeping bodies and position myself in front, between my father and uncle.

“Tell us one of your stories, Nephew,” my uncle says. He reaches under his seat for the thermos. “We could use some entertainment to keep us awake.” He twists open the lid of the thermos and fills its handled cup. “Make some noise for us. C’mon.” He takes a sip and grimaces. Then he gives it to me to pass to my father. “Alright, start talking.”

For the next several hours, I stare at the lights cutting through the darkness and, in between fetching fresh beers from the cooler, I talk. I tell them about a dream in which I fall asleep near a river and am swallowed by a snake. At the end of the dream I’m transformed into “my spirit animal,” the snake.

My uncle turns toward me and laughs. “Spirit animal? Is that what you said? How much of that beer you been drinking, Nephew? Give that to me.” He jerks the can from my hand and shakes it to check its weight. “A snake, huh? Is that what they call a wet dream these days?” He laughs again, but I don’t get it. He takes a long drink and empties his can. “So is that like your Indian name, Nephew? What do we call you, Slippery Snake? How about just Snake, Snake-in-the-Grass.”

Pop always drives on these trips cause he doesn’t sleep much. He says that the late-late night hours are special. “It’s when you get to experience what no one else is willing to wait for. That’s when the best discoveries are made,” he says. So I stay up too. I don’t know if I’ve made any discoveries yet, not like a pot of gold or anything, but I like how the road looks in the darkness, how it grows narrow and the terrain more flat and desert-like. Occasionally a pygmy rabbit darts across the blacktop. I count them. It feels like time is standing still, and I don’t want it to start up again. I worry about time passing, the world moving along without me. I feel that I belong here with the men, and want to stay up late with them every night, so I won’t miss out on this. The road seems to form itself before us as we drive, as if our headlights are the source of the land’s formation. Everything beyond our vision is just dead space, frozen time, waiting for our illumination to give it its shape.

setting out

Near dawn, we pull onto a dirt road and rattle over a cattle guard. My father pulls the van onto a turnout and shuts down the engine. My uncle snores with his head against his folded hands on the passenger window. Pop tells me to climb in the back and get some shuteye. “We set out in two hours,” he says. “We’ll need a little rest. And take down one of those blankets. It’s getting cold. Look.” He points to the windshield on which fall the first flakes of pre-dawn snow.

A few hours later, Pop’s voice cries out to wake us. I’m shivering. I tried to find a blanket, but with everyone stuffed together and sleeping, I couldn’t get to them. Several of the boys are huddled tight against the carpeted floor trying to get warm. Mr. Roberts lies on his back with his arms spread wide. His large body has forced most of us to seek out the corners of the van. He snores on, while the gangly boys unfold their limbs and stretch themselves awake. When Pop swings the van doors open, they are bolted to life by the image of the land before them—a white open valley blanketed with fresh-fallen snow.

When it comes to smuggled food Pop means business. He makes us unload all the gear, and he gathers the boys in a line with our backpacks and sleeping bags. “Okay,” he says, rubbing his hands together, “Before we set out, we need to check the weight on those packs. No extra crap, got it?” The boys look at each other and smile. Pop starts with my brother Robert’s pack and finds a trove of Lipton’s Instant Soup and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which Pop dumps in a brown paper bag. My brother eyes me like the snitch I am.

“Now, the sleeping bag and tents,” he says. “Unroll and unpack. Real light and tight. Nothing dangling. We’ll be crossing creeks, and the last thing you’ll want is a wet bag, trust me.”  The search of my brother’s sleeping bag elicits dozens of candy bars, a bag of licorice ropes and two canisters of Pringles. By the time he finishes his inspection of our gear, he fills four bags with enough canned and snack food to supply the small, shiftless army we are. None of the other boys will talk to me for the rest of the day.  Free of such contraband myself, I stand in a smug posture during Pop’s search of my gear—a search he made only to show that out in the wild there is no such thing as a favorite.

After several failed attempts to wake the sleeping Tom Roberts, he finally succumbs to our badgering and the cold air. He exits the van and wobbles. “Whoa,” he says. “I think I’m still loaded. Are we here or what?” We laugh at him. He then hurries to the other side of the van where he spends several minutes on his knees throwing up on a bush. His sons search for a camera, also laughing. When he finishes, he looks much better, a little cheerful even. “I’m ready,” he says. “If I can survive Reno, I can survive anything. Let’s go!” He puts on his pack, but refuses to carry a gun. Everyone else carries either a rifle or a shotgun. Pop shoulders his deer rifle, a Weatherby 270 Magnum with a power scope. He also wears a belt with a holster that carries a Smith and Wesson 38 Special. After weeks of pestering, Pop has agreed to let me carry the 30-30, even though I can still hardly raise the barrel to shoot. My gun, like those of our entire band of boys, is fully loaded.

jeremiah johnson made his way into the mountains

As a boy I idolize two people: my father and Jeremiah Johnson. In a way, both are characters loosely based on real people — Robert Redford’s Jeremiah is inspired by the legendary mountain man/Crow killer, Liver-Eating Johnson[11]; Pop is a sort of composite character built from an assortment of Hemingway heroes crossed with Steve McQueen. I see them as one in the same, and I even have a poster of Redford’s character in my bedroom. When Jeremiah builds a log cabin with his bare hands, I asked my mother if I can cut down her pine tree in the backyard to build a fort. When he hunts down and kills the Crows who murdered his family, I scan the picket fences of our neighbors’ yards in pursuit of their buck-skin faces. When he makes love to the beautiful Indian squaw after they present one another with fresh kills, I spend a week bent over in the deep grass of the surrounding fields stalking quail with a slingshot.

Ironically, when I stare at my own face in the mirror I ignore its Indian features—the dark skin and eyes, those high-set cheekbones—and search instead for signs of my father’s, Jeremiah’s. 15 years later I will hike the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico and stare in fascination at all of the faces that resemble mine, faces that will stare back, or so it seems, in a kind of distant recognition. As a boy, I don’t acknowledge the similarities between my face and the faces of those phantom Indian warriors who I dream, like the movie Jeremiah, of retributively slaughtering.

modoc county national forest

Modoc County is a high-desert wilderness tucked in the northeast corner of California and bordered by Nevada to the east and Oregon to the north. The lowlands are strewn with the aforementioned lava beds, rough grasses and sage meadows. Encircling the rolling sagebrush are pine-covered mountain bluffs with thick groves of aspen and juniper. The high-bluff mesas reach 10,000 feet in elevation, while lowland meadows rest at roughly 4,500. It is vast country, a place whose county motto reads, “Where the West Still Lives.” A place where the Indian wars raged, and where the kind of blood I dream of spilling did just that. The famous Modoc chief, Captain Jack,[12] held up there. Of course, we don’t know any of this as we hike over those same lava plains in the early morning. We are too busy trying to keep up with Pop, who leads the way, searching for an enclave of our own, a place to bed down his grumbling band of men and boys.

I follow close behind Pop all through the hike.  I always hike near the front, next to my father who always leads. My uncle walks at the rear of the pack and takes movies with the Super 8. He keeps the boys’ spirits up telling jokes and making fun of my father. He has a paradoxical relationship with Pop. He both follows and criticizes everything he does. My uncle is the only one in our family from the east coast — New Jersey. He has an accent that I imagine to be the same as those Bowery Boys in the movies ’cause he has that same smart-ass way of talking to people. The other kids follow his lead, but they make fun of me instead — make fun of how I follow Pop, try to be the little man. “Look, he’s a little Lee,” they say, pointing and laughing, “only dark brown.” 

Hibernation

No one expected winter. The snow, beautiful at first, quickly loses its luster after slogging through it all morning. We follow Pop who is deaf to our complaints. He shoulders his rifle and trudges ahead purposefully. I follow him as close as I can but it’s a struggle. The snow turns to freezing rain, then to heavy rain by mid day, which turns everything to muck. It’s like walking through pancake batter in snow shoes. We slip and fall, covering our clothes with thick streaks of lava-red mud till we look like we’ve been war-painted. By the time we find a suitable camp, a well-sheltered place next to a running stream, we’re exhausted, shivering and in a foul mood. Aside from some deer droppings and the crows, there are few signs of life. Nothing moves beyond the shimmering Aspen. Modoc County may be “Where the West still lives,” but apparently little else does.

“We’ve picked a bad time to survive, boys,” my Uncle Rich says, and as much as I hate to agree with him, he’s right. It’s still winter here. It may be warm and Spring-like in the Bay Area, but in Modoc it’s freezing cold and snowing and NOTHING IS GROWING! Pop’s diligent plan — namely stockpiling — overlooked the obvious: it’s the wrong season for survival. We are apparently the only life forms inhabiting Modoc County. “It’s like the place is hibernating,” Robert says. “What are we going to eat?”

hunger pains

            “I’m hungry,” Everyone seems to say at once.  Day three of our survival trip begins the same as the previous two — with empty stomachs. Before the rest of us got up, Pop ventured out and found a patch of mustard greens and shot two grey squirrels. So our breakfast this morning is a kind of squirrel stew with greens and instant rice that Pop cooks over the fire in a pressure-cooker. I’m the only kid who will eat it. After yesterday’s lunch of fried catfish and wild mushrooms — a lunch my brother Boz threw up after eating — the others settle for their sunflower seeds, or rip open the linings of their jackets for the last of the candy bars their mothers have sewn into them.

            Pop gathers us around the fire and tells us to pair up and search the surrounding area for edible food. He shows us photos from the Gibbon’s book of some plants and berries and mushrooms to look for. “The mushrooms are real good at hiding, so you have to look close for them,” he tells us. “If you see any fallen trees or stumps, look on the backsides of them. Don’t eat anything until you bring it back here and let me see it, alright?”

“Right. like stuff can actually grow out here,” Robert says.

            “There’s food out here.” Pop tells him. “You just have to look. Brush away the snow and look beyond the surface.” He pointed to both his temples. “Think like a plant.”

At this statement, my uncle hands me a folded G.I. shovel and tells me to go dig for something to eat. Then he turns to Pop, “Go easy on the Flower-Power, Grover.[13] Save it for Snake, here. He’ll tune in to that plant energy, won’t you, Snake in the Grass?” I grab the shovel from him and promise myself never to tell my uncle another story. “Okay, everyone,” my uncle continues, “our wilderness leader wants us to gather some flowers. Better get moving before we starve.”

Robert

Thinking back on it — it wasn’t really planned well. People who do that stuff —stay out in the wilderness — don’t go out there with no food at all. They’d bring corn or something, some sort of staple, right? He brought a bag of sunflower seeds and a box of mashed potatoes for like 11 people! Maybe if you’re in the military, the Special Forces, you’d train for it, go see if you can survive in the wilderness, but we were like the Lost Boys. I wasn’t even driving yet. I couldn’t have been more than 13, maybe 14. You were what, nine years old? But he was always doing stuff like that. He had so much confidence in our ability to  survive anything. Remember Baja? Think about it. He took a bunch of neighborhood kids on this like 2500 mile journey across Baja in what, 1975? That was like the wild west back then. I mean, you’ll never see Baja like that again. We had that dune buggy and the jeep and those dirt bikes, and it was all fair game. Whoever felt like driving just got behind the wheel.  You weren’t even tall enough to reach the foot pegs on the Kawasaki. We used to hold you upright and just have you gas it. I would never let my kids go on a trip like that.  And that survival trip when he handed everyone a loaded gun? We talk about that all the time. We can’t believe we’re still alive. It wasn’t the wilderness; it’s a miracle we survived each other.

great-white hunter

“Well, I guess we were wrong about him. That Snake, he sure does know his way around the mountains. Why, just look at the size of the rack on that buck! We have him to thank for our bounty tonight, boys! Let’s hear it for The Kid, shall we?” They repeat their praises as they pass thick slices of the roasted venison I’ve provided.

In my mind, this is how I replay the scene. It is our sixth night surviving. Everyone is cold and hungry and wants to leave. I do too, but I won’t admit it.  I lie awake, the bottom of my sleeping bag resting in a pool of water, and I imagine this scene. In my fantasy, I have saved everyone from starvation by killing a big buck.

The next morning, I wake before dawn, get my rifle and set out. Pop says that the bucks like to bed down in the aspen groves, so I hike in their direction. It’s light by the time I reach them. Their long, beech-white trunks are spotted with black flecks. They remind me of the gangly legs of a foal I once saw being born — the trunks disproportionately long compared to their leafy tops, which sit umbrella-like on their bases. The leaves, mustard yellow, flicker like fishing lures. I stand looking at them when something flashes in the corner of my eye. It is white, whatever it is, and has moved into a copse of scrub oaks. I’m pretty sure it’s a white-tail deer. Approaching the trees I spot him, a buck? Maybe, though he blends into the trees, so I’m not sure if I’m seeing horns or tree limbs. My heart pounds. Then I see it move again, deeper into the forest. The closer I get, the faster he moves, until he just stops, freezes like a backyard target-deer. I plant my feet and slowly raise my rifle.

buck fever

I try to set the buck’s shoulder in the front sight of my gun, but I’m shaking. He keeps bobbing in and out of my line of fire. Pop says to go for the shoulder. The neck is better, he told me, but it’s a riskier shot. “Whatever you do,” I hear him saying to me, “Don’t gut-shoot him. A gut-shot and he’s gone. You’ll never see him again. Wastes everything.”

I take a deep breath and hold it, but my head swims till I have to sit down. I feel like everything is closing in around me, like the time Robert locked me in a closet and I panicked, nearly breaking the door down before he let me out. I place my head between my legs, breath slowly, curse myself for wasting a good kill. When I stand up, I see that the buck is still there, just browsing as though nothing’s happened. I shoulder my rifle, steady my hands till the buck comes into my sights and stays put. I reach out as far as I can until my finger finds the trigger.

Ten minutes later, I’m still watching the buck. I raise and lower my rifle. Raise it. Lower it. The third time I do this, I hear a shot. I look around but don’t see anyone. I turn back toward the buck. He’s still there, browsing. If he fears a predator in the wild, it is someone other than me. Just then, I hear three successive shots fired a ways off. I know it is Pop, signaling for me to get my ass back to camp. I know he’ll be mad as hell, give me a lecture, tell me how I screwed up big time, and put our survival at risk. He’ll be right. When I turn back the buck is gone, off into the thicket of trees and out of sight.

Absorbed in thoughts of self-loathing for not being able to pull the trigger, I don’t pay attention to my path and get lost while hiking back to camp. Somehow I’ve walked in circles for like two hours. Nothing looks familiar. Pop says that if we get lost, stay put. I don’t want to stay put. I feel like I should keep moving or I’ll never get back. I don’t want to be out here anymore.  Not lost in the wilderness, not out here trying to survive, not eating squirrel meat and weeds. I want to be home and warm.

 When I am afraid, I sleep. So that’s what I do. I walk to the base of an oak tree, curl up, go to sleep gripping my rifle. My hope is that I can sleep away the time while the others look for me, and when I wake up, everything will be okay. Sure, Pop will be mad, but then he’ll tell me how relieved he is, how frightened he was when he discovered I was lost and alone out here.

Pop wakes me without a word. Robert is with him. He looks at me with disgust. Pop doesn’t say a word beyond “get up, let’s go.” We hike back to camp in a whimper.

home movies 2

The shooting begins. Bodies succumb to their wounds, fall and then quietly lift themselves back to life. We are like Terminator Boys, whose wounds heal themselves. Our deaths, transient — we grasp chests, necks, stomachs, we die —then we get back up and start shooting again. My brother, Boz, takes a bullet in the gut and crumbles like a sack. He mouths, “You got me!” Incredulous. How has it come to this?  He lies still, no sound.  We watch him. It is eerily quiet — not even a projector’ s whir. Our expelled breaths the only soundtrack.[14]

mudhens[15]

We hike across meadows and through lava-crested hills until we reach Blue Lake. We stand on the marshy shores and unpack the fishing gear. Another problem with surviving here has been all the rain. Rains have left the streams muddied, and the water rushes thick, like rivers of creamed blood. Bad for fishing, worse for drinking. From the shore, some of the boys cast lines out anyway. Greg Roberts and I collect cattails, apparently edible.

My uncle takes a few shots at some geese flying overhead, but they are well out of range and he knows it. Desperate, he and my father start shooting mud hens. These birds mostly just sit out in the water, like black decoys. Occasionally they will dive below the surface. When one is shot, the flock-mates (if that’s what they are called), rather than flying off, dive to the bottom only to resurface half a minute later to be shot themselves. They are like those ducks in an arcade shooting-gallery. In the end, Uncle Rich and Pop kill seven, but without a dog we have no way to retrieve them. Not wanting to get soaked, Pop has us throw rocks out beyond the floating birds until they bob to shore.

robert

I remember the preparations for the trip. That guy, Euell Gibbons, was a big thing and Pop had that book — How to Eat Wild Dandelions or something like that. He was always into that stuff anyway, trying to survive off the land and all that. When I was packing, well, I knew I was going to starve to death. He actually went through our backpacks to make sure we didn’t sneak in any food, but I snuck a bunch of Cup-of-Soups in my mess-kit. That one night—I think it was like the sixth night there — he came to me and asked me for my mess-kit. He knew that I had snuck it in. I figured you had told him cause you were so gung-ho and all, his little big man.  But then he took it and put it into the stew with those ducks he shot and the food Uncle Rich snuck. I mean, at that point, he knew he needed to feed us something. The kids were really starting to complain a lot. Some were pretty sick.  Tom Roberts had passed out some candy to the kids that afternoon that his wife had sewed into the lining of his jacket. Thank God for that food we snuck. That’s all I can say.

We all had our fishing poles, but the river was a mess if you remember. We couldn’t fish, so we had nothing. It looked like the Muddy Mississippi. That’s what everyone kept saying.  We had no food. The first night we ate those squirrels. Well some of us did. A few of the kids wouldn’t touch ‘em. After that, we had those fucking dandelions and that sour duck he shot, but that was a total disaster.

So, that last night, he put the ducks and potatoes and my Cup-of-Soups in that big pressure cooker (you remember that one he always used?) right on the open fire, to make a stew out of it. We were all just starving at that point. We joked about how we were going to cut up our boots and cook the leather to eat. So that duck and soup was smelling real good. And then the pressure cooker started whistling, like a teapot, so we knew it had to be close.  We all had our bowls held out just waiting.

Then it blew up! Everything. Sky high. Blew the lid clean off the pot. The relief valve was bad or something, so there went our precious stew flying into the trees. I don’t think it was going to go far enough around to begin with, but when that happened, I remember everyone holding there bowls out trying to catch whatever dripped down from the limbs. It was pretty pathetic. Some of the kids just laughed, but it wasn’t really the funny kind of laugh. I sure didn’t think it was funny. There was still some left in the pot, some scraps of meat and broth, but I was fed up. I just threw my bowl down and went to bed.

It was a miserable night. It rained so hard. The men went to the big tent to drink and sleep, but we had those one-man pup tents that you couldn’t quite fit into. We pretty much slept in standing water. I actually slept pretty good because I think Steve and I had gotten new sleeping bags, so we were dry and warm compared to some of you guys. You must have been pretty miserable.

father, hunger

From inside their tent, the men laugh about it, but they have their wine to warm their bellies. I have nothing, just an empty bowl and a wet bed to turn to. I stand next to the dying embers of the fire, looking up into the trees, where scraps of meat and broth still hang from wet limbs. A pathetic survivor, I hold my bowl upward imagining some scrap of meat or bone will fall down to fill me up. The voices of the men lift into the darkness in a drone, like one long laugh-track. I think of those Boy Scouts Pop scoffs about, and wonder what they’re eating on this night, if they’re roasting hotdogs or marshmallows, if they’re all together—scouts and leaders, boys and their fathers—singing camp-songs around the fire. Wherever they are, I imagine their bellies are warm, their bowls filled to the brim.

leaving the wilderness

The following morning Pop tells us we are breaking camp and heading out. I act like I’m really upset about it, but no one buys it. They know I’m as miserable as everyone else. Even though I feel guilty, like my getting lost is the reason we have to quit, I want it to be over like everyone else. Well, everyone but Pop.

We hike out and reach the bus at about noon. It’s still raining hard. Everything is caked with red lava mud — our shoes weigh a ton, and our pant legs and jackets are soaked and covered with streaks of mud where we’ve slid face down under strands of barbed wire or fallen during the hike back. Our packs, tents and sleeping bags are like everything else about us — heavy.

We climb in the van and over each other and fall in a messy heap wherever we can.  Our biggest worry now is that our confiscated food will be ruined. “If it is soaked,” Greg Roberts said, “I’m going break into the first store we get to and steal every bag of chips in the place. I’ll stuff my pockets and run.” Everyone adds their own story of desperation, the lengths to which they’ll go to steal and gorge on food. My uncle yells, “Take it easy boys. Tonight we’re going to eat steak dinner. We’ll eat like kings.” Pop starts the van and jambs it into gear. At last we are leaving the wilderness.

            Within a half a mile, however, the trouble starts. The road, caked with the same thick red mud that clings to us, is like a sheet of ice. We lose traction on the first hill we attempt. Less than halfway up, we stall.

Every groaned.

Pop attempts to rock it back and forth, and to regain momentum, but it’s no use. We are stuck.  “Bail out everyone. We need to push!” he yells.

“I can’t believe this,” my brother said. “It’s like survival takes forever.”

It takes nearly an hour, but eventually we get unstuck. When we reach the paved road it’s nearly dark. From there, we drive until we come to a little gas station where we all jump out and buy loads of candy and chips and soda. We stuff our faces, so by the time we get to a restaurant, most of the kids are nauseous. Our stomachs are shocked by the food, the rush of salt and sugar.  After that, we drive up to this reservoir near Truckee and camp a few miles from the highway. By now, we have stores of food. We have big Styrofoam coolers iced down and filled with eggs and bacon and beer and soda. We eat greasy fried breakfasts, fat cheeseburgers and baked potatoes for dinner.

Home

When we get home a few days later, the moms have this grand feast waiting for us. They expect us to be these walking skeletons. We are far from starving by that point. We sit at the table and stare at the kind of spread we’d all fantasized about just a few days before: pot roast, broiled pork chops, chicken and dumplings, real mashed potatoes and gravy, artichoke casseroles. There are a lot of leftovers that night — more than enough to survive two weeks in the wilderness.

[2] Dave Simonett, Trampled by Turtles, “When I Come Back Again,” Songs from a Ghost Town.

[3] It is.

[4] Not sure if it was the boy or the burger that saddened me.

[5] The first time my brother fires the weapon, the recoil leaves a dark bruise on his shoulder and a half-moon scar on the bridge of his nose where the scope whacked him. Truth is, most of his memories of shooting/hunting with my father are troubling. At ten, he witnessed a friend of Pop’s accidently shoot and kill his (the friend’s) Brittany Spaniel while hunting pheasant. The following year, also while pheasant hunting, a shotgun blast fired too close to my brother’s head left him with a deafening ring. The incessant noise lasted for months.  Years later, he claims to at times still hear it and to suffer from a 70% hearing loss.

[6]Don’t really want to engage in the whole Truth-in-Memoir debate here, but I’m pretty sure that my brothers and I knew nothing then of black-market arms dealers. We’d learn about that soon enough. At the time, Robert probably responded with a roll of his eyes, which I likely interpreted to mean, “holy smokes!” I was the youngest and Pop’s staunchest follower, not yet capable of my brother’s cynicism.  

[7] I only recently found out that Pop served in the Canadian Air Force, rather than the U.S. Air Force as we had believed for like 40 years.

[8] Our planned route was the same as the one blazed by racers in the Baja 1000, the famous 1000-mile off-road race.  Due to difficulties (car repairs, illnesses/injuries, loss of direction, etc.) we were often forced back on to paved roads.  Although, nothing in 1974, mid-peninsular Baja could really be called paved.

[9] While on a four-wheel drive expedition through the Rubicon in Desolation Valley, my father used the belt from his pants to secure a broken leaf spring. Later, on the same trip, he removed the engine hood, so my uncle could sit on the front fender and manually work the carburetor’s linkage (essentially, work the gas) after breaking the throttle cable. We traveled over 60 miles off road in this fashion. There are more—too many—similar episodes I could relate.

[10] We later find out Pop brings powdered milk instant rice, “Just for flavor.” The men also had liquor, wine and at least two cartons of  Marlboros.

[11] A year earlier, Pop killed a big buck while hunting in Modoc. While field-dressing it, he removed the liver and held it in his cupped hands as though it were a rare stone, then handed it to me as an offering. “That’s what we’ll be eating tonight,” he told me. I gulped.

 [12] Captain Jack, along with 55 Modoc warriors, held off 500 U.S. army soldiers, fortressing themselves in the famous lava tubes that blanket the plains. It took a siege of over 1000 soldiers to force the Modocs, weakened by starvation, to surrender. Captain Jack was later tried and sentenced to death by the US Government for the murder of General Canby. He was hanged on October 3 rd 1873. His head was later shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution where it remained until 1984 when decedents of Captain Jack removed it from the desk of an unnamed scientist who was using the skull as a paperweight.

[13] Pop’s legal first name.  My Uncle rich is the only one who ever calls him this. To everyone else he’s “Lee,” his middle name.

[14] Robert has all the old Super 8 movies of our trips transferred to videotape in 1999.

[15] Also known as coots, mud hens are mostly black (thus their name) birds that inhabit swamps and marshes. They have short wings, long legs, and big feet which make them poor flyers and easy targets. They are not generally eaten — on a culinary par with the squirrel.

___________________________________

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Mark Montgomery now lives in Central New York , where he teaches in the English Department at Cayuga Community College.  He has a Ph.D. in English from SUNY-Binghamton.  This work is part of his forthcoming memoir, which explores the complex relationships between fathers and sons, particularly the challenges faced when dealing with his son, who has Tourette’s syndrome.

What Would Rachel Do?

I wonder how Rachel Carson would look in lycra.

These are the kinds of thoughts I have when out on a ride in the north Pennsylvania hills where I live and teach. Usually, such thoughts occur near the top of a tough climb, when the oxygen goes to my legs instead of my brain.

Today, I’m heading west on Cherry Flats Road, mashing the pedals of my steel and carbon fiber road bike up a steep grade, sucking wind, and marveling at the lime green leaves emerging from the hardwoods scattered on the north-central Pennsylvania hills. It’s been a long winter, and I’m enjoying riding my bike without multiple layers and freezing digits. After the climb, my breathing slows and I’m settling into a moderate pace when my gaze is jerked upward by splash of black against the sky. I see a raptor—an osprey, I think—winging toward me about 70’ above a small pond. I watch, transfixed, as the bird wheels 180 degrees, rises slightly, and plunges toward the water. As the osprey dives, I hear myself saying “oh, oh, oh,” then “boom!” when the bird hits the water. I realize that my hands are above my head, as if I have just won a stage of the Tour de France, while the raptor rises out of the water and wings south. I turn my head to follow its path and see water streaming off its wings. Too surprised to think about stopping, I face forward again and find that I’ve veered toward the yellow lines. No big deal. No cars anywhere nearby. Grabbing the bars, I steer toward the edge of the road as I replay what I saw in my mind. The glance, the focus, the turn, the plunge—I was shocked and awed, though probably not as much as the fish that nearly got nicked.

I’m fortunate that I live and work in this part of Pennsylvania. Though I don’t see ospreys fishing on every bike ride, I see animals and birds in greater numbers than I’ve seen elsewhere. I see deer, beavers, groundhogs, bobcats, turkeys, hawks, bald eagles, barn swallows, cedar waxwings, red-winged blackbirds, bobolinks, and killdeer. One recent ride, I saw the youngest fawn I had ever seen trot across the road in front of me. I’m always wowed by these encounters, and they have become a welcome aspect of my rides, in part because they remind me that there’s so much life out there.

I also ride my bike because it gives me space to think about teaching. I teach composition and environmental literature at Mansfield University, a small public university a few miles north of where I saw the osprey. And one of the things I ponder most as I ride are ways of capitalizing on this “wow” factor in my class on environmental literature (comp, too, to a lesser extent). For environmental literature, I assign Thoreau, Susan Fennimore Cooper, Leopold, Beston, Carson, Abbey, Hogan, Gessner—the usual suspects (well, except maybe for Gessner, but I’ve got a weak spot for essays about pissing outside). There are always a few of my students, usually from the sciences or English, who devour the texts and write essays that reflect awe and understanding when looking at nature. They get the “wow” factor—in the texts and outside of them—and it changes the way they think. These students get the idea that we need to care for the places where we live, and we need to do it now. But there are many more that don’t appear to care, and those are the ones that I carry with me most on my rides. It’s not that they don’t think there are problems with our treatment of and attitudes toward the environment. They do. And it’s not from a lack of contact with nature. Tioga County is rural. Local schools close on the opening day of deer season, farms dot the hillsides and valleys, and bears wander through campus during exam week. Many students eat off the farm. Many are intimate with land and animals in ways I never have been. But they don’t seem overly concerned about environmental problems. They just want to become better writers—at least, that’s what they say in my class anyway—and they want a degree and a job.

  Enroll these students in a small university working to distinguish itself as Pennsylvania’s public liberal arts school, and the pedagogical issues get interesting. How does an English professor teach these students the value of a liberal education and the need to think critically and draw on multiple disciplines to solve problems like global warming? As I mull that question, the first thought that comes to mind is: I don’t. That’s a huge burden to put on one class, and the best I can do is help students find their own way into this perspective. These are students who, like me, didn’t grow up questioning authority as much as acquiescing to it, taking the written or spoken word at face value. A liberal education, however, asks students to look for ways to ask hard questions of one’s self and the public, and it insists that we discuss environmental concerns and the need for public action. But this is a difficult thing to do when you’re worried about passing your classes and making it to your job on time. My students want good jobs close to home, and they want to start families. The environment can take care of itself. So, I’m always wondering about ways to get them to buy into the idea that education is about more than getting a job, more than going through the motions and walking across the stage. I spend a lot of time on my bike thinking about this issue, and I have two main questions. One: How do I get students who grow up in families that are not predisposed toward liberal education (or any education, really) to understand the all-encompassing importance of it? Two: How can I stop being so damn serious about it? If I were one of those students and I heard me babbling about the importance of liberal education, caring for self by caring for the public, blah, blah, I’d run straight toward the nearest bar.

  “Damn straight,” a voice blurts behind me, and I turn to see David Gessner pedaling up beside me on an old Cannondale while Rachel Carson slides her Raleigh into our draft.  

“Do you always talk to yourself when you ride?” he pants.

Gessner wears a beer jersey and baggy shorts, his hair unruly in the wind. Sweat drips off his nose. Carson wears a wool jersey and shorts and a slight smile. In contrast to Gessner’s, her hair ripples calmly.

“Now, David, don’t get into one of your moods.” Carson says. “Don’t you want to help this young man answer his questions?”

We ride by the spring where I often stop for water. Maybe that climb was steeper than I thought. The road rises slightly and my breathing deepens. So does Gessner’s. Tucked in behind us, Carson appears to be riding effortlessly. It doesn’t hurt that she probably weighs thirty or forty pounds less. But I’m willing to trade a draft for some answers.

The road levels and Carson pulls between us. Gessner and I catch our breath.

“OK,” I ask, “what do y’all think?”

“About what?” Gessner replies. Carson begins to speak, but Gessner continues. “Being earnest is a buzz kill. Relax. Have fun. Beware serious conferences, serious people, and serious talks about nature.”

“But I enjoy those serious conferences and serious people and serious talks about nature,” I reply, while Carson nods in agreement. “I can’t help but be serious when I think about the way that my university sells itself as this public liberal arts school when the students who come here have no idea what the liberal arts are all about. They grow up in families like mine—working class, little understanding of the way colleges work. They sense education is important—at least, some do—but they have no idea what it means to make education and learning a part of every single facet of your life.” Gessner starts to speak, but I raise my hand. “I know, I know, that sounded serious. Earnest even. Ugh.” I look up the road, a bit frustrated because I can’t even articulate clearly what I’m trying to say.

“There’s you answer,” Carson offers and points to the white back of a bobolink zooming low over a field. We all look, freewheels ticking, as the R2D2-like bloops and burbles cascade over our eardrums. The bird swoops left in a low arc and settles on a stalk of hay. It’s one of those “wow” moments.

“But that’s so cliché,” Gessner responds. “Cool, but cliché.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “I love seeing those things myself, but I’m not sure that showing my students bobolinks will in any way help them grasp what I want them to. Nor do I think it will help my administration understand just what we are trying to do. Jesus, I sound gloomy. Maybe even whiny.”

“Definitely whiny,” Gessner says.

“Definitely whiny,” I say back.

“You know when I wrote Silent Spring,” Carson begins, “I wasn’t really looking to create that kind of hoopla, but I felt the story had to get out. I had suspected that pesticides were a problem and followed the research, and eventually our carelessness and ignorance just got to be too much. We were not using pesticides well, and those actions masked a deeper problem concerning the way humans viewed the world. That bothered me and motivated me. But there was another motivation, one that might help you here.”

“What’s that?”

Carson looks at me, then away, in time to flick her bike around a chipmunk carcass. She says: “The sense of wonder. The ‘wow’ moment, one might say. I wrote about this, too, a long time ago. I believed then, and still do, that it’s best to enable students, kids, anyone to feel nature, to experience it on a visceral level. That’s probably more important than knowing whether you’ve seen a bobolink or a robin. So the question of how to teach one’s students to appreciate the wow moment is answered in part by getting them outside. And the potential for change there is much greater.”

“Change, smange,” Gessner grumbles. “We’re writers and Jimmy here is a teacher. We don’t have that much of an impact on how kids view nature. We’d have more effect swinging these bicycles at them than showing them bobolinks.”

“I’m not swinging my bike at anybody,” I say. “I don’t want to hurt it.”

“David,” Carson says, “ask yourself how many times someone has taken students outside and given them permission to look and time to do it. You won’t reach everyone. I surely didn’t. But some will enjoy it. They will rekindle an emotional attachment already present or they may being to develop one. The key is to help them feel their connection in the pit of their stomach.”

“This is all well and good, Rachel—it’s ok if I call you Rachel, isn’t it? This is my bike ride and my essay, after all. Anyway, I’m picking up what you are putting down, and I’m liking the way this conversation is justifying the way I teach my environmental lit class by focusing on the different perspectives of nature as presented by the writers. Oddly enough, you and Gessner provoke the most reactions in class. Students get fired up when reading Silent Spring, and I once spent a large portion of class listening to my students wax eloquently about the pleasures of pissing and shitting in the woods after reading ‘Marking My Territory.’ But, and this is a big but, I’m not sure that’s enough. Are you saying I should take my students outside? They’ll love that, I’ll get the rep as the easy prof on campus—you know, we look at trees, that kind of thing—and I’m afraid my students won’t learn anything about the importance of educating themselves. Because, with all due respect, they need knowledge to go along with those feelings. I’d argue that many of my students come from families who make many decisions based on feelings and little knowledge. Pardon me, but that’s fucked. That’s the same kind of mentality you ran up against when Silent Spring was released. I mean, that book is not about the ‘wow.’ It’s about the need for education. Because of that book, I hold you up as the prime example of what a liberal arts education put into action can do.”

We drift downhill toward the town of Cherry Flats, moving single file to let a rattly Ford pickup pass. Gessner and Carson resume their spots beside me. I take a swig from my water bottle and notice that Gessner and Carson don’t have any. Weird.

Carson’s voice breaks through the hum of our tires: “Do you believe what you are doing is important and that your perspective matters?”

I nod.

“Then why the doubt?” The question hangs in the air. I glance at Gessner, hoping for a comment about how things are getting too serious. No such luck. He looks out over the field to our left and fidgets on his saddle like his ass hurts. Pansy, I think. We’ve only ridden about three miles together. I know I’m stalling, knowing that I don’t have a good answer, and knowing that I’m a better doubter than cyclist.

“That’s a good question that I can’t fully answer. I feel it often, even after a good class. I think part of it stems from the fact that I’m not even convinced that my students need to be bothered with tales of terror about the environment. They need jobs. People have been hammered in this part of the country. Hell, I’m part of the economic elite, and I’m an English prof, for God’s sake. How are my students supposed to care for the environment if they can’t keep a roof over their heads? Part of it stems from the fact that I never feel like I’m doing enough, either professionally or personally. I give talks on campus about caring for the environment and make students laugh—I can be funny, David. A lot of students show up, too—more than faculty—which is cool. I push our administration to make changes to the campus that would show us taking responsibility for our impact on the environment. Let’s see, ummm, that’s about it.”

“So, you’re doing what you can do,” Carson says. “That’s a start. I don’t have much to offer, except that you need to live your convictions and continue doing what you are doing. It’s fine not to be yukking it up all the time. Just be sure it’s not gloom and doubt making you serious, but hope and purpose. Oh, and be sure to relish your “wow” moments. They will keep you charged up for facing a room full of students who are perhaps not as passionate about this world as you are. David, would you like to add anything?”

Gessner squints thoughtfully. “Yeah, I’ve got to piss.”

Carson slows and I ride on, figuring the pair will catch me before I turn onto Arnot Road. They don’t though. Maybe Gessner blew a tire. I think about turning around in case he needs my pump. But if he isn’t smart enough to bring water, then why should I baby him?  

James Guignard is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Composition at Mansfield University, where he teaches composition, advanced and professional writing, composition theory, and environmental literature. He is the co-editor of Literature, Writing, and the Natural World (Cambridge, 2009), and has published essays in Liberal Education, Elsewhere: A Journal for the Literature of Place, and Virginia English Bulletin.  Currently, he is researching the rhetoric of the natural gas industry in northcentral Pennsylvania.

Excerpts from the Memoir
of Jose Antonio Rodriguez 

Burning Garbage

Cada quince días, says Amá when I ask her how often we burn our garbage.  The cloud rises and covers some of the cacti in soot.  But the cacti are very hardy and they never burn.  They keep swaying slowly even in smoke.  Clorox bottles take the longest to burn and it’s dangerous to get the burning plastic on your skin because it becomes gooey and it sticks and you won’t be able to take it off and it’ll burn like nothing you’ve ever felt before.  But the leftovers of our burning aren’t interesting; we already know what was in there.

The neighbor’s, though, that’s fun.  They live in a pretty yellow house with potted plants in front, flowering plants at that, and toys strewn in the front yard, like the kids don’t even like them that much.  Sometimes I wonder if they’ve completely forgotten them, if the toys have become unwanted, unclaimed.  But Amá says you can’t just go around picking up someone else’s things.  The garbage they burn, though, that’s clearly unwanted stuff.  So when the fire is done, my sister Morayma and I go and sift through the ashes, look for things we can save.  Sometimes there’s nothing but the remains of Clorox bottles or half burnt cardboard boxes.  If the boxes were whole you could use them to fan yourself or to fold into something, but because they’re made of the same thing as paper, the fire eats them up before anything else.  And we come and ask Amá to rinse our feet that are the color of a cloudy sky.  And she gets angry sometimes, but just a little.

 Today though Morayma finds a coffee cup and I find a toy car wheel and a wooden block with a letter on it and those things we save, bring inside.  Morayma feels the smooth surface of painted clay, beige with little orange flowers that would form a circle if the cup was complete, and I spin the one tire from the wire axle like a top.  Then I place the tire on the ground and imagine the entire car.  It would be a truck actually, one of those yellow ones and the truck would be so complete, so like the real thing, that I would never get bored running it along the ground or just holding it.  I could place the wooden block with its perfect sides on the box.  It could even hold Morayma’s cup.

 When we’re done, we place the things in a corner.  Amá says we’re just collecting junk but she doesn’t throw it away.

 At the end of the day with the sky almost orange again, little black flakes start to fall from the sky, like singed leaves of grass, black and light as a baby chick’s feathers.  They feel like paper, like the paper of the big dolls hanging from shops in the city.  The frills in all sorts of bright colors adorn the large dolls everywhere and beautiful because the paper is thin and the light shines through.  Amá says the dolls are called piñatas but when I ask her what they are for, she keeps quiet.  Yes, this is what they look like but black.

¿Qué es?

Caña, alguien está quemando caña, says Amá.

Somewhere far away someone is doing something, burning sugarcane, and something other than smoke has risen to the sky.  It has traveled from far away because fire leaves only the light part of things.  The heavy part disappears.  The little flakes are falling over me and it makes the evening magical.  Now I know why we can burn garbage in the back of our house, why the neighbors can do it, and never run out of space, because the wind takes away the ashes, carries them and lets them fall far away.

Beans

After a long time of running around chasing after lizards I get a headache and go sit by Amá who’s kneeling outside in the shade by the house.

Te va a salir sangre de la nariz, she warns.

I stare at the pot of beans because it seems it should fall, tip over, as it sits all shaky on the grill that looks really similar to the corner of the box spring of a bed.  The coils are rusted.  They give under the weight of the pot.  Amá keeps adding water to the pot.  Next to the pot is a comal where she lays each tortilla that she makes perfectly circular with the tortillera.

Tengo hambre, I say and she takes a tortilla, adds a pinch of salt, and rolls it up into a perfect little flute for me.

I smell the tortilla first.  I love the aroma, but I’m scared of the fire pit in the ground.  The flames are always kicking up and the heat flashes out from the tips like sheets of hot wind against your cheek.  You have to stay away a little.  Also, the burning wood smokes up and leaves a layer of soot all over your face if you sit there long enough.  Amá always looks a little gray, her eyes watery, unless the day is windy.  If it is windy, having a fire outside is dangerous and so she has to use the stove inside, and that uses gas from a tank.

I wait until the beans are ready and she serves me a few in a plastic cup and I spoon them out and take bites from a tortilla.  And then I run off to chase after lizards, the only animals out in the noonday sun.  All the other animals stay under the shade in the hottest part of the day.  We don’t have any horses or cows but I see them sometimes by the side of the road when I have to go run an errand.  And if it’s very hot, they’re always resting under a tree.  I should learn from that but I don’t.

A little bit later I’m in bed with a nose bleed, pinching my nose to coagulate the blood that just pours out.  Amá is angry because she told me this would happen from running around all day under the sun in the heat and I didn’t listen.  I wonder if all the kids I see from far away under the sun are also bleeding now in their houses.  She says sometimes talking to me is like talking to a dog but who would talk to dog?  That’s just silly.

I can feel the blood running down my throat as I swallow but I don’t taste it.  And I think myself lucky that I don’t have to taste blood.  Then I must have slept because when I get up, the house is noisy with the voices of my brothers and sisters who are back from school or work.  I get up and go to the kitchen.  Amá is ironing, which means I have to be careful around the iron because once, it tripped over and the hot part of it landed on my foot and it hurt worse than a headache.  I was also running then.  She stops for a second, takes a wet rag and wipes my hands which are splotchy with dried blood and my face which I figure must also be splotchy.  I walk outside, play marbles with Juan.  It’s not a lot of fun because we only have a few marbles and so the game is over right away.  The best part is making the little hole in the ground for the marbles to land in because the dirt is cool just a little under the surface and it feels good on the fingertips.  Lizards skitter by but I don’t chase after them. 

Vengan a cenar, we hear.

There’s only like three chairs in the kitchen so most everybody stands.  She places a plate of beans before me, refried and the hint of lard grease makes my mouth water.  I take a piece of tortilla and scoop up a mouthful of beans, always careful to stay on one end of the plate because the other end has a hole in it and we shouldn’t be wasting food by letting it squish through the plate.  When I am done, I have another glass of water, then I sit under the door frame that faces the sun that is leaving.  The sky is turning shades of orange and pink and blue.  The weeds and the trees are already ringing with the songs of cicadas and the early chirping of crickets.  A goat is bleating but the sound is soft, like it is hiding behind all the other sounds.  It must be somewhere down the road in some other house.  Maybe it’s tied to a tree or sitting inside a pen.  When goats bleat up close it’s really loud.  I used to think they bleated because they were tied up or trapped in a pen but no, they’re always bleating, even when they’re out grazing on anything they can find.  Even when they are not tied or inside a pen.  Still, it always sounds sad, like they’re crying out for something.  And I wish I could ask them, but they wouldn’t understand me.

I tell Amá I need to go to the bathroom.  I’m scared of the dark so she tells my sister Aleida to go with me.  We go out behind the house, close to the ebony tree.  I pull down my shorts and squat.  Aleida stands a few feet from me.  We say nothing.  When I’m done I grab a corn cob within reach and wipe myself. 

I go back to the door frame.  Just as everything is becoming darkness, somebody nudges my shoulder and leads me to bed.

Chickens are Nosy

 I hate it when the chickens come around because they’re hungry too.  The tank for the stove is out of gas and so my sister Mari cooks potatoes out of a dirt-filled barrel outside.  It’s different to eat outside, exciting.  The kindling is mostly little sticks and torn pages from my older brother’s comic books, pages with so many big-chested women and angry-looking men lying in bed together and kissing but not how relatives kiss us when they come visit.  Amá is not here, she’s on the other side visiting Apá, who’s working hard.  The potatoes are half raw because we’ve run out of kindling or because my sister got tired of stirring.  I don’t know, but I don’t say anything.  I just keep eating.  The chicken’s run out of worms, I guess, and comes around wanting food, sneaking out from under the cactus bush.  Its white feathers look so pretty against the pale gray green of the cactus bush.  They ask with their beady yellow eyes, I know the look.  It remains just a little longer than usual on the thing it wants.  Then it moves on to other things, the look, but the chicken sticks around, walking in circles, pretending, like we’re not going to figure it out.  They walk but never leave, hoping for something to fall from our hands, slip out of our potato tacos.  I don’t think they like potatoes but they’re hoping they might.  The chicken zig-zags.  My brother Juan hits it with a stick, too hard, the chicken wobbles.

¿Juan, qué hiciste? shrieks Mari.

Nada.  No’más quería asustarla.

And it’s true he only wanted to scare it away.  I can tell he feels bad because his head hangs down a little and he eats more slowly.  We’ll have to nurse the chicken back to health or kill it.  And we don’t want to kill it, it’s too young, mostly bones, not enough meat.  That afternoon the chicken is still kind of wobbly, slow.  Mari crushes a mejoral in a spoon and dilutes it in a cup of water.  I wish the mejoral was for me because when Amá gives us one when something hurts, she mixes the crushed mejoral with a little bit of sugar.  It tastes a little mediciny but still kind of like candy.

Mari lifts the chicken from the ground and it doesn’t even flap its wings.  Mari dips its beak in the water.  I hold the cup but it’s not really drinking.  It doesn’t know the water has medicine that will make it better.  I wonder if the mejoral would help it anyway.  It helps me sometimes when I get headaches, like something is pressing against the inside of my head.  Amá says it’s because I’m too much out in the sun like a lizard, that I have to come in and be in the shade once in a while.  And I try to remember this but I always forget.  I think the chicken’s going to die because she hasn’t clucked very much today and she’s got sleepy eyes.  I think we’re gonna have soup, but not a lot.

  At the end of the day the train makes a stop and whistles loudly.  It always hurts my ears but it also means Amá may be coming so I run to the side of the road, wait for her.  The train is the only way in and out of this place where we live if you don’t have a car.  And very few people have a car.  When one of us is very sick and has to go to the doctor in the city, Apá has to find a ride.  Or he used to.  I haven’t seen him in a while.

Amá walks up the pathway with several fat bags.  She stops and hands me a little wind-up monkey playing a drum.  It’s ugly.  And it doesn’t matter that this is the first new toy I’ve ever gotten.  It’s still ugly.  She can tell I don’t like it.  She’s upset like ahh, forget it.  She walks past me, goes inside, lays the packages on the table in the kitchen and sits, slumps on a chair.

She says we’ll be leaving soon, far away to the other side, to a place called the United States.  I don’t know why it is the other side.  I imagine it’s somewhere on the other side of the canal that runs close to the houses around here.  But I’ve seen the other side of that canal and it looks the same as this side, with little houses and little potted plants and swings made of car tires. 

¿Y Apá? I ask.

Bien.

¿Lo vio?

Sí.

¿Dónde?

En el puente.

¿El puente que crusa el canal?

No, otro puente.

¿Cuál?

Uno lejos.

I’ve never seen any bridge other than the one that crosses over the canal.  But Apá is across another bridge, one that is far away.  Far away.

When you stand on the railroad tracks and look down at a wooden plank and then the next one and the next one, it gets so that you can’t count anymore and the planks keep going away from you in a straight line.  Then you just end up looking at the sky because far away it looks like it touches the tracks, the clouds not above anymore, just down there with the tracks.  I wonder if where Apá is he can see the clouds around him, he can touch the sky.

Mapas

I look at the sheets, see the splotches of dried urine, my urine, the edges always threatening to seep further across until they cover the entire surface of the bed.  Zorrillo, Amá calls me like joking but also a little angry or tired.  It’s hard to tell.  She says the sheets are covered in maps.  This means she has to clean the sheets more often, which is more work and she’s always cooking or washing, cooking or washing, cooking or washing.

I run outside because I don’t want to look at those maps anymore.  I’m not sure what maps are, but I seem to make them.  I run to the tall mesquite and climb it.  Then when I get bored of that, I go stare at the flowers of the cactus, one layer of yellow petals, simple flower, like the simple cactus that looks like huge thick leaves growing out of each other.  No trunk, no branches, but still managing to work their way off of the ground into pretty patterns.  Sometimes my sisters take the insides of the flowers and press them to their ears like earrings, but if I do that they get angry.  After that I go to the pig pen where a pig rolls in the mud.  I wish I could roll in the mud but Amá would get very angry cause I’d have dirtied my shorts.

After a while I get tired and go sit indoors.  Sometimes Amá bathes me – I stand on a rock outside and she pours water over me and it feels cool – but not always.  Sometimes she just looks at me, looks down at the dirt caked around my ankles humid from the sweat that trickles down my legs making odd shapes as it works itself over and around the layer of dirt that coats everything, everything that moves and everything that doesn’t.

Más mapas, says Amá and she means my body.

It Happened Again

She said it again, ya no te quiero.  I don’t know how it happened that I forgot that she could stop loving me.  But there it is, she’s said it.  I’ve really ruined everything now.  How could I be so stupid?  How could I forget to behave?  The dirt, the dirt everywhere is hard and oily from all the bare feet.  There is a hole in the ground in the corner of the room and a little snake pokes its head through.  It looks at me, sticks its tongue out and then dips below and disappears.

She comes around this time, bends down to me.  Anda, sí te quiero, she says in a soft voice.  And I am happy again.  But around her face everything seems a little out of place. The walls seem crooked, the sky peeking in through the door is not the right blue.  The chicken walking around stares at me too long, one leg suspended off the ground.  It should be looking at the ground for kernels of corn or rice or worms.  But it keeps looking at me.  Amá took pity on me, sure.  That’s why she said she loved me again.  But I don’t know if she really does anymore.  She confuses me with her threats, her words that change, her face soft one minute and hard the next.  She loves me though.  She loves me.  She loves me.

I run out and there on the ground is a lizard the color of dust.  Its neck expands and contracts.  It is breathing and its glossy eyes see me.  But it does not know where I have been.  It knows nothing, only that it runs and hides.  I tell myself, remember to listen, remember always to listen and obey.  Then I run away, climb the large mesquite tree behind the outhouse.  I hold one to a branch and close my eyes.  The tough bark scratches my thighs, irritates my palms, but right now I am only the swaying branch, like a lizard, green this time.

Refrigerator

One night I was in the house in my usual bed and the next I was here, in this house that must be what a palace looks like.  Amá says some friends crossed us over in the night, me, Morayma, Juan, Aleida and Mirella, that we were sleeping and so don’t remember.  And Apá is here and I can hardly believe it.  He carries me and kisses me and it is like he never left.  I feel bad though that I never got to see the bridge, the one Apá crossed, the one he never crossed back. 

I’d never seen Tía Ninfa before but Amá says she is her sister and so I have to be respectful.  She’s rich.  Her house has so many rooms I can’t count them.  We sleep in what Tía Ninfa calls the garage, which is supposed to be a room for cars.  Why would cars need a room? Why would they even need a roof?  The only concrete floor I’d seen up until now was in one little store on the other side and in the city of Río Bravo.  But here this house has concrete everywhere.  Amá and Apá sleep on a bed, and the rest of us sleep on the floor.  We sleep on sheets of foam with blankets but it’s still hard.  It’s like sleeping right on the concrete, which is way harder than sleeping on dirt.  But it doesn’t matter because it’s only at night and the garage is warmer than the house on the other side.  The coldest part of winter is leaving but it’s still cold outside.

The house has three rooms with beds and little rooms in them called closets.  A separate room for clothes.  Again, why would clothes need a room to themselves?  My tíos’ bedroom has the largest bed I’ve ever seen.  It’s gigantic, so big their bodies could move around all night and never touch.  My boy cousin has his own room too and my two girl cousins share another room.  There’s a large area at the center called a living room and it seems larger than our entire house on the other side.  Next to it is the largest table I’ve ever seen.  It has eight chairs around it.  And I count only five people in Tía Ninfa’s family and I don’t know why they have so many extra chairs.  And there are glass doors that slide open leading into what Tía calls the backyard.  The sliding doors though, I’ve never seen those, not even in Río Bravo.  You can see outside, see the sunlight, but you don’t feel a thing.

The strangest and best thing is that I’m not cold when I’m inside the house.  It smells great too, like perfumed because it smells different than outside and I’ve never been in a house that had a different smell then outside, except maybe for a kitchen or the doctor’s office.  This is where we’re staying now.  This is where, until we find a place to live here on the other side.  That’s what Amá said before she gave me the big speech about not being a pest, not hanging around the kitchen, saying no thank you if I am offered food, not playing with anything that is not mine, not touching anything, not asking for anything.

Why can’t we hang around the kitchen?  Because it’s not our kitchen, she said.  And we need to be nice and behave.  I asked her if I could ask for water.  And she said yes, you can ask for water, and I felt better.  That’s how it was, then she had to leave for something and we all stayed behind.

All the objects in Tía Ninfa’s house sparkle like they belong in a store, like I’m in a store.  A hissing noise comes on and off during the day and I know not to ask what it is.  These things called lamps sit by small tables next to a long chair for several people that has big soft cushions.  It reminds me of the long chairs at the doctor’s office in Río Bravo.  My cousins call it a sofa.  They have a television set in every room.  I don’t know why that is, why they need more than one television set and if the same show can be seen in all televisions.  The kitchen has a faucet with running water, indoor water.  I guess they don’t need a well.  The kitchen also has rows of little doors up high where I can’t reach and down close to the floor where I can but I don’t know what’s behind the doors or why they have so many of them.  It’s beautiful, though, like a little fort.

The refrigerator is huge and it has doors side by side.  I know what that is because I’ve seen something similar in the store on the other side, where they kept Cokes and chilled treats.  It is beautiful, white and tall with smooth rounded corners.  My cousin Criselda opens the thinner door and it is filled with boxes of treats and ice cream.  They’re practically falling out of little white wire baskets, even more treats than in the store on the other side.  And packets of frozen stuff that looks like meat.  She opens a box and pulls out a little plastic wrapped thing.  She asks me if I want one like she’d be happy to give me one, and I’m not sure what it is but I say no, thank you.  Okay, she says, then she open the package and reveals an ice cream popsicle shaped like a round face with big dark brown round ears.  I don’t know why but the face looks familiar.  The face is vanilla and the eyes and smile are chocolate and the ears are covered in a hard chocolate film.  She holds it from a smooth even little stick.  When she bites an ear I see the inside of the ears are chocolate too.  The dark chocolate film crackles between her teeth.  And she’s licking and biting and the popsicle is really thick and it seems like it’s too much ice cream for her.  It begins to melt down her hand, around each knuckle.  I think of telling her that it’s dripping but I don’t because I shouldn’t be staring.  That’s another thing I’m not supposed to do.

When she’s done, she licks the stick clean and the stick was smooth all the way up, rounded at the edges, no sharp corners.  She throws it away in the waste basket and walks away down the hall.  The refrigerator is silent.  No, the refrigerator is humming.  There is a motor of sorts, like the ones that make cars run, and it is keeping everything cold and everything else frozen.  It does not move.  I think of opening the thin door, taking an ice cream popsicle.  But I can’t, she offered and I said no and the offer is gone.  She should have insisted.  I’ve seen grown ups insist to each other.  Maybe if she would have insisted, I would have said yes, not knowing what I was saying yes to and thrilled to discover the surprise.  But Amá said nothing about people insisting and what to do in that situation.  And it doesn’t matter anymore, except that the door is there and it is not locked and not heavy to open.  I can reach the handle because it runs all the way down the edge of the door so grown ups and kids can open it, I guess.  And I am standing before it.  And it hums and on the other side of the door is something soft and sweet and cold.  And I start to pout and I don’t know why I’m pouting because nobody is laughing at me, nobody is making fun of me, nobody is chasing me with stones in their hands.  Still, my lips tighten and stick out and I’m glad nobody is watching me.  I walk outside, out back.  A chain link fence encircles the backyard, and I know not to ask why the house has to be fenced.

José Antonio Rodríguez is a graduate student in the English and Creative Writing program at SUNY- Binghamton and editor of the literary journal Harpur Palate.  He is the recipient of the 2009 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award.  His work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Cream City Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Connecticut Review and elsewhere.

Becoming All Animal

“But she didn’t entirely forget. We are always in both worlds, because they aren’t really two.”

—from The Woman Who Married A Bear by Gary Snyder

            You study the sky, hesitant to have left shelter. Wind pushes clouds over the granite ridgelines like predator and prey, the white ones seemingly chased by darker ones. But for now the sun is warm on your hair. You have time and needs to meet. Something in your bones surges and you feel your feet make the decision to proceed. Your load is winter-ponderous, not the light lift of warm weather, but your back revels in being useful, capable. As you move, your breasts, fuller at this time in your cycle, amplify the sway of your body over land. Your haunches rally as you step up rocks; shoulders, hips, and ankles balance-dance as beneath your feet the granite shifts color, clouds still dashing across blue plains above.

            This is not just another solo backpack trip. I am on a mission, sent by that inner voice that, when I hear it, I cannot disobey. Though the forecasters call for the first winter storm of the season, and though I’m used to the milder climate and terrain of the southern Appalachians, I doggedly stuffed one more warm shirt under the top pouch of my pack this morning, and drove an hour-and-a-half to South Lake Tahoe to get my permit. There is irony in having to gain society’s permission to escape it. The ranger wrote out the parking pass and hunted down change. That’s what I was hunting too, in another fashion, and I was glad the ranger was female when she asked, “How many?”

            “One.”

            “Any dogs?”

            “No.”

            Locking my car, I pause before hefting the pack, always unreasonably heavy when I go alone. If I were a werewolf, or the bear husband of the old stories, this is when the hair would quickly grow in across my cheeks and shoulders, the claws emerge and back hunch. People watching would know then. But here in this parking lot, a family walks by and looks only at my pack and pony-tail. They have no idea the changes going on inside me as I attempt my first shape-shift. As I deliberately become all animal.

   You are away at college and have gotten up the nerve to kayak. Bobbing with what comes, hips starting to react on their own, you follow the experienced paddlers. At the end of the drop the back wave catches your edge and you’re underwater. So slow and dark and cold. And then you’re up, shaking your head like a spaniel. Such a different world beyond the familiar surface — now you know. This is what you came for. To belong somewhere like a frog or heron.  Like the people cheering you who belong on the river — so beautiful and strong and free — so unlike the people you grew up around. Laughing, you peel off wet clothes by the side of the road, not caring who sees. Later, in front of your mirror, you stare at your body, neck twisted, watching your back, flexing both arms at once. There, between your shoulder blades, new ridges. The beginning of wings.

            Of course I know and you know that we are animals. But like the phrase “Boys will be boys,” the fact that we’re animals is treated as something we can’t help, rather than something to be proud of, to cultivate. I don’t remember when it first occurred to me that by inhabiting my animal nature more I might find a way around my fears, which had grown rather than shrunk over the years of traveling, hiking, and backpacking alone. Fears of meeting human males in the wild; of being told, if I made it out of a bad situation, that I should have known better; of believing all the voices out there that say it’s a woman’s fault for going anywhere — but especially into the wilderness — alone. Maybe it was when I read about grizzly sows having to avoid and ward off attacks from the large males. They can’t hide away all the time and they don’t look for an even larger male to protect them. They adapt. They use their senses to discover if a male is around. If so, the sow tries not to feed in the prime areas when the male is likely to feed. But if she or her cub is charged and the sow must fight, she fights tremendously. And who of us would suggest if she fails and is killed, or her cub is killed, that she asked for it?

            At the trailhead I check the map for distances. A man with a toddler is ahead of me.

            “How far you going in?” he asks.

            “Don’t know yet.” I evade the question. Though my instincts say he is harmless, I won’t give my destination. Smiling, I leave them behind. My goal this trip is not to act as a female grizzly would, or any particular animal, though I often think about what I know of animal behavior. I want to become my own animal. To do this I must shut off the cultural white noise and remember what it is to think with my body. My cerebral cortex has been thoroughly colonized, but my haunches are still pretty pre-cultural. My hands and feet are quick to solve problems when I trust them to.

            I approach two middle-aged women at the top of a long stair-like climb. They’ve been resting and watching my small steps and deliberate foot placements.

            “How much does that pack weigh?” one asks in fatigued awe.

            “I have no idea,” I say with a breathless laugh. “Never weigh your pack. You want to believe it’s lighter than it is when you start out, and to brag it was heavier than it was when you get home.”

            This attitude is more self-preservation than suicidal tendency or ego. If the pack is too heavy, my back will tell me (I try it on at home). But put a number to it and my brain will convince my body it’s too heavy regardless. Or worse, if I’m having a bad day, I don’t want to know the pack is plenty light and should be no problem. Animals don’t weigh loads, and I know that when I’m out on my own my body amazes me. What seems heavy in the driveway seems infinitely doable on the leaf-strewn trail.

            You are thirteen, swinging down from the cherry tree by your window. It is quiet except for the sounds of cars nearby and your mother’s voice in your ear: not after dark . . . never alone. . . don’t you read the papers?  No one understands your restlessness. The suburbs suck. Your brothers get to go where they want, even at night. You get to go to your room. Because there’s nothing else to do you walk the black edge of the road, with each step daydreaming of woods, dogs that come every time you call, and strong, kind boys. A half moon winks through the trees. Then someone whistles. “Hey baby, you don’t have to walk.” You remember where you are. Stuck. The car doesn’t stop. What if I want to walk, you think. What then?

            Like many female adventurers, I’ve had to learn the hard way and I break society’s rules. I’ve struggled free from some of the traps western culture has set out to extirpate my instincts, and I feel lucky not to have lost a limb so far. Although a mouthy child, always be polite, was firmly ingrained by the time I became an adult. Attached to that was don’t make a scene. Following these rules makes it almost impossible for the civilized female to prevent a threatening encounter with a male, so caught up is she in giving him the benefit of the doubt until he has his hands on her, is forcing her into the car or on the ground.

            I laugh at the centuries-old message that civilization is created for and maintained by women. Civilization — that place with walls where humans deceive themselves about the extent of their control and buy into the myth of security. The only place, we’re told, where women can be safe. I am not less safe in the wild. Statistics show I’m at greater risk of attack in my house or on a city street, where unethical men may prowl the night, than I am miles away from a trailhead or parking lot. I don’t trust what civilization and culture tell me anymore. I trust my gut. Out alone, I look everyone in the eye once and then avert my gaze (but never, ever look down). I turn to face anyone coming up the trail from behind. I can look ornery and unapproachable in seconds. I don’t wear the shroud of fear and vulnerability I’m told is attractive, is feminine. I bare my aggression, like teeth. If a man does not understand how to respect my privacy — a kind of territory — then he deserves whatever growls he’s given.

            Two young women day-hiking ahead. One steps aside and as I pass, whispers: courageous.

            It breaks my heart.

             Someone rounds the turn below you. Something about his size, or that he’s alone, or the way he cocks his head sends a tremor up your back. There is a large boulder and you slip behind it. What about this person makes your ruff go up, makes you not even want to sniff out his intentions? It doesn’t matter. There are no walls here and disappearing is not hard. As he reaches the boulder and moves past, you’re crouched, ready to pretend you were peeing if he looks. He doesn’t look. Why would he? No one expects you to be here. A little amazed, you watch him march uphill, oblivious. A wren perched without moving in the bushes nearby meets your gaze.

            Men are animals. This is what I’ve been told countless times before driving cross-country or going camping by myself. Most often it’s male friends who have drummed this into my skull. I understand them to mean that men are driven by their dicks which pulse with instinct, not reason. They mean that men can act badly. Well, women are animals too — treated like such is the way many feel. And animals are animals. I leave civilization to be with animals and to be an animal, and surely I can allow men inside this definition in the same, less derogatory way I’m including myself. Most animals, especially the best killers, the blood-thirstiest, have ingrained inhibitions — both social and genetic — that keep deadly conflicts among members of a species to a minimum. Especially prevalent are the inhibitions males of these species (most birds and mammals) have that keep them from physically attacking a female. It seems our culture evolved too fast; our hereditary inhibitions couldn’t keep up.

            Or maybe the messages given females are social inhibitions devised by patriarchal culture rather than biological evolution. The messages: “You’re putting yourself in danger!” — as if women should never take risks or don’t want to; “You’re asking for it!”— the ”it” presumably the same as in “doing it”; and “Take someone with you!”— an especially problematic message for single women since more than 80% of sexual crimes are committed by someone we know.

            Women are domesticated through fear. We’re taught that we need — no, deserve —protection. A privilege that we enjoy like poodles who’re primped, dressed in bows, and carried around. I don’t want to be a decoration or a pet who waits for her husband to come home. My husband and I do things together — climb, hike, kayak, bike, read, debate. But we also do things separately. And when I go into the woods alone he has to defend both my decision and his to others (not to stay, but presumably to have let me go).

            Even in other primates, possibly the most social of animals, members take time by themselves. For some people, being alone in a crowded city street or bar is enough, or having the whole house to oneself. I need the woods, mountains, and rivers which remind me dirt and sweat aren’t undesirable, that I have muscles for a purpose. I need places without mirrors. In all their good intentions, people who’ve tried to keep me safe have helped keep me from discovering myself and exploring my creativity, my body, and the land. A room of one’s own? Yes, but an isolated canyon, peak, or valley occasionally is just as necessary. Let me go, I begged my mother. Let me go, I begged the voices in my head. I never would’ve married a man I had to beg this way.

            When you reach the lake it’s still sunny. You hurry, hoping to get in a quick dip while the sun is full-force. After scouting out a place in the steep granite walls that will let you camp above, unseen from the banks, you reclaim your pack and huff it up manzanita and scree to the flat. The wind, as if it’d been waiting, surges as you pitch the tent. You check from below to make sure it’s hidden. Once it’s weighted down with rocks in each corner and over the stakes, you explore the shoreline. All the hikers have left. Each time the sun’s consumed by a cloud you wonder, Is this it? Kingfishers rattle. You strain to hear the sounds of conversation carried a long way, relax when you determine it’s the wind-thrown water hitting logs and rocks. As a stellar jay cries and heads for the lone Jeffrey Pine, you settle in to listen to the voices.

            Even with everyone gone, I have to concentrate on the sounds around me, make them familiar, before I can completely relax. The animals that live here know these sounds, but I’m new to this habitat. I’m used to rustling leaves and eastern rivers, not the irregular slapping of lake water on a rugged shore. Sun heats my face and I begin to strip, hoping it will hang around long enough for me to run into the cold, clear water. Then a cloud shoulders the warmth aside and, reluctantly, I pull my shirts back on. Am I being wise or wimpy, I wonder. Skinny dipping is an obsession of mine, even when it’s too cold to really swim. Immersing myself in natural waters is a conscious reminder that I don’t have control over things like temperature, depth, or what’s on the bottom. It’s a reverse-baptism, one that celebrates my body and mortality by baring myself to this beautiful, relentless creation. Two mallards come right up to where I’m filtering water, and I enviously lose myself in their antics and the iridescent blue, green and purple feathers up close. As they paddle away I screw the lid on my bottle.

            “Is that water potable?” I spin. The man has stopped a respectful distance away.

            “No, that’s why I have a filter,” I fumble. I didn’t hear him. I hadn’t heard him.

At first this is all I can think, but as a woman catches up with him I realize this time it’s okay. Maybe animals stalked from downwind feel this way when they finally get a sniff of a too-close stranger.

            “Sorry if I startled you. I didn’t expect to see anyone out here,” he’s saying. “You know there’s a winter storm watch. . .”

            I nod. I’ve categorized him as one of my kind — pleasant outdoor enthusiast who appreciates solitude. “The weather report called for snow down to 7,000 ft. That’s why I didn’t go any further in.”

            “5,500 is what I heard.”

            We all look toward the lake, imagine snow covering the shore, pines, and granite ledges. The hush of the next morning.

            After they leave I feel truly alone. It’s wonderful. The wind has picked up and I’ve started the stove even though I ate my sandwich only two hours ago. Like the other animals, I must scurry for food before the storm hits. In my case, hot food. The temperature is dropping fast. As creamy garlic pasta burps in the pot, I squat on a boulder to get a better view. Like an animal, I stayed when people fled to their cars. Like an animal, I’m not uneasy that a storm is coming. Perhaps, as for the other animals, this can be a kind of home. At least I feel at home, the way when the curtains are pulled you can walk around in your underwear, not caring if your hair’s combed or teeth brushed. Here, on this ridge, I’ve escaped society’s gaze.

            The steep scree and aspen slopes rise above on three sides. Could the black bears around here scramble up them? It’s hard to imagine. I stare at the nooks in the rock walls as I eat way more than I need, trying to hoard all the fat against a cold night. I compare each gust with the last and each one’s stronger. No bears pass through. The barometric lows before a major storm make animals lethargic, I recall. That and my full belly has me thinking it’s time to den.

            A few drops of rain convince you to take a last pee in the half-light. Something moves, a dark head bobs in and out of the tall manzanita. Your heart stops. They’ve come for you. More follow the first, but they’re in baseball caps. You look back and the bear becomes a guy whose navy sweatshirt hood is pulled tight around his head. You’re disappointed.

            And nervous. They came from another direction, off-trail, and head toward the high point of nearby rocks. They didn’t see me but can’t help but notice the tent from where they’re going. My brain says to zip up tight, avoid contact, but my body wants to stand ground. They know where I am; I want to see where they are, where they go, and when they leave. Can they tell I’m female? Probably not in my shell and hat. But if they come closer. . .?

            They’re not dressed for the weather that’s coming. They don’t even carry daypacks. What brings them out here? To my place? I remember how ethologists say an animal will be the most aggressive toward others of its species in familiar territory. The fact that I’ve settled in may be why I’m not interested in retreating. It doesn’t take long for them to wander out the back way they came, and I consider how I’d feel if I were holed up in the tent now. I wouldn’t know they were gone. Even if I peeked out and didn’t see them, I’d wonder if they were hidden. I’d worry all night. My body made the right decision.

            It’s started raining and I consider keeping the food bag in my tent. What animal will be out in this?  Or I could just stash it in the crook of a small tree. I mean, there aren’t many tall enough and all the lower branches on the pines are broken off so that . . . but my body is not listening.

            My hands grab the unwieldy clothesline and double-bagged food, while my feet and eyes hunt for a suitable spot. There is really only one option. The pine is on a steep, scrubby slope which makes it difficult to get into good position for an underhand throw. I didn’t often have to hang food where I’m from, but after a couple tries I lob the rock over the branch and the tied rope follows. Now I stand amidst juniper and rock. It’s only me, with no reinforcements, and I’m enough.

            Finally in the tent, wet gear off to the side, I think about how I came to doubt myself. Was it that I was born with a suburban spoon in my mouth which fed me all those white middle-class fairy tales about how great it is to have men do everything for you? Was it that in the seventies and eighties females were working hard to prove their competence in the male world of commerce, emphasizing their minds and masking their bodies? Was it that no women I knew sought solitude outdoors? In the metropolitan area of my youth, the wild was something only men were supposed to crave, and then only a few weekends a year when they tested their brawn against their pin-striped brains.

            You are five, racing around the front lawn behind your older brothers on the first really warm spring day. Your mother calls you aside and hands you a shirt. You start to cry and point at your brothers. “Little girls are different,” she says. “Little girls wear shirts.” But you cry harder and beg for one day more, one day, and she relents. No longer sure what the game is, you roll down the hill again and again. Grass sticks to your back and belly. Climbing the magnolia you pay special attention to how smooth the bark is as you hold the trunk. Your brothers go inside. It’s getting cool. Under the wisteria you tuck your knees to your bare chest for warmth, afraid to go indoors. Afraid of never being let out.

            With short hair and a penchant for dirt, I was always mistaken for a boy when little. I prided myself on being a tomboy and wore my brothers’ hand-me-downs until puberty dropped me into a vat of pink-glitter lip gloss. Luckily, once at college, the hippies got me comfortable with a clean face again, and the rednecks reminded me that flannel could be flattering.

            Today I’m still caught off guard by the people — both males and females — who describe me as butch. When single, I learned it was easier to move around in social circles if I grew my hair long. A man I’d been working with for over a year and whom I admired, asked if I knew how much taking up knitting had changed my image (why do people assume lesbians don’t knit?). This man and I took high schoolers on hikes and longer trips. In the woods I felt no qualms about spitting if I had to, competed in belching contests, and — like the male leaders — didn’t suppress any gastric emissions caused by the rice and bean diet. Not my behavior in a restaurant, but they didn’t necessarily know that. It now occurs to me that those actions construed as manly are really me at my most animal.

            How did it happen that men get the freedom to act as animals? Do we really think they can’t help it, or, rather, that we can help it more than they can? Maybe it’s feared that women who let themselves be a little wild will, like the woman who married a bear in Northwest Indian tales, choose not to turn back. I don’t know if that’s still a possibility anywhere in the world, but it’s not one I’d choose. Still, I’ll claw and kick for the chance to temporarily drop as far out of human society as possible. And to spit when I need to.

         The wind is crazy now, pushing your tent’s dome from all sides, bending the poles concave at times. You hear each gust gather in another valley and grow to the great growl of Urset that charges over the ridge and shakes your den. Maybe you are trespassing. Your full bladder whines insistently so you slip out of your bag and into rain gear. Outside it’s dark, as if the earth rolled into a cave. The cold rain stings your butt with its quills. Shadows everywhere shift and settle. Remember what the elders say: if you meet a bear, open your coat and show that you’re a woman.

            Back in my sleeping bag trying to warm up, I wallow in memories of sun on my skin: hiking the Cumberland Island beaches on my first backpack trip, all of us naked except for what we carried; stripping my shirt off every lunch stop during desert day hikes; standing nude, shin deep in the Colorado River, admiring the rich colors of the Grand Canyon while a breeze slips between my legs; celebrating Independence Day by skinny dipping solo in the Rio Grande, stroking back and forth from America to Mexico.

            I’ve always wanted to get rid of barriers between me and the earth, but it wasn’t until my freshman year in college that I finally returned to the outdoors as the little girl I was before impending breasts and periods separated me from boys and nature. I remember nervously approaching the reservoir’s edge with others for a dip to wash off all the grease and stress of the restaurant’s late shift. I said I’d go but wouldn’t strip. No one cared. When I’d almost reached the water, others were just starting to splash into the shallows. The dark swallowed the details and suddenly I felt more self-conscious in underwear. The next instant I was wading to where the black water could slide over my chest.

            What do we lose when we become afraid to ever bare ourselves, emotionally or physically? When we’re uncomfortable being naked except to make love or wash? The distrust of our bodies is crippling. As girls, we’re told they beguile ceaselessly and cruelly, so we clothe ourselves to hide or accent them. We’re told they’re weak and can’t protect us, so we cower. Then, sometime when we’re older, we hear from women who’ve found their voices, who have begun to expose these lies. They tell us together we can fight to make the world safe someday. I know their work has made it easier for me to shape my life, and I’m grateful. But I don’t believe the world will ever be completely safe for anyone. And I’m glad because a safe world has no room for wildness.

            At midnight the rain slaps the nylon even harder, unlikely to ever gentle into snow. Can this cheap tent hold up for six or seven more hours of this? I feel certain a pole will snap or nylon tear. As it is I’m riding on the raft of my Thermarest, the decomposed granite outside unable to absorb this much water. It’s pooled underneath my groundcloth and the tent floats between where the corners are staked. The fly doesn’t even cover the back of the tent where the full force of the storm has soaked the wall. I imagine trying to hike the steepness in these gusts with a full pack in the dark. I don’t think I could get down the manzanita slope, let alone keep from getting blown off the narrow cliff-edged trail. For a few minutes I stare anxiously at the nylon sides pressing in on me. Then I remember why I’m here. No animal would stay awake worrying about what might happen. It’d just react if something did. Abruptly I release the tension in my body. The reality is I don’t want to have to deal with a busted tent or stashing my pack so I can get to the car in the dark, but I know I could. Now I concentrate on the noise and let it drown out the cultural messages my brain tries to send. The storm distracts me from pointless human worry, and I welcome it.         

           You’re on the borderline between awake and asleep, afloat in a deep pool of belonging. Your heart reaches out to other creatures burrowed in this place, enduring the same forces. To creatures nested in places you’ll never know, living lives you can’t imagine. In their world the expectations are simple. You sense that their world is your world but without the lies. You release those lies, which turn into ravens calling and winging above the dark valley. You have not taken back the night.

            Better, you are sharing it.

The Litchfields, Lynda Barreto

 

  

 

Machine

      My cousin asks about the ride I just did in New York City.  I tell him it was great.  I take a sip of beer, “70 miles and I got to bike through the Lincoln Tunnel and over the George Washington Bridge.  The tunnel was the best part, all the yellow lights spaced 6 feet from one another.  Everyone was surrounded by a web of their own shadows, all we heard were the echoes of other cyclists screaming; I cawed like a crow.  I would’ve liked the bridge more if a razor blade hadn’t found its way into my rear wheel, but that’s New York for you.” 

Condensation slides down the bottle and drips off my fingers; I make patterns on the orange tiles poolside.  “There were a few professional riders there.”  He nods but looks a little distracted.  “I kept up with them for the first 30 miles, was even in front at one point.”  I don’t mention that it didn’t last.  The winds on the Westside Highway were crazy; I felt like I was going backwards.  With all the people passing me, it probably looked that way too.

My cousin, the state trooper, seems hesitant but curious.  “Let me ask you something.”  He looks around to see if anyone else can hear, as if I’m about to tell him something secret.  “Why are all these cyclists doping?” 

I laugh then shrug; the answer I don’t give him is that they take drugs for the same reason I stopped. 

It’s just after 10 p.m.  I come home from work angry, frustrated or disgusted; I heat a frozen pizza and smoke a bowl.  My friends are either out of town or occupied for the night.  I sit and think about the store and the customers; I wish I had a new job, but I’d settle for a punching bag.  My mind recycles the day’s stupid questions, stupid answers – the annoyances of a meaningless job.  I smoke another bowl then decide to go for a walk.

Outside, the air is cool and heavy and damp.  It recently stopped raining and I like the sheen of the wet roads under moonlight.  I look at my bike, chained and waiting to take me to work the next day.  I grimace in disgust and decide not to go for the walk; I decide to take the bike somewhere other than work.

I go up Hamilton Street and find myself out of breath at the top of the hill.  For some reason, instead of coasting down the other side I get out of the saddle, stand on my pedals and kick each leg down.  I push harder with each stroke, trying to build instead of maintain momentum.  At the corner of George Street I take a left and ride through the College Avenue campus: buildings I studied in, a spot where I used to sit and read; I ride past 4 different apartments and dorms I lived in and dozens that friends have moved out of.  I find the entrance to a walkway along the Route 18 Bridge and ride to Busch Campus, past classrooms I failed out of, more familiar dorms. 

I feel sweat, cool in a dark breeze – it clings to my hair, it slides along my jawbone and drips from my chin to my shirt.  I feel free, like a little kid riding to his friend’s house. 

The streetlights bounce off the road.  No cars in sight.  I ride through the nature preserve and a family of deer runs parallel to me, 20 feet off my side.  They pass a small trail I turn onto.  It leads down to some park I don’t know about.  It’s flooded from the rain, sunk under the muck of the Raritan.  I stop where the path slips into the water.  Across river, the lights of New Brunswick fill houses and flood the streets.  From a distance they seem less offensive, less like crack houses and roads full of balled up underwear, banana peals, and torn bits of paper.

I’m curious to find out what I can make my body do.  I’ve been riding daily; I don’t get tired from 12 miles so I decide to push up to thirty.  There is no way I would’ve thought about doing this a month ago.  

Early morning I take to the street with three liters of water on my back and an empty stomach.  I’ve never ridden this far, but I think food might cause me to cramp up.  88 degrees, 15 mph; I’m sweating, but not as much as I need to.  20 miles into the ride I run out of water; I stop to refill my CamelBak at a water fountain.  I start cramping up on my way back home and finish off the 30 coasting at five mph

I pull up in front of my apartment and climb off my bike.  My knees weak, but not quite buckling.  I wonder if I should’ve stopped at the 20 mile mark or at 25 when my legs went numb.  I lift the bike onto my shoulder and walk up the stairs to the door of my apartment building.  My arms are shaking.  The key is in my hand but I can’t get it into the lock.  I put the bike down, hold my right arm with my left and thread the key.  I struggle to turn the lock, but eventually pry the door open. 

With the bike back on my shoulder, I climb 3 flights of stairs.  In my apartment I throw some mac and cheese in the microwave and get into the shower with my clothes on.  I hang the wet clothes on the shower rod and towel off.  I can’t believe how hungry I am. 

A shaking finger pops open the microwave and I grab a fork.  One bite and I’m in the bathroom.  Four liters of water spill out my mouth.  At the time I think I just pushed my body too far too soon, that it’s overexertion, that my legs are being vindictive, my body pulled thin.  My stomach locks. 

I leave the bowl of food beside my bed and pass out for two hours.  Dehydration is dangerous; over hydrating is a different kind of terrible.  Water intoxication, (hyponatremia) looks like dehydration and comes with the confusion, nausea, and fatigue.  An excessive amount of water floods the body, dilutes a person’s salt content.  The blood contains fewer minerals; eventually muscles, the brain, the heart, everything weakens.  Some get sick, some shift into a coma, some die. 

After the 30 mile ride I wonder what was worse for me, the extra 18 miles or the four liters of water.  I assume it was the water, choosing stupidity over lack of ability; after all, I want to ride further, I don’t care if I drink that much again. 

 “You really could’ve fucked yourself like that.”  I’m at a party talking to a friend about what happened; he laughs at me.  The loud music, our conversation, the sweat packed bodies – it seems like we should be talking about liquor instead of water.  I ask him some questions about bikes, long rides and repair.  He doesn’t know anything either, “But someone was telling me about a bike library over near Commercial Avenue.” 

The Bike Library is more of a bicycle graveyard.  It’s raining the first time I see it.  Dozens of bike frames, random parts and several piles of tires and inner tubes.  Nobody is there so I try again the next week; my rear wheel is bent so it rubs against my break pads with every rotation; it’s making my rides a lot harder, at least my legs are getting built up. 

 “That’s not safe,” this is a kid named Ryan talking to me.  I’m immediately skeptical of anyone who shares my name.  He’s got a thin red beard that works down to the middle of his chest; he’s got a canteen hanging by his side and clipped to it is a set of camping utensils.  The knife and spork bang together as he diagnoses my bike. 

“You broke a few spokes.” He illustrates this by prying several of them away from the wheel.  He also points to a dent in the frame, “Hit by a car?”  I tell him I bought the bike used, I’m not sure.  I find out that aluminum is unsafe if there’s a breach in the integrity of the frame.  He tells me that it’ll probably be fine to ride for a while, but there’s no way to know when it’s going to split open.  I imagine riding downhill and hearing a snap, seeing the ground come closer and my face sliding down the street.  Helmets can only do so much. 

I spend the afternoon scavenging the piles for the right size wheel, a tube that will hold air, and a new tire since mine was ruined from a blowout.  Ryan shows me how to true a wheel and I spend the better part of an hour twisting the spokes of my new wheel with a wrench; finally the rim is straight, or straight enough.  I put a new tube and tire on the wheel; it takes another hour.  He helps me adjust my front and rear derailleur so my chain can shift gears smoothly on the new set of cogs. 

When I’m about to leave I ask if I’ve done everything properly.  Kevin shrugs, “If you put the tube on wrong it’ll blow in a block or two.”  Feeling uneasy I take the first few streets slowly.  Despite the fear of an exploding tire, I can’t help but smile.  I understand more about my bike; it’s less foreign and more a part of me. 

I start to read a book on bicycle repair and buy a spoke wrench and some other tools.  I wonder how far I could go by bike.  It’s going to be another month before I start to hear back from graduate schools.  I’ve made a short list of things I want to do or attempt and fail.  I think about cycling, what to attempt that sounds crazy, that I wouldn’t have dreamed of last week, or last month.  I think of On the Road and want it to be better, closer to the asphalt.  I convince myself that I can cross the country on my own if I ride every day for the next year.  I think of after school specials about bulimia and how the girls say they felt powerless in their lives, that they just wanted to control their bodies. 

On the phone, I’m telling a friend about the idea of riding to California.  He says, “I know a guy who’s doing that right now.”  Before I know anything about Bill Garrett, he’s already my hero.  “He’s been gone for less than a week.” And I’m told that he’s already gone from New Jersey, through Pennsylvania, up to New York and then come back through Pennsylvania.  Not only is he biking to the west coast, but he’s going out of his way to see friends and family.  Knowing that a person is already riding my impossible trip makes me want to go even more.  Bill sends daily emails from his tent; my friend forwards them all to me.  In one of the first messages I read, Bill says, “I got up during the night to go to the bathroom and was astounded by the sky.  Clear, dark, and spectacular.  The stars were so clear and bright.  The big dipper was right in front of me, almost on the horizon.  Back in NJ I’ve never seen it that low.”  Jealous, I start training constantly.

On a day off of work I get back from a long ride; I shower then eat and drink continually.  The Giants/Eagles game is on.  A player is down on the field; he tries to get up, but his right leg buckles.  They show the sidelines and the teammate who just ran back a punt is taking oxygen.  They fade to a commercial break and I flip around and find that the Tour De France is on. Nobody knows that this year’s winner will have his jersey taken away for doping.  Right now I’m wondering if someday all cyclists will ride wearing oxygen masks.  I take a bite of my sandwich, my ride dwarfed by the screen.  As I’m watching the cyclists, the injured player is taken off the football field.

Between plays, I watch the race.  At the final sprint, the riders shake their bikes from side to side to maximize the pressure of each pedal stroke.  For the final mile they push harder than the 120 that precede it.  Tomorrow they’ll do it again; tomorrow I’ll put 30 miles in after work.  This is less inspiring than crushing. 

Rather than watch the day’s highlights, I turn back to football, a sport I have no intentions of playing.  The Giants are on defense and one of the players has sacked the Eagles quarterback.  It’s the guy who was carted off the field earlier; the pain and inflammation had been too much, but with the help of a cortisone shot he came back to the game. 

I don’t get tired after biking anymore, but I vary my week with short and long rides.  The longer ones are around 30 miles.  I push myself, but remember to keep the rest of the ride in mind.  I make sure to pace my water intake.  My shorter rides are still between 10 and 15 miles.  They’re heart choking sprints with no breaks in a lungless body numbing motion.  The former is for endurance, the latter for speed.  I’ve gone from 12 miles to 30, from 10 mph to 15.  At first the speed and endurance grew rapidly, then I leveled off.  After a few weeks on this plateau I’m frustrated.  I start to rotate days off into my schedule.  Even with the rest, my legs don’t push my numbers any higher.  I wonder what I can do to push my body further. 

One day I get back from a sprint.  My lungs burn, my throat is raw, fingertips numb.  I make a quesadilla; I sit on my bed eating, drinking Kool-aid and smoking a bowl.  I think about my lungs, my distance rides, my speed.  I decide to start eating better.  More fruit, less of cookies, chips and ice cream.  More cooked meals, fewer boxes.  I email my friend from college and tell her I’m going to stop smoking pot so I can ride further faster. 

The next day I get home from work and open the drawer that contains my pot, pipes and lighters.  I remember my flat speed.  I close the drawer and grab my bike for a 12 miles sprint.  A few hours after I get back I forget, go to the drawer and end up back on my bike.  I have the following day off and end up in the park at least 6 different times.  A week later I’ve forgotten about the drawer but I keep up the pace.  Two weeks later I average a steady 17.  At the end of the month I’m over 18.

The numbers keep me going.  In fact, I’ve been writing 4000 on my left hand with a marker, rewriting it a few times a week when the ink fades.  4000 is roughly the number of miles I’ll need to ride to get to California.  4000 is what I look at when I’m daydreaming at work or on my rides. 

20 miles into the day I think, “This is half a percent of my way across the country.”  I find this more motivating than discouraging.  I’ve saved my right hand for hills.  No numbers, but I have an arrow drawn on it.  The arrow aims straight ahead, always aligned with my body the same way regardless of whether I’m going up hills, down them or coasting on flats.  I follow the arrow and ignore elevation; it’s all just in front of me, waiting to be pushed into the past. 

With my new passion for ignoring hills I decide to visit my parents’ place for the weekend.  There’s a highway near their house that is cycling friendly.  9W runs right to the George Washington Bridge.  There are no flats; at the top of every hill you see the top of another one in front of you; every turn leads to a steady drop or a sharp climb.  More impressive than the hills are the bikes.  A friend from New Brunswick tells me, “Hot shot Wall Street bankers ride there.” 

I pass a group of Sunday cyclists, some bike club’s weekend ride.  Three people have the same $1600 Specialized, one guy has a $3000 Cannondale.  My CamelBak is leaking water or I actually drool when I see a black on black Trek listed at $6000.  My bike has at least 16 years on all of them.  Raleigh Technium 440; unfortunately age doesn’t mean experience.  My rusty chain alerts them of my presence and I pass them, eyeing their bikes as we climb a hill.

Another rise, another turn.  The riders behind me are gone, but there are two others ahead of me.  A turn later I’m close enough to read their cross bars.  A Trek 1000 and, “Holy shit, that’s a nice bike.”  He smiles back at me, “Thanks.”  It’s a vintage Pinarello aluminum frame, sexy yellow paint job and at least $2000 of high end components.  He even took out the aluminum fork and replaced it with carbon fiber.  The handlebars have carbon SRAM gear shifters infinitely more expensive than my whole bike. 

I pass the pair and a few more cyclists before I hit the 20 mile mark.  I look at my hand and think, if I could do that 199 more times, I’d be across the country. 

I turn around and make my way back home.  I’m amazed at how many hills I still have to climb.  It felt like the ride out had been all uphill, but unless the topography changed things were split pretty evenly.  I follow my arrow through another hill and think of Bill out west, going up a mountain pass.

I get home from work; 9:45.  Still 15 minutes till my sister is on the phone with her boyfriend.  I call her and she tells me that she’s worrying about our parents’ health.  I check to see if any schools have posted a decision yet, one has.  She asks if I got in, but the page is still loading. 

“Well?”  I’m silent long enough for her to know. When I finally speak, I just tell her I have to go.  I know one place I won’t be next year. 

I change, attach some lights to my wheels and carry the bike down the stairs.  I ride to the park.  It’s too dark to use the paths so I just circle around the perimeter, front wheel spinning red, rear wheel spinning blue.  I wait for my legs to burn, my lungs to claw at my chest.  I find silence.  I can’t see my hand, but I know the number is there.  Bill’s latest email came right before he went to sleep, “The tent is set up.  I’m overlooking tree-covered ridges and have birds singing around me.  I will sleep well tonight.” 

I take a long breath in through my nose, hold it two seconds, out through my mouth, wait two seconds and repeat.  The pauses, the pattern, they slow down my heart; I speak and my body listens. 

It’s dark even on the roads around the park.  I’m blind to my cyclometer, but can feel the pace in my chest slow as the wind comes faster.  I pretend to hear the birds outside my tent.    

My body tells me that I’ve improved as a cyclist.  My thighs are thicker and more toned each month; I breathe easily even though my rides are longer and my speed is faster.  But faster than what?  Further than what?  I don’t know if my improvement has moved me from bad to good, bad to okay, or bad to less bad.  When I see a flyer for an organized ride in Lambertville, I send in my registration.  It’s 40 miles of “rolling hills” and it starts and ends at a brewery.  Lambertville is only 33 miles from New Brunswick; I went there and rode home on a day off a few weeks earlier.  I get excited because for the first time I won’t be riding in a vacuum, I’ll have other riders to help gauge my abilities.

Check in at seven; the ride starts at eight; everyone clips into their pedals and we begin. I’m in the middle of the group looking at 60 sets of bike shorts; this in itself is motivation to move up. 

I work my way towards the front of the pack by the end of the second mile.  Six riders with matching jerseys are directly in front of me, drafting off of one another.  At the fifth mile they shuffle positions.  I keep my distance; I say that drafting is a cop out.  You can go the same speed with nearly half the energy.  Of course, I’d probably do it if I weren’t afraid of crashing into someone when they stop short. 

At mile 10 we round a corner, “No fucking way,” I’m looking up the steepest climb I’ve ever faced.  Already defeated, I shift into the second lowest gear leaving myself one last resort that isn’t walking my bike up the hill.  The peloton ahead of me shatters; they’re all out of their saddles, pushing their bodies, piston legs and heaving chests; slowly, we grind our way up the hill.  At the half way point the grade gets steeper, I pass everyone, not going faster, just less slowly. 

“On your left.”  I go to look over my shoulder, but before I get my head around- red spandex flies past me at a speed my body can’t fathom.

Purple face, shaking hands, pounding chest; frustrated, I get to the top of the hill in time to see the red jersey disappear around a corner about half a mile down the country road.  I shame myself.  This is a hill; I’ll need to climb mountains when I go cross country.  Bill just crossed the Cascades, three passes in one day.  I gear up, rise out of my seat and give my pedals three hard strokes before coasting for a tenth of a mile. 

Disappointed in my early fatigue, I reach for my water bottle.  My legs and lungs savor the rest and resume their cadence when my odometer clicks .1. 

The next 5 miles I’m alone aside from the cows I pass.  Nobody in front, nobody behind.  It’s not until I’m in the midst of some of those rolling hills that I hear, “to your left”. 

All black outfit, shining Cannondale, Oakleys and a friendly smile.  “Are you in front?”  I tell him that there’s one more person ahead of us.  “What’s your name?”  He’s Paul.  This rider, obscured by glasses and a helmet; in my mind, he looks like my old boss, same name so they share a face.  This is my first high speed conversation.

We turn onto a small country highway.  He asks why I’m riding and laughs when I say, “for the crotch numbing fun of it”.  His longest ride was a metric century and his favorite stat is top speed; he hit 53 on a nearby highway.  I’ve only gotten up to 37.  He checks his left shoulder, “Car back.” He drops behind me until a Civic passes us.  Paul pulls back beside me, “37?  There’s a hill coming up in a little while, you should be able to get 40.”  I hit 43; the hill did most of the work.  I felt better going 6 on that first climb.

I want to ask Paul about the other hills when he says “Big car back.”  I look over my shoulder and see an 18 wheeler.  Paul goes in front of me.  As the truck is beside us he points his right hand to the ground and shakes it so I know that loose gravel is coming up.  Just after the truck passes us I stare at the trailer and all I can think of is currents of air, we could probably get into the 30s drafting behind it.  Instead I squeeze my breaks until the gravel is behind me, then I shift into a higher gear to catch up with Paul.  I look over my shoulder; no cars coming up so I pull beside him.  He asks when I last saw the rider in front.  I check my odometer and I’ve been lagging for ten miles.  What makes my body incapable of doing what the red cyclist did?

Paul takes his hands off the handlebars and reaches into the back pocket of his jersey.  I see him take out an energy shot, a mixture of caffeine, protein and herbs that looks like thick fruit punch.  He downs it and puts the packet back into the pocket.  

Everything is hidden but his mouth, he’s grinning when he asks if I feel like catching the guy.  We don’t talk for the next five miles to save our oxygen for the ride. 

We lean into a turn; on the other side we see the jersey at the same time.  There’s a long hill in front of us, not as steep as the first, but roughly the same vertical gain.  Paul is a faster climber than I am, but I refuse to give in to my legs.  I keep my bike in the highest gear I can manage and follow Paul to the top.  A mile down the road we take a left and pull beside the man in red, Mike. 

“How the hell did you take that first hill so fast?”  He lives in the area, “I can’t leave my driveway without climbing a hill.”  I think of my rides in New Brunswick, long and flat.  I might be jealous. 

At the next rest stop, Paul and Mike refill their bottles.  I still have a liter so I keep going, “I’ll see you guys in a few miles.”  I figure they’ll probably chase me down sooner than that, but they never do.  I ride the last 15 miles with phantoms right behind me.  My cyclometer keeps telling me to go faster.  I follow the arrow on my right hand but every hill slows down my speed on the flats: this is unacceptable.  I think about cycling cross country, I think about breathing, I look at the 4000, ignore my legs and the number on my handlebar approves.

When I finish the ride, there’s a celebratory picnic and I’m told to help myself.  “You’re the first one back; how do you feel?”  I’m happy I don’t have to wait in line for food. 

Midway through my second plate of grilled chicken, Paul and Mike sit next to me.  “We got lost, ended up riding an extra 5 miles.”  And I’d been thinking my endurance overcame speed.  We eat and talk about the ride; we watch the line grow longer.  This wasn’t a race, but neither is chasing down a car or a person riding in the distance.  I’ve never known a cyclist to be content behind someone else. 

I point to the line and say, “That guy is my idol.”  Sideburns so grizzly they can only be called muttonchops, cigarette in hand, oil-stained t-shirt underneath a leather vest and jean shorts so jagged I’m not sure if they were cut or worn until the bottom half fell off.  Paul tells me, “I saw him smoking on the ride.” 

I wonder how he made it up the first hill.  For the most part, everyone here is in skintight spandex; they cut down drag, but I think that near-naked shame factors in to the increase of speed.  No one can see your face if you go fast enough.

I wonder if Muttonchops cares that he could’ve gone faster with the absurd attire, without the cigarettes.  I saw some people riding mountain bikes and wonder if they tell themselves, “I’d be in the front if I had thin, no tread tires, if I had rams-head handlebars, if my fork were carbon fiber.”  If someone on $4000 carbon bike passes me, I can’t help but to ask myself if it’s the rider or his bike that’s faster.

Half my transition from 10 mph to 20 mph and 10 miles to 50 was eating better, riding several times a day and giving my resin coated lungs a well earned break from smoke.  The other half was equipment. 

Riding a bike in flip-flops has liberating feel – hovering over the ground practically barefoot, surrounded by the wind, images rushing to be blurred in peripherals.  When I bought cycling cleats, there was a strange transition.  The shoes have a metal plate at the bottom that locks into the pedal.  Aside from providing the opportunity to break one’s ankle in a bike crash, they give you the ability to pull up on the pedals in addition to pushing down. 

After I bought the shoes I went home and changed the pedals on my bike and went for my daily ride.  My liberated feet were now locked down; very physically, I had become a moving piece of the bike; every pedal stroke made me think of the churning pistons powering an engine.  My average mph was 1.2 faster than normal. 

A fear of the inevitable collapse of my aluminum frame got me thinking about buying a new bike, when I realized that if I rode cross country I needed a touring bike to carry my gear, I made the purchase.  It looks like a racing bike, but it’s built with heavier metal so it’s more for reliability than speed.  Steel over carbon fiber and aluminum; but the 20 years of technology that separate my old and new road bike more than compensate for the additional eight pounds. Gear shifters that are built into the break levers and a more efficient drive train give me an extra two mph on my rides.  

Then there’s the spandex.  The wind is worse than hills are, less tangible, less visible, less predictable.  No evidence of what you struggled against.  When I’ve worn loose t-shirts and baggy shorts they fill with the rushing air.  I become more of a wheel-bound sailboat and less of a blade slipping through the wind.  The cycling clothes help with the wind, but place any pit stops or errands out of the realm of public decency. 

By far the most important piece of equipment I own is my cyclometer.  A magnet on the wheel, a sensor, and a computer the size of a wrist watch that straps onto my handlebars.  I don’t know how fast I went before I owned this little device, but the day I bought it was the same day I started taking cycling seriously.  The numbers push me when nobody is riding in the park.  They tell me I’ve gone faster before; they say I should be going that speed now.  Most of my riding is a struggle to go further, to go faster, but I’m left to wonder, how much of my success is because of my body, and how much is because of my gear. 

I want to ask Mike if he had to buy a new bike to ride the local hills or if he already had one.  I think of Muttonchops and wonder what he’d do on my bike.  The sky is getting cloudy so I say goodbye to my new friends; they ask why I’m putting my helmet back on.  I don’t own a car. 

I find the phone pole I left my bike lock on.  The 10 pounds of steel chain links get draped over my shoulder and I start my post-ride ride back to the house I stayed at last night. 

I’m more confident that I could make it to the west coast if I keep pushing myself.  I get distracted imagining the scenery Bill describes, “lots of farm country — fields of corn and soybeans.  Saw one field of small sunflowers.”  I wonder if I’ll be paying attention to the fields or if my body will be too tired, my mind too set on the road ahead of me. 

From the side of the highway I see a familiar bike on a car roof.  With the down grade, I’m going 27 mph, but the car is doubling my speed, I feel sluggish.  I wonder how much I’d slow down if I had a car and didn’t ride several times a day.  Traveling 30 miles to see friends, getting groceries, going to work, my everyday life is conditioning.  To get food to eat I need to practice. 

I’m on French Street and the right half of the road is bordered by parked cars; I take the lane.  It’s narrow so I’m centered between the yellow line and the row of cars.  The last thing I want is a door to swing open and clothesline me. 

A horn blares.  Over my shoulder I see a mini-van; inside, the driver is thrashing his arms around.  I pass a sign, speed limit 25, I’m at 23.  Screw him.  The horn comes again.  He must’ve rolled down his window, “…off the road.” 

A few blocks away, the metered parking stops, there are no cars.  I wait until this area to ride closer to the curb; the mini-van rides his horn the whole way.  As soon as I’m leaning to the right I hear his engine rev; I barely have time to get out of the way before he’s beside me.  Inside the van, he’s fidgeting with some buttons on his door and the passenger window comes down.  With the wind in my face I hear, “Hey Lance Armstrong, get the fuck off the road.”  I could tell this man that roads were first paved for bicyclists but I don’t think he’d care.  He’s streaming profanity, occasionally interjecting sentence fragments, “…hit you with my car.” 

I’m still riding beside the van when I ask the driver of this two-ton weapon, “Have you ever gotten your ass kicked by a man in spandex?”  He looks blank, curses a little more and speeds ahead to a red light.  I pull beside him with a smile that says fuck you. 

I watch the light for the side street: it turns yellow, no cars coming; I take off a few seconds before he gets the green.  The slope of the road gets steeper; I gear up and kick my pedals past 30, till I can’t keep up with the hill. 

I pull up in front of my apartment; my legs and hands are shaking.  My body, stoked with adrenaline.  I barely think about going inside to sit down.  With my cyclometer reset, I ride to the park and put in another 20 miles.  My legs don’t tire, my lungs don’t ache.  When I return, I write down my average mph and it’s 1.5 over normal.  I laugh when I read Bill’s message, “Roads are not busy.  Most everybody waves as they pass.  Farmers out working always wave.” 

I see the same faces on my rides.  Some stick to mornings, others come after work, but most people ride on Sundays.  I pick out distant objects, the cyclists.  I check the minutes and seconds on my cyclometer and pick a time to pass the person by.  I never know how long the person has been here, what mile they’re on.  It’s not a race with the person, just a question as to whether or not I can pass an object. 

One day I’m riding back through the park after a campus loop.  I decide to get ten more miles out of the park.  I see a member of the Rutgers cycling team in the parking lot.  His bike is flipped over and he’s changing a tire.  When I double back for the last three miles I can see him pulling onto the road.  He’s a few hundred feet away when I decide to chase him down.  I pace myself at first, creeping up slowly.  When I’m 20 feet back I check my speedometer, 18 flickering up to 18.5.  I’ve been riding a little over 90 minutes.  I have another mile of road left in the park.  I gear up and push myself up to 19; I’m grinding my teeth as I pass him.  I push harder but hover at 19.  With the corner of my eye I check my shoulder and I don’t see the kid.  I ease back down to 18.  He swerves to my left and blows past.  I don’t bother chasing, my legs are shot.  I turn onto the street and speed past the cars at red lights. 

I check my email and read the final forwarded message from Bill, “I have reached the Pacific Ocean.  I wish I could say I had profound thoughts at the time, that I could write something that will be remembered, but I can’t.  It just happened.”  Rereading the message, I peel a clementine and eat the sections one at a time.  Daydreams come of long empty roads cutting through cornfields and rain coming down mountain passes. I wonder if I’ll think of anything when my feet touch the Pacific and I feel the salty breeze, when I hear birds calling one another as they scatter across the setting sun.

The Coal Spur Kid

Prologue

Conrail—Johnson City, NY

            The first house I ever knew as home is less than a hundred yards from an old rail line that once hauled freight and passengers on a track that snaked along the northern edge of the Chenango River.  Now it exists for no other reason than to haul in carloads of coal from the rich anthracite fields in places like Inez, Kentucky, to the local power plant that still eats up metric tons of the black stuff every day.  I was only two years old when my parents bought that house and my childhood is rooted there.  Nearly three decades later, I guess I’m one of those people who can say they’ve grown up around trains. 

But then again, people like that always seemed to me—and still do—rougher, more hardened, and intimate with labor around big machines than I imagine myself ever being.  They’re the ones who mean they’ve worked with trains, because their fathers and their fathers’ fathers did.  Their histories are, in a lot of ways, more honest; so are their “growing up around trains” assertions.  My father was a firefighter, and his was a beer-truck driver, and the only manual labor I’ve known has been delivering newspapers and hauling firewood on a beat-up Radio Flyer wagon with a rusty axel.

So I suppose a more truthful, or at least accurate, description of my coal-dusted childhood would be to say I grew up near trains, or, rather, near train tracks since the appearance of an actual line of lumbering cars was, at best, an every-other-day event.  Even then, when I’d hear the low rumble of the engines and the metal-on-metal squeal from the hundred wheels, the real attraction to the slow-rolling monster had less (if any) to do with the actual locomotives and cars—those things that workers or camera-clad railfans would focus on—and far more with what that train could do to the things you left on the tracks. 

There are the ubiquitous pennies, of course, but you should see what happens to firecrackers or beer cans, or melted plastic action figures, or some unfortunate kid’s plastic retainer, and even once the bloated corpse of a recently-deceased opossum.  Anything that would crush or squish was fair game.  Even then, I had heard enough derailment stories to leave the ballast rocks for throwing—which was both the ritual that grew out of frustration at the lack of anything to set on the trembling rails, and my own little futile protest against the noisy beast whose wheels screamed and whose giant steel couplers smashed and banged like gunshots too early on the mornings when I was sent out to roam but too tired to really go anywhere.

But then there were always the rails, train or not.  Those actual ribbons of metal that were so hard and so straight in their silence that I’d walk on them like balance beams and never think about all the things I’d left on them to be flattened or severed.  They were just there to sit on in the hot middle of a long day in July with the trees on either side of the line shading me from the sun and from the prying gaze of parents or all those other authority figures who loomed always somewhere too close.  They felt like they were all mine.

And would it be too hokey or too American to say that one day I saw how these same rails stretched into the setting sun beyond the trestle, toward a point on the horizon that I could now and then glimpse between the valley’s slanting sides that had gathered and held me, my family—two, three generations deep—next to the river running along its green floor?  Is it overly romantic to tell you that, on at least one occasion, it’s very likely that I wondered where those rails went, how far they could go if I followed them for a few hours or a few days? 

After all, isn’t that how the railroad and its trains have made their way into our imaginations?  Some kid somewhere dreaming of just where those tracks can lead, who he could meet—the loners, the outlaws, the thousand archetypes of independence—along that right-of-way, or all the hidden things that are ignored by the highway and completely obliterated from an airplane seat. They’re freedom and adventure all balled up together—or at least the twinkling possibility of these things.  Hell, the railroad is possibility. 

And if thinking of miles upon miles of steel and wood this way is too hokey, too sentimental, or (and this may sound like the worst of all to anyone who’s never had to wonder about these things) too hopeful, then I guess I’m stuck.  Because, even if I didn’t know it when I was a bored kid on summer break just looking for rocks to throw and pennies to smash flat, that’s the stuff living next to the old Conrail coal spur taught me.

When I actually—finally—started following these tracks, walking them just to see where they went, every step down the line took me deeper into what third-generation railroader Russell Butler has called the endless love-hate affair with an ineffable, intangible beast.  I found myself wandering farther and farther just to see what I could find out there.  Even if it turned out to be just another long pair of rails that merged somewhere too far away, I had seen something that was new and foreign to me, something that held the fascination that everything foreign holds.  And, despite every attempt to be satisfied with what I had come upon in the miles and miles of walking, it was never enough.  I knew there was more to be seen, that there were more places and vistas that were yet undiscovered—undiscovered by me, at least—and I wanted, I needed to find them.  But as is the case with any dysfunctional relationship, one partner will always hold a certain sway over the other for reasons that are so often terribly obvious to anyone removed enough to look at that relationship with vision that isn’t clouded by the storms of fascination and obsession.

The sway that the railroad lines had over me—that they still have over me—is, in all honesty, hopelessly wistful and nostalgic.  There is a long history behind and a wealth of promise ahead when you stand on any stretch of the more than 170,000 miles of track braided and woven throughout the country.  There is an entire world of senses: grime and grease, the smell of oil and creosote-soaked ties, walls of rusty steel, and polished steel where the wheels meet the rails, the seemingly immovable tons that can suddenly lurch into a smooth, determined roll. 

The railroad has in it a song to sing to anyone who is willing to listen, one especially melodic to all of us who grew up in those once-impressive factory and industrial towns that are scattered all across the wide table of the nation like so many handfuls of rusty crumbs.  For those of us whose parents pushed us away from home as soon as we could fend for ourselves—not because we were talking up space but because, and I heard it enough myself, “There’s nothing worth sticking around here for”—the most important thing was, no, is the idea that someplace out there is bigger, more exciting, more…everything that isn’t here: that America that all the old travel posters told us to see from the observation cars on The California Zephyr and The Empire Builder and The Starlight Express, the America seen from an open boxcar door. 

Whether or not I could ever get to that other place wasn’t (isn’t) really the question—just knowing, or at least believing, that there was someplace beyond the little sphere of my world was enough.  And all those trains that run on all the hundreds and hundreds of lines, from big yards and stations, through small, lonely towns and back, they’re a physical connection to all the people who have stories to tell and all those places that are just waiting to be seen.  Any little thing that can remind me of this is like a message in a bottle washing up from out of that great sea of the nation.

One

Conrail / Norfolk Southern—Allentown, PA

I didn’t know who “Steam Train Maury” was, but I did know he was dead after nearly ninety years.  And while I suppose there was an obituary written for him in some newspaper somewhere, knowledge of this unknown man’s death came to me in the blustery cold of late November on the dusty yellow side of a train car.  The little remembrance was a simple one—his name, birth and death dates, and a solemn “R.I.P.”—written in a quick-yet-deliberate script next to a sketch of a flapping swallow-tail flag with a diamond holding an eponymous capital letter V in its center. 

It was easily the tenth one of these simple monuments I’d seen on different cars of this train parked on a service spur running under a rusty hundred-year-old trestle that carried the Conrail and Norfolk Southern mainlines over the Lehigh River into Allentown, Pennsylvania.  This was the train and trestle I had walked five west-bound miles of track to photograph with their respective bulk and lacey nineteenth-century girders lit by the orange of a setting sun against the grey of a departing cold front.

            And it was really no surprise to see something written on the train.  Spray paint on the freights is really just a descendent of the New York City subway graffiti movement that exploded in the early-1970s and was snuffed out less than 30 years later in defense of the mostly symbolic “quality of life” ideal that it supposedly attacked.  But it makes perfect sense that graffiti writers would want to paint on trains—the New York subway outlaws got their work to run through all the boroughs; this latest version could get it out to the whole continent. 

Still, that image I had always thought of, like a lot of people, was of vibrant aerosol paintings.  This memorial to Steam Train was as far from a swirl of transformed letters and numbers as it got; this was just a quick little thing, maybe a few inches square, like something you’d absent-mindedly doodle while talking on the phone.  Only, it was on the side of a train and was repeated exactly, specifically, again and again on the cars.  They were all alike and freshly-made and said he had died today.  I had no idea who the man memorialized was, but such repetition on so many cars that came from so many different places made me realize that this drawing must have been made by someone next to this very train, someone who could be as close to it as I now was, and my mind wandered.

A vision of a craggy old hobo tramping sadly along this same worn path, mulling over the death of his long-time hobo-buddy—good old Steam Train—with a bandana pouch tied to the end of an old walking stick he’d slung over his curved shoulder and (why not?) a dusty fedora perched on the back of his greasy-haired head.  Some grey beard who’d been riding the rails for years, marking the cars he’d hopped with a hunk of paint stick he’d likely picked up off the ground in some yard somewhere or from a maintenance shed way down the line.  He would’ve been just like the old hoboes back in the day when hopping an interstate train wasn’t considered neither atypical nor federal offense. 

And my mind jumped to a middle-school English class where I had given a terrible, thrown-together book report on Jack London and only talked about his train-hopping days.  The only thing I could recall about the story was how he had dubbed himself “Skysail Jack” and carved his moniker into water towers, shed walls, and bridge supports along his routes to let everyone know he’d been there; and how his tramp compatriots had an entire pictorial language they’d perfected and learned.  A whole list of symbols that told others fresh off the train what the new town had to offer them: where a friendly woman lived, a place for clean water, whether the local law was vicious or lenient, and a hundred other things that any weary, dirty traveler would want to know.  It was a complete network of silent, secret communication solely for those in the know. 

But now I knew that was more than a century dead and gone and I kept coming back to this drawing and my imaginary artist because they were both right here, in front of me.  The drawing gave birth to the artist, and I could see for myself the little details that spoke of this human presence.  There was one line that was supposed to meet up with another but stopped short; and then there were the cracks in the car’s surface that a fluid drawing hand had gotten caught on. I could even drag my finger down the drawing’s edge and smudge the paint that was still a little wet. I felt connected to the train, to the drawing, and, suddenly, to whatever hand had put it here. 

I’d seen sketches like this before and never thought much about them.  Really, they’re not much to think of—all but invisible when the train is roaring past and then dwarfed by those big, more ostentatious spray painted graffiti they exist among.  The ones I had seen before weren’t so different from this, either.  Sure, the motif would change and the dates, if there were any, would differ, but I had always chalked them up to some drunken kid’s need to do something while hiding out along the tracks somewhere.  I mean, that’s what I figured because it’s exactly what I would’ve done. Or I just supposed some transient, some homeless down-on-his-luck guy, was lurking around looking for some secluded spot to sleep in.

            I snapped a photo of the little thing.  I don’t know why.  No, I do.  It had something to do with the hopeless sincerity I saw in it.  The act of any public memorial is only half-selfish—it’s something mollifying for the one doing the memorializing, yes, but its whole intention is to be seen.  Whatever we get from seeing that memorial is innately and tightly bound-up in the re-acknowledgment of mortality that always seems to fall onto us like epiphany, as if we had somehow forgotten that we can’t be here forever.  But even in out own worn-out, selfish denial, we can be altruistic as well.

This artist surely knew, or I suppose hoped, there would be at least one other witness, one more person to stop, maybe for just a glance, but still stop and think about this dead man who meant enough to someone to be remembered, even if it was in this unconventional way.  When I took that photo, Steam Train, whoever he may have been, along with his memory, continued on, off in another direction.  The drawn-on train carried him down the line to who-knows-where, but the image written onto the film in my camera would now part from the train, become something else even.  Instead of just riding that steel route, I carried it to the photo lab and then, eventually, back into my own home days, weeks after it was penned onto that dusty car.  The memory of a man I didn’t know would now live with me.  Even in death, he kept right on going. 

And doesn’t everyone want to believe that there’s someone out there who’ll care enough to leave a little remembrance of each of us when we’re gone.  Just a little something that maybe someone else might see so, in our sad absences, we can keep on going, even if it’s just as so many quiet reminders that we really were once here.  The littlest memorial, even if we make it ourselves, will quietly say to everything that gets left behind, I mattered in some small way. 

Standing there with the sun setting and the November wind rustling the few stubborn remaining leaves, I thought about Jack London and how the ninety-odd years he’d been dead was just about the same number of years Steam Train Maury had been alive.  I thought about who they both must have left behind and figured it was about time to go.

            It was already getting dark and I hadn’t even started the five-mile hike home back up the tracks.  The thin chill that had been dancing around all day slumped right down into a heavy cold so I decided to walk the long trestle into the city and get something warm to drink.  It wasn’t the safest route in, but most large trestles like this have an open grate catwalk down the middle or on one side for workers to use.  This one had a wide center walk and, more importantly, I knew that any train crossing it in the dark would have its lights on and be visible from a good half-mile away.  In the worst-case scenario of two trains crossing at once—one bound north, the other south—with me somewhere in the middle, I could lie facedown on the catwalk and have at least a few feet of clearance as the cars rumbled by above my head.  And while this was an unlikely situation, I still hurried across in a half-jog once I managed to climb the rocky embankment that led up from the maintenance line below.

            My head tucked down and into the stiffening wind, I watched the river rush by and listened to the hollow thump, thunk-thump of an uprooted tree trunk caught in the eddying current against a massive granite support some twenty feet below.  The sound of the wind and watery trunk in my ears left me all but unable to hear any train that might roll onto the trestle, so every ten seconds I’d toss a quick glance back over my shoulder and then ahead into the dark looking for only the bright headlight of an oncoming locomotive. 

Walk, walk, walk, look.  Walk, walk, walk, look.  I knew you can never be too careful.  I’d heard the stories: veterans who’d worked twenty, thirty years on the railroad were killed everyday.  Like the maintenance worker who bled to death after a chemical tanker’s brakes failed.  The runaway car rolled silently down the line he was repairing, picking up speed the whole way, and cut him clean in half across his midsection.  Or that one about the engineer whose locomotive backed into a line of parked service vehicles and crushed three guys between the bumpers.  These were the professionals with hardhats and work boots and high-visibility safety vests.  Where that left me, in my worn sneakers and baseball hat, was something I never wanted to think too much about, and by the time I was finally across I was shivering and needed to catch my breath.

*

            I still try to figure out where he came from.  Was he there the whole time watching me come across?  Or just ahead of me on the trestle? Did he climb up from the riverbank underneath the last stretch?  Was he behind me and I just didn’t realize it?  Whatever it was that happened to get him there, he was no more than ten feet away when I noticed him on the other side of the tracks blowing warming breaths into his gloved hands.  With the sun not completely gone down behind him, I could still make out his dirty jeans, a backpack, a heavy black garage jacket bundled against the cold, and the worn bill of a baseball hat peeking out from under a hood.  I figured he was just one of the city’s many homeless up here to drink or piss or sleep. He seemed oblivious to my presence, but I still wanted to get out of there.  A couple hundred dollars-worth of camera equipment was reason enough to not stick around.  Staring back across the trestle, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other as if impatient for something to arrive, and when my shoes slid on the loose ballast, he looked my way with a slow, unsure turn that said he was as surprised as I was to come across someone else up here.

            In the long seconds that passed we surely sized one another up, or at least that’s what I did.  I wondered if I could fight if I had to and thought I might get a good quick shot in, unless he had a knife, or a gun, or anything.  I tried to gauge how far away the street lights on the busy main road were and wondered how long it had been since I’d actually had to run from anything, or to anything for that matter.  In my mind I practiced what I’d say when he asked me for a cigarette, or my money, or my camera.  All the things I’d learned from TV told me to just give them what they want and stay alive.

            When he blew into his fists again, still looking at me, I was ready to do whatever I had to: run, fight, hand over everything valuable I had and head to the police station to file a report if I could still move.  But something drew his glance back down the tracks again and he took a second to look, never moving his hands away from his mouth, before turning back to me, opening one fist into a casual spread-finger wave, and then pointing down to the trestle to where a blinding yellow light said a locomotive was just beginning to rumble its way in our direction from across the darkening bridge.

            It tore between us, southbound, with all the noise and terror that is a fully-loaded freight train pushing toward high speed—a high-priority “hotshot” of double-stacked shipping containers that probably wouldn’t be stopping or even slowing down until it reached its destination.  In the spaces between the cars flashing by, I would catch moments of him watching them.  Like single frames cut from a boring film, I could see him frozen in random poses: standing there looking down the length of the train with a hand on his head to hold his hat down against the wind; facing the cars but watching their path with his hands in his pockets; again blowing into his fists or shrugging his hood back up around his neck.  

            Then it was past as quickly as it had come upon us.  And he still stood there, hands deep in his coat pockets, watching the flashing red light on the rear of last car disappear around the bend.  When the world was again enveloped in the eerie quiet that arrives in the wake of a passing train, he looked over his shoulder toward the bridge and back again to the bend ahead, hopped over one rail then the other in a few light steps, and made a casual bee-line toward me.

            I had run into plenty of people in the time I’d spent along the tracks—spend enough time anywhere and you’re bound to meet someone.  Most were older men; some retired rail workers or train engineers who simply couldn’t stay away, others were just guys who’d fallen in love with the idea of the railroad as kids but never really saw it as a career option.  They both always seemed to have at least one camera with them and they always talked openly about a basement dedicated to model trains. And, depending on where you were, there were usually a few dog walkers or drunks wandering a stretch of track.  Of course the few times I had to give identification to security guards or railroad cops and talk my way out of a trespassing ticket were always in the back of my mind, too.  But all my encounters had been in the light of day—mornings, afternoons—making them, at best, friendly, or, at worst, barely genial.  In the dark, away from the security of passing cars and pedestrians, on your own, even a guy who has just waved and warned you of an on-coming train is suspicious. 

The uneasiness that had been relieved by that wave he’d given me suddenly returned, and I thought again of running, worried that he’d be right on my heels if I did.  I made a fist around the keys in my pocket and waited.

            The first words were his and, to my surprise, my anxiety faded almost as soon as he spoke. He said there was a fox carrying its little kits one by one across the tracks seconds before the train screamed through—that’s what he was pointing at—and the whole time he thought we were going to helplessly watch her get hit. The relief he felt at the fox’s survival came through in the timbre of his low soft voice. 

            He was taller than he looked from across the tracks—as tall as me—and when he stuck out his hand to shake hello, the wrists that poked out between the too-short cuffs of his jacket and the bottoms of his cloth gloves told me we had a similar build as well.  Short hair peeked from under the sides of his hat and faded into scruffy week-old stubble on his cheeks and chin that only half-hid a clearly boyish face.  I couldn’t tell how old he was, maybe somewhere in his mid-twenties, but he asked the stock railroad questions that always come up—Was I waiting for a train?  Did I see the one laid-up back on that maintenance line?  Were there any cops around?  I knew these questions were a way to gauge my reasons for being around trains without coming off like an interrogator or nutjob. They worked as sort of code that told him as much about me as they told me about him.  I answered each in turn and, through his eager additions of his own information, learned that we were both on the long list of those who found themselves fascinated by the train.

He said he had made his way from the same direction I had to also take photos, and he showed me his pack that was loaded with equipment and film while telling me how surprised he was to find someone else who came to this out-of-the-way spot.  He described a long line of new chrome auto carriers that was stuck waiting on the trestle an hour or so earlier and how the sun was reflecting off the river so that it was like the cars were lit from below and netted with shadows from above.  Since then he’d just been hanging around, waiting to see if any other trains would roll through and was, it sounded, relieved that I didn’t seem like someone who was going to rob or kill him, or even hit him up for a cigarette.

            We talked about the train that just came through and about this spot and how it looked at different times of the day and year.  He knew all about the big Norfolk Southern yard that was less than a mile from the trestle and, through this intimate knowledge, hinted at ways to get into it without too much risk.  When he asked what I thought about graffiti—another stock question that can often reveal more than any other when it comes to trains—I told him the truth, that I liked it and was happy to shoot it and had even done some back when I was a kid living in New York.  He smiled and gave a little chuckle at this and I noticed two deep dimples appear on either side of his mouth when he nodded in what I took to be agreement.  He wanted to know if I ever saw so-and-so painted on the trains around here and when I said I had—had, in fact just taken a photo of a bright green-and-blue one the day before—he gave that same little nod and chuckle.  I added that I had just seen something odd on the maintenance spur train back across the river and wondered if he knew who this Steam Train Maury guy was.

*

Together, walking the short half-mile to a 7-11 in town, I learned that, in addition to a physiology, we shared a first name as well.  Still, he insisted that he usually went by his surname, Vauxhall, even if people usually screwed up the pronunciation of it—ending it with a hard x.  In his soft voice that teetered on a mumble, he said, as if in passing, to just call him V; it was easier and that’s what he went by on the trains, most of the time anyway.  And then, perking up, he told me all about Maury Graham, a five-time “king of the hoboes” and “official grand patriarch” of rail riders, who had suffered a stroke just a few days prior and was found dead this morning.  But it was OK.  The old guy had been sick for a while, lived a good life, and a lot of people will remember him.

And right then I felt a rock of disheartened recognition appear in my stomach.  As soon as I made the connection he had implied—the one-letter nickname “on the trains,” all that Steam Train Maury information right at hand—I saw that this guy, the one who walked the tracks, hung out on trestles, lugged camera equipment on his back for miles, who was, for all intents and purposes, no different than me, had been the one memorializing the dead man on the cars.  It wasn’t some old hobo sentimentally remembering his friend.  V admitted that, while he never met the man or even knew anyone who had, he still felt it was important to get the word out that the old tramp had “caught the westbound.”  And I felt like I’d been cheated, like someone who suddenly realizes they’re the butt of a joke everyone else (even just one other person) was in on all along.

            As we left the store, coffees in-hand for the long walk we both had ahead of us, I wanted to be away from and done with him.  I felt an odd sense of betrayal at his not being my idealized and romantic vision of a lamenting hobo-artist, so I lied and said I had to go over to the photo store to drop off some film and then meet my wife for dinner in a little while.  Whether or not he believed me, I still don’t know, but he gave a nod that I took to say OK.  I half-heartedly suggested we go out and shoot together before the snow started falling and I momentarily brightened at the memory of his hints at knowing a way into the big NS yard. 

He took off his backpack and rummaged around in it for a minute before coming out with a pen and a torn sheet of notebook paper.  On it he told me to write my e-mail address or phone number and said he’d give me a call next time he was going to go out.  I wrote both down so he wouldn’t think I was just trying to get rid of him and said to call whenever, that there were a lot of places I wanted to check out.  He stuffed it into his coat pocket and nodded in agreement giving me a quick “see you later” while heading down the sidewalk before disappearing into the dark weeds that backed the scrubby woods bordering the tracks.  I still had his pen.

Two

Norfolk Southern—Allentown, PA

On an unexpectedly warm Tuesday morning in December, I got a terse message from V asking if I wanted to come to one of his favorite “benching spots”—someplace to take a look at trains and shoot some photos—a classification yard near Allentown where Norfolk Southern would sort and arrange cars based on destination and assemble them into full trains, “manifests,” that would eventually take those cars to wherever they needed to go.  I knew from looking at atlases and online maps that this spot he was talking about sat right on the edge of the large NS holding yard V had hinted at getting into when we first met.

            He mentioned that he usually liked to go alone, but for whatever reason—I never got around to asking—he had decided to bring me along.  The message explained how it was only about two miles from his apartment and we could follow an old canal towpath all the way there.  Outside, it was warm enough to recall the easy weather I had been resigned to not see for months and, in my haste to be out in it, I had already forgotten the wet rag of disappointment and frustration that had flopped down when I found out who V actually was.  I thought a nice walk near some water would afford some time to get reacquainted with him, to get a meaningful conversation going on the “deeper issues” the railroad couldn’t help but dredge up.

            So I agreed to go and fifteen minutes later we were walking along the gravelly path with the sharp-angled sun on our jacketed backs and a crisp breeze in our faces.  The shallow canal that used to ferry boatloads of anthracite coal between Mauch Chunk and Easton predated the railroad that followed it.  But this was the case for countless lines, especially in the waterway-laced northeast.  A trail would grow up along a riverbank and become a major transportation route; a canal is cut around those impassible spots or, like the one we were following, it was dug as glassy-smooth answer to the churning turbulent eddies of the wide Lehigh.  Eventually, the rails are laid along the same general route and that’s that. Now, the slow flowing ribbon of water carried only small sheets of ice that had broken off from the larger cracking masses along its edges.  There were crows in the trees and the low rumble of idling locomotives rolled between their sharp calls.

            V didn’t say much, despite my attempts at engagement, and the first twenty minutes of our walk passed painfully with me trying to lead him into what I imagined would be an enlightening discourse on the meaning of his fascination with trains—and writing on them.

            Attempt number one went something like: “Being out here by yourself probably gives you a lot of time to think…. I always end up making lists of stuff I have to do or remembering something I didn’t.”

            A nod.

A few minutes went by.

            Number two: “I never really got into it, but you probably know other people who write….”

“Not really.”

The frustration I met months ago, when I first understood that V was just some guy like me and not a wild artist-hobo packed full with stories of love and loss and adventure collected from a life spent on the rails, had returned.  I felt sure he was going out of his way to avoid talking about something that, I thought, should matter to him.

            So a third to truly test the unresponsive waters: “Can you get arrested for something like this? For drawing on cars?  Because I’ve had to deal with cops for just being too close to an engine.  I mean, given the rail companies’ histories of protecting their stock at all costs, I’d imagine they don’t look too kindly on people ruining expensive equipment…”

            Silence and a look in the direction of a hidden cardinal’s cry.

            His gait wasn’t fast, but the stride was long—his frame, like my own, borders on lankiness—but somehow it carried him a full step ahead of me, and more than once I found myself working to catch up after slowing to look back down the path. V didn’t look back—not at the path or at me.

            Halfway to our destination he slowed a little, turned his head slightly, and shot his first full sentence of the trip over his shoulder at me: “Don’t fuck around when we’re in the yard.”  At which I give a half-chuckle that could easily have been read as dismissive—mostly because it was—and he just went on walking at the familiar pace.

            Only I got to thinking about his advice, no, his order, and I really began to take offense.  How could he have forgotten that I wasn’t some stupid kid looking for a new party spot where I could spray-paint the names of my favorite heavy metal band or brand of cheap beer?  He had to have known that I had years of experience and was serious about trains; and the more I thought about it, the more I began to resent his bald-faced assumption of my naïveté and general lack of common sense.  So I quietly fumed over it for another hundred yards down the canal.

            And then he began to say more.  He enumerated all the rules and precautions that had taken him a lot longer than this walk to internalize as second nature; the ones that, as he began to break them down in a matter-of-fact way that sounded like it was straight out of an instruction manual, I saw had kept him out of jail and, more importantly, in one piece:

1)      Don’t walk between the rails; stay on the ballast.  That old image of “walking the line” on the crossties or on the rail itself, as if it was a just a shiny steel balance beam, is just stupid.  For all of their ridiculous weight and size, trains can be dead quiet when they roll and will sneak right up on you.  By then you’ll be able to feel the rails’ camber bend, but it’ll be too late to do anything but get flattened.  A train doesn’t care if you’re in its way.  This fact is paramount.

2)      When you cross an empty line, look both ways twice and move across the track diagonally in four steps.  This is the minimum number anyone needs to move with any measure of safety: one step outside the rail on a secure tie, two between, and a fourth onto a tie on the other side.  You do this because no one wants to carry you and your broken ankle home.

3)      Respect the cars at all cost; they are not your personal jungle gym.  Never, ever go under a car. When you must climb over one, use the grab irons and ladders and always maintain three points of contact with the car.  Get up, across, and off as quickly, but as safely, as possible.  If you can go around the train to get to the other side, do it.  Climb only when necessary.

4)      Most importantly, always be aware of your surroundings.  Never wholly lose yourself in anything you’re doing.  Know at least two ways to get out of wherever you are and don’t hesitate to use one if you need to.  Safety has many meanings in a yard.

Within thirty minutes of the end of V’s lecture, we had crossed a narrow pedestrian bridge over the canal, moved through a muddy stretch of bare trees, and climbed a shallow rise.  Stopping at the top, V finally looked back with a half-chuckle and his creased brow unfurrowed in what I could only read as something that was at once relief and, at the same time, measured calm. A few short feet below us sat at least ten full lines of cars, their rust-mottled roofs stretching uninterrupted a good half-mile in either direction through the deserted yard.

V loped down the muddy bank toward the trains and held up a finger to silently say Wait here a minute. He looked both ways, twice; crossed, in four sure steps, the only empty line; stood with his face to a gleaming sun-yellow boxcar and looked around once more before waving me into the quiet yard.

            There’s a quick moment in Style Wars—Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant’s 1983 documentary on New York City subway graffiti culture—when one prolific artist, Donald “Dondi” White, attempts to describe the near-transcendental feeling that accompanies a visit to a train yard.  He says, “It’s like you’re in a yard of metal giants….  You’re, like, a little dude in the midst of all this metal and you’re here to produce something.”

            And while that specific reference point may have been located somewhere in one of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s subway storage yards, it’s a point that I came to see is mirrored in every train yard.  It’s a point where I found my tiny, squishy, breakable mortal body forced—or, actually, placed—in direct contact with countless tons of unfeeling metal that could, without any goading or even on a cold whim a mile down the track, squish and break that tiny body a hundred times over and never look back.  Fear can do a lot for reverence.  That’s why there was a definite reverential lilt to Dondi’s voice in the film and it’s the exact same reason for the little moth of anxiety that was fluttering its sturdy wings in the dip of my throat when V seemingly evaporated into the steely air of the yard.

I lost him after stopping to run my hand over the clean berry pink and apple green lines of some intricate piece of graffiti that, from a distance, proclaimed someone’s pseudonym, but from here just dissolved into looping swirls of color.  Or, he lost me. V was stopped looking closely at a drawing two cars in front of me just seconds before and then he was gone—that quickly, that quietly—and a chill of panic instantly rolled through me and left its ghost to shudder up and down my sweaty back.

I suddenly felt incredibly and utterly alone. I’d been around trains more than enough times, and had always thought it would be incredible to explore an entire yard overflowing with cars.  And it had been.  Here, standing quietly, were cars I had only seen in a blur as they passed at a crossing, cars from long-defunct railroads that were now called, honorifically, “fallen flags.”  I could touch their rusty sides and be connected with every place they’d been; I could read the penciled work orders some repairman had made—“doors lubed 10/89”—and wonder who had worked on it since.  And there were all the other things written or scratched or painted on the cars—nicknames, messages, political rants, a tic-tac-toe game started but never finished—that told me, reassuringly, that I wasn’t the first one to be next to this car. 

In fact, in the fifteen minutes we had been walking up and down the lines, I had finished an entire roll of film, reloaded, and was half way through a second.  Snapping photos of the cars’ details out on a line somewhere, even a secluded stretch of track, was one thing; but when there are suddenly cars all around, they close in and become something entirely different.

 The air in the interior of the yard, between the closely-laid lines, was colder than it had been on the outside and sunlight struggled to make its way even halfway down the cars’ sides.  I became desperately aware of the walls of metal that had been around me this whole time, the ones I hadn’t been paying attention to for want of capturing all the new angles and details being this deep into the yard afforded.  I didn’t even know where we were in the yard or how far down the lines we had gone before V disappeared; I was just following his casual footfalls, craning my neck like a tourist.

  I thought back to our first meeting and grew positive that he’d abandoned me with a spiteful laugh.  That he lured me out here as some sort of retribution for ditching him after the trestle those weeks ago.  I wondered if someone could be that spiteful.  Or maybe it was that he saw someone—a worker or a cop—and ran, got away, left me to be caught.  Maybe he even tried to signal me, say Quick, let’s get out of here! with some specific hand gesture that I never noticed. 

It was the same panic that accompanies the moment you understand you’re lost deep in the woods or in some city you’ve never been to before.  That separation from everything familiar and known.  I wanted to yell out, call to him in both anger and fear, and let him know that I knew he was still out there and that he was an asshole for taking off on me.  But as I took in the air to shout, I realized that if there was a worker or a cop somewhere nearby they’d surely know the layout of the yard better than I and catch me once they heard the false anger crack a little and echo around all the lifeless metal. 

So I did nothing but stand stock still.  The crows had flown from the trees and the sun had gone behind one of those thick winter clouds and made the growing shadows kick up the wind into sudden gusts strong enough to rattle the dangling metal security tags on the cars’ doors and make them sound like someone’s jingling keys. 

When the temperature rises or drops suddenly—in the bright early morning or when that brightness is quickly snuffed out—the very physical shape of the cars changes just a little. Their riveted and welded seams expand or contract by mere hundredths of a millimeter and send out high staccatos of discordant pings or low aching groans that, as I stood there wide-eyed and alert to every slightest noise or motion within ten feet, frightened me enough to push the pulse in my wrists to a pounding I could feel as those eerie songs careened around me.  But up ahead, beyond the fat belly of a black acid-etched tanker, or maybe a little behind me, on a line, or maybe two over, the rolling grumble of footsteps on ballast began to drown out every other sound. 

I invented arrest scenarios and figured out what I could sell to raise bail money.  I told myself I would be a first-time offender and would get by just fine as long as they didn’t make an example out of me.  But if they did?  In the hyper-cautious post-9/11 world, being too close to any large machine, if you didn’t belong there, was automatically suspicious; and I had read about overzealous railroads pushing for felony convictions of trespassers.  The fears of a terrorist derailing a few hundred cars were, surely, a bit reactionary; but when those cars could be holding millions of gallons of toxic chemicals, maybe there was something to worry about.

As quickly as I could, I dropped down onto my haunches, as if dodging something swung at my head, into what was little more than a standing fetal position, and peered under the cars to see where the sound was coming from.  This, V had told me, was the safest way to look around.  Hopping onto a ladder or platform or coupler on the end of a car wasn’t worth the risk and only added more obstacles if you did need to get out of there in a hurry.  Crouched with my hands on the large loose rocks, I was stable enough to scan the low horizon and swiveled my head as far at it would go, first right, toward what I remembered to be the yard’s entrance, and then left into its depths.  I found no one.

I stood like that for what felt like too long just trying to figure out what to do, whether or not I should just pick a direction and head that way in a straight line, hopping between cars until I got to the edge of the yard.  Once there I could follow the access road back, I figured. 

And then I was struck with the gleaming realization that I could get out. These weren’t impenetrable walls, I told myself; they only held me there as long as I let them. And when I again stood and looked around at the high metal sides of the cars, at the grimy old grey hoppers filled with barley or kitty litter or flour, at the freshly-painted boxcars that carried I didn’t know what, I felt a change, a new sense of security in their silent weight surrounding me. There, buttressed by so much potential energy, I began to see the odd calm and peace that is hidden in the train.  It was, I now realize, not unlike the serenity that accompanies a day-long hike, miles-long bike ride, or anything that pushes the body to a confrontation with what its owner thought were its limits, physical or mental.

All around me were the real things I had been photographing and idealizing.  They were hard and dangerous and covered in the dirt of labor, yes, but they were also dotted, more often than not, with paintings and drawings done by people who were not me, but who were like me, more like me than I had thought.  And all the places that they hadn’t written or painted on held the same potential for communication and contact. 

I took comfort in this and by the time I noticed that the footsteps had stopped and that the sun was beginning to crawl back out from behind the heavy clouds, the weight of panic had already fluttered away leaving me free to stroll down the line, deeper into the yard.  I raised my camera to my eye far less but saw more—the marks some worker’s boots had made on the rungs of the ladder; a handprint in the dust of a door; a sketch, like V’s, only much older and faded into the very paint of the car, that said “Water Bed Lou’s in Love.”

It wasn’t until my second lap of the innermost line that I finally saw the greasy cuffs and trail boots moving down the other side of the car next to me, trolling slowly back toward the far end of the train.  Their familiar long stride told me V was right there, that he had been no more than a couple lines away.

And, as if out of the air, the lightest sting of disappointment and loss appeared.  The feeling of being utterly alone, within tilted metal walls in what amounted to little more than a mile-long hallway barely three feet wide, evaporated entirely.  I’d had the opportunity to get out of there or to continue on, taking photos and exploring the foreign world for as long as I wanted by myself, and I embraced it.  Now with the appearance of another body, it was no longer me focused solely on myself.  Even though I had known that V was somewhere out there, his actual presence was only an idea.  He was no different from the boot marks or handprints I’d seen; he was no different than anything anyone—including him—may have written on the trains. 

This connection reached me as he did, with a half-chuckle that asked Where’ve you been this whole time?

Three

Delaware & Hudson—Binghamton, NY

            Even months later, after I had moved from Pennsylvania back to my old hometown in upstate New York, that double sense of being found and of finding something lingered on.  This was due, I’m sure, in no small part to the increasing frequency V and I had spent lurking around together before I finally left.  Each time we went to a new spot, or even one we were familiar with—like the old trestle or, what would be come to be called in the parlance of the railroad, the “hump” yard in Allentown—I’d felt more sure and aware of everything around me. It’s not that I had stopped looking at the larger train; the massive engines and long snakes of manifest cars still made my mind wander and heart jump a little.  But now, when I would walk next to the laid-up trains or even circle around a lone car left on its own, I looked more closely.

In New York, alone, in the deep cold of early March, I still went—in what came to be the shorthand for any activity around them—“down to the trains” on a near-daily basis.  I had done my homework, too.  Downloading satellite images from the internet and digging through street and surveyors’ maps had given a virtual guided tour of all the regional yards and trackage.  In no time I found that the old Delaware & Hudson yard—where long lines of cars would sit unattended waiting for locomotives to reassemble them or pick them up and move them to one of the four other yards around town—was just a short walk from my front door. 

And I would follow tracks for miles, walking their straight and snaking lines, only half expecting to find any cars and not minding too much if they never appeared.  The long walks down any newly-uncovered stretch—fourteen miles one day, ten another—took me into spaces that would have been mundane from the front seat of a car but, on foot, became new and foreign.  They were the lesser-seen pieces of the more familiar towns and cities that fell within an ever-widening circle of exploration.  Small, innocuous places like Sanitaria Springs and the epic-sounding (but diminutive) Steel City that I had hardly even heard of—barely dots on the map—suddenly took on an importance that, had I not marked them as reference points and mileposts on one long journey or another, would have, as far as I knew, remained invisible forever.

            There is something about coming across some forgotten or neglected thing, about finding a new town or field or burnt-out industrial area—any one of the thousand things that train tracks go past or through or near or around—that I can only describe as an odd mingling of trepidation and delight.  With every next step farther down the line into an unfamiliar space, I would feel an inherent loss of control that bred a certain fear and, at the same time, fostered it.  But my surprise that would manifest as open-air exclamations of “Where’d this come from?!” and “Who knew this was here?!” acted as a buffer to that fear and, more often than not, was a warm hand on my back that kept urging me on: just fifteen more minutes and then I’ll turn around, just to that next bend in the track, just to the other side of the bridge.  There is always just one more step and I’d usually have to force myself not to take it and head home.

            I figured out that I could go to the D&H yard in the morning after my wife had gone to work and walk up and down the lines with abandon, distracted only by the occasional shunting of a manifest or the windy rumble of a hotshot roaring westbound on the Canadian Pacific mainline that edged (and officially owned) the yard.  Through the winter, it served as the more-than-apt replacement for the busy Norfolk Southern one V and I had grown intimately familiar with.  New to me, though, was the snow that laid itself down on Binghamton nearly every night and how it would blanket the footprints I had made between the lines the day before; and mine were the only ones to disturb the whiteness that appeared that much more brilliant with the light sprinkling of anthracite dust that fell, itself like snow, from the hopper doors of the mile-long coal trains that trundled their way east throughout the cold months.  But any journey into the D&H yard had taken on a second purpose. 

            While there was always at least one scenic photo to take of the scrub- or wood- or wastelands that pop up around trains, there were dozens, sometime hundreds more to take of the train, of what was written on it.  The time (and miles) I had spent with V in the months prior to my prodigal return had quietly turned my lens more and more toward the drawings he was doing and the ones that had been done long before his.  I began to know the images and monikers—Bozo Texino, Herby, Colossus of Roads, The Rambler, Smokin’ Joe, The Solo Artist, and hundreds more—that began to pop up everywhere once they were pointed out to me. 

            I learned that some who drew these little icons were graffiti artists looking to broaden their media horizons; others were actual hoboes who still rode the rails as a way of life; and still others, most in fact, were just rail workers who could take advantage of their free time and access to train cars.  Looking closely, looking for them, really, revealed, in many cases that there were people all over the continent producing a wealth of these little things.  “New York Slim” was obvious; “The Rambler” was from Port Beaumont, Texas; “The Kodak Kidd” frequented northeast Pennsylvania; “Ozone” and “The Raven” were from Roseville, California; “Chad the Dogcatcher” worked in Enola, Pennsylvania; and “Virginia Zeke” spent a lot of his time in Richmond.

            Many of the cars that would run on Norfolk Southern trackage would end up riding the Canadian Pacific north and it was likely that V and I, although hundreds of miles apart now, saw many of the same cars in our yards.  So I began to notice V’s flapping flag design appearing more frequently, too.  Older ones that had faded and weathered sometimes looked like they’d melted into the very metal of the car; others had been covered by indifferent graffiti writers or repairmen who had to put a new company logo or tracking number over them.  The new ones he had been brazenly applying when we went out shone bright white or deep black—he used only these two colors—on dark- or light-colored cars.

            When I asked him why he used this specific design, he explained that the flag itself was an old logo for the Lehigh Valley Railroad—a local favorite—but co-opted and made personal with a lone V instead of the original L.V. in the diamond.  He said that there were probably thousands of these little flags flying on cars and that he had found out through online photo sharing sites that a few had even made it all the way out to California, Texas, and British Columbia, places he himself had never been to and likely never would.

            I’d seen it plenty of times.  The actual drawing took only a few seconds, but each one was neatly crafted; the speed came from repetition, not a disregard for precision.  Every line was of equal importance—from the circle that would become the ball on the top of the flagpole to the symmetrical diamond in the center of the flag—and there was an undeniable craftsmanship in V’s method of first sharpening the paint stick with a pocket knife before standing mere inches away with his left hand on the car and drawing the image at eye-level. 

            I stood close a few times and saw the soft pigment of the crayon melt on sun-warmed paint of the car and his hand adapt to the effects of the heat by twisting as he drew, like an architect or draftsman spins a pencil to always keep it sharp. And when V tossed half a broken paint stick to me and lifted his chin in the direction of a hulking white refrigerator car, I didn’t know what I was supposed to write.  Bands I liked flashed through my head, as did brands of beer and the initials of a girl I loved, lists of vulgarities, political views, and the image of a goofy-looking dog I used to draw on my notebooks in fourth grade—none of which felt like they were the right thing to put on the side of a train.  There is a temptation that accompanies every blank space and I felt the urge to fill this blank space with an image that meant something to me, something that could be, like all the names I’d seen often enough to feel like I knew them personally, a moniker, an alter-ego of some kind.

Winding my way among the cars in the snow-coated yard, I would often stop to look back down the lines just to see the prints I had made and wonder what someone coming across them would think.  Would they see the back-and-forth zigzags and assume some brakeman was just doing his job, walking the lengths of the trains to inspect the cars?  Would they think it was some kids from the working-class neighborhood that abutted the yard playing around on their own industrial jungle gym? 

If I could choose, I would want them to follow my tracks, putting a foot first in one then the next, taking a few slow steps next to a train then crossing to another to stand — like I did — and face the car.  If they looked up from the prints they were following they would see my quick sketch of a pompadoured guy with Xs for eyes and a pair of crossed train tracks behind him drawn by someone called The Coal Spur Kid. 

Then maybe they would conjure up a story for that guy they’d seen on the side of the car and, in telling it, carry him on to someplace new.

* * *

Selected Works Consulted

 Abel, Allen. “The Art of Vandalism.” Saturday Night magazine (n.d.), archived on North Bank Fred: Freighthopping, Hoboes, Boxcar Art <http://www.northbankfred.com/canada>

Butler, Russell. “Steel Road, Evanescent Route: My Life on the Line—the Railroad Line” (n.d.), archived on Michael Poulin’s BoxcarArt.com <http://www.geocities.com/boxcarart101/colossusinterview.html>

Cooper, Bruce C.  Riding the Transcontinental Rails: Overland Travel on the Pacific Railroad 1865­-1881.  Philadelphia: Polyglot Press, 2004.

Daniel, Bill.  “Monikers and the like.” Personal email, 2 Feb. 2005.

————.  Who is Bozo Texino?  Dir. Bill Daniel, Prod. Bill Daniel. DVD. 2005.

Gastman, Roger, Darin Rowland, and Ian Sattler. Freight Train Graffiti. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006.

 Hultrans, Andrew. “The Mark of Bozo.” Stim magazine, vol. 1, no. 2 (June 1996), archived on Stim Online <http://www.stim.com/stim-x/0696june/features/hobo.html>

 Kaplan, Eben.  “Rail Security and the Terrorist Threat.” Backgrounder.  Council on Foreign Relations online, 3-12-07 <http://www.cfr.org/publication/12800/rail_security_and_the_terrorist_threat.html>

Kerlansky, Mervyn, and Jon Narr with text by Norman Mailer. The Faith of Graffiti. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974.

 London, Jack. The Road. Archived on the Jack London Online Collection <http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/TheRoad/>

 McKay, J.R. “Bozo Texino.” On Mainline Mac’s Homepage <http://www.geocities.com/lokomac8/bozo.htm>

Parlsen, David. “Art or vandalism, railcar graffiti roll across the land.” Wausau (WI) Daily Herald, 6 Jan, 2004, p. 1A.

Poulin, Michael. “Beer and Boxcars: An Interview with Hollywood and Rum Runner” (n.d.), archived on Michael Poulin’s BoxcarArt.com <http://www.geocities.com/boxcarart101/colossusinterview.html>

 Silver, Tony, and Henry Chalfant. Style Wars. Dir. Tony Silver, Prod. Silver and Chalfant. DVD. Plexifilm 2003.

Trackside, Mick. “Freights & Chalk.” Personal email, 31 Jan. 2005.

Appendix

Bozo Texino, no date

The Kodak Kidd, Trackside, September 2001

Colossus of Roads, VTV=OS, not dated

Smokin' Joe, #13,975, January 1996

Herby, January 25, 1977

The Rambler, August 18, 1993

V -- Steam Train Maury Tribute, November 18, 2006

About CNF

In relation to the natural world …

Editor’s Statement

Ragazine’s inaugural creative non-fiction section brings together the kind of writing I would most like to see:  grounded, compelling first-person narration set in a concrete time and place that reflects thematically some way on the human relation to the natural world and the ways we’ve transformed that world, and in the process, transformed ourselves.  Creative non-fiction is an expansive genre that spans narrative history, literary journalism, narrative non-fiction, the personal essay, memoir, and probably many other sub-categories I’m forgetting, but the kind of writing I welcome you to submit to Ragazine should focus on the previously mentioned themes in some broad sense. 

 The writers in this issue, Burns, Guignard, and Beckman, all write about limit experiences:  those times, and places, where they step outside their mundane realities and become something else, something wonderful, pulsing, more fully alive.  From the intense drive of the bicyclist using heart, lungs, and thighs to push himself one more mile to the woman hiking into the wild alone to weather the coming storm as an animal would, to the train yard haunter who has finally made it into the inner circle of the graffiti artists whose canvases are the trains, these pieces are an excursion outside of our daily lives, a trip to different edges where all roads lead back to lives more deeply examined and fully lived.  They are perfect to inaugurate the creative non-fiction section of Ragazine, and stand as the kind of art so many of us would like to live, and write. 

 The editor, Leslie Heywood, is the author of Pretty Good for a Girl:  A Memoir (The Free Press/Simon & Schuster), Natural Selection:  Poems  (Louisiana Literature Press); The Proving Grounds:  Poems (Red Hen Press), and many shorter works of creative non-fiction as well as academic writing.  She is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Binghamton University, and has particular interests in nature and science writing.  She is working on High Wolf Content, a book of creative non-fiction about a woman at a crossroads who travels the country with her wolf to make a choice, writing that includes personal narrative as well as an account of the history of the human/wolf relationship and the theory of human/wolf co-evolution. 

Submissions and Questions:  ragazine.cnf@gmail.com, or leslie.heywood@gmail.com