Written in the fall of 2017 and published in April 2018 for The Dark Mountain Project Issue 13: Being Human.

For a few hours I felt like what it must have been to be gathered, babies on backs, hands soaked in sap, harvesting the fat of the land. The pine nuts looked like tiny grubs, glistening and white, soft and pliable underneath a fortress of spine and shell.

There was life buzzing everywhere. Nutcrackers hollered and chipmunks skittered and ants swarmed the sweetness. The Paiute said that when the rabbitbrush turned yellow it was time to harvest, and so we did.

We didn’t have the wise ones to teach us and we didn’t have tiny computers, so we learned the way we taught ourselves before. We tried, and succeeded, and sometimes failed, and then we began to get an eye for the patterns. The right colors. The meaningful shapes. I can see them now with my eyes closed. I can dream walk the landscape, seeing them reveal themselves to me, glistening, laden with the fruit of a summer under the high desert sun, surviving.   

We figured out which were the correct sides of the trees to approach. We looked at the sun and where it hung in the sky and learned which nuts had been exposed for too long and were desolate husks inside their dark shells, whisked away by the wind once opened. We spied the low hanging branches that offered easy prey, and soon I could bypass tall thin trees and make my way towards the ones that looked like the oaks from my homeland, sprawling and wideopen, a coniferous embrace.

And even though the time for the pine nuts is gone now, and we await the snow with bated breath and predictions and busy ourselves with soot and bonfires and the gathering of needles, I still watch those low trees as we fly past on our internal combustion engine, looking for the promising ones.

And the dog is with me still, though his eyes have grayed and he’s taken to convulsing from time to time, which we manage with medicine that will kill him early, but not as soon as the seizures, so we measure and take blood and weigh. And we use the royal we when we talk about how we are doing.

And he has been with me through three great loves, the second of which has sunk behind a mountain on the horizon, and the third of which stood beside me laughing, hands black, holding a garbage bag open for the bounty we were collecting in the high desert that day, as the aspen leaves quaked yellow and the sky just beamed all cerulean like it does in the autumn. Like it wants to show off its best dress before a season of scarves and boots.

And I said how we were animals, and how delightful to access that part of our brains that are seeking reward and sustenance. And I noted how saying we are animals is so trite, because of course we are. Of course we are.

And the dog streaked past, chasing some unnamed being, which rose that day not thinking it would be its last, and which leapt onto the nearest tree to conquer another turn of the sun.

I thought of the morning that the dog got a robin. And I tried to stop him, tried to save it, but saw it was too far gone, its wings bloody and slick with saliva, feathers glommed together. I didn’t think, I just twisted its neck backwards and held its warm body in my left hand. But its eyes were still open and its mouth gaped like a rattlesnake, like Joanna once said, giving me the right words for the maw of a bird.

So I kept twisting and pulled its head away from the rest. It came off so easily, tiny vertebrae separating, spinal cord no longer a part of the nervous system, heart no longer connected to the brain that would have thought, terror! in its last moments. But how many of us living beings are lucky enough not to feel that.

Humans. Thank you to Morpheus and alcohol and hospice. Family singing and soothing around the firelight. Held hands and feigned forgiveness.

Then the bird was still, and I laid a rock on top of the two pieces of what it used to be and thrashed at the dog to get away. And its blood and feathers were splattered on my hands and I wiped them on a vanilla-scented Jeffrey Pine and paced back and forth, waving them, shaking. I laid my bloody hand down on the rock and said I’m sorry. Its feathers were splayed out from under it because it was not a big enough rock, but it’s all I could find. And smaller feathers were attached to the puzzle piece bark of the tree, gently quaking, the culmination of what the dinosaurs became, a fragile creature that I could not save.

For a long time I could feel the impression of its warm head in my right palm and the feeling I had when it ceased to be part of the body. Like the way you can still feel shit on your hand for hours after you’ve accidentally touched it. It burned there, brightred, throbbing.

But I’ve peered through a rifle sight and taken aim and fired, praying to the old gods that I’d bring something down, and I wonder how I reckon that with the sorrow for the little bird. And I’ve delicately sliced through creamy white garlic cloves while standing at a bench of tile, looking at the perfect hole through the middle where the green grows, trying to procreate. And I’ve blown on the coals of a near-dead fire hoping I could avoid starting anew. And that day, after the desert, journeying into the pines, I delivered home a village of ants in the bag of pine cones, and they still linger there, dessicated in their plastic sarcophagus, separated for ever from their pheromones and their brethren. They always instilled in me the most sorrow, because when I’d find one crawling on my dashboard I’d imagine it lost in a vast wilderness of dimpled plastic and steel, knowing it would never, ever find its way home.

It had begun as an afternoon stroll, but within ten minutes it was decided that it would become a berry picking expedition. The contents of the only water bottle were emptied and it was conscripted into service for the mission. How grateful I was for the presence of the berries, though I would certainly have dressed myself differently had I known where I would wind up. I set out for a jaunt in sandals and a skirt and returned home with legs scratched and bloody from gooseberry thorns.

More than the fruits themselves I was grateful for the practice of picking them—my neurons firing when I registered the sight of the red globes—made even more poignant by the fact that there were so few. The drought had rendered the plants only viable when they sat on the bank of the creek, and so that’s where I kept myself and my dogs, close to the water, my bearbrain shooting lighting bright when we came upon a harvestable bush. So fortunate are we when we are able to put to use our gift of recognizing these patterns in nature. First find this—these particular leaves, fanned out and quarter-sized and low to the ground, hovering. Sometimes they are bright yellow now in mid-September and sometimes they are still green. It didn’t seem to matter whether they were losing their chlorophyll or not when it came to the presence of the ripe fruit. Then, look closer, underneath, is there red ? Am I certain it isn’t the fall flush of some ground shrub? How far away—close enough to justify trudging uphill in sandals? How many points of color do I see? Enough to make the trip worth it?

It occurred to me that I worked with the mindset of an apex predator. I looked up very rarely. I thought of the deer, when we hunted them, when I sat on the hill with binoculars and watched them in the hot sun for hours. Eat, look up, eat, look up. Sleep, wake, look again, smell the air, doze with one eye open. Never settled even when nestled in their hiding places. Always cautious, waiting for the shot from afar, the teeth from above. I on the other hand was close to oblivious of any dangers posed to me as I worked, though I thought for a few moments about the night in Echo Valley when I took off my backpack, bent down to tie my shoes, felt a shiver run across my spine and rose quickly to my feet, slinging the barrier that would protect the back of my neck up and onto my shoulders in a fluid motion. And then I half-ran uphill, looking behind me, truly afraid, down in the base of my skull.

This is not a feeling we are fortunate enough to experience, most of us. Though we still look up when a shadow passes overhead, it has been a long time since eagles stole our children to pull out their eyeballs and leave the distinctive marks that anthropologists would later identify. But we still flinch at the shadows. I found that to be a beautiful thought. But in this familiar forest, with my animals as my protectors, I was unabashedly unafraid. I worked with my head down, aware mostly of my being unaware. Hikers would pass me on the other side of the creek and I did not register their presence until I heard their voices or their missteps. The dogs looped and weaved around me and I barely noticed their trajectories. The young one would streak past, so fast so fast so fast, and the old one trudged along, his breathing labored.

I relished in the activity—foraging, I thought, being one of our greatest joys and one we are so rarely able to exercise. Instead we choose Ambien and Restless Leg Syndrome and visits with The Therapist. I recall the hunting of the morels after the Great Fire and their shape, their glorious shape, becoming apparent to me once my eyes unfocused slightly and cued in on that honeycombed silhouette in the duff. I saw them behind my eyelids when I closed them to sleep that month, so great were their numbers, and so focused was I on seeing them. They were miraculous—fanning forward as my gaze lifted from blackened, crawling hands to the whole carpeted floor of the forest before me, rolling swales of burned Ponderosa pines and dewy new moss, and the tightly-clustered skeletons of aspens which died together, entwined like the lovers of Pompeii. How I loved those days that spring, the bitter rewards of the fire that took so much. They reminded me that life gives freely, but that life also covets life, and that the sweet beauty of these sparrow-brown mushrooms dancing in butter in my cast iron skillet was the devil’s bargain we struck for the loss of of our forest, and that it was not up to me to decide whether it was worth it—it simply was.

And so this day, laughing in the face of the low-growling drought that kept me hemmed in with smoke from these new fires, these fires whose dragon-breath rolled over the mountains each afternoon to trap us, I kneeled in the middle of bushes armed with teeth, releasing the precious red orbs from their thorny castles into my dented water bottle. And I didn’t think—at least not much, blessedly, about the emptiness in my belly, about the words that played themselves over and over in my head as I tried to sleep, about everything that I have ever done wrong, every misstep I have ever made, every enemy I have created, every time I refused to forgive. I only looked, and picked, and stepped, and looked, and picked, and stepped.

My fingers grasped the berries, glossy and slightly translucent, and my brain registered with pleasure the sensation of a firm, ripe specimen—satisfaction that i had made the right choice. Drop it in the bottle, move along, methodically, working from one end of the bush to the other, conserving effort, grasping with three fingers and pulling firmly to release several at a time if I were lucky enough to find such a rare occurrence. Sometimes my brain would register yes, red, and tell my fingers to grasp, and they would be met with the disappointing sensation of a dried husk. I ruminated on the fact that my senses had led me astray, had not discerned the true, darker color of this fruit that could not feed me, and allowed me to waste my energy in trying to separate if from its bush. Sometimes, even worse, my bumbling fingers would grasp a perfect little globe and let it slip, into the detritus on the ground, into the river, and I would curse my humanness, my soft digits for not wanting to delve deeply into the bush in fear of being pierced by the mild kiss of the tiny thorns.

And I do curse my humanness, most often when I am allowed to slip back into this part of my brain, the part that senses without description the pure joy of finding sustenance in nature. I curse the weak limbs that cannot propel me forward the way the young dog’s do. When I see him fly, his legs lifting off the ground with the unbridled joy of being, and running, I despise the heavy clubs attached to my torso that take so much cajoling to move quickly through the forest—they are earthbound, clumsy. I curse my sense of smell, that talent we lost so long ago when we joined forces with the wolf, who was better, who cultivated his talent while we let ours wane, content to strategize and perform feats of mathematics.

As I leaned down to inspect another new cluster of fruit I smelled the beginning of the rain. I had been hearing the thunder for about an hour, and I sighed with relief that at least I could still detect this. It was not the smell of petrichor—the water had not yet hit the earth—it was the smell of the cool and dry wind that is the harbinger of a coming storm as it sweeps down the creek bed, which tumbles down the canyon, leaving the high country from whence it came. I thought of my hastiness in decrying my piteous sense of smell and felt a pang of gratitude that I still had the capacities I did, though we are certainly blundering when compared to the deer, who leap to their feet and flee once the thread of a human scent comes their way, and when paired against the pigs who smelled us before we even crested the hill from which we saw them, already running. The wind, the wind, the wind carried our evidence to them and now carried the evidence of the rainstorm to me. I smiled, and stood still and inhaled, and tongued the feeling of being not-so-far-removed.

I thought of the smell of the sow as we opened her belly, and how it was the same as the smell of the sweet, curled, soft dead buck that we loaded into the back of my truck. I thought of how they smelled like the blood of the middle dog when his foot was opened wide by a truck’s tire, and how when I raced him to the doctor a drop of blood flew forward onto my windshield, where it remains, in the center, browned and cracking and almost-gone. And as I drove that day, my fingers gripping the steering wheel, I realized that he smelled like those dead animals, like just-blood. And I thought of how we ate the pig, and how we were desperately trying to save the dog, and how if it were me bleeding in the back of the truck my blood would smell just like that, and how we are all of us the same.

You see

even though

you have to raise a child

it was socially acceptable

necessary

for the propagation of the species

and you can talk about it

and you got fuzzy toys

and alphabet letters

to hang on the wall

and arms to embrace you

and free healthcare

even though it’s America

and you got a husband

to make you a sink

and build you a fence

and you didn’t like onions

for the first three months

and you let him know it

and he’s been hearing it ever since

and mine is afraid

we’ll be like you

and he’ll never have

a moment’s peace

and I can’t talk about it.

I am so dramatic

I

almost left my engagement ring

on the counter

for you to find

once I had driven off

but instead I sank

onto the cool tile floor

and stared at the droplet

of chocolate

on the broken dishwasher

for a long time

and then

I cut some grapes in half

and covered them with vinegar

and sugar

and black pepper

and vanilla.

I think you are not lucky

enough

to know

the sadness

I’ve known.
perhaps that is why

I keep courting it.
to recognize the deep wells

in another’s

smiling eyes

and say

I know you.
I see you.
I smell

the hospital room.

I know

the lightness in the chest

and the bloom of sweat

on the palms
that come with the phone call

 
the hideous joy of lying

on the left side

doubled over

wracked with seizuresobs

 
there are no peach-colored books

no meditations

to replace

this kind
of knowing

I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. The first man I ever loved chose the bottle before me, day after day after day after day ad infinitum. I watched him die in a hospital bed. He had Sprite once we instituted the do not resuscitate order. He wanted 7up but they only had Sprite. They said he could have it now because it didn’t matter if he aspirated on the liquid. It was one of the most beautiful things to watch him drink it. He had kept asking for it, kept asking for it. It’s funny what it all comes down to.

I remember him drinking 7up all the time as a child. I remember the 1980s design of the can, the fun red circle on the green background. There was the mascot, the circle with legs and arms and sunglasses. I don’t remember if it had a name. I remember his shaving cream. Old Spice. I remember the red jar that it came in and the bone-handled brush he used to lather up his face. I remember a mug he had, a porcelain mug with a bridge where one would drink, to guard the moustache from the liquid. You don’t see those too often anymore. I found one at a thrift store not too long ago. I didn’t buy it. I regret that.

His bones showed beneath his skin and his face looked like one of the walking dead I sometimes think about when I go running with the dogs. Sister said the hospital smelled like ants when you squish them. Dead ants and babies being born and then I went to the bathroom and on the way back I stopped and picked up a New Yorker and read some of the cartoons and when I came back to the room they were taking his name down. They said he was gone. I couldn’t believe it. After all that time, after all those gasps, I missed it? For some cartoons? I don’t even like the cartoons in the New Yorker. But there were one or two breaths left in him. One or two more beats of his heart. I was there for the last moment. I don’t know what that means or why it is significant. There was an article up there on the wall about who he was and his music with a  photo of him from the seventies, looking cool. But it is gone now and somebody else is dying in that room.

His ashes still sit in an urn in his girlfriend’s house in Portland. We are entitled to half. We are supposed to spread them in Ontario where the loons cry in the sunset and i remember throwing our trash on an island where black bears would wait for us, wait for the new bounty and rip the plastic to shreds. I thought that was amazing. it was horrifying. We are supposed to say goodbye to him where we used to make soap and pick blueberries but you can’t come. Because you aren’t allowed into Canada because you wrecked your car when you were drinking and driving. And you wonder why I stormed off tonight.

I don’t cry for him often. I cried for him tonight, shoulders heaving, while I wrote the part about the 7up, while my roommate was blessedly gone, thank goodness. I cried for the little girl in the blue nightgown with a rose stuck in the bosom, pretending to be Carmen from the opera by Georges Bizet. He always used to put in the tape for me in the mornings, the performance at the San Francisco Met and I would wake up to the sound of L’amour est un Oiseau Rebelle, Love is a Wild Bird, the Habanera. I would pick a pink rose from the garden so I would look like Carmen. She throws the rose to her would-be lover, Jose, and in doing so seals his fate. I liked that he threw away everything for her.

So I don’t need you, but I wish you were here to hold me, and I’m so angry that you’re not. I’m so angry that nobody will ever truly be there for me really. I’m so angry that you left me daddy, I’m so angry that you couldn’t tell the things that came and stared at you at night to go away. I’m so angry that scotch was the only thing that made them fade for a while. I’m so angry that I can’t have a scotch right now and I’m so angry that I want one. I’m so angry that all the men I’ve ever loved since are just like you in that way. I’m so angry for being such a cliche. The girl with daddy issues. I’m so angry that I’m so weak, like my mother, and so proud, like both of them, and so precariously teetering on the brink of dysfunction and mania and depression but I run, run run and I smile, smile smile and bring people flowers and make them love me so maybe they won’t leave me all alone. I sat naked in the shower and let the water fall over my hair and I couldn’t tell which droplets were water and which droplets were tears and that made me feel poetic.

I have my yellow blanket that I stole from my brother’s crib. He used to threaten to take it back from me when we were older. I had become so attached to it. It was possibly the first of many of the things that I stole from my siblings, my right as the first born to take what was rightfully mine. I was there first, after all. And so there I sat, holding my dying father’s hand, while my sister was in California, too poor to afford to stay for that last moment, and my brother was in Washington, driving at breakneck speed back to Portland, where I sat in a quiet hospital room, just he and I, and he asked me to play him one more song before I left. And I did, and I left, and we made it two hours away, and then we turned around. Thank you for letting us turn around. I’m sorry I left you the way I did. You were good to me. You let me say goodbye to my father. I’ll never forget you for that, although you were just as great if not greater of a monster when it came to the whiskey. But if it weren’t for you I never would have gotten to see him drink that last Sprite. I know he knew it wasn’t a 7up, but I think he really enjoyed it anyway. And for that I am forever grateful.

You died three years ago yesterday, and tonight I took the dogs out to the lake in the crepuscular light. There I found, writ in river stones, your name.

The sun was still salmon-colored on the mountains. It gave me the soothing feeling of not-so-alone.

I should have run, run so fast the grief could not catch me. I love the feeling of outrunning sadness, just breathing, the dogs weaving back and forth across the trail. But instead I smoked the half cigarette I found in the ashtray, as you would have done. I sighed with relief when I found it, a small tribute to you, and lit it, letting the smoke settle around me like sorrow.

Written in April 2015 and published in April 2016 for The Dark Mountain Project Issue 9: The Humbling.

the last time I held a baby

The last time I held a baby was when I stood over the split belly of a wild sow in the half-moonlit vineyards of the Sonoma coast in November. She had been shot through the heart by the man I will marry.

We should all be so lucky, our exit announced by a quick shriek and then darkness. I wondered if she was imbued with the awareness of her children. I could see their snouts, feel their developing hooves. They were almost fully formed. There were eight. Another month and they would have sprung forth to roam across the rolling hills of California, inhaling salamanders and breaking apart the mycelium that give us the chanterelles.

The fault was not hers. She did not ask for her ancestors to be brought here. Her straight, wire-haired tail told us of her Russian heritage. If she and her children reached their full potential, she would be responsible for seven million in ten years. Her very-great-grandmothers were brought to a land which was unprepared for them, and now we must kill them to save what little is left.

In New Zealand the pigs devoured almost all of the ground-nesting birds. Big, fat, flightless parrots. But in California most birds raise their broods in the branches. When it came my turn to try, it was not so easy. I shot three of my own in the dark, and I watched them run off bleeding, but I never found their bodies, and it left me dull and aching.

So I drove home in the snow, and the tires were bald, and I cried in fits and starts as I skirted the edges of two-thousand-foot cliffs and I thought about the pigs heaving, alone, vultures circling, bile entering their wounds to eat away at their breathing because I had miscalculated.

And there was never such a feeling of misanthropy as my knowing I held a weapon in my hands that I was perhaps not yet skilled enough to use. Like so many before me, I had shot in desperation to try and bring my people back something to eat. Something to lay kisses on my prideseeking heart. Something to smile over while the flash held my face in its 155 sarah rea hands. The kill zone on a wild boar is the size of a gallon water jug, and I had blown those apart at a hundred yards. There is so much more to it than that.

But I had in the back of the truck, cocooned in snow, a little rabbit. I had shot it in the shoulder, and it looked me in the eye as its stomach opened up and it ran straight towards me and fell, kicking. It died right at my feet. I sobbed over its body.

And you opened up my knife for me and told me how to take the rabbit apart. And you took a photo and in it I looked like a little girl, hands covered in blood. And its entire stomach lay right where I had shot it once I followed the red trail back to the fence where we had first seen it pause, and you had said shoot.

I thought of the night when we took apart that mother sow. Her skull sits on my wooden table now next to a bowl of pomegranates, and one of her cutting teeth keeps falling out because we did not take the care to fill it with epoxy. It was my birthday when we cut her into named pieces, and we drank whiskey from the bottle, and you fell and hit your head by the fireplace when I was asleep and you lay there for a long time.

There was no sisterhood for that animal, no arms around her to celebrate the impending birth of her piglets, no outrage when she was taken from the herd. Had we not found her they may have eaten her body themselves. She just died, her jaws clenched with clover, heart exploded and sucking in the cold night air. I watched her ribs being sawed apart. God, she was glorious.