The West Will Swallow You

by Leath Tonino

  White can have so many different whites inside of its whiteness, she said last week.

  Indeed, I replied, refilling our little clear plastic cups.

  Gram likes talking weather, no doubt about it, and Gram likes talking Granddad too—a nice quiet man, the Protestant Farm Boy from Illinois who grew up to marry the Irish Lass from the Big City. He was one of the first commercial pilots and she was one of the first commercial stewardesses, and it was the Golden Age of Aviation. They met in Newfoundland when their flights were grounded by storms, and it was the Golden Age of Aviation. They met again months later, in the Azores, and it was the Golden Age of Aviation, the Golden Age of Aviation.

  A kind man who didn’t complain about anything, Gram told me last week, until that one day when he said, I don’t feel quite right, and by Friday afternoon he was gone.

  He was great, I said. I loved climbing into his lap and “helping” with crossword puzzles.

  Did you ever meet him? she asked in response.

  Dementia, according to the experts, is a kind of cloud. Okay. But planes cut through clouds and, no doubt about it, Gram likes talking planes as well—how their contrails swoosh and swish, how they hang on the empty blue. Planes carry us to Newfoundland, to the Azores, to the man of our dreams. Planes transport us to lands we’ve never visited and lands we’ve forgotten and lands we can just make out at the receding edge of memory.

  Sitting on the patio at the assisted living facility last week, sipping our little clear plastic cups of ginger ale, I learned, as I had learned the week prior, that young folks better label the backs of their photographs, because it’s easy to lose track of where and when and the rest, and that young folks should likewise label their shirts and pants, because things are bound to get lost at a place like this.

  A place like this, I thought. What is a place like this? Isn’t it a regular place, a place beneath the sky that touches all places?

  Here comes another cloud, Gram said. This one’s in a hurry. Watch now. I think it’s going to catch the others. Give it a minute. Give it a minute. Watch now and let’s see what it does.

  I did as instructed: I watched.

  Look at that one, Gram continued, pointing with the hand that held the little clear plastic cup, raising a toast without knowing she was raising a toast, without any awareness whatsoever that she was celebrating the sky that touches all places, the sky that touches the tops of all clouds.

  Yeah, look at that one, I echoed.

  Her face, round and wrinkled, seemed to glow from the inside. That one sure does like to flop, she said. Flopping around. Flopping around without a care. Would you believe that?

  Ways to Take Your Coffee

  With snow falling on blue spruce and a cardinal’s red quickness at the feeder and the fireplace’s crackly warmth easing into your bones and the final pages of a book about bears and the opening pages of a book about monks and no plans for the morning, the afternoon, tomorrow, the rest of your life.

  With a frisky dog straining against the leash and then released from the leash and then running frisky-wild, frisky-free, high on the caffeine that is canine living, that is a meadow of tall grass rich with secret smells and plentiful muck and perfect spots for rolling.

  With ancient mountains all around and an entire ancient mountain beneath your butt and the climb still burning your legs and the climb still thrilling your mind and clouds building on the horizon, a storm coming for sure, but you’ve got time, you and your best friend, plenty of time to light the stove and brew a strong pot and trade sips while two golden eagles circle, circle, circle the summit, never once flapping their wings.

  With a splash of whiskey after an incredibly long weekend of whiskey and maybe some nature documentaries on the tube, maybe a greasy egg sandwich, certainly a headache, a rock-splitting headache, definitely the couch.

  With the tray table lowered and the flight attendant offering refills and the plane sort of empty, nobody in your row, nobody between you and that thirty-thousand-foot view of twisty rivers, lumpy hills, entire watersheds, the earth just going and going, no end in sight.

  With bare feet in cool sand and the surf whispering along the beach and five gray whales spouting in the distance where millions of tiny silver fish turn as one, flash as one in the oneness of ocean, the oceanic oneness that comes up to your ankles, your shins, your knees, then pulls back into the immensity of itself like an invitation, like a dare.

  With tired, bearded men in a desert truck stop at midnight and then on out to your old trusty car and then on down the old lonely road, basins and ranges, ranges and basins, the radio off because it’s broken, the pedal pressed, the tires whumping, the sky without stars, a bottomless cup, so black, so black, no cream, no sugar.

  Doe’s Song

  Jennifer hit the deer and the deer came onto the windshield and the deer fell to the pavement. The deer got up and tried to run but the deer couldn’t run and fell to the pavement. The deer’s front left leg was broken, flipped over one shoulder like a scarf. The deer got up and ran on three legs across the road, the bad leg dangling. The whole thing took maybe thirty seconds, a minute tops.

  Mike and I were following Jennifer in a second car and when she slammed the brakes we slammed the brakes. We saw the deer try to stand and we saw the deer fall and we saw the deer rise and run. We saw the leg. She was a doe, not sure what age. It’s obvious that she was lovely, but I’ll say it anyway: She was lovely. Brown and slim. Smooth. If she had a name, no human knew it.

  This was springtime, a soft evening in Princeton, New Jersey, a narrow road in forested suburbs, the kind of place where deer are hit every day. I will repeat that: the kind of place where deer are hit every day. I will repeat that: every day. Where every day deer are struck with the force of rockfall and lightning. Where roads curve and bones litter green thickets separating elegant mansions. Where we live our lives, always moving, always rushing this way and that, here and there. Where spots of blood on new leaves go mostly unnoticed and kids can be heard laughing in their yards, playing after the homework is done.

  Yes, a soft evening, the clouds rosy, the sky between the clouds a pale, delicate blue.

  When I reached Jennifer’s window she was sobbing, face in her hands. “Did you see the leg?” she said, the hands coming down to her lap, thin and red, her face red and wet. “Did you see the leg? Is it going to be okay?” I assumed that the doe would not be okay. I assumed that the doe was in a tremendous amount of pain. “It happened so fast. There wasn’t anything I could do. Is it going to be okay? Is it going to die?” I didn’t know. I was thinking of suffering. “Is it going to be okay?”

  Cars were lining up behind us, cars and more cars. I waved them around, crossed the road, and there she was, fifty feet into the woods, curled on the ground, looking at me, shaking. I stopped, not wanting to scare her, and said I was a friend. Unsure what else to do, I sang a little song, a gentle tune without words. I invented the song as I went, the doe looking at me, shaking, a sadness thickening in my body. And then something cut through that sadness. Cleaved that sadness. I stepped back. I knew for certain that my presence was only making things worse.

  Sure enough, the doe got up and ran, the bad leg now like a sock of pennies.

  Returning to the scene of the accident, I found Mike in the passenger seat, Jennifer gripping the steering wheel. They weren’t talking and they weren’t crying. They were mesmerized, it seemed, by the dashboard’s dust. A pickup truck passed behind me, way too fast and way too close. I felt the press of air against my neck, the force of it, the hint of rockfall and lightning.

  “Do you think it will be okay? Do you think it will live?”

  Mike stared ahead, scrutinized the dust. I said nothing. Jennifer raised her thin red hands and dropped her face to meet them.

  Richard Nelson’s 1997 book, Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America, doesn’t deal extensively with roadkill, but the few statistics it does provide are overwhelming. By chance, I had be
en overwhelmed with them at breakfast, drinking my coffee, reading at the table in Vermont prior to getting in the car for the drive to New Jersey.

  “Back in 1961 when deer were scarce by present standards,” Nelson writes, “official reports counted fewer than 400 deer killed by cars on [Wisconsin’s] roads. Just 30 years later, in the 1990s, the number had soared to between 35,000 and 50,000 whitetails killed annually, and the actual figure could be much higher, since injured deer often get away from the highway before dying.”

  He goes on: “The number of deer killed by cars in Boulder [Colorado] varies from 120 to more than 200 each year, and an equal number (if not more) are injured or straggle off to die in the brushland. Deer accidents increase during winter, midsummer, and especially the fall rut. An animal control officer told me, ‘We’ll pick up two or three dead deer every day in rutting season, plus usually one more that’s injured so badly it has to be euthanized.’”

  Spring morning, a cup of coffee, the house quiet. I reclined in my chair and thought through the math. Boulder plus Colorado’s other cities, towns, and open roads. Plus Wisconsin. Plus Florida and California. Plus Vermont and New Jersey. Two or three. Plus usually one more. Between 35,000 and 50,000. Could be much higher. I took a gulp, then took another. Straggle off to die in the brushland.

  If all went well, I’d make it to Princeton in five hours, perhaps faster.

  Seven years ago I drove from Vermont to Colorado keeping a tally, organized by species, on the inside cover of an atlas. The atlas sat in the passenger seat with a pencil atop it, one of those short pencils you find in libraries. For some two thousand miles it was just me and the road and the dead animals and the tally and the short pencil. The radio in my car was busted. No air-conditioning either.

  The first day’s push got me to Lansing, Michigan, where an old best friend lived at the time. We hadn’t seen each other in years, so we drank late into the night, joking and remembering and playing guitars. I didn’t mention my tally, the early doe in the Adirondacks, the second with her neck snapped back, the skunk whose white stripe was red, the mash of porcupine, the smears I couldn’t name. Ohio was bad, worse than New York. A red-tailed hawk with its wing sticking straight up. A stain that looked like tar.

  Morning came too early, hot and hungover, and in no time I was on the road again. My destination was Chicago, a half-day’s drive at most. Within fifteen minutes, though, I began to doubt whether I would make it that far. It was the raccoons, Procyon lotor. It was the damn tally. It was me picking the pencil up, putting it down, picking it up, putting it down, picking it up. I knew I’d feel better if I stopped counting, but I wouldn’t let myself stop counting. I was thirsty and ran out of water. I worried that I might vomit. When I finally hit Chicago, my shirt was off and I was sweating and the vinyl seat was sucking against my aching spine. I’d racked up an even twenty raccoons, three deer, a squirrel, and four unidentifiables.

  Iowa. Nebraska. The rest of the trip was more of the same, though never quite as low and sad and hard as Michigan. This is a big country, and it gets bigger when you’re watching and tallying and grabbing the pencil again and again. You know that kind of pencil I’m talking about, the kind from libraries? They don’t have an eraser. Any mark you make with one of those pencils is a mark made for good.

  There was a game on, the Philadelphia 76ers. I don’t really care for pro basketball, but Mike and Jennifer like sports, and I was their guest, so we watched. We also prepared a feast. Jennifer made tortilla chips from scratch with lots of oil and salt. I chopped jalapeños and onions, cooked black beans and rice. Mike grated cheddar cheese and fed the dog, Lucy. We had some beers. Jennifer had red wine. Nobody mentioned the deer.

  The game was close and long and the commercials came and came like the raccoons that morning heading west from Lansing. They felt to me like dead things, like little flashy, noisy corpses. I sat on the carpeted floor, a giant pillow propped against the base of the couch for a backrest. We had some ice cream. Another drink. Three-pointer, slam dunk. During a commercial break I went out to the driveway and looked at the stars. I went out again during the next commercial. And the next. We talked for a while about nothing in particular, relaxed and played with Lucy, said goodnight and went to bed.

  Edging up to sleep, I saw the stars inside my eyes, constellations bordering dreams.

  The next day, rising before dawn to get the coffee started, I found Jennifer sitting on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, her face red and wet and buried in her hands, the hands lifted to meet her face.

  At the Little Otter Creek Wildlife Management Area, in Ferrisburgh, Vermont, I discovered the spot where the deer that die on nearby roads get piled, though I’m not sure whose job it is to haul them there. It’s a mass grave and an open grave on a dead-end track in a stand of white pine. The smell drags you along the track, the curious horror of that smell, and then you see a leg. Then another. Then the shallow depression with the skulls and tangled bodies, the stages of decay, the churn and grind of time. Often I’ve sat on the ground and forced myself to be still, to inhale, to look. The stink is dire. Teeth and jawbones are everywhere. This is a mile from my childhood house, an easy walk.

  I’ve got a hunch few people know the grave exists besides me and the person who hauls the bodies from the road.

  When I was a teenager, I spent a week studying wilderness medicine. The class was held in the middle of winter. The two instructors were mountaineers with countless hours of experience saving lives and facing deaths in remote corners of the world. Simon was a Denali guy and Gabe did landmine work in Southeast Asia. Both climbed ice.

  After lunch on the last day of the course Simon got quiet and very serious. He said that now we had to talk about another aspect of the work and that if anybody didn’t feel comfortable it was fine to leave the room. Nobody left. We all sat tight. Outside it was getting ready to storm, snow lightly falling, night only a few hours off. A fellow next to me, usually a fierce joker, put his hands on the table.

  Simon said the other aspect of the work was trauma. He told a story about a plane crash. It was a commercial jet and a major American airport. It was many bodies. It was a heavy response, dozens and dozens of emergency personnel on site. He described how easily you get pulled into the situation, the flow of the disaster, everything that needs to be done and that you’ve been trained to do without thinking. And then it’s finished, he said. You’re at home on the couch. You’re watching TV or having dinner or humming your kid a lullaby. You’re chopping onions. You’re at the edge of sleep.

  Processing. That was the lesson. Having spent all week teaching us how to help people, how to assess their injuries, how to stabilize and evacuate, the last lesson was that sometimes you can’t. I will repeat that: Sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you arrive on the scene and the bodies are in pieces and the pieces are in pieces. Sometimes there’s enough blood to drown in a thousand times, once nightly for years to come. You may have nightmares. The images may haunt you. Following that bad plane crash, Simon told us, the medical crews went through psychiatric evaluations and participated in discussion groups. They didn’t just drift off. They knew that drifting off was not an option.

  Remembering this lecture, I think of deer hunters. They process the meat. That’s their word for bleeding and skinning and butchering and wrapping the cuts in plastic and paper and putting them in the garage chest freezer. For dating and naming the cuts with black ink. For turning a killing into another year’s calories, into holiday feasts shared with family and friends. Processing. It’s a method. It’s been passed down the generations, season to season, hand to hand, father and mother to daughter and son.

  Matt, a teacher I know, tells a story about a cow moose. He was leading a group of high school students on a camping trip in late spring. Exploring, they came upon a brook bridged by a fallen tree. The moose lay beneath the tree, partway in the water. What had happened? Maybe the tree fell on the moose while she was having a drink? The back end of the
carcass was eaten clean, the skeleton chewed by coyotes and a long winter. The front end, protected by the log, was fur and flesh, a rotten mess feeding the soil. They lifted the log as a group and tugged the moose free, out of the brook and onto higher ground. They wanted to have a funeral.

  “It was really beautiful,” Matt recalls. “We went around the circle and everyone was given a chance to say something, whatever they wanted, or they could be silent when their turn came. One student said a prayer. I was blown away. I won’t try to repeat it because I’ll get it wrong. It was something like, The moose is now able to complete its journey. It was stirring and it was raw and it was beautiful. It was life and it was death. It was profound and it allowed students to participate in that larger dance.”

  Some of Matt’s students have lost a parent. Some have lost siblings, aunts, uncles, friends. I picture their circle, the things said and not said, the quiet of springtime leaves speaking to other springtime leaves, the ghosts hovering close. Afternoon light slants to the glistening pelvis. The muzzle is huge and softening. The brook’s voice fills each young ear.

  “I think being able to witness the cycle of life and death as it appears in the natural world allows them to accept,” Matt says. “Not to gloss over or forget or ignore, but to just accept.”

  Richard Nelson again: “The historical literature portrays Indians, above all, as masters of still hunting: a solitary man in the forest, armed with bow and arrow, slipping like a phantom through light and shadow, stopping every few yards to watch, waiting for the flicker of movement that reveals a deer, then cannily stalking within range. There is also a romantic but accurate image of the hunter disguised as his prey, covered with a whole or partial deer hide, his own head embellished with antlers.” The Navajo, who practiced this style, would use “the sacred hide of a deer killed by suffocation rather than with arrows or bullets.”