DREAMS IN A BACKWATERPART TWOIII(1) GLORY-OF-THE-SNOW
Stillness, well defined. "Goodbye! Bye! Happy birthday!" "Thank
you! Thank you for the presents!" "You're
welcome! Thank you for the cake and ice cream!" "You're
welcome! Goodbye! Bye!" My niece,
whose birthday it is, stands on the front porch in the
twilight, calling and waving. One hand is stuffed deep into
the pocket of her pants; her shoulders are hunched against the chill.
But she is beaming with the afterglow of her party, which was a great
success. She grins at me, grins at her parents standing beside
her, grins at her grandmother and grandfather as they slowly grope
their way through the gathering darkness towards the car. She
grins and hunches her shoulders against the chill of the evening,
standing as one with the adults to say the thank-you's and the
goodbye's – for she is ten years old now, into the double digits, and
old enough to begin taking her place beside the grown-ups in their
grown-up world. Old enough to someday remember this night not
just as one of the many fragmented bits and pieces of a
half-forgotten childhood, but as part of a greater whole. Old
enough to begin remembering her way into adulthood. Will she
turn the day over and over again in her mind as she lies in bed
waiting for sleep, reliving it, struggling to grasp its shape and
meaning, trying to sort out the true natures of its players from her
own egoistic intent, as I used to do when I was her age? And,
thus imagining, will she remember only the pleasure her presents
gave her, her pride at being the centerpiece of her family's
celebration this night; or will her pleasure and her pride be tinged
with a child's fear and sorrow at the memory of this goodbye?
For goodbyes must sooner or later always be said; and each goodbye,
as every child must learn to recognize sometime, may just possibly be
the last. I get into my
parent's car, shivering slightly. The air smells damp, earthy,
and of a stale coldness, for there are still some lingering patches
of snow on the ground. Spring has only just arrived. We
all begin to wave and call one last time; but now my niece, giving an
exaggerated, exasperated sigh, flings herself round and darts off
into the house – lured back, perhaps, by the thought of playing one of
the new games she's been given with her younger sister. The night's excitements
aren't over yet! Seeing her so taken, so overwhelmed with
unbridled impatience in the face of the slow, formulaic rituals of
which adults are so fond, I am reminded of how strong and fierce my
own emotions ran when I was her age. They swept through me in
great waves then, possessing me entirely. Anything might
happen; at any moment anything might happen – didn't the grown-ups
know? But the grown-ups, it seemed to me, lived comparatively
stunted lives; they were almost always placid and bland and correct,
smiling often but not laughing nearly so much. How was it, I
wondered, that they grew so tame? I would never let that happen
to me! And yet, what did I feel this moment, tonight, as I rode
in my parent's car down the dark drive and turned out onto the
country road that would lead us home? Contentment, merely:
a satisfying enough sensation but a simple one too; and was undisturbed by
the knowledge that yes, this goodbye might just possibly be the
last. Probably it would not be – but then again, you never
did know. This is a knowledge I have grown used to. Yet despite
my calm acceptance of life's potential dangers, I will not even
now permit myself to agree to the idea that the excitement and
expectation with which I once greeted it has diminished to
nothing more than a dull, settled, and comfortable routine.
It's only that, somewhere along the way, I have come to realize that
the real excitement lies not so much in the risks that life might
take with me, but in those risks that I am willing to take with my
own life. All I needed, I reminded myself as I ride along down the
road, was a little courage. A little courage, and a great deal
of patience. "Look! Look!" my mother cries, leaning forward in her
seat. "Do you see?" We have just reached the
end of one country road and are making the turn out onto
another. The car's headlights sweep over an empty field. "Yeah –
geez, look at 'em all!" my father says. There are a number
of deer standing in small groups scattered across the field; we can
see their eyes glowing yellow in the darkness as the headlights catch
them. Their shadowy bulks move stealthily past us, wading
through clumps of withered grass. "One, two, three . . ." "And there's some more back towards the trees." "And – oh,
look! There's two more of them, standing there along the edge
of the road! Careful they don't jump out in front of the car!" My father
slows to a halt and backs the car up, then gently rolls it forward
again. Again the headlights run over the length of the field
and we take a quick count. There are ten of them at least – no,
twelve, thirteen – perhaps more. "Look at
that!" my mother says as the deer, having gazed at us for
several long seconds, lower their heads and calmly begin to graze
again. "They aren't even afraid!" "No-o," agrees my father, slowly, assessingly, "they
aren't. Well . . . they don't know any better, I suppose." "They're
just ignoring us! They . . . they don't seem to care at
all." My mother's voice betrays a certain pique, as if she
took their behavior as a personal affront. "They
don't know any better, that's all," my father reassures.
And again he backs the car up and rolls it forward slowly, letting
the headlights sweep over the field. I'm beginning to grow a little
tired of this game. "They
aren't afraid of us at all. . . ." my mother murmurs;
and I sense in her a growing wonderment, not
unmixed with pity. "Goodbye, deer!" she calls out
softly as we pull away. "Don't get hit by any cars!" "Lucky it's not hunting season," my father comments. "Yes." "Of course, if they weren't hunted . . ." "There'd
be too many of them and they'd starve to death. I
know." We are all familiar with the litany of this
rationalization. "Poor things. Seems like they were
just made to be killed." We fall into
silence. There's nothing more to be said on the subject.
Deer have become, for us as for many of the people who live around
here, a symbol of all that humanity has lost on its obsessive trek
towards civilization: their twisted carcasses at the side of the road
bear ample testimony to that. To some, the fragility of their
existence represents all the beauty – and all the futility – of
nature; to others, it merely provides testament to a sort of
excessive profuseness. It would be too much, I suppose, to ascribe
to the deer – not to mention the opossums, skunks, raccoons,
hedgehogs, squirrels, chipmunks, and birds whose bodies litter the
roadside – a certain bravery, as that of fearless soldiers fallen at
the front. I myself have learned to view these corpses with a
certain coldness. It's not that I have grown callous, but
rather that I sense an injustice here so profound it has turned me
bitter, my helplessness in the face of it freezing my capacity
for response and giving me the facade of neutrality. I am, I
suppose, like the deer in a way, for I too have run out of
choices. But how, I wonder as we continue careening down the
road, did it ever come to this? How has it come to be that the
only options left for the deer to take – that of being hunted down
with rifles, starving to death, or being struck by a speeding truck
or car – are likewise the only options I have left to offer? No one, of
course, hits a deer because they want to. Apart from anything
else, they cause too much damage to the car. It's only that
they come leaping out of the darkness and catapulting into the road with
such unexpected suddenness that there is not time enough to stop. I
remember one day driving out along some country road – this must be
some ten years ago now – and coming upon a recently hit deer.
The car that had struck it had pulled over just a little ways beyond;
three people had gotten out of the car and were standing around
looking into the ditch where the stricken animal lay. It was not dead. As I drove
slowly by, studying the accident scene and not quite knowing at first what
it was that I witnessed, I saw the deer – a buck – flailing his long,
spindly legs and rocking his body forward as if trying to stand.
As he did so I saw that he had a great gash running vertically down
his chest, a long, deep crevice that gaped open to reveal thick
tendrils of bleeding muscle within. The deer fell back, his
legs again flailing wildly; rocked himself forward and again tried to
stand . . . What must it
be like, I wondered, to have some great ferocious beast with savage
metal teeth bring you down, deliver a mortal blow – and then, not
finish the job, but simply settle itself nearby and wait? What
must it be like to see that beast disengorge itself of some sort of
apparently parasitical creatures living within it, who likewise did
nothing, made no effort to finish the kill, but simply stood to one
side, watching and waiting? I confess that
scenes such as this do more than "haunt my memory," or
"wring my heart with pity." They twist and squeeze my
heart until it is left ragged and sore. They deliver, into
the body of my spirit as definitively as into the chest of that deer,
a mortal wound. Something profoundly wrong is happening here. The human
species is, at this moment of history at least (for I like to hold to
the possibility, for the sake of my intellectual well-being if
nothing else, that it's our relative place in evolutionary time
rather than some more fundamental lack that has brought us to our present
crisis), constituted of profoundly perverted creatures.
We have extended our physical prowess in ways that are, quite
literally, beyond our control. Products of the Machine Age, we
watch the havoc we wreak without much sense of personal
responsibility. We have become as mere spectators, paralyzed by
the power we have been given but have not earned, to the acts we
commit. Will we outgrow this historical moment
successfully? Will we be able to suffer within our hearts,
within our minds, within our bodies and our souls, the damage we have
inflicted upon the earth? For I think that we must sooner or
later learn to do just this, or else perish from those wounds which,
being rendered upon nature, are likewise rendered upon ourselves. My head pounds
furiously with the knowledge of our ignorance. My heart races
with rage over the many injustices we cannot seem to stop ourselves
from committing. We have, I believe, no hope at present for
gaining control over our destiny; we are as a species simply being
borne along with the tide of events. Yet we are loathe to
acknowledge the limitations of our understanding, eager to endorse
the biases of a human-centered perspective: and thus it
is that we become the servants of selfishness. And thus it is
that I come once again to that point at which I feel I have no
other choice but to turn my back on what I see human beings doing to
this world. I turn my back not with the helpless, hopeless
despair of the victim, but with the righteous anger of one who sees
the limitations of the era in which he lives as having resulted from
the ignorance, and the arrogance, of both the masses and their
leaders in the face of what they are doing, of what they have done.
It leaves me with but one conviction: that there is no
help for me to give, unless I be willing to sacrifice myself to what
appears to be a futile cause. And this I am not willing to do. Still, if I
determine that the governing systems of society now in existence are
antagonistic to the health of this member, if I determine that the
governing systems are so complex, interwoven, and interdependent that
all attempts to change them lack efficacy, do I not then become
morally free to exert upon society whatever pressures it takes to release
me from its grasp? I am become a
lawless creature – and yet I am bound by unseen chains. And
still I refuse to acknowledge that I owe moral servitude to anything but
that which serves the highest purpose to which nature may put
me. I am the Watcher. I am the Witness. And in this
record of what I see, I take my stand. UNTITLED
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