Following the wobbly lead of my own light, I make my way down the steep slope. Something crunches beneath my feet. Then it happens again. As I go lower, the crunching increases. I direct the light at my feet and tiny points of light wink back, reflected off scattered shards of black fiberglass. A group of officers are standing at the woven wire fence running parallel to the interstate, searching the brush with their flashlights. Suddenly one of the officers makes an exclamation, and the beams converge in a shifting blob of light. The lights focus on a body.
He is a young man, maybe eighteen. Barefoot. He is lying at an impossible angle, and steam is rising from his torso. His upper body is facedown, but his midsection is so severely twisted that his buttocks rest flat on the ground. One leg is extended naturally. The other is flexed at the knee and then, midway up the thigh, is bent again at a ninety-degree angle. His hair is curly, brown, and tousled.
Leif checks for a pulse and I check for another passenger. There is no pulse, and one of the officers tells me the boy was alone in the car. The officer seems a little dazed, keeps shaking his head. “It was a routine traffic stop. Kid was speeding. He pulled over, no problem, he was real cooperative. Showed me his license, answered all my questions, no sign of trouble.” The plates hadn’t checked out, however, and the officer asked the boy to follow him to the patrol headquarters one exit back.
“He said fine, no problem. When I pulled into the turnaround, he just disappeared. Killed the lights and split. I knew I’d never catch him, so I just followed slowly. Got to this curve, could see a vehicle had left the roadway. No skid marks, the kid never touched the brakes.”
The car was a Corvette. Later, the reconstruction experts will calculate that the vehicle was moving at well over 100 miles per hour when it launched from the embankment. After casting around a bit, I find the bulk of the car far below, leaning against a sturdy tree. It looks a foil gum wrapper that has been rolled between a giant pair of palms. The two bucket seats are wrapped tightly around the engine. The rear axle is bent at a severe angle, one tireless chrome rim sticking straight up in the air. Backtracking, I can see that the vehicle began snapping off trees about twenty feet up. One large pine has a two-foot-square gash of bark ripped away. I bump into the battery. I find a shoe. The gas tank, separated from the frame, is resting in some weeds. I sweep my light through the treetops, and see a flash of white. A sweat sock, hanging from a branch. Then I see another flash of color, and another. It takes me a minute, but then I recognize them. Comic books. They’re everywhere, as far as the light can reach, the brightly colored sheaves of paper draping the branches like unfallen leaves, or Christmas tree trimmings. There is no wind; they do not stir.
The boy landed forty feet beyond the bulk of the car. We crunch back up the hillside to fetch a longboard, some straps, and a body bag, and return to the body with the coroner. An officer is taking pictures of the scene. The white flash fires sporadically, painting the whole scene white for fractions of a second. The coroner bends down, inspects the body. It still steams, but not so vigorously. Leif looks at the coroner. “Wanna mark his position before we move him?”
“Yeah,” grunts the coroner, a fat man wearing a loose tie. “Anybody got paint?”
We stand there then, silent, while the trooper hikes to his car for spray paint. This is how it goes when you die this way, people stand around your body, poke it and prod it, turn it over to look at your wounds, conjecture about how it might have gone. One minute you’re alive and flying, the next you’re cooling in the leaves. You drop to the temperature of the dirt, and it’s all over.
The coroner digs out the kid’s wallet. He’s carrying five hundred bucks and a picture of his girlfriend. She lives in Minneapolis, and he was on his way to meet her. Minneapolis is just over an hour away. She’s probably putting on her makeup. The kid is seventeen. He’s three states away from home. The trooper returns with the paint and says the license check is back; the car belongs to the boy’s dad, and it’s been reported stolen. That explains the kid bolting.
The coroner shakes the aerosol paint can. The glass mixing ball rattles noisily in the woods. Then, bracing one hand on his pudgy knee, he bends over and laboriously traces a fluorescent orange line around the boy. The paint sticks to the brown leaves. Some of it spatters on the boy’s jeans. The coroner straightens, nods at Leif and Todd. “All yours.”
We move him to the body bag, every move accompanied by the gentle grating of pulverized bone. We wrap the bag in a white sheet, strap it to the longboard, lug the whole works up the hill and stow it in the rig.
The ride to the morgue is a quiet one. Whenever we turn or hit a bump, the body rocks gently beneath the sheet. Leif and Todd are in the front. I ride in the back with the boy. I think of the father, probably still angry about his car, and the girlfriend, checking herself in the mirror, making herself special. It is eerie to know someone is dead while their loved ones are oblivious. We sit with the bodies and wonder about the family, a mother, a father, a lover, someone occupied with the mundane business of living, and here we are, in possession of information that will shatter their life.
It is the darkest secret you can hold.
Do you know how to tell if someone is dead for good? The distinction, if I may understate, is critical. And yet isn’t always easy to tell. Sometimes you bust through a door at four in the morning and find someone who might be dead, or might not. Do you start CPR? Or do you comfort the family and call the coroner? The text used in my first EMT class, the fourth edition of Emergency Care and Transportation of the Sick and Injured, decrees, “CPR and appropriate treatment must be instituted unless there are obvious signs of death, such as rigor mortis, decapitation, or other massive injuries not compatible with life.” Another passage excused us from heroic intervention if the body was consumed by fire, or exhibited signs of “putrefaction.” We were also directed by the authors to roll the body and check for dependent lividity, a condition in which noncirculating blood pools, causing dark discoloration of the dependent portions of the body. In contrast, areas of the body in contact with a hard surface—the scapulae and buttocks, for instance, if the victim is supine—are blanched, the blood pressed from the skin. Dependent lividity sets in fifteen to thirty minutes after death; if you see it, you can put your pocket mask back in its case and turn the defibrillator off. Rigor mortis kicks in several hours later. If a patient is stiff and cool, you have nothing to do. An excerpt from chapter 6 of Emergency Care and Transportation reads, “CPR should not be administered if obvious signs of irreversible death are present,” a directive that seemed to support the concept of reversible death. A little glimmer of hope amongst the rigor mortis.
So. We are given the responsibility of calling death by name. With our own hearts in our throat, we look for the signs, make the call. But here’s the kicker: Despite the training, despite the onus of the decision, we are not granted the authority to pronounce an individual dead. As soon as we decide someone is irreversibly dead, we have to summon the coroner to make it official.
It can be a nervous-making wait. On a muggy summer evening around midnight, Jack the feed mill guy and I find a woman sitting upright in a chair. She has no heartbeat, and blood has already pooled in her feet and lower back. But every once in a while she seems to breathe. Heartbeat without breath, that I’ve seen. But breath without heartbeat, that shouldn’t be. The woman’s seventeen-year-old daughter is right there. Looking at me. Waiting for a decision. The woman is hooked up to an oxygen system, a big hose running to a little mask over her nose. We’re told she has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and was expected to die in three months. I listen again, hard, for a heartbeat. Nothing. But every now and then, she seems to breathe. I’m just about to pull her from the chair when Don, one of the Bloomer medics, appears. Speaking low, I tell him what I’ve seen. He pulls the little mask away, switches off the machine. It’s an external respirator. She wasn’t breathing, it was the machine.
We call the coroner and gather on
the porch. I go back in, ask the daughter how she is doing, if we can help with anything, or call anyone. She is phoning relatives. I sneak back in to the body, feel for a pulse once more. I’ve done this before. I have a terror of being wrong about this. We are so primed, so taught, to fight for revival, that when we decide not to intervene, it takes a long time for the doubt to dissipate. I’ll find myself riding home in the dark van, and suddenly I’ll shudder at the idea of the body in the bag, the hearse pulling away from the house, the heart squeezing and pitching, a muscly gray metronome…thup…thup…thup…oops…oops…oops…
Sometimes I go to the forest and prepare to die. So far, I’ve simply fallen asleep, but it strikes me that sleeping directly on the dirt is good practice for the Big Nap. I usually conduct these rehearsals while hunting. I’ll put my rifle down and curl up on a patch of leaves, or settle against the base of a solid white pine—if the air is crisp and I can cop a patch of sun, c’est magnifique. Jack, my brother’s beefy half-Labrador mongrel dog, often tags along on these walkabouts, and if I stop to sleep, he drops to his haunches at my side, bull-chested and alert, sniffing and cocking his ears, seated but still on the hunt. As I drift off, I can feel him glancing down, impatient to move on. Eventually, he slides to the ground, drapes his jowls across his forepaws, heaves a deep sigh, and settles to his own rabbity dreams.
I’ve had the bug to sleep in the woods ever since I was a child. My brothers and sisters and I—five of us, at the time—rarely slept in the house during the summer. We would gather at bedtime and traipse off to the woods, trailing our sleeping bags and dragging our pillows in the dirt. Out beneath the trees in the Breeds Woods forty, we’d lie on our backs and pick out stars, and speculate on the nature of the satellites that moved through the branches on their slow, straight line. I don’t remember ever being caught in the rain, or worrying about bears or hydrophobic skunks. I also don’t recall the mornings…whether or not we trooped home en masse, or just straggled home as we woke. We didn’t always sleep in the forest. I can remember sleeping in the yard, although not often, because in the morning everything would be chilled and soggy with dew. I recall sleeping in the smooth concrete mangers of the cow barn, and we spent many nights atop the hay stacks of the pole barn, burrowed into the bales twenty feet off the ground. Our sleeping bags were lousy with chaff.
But back to the woods. To sleep in the presence of trees and in the proximity of the earth is to get a sense of what it is to be holy. They say when Christ needed to get his head together, he did forty days in the wilderness. I stop at forty winks, but I believe I get a taste of what he was after. When I sleep on the forest floor, I never feel as if I’m simply taking a nap. I feel as if I’m performing some sort of embryonic ritual. When I awaken, I feel as if some important work has been done. This is not rest—this is ablution. By placing myself on the altar of the earth and retiring all my defenses, I am receding within myself, plucking a little transcendence from the perpetually gnashing jaws of time.
I am on the verge of rhapsodizing, so let me reframe: I’m no tree-hugger. I’m a tree-leaner, and a tree-sitter, and a tree-seeker, but I also have the ability to appreciate a tree in the form of a straight set of two-by-fours. I do not believe the trees are sentient beings, nor do I believe they have a spirit of their own. The trees do not speak to me. But I am pleased to take their shelter, pleased when they reinforce my smallness, pleased when they give me separation from the everyday static jamming my head. There is a big old white pine I like, deep within in the same forty where we slept when we were kids. It is ringed with a blanket of shed needles, rusty orange and springy. They make a fine mat, and while the tree towers above me, I am equally humbled by the idea of the tremendous roots threading the soil beneath me, knitted to the earth, clasping the soil in a way we surface-running humans never do. Such gravity. I rest above them, and they feed me as surely as if they were joined to my own veins. I absorb their ballast, resetting my keel for the journey back into a spinning world.
You have to get right down there. Don’t mind the dirt—we need more of that, anyway. Our society has gone bonkers for cleanliness, but I fear—and research biologists are beginning to confirm—that all of this compulsive disinfecting will ultimately leave us vulnerable. I’m all for a little dirt in the gut, if only to hatch some resistance to a broad spectrum of microbaddies. So. Catch the scent of the earth. Smell that vital decay. Put your cheek to the rough skin of the planet. What you feel is time settling constantly into itself, and this is deeply reassuring. You belong here, you see. This is where your cells, your minerals, all the microscopic bits of you can best blend into the cosmos. To seep gently through the leaves in a graceful descent back to the beginning of things. I have come to think of my sleeps in the forest as a rehearsal for burial, and I have come to wonder why anyone would want to be sequestered in a casket, sealed away from the embrace of all this peaceful dirt.
The earth is a fine cradle. We are all bound to sleep there.
A regular contemplation of death seems a worthy exercise. There’s no need for a morbid obsession—death will find you in its own time, regardless—it just seems worthwhile to give it the odd ponder. Not its form, or nature, or significance. Based on what I’ve seen, the forms of death are infinitely variable; and its nature is—for corporeal purposes—quite simply final. And as to the significance of death—as a portal, for instance—I am resigned to discovering that one in transit. The contemplation of death may or may not lead to any sort of explication, but it does provide a preemptive psychological advantage, in much the same way you might nod to a policeman when you know he just clocked you a few miles per hour over the limit: If he pulls you over, it seems less ignominious to have met his gaze prior, to be able to say, “Well, I figured you had me,” than to have averted your eyes, pretending not to see him framing you in the radar gun. Death is coming. Why not give it a nod now and then?
As an EMT, you are at war with death. Collateral damage is inevitable. And sometimes, in the middle of the battle, you wonder why we fight at all. On a sweet spring morning, I am struggling to push a Combitube down the throat of an elderly woman when I glance up to see her husband, silent and teary-eyed in the corner, and I wish we hadn’t been called at all. I wish he had simply put the phone down and held her hand as she died. Instead we push back the little wooden table where their coffee cups still rest, and we tear at her clothes, poke and prod her, shock her weary heart, strap her to a plastic board and scream away, and she will die anyway. The first time you press on the chest of an elderly person, the ribs separate from the sternum, popping like a string of soggy firecrackers. There are times when rescue is nothing more than organized physical assault. Sometimes I wish we would just leave people be, let them slip quietly over the vale. Sometimes life is not ours to save. Driving east one day, I passed an abandoned farmstead glittering in the winter sun, and thinking of the hands that built the tumbled wooden buildings, I suddenly saw death as a peaceful thing, an opportunity to check out of the game, to dispense with toil and trouble, an inky comfort in the unknown. No more appointments, no more petty recriminations, no phones, no more hurry or worry. Gonna be easy from now on, as the song goes.
When my brother Eric died, we had a parade. First came the hearse, Eric’s little casket curtained within, then a heat-skewed line of cars that stretched the length of Main Street, headlights switched on and sapped by the midday sun. We drove from the city of Bloomer—population 3,085, Jump Rope Capital of the World—and rolled slow and easy up and over the middling hills of County Highway F, northbound.
It was June. Hot, and the corn was coming on. Twin Lakes Cemetery lay fourteen miles up-country, notched from a farmer’s field half a forty shy of the Rusk County Line. Ten miles into the trip, we banked through the cambered sweep of Morley’s Corner and strung out along the straight stretch running past the old Alan North place. The North place, with its patchwork pines and long dirt drive, was long ago flattened by a turkey farming conglomerate. My brothers
and I always resented the giant irrigation circles that had replaced the tuckaway meadows, and by virtue of association, the men in the behemoth articulated tractors churning to and fro across the fertile dirt. Omnivorous dusty green bullies, they didn’t so much till the land as rough it up and leave it humbled. But today, as we filed down the two-lane beside the factory fields, the man in the monstrous John Deere, its eight-row cultivator tailed by a scudding dust bank, drew his rig to a stop smack in the middle of the field. The dust bank converged on the cab and rolled beyond, and still he held his place, the tractor idling, until the whole quarter-mile-long run of cars passed. I thought of the missing-man formation, in which a squadron of fighter planes performs a fly-over and one craft separates, veering to the heavens. Howling ballet, starring killing machines. But it tightens my throat every time. The figure in the air-conditioned tractor cab was indistinct, but I wondered who he was and what was in his heart as he held the clutch down, his steady foot restraining the diesel while it knocked and grumbled, raring to plow to the end of the row.
All around these townships, I see the dead. It is landscape as sepulcher. There’s the school sign erected in memory of Tummer Olson; there’s the ski hill where Lisa Stansky died; in that house we found an old woman gone in her bed; here is where Harry lay; there is the house from which they ran with the Jensen baby, too late. Bob shot himself in that cabin, the train hit Jake right at that bend. How important this is, this constant remembering, these unremarkable memorials. Every death is a memory that ends here. These are stakes to peg your history on. Be grateful for death, the one great certainty in an uncertain world. Be thankful for the spirit smoke that lingers for every candle gone out.
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