Essays from the Nick of Time

by Mark Slouka

  One year I carried the cowbird’s egg into the woods and threw it against the trunk of a tree, where it made a dark, wet spot.

  Another year I didn’t notice the egg until after it had hatched. Unable to watch the nestlings starve, I took the intruder out of the nest and then, feeling like a fool, tried to feed it chopped worms and minced bits of largemouth bass with a straw. It died—to spite me, I think—sitting hunched up in a corner of the shoebox like a bitter old man in an ill-fitting suit.

  A third year, shamefully, I killed the thing outright like a miniature chicken, though the distress of the phoebes over its disappearance touched my heart. After that I let things alone.

  And that’s where it stands now, more or less. Some years the cowbird comes and the phoebes’ nestlings die. Other years it doesn’t, and they live. As it has always been, as it was long before I was around to be troubled by it, so it remains. A cowbird was laying its eggs in a phoebe’s nest (this is what I tell myself) when Jamestown was founded, when Christ was a somber lad wandering the streets of dusty Judea, when the Enlightened One, moved by mercy, supposedly threw himself into a pit to feed a starving tiger.

  What troubles me about the ritual that plays out under the eave, I think, is my own uncertainty in the face of it. It’s a problem. I don’t know how to read it. On the one hand, its mute endurance awes me; disturbed by my interference, it simply parts like a stream around a child’s finger—for years, if necessary, or decades—until the finger is moved. On the other, though I recognize the play’s authority, sense its rightness, I find it difficult to be still. The Sophoclean cruelty of the arrangement, which has the parents dutifully feeding their children’s murderer even as their own young, unseen, starve under its wings, gets to me every time. Antiquity and endurance are not quite enough. I can do something, save something now. And yet…

  And yet, far off, I can hear something whispering that this compulsion to do, to intrude ourselves, to improve on what is—even when wholly well intentioned, particularly when wholly well intentioned—is the source of all our troubles. Could it be that one of our most quintessential, even admirable human traits constitutes a richly ironic sin, a sin for which we, in the fullness of time, will be punished? Could it be that the pendulum, having swung over the course of the centuries from humility to hubris in the face of nature’s mystery, has reached the top of its arc?

  Caught in the pause, neither moving forward nor yet falling back, I do nothing—badly. I sit on my sagging porch reading the New York Times, trying to ignore the parents flicking to the nest over my head, their beaks crammed with broken insects and worms, trying not to hear the insatiable screeching of the invader or, worse, the faint asthmatic peeping of the phoebes’ brood. I fold the page, snap the crease—turn my mind to the pointless (or pointed) cruelties of men, to which I am accustomed. I stand up. I sit down again.

  II

  I spend my summers—or the bulk of them—in a four-room cabin by the side of a small pond, immersed in the chanting, rasping, riotous chatter of the natural world, a chatter I adore but cannot understand, a chatter punctuated at regular intervals—as if by an invisible host, tapping his knife to a glass—by death. One day I returned to the shack in which I write to find the makeshift door pushed open and my papers covered in blood and hair. Cleaning up the mess, I discovered a hoofed leg, like a miniature satyr’s—caught in a crack in the floorboards.

  On a hot, still August morning, walking the road that encircles our pond, loosely, like a necklace on a table, I found a painted turtle crushed into the dirt. An aquatic species, it had obviously come from the water to lay its eggs when the car’s tire found it. It was only after I’d gently pushed it into the weeds with my foot so the kids wouldn’t see it that it occurred to me that I didn’t know if it had died coming from the water or returning to it. I bent down and drew it back out of the grass.

  Like all painted turtles, it had been beautiful to the point of tastelessness, the underside of its indigo shell, now broken into unfamiliar continents, a child’s swirl of yellows and reds spilling, as if through an excess of sheer joy, onto the soft, phallic folds of the neck. I lay it upside down on my hand. It felt warm, I realized, because it had been in the sun. And though I didn’t want to, I slid my fingers into the ugly split in the skin and under the cracked plastron and felt them there: small, smooth, oval. I slipped them one by one out of that wreckage—startlingly white, apparently undamaged—and brought them back to the cabin, where I placed them in an old Thompson Cigar box between two layers of sphagnum moss left over from some gardening venture.

  They meant a good deal to me, those five orphans, and over the next few weeks I checked the box often, already imagining the Washington quarter–sized hatchlings—perfect miniatures—scurrying over the moss, the aquarium we would set up for them on the bench, the day in September when, half-grown, they would swim off our palms into the darkness of the lake. Instead they browned, then collapsed, as though something inside them had left. The world has its own imaginings.

  That afternoon, carrying the box with its increasingly aromatic cargo into the woods, I noticed for the first time the design on the lid—a seventeenth-century antique map of the Americas, complete with representations of three-masted schooners sailing the Mare Pacificum and monstrous cyclones under the circulus aequinoctalis. In the lower left-hand corner, inside an ornate frame suitable to a wall mirror, were the words: America: Nova Tabula.

  In another age, I might have heard the low chuckle of divine mirth, sensed a smile in the fiddlehead fern waving frantically on a windless day. “The nova tabula is in your hands, you fool,” the wind would whisper to me. “There is no map—read as you may, write what you will.”

  III

  The very notion of an intelligent design, I have to say, is slightly embarrassing—it seems so open-faced and naive, so primitive, so depressingly lacking in irony. It suggests that one has somehow missed the fact that life is now all DNA sequencing and logarithms—wetware, to recall the cyberists’ piquant phrase—or worse, that one has bought into one of the religious right’s cartoons, which is mortifying.

  Since I have little hipness to lose, I’ll confess it straight out: intelligent design is a notion, a myth—all right, a theology—I’ve always been attracted to. Unapologetically in love with both the natural world and the written page (between which I sense all manner of linkage, both of which seem to me to be fading from our lives, to our inestimable loss), most at home in myself when I am navigating one or the other, I’ve found myself wishing at times that on some level it could all be true. Not that Toto might reveal to us at long last the benevolent, white-haired wizard behind the curtain, but something… subtler: that we could glimpse the wisdom behind it all, sense, even if momentarily, the pattern in the carpet. How glorious it would be to feel the key turn, to be able to enter the culture of things outside of us, to understand not only the what of the universe, but the why. To read the slow rain of rising trout, or comprehend—really comprehend—the shocking orange of fungus, labial and exquisite, shining on the underside of a rotting log. To grasp the intent and the glory, the slow fire of life, behind them.

  It’s a fantasy with a long pedigree. For countless millennia, after all, like three-year-olds who can’t read but nonetheless turn the pages, move their lips, we imagined meaning, a narrative, agency. And since everything ultimately has to be about us, the story we imposed on nature was largely our own. The agency behind the screen had not only to resemble us but to care about our welfare. It’s almost touching, this presumption. Knowing nothing, we assumed all. Nature became our mirror, our metaphor bank. The cruel sun? The spendthrift weed? Nature was the vehicle; we were the tenor—always. For millennia, and well into the nineteenth century, we read the world metaphorically, much as a Freudian psychoanalyst might read our gestures and verbal slips as clues to the workings of the unconscious. The visible world was a system of signs, pointing to some deeper, hidden actor, who was communicating with us. The ciga
r was never just a cigar.

  It didn’t work, of course. The cigar, it turned out, was just a cigar; the sand flea just a sand flea. Nature was not “a grave,” “a kind parent,” “a merciless stepmother.” It didn’t “abhor a vacuum,” or “the old.” Alas, it didn’t abhor anything at all. It just went on, perfectly. If nature was a story, it was a new kind of story: plotless, endless, at once both circular and linear, so vast it seemed not to move at all—a millennium hand, an eon hand—yet everywhere seething with a strange and wondrous energy, telling over and over of two great armies folding into one another without rancor or victory… we couldn’t grasp it.

  So we made up our own, more suited to us. And when our made-up story no longer satisfied us, round about the seventeenth century, we decided to take the book apart. Thus, science. As if untying the volume’s signatures and teasing apart the paper’s weave could reveal something, some wisdom; could teach us, at long last, our place.

  Eventually, rounding the curve of the second millennium antes deum, the majority of us simply lost interest in the game. We had outgrown childish things. The Other had nothing to do with us. Starting in the industrialized West, we migrated indoors, into mediated environments from which the natural world in all its mystery had been seamlessly removed. We were enough for ourselves. We exchanged “information.” We worried about our equity. We spent large portions of our lives watching people we didn’t know pretending to be living lives that were not their own. The high wind tossing the continents of trees, the paper wasp tending its soft, masticated nest, the blossom trembling in the sun—these had nothing to do with us. The Other had become merely other—an afterthought, an irrelevance. If it got in our way, or troubled our oversensitive skin, we killed it. If it didn’t work the way we wanted, we shaped it to our needs. Wonder? What was there to wonder at?

  It occurs to me, though, that our inability to read the Book of Nature—and yes, I intend that uppercase N in all its Romantic glory—doesn’t necessarily mean there is no book to be read, only that we can’t read it; that the stories we’ve told and the tools we’ve developed to disarticulate it and the indifference we’ve cultivated to make it go away won’t do. That we need something different. Why? Because the text still matters, whether we can decipher it or not. Because, as seems increasingly clear, unless we reach some proper accommodation with nature, show it a bit of respect, admit our ignorance of it, it will bury us with as little fanfare as night follows day: the evolutionary tide of a billion years will wash over us and recede; a few ticks of the clock hand, and the scars we’ve made will heal; a paper wasp, moving in the shadow of Lincoln’s lower lip, will tend its soft, masticated nest. Which would be a shame; I’ve grown fond of our maudlin, murderous tribe.

  IV

  Seen through the other end of the telescope, from the kind of distance that confers clarity, one thing seems certain: we have not yet found the language with which to front the world we inhabit, a world that has worked superbly, if life is the proof, for unfathomable time; a world that continues to hold us—despite the din of our distractions—precisely the way a nest holds an egg. We have not even begun to learn this language; its alphabet is a mystery, its declensions unknown.

  There are times, sitting up to my chin in a warm pond watching a damselfly the precise iridescent green of cheap tinsel perch on a spear of weed protruding above the water, feeling the velvety sides of the bullhead catfish bumping against my feet, when I can almost feel it. A genius. A music just beyond my range of hearing. The surface film, cooking in the August sun, stretches before my eyes, a teeming graveyard of mayflies and midges and tiny, ivory-white moths, a macabre and gorgeous litter of wings and legs and antennae, of pale exoskeletons like comic-book armor and lime-green duckweed. Twenty feet out, I can make out the dull glint of a dead bluegill. Water striders and dragonfly larvae move over and through this mat, this mulch. Organisms I know nothing about—a thousand to a bottle cap—zip and spin in every palmful of water. Something is swirling now beneath the dead bluegill and the fish jerks and then rises to the surface again. And I think to myself: This is beyond us. Only reverence is appropriate here.

  V

  On a still July afternoon two summers ago, a neighbor called to say that he’d found a baby rabbit in an open field by his woodshed. There was no nest in evidence, no mother. It appeared to be starving. Knowing my daughter’s willingness to serve as nursemaid (or priest, if necessary) to any and all, he thought she might take it in.

  We walked over together to find a baby cottontail, some weeks old, crouched in the corner of a book carton. It was smaller than a man’s fist. It had impossibly soft brown fur and strangely sentient brown eyes and wheat-pale whiskers that moved whenever its nose twitched, which was often. When my daughter picked it up, it sat perfectly still in her hands and twitched its rubbery little nose. By the time we’d carried the carton back to our cabin, it had a name.

  Winston died three days later. He seemed to be doing well the first day, greedily suckling warm milk out of the eyedropper, wetting his rabbit chin, but by the second morning something was clearly wrong. A terrible stiffness had set in, as if his spine had curved and solidified. His big hind legs, with their reversed rabbit knees, twitched and kicked spasmodically. We took Winston to one of those Good Samaritans who specialize in animal recovery at their own expense, who told us there was nothing we could have done, that baby cottontails were among the most delicate of commonly found creatures.

  My daughter, who has grown up in the natural world and thus understands—perhaps better than I—that death, too, is in the picture, buried him along with the dragonflies and the voles and the chipmunks and the cowbird I’d tried to nurse in the clearing behind the second oak.

  I wanted to say something, for all three of us, but what could I say? Science couldn’t help me here—it spoke a different language, a language washed clean of sentiment and pain. Christ couldn’t help me much either. I could have said something, I suppose, about God’s plan, but I really had no idea what God’s plan might have been in paralyzing Winston, and so, fighting the slightly absurd tightening in my throat, I said that I didn’t know why Winston had died and that I was very sorry for it and that we can’t always understand why things happen but that life was all around us—that there were cottontails at that moment along the edge of the meadow—so something had to be working right. Something to that effect. Then we read aloud, as we always do, James Dickey’s “Heaven of Animals.” It’s a good poem, and it was just good enough.

  That pain. I wondered about it then; wonder about it still. What was it I mourned, precisely? Not just this creature, or this creature alone. Not just his leaf-soft ears, or the inward curl of his front paws, or his mute distress—which seemed obvious enough by the second morning—but something else as well. Time, maybe. “Time robs us of all, even of memory,” Virgil reminds us in the Eclogues, his vision of a perfect, haunted world. But whose time? A rich vein of self-regard, I began to suspect—and self-indulgence, maybe—ran beneath my sorrow. What Winston called to my attention that afternoon—the impatient clink of the knife on glass—was death itself. My own, of course (the inevitability of which has always struck me as distinctly unfair, and somewhat unlikely), but much more so, that of the little girl next to me, whose life means more to me than anything else, and whose own mortality… it’s a thought I touch like a red-hot oven.

  And suddenly I’m there—on the border of acceptance. Of deference. Perhaps even of wisdom. On this side of the line is everything eternal; the vast tide of life breathing in and out, endlessly. Beyond it—marked by a running stream, a stand of trees, a thousand miles of wire—is the territory of love. And I’ll step across it every time.

  REFUTATIONS

  Quitting the Paint Factory

  2004

  Love yields to business. If you seek a way

  out of love, be busy; you’ll be safe, then.

  —OVID, REMEDIA AMORIS

  I distrust the perpetually busy, alwa
ys have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.

  When I was young, my parents read me Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the summer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow Formicidae. Winter comes, as winters will, and the grasshopper, who hasn’t planned ahead and who doesn’t know what a 401(k) is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants’ door, carrying his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: “I was singing, if you please,” the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. “You were singing?” says the ant. “Well, then, go and sing.” And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my bills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a windblown grasshopper was saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundated under the golden rain of my pee.

  I was right.

  In the lifetime that has passed since Calvin Coolidge gave a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he famously proclaimed that “the chief business of the American people is business,” the dominion of the ants has grown enormously. Look about: The business of business is everywhere and inescapable; the song of the buyers and the sellers never stops; the term workaholic has been folded up and put away. We have no time for our friends or our families, no time to think or to make a meal. We’re moving product, while the soul drowns like a cat in a well.1