The West Will Swallow You

by Leath Tonino

  Suffocation? It sounds impossible. It’s not. Deer are sprinters, but humans run longer, or at least we can. Open country, the red dirt and sagebrush, the monsoon thunder-heads building from endless scrub. Hear the beat of your own feet, the uninterrupted drumming. You follow the buck. You follow and follow. You gain inches until you are within inches, and now you can almost touch the running back, the ears, the breathing chest. Crushing the sagebrush, freeing the scent together, the two of you move in sync, human matching deer and deer matching human, mile after mile.

  Nelson quotes writer Barre Toelken: “When the deer is finally caught he is thrown to the ground as gently as possible, his mouth and nose are held shut, and covered with a handful of pollen so that he may die breathing the sacred substance.”

  A snort, a golden cloud-puff of pollen. Dust hangs in a lens over the shuddering embrace.

  “And then—I am not sure how widespread this is with the Navajos—one sings to the deer as it is dying, and apologizes ritually for taking its life, explaining that he needs the skin for his family.”

  Four or five days before Simon’s lecture on trauma, during an anatomy lesson, he mentioned a time teaching a class when he’d come across a dead deer in the woods. He brought the students out and they put on gloves and inspected the body. It was a great success, the dead animal bringing to life what can be so much jargon, so much diagramming on the page or blackboard. The smell of late autumn, the foliage and distant smoke and hardness to the air. I see them circled up, crouched down, quiet and attentive. I see Simon bending forward. The windpipe worked, he said. You could push air into the lungs and they would fill.

  I have tried to say goodbye. I have tried, many ways, many times, to say goodbye.

  Once, on my way to the lake for a swim, I hit a chipmunk. It was a summer day, hot and humid. Besides a speck of blood at the mouth, the chipmunk seemed intact, normal. I searched the car for something to use as a bag, but all I could find was an old foam sandal. I slid the chipmunk onto the sandal and took the body with me to the beach. Sitting shirtless on blue stones, using a jackknife and some twigs, I dissected the chipmunk. I looked inside the chipmunk. I will repeat that: I looked inside.

  A few weeks later, my dog killed a chipmunk and brought the body to me. She had been chasing the chipmunk around a shagbark hickory and then the chipmunk was in her mouth and then the chipmunk was at my feet. I sharpened a knife from the kitchen and collected some other instruments, some pins, tweezers, two of those spikes with yellow plastic handles used for eating corn on the cob. I went to the beach. I was supposed to meet friends for a dip. When they arrived I had the pelt laid across a log, the guts in a neat pile for the birds.

  The rest of that summer I drove with a dissection kit in my car. I got a real scalpel and some latex gloves. I was always nervous about making the initial incision. I remember cutting into an eyeball and recoiling as a stream of fluid burst out. I remember realizing that every creature is made of layers.

  Another summer, working for the Forest Service in Arizona, I collected skulls and smaller bones. The pile in the weeds outside my cabin door grew with each passing hike. Scapula. Vertebrae. Ribs. I found dead sparrows on the dirt road and caged them in chicken wire so that they could decompose without the local scavengers stealing them. I picked a squirrel up and put him in a cinder block’s hollow and checked his progress daily. When the field season ended I strung all my bones on bits of clear fishing line, then climbed a ponderosa pine and decorated the tree. It was a mobile. Maybe a hundred floating pieces.

  That same summer my girlfriend hit a jackrabbit. It was her first roadkill. The moon was in the rearview mirror, the sky purple, the windows down. The rabbit jumped out and was tossed up and we heard a sound. I wrote my girlfriend a poem. The sound was in the poem. She cried.

  I have sat for hours, the scatter of teeth and stink of flesh all around. I have sat this way with no intention, with no thoughts in my mind, with an inability to rise.

  They tell us that life lives off life, feeds off life, trails death everywhere it goes. That’s just how it is, they insist. You can wear a mask to avoid inhaling insects. You can sweep the ground before your crushing foot lands. You can go vegetarian, go vegan, and still you will fail. But you should not call it failure. You should call it life, living, dying, the world being the world. The most we can do is pause, pray, give thanks, apologize, make ceremonies, make them a part of the very life that kills other lives.

  The deer die and the blood is on our hands, the shards of bone splintering memory. This is far from new. We’ve been killing deer for millennia. We will not claw our way out of the cycle. Only by clawing our way deeper into the cycle might we find some peace, a place to rest. Perhaps our efforts won’t ever feel like enough. Perhaps there is no place to rest. Perhaps it is hard, hard, hard indeed.

  I accept.

  But there is something else going on here. The word is “accident,” car accident. The slaughter is unintentional, and when the slaughter is unintentional the slaughter becomes even worse because we have no ability to process the slaughter, no ritual by which to share and address the pain. A nice dinner. A couple beers. A basketball game and some shut-eye. Then nightmares, twisted sleep, sorrow in the chest. Tears falling to raised hands.

  And there is this, too: What if the doe is not a deer? What if the doe is an aquifer, an ocean, the night’s own private darkness? What if the doe is the black soil? What if the doe is the chirps and growls and heavy breath, the canyons and forests and ridgelines, the ice, the plankton, the drifting seed? What if the car that hits the doe is a light switch, a faucet, a new shirt? A government? An economy? What if the car is our everyday experience, our reality, our modern way, and what if it is constantly murdering the smooth brown bodies we love?

  What if there is no backing out, no making things right? What happens if we ignore all of this? What happens then?

  Jennifer let go of her hands and the blanket caught them. Morning in New Jersey. Windows not yet bright with sun. I sat down and Lucy, the dog, ran in from the hall and leapt onto the couch, snuggling between us.

  “In the middle of the night I woke up crying,” Jennifer said. “I was sobbing and I couldn’t stop. Do you think that deer is going to die?”

  There was nothing to say, but I said something anyway. Something. Anything. And as I was speaking Jennifer’s tears dried on her cheeks and Mike came out from the bedroom and Lucy rolled onto her back, making us laugh. And we all spoke, though I forget what we said. And then I got up to start the coffee. And I made a lot and I made it strong. And in my head, as I waited for the pot to fill, leaning against the kitchen counter, my bare feet on the cold tile floor, I sang that gentle tune, the tune for the doe, the song of goodbye, which I still remember today.

  Where I Write

  I would like to say that my feet know the narrow dirt path better than they know my socks. I would like to say that the path curves into a birch grove floored with ferns and after precisely 103 paces reaches a hut above a stream. I would like to say that inside this hut I sit on a hard chair at a clean desk and write essays, articles, stories, and poems. That I have a place, that I go there daily to relish its moods and variations, that I work there, that the place works through me and back out onto the page—these are things I would like to say. But I will not say them. Because I am not a liar.

  I am, as a friend recently put it, a wandering fool.

  The first prose I ever published was written on a homemade raft that measured five feet by seven feet. I was living on the raft, drifting and rowing and sailing the length of Vermont’s summery Lake Champlain. This special raft of mine was thin, sensitive, and the slightest wave wobbled my script. I took breaks from scribbling, sharpened my pencil. Dunked my head, came up dripping. Ten days into the voyage, tracing a random stretch of shoreline with the finished piece, I hailed a farmer soaking his toes who said he would be happy to deliver it to the Burlington newspaper. Onward from there.

  In San Fra
ncisco, I found myself repeatedly walking forty rainy blocks to the public library, backpack stuffed with peanut butter sandwiches and a laptop. I always ate the sandwiches in the too-warm hallway near the basement bathroom, then climbed the stairs to my favorite table. Sometimes my feet touched the feet of strangers beneath the table: old men with funny ears, young ladies studying medical texts, children squirming from boredom or delight, schizophrenics mumbling into their fat novels. Wearing headphones, I listened to the same four minutes of looping Russian choral music, week after week. I didn’t get a lot of writing done, distracted more often than not by books about sea lions, mountaineers, bristlecone pines, hermits, and environmental catastrophes.

  My favorite office to date smelled of detergent—a laundry room in the wilderness. For four springs and four summers I resided at a Forest Service field station on the Kaibab Plateau, just north of the Grand Canyon. This remote laundry room was furnished with a washing machine and dryer, of course, but also a hard chair, a clean desk. The acoustics were interesting—bouncy, bright—and I liked to hum my sentences and paragraphs into existence. Out the window, in the siding of a neighboring cabin, a family of wrens came and went from their knothole nest. Birdsong overlaid my song, as well as the churning song of the washer and the droning song of the dryer. There were lovely harmonies to explore in that room. And sunrise-pink light. And hours of effort.

  As for that perfect studio-shack, that snug hut in the woods—I’m hoping to buy land, clear brush, make it happen. Carpenters speak of building “from the ground up,” and that seems an appropriate practice for a writer interested in nature. Until then, I’ll take whatever I can get, whatever’s offered. A tent in Scotland. A dormitory in Antarctica. The Embassy Suites. The leeward side of a summit boulder. Lakeview, Montana. Lamy, New Mexico. Ponds and marshes. Curbs and benches. Low autumn light hitting my good friend’s deck at a slant, hitting his sleepy border collie, hitting the clinking ice cubes in my glass.

  Last month: my mother’s garage. Next month: a slickrock alcove, a foam Therm-a-Rest pad, a hooded jacket. Tonight, on the New Jersey shore, Atlantic City’s skyline glows neon beyond the bay of crying gulls.

  What are they crying about? How did I get here? Who’s winning at the casino? When will I leave?

  Oh, these are question only a liar could answer. The gulls, the ocean, the notebook on the blue bedspread, the spider on the blue wall. It’s not my home, not my place, but it’ll do. For now. For a wandering fool.

  Credits and Acknowledgments

  First, I’d like to thank those involved with the publications where many of the pieces first appeared: Steve Casimiro, Sean Prentiss, Tyler Cohen, Victoria Schlesinger, Moises Velasquez-Manoff, Dan Rademacher, Donald McNutt, Peter Gurche, Danny Kuzio, Jodi Peterson, Michelle Nijhuis, Diane Sylvain, Brian Calvert, Bruce Jennings, Scott Gast, Diana Owen, Hannah Fries, Tara Rae Miner, Jonah Ogles, Chris Keyes, Elizabeth Hightower, Will Gordon, Carol Ann Fitzgerald, Sy Safransky, and Lisa Lynn. There are countless others working behind the scenes at these publications, helping connect writers with readers, and I’m sorry not to know each and every name.

  Second, I’d like to thank the new friends, old friends, experts, colleagues, and random strangers who have served as resources for my writing projects. Included in this category are the authors I’ve quoted or referenced in my work. In particular, though, I’m thinking of the people who have generously allowed me to ask questions and take notes. Your openness to being followed around and turned into characters on the page is integral.

  Third, I’d like to thank the team at Trinity University Press: Steffanie Mortis, Tom Payton, Sarah Nawrocki, Burgin Streetman, Christi Stanforth. I appreciate your support of writers interested in, for lack of a better phrase, environmental nonfiction. Keep going. More books, please.

  Fourth, I’d like to thank my kind family, my funny and adventurous buddies, my various literary and scientific mentors, and everybody else who has encouraged my pursuit of a life devoted to engaging, via experience and thought, the world of nature, the nature of the world. You know who you are.

  Finally, I’d like to thank the land’s creatures, by which I mean not only squirrels and marmots and minnows and ants and woodpeckers and warblers, but also trees and boulders, melting snowfields and jumpy creeks, strange weathers and stunning sunsets. Honestly, it annoys me when authors publicly extend their gratitude beyond the human realm, yet there’s absolutely no denying that without places, especially places in the American West—without this earth—I’d be in a different business. People make books, true, but something else makes people. Thanks to something else.

  The essays in this book were previously published in the following publications and are reprinted here with thanks (and, in some cases, revisions, including altered titles).

  Adventure Journal, “In Praise of Scrambling”

  Backcountry Magazine, “Pooh Bear in Yellowstone”

  Bay Nature, “A Room of Boughs in a City of Lights,” “Birdnap”

  Blueline, “Addressing the Forces That Would Destroy Us and Everything We Love”

  Camas, “Thoughts after an Owl”

  Coachella Review, “Big Canyon”

  Cross Country Skier, “Grandma’s Deep Winter Kaibab Adventure”

  High Country News, “Stucco’d All Over,” “Watching Goggles,” “The Anthropological Aesthetic,” “Listening to Big Empty,” “The Irrigator’s Club,” “Relittering,” “When We Curse Peaks,” “Wild Reading,” “Doug”

  Minding Nature, “Letter to the Megalopolis”

  Orion Magazine, “The Drop,” “Secret Springs,” “Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere,” “Flying with Birds,” “Creeking,” “Adjusting Monty,” “Where I Write,” “Nature-Loving Beards,” “Things I Won’t Say about Wilderness”

  Outside, “Favor the Mountain,” “The Unknown Country”

  The Sun, “Ways to Take Your Coffee,” “Write-Ins for President”

  Vermont Sports, “Old Friend”

  LEATH TONINO, a writer from Vermont, has also worked as a wildlife biologist in Arizona, a blueberry farmer in New Jersey, and a snow shoveler in Antarctica. He is the author of The Animal One Thousand Miles Long: Seven Lengths of Vermont and Other Adventures, and his work has appeared in magazines such as Outside, Men’s Journal, Orion, Tricycle, Utne Reader, and The Sun. When not at his desk, he roams North America’s libraries and wildlands.