In which I try and fail to write about my "examining my girl-self" project and turn to a prompt that leads me to That Other Essay I Have Been Avoiding.
This comes out of a prompt in Elizabeth Andrew's Writing Your Sacred Journey...prompted to write about a way in which nature is not always pleasant.
When I was in eighth grade, I joined the church youth group on an end of the winter camping trip. It was a warm sort of March, made for endless afternoon broomball games in the slushy surface of the frozen river. As a group, we made good on Camp Luther's highway clean-up promises. We found the usual sorts of things you find at the side of northern Wisconsin's highways: shoes, beer bottles, soda cans...underwear. Things that make you wonder. We were given instructions that if we found roadkilled deer that we mark it and call in the truck that would take it away to a wildlife center for critters to munch on.
About midway through the day, my partner Jenn and I found such a deer. It had frozen and thawed many times over the course of the winter and had a sort of dehydrated, sunken look. It hadn't any eyes and crows had been at its insides as well. We stood and looked at it for a long time, taking in the broken legs, the way the constricting muscles had pulled the vertebrae of the neck back, bending the head over the spine. The formerly dense fur was patchy and sticking together in wet spikes.
It was, at that point, the largest dead thing I had been near.
When I was little, our neighbors' house had eves made for bird nests, and starlings and house sparrows used them every year. Each spring, some of the nestlings would overflow, long before they were supposed to be testing their wings, to meet their death on the ground below. I patrolled the back yard, looking for these unfortunates, ostensibly to keep my neighbor's indoor/outdoor cats from eating them. I still remember the sort of guilty-nervous swoop of my stomach when I found the small, featherless bodies, eyes still closed, looking more like bruises on the sides of their overlarge heads.
My summer rambles around the neighborhood were relatively unsupervised, and between bike-rides and games of empty-lot kickball, I'd often check back several times, looking in on the progress of decomposition and insect activity. If I didn't see Damon and Pythias (my neighbor's mythically named cats) in the yard, I wouldn't tell my neighbor about the dead bird. I liked to keep it to myself, a little science experiment.
Over the 16 years we lived in that house on Summer Street, we buried a lot of fish, birds, bunnies and cats under the pine tree in our backyard. By the time I was in high school, I started to think about digging them up to see if I could reconstruct the skeletons of the larger animals, even my beloved bunny Fluff. I always felt sort of ashamed about it, but I still wanted to do it. I never did.
When I began looking for colleges, I searched for a place that would let me know how to determine age, ethnicity and sex from skeletal evidence. I made my decision based on several phone conversations had with Professor O'Connell, skeletal anthropologist extraordinaire. I had a lot of great opportunities. I went to the city morgue in the company of another professor to examine the remains of a man who had been found in a field. It was possible that his fingertips had been removed to make identification difficult. We determined, based on spiral fractures in the phalanges, that it was wildlife chewing on his fingers that removed them, not the straight-across tool-marks that might indicate human action. Professor Myster pointed out to us skull features we'd only seen in the lab (mandibular tori, for example...bumps in the bone of the lower jaw. I have them too). We watched the insect life that had come to the morgue along with the man's remains thaw out and move about. I remembered eighth grade's frozen and thawed deer, for this man had also spent some time in the elements. His skin reminded me of pictures I'd seen in National Geographic of the Ice Man. (Oh, how I used to inhale anything Nat Geo had for me about human remains in archaeology!)
I remember Professor Myster's excitement in the field. It seems strange to admit to excitement around death, but it was very academic. It made me feel less weird for all those years of backyard decomp studies. It made me feel like I'd found a place, like I had chosen correctly.
The world needs these people who do not find the processes of death terrifying and stomach-turningly disgusting, and I was ready and willing to join the ranks of these men and women.
I spent the summer between my junior and senior years holed up in the osteology lab for hours with boxes of bones that had been taken from the desert 80 years before--Hamline's teaching collection. I put to use my skills in bone measurement, defining age at death, the sex of the individual, learned also to keep the skeletons I had laid out respectfully covered with red cloth and to smudge with sage before and after--and whenever something felt off in the room. (And there were times when I suddenly did not feel like I was alone.)
Even as I gloried in this work, my mind was crumbling on itself. The black sludge that traveled the genetic lines from at least as far back as my great grandfather began to bubble up in me...I always have images of that cartoon ice-age critter in a tar pit when I think of this time. The more I struggled, the more exhausted I became, and so I gave myself over to it. All my uncertainty, all my feelings of unworth. I allowed those feelings to get in the way, allowed myself to believe it was easier to just give up. Friendships dwindled; my senior project died. If DB hadn't been enrolled in school and determined to finish, he would have gone as well. I wonder, sometimes, if he had, if I would have crawled back to my parents' house. Taken a leave of absence and come back at some better time. Come back to my bones.
And I've lived with this feeling of life interrupted/gone awry for the last eight years.
Eight years of being ok with a sort of slacker underachievement that would never have appeased the gods of my younger days. ...and really, didn't appease the gods of my early twenties either, but I hadn't the will to crawl out of that damn tar pit.
Out of intense longing, I've never closed the door on this time of my life. I have to do it now. It's part of me. In some parallel universe, I have no doubt that I pour over skeletons, both modern and ancient, unwrapping their secrets. I may even be an entomologist, taking insect evidence from dump sights. I dreamed, for a time, of following in Professor Myster's footsteps and going to the U of Tennessee to study decomposition at the "Body Farm". Maybe I'm hangin' out down there, teaching and studying, the next in a line of delightfully off-kilter academics who don't mind decay.
But I don't live in that world, so I must find a way to lay it down and pick up the dream that is real in this world. I know that moving forward now requires me to face this part of my life that I have--to this point--acknowledged, but not yet embraced.
As I go through the detritus of my young creative life, and find pieces of real brilliance and pieces that make me love me all over again, I'm sure there is also wealth in the years of my life between 21 and 28. I think the first step in discovering that wealth might be accepting the mistakes and decisions I made as my own.
We all come upon the life we're supposed to live in different ways, and the way the world is opening up before and behind me right now scares the hell out of me. ...the comparison springs readily to mind, so forgive me...scares me like all the dead things in the world haven't been able to.
My friend KC told me something fantastic the other day (and she has lived through a lot of the same things that I have and has the benefit of nearly 30 years on me). KC is an avid outdoorswoman. She kayaks and white-water canoes like a pro. She said: "Do you know why most people capsize in their kayaks?" I, knowing nothing of kayaking, shook my head in the negative. "People tip because when they hit the rapids, they stop paddling. They grab the sides of the craft and try to find their balance that way, rather than paddling through it. You just have to keep your oar in."
That's the advice with which I'm moving forward. No more tar pits, just sections of river that are more rough than others. (I imagine that the sense of getting through the rapids is exhilarating.)
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