Sat July 6
The squirrel wasn’t dead yet.
I see plenty of road kill and it’s always sad. Often gruesome. From deer to frogs to grasshoppers, and everything in between. But this was the first time I saw a grey clump of fur in the road, hardly any insides of the creature, then the bushy tail moved just a little. It wasn’t even a twitch. Just enough movement to let me know it wasn’t dead yet.
Ohhhhhh!
I let out a long, low groan.
I was talking with my best friend Michelle in one of our morning chats when I saw it. She’s a pediatric nurse on the west coast, so when she hits the road at 6 for her 7am shift, it’s the perfect time for us to connect while I do my after breakfast walk. She was telling me about a challenging patient who’d been in the hospital, so my moaning wasn’t necessarily inappropriate. But I had to stop her.
“Michelle, Michelle… there’s a squirrel that got hit by a car and it’s not dead yet!”
“Oh!” came her sad sympathy. Patients. Pain. Sickness. Accidents. Death. Or really, not dead yet.
I stopped to absorb the scene. If he/she was still in distress, I didn’t want to cause him/her any further panic or pain. Honestly, I was a little scared to pass it too. Would it jump up, a last shot of adrenaline injecting its’ survival instinct. I must live. I had to pass it though, and the thought of putting it out of its misery did cross my mind for a hairsbreadth. No clue how I would achieve such an unthinkable act.
Oh my god, Bobby Bacala suddenly springs to mind… Phil and I are re-watching The Sopranos right now, and we just watched the wrenching episode where Tony and Carmela go out to Bobby and Janice’s lake house for Tony’s 47th birthday, and a monopoly game turns into a brawl. Later in the episode Bobby kills some random kid in a laundry mat, because Tony had mentioned that among all Bobby’s “deeds” and loyalty he’d never “popped his cherry” in that way.
I know, it’s only a character (I suppose this is the mantra I feed myself about all stories of fiction) but why? Why be driven to take a life? This is what fiction does. Aims to put us into the shoes of the unimaginable. All I can do is shudder.
Back at my squirrel in the road, all I could do was stand and briefly gawk. I knew I couldn’t kill it. Nor could I even stay to accompany its passing. I gave it my sadness, my recognition, and also a wide berth and as I walked out into the middle of the road to pass it and as I did I saw whitish and red goo coming out of his/her eye.
Deep sigh.
“Its’ brains are coming out of his eye.” I told Michelle. “What can I do? Nothing.”
“Yeah.” she agreed. “We can’t fix it.”
The next day I met my friend Nina to do a trail walk through the woods. Yes, you heard me right. I’ve been going on trail walks in the woods! We started doing these walks in the late fall, and there were no bugs, and I truly enjoyed it. There have been other times when a trail walk in the woods seemed like a fun thing to do. About a decade ago I was on a writing retreat further north on the coast and there was a nearby ridge trail people at the retreat center said was really nice. I’d gone there solo, parked my car, headed into the thick canopy of trees and with each dozen strides more and more mosquitos and other buzzing menaces surrounded me. City girl hadn’t thought about bringing a hat or a water bottle or even putting on bug spray. Less than 10 minutes in I quit. Turned around and breathed in a deep sigh of relief, and satisfaction as I slammed the car door of my little Fiat 500 shut. Quiet. Safety. What was I thinking? I thought.
One of the reasons I love Nina is how intrepid she is. In hunting season we donned bright orange for our walks. Winter was the best for hiking! Snow crunched under our boots. Zero pests buzzed and I was reminded why as a kid I always said winter was my favorite season. In the late winter/early spring even icy trails were no problem with spikey yak-tracks on our boots. The trickiest time, really, was mud season, when ice turned to big pools of indeterminate depth. Then we picked our way in great circular detours around the puddles.
A couple weeks ago it started to downpour on the morning we were planning to rendezvous for our trail walk. I shot her a text, “Are we still on?” Nina is also one of the busiest people I know. She was already on an errand to the Farmer’s Market before coming to meet me. The dancing dots revealed her reply. “It’s just a sprinkle…” I looked out the window at the streams of water coming down. I suppose it will let up by the time we get there. I thought.
“There is no such thing as bad weather,” she declares in each season “only inappropriate clothing.” I brought my hat and my rain coat and indeed it did let up a bit. And under all those trees it’s not that bad. Plus, the rain cuts down on the bugs. I’ll take rain over bugs any day.
My most recent challenge to our walks though was not the conditions outside, but the ones inside, of me. Yes, you may know I have “stomach issues” which have been given the infuriating diagnosis of IBS. Really only a description of a collection of symptoms which stubbornly refuse to cooperate with most treatments. Oh, so many possible treatments. My standard complaint for years has been at the constipation end of the spectrum, but a recent medication attempting to gently woo my gut to a middle zone in fact has flung me to the extreme other end of my gut woes. I hate that D word, so I’m not even gonna write it. I have trouble spelling it too. So badly autocorrect doesn’t even know what I’m talking about. I’m guessing you do, though.
Anyway, all of this to say, that I’d made it through the whole trail with Nina the other morning without incident, but by the end, where there’s a port-o-potty, I felt that stirring that told me it might be better to give the port-o-potty a go than to wait. Nina had to go too and so I suggested she go first, because I knew I could wait, and I didn’t want to subject her what I knew I’d need to expel.
“It’s so clean!” she shouted from inside the little green plastic outhouse.
When it was my turn, I agreed. It was also built to accommodate a wheelchair so it was quite roomy. It was so clean, cleaner than many public bathrooms I’ve been in. When I sat to do my business, I noticed a slug on the floor, its antennae waving slowly as they do. And I felt bad for it. Did it walk, or slide in the door? Was there a crack somewhere along the base when it snuck in thinking it’d found some special new shell?
When I came out to see Nina I asked her “Did you see the slug?”
“No,” she said “I only saw the trash.”
“Trash? I didn’t see any trash.” I wondered how I’d missed it. I do know I can miss a lot of things when instead noticing bugs.
“That’s because I picked it up!” she declared.
“Oh!” we laughed together about that one.
Now I sit here and think, she picked up the trash. I left that poor slug there. And thought how sad to be a slug in an outhouse. Should I have moved it?
When I got home I was three-quarters of the way through my shower when I noticed a wasp in the window. It looked sort of small and possibly hampered by all the misty, steamy moisture of the water. For this reason I didn’t really panic. I even made sure to rinse my hair one more time before hopping out to dry off. Then I went and grabbed my trusty Bugzooka and because the window was low, and the wasp didn’t seem too agitated it was easy to pop him right into the little capsule with its suction of air. When I examined him more closely he was squished up in a corner. Had he lived?
By the time I got dressed and took the capsule outside I noticed antennae waving a little bit, so I thought he might be ok. Usually with bigger and/or more agitated wasps I don’t even want to open up the capsule to release them, imagining them turning around to take their revenge on me for such a bizarre journey. But I didn’t mind opening it up this time. I tried to fling it away, but he stuck in his little corner, and I realized, this was even better. I just left it there open, and figuring he’d find his way out on his own if he was well enough.
Later that day I was at the other end of the deck chatting on the phone with Michelle again. It was her day off so we can talk later while she has her coffee and I get ready for lunch.
“I had a wasp in the shower today” I told her, “I got it with the Bugzooka but it wasn’t coming out of the capsule.” I walked across the deck to see if it was still in there, but it was gone. And my heart felt lighter seeing it was empty.
The way life should be.