Burning Bridges Like Matchsticks

It is fall now. The trappings of summer remain; the girls still lie tanning on the piers along the lake, the tomatoes still ripen in the garden, the apples catch the rays peaking through heavy, heaving boughs; all blushing in the sun. It is no colder than it was a month ago. We had a summer flecked with chill rain and drizzle, but on a morning two weeks ago, there was a crispness to the air that was not there before and summer was gone. The next day was hot and humid, the same choking thickness that we cursed a few days before, but we soaked it up, reveled in it, knowing now how soon it'd pass.

There is a day like this in the winter, when a warm wind blows and we shake our heads and wonder if we'd actually put the garden to bed properly last fall (a lifetime ago, it seems) and maybe it'd be worth the drive to go North for a last ski trip, but mostly we just feel the air blow mild against our faces and enjoy. We bastardize the word chinook once again and give it to the warm wind on that first spring day.

And so, if we do such things on the first day of spring, we must do them in reverse now. We call the cool air that broke the heat the williwaw and make vague plans to tear down bean poles, uproot peppers and turn over weed choked beds. There is time, maybe, for a last camping trip before the leaves turn to fire and then drop, revealing a sadly diminished sun. Mostly we just walk through the cool dusk, feel the warmth of our hands clasped together and enjoy.

I took an AP English class my senior year in high school. There was a poem in our textbook about roadkill that I remember paging past. Something in it caught my eye, and I read it and liked it. Not enough to copy it down, though. But ever since then, I've regretted that decision. It's hard to find things when you don't know the title, the author, or anything other than a general outline of the story. And yet...

Burying an Animal on the Way to New York
Gerald Stern

Don't flinch when you come across a dead animal lying on the road;
you are being shown the secret of life.
Drive slowly over the brown flesh;
you are helping to bury it.
If you are the last mourner there will be no caress
at all from the crushed limbs
and you will have to slide over the dark spot imagining
the first suffering all by yourself
Shreds of spirit and little ghost fragments will be spread out
for two miles above the white highway.
Slow down with your radio off and your windows open
to hear the twittering as you go by.

The Internet. Connecting roadkill poems and morbid tree-huggers since 1973.

Outdoors Tip #49: If you've lost your bearings, remember that the condensation is thicker on the northern side of parked cars.

I skiied down this road two short months ago, and now I drive along it; windows open, ears straining. My muffler is badly in need of replacement and so I stop every few hundred yards, turn off the engine and sit, listening for the trill of amorous frogs. At the second marshy patch along the roadside, my headlights shine on an oily patch of darkness crouched on the shoulder. Slow moves as I try to ready the camera, but as I raise it, he slips away into the cold water and cattails. I will park behind a copse a quarter mile away, wander the darkness till I've judged it long enough for him to forgive my interruption. I will find nothing but a channel of bent leaves and parted stems next to a half gnawed poplar branch.

First snow of the season, first real snow, first time the city has woken up and found itself muffled and soft, first time deadlines and the morning commute are subsumed, if only for a moment, by deeper and more chance agencies than one's manager.

I skip work in the morning, throw dusty skis into snow. There are moments of hesitation; it's been at least a year since I last did this, but the shifting of weight soon becomes unconscious, and I glide down a road thinly coated with snow, listening to the muted slap and creak of my skis and the occasional rasp of pavement below them. On skis, the subtleties of topography are magnified and the ground that feels flat underneath a booted feet reveals a host of troughs and barrows. I crest a rise that is, at best, a foot above the surrounding terrain, the grade a paltry inch every ten feet. As I kick off I can feel the otherwise imperceptible drop, and suddenly, I'm flying, every kick pushing me further and faster than before.

I follow a twisted sidepath, breaking fresh tracks in the deeper snow of the trails. Halfway to the end of it, the path winds through a deep clump of brush, hanging over it like a tunnel. The brush is full of robins. There are dozens, red-jacketed and alien against bright snow and dark branches.

There's a dead groundhog on the side of the road. One second, it is a dark lump lying in the frosty gravel. Two seconds and each hair glints fleetingly, refracting the first rays of sunlight thrown low and hard across the landscape. Three seconds and I see the bubblegum pink of its intestines, caked on the body like dried foam on a bar of soap. Four seconds, it's gone.

"Do you have anything to declare, sir?"

"I declare that I'm delighted to be back home."