Breakdown: Prompt Post No. 3

Growing up in the country, one has a sense of life and death at all times, in all places. Thick snows blanket the winter wheat sprouting and growing below; warm wind and sun thaw these crusts, and spring comes. A calf is born in the snowstorm; its mother's dead, bloated body is hauled away by the rendering truck the next day. Kids out here don't learn about life and death from the purchase and flush of a goldfish sparkle.

And even when we don't yet know it, we are a part of the cycle.

I showed swine and poultry and beef throughout my years in 4-H: Starsky and Hutch, the pigs who ran away and frolicked under the pivot in the corn field gave way to Caesar and Calpurnia who gave way to a new set of speakers for my Jeep. Fauntleroy and Napoleon, the proud green-plumed Araucana roosters won me purple-plumed ribbons and spots in the paper and prize monies. That what these animals stood for then, in my adolescence. And Burgermeister (who funded my senior-year wardrobe and took the place of Hamburgler)...they all helped me know not death, but its place in the cycle of work and reward and creation. Here, on the unforgiving grass plains that break men with as much regularity as men break the earth, here the cycle of being is always around us.

I am thinking about loss and decay today, as I drive to the lake. The readings for my nature writing class have all focused on death and loss this week, and I am struck by how unique departure is as it graces or destroys us, as different as the sunset or the patterns in the melted mud-caked snow. The Nebraska Glaciation period cut and carved the gullies behind my house and yard then ended; the natives, the buffalo, even the people who lived here before me are all gone now. One with the earth. One essay in particular regarding death has stuck with me, not for its beauty, but because of the author's innocence.

In Apologia, author Barry Lopez performs the last rites for several road-killed animals on a drive across the country. While in Nebraska, pulling a dead badger off the road, he feels himself the recipient of a stranger's blessing.

"A car drifts toward us over the prairie, coming on in the other land, a 1962 Chevrolet station wagon. The driver slows to pass...an arm and the gesture of his thick left hand...opens in a kind of shrug, hangs briefly in limp sadness, then extends itself in supplication."

"Limp sadness?" I read this essay a week ago, shaking my head at its naivete, its misunderstanding of life and death and this Nebraskan gesture. Roadkill is not a thing of contemplation when both sides of the road are littered from day to day with the bodies of dead animals. It doesn't invite the holy, nor does it teach us a lesson other than be mindful. We are few and far between the humanly-populated sites of Nebraska; we wave with a hand out the window when we see you.

I am a skeptic, too used to roadside death to care about Lopez' badger, but I do wonder, do I not feel reverence for these deaths because they are so common, or because of how they've happened? Has growing up with an understanding and acceptance of death removed me from it, instead of making me humble?

Turning to the lake road and passing the old potato shed, I decide to stop and take pictures. It's been at least two decades since people grew and harvested potatoes in my community, but there's still talk of the industry in the state. This old building sits about four miles from my home, and I can't believe the state of things as I pull into the gravel lot around it. What was once a proud, two-story building and landmark next to our turnoff is now a pile of rotted wood and humming aluminum.

I walk across the wreckage of a ceiling littering the floor, and feel a piece of my childhood drift away. How many years did I drive past this building to the lake? Or to school? What was steady and permanent is now nothing. As much as anything, this too, is life. But inanimate and quiet when it stood, why does this testament to human ingenuity move me more than the absence of life decaying along the road?

I return home after my time at the lake, restless in mind and body. Sometimes a walk in the canyon will diffuse this frantic energy. I take my camera and my feelings to the open spaces around me. The snow has melted after the warm days, and I know the trail to the spring won't be too muddy. This trail begins at the edge of our yard and wanders through barbwire, beyond the boundaries of fencing, and down a valley before ending at the spring sunk low in the side of a hill. Faint oatmeal colored sand leads the way passed junked out cars, broken piles of feed bunk rubble and today, the long-gone body of a coyote.

Terry Tempest Williams writes that "Artifacts are alive," that "They remind us what it is to be human--that it is our nature to survive, to create words of beauty, to be resourceful, to be attentive to the world we live in." I pass first the human artifacts, the reckless tracings of modern society, and I wonder, really? Is abandoning our buildings and our vehicles to the earth really paying any kind of attention to anything? Is this any worse than abandoning each other? The First Nations left us arrowhead and oral stories; in their footprints we have deposited rusted metal and biohazard warnings.

I nudge the teeth out of the jaw bone gently, thumbing the deep cleft of the canines with my finger. This animal knew life and death in the wild, more naturally than the modern people who came before me, and certainly more fully than me. I enjoy the readings and the essays and the contemplation of life and death and nature, but until we go there ourselves...we can't pretend to know it or understand it. Not really.

A sharp wind is howling across the old riverbed, dry now in its wanderings. I kneel, rake bare fingers through the pebbles, and hope for something wonderful. I used to come out here and hunt for fossils when I was little, sending promising specimens to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I wanted to find a dinosaur, a valuable creature.. something. I can't remember now the "value" of my childhood finds, but each of the letters came back to back to me from someone who was most likely a grad student, sighing again over the newest odd fossilized thing from the 6 year-old in northwest Nebraska. No dinosaurs, no mammoths. Nothing "special." Even in my childhood innocence I had already labeled the values of death's lessons. There is nothing to hold my attention in the pebbles my fingers turn up (the shell of a land snail), so I snap some pictures and stand up.

I feel each step crumble slightly under solid pressure-- the soil here is crumbly and breaks down before blowing away for ever. Over the dried cake-batter yellow sand of the butte ahead is what I came for. The spot of land my brother once wanted to inhabit and build a house upon.

The last time we were out here, dad stood among the scrubby cedar shrubs and eyed the ground with menace, as if he distrusted the very land holding him up.

"Why anyone would want to live clear out here," he says, shaking his head at whatever it was he was imagining. I don't remind him that that just a quarter of a mile away is the house he lives in...also "clear our here" by anybody else's standards. My brother had only been situated to his new surroundings for a few weeks then, his body barely left alone in the ground. I knew it wasn't the emptiness of the land that really rankled my dad, but rather the distance that had grown between the two men. I don't know that dad would have done anything to have him back, neighbors, buddies, as it had been once before, but with something like that is better no knowing.

I come out here, to this sandy spot on a lonely hill when I need reminded that death is really its own kind of power. The quiet dip and bend of dried-out grasses or the remains of small bodies around me offers a kind of raw solace that can't be found in human comfort. I come out here to feel death in a way that roadkill and obituaries can't seem to manage.

He visited me once, in a dream, and we made our peace then, in that shimmer of a moment. We weren't close in life, my brother and I, but I come here now to visit him and his memory, instead of the place outside town that holds his body. I come here because it is my only way to get to him. And sometimes, it's the only way I know to get away from me. I come out here to know things I can't know with book smarts or language or by walking in the traditions of other ways. There is intimacy in death, and in this land, and if, as Dictionary.com tells us "intimate," as an adjective, means "relating to or indicative of one's deepest nature: intimate prayers,"

then I might not pause for thecoontail or the bits of deer on blacktop, but I know where to kneel when I feel compelled to pray.

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