It’s Death That Brings us Spring
It’s late December at Tule Lake, in Northern California, near the Oregon border. We hunt quail and cottontail. All morning we fight crossfire snow against its attempt of immutability. This is the day I will discover that nothing is permanent or sacred.
By early afternoon, the storm retreats a new sky, ice blue. Jagged-edged clouds jet overhead. The sun is a prop, a simple backlight, frozen in place. Not far from home, we inhabit a new planet.
Like the dynamic weather, the fragility of life envelopes us, leaves us in awe of nature. We are ubiquitous white noise, the atmosphere is a blur of temporal emotion. By the end of the day, a surplus of dark clouds is forecast to labor another dark storm on its shoulders.
Pops, can we grab some lunch? I need to thaw out my fingers.
Laughing, he asks, “A 4:00 A.M., breakfast wasn’t enough to fill you for a week?”
It was, and it wasn’t. I see my wide smile in the passenger window.
“Ok, Gayle lets pull over, at least have a sandwich and chips. Warm up. If we had us a campfire, we could roast up a few of our cottontail.” He chuckles.
Instinctively I swivel my head, peer through the rear window at the bed of the truck, nearly full of fresh snow. Five skinned cotton tail and quail stand on their heads, dressed and frozen in place.
Once we get home, we can wrap them in butcher paper, then off to the freezer, I say.
We field dress them after each kill and then plant them in back. Nine, ten, eleven, I count.
Dad and I enjoy each other’s company, and of course, the hunt. But in fairness, in this part of Northern California, nature’s gifts are a substantial part of winter and spring supper. I don’t remember a year when mom’s coffin Frigidaire wasn’t half full of venison and other wild game. The rest chock-full of frozen ravioli, biscotti, and gnocchi.
Dad parks the truck. Two questions go unanswered. What the hell is that out in the lake? I ask. We both squint.
Dad says, “Why is everyone fixed in place, staring? Look, there’s neighbor John.”
No shit pops! Dad smiles, we both curse a lot.
They say don’t befriend your children, but dad treats me like an adult most of the time, even though I am only twelve. We are friends, up to a point, if you know what I mean.
I don’t trust my eyes, so I stretch my neck toward the windshield, and glare at the dark silhouette in the lake. An alarm goes off. My senses alert me why everyone is so mesmerized. On one of the coldest days of the year, there’s a solitary doe, no more than one hundred yards off the laced shoreline, near the center of the shallow lake, the only reason she hasn’t drown.
Dad and I pour out of the warm truck and join the adult men and women at the lake’s edge. We enter a movie set. It’s the scene where we wait paralyzed in fear and excitement, for an apocalypse to either get busy or end. Helplessly, we gaze across the frigid surface in silence and reverence. Like French Mimes, our eyes steal glances at one another, the ice-covered lake, our boots, anything to avoid speech. An intermittent wind whisks communal sadness and helplessness.
She stands rigid, belly high in frigid water, her eyes transfixed, obsidian. She gazes our way as if begging for help. The glazed surface of the lake has knitted her legs too snuggly.
I imagine the blood coagulating in her veins & arteries. Dried blood on my hands gets my attention.
We exist helpless and awkward. Just like the freezing weather, death is ubiquitous.
I’m just a boy, and up until today, I haven’t believed in the omnipotence of death.
One by one, we slowly leave the lakeside funeral salon. Most drive away.
Dad and I return to the idling truck, crank up the heat, and exchange sandwiches and fruit from the cooler, things that sustain us. We eat clumsily, while dissolution executes its hypnotic trance on the lake. After this day, sadness and I will share intimacy forever.
Dad, this is horrible. I know what you will say, but is there anything we can do?
“Not one thing, son. The ice is too thin to walk or crawl on, too thick for a boat. Besides, I am not so sure that by the time we reach her, she will be alive.”
~~~
By early evening, we make our way home in near darkness, driving along Tule Lake one more time to lazy Highway 97. We glance at her in the headlights. She is a tombstone, white marble with new snow. She stares through me, and beyond, somehow into eternity.
~~~
Many years later, I think of the choices life often makes for us. And about the fix, my father could not save himself from. I remember how we were comfortable saying our empty goodbyes as if to leave room for our bond of silence.
I have experienced more loss since, but like many, I find peace and beauty in the little things, like nature, and changes in weather. Though temporal, they seem to endure.
Sometimes in winter, when the wind sails in its sea of darkness, I feel at peace. I find the beginning of storms calming, harbingers of renewal. In the chill of a handful of dreams, I encounter death, but rarely sorrow. It’s then I make it snow as I walk a frozen landscape where fence wires thrum like music staff, fill with notes of snowy birds, their melodies and song, their promises.
It’s then I know that soon, everything will bloom again at Tule Lake. And once again the birds of prey will sweep furrows in the soft side of the bluest of skies, time its doorstep.
The End