f late -- and befitting the times, I suppose -- my mind has found itself inexorably drifting again and again to morbidity. I write this as someone who, at around the age of 10 or 12, has held a severed human hand and pulled on the protruding tendons to watch the fingers clench and unclench. That instance was, admittedly, in clinical surroundings, and as such was an exercise of mechanics to my young mind more than anything else; but it is an experience to which I have returned on odd occasions since, with feelings of such wide variety as to render the resultant sum (strangely) one of ambivalence.Anyway, this is only a preamble to the encounter I had originally intended to relate. The recent (and the looming possibility of future) mass deaths have merely cast the experience in a subtly different frame, as they have with so much else in daily existence.
There is a circle of friends of mine who, whenever time allows, grab the opportunity to head into the hills that line the Bay on all sides. There are numerous parks in the area, and countless trails -- enough to never have to take the same one twice if you don't want to. It was on one such day that I, in company with four of these friends, headed away from the road and the parked truck and onto the exposed, dusty track that penetrated the wilderness.
Within short order we had turned off the wide path onto a narrower trail -- which, unlike our ingress, had a network of branches and leaves to shield it from the midday sun. Under the shade, the landscape changed completely, and the vegetation became saturated with the sheen that an abundance of water brings.
It was as we clambered down from the path into the sunken valley it was following that we discovered the deer carcass. It had been virtually invisible from the trail, unless you knew already where to look for it, and was in the final stages of decomposition. There it lay, on the bank of a bug-infested pool of stagnant water: its back arched and all but the faintest traces of skin, tendon and flesh still lingering. I remember most vividly the strands joining mandible to the lower region of the skull proper.
We each took our turn taking this sight in, fairly silent save for the suppositions as to the cause of death -- whether it had been a mountain lion, or a fall from a great height, or some other affliction not visibly evident. I can't of course speak for any of my companions (although, tangentially, I do recall now as I write that there had been an earlier conversation on the path about corpses and radio and unnatural acts... I digress) but, as my tugging at a severed hand had been mechanical, my view of the body lying at the edge of the pool was sculptural. I did have thoughts regarding the idea that the skeleton before me had once been mobile, as well as hidden from view by living tissue; and that it doubtless had sauntered through this area not so long ago, ignorant of the fact that its remains would end up being gawked at by a group of bipeds. But those thoughts were more difficult to think than admiring the way the curve of the vertebrae matched the edge of the water, or the pattern of ribs and remnants of outer covering.
Eventually, we clambered back up to the path and headed back to the truck that had brought us here, pausing at the top to look back to see if we could spy the skeleton from the trail far above. Although I haven't been back, I assume -- given the general inaccessibility of the pool -- that the deer is still there.
G3(7)