Impact

Mushrooms and feather stained green, Caperton Swamp, Winter 2022

I have been to Caperton Swamp on January days when I could walk across the dry, fractured swamp bed to the island where the beavers live, but this winter has been wet and the water is deep. A thin sheet of ice covers anything in shadow. 

During a rainy spring, the area looks like a watery bullseye from above. A managed path encircles the largest body of water and another ring of water will catch the overflow so that you walk the distance around the swamp with water on both sides of your trail. At dusk and dawn, it is easy to put the nearby city out of your mind. Almost. 

There is no overflow today, only the swamp shimmering in clear light. This made it easy for us to explore the outlying areas with our shoes mostly dry. 

Today my three children, a family friend and his children and I were looking for mushrooms, but at the end of another socially distanced winter break, we would take what we could get. 

If you can go to the woods with the children in your family, do so. Adults, even when we aren’t tall, tend to only see what is up. We have to retrain our eyes and hearts for the mosses and fungi of this world. I’m still learning this. Children see what is on the earth without much trouble. 

I guessed we would see no deer today. There were too many of us too excited to see each other. Cardinals and robins throw their song high above us. A great blue heron - a specter itself - now a squat oval on a thin branch, now a long crooked ribbon lifting into the air, now a clacking needle and yarn in the gray sky. 

The Kingfisher, doomsday preacher in the air proselytizes:
Are you in order?
No, you are not!
I will recite your terrestrial sins to you.
But first I will sing of my excellence. 

Back and forth across the water he flies, irreverent to our coming and going. 


“Look, another mushroom
Oh look, this one’s jiggly!
Oh I think a snake might be sleeping there
Do we have a beaver?
Where do the turtles go in winter?
Do they really breathe through their butts all winter?”

“Mama

I found a skull.” 

“I’m coming.” 

You just never know in the woods. 

The small, smooth skull fits neatly into my son’s cupped hands. It is dyed red - like blood spilled on dry wood. A rusting red soaked into a thirsty medium. Wine on the forest floor.

My son places it in my care with the tenderness that comes from being very curious and very afraid. The bottom jaw is missing but I know it is that of a fawn. I coach the group on how to gently pull only the top loose layer of leaves away from the surrounding area until we have a clutch of delicately curved ribs, a pair of gentle femurs, and a hip joint lined up on a fallen tree. 
Some of these had been nestled under the tree itself.

My idea of what happened is one of many possible guesses. It is the account I will tell of this short life. I will tell you my story. You can tell me yours and together we will remember a fellow mammal neither of us knew. 

There are busy roads everywhere these days and the young deer cannot be talked out of them. The instinct to follow their mother overrides all but the shallowest breath of caution. 

I hate the way the spindle legs of deer splay and fold and cartwheel through space. A detonation of their grace. They did not evolve for revolution. 

It is twice an affront that they do not always die on impact. Yet another that so few of us are equipped or willing to bring a quick end to their lives now past redemption.

The busy road was in stumbling distance from where we stood. 

A young deer injured beyond reckoning could look for a place to hide here and wonder why the edges of this bright world were now unfocused and why this leg or that is no longer doing its good work. 

And so it will lay down.

And it will stay.

And the bright world is now threaded with the shadows of time as it will someday be for me and you. 

That leg does not hurt now, but the body is heavy and perhaps, Mother, I will rest awhile. 

And in one final folding of the spotted neck, a small consciousness in the woods comes unmoored and slips back into the stream of the Source from which life comes. 

And is still. 

I wonder about the Mother and know that since I am one, my opinion of her from a scene I did not witness cannot be trusted. 

Does are always different in my experience. Some stamp their legs at me, at my bipedal audacity. Some dart away, tails flashing. 

I do not know if I hope she stayed near until the final stillness. I do not hope for this at all. Whether she stayed or not, perhaps we can rely on what happened next. 

Coyote. Fox. Raccoon. Flies. Microbes. Vultures. 

Life going on and spreading out in all directions. An unseen, busy carcass, then only bones. 

I hope for this. 

Then the rains came, and a flood concluded services. Over weeks the water sways apart the tissues like a cantor at a funeral mass. 

Rise and fall. Rocking the bones unto their resting place in soft earth, in grey mud, in silt and autumn’s leaves. 

The moon stretches out a cold light and the ground is set with holy dark jewels in the forest floor. 

And we bend our young backs and pull back the shroud, at once meeting and remembering a life away and now up in the branches overhead. 

We replace the bones.

Kingfisher calls to us sinners.

Now.
Now you are in order.
And perhaps now I will forgive you for not having wings.