field survey

some days after breakfast the sweetie and i walk down the steps of the caboose and we head up the railroad tracks a little, walk the right-of-way through the trees and around the curve, past the field with that one cow on the east side of the rails and the wrung out land where the river came up to the west. but today i am restless and want to walk the other way, over the two lane road we call highway 28 and down behind the post office, toward the depot at the edge of town.

i know what is there, know there are trains on those tracks, art deco passenger cars, boarded up cabooses, steam engines and coal engines and all sorts of monstrous beasts smelling of oil and metal. we walk down the tracks past the bbq and the auction. we  cross over the highway and find ourselves very quickly among little yellow rail repair vehicles. there's an old handcart sitting low and still. behind the post office are the first big cars, covered over with dark strapped-down tarps.

we roam around. i tightrope walk along a rail while the sweetie tries to pace himself with the ties. they do not match his stride and he kicks around the outside of track closest to the water, right where the bush kill crept up during the flood.

the sweetie finds a few bones along the track, shining white ribs and slices of spine, an animal dissolving into the dirt. we look at them a while, but they are nothing big. small pieces of a deer, probably hit by a car at night there on the dark curve just above the rails. the sweetie abandons the bones, slides down the bank a little more recklessly than a man with so far to fall really ought to and is out at the edge of the water, skipping fat rocks across the ice.

i am not the sweetie, barreling headlong down a steep slope like a madman. i pick my way through the piles of leaves and loose stones to where the ground levels out and small trees huddle in clumps. i watch where i put my feet, try to avoid thorny vines that snag at my legs anyway. generally this cautiousness simply leaves me behind the sweetie on hikes, trailing him, being always not the first to see anything.

but today because i look down to be sure my shoe doesn't slide into the soft, sandy mud near the water there is a gift. because of the storm, because of the flood and the meanness of water, there are things strewn all along the valley up nearly as high as the banked tracks some places. propane tanks. a mug handle. the sole of one shoe. and because we walk along the water from time to time i'm learning to ignore the bits of bright things caught around the bottoms of trees. there is a layer of the unnatural over the rocks, the plants, the broken branches that will be there a while.

but this is different. a white triangle bigger than all the smashed pieces of things and brighter than any twisted, tree-snagged plastic bag. i lean down and think back to when i was pining for a deer skeleton we saw by the side of the road. it stayed where it was on the side of the road but this new skull is there, loosed from the rest of its bones, waiting for me to pick it up and take it home. waiting for a place with the rest of the ridiculousness we drag in.