A few years ago I lived at a boy’s boarding school. The Kiskiminetas Springs School—Kiski—rests on 350 acres in rural western Pennsylvania. There was a run I loved to do there. From spring through fall, I’d run off of campus, across a pair of bridges, to an old canal trail paralleling the Conemaugh River. A couple miles down I’d ascend a gnarly gullied bank to some train tracks. Then go through a 2000’ train tunnel where I’d have a good chance to share the space with an 80- or 100-car train carrying coal and tar sands oil. Then head back through a Christmas tree farm, up the river, and the cliff stairs to campus.
Recently divorced, often lonely and confused, each journey yielded experiences. There was the marvelous dappling of sycamore bark, the regal severity of a bald eagle gliding over the water, the patient heron walking the bank like a monk, the churning dance of millipede legs crossing the trail, the gentle alien-ness of a walking stick, a grosbeak’s red breast brightly shining, the shouts of local teenagers launching into the river from a rope swing, or the drama of a swarming ball of honeybees in the knot of a tree next to a palm-sized wolf spider.
One very hot day in the summer of 2013, I’d scrambled up the gully to the tracks. I ran toward the tunnel on the railroad ties, smelling years and years of oil, tar, and coal stains. All around, hardwoods cling to the steep slopes of the tunnel’s hill. Knotweed, that impetuous invader, lines the eastern edge where the heavy gravel gives way to soil.
A fox was there. She was simply lying amongst broken stones, cracked and peeling cherry branches, a small flaking steel panel, a rusted railroad spike, the tunnel gaping behind her. She was resting just feet from the tracks, among this terrestrial jetsam. She was still. Very near death.
I don’t know if it was a fall from above the tunnel. Maybe she had been sideswiped by a train. But this is not an autopsy.
The fox, unconscious, lay on her left side. Her white-tipped tail was mussed up, filthy, as if some drooling dog had made it into a chew toy. Her purple gums oozed and her tongue lolled between her teeth. Her eyes were closed. Her right chocolate paw was stretched out a bit. I touched her paws, her claws and the spaces between her wrist bones. Her copper fur, resplendent in the summer sun, was softer than anything but baby’s skin. Her ribs stretched with each bare breath, tiny struggles from her body’s will to live. Despite her erased senses, she couldn’t not breathe. Her beautiful precious life was suffering.
What was I to do? Should I have picked her up, and lay her in the greenery? Should I have accelerated her body’s passage to becoming food for flies, ants, crows, or coyotes, some piece of the next generation of grass, knotweed, and cherry leaves? Should I have honored her with a burial rite? None of these things? Had I not been there, what would it have mattered?
Mary Oliver writes, “To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your life depends on it; and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”
I turned and ran through the tunnel.
* These were my contribution to the closing service of the year at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Centre County.
Peter Walks for Democracy 