Truck June 2015: Essay by Shawn Smucker

One fall night, just as the sun sank into a sea of brown leaves, we heard my 4-year-old son screaming somewhere in the woods. Sam’s cries were urgent and panic-stricken, those of a child in trouble.

First I should tell you that before we moved into the city last year we lived in the middle of a forty-acre wood, in the southernmost tip of Lancaster County. When we drove home and came around the second-to-last hill, the sky was low and the fields split by large rocks. It felt like we were ascending some holy mountain, some distant place few mortals dared to visit. That house was far away from everything. It took us ten minutes just to drive the lane to the house.

Sometimes, in early spring or late fall, our two youngest children wandered outside, into the trees. Abra was five and Sam was four, and my wife and I kept track of them from the kitchen window as they stumbled through the undergrowth, swinging sticks like swords. We only asked that they wear bright clothing and keep the house in sight. They moved through the drab trees like two bright kites on a day when the wind comes in close dashes, then stops, then flares up again.

We had been having a dinner party on the deck when we first heard Sam scream, and those of us close to the edge raced into the woods, crashing through the underbrush. The other kids shouted for us to come, but when we got to where they were playing, he wasn’t there. His voice was still some ways off.

I ran down a small path, the tiny branches cutting at my face. You think of the worst possible scenario in those moments. You wonder if this will be one of those days that completely change the trajectory of your life.

There he was, barefoot, sitting on a rock, screaming, tears lining his face.

“Sam?” I asked, out of breath. “What’s wrong?”

He pointed at his feet and screamed again. He had wandered into a small patch of stinging nettles, and he didn’t have any shoes on. Of course he didn’t. He rarely did. Small red blotches started to emerge on his feet and ankles and the backs of his legs. I picked him up, cradled him against me, and carried him back through the forest, back through the undergrowth, trying not to stumble.

Back at the house we put cold cloths on his feet and held his hand. We told him it would be okay and we soaked up the huge tears. He looked uncertain. He looked betrayed. It was the first time in his life he had been so hurt by a plant, and I think the realization that tender green things can cause so much pain confused him. Before it had been only dinosaurs or mean-looking insects. If this, then what? Could clouds injure him? Could the very air he breathed turn on him?

What is this world, so full of unexpected pain?

*

We live in the city now. We walk to St. James Episcopal Church on Sundays, and sometimes my older son and I walk to the park in the morning when the sun is just coming up over the buildings, casting fresh shadows down the alleys.

There are no stinging nettles growing up through the cracked sidewalks.

Our backyard is small and fenced in and inhabited by semi-wild cats that roam the neighborhood. Beyond our yard is a narrow alley where they live their life, yowling and fighting and moving here and there like shadows. Beyond that, a broken building rises up over an empty lot. It smiles down on us through shattered teeth.

On a whim, I bought seeds and turned the backyard over by hand, with only a shovel. The kids helped me rake it smooth, and then my oldest son, the one who goes to the park with me in the early mornings, took a small spade and made lines, shallow furrows. He counted out the seeds, one at a time, while his sisters cleaned a different bed, while his brothers clowned around on the back patio.

Leo was not alive when we lived on the forty acres. He is only nine months old, and if we do not move, he will know nothing besides this busy street in front of our house, this broken building, this stinging nettle-less landscape. We protected his older siblings from bees and falling-down trees – we protect him from broken glass and the screaming of sirens.

“Dad, what’s this?”

My daughter found a crack pipe there in the dirt while we prepared the garden. The stem was shattered, the bulb round and full of mud. It was as unexpected as Sam’s stinging nettles. We talked about it with the kids, what it was for, what it meant (as much as any of can explain the meaning of these things, this life, this pain).

There are unexpected things everywhere, I suppose, pain and hurt and other things the children will stumble upon at some point. But we go on planting, we go on letting them search, watching them find. It’s the only way to live a life. The pain is there, and the things that hint at pain, but there are also seeds, just below the surface, dying a death that brings unexpected life.

***

Shawn Smucker is the author of numerous nonfiction books, including Building a Life Out of Words, How to Use a Runaway Truck Ramp, and Refuse to Drown. His first novel, The Day the Angels Fell, was published in late 2014. He lives with his wife and five children in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. You can find him online at shawnsmucker.com.

Truck June 2015: Essay by Mary Walker, "Wintering With Cranes"

Wintering With Cranes

In the presence of 20,000 birds of an ancient species, each creature statuesque and as tall as my shoulder, there is a calm like no other. On this day in this place, the winter sun is benevolent and the air is clear. I stand with the Sandhill Cranes beside spring-fed ponds in a 1300 square-mile valley. Together we feel the planet slowly turning. This wide-open landscape formed some 17 million years ago in the Miocene. My own species dates some 200,000 years back, but the cranes have spun a virtually unchanged thread of life for more than 2 million years. I stand with beings that have spanned epochs.

This is the Basin and Range country of the American Southwest. The down-dropped valley that lies between 7000- to 9000-foot mountains came into being some 17 million years ago when the very crust of the earth spread, pulling the craggy mountain ranges apart, and creating closed watershed basins of vast proportions. Greater and Lesser Sandhill Cranes must have found this spot and a few others like it, ages ago. It suited their winter needs, providing moderate temperatures, food, and water to sleep in as protection against predators. From their summer breeding grounds in the northern Rocky Mountains and further north they kept coming. The individuals here today, calling to each other, preening, flying out to feed in grasses and grains throughout the valley, carry knowledge in their bones, those long leg bones that wade in the shallows and that trail behind their bodies in flight. Their recent history, containing memories of the annual migrations of their own lifetimes, is carried in their minds. Geological history resides in their DNA.

When I arrive here at daybreak, I watch the cranes lift from the ponds, each pair and their young, circling, twirling and calling in clear, loud tones. Soon thousands fill the air, forming a swirling musical calliope in the sky, until groups fly off in varied directions to forage in the winter stubble of the fields. In late morning, as the cranes start to return, just a few of them approach, flying high across the wide valley. Graceful fliers with five-foot wingspans, they come closer, circling for landing, testing the breeze before they touch down. Next, ten more arrive. Suddenly hundreds return, their calls filling the sky and their wing beats becoming a primal drumming. It is a spectacle as large as this expanse of open land, and seemingly as old and constant as time itself.

The growing throng on the ground condenses, expands, and shifts in waves to accommodate more individuals landing, always calling, calling, to keep family units together. After a brief rest, some of the cranes fly out again to feed, while others stay in the shallows through the afternoon, all facing the same direction like a congregation in prayer. The cranes are facing into the breeze in take-off formation, to escape in an instant if a marauding hawk or eagle comes by.

At dusk all the cranes have returned to the ponds. As they fold their enormous wings and find their places among the softly milling thousands, sunset brings a sense of physical tiredness and quiet to us all. In the darkness, the planet makes its transit against the starry sky. Tomorrow will bring another chance to soar with the cranes and to engage with them in a dance of eons. 

 ***

Mary Walker grew up in a small town in the mountains of northern Pennsylvania. After migrating southward down the chain of those same Appalachian Mountains to Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, she retired in Arizona. She has been an environmental chemist and a private pilot. She now watches birds, and plays and teaches mountain dulcimer.