Dead Letter Department #88

weather report

When I went for a beach walk on Sunday, it took me ages to realize I was walking directly towards an enormous juvenile bald eagle. It was standing in the stream, tearing at something I couldn’t see, ripping off great gobs of meat & then swallowing them. I didn’t want to disturb its breakfast, but there wasn’t any way past without getting too close for its comfort, and soon it was soaring away down the beach, those great wings beating against the air. I tried to pass quickly, so it could come back & finish what turned out to be a bird carcass of some kind, now ripped into indistinguishability even if I knew my birds better than I do, but I was guessing it had been one of the little dark duck-looking guys floating out on the bay.

There were several of them floating in what seemed to me to be perilous proximity to this whole scene, & I wondered what it looked like to them, what it’s like to be a both a predator snatching silver fish out of the water & prey to anything larger and toothier than yourself. Did they watch the eagle come down? Was it frightening, in the way birds feel fear, to watch?

I didn’t get as much of a walk in as I wanted, partially because the tide had cut off one long stretch of beach, & partially because it began to hail in that half threatening, half thoughtful way, where you can’t tell if you’re going to have blue skies in ten minutes or an absolute deluge of cold shards pummeling your face, but at least I had a few minutes to let the waves crash at my feet and the sky stretch out a long ways ahead of me.

books i did not finish

I won’t link to them this time, because that seems rude to do with something I didn’t finish, but in the big stack of comics I picked up at my librarian neighbor’s yard sale last year there was the beginnings of a series called Papergirls, which looked cool: teen girls on bikes doing a paper route & chasing a world-changing news story. It’s drawn beautifully & I was getting into the characters, but unfortunately it’s also about time travel which, frankly, bores the pants off me 9 times out of 10. As soon as someone is meeting an older or younger version of themselves, I have a visceral reaction—just, yuck. What are the stakes now that we’re flitting in and out of timelines? My interest dries up with a quickness.

The other unfinished book was a collection of essays by Edward Abbey, who I read back in college because my Transcendentalist literature professor was super into him. I can’t remember if he assigned the books or just talked about Abbey so much that I hunted them down myself, but I have a whole linked cascade of memories around reading Desert Solitaire, & listening to the professor lecture.

I had a good time in the class, sitting at the end of the table with my friend, & I remember the professor fondly, but we did get into it a little bit about Thoreau, who I loved, & also wanted to place into a framework, so to speak, of how much of other people’s work, very much including women’s work, was required for him to go suck the marrow out of life in quiet contemplation, the massive web of interconnected people needed to support him in his solitude. I did not think this diminished his work—if anything, it made him more accessible, more interesting, since he was not entirely the sort of rugged, lonely, self-sufficient, impossible to achieve figure I had once thought. The professor was not especially interested in this take, and I felt like the argument, respectful as it was, colored our relationship forever afterwards.

When the whole class went to the professor’s house for his end of term party, he was letting us students hold his pet snake. Thrilled, I asked if I could be next.

“I don’t really want anyone holding him who’s not a naturalist,” he said.

It was the first time I remember quite clearly & consciously making a decision to not correct someone on a major misapprehension about myself. I was sufficiently a naturalist as a kid that I remember my friend’s parents having her call me when they found a hurt bird & pedaling wildly on my bike over to their house to try to help. I spent part of my high school years living on a farm & thrashing about in the Vermont woods, was, by the time I got to college, reasonably well-traveled for 21, passionate about nature, wild animals, vast vistas, all things the professor & I had in common—& he was never going to be able to see that, perhaps because he thought I had insulted Thoreau.

I wanted to somehow pour all of that information into him, to have him go, “Oh, I’ve misunderstood you, you love the same things I do,” & hand me the snake, but I knew it was pointless. He had already decided about me, and it was not my responsibility to try to fix that, so I just—didn’t bother. I think that’s why it’s locked into my memory, the feeling of deliberately stepping back from how he perceived me, someone in power, someone whose opinion I deeply cared about, instead of frantically trying to scramble around & fix it, make myself somehow visible to him.

Class was over. I wasn’t going to be one of the special students he picked out of the crowd & decided to mentor, with the ever-dangling possibility of throwing his substantial name in publishing behind you after graduation. He could think I was—I don’t know, someone constitutionally incapable of handling a snake because I wanted to talk about feminism & Transcendentalism at the same time?

All of this to say, I thought I might have gotten something out of revisiting Edward Abbey, & instead after a crude joke about lesbians in the foreword, an essay about the social & cultural inferiority of Latin American cultures requiring greater immigration control in Arizona, & a stray remark about how the indigenous population in the US was too disorganized & stupid to hold off the European invasion—hold off a genocide, somehow, though of course he doesn’t say how—I slapped the covers back together & gave up. There are so many good books in this world, smart, well-written, useful, whatever I want them to be, & no reason at all to wade through that racist garbage in hopes of grabbing onto some useful nuggets.

Thank you, as always, for letting the Dead Letter Department continue to arrive in your inbox. If you want more & more personal writing, you can subscribe to the secret edition here: 14 secret letters & counting. I’ll write to you again soon, & in the meantime, may any arguments you have about Thoreau be productive ones.