The calf must have come late in the
night, when blue shadows cast their own black shadows.Stillborn, the calf lay wholly deflated and cross-legged
on a patch of dark ground at the very corner of an otherwise snowy pasture.
By the time I drove near the calf at
sunrise, the other cattle had cleared a semi-circle around it.
None of them would go near.
The entire gathering of animals was comprised
of expectant mothers or mothers with wobbly newborns at their side.
I stopped my truck, stepped out, and crunched
over the snowy terrain between the road and the fence.I leaned hard against the barbed wire
strands, peering down at the calf.
The calf could just as well have been
a black coat flung to the ground.For that calf, it mattered not whether the gate was latched shut of
flung wide open.It did not matter that
the snow will soon melt and sweet new grass will flush green across the
expanse.
The beginning was the end.
Standing on the opposite side of the
fence, no more than three paces away, the mothers and newborns cautiously watched
me.
What was my place in this, they
wondered?
A valid question, that.
I crunched back to my truck, climbed
in, and drove away from the rising sun.
I often dream of fish. I have no way of explaining this, but my
dreams are regularly swimming with fish, jumping with them. This has been so for as long as I can remember. Trout.
Small fish gathering about me in clear waters. Fish from the sea
Why not dogs?
Why not songbirds?
I don’t know.
For the last two weeks, I have been
sparring with the flu. More recently, I
have been sleeping fitfully at night.
Yesterday, by 2:00 afternoon, after jabbing at my computer for the
better part of the day, I flopped back on my sofa, thinking I might catch a
nap. I lay there for perhaps fifteen
minutes, gradually shrinking away from the daylight and the immediate sounds of
light winds nosing at the bay windows.
Finally, I settled into a shallow
state of dream. I was fishing inside
some kind of industrial building whose lower levels were filled with water and
populated with dark fish. On my second
cast into one of the lower level lochs, a big fish struck. As habit dictates, I pulled back hard on my
fishing rod to set the hook.
I woke with a jerk on my sofa. I lay there confused, blinking forcefully to
ward off the too-bright light.
Her printer cartridges had long ago
ran out of ink. But she continued
printing anyway. Blank, stark white
sheets of paper stacked up in the finishing tray. When the printer reached the end of the
document and then clicked and shuddered before falling silent (as it always did
when finished), she scooped the blank pages from the tray.
A curious satisfaction overcame her as
she thumbed through the blank pages.
Eventually, she found a large
envelope, addressed it, and enclosed the ghost pages inside.
The following day she posted the
envelope.
Off into the mechanics of this world
it went: the story of her life.
Early this morning, I flopped onto my
sofa, flicked my television and satellite remotes and waited for something “newsy”
to appear.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, my television launched into some
kind of weird, complimentary-colored Pablo Picasso mode. The colors and abstract shapes shifted about the
screen in jerking fashion to the sounds of a normal audio feed.
I flipped through several channels and
found the same result.
On a different day, I might have
enjoyed this television mode.
After capturing the photograph I have
posted here, I rebooted and found some news.
In the bigger picture, perhaps we
might take comfort in the simple misery of knowing we all—man, fish, beast, and
bird—are little more than a compendium of dust particles swept across unfathomable
space. Time eventually smears all of us
into a singular, meaningless, impenetrable event. Who, then, in a half-billion years, will
recall the sad tale of Nigel the gannet?
Nigel lived his last five years on the
small, otherwise uninhabited island of Mana, just off the coast of mainland New
Zealand. The “otherwise uninhabited”
part of this story is a bit tricky.
Years ago, conservation rangers from New Zealand placed some eighty immobile,
painted concrete replicas of gannets on the eastern cliffs of the island. The same rangers also broadcast gannet calls
from speakers powered by a small solar photovoltaic system. The hope was to attract nesting gannets back
to the island after forty years of absence.
Nigel landed on the island in 2013 and
soon began courting a particular concrete bird.
Who can say why that bird?
Something about the curve of her sleek neck? Her colors a bit brighter? A certain flaw that made her seem approachable
for a regular bird like Nigel?
Nigel made his choice and did not look
back again. He lived alone with his
concrete love and her inanimate concrete companions.
Nigel groomed her concrete flanks, her
cold neck. He carefully constructed a
nest for her. For five years, devoted
his time to his concrete mate.
Recently, Nigel was found dead
alongside the cold mate he chose. He had
never wavered in his dedication to her.
Of course, to be a true tale of
sadness, there must be one more insult to add to injury. In the story of Nigel the gannet it is
this: Nigel died only a few weeks after another
three living gannets settled into another part of the concrete colony alongside
him.
Nigel ignored the other living
gannets, of course. His love for his concrete
mate remained steadfast until the end, until he was swept against the great
unknown.
-- Mitchell
Hegman
The details of
this story are from an article that appeared in The Guardian.
Perhaps, you played that game as a kid—you
know—where you try to see who can stare the longest without blinking. Maybe you and a friend stared directly at
each other. You stared until your eyes
watered. You stared until your vison
went out-of-focus.
But eventually someone gave in.
After the first person blinked,
everyone happily blinked. And blinking
your eyes felt better than anything else in the world.
The blink reset everything.
While in Aruba, it occurred to me that
I need to blink—in terms of producing a daily blog, I mean. I need to stop forcing daily blogs. I may need to allow days to pass without a
blog. For one thing, I feel my blogs
have been suffering from serving quantity rather than quality in their
measure. In recent weeks, I have been
very frustrated by an increasing occurrence of repeating themes, spelling
errors, typos, etc.
I will not stop blogging. I enjoy it!
My goal is to provide a well-rested blog with more horsepower.
One of my intentions is to (as I have
done in recent months) devote more time to other writing projects. The first project is a technical book in
digital multimeters. The other us a
telling of my late wife’s life, which is hugely beautiful and tragic at the
same time. I have many dozens of pages
started on each of these projects.
I am at a loss for words on what I need
to say next. I know what I want to say, but
nobody has yet invented words big enough, bright enough, and strong enough to
convey everything. So here goes: My sincerest thanks to all you who have
stopped by to see me daily at the blog. Having
you out there has been both humbling and gratifying for me.
-- Mitchell
Hegman
Note: Later today
I will finally be arriving back home in beautiful Montana!
