Soul tracks

Full of the normal triggers in my writing of late. Mild descriptions of dead animals among the rest.

I’m under a bridge in Carnation Washington. I’m not sure why I had to drive two and a half hours of stretching my driving skills on multi-lane Seattle freeways - merging into a lane among a chorus of blazing beeps, a blue car in my blind spot - but I’m here. I’ve come, I suppose, because this is where I’ve tracked the trackers. The group of us kneels in the dust under a nondescript bridge, intrigued by the echoes of footfalls in the powdery dryness of desert Washington-underbridge.

Today I’ve learned all sorts of things about the nature of track and tracking. I’ve added lizard, jackrabbit, toad and robin to my list of symbolic vocabulary. I’ve learned the difference between a coyote and a dog. I know the ambling bear-like gait of a raccoon, and the splayed thumb six toed star of a possum. I can speak now about direct and indirect registers.

When a human walks, we create a zigzag of tracks, right left, right left. A four-legged animal is doing the same, but with two extra sets of footsteps. As they step, their back feet can land precisely where their front feet were - a direct register - off a little - an indirect register - or off a lot - an overstep or understep.

As we move from animal to animal who made their way across the dust of this under-bridge, cars roaring above us, Snoqualmie river meandering below, I find myself wanting to skip past the vocabulary of who, and ask questions of why. I know there is a poem in every series of footsteps, each pause a point of connection between animal and world, each step a dance of forces, souls singing to souls one step at a time.

I want to know how to read it.

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. . .

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Have you ever sat in a park and watched people’s feet? It’s all there in their shoes. The woman there has her body half turned towards the old white man with his dog, but her feet turn away, ready to flee. His feet point solidly towards her, trying to make a point of connection. Her daughter hides behind mother’s skirt, just peeking out enough that she too can observe. The dog strains on the leash in every direction, just wanting to move.

There on the path five teenagers loiter. Three girls and two boys. Their feet spread expansively, mostly towards each other. They’re trying to take up space with loud voices and unrestrained laughter - trying to discover just how much space is theirs. Two of the girls’ feet stray towards one of the boys, but his point more often at the other boy. When one of the girls turns and starts walking, the group doesn’t move and she circles back in. A second girl moves and they follow her.

Around the slide, two small children run, their feet describing joyful circles of endless repetition, footfalls inelegant in bodies that seem simultaneously too big and too small for them. On the bench sit their mothers talking idly about small things, the white woman sits with her large butt firmly planted on the bench, the black woman gives her a little more space and sits on the edge of the bench, her body turned towards the other woman’s words.

The old man and woman sit on the swinging bench. I could not track their abiding love in soil, inside feet pressing gently against each other as they sit, bodies turned slightly apart, observing in silence everything I see, but in this medium I track what is lost to the air as they swing back and forth, the old man’s foot touching the earth on occasion to make their gentle rocking continue.

And here I am, sitting, watching. My back is to a tree, a defensive posture, but one that also allows me to relax and observe. I sit cross-legged, souls facing the edge of the sky. I cannot help but be a ripple in this pool. I am struck often, as I observe, by the potential of a baby that exists between every fertile man and woman, even if they never would. Every one of us has a billion ancestors in the last thousand years alone, likewise the next thousand would give every child a chance at a billion descendants, a tree that stretches out, roots mirroring branches into eternity.

With my back to this tree, I cannot help but ripple the potentials here. Even my gaze is a force that might alter a step, a force to be tracked. The man’s dog certainly turns towards me, smelling the scent of tanned skins on my hands, and perhaps some death on my coat. I do not know what a domesticated animal might make of my use of the wild dead.

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. . .

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For my birthday, I decide to have a tanning party. What began as a subtle act of service has become an obsession. When I pass a roadkill animal unable to stop for whatever reason, I feel like I have failed some ancient promise. When I pick one up and don’t have time or capacity to skin and alchemize its body into new beauty, it hurts my heart.

As a little boy, I went through the phase many do where I began to hate humans. I believed through my teenage years that the world would be better without us. College brought Braiding Sweetgrass and Ethnobotany, and the study of how others benefit from human kind. I learned Plantain doesn’t think the world would be better without us, and neither would a host of others. I learned indigenous humans created richer ecosystems here in the Pacific Northwest, not poorer. Humans had a place.

But we are not yet indigenous to this place, we are still in the destroying phase of the human habitat change, and the poison that is my hatred still sits in sight. That hatred scares me. I cannot afford to hate myself. I find small ways to redeem myself and feel guilty when I do not.

As I have become aware of the untended dead, spilling off the sides of our oil lubricated roads, the work is larger than one man. I know dead animals attract more, and this owl I find, feathers rustling at every unstopping car, is here because of that dead rat just past the pavement. I pick them both up, and bring them home, but for every animal that is now buried in the garden or graces the woods, there are more I could not tend.

So this birthday I ask for help. I am a teacher - so I call in those who don’t yet have these skills and offer to walk them through the art of it. We laugh and sing and tell stories as we work. I marvel at my hands as I help another, and how easily they seem to work, when a year ago they felt inept. My coworker takes on a hide that would have otherwise been my overwhelm with presence and enthusiasm. It feels hopeful.

My partner’s mother comes in with questions.

“But what do you do before this step?”

“See over there? We scrape the hide.”

“And what happens before that?”

“We flesh the hide, that’s what I’m doing here.”

“And what happens before that?”

“Well, skinning the animal - do you want to learn?”

She does - and her daughter had brought me a birthday raccoon, so we hang it and begin. She does fabulous for a first time, with only one hole, easily sewn. I help her with the trickier parts, young experienced hands working with older inexperienced ones - a fun reversal of the normal order of these things.

As I help her with the paws, I’m struck by the connection between these paws and the raccoon tracks I’ve so recently learned. There is something about knowing the shape of an animals steps on the earth that makes me mourn its absence in a different way.

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. . .

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Soul is a wild animal.

Soul walks its own path through the forest of my life. I see it sometimes rising with a winter sun, or soaring with a flock of starlings. I catch it here in my lover’s kiss, and there in another’s eyes. More often, I see the track and sign of it. Wild soul leaves imprints in the mud of my monotony, a reminder here and there of life.

Soul cannot be tamed, and I resent this. I find soul in the steam off a soup pot, but so often cooking is just something I have to do now. The recipes that once invited insight have simmered into routine. The wild herbs I gather are old friends now, garden groupies available and mild, while somewhere outside my view, soul stalks. So many of the places I thought she would always be are now no longer her territory. She’s moved on, following the field mice, letting the old hunted out lands be.

I’d made observation towers in those lands, set up game cameras, set out food every day, and maybe something that once was soul still feeds there. This once-soul scoops cat food from under the deck with raccoon hands and burrows around in my trash. It is predictable and enjoyable and the image of it evokes memory just like the tracks do, but it is not in itself wild.

If I am to stay alive and not just live, I must become a better tracker. I must follow soul not lure it to me. I must learn her gait and the ripple of her passing on the birds. I must track my soul through the wilds of my heart until I know her footsteps are fresh, and the potential of our children makes a tree of life between us. I must learn the gait of my soul, and read in the bottom of her feet the intentions of a wild thing. I cannot control her, only tail her. I cannot lead her, only follow.

And when I find her, she will be dead. Hit on the side of the road by a passing dream. I will feel her paws and marvel at how well they fit the tracks I’ve learned, and I will grieve thinking myself alone, and my life over, and not remembering that whenever an animal dies it opens a niche, and soon nature will have birthed a new incarnation, this one walking with star shaped paws.

And I will rise and step towards the glimmer of the wild, dressed in the hides of my soul that has been, soft fur on soft skin, and walk on silent feet towards the glimmer of my aliveness.

Again.