Trying To Get Home

To get to work, I drive down a mountain highway, a stretch so beautiful and so panoramic that I am often in danger of driving off the side of the road while gaping at a sunrise or pockets of mist in the hollows or clouds ablaze from beneath. My head is forever swiveling to watch for deer or even bears, and sometimes red-tailed hawks will startle me by flying out of a ridge-line directly across my path. Yesterday, I passed a little fawn, smaller than my dog, lifeless in the center of the road.  She lay in a tight curl, her chin on her back legs, as if sound asleep in the safety of the woods. The sight swept me with such sadness that when I arrived at work, I realized that I remembered nothing of the drive and that I had been preoccupied with grief for yet another little creature.

Part of this dark reverie was very familiar to me. It centered on the mournful thought – whether based in reality or sentimental speculation — that the fawn was killed while trying to get home. She (and I know it was a female because I noted the pattern of spots on its coat) was either preceding or following her mama when she stepped out onto that ribbon of asphalt and was riveted by the spectacle of the onrushing, screaming vehicle that took her life. Most likely her mama saw her die, or at the very least found her soon after her death. And this was the scene that haunted me all that day. The idea of the doe nosing and nudging the still little body, urging her to rise and run, and sensing the absence of the life-force, and finally being forced either through natural instinctive fear or by the approach of the killing cars to flee her baby. And then what of the quiet hours of night, when the doe made her way to the secluded place where she beds down? Did she think of her baby? Do deer speculate? I know that the smug, smirking scientists and realists and good Christians would quickly dismiss my question with a wave of the hand, but their logical coolness does nothing to sway me from my questions. Do animals think, consider, ponder, revisit, even ruminate in their minds as they do with their teeth? I am not alone in believing that they grieve; entire books have been written on the subject. I have seen them with my own eyes express anguish and loss.

The mournful weight of the day was augmented by a movie I’d recently watched with my wife, a sweet and thoughtful story of a boy trying to rescue a horse destined for slaughter. At the end of the two hours, the thought that stayed with me like a sob caught in the throat was that the boy was trying to get home, and trying to get the horse home as well. So I moved through the hours of my work day in the air of sadness, the very air of sadness itself.

And I was thinking of another animal, long dead and lost to the memory of all but this watching earth and me, the once-boy who still walks upon it.

The animal was a small frog who lived among the mossy bricks beneath our garden faucet when I was a boy. Whenever my mother would go to fill a watering can, or when I would attach the short hose to the spigot to spray and play, the frog would be there, watching with his movement-sensitive eyes, leaping to safety and concealment, but always reappearing. I named him, with the stunning originality of childhood, “Hoppy.”

One deep summer day, for reasons that I cannot recall (perhaps they are too painful due to being trivial and thus making me even more culpable in what was to follow), I decided to catch Hoppy and put him in an empty paint can, just to keep him with me during the course of a locust-droning afternoon. I pulled fresh grass and put it into the paint can, making a thick, damp carpet for my little friend. Beneath the spigot, Hoppy was crouched in the shade of the day, his eyes half-closed. I scooped him up and put him in the can, and took him in to show him to my mother.

And right about that time, one of my friends showed up to play.

He admired Hoppy, taking him from the paint can and carrying him around for a while. When we decided to play soldier, I placed the frog back into his paint can and placed it under the beech tree about twenty feet from the garden faucet. Almost immediately, he began to hop out of the can. Instead of letting him do so, I decided (being motivated by – what? The need to control him? I cannot tell, and my boy-mind is lost to me now) to place the lid of the can loosely on top. Hoppy leaped up and banged himself against the lid a few times, knocking it loose. I had enough foresight to leave the lid slightly ajar when I placed the brick on top of it to keep the frog from escaping. It didn’t take long for my friend and me to become completely absorbed in our play, and as the time slipped on, we decided to move the battle to his house, a block away.

When I trotted into our yard a few hours later, the first thing I saw was the paint can. When I had placed it there earlier, it had been in full shade. Now that the sun had shifted, it was gleaming in the flat sunlight, and my face suddenly felt as hot as the ground beneath my bare feet. I went to the can and lifted the brick and then the lid. Hoppy lay on his back, his pale belly up to the unforgiving sky, his little mouth open. He had gone away to whatever place the little things go when they leave the world of boys and paint cans. I glanced over at the side of the house; the spigot was in full shade, the bricks beneath it cool and damp. I began crying, and my mother, hearing me from the kitchen window, called to me to come inside so she could find out what was the matter. I ran to her and squalled my way through an apology and an explanation. She came outside and looked at Hoppy, then suggested in her soft voice that I bury him in the back garden.

Later, after supper and after consigning Hoppy’s little limp body to the black earth out back, I sat in my swing for a long time, my toes dragging in the dust, and stared at where Hoppy had lived among the bricks. And the thought that kept torturing me was this: he was just trying to get home. He had thrown his little body against the lid until he grew too tired to try, and then he had gasped his way through his final hour in the scalding stillness of that metal container and had finally passed from this life while the towheaded boy who had confined him there was laughing and making rifle and grenade noises with his little friend down the street.

I am now considered by society to be an old man, but I have never forgotten the shame and horror that welled up within me when I returned home that day and saw the paint can in the sun. I am not ashamed to confess that I have whispered many, many times as an adult, “Please forgive me,” thinking of the little frog and wondering if somehow he, or the transformed energy he possessed, can hear me, if he can forgive me. What I did to Hoppy was unintentional, but it was thoughtless. Have I learned a lesson from that long-ago summer day? No. I have been thoughtless since then, and who can tell what destruction I have brought about in my forgettings, in my wanderings?

And now, writing these words in the sultry heat of an August afternoon, I am too close to certain truths. Too aware that my days of play are past, and too aware that I, too, am just trying to get home. I am troubled by many things, among them this question: what great hand might pluck me up and set me down in a deadly place where I can never again reach the cool, shadowy bricks, the safety of the only place I truly want to be?

~ S.K. Orr