Read Online Pecked to death by ducks by Tim Cahill - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Tim Cahill
Tags: American, Adventure stories
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whirling, thrusting, piercing, ripping. It is like some sick, Martian samurai movie out there in the alfalfa field. . . .
Alas.
And so I had arranged to spend several days in the mountains, alone, with no particular goal and nothing to do. No Walkman, no book. Just me and my journal.
The first day, as always, was the worst. I worried about the phone calls I was missing, about the work I had to do, about the book and the outline. I slept badly. By the second day, however, my body began to fall into the desultory rhythms of camp life, and it dragged my mind along with it, so that I was thinking, rather lazily, not about outlines or commitments, but about moving to a new site, on a windy ridge. The idea was that the wind would scatter the deerflies. Still, sitting there on the ridge, being battered by a ceaseless wind for a couple of days, didn't sound like all that much fun, either. Which is when I hit on the perfectly obvious idea of moving up above the flies the way the elk do.
It was a reasonably challenging climb. I set up my tent and lay back in the bright afternoon sun, thinking about how much fun it was not thinking. My mind was puttering about, cleaning up minor details it had recently ignored. Every once in a while, I made a little note in my journal.
If I had been sentenced to sit in my chair at home, to empty my mind and think about nothing and everything all at once, I couldn't have done it. The phone would ring, and someone would say, "You are twenty days overdue on your mortgage payment, and a late fee has been charged to your account." The doorbell would ring, and a pleasant, older woman would ask me if I knew that "Satan rules the world," and then she'd try to sell me a Watchtower magazine, which would explain everything.
Even without these interruptions, I'd have found several hours of emptiness oppressive. Who sits for three hours without picking up a book, listening to music, watching TV, drinking?
What happens in the woods is this: The mind is forced to deal with certain niggling but elemental details. Those things we take for granted—shelter, food, basic conveniences, comfort, brute survival—require all our attention and must be attended to. When a storm is blowing in and the tent isn't set up, worrying about mortgages and outlines is a luxury. Later, such concerns
seem an imposition. Primitive necessity, it seems, can snap the thread of linear thinking. It can send us skittering from deerflies directly into the cosmos.
Or so I thought, lying on my back in the high-country wild-flowers. Directly above, the sky was a thin, shimmering blue, that bright, soaring blue you see high in the mountains, a blue that seems to rise forever. Staring into it, I had the sense of space beyond and a feeling that, if I really worked at it, squinted a little, I could see them up there, all those exploding stars and swirling nebulas dancing their mad galactic polka.
I was visualizing the shape of the galaxy—I have a lawn sprinkler that throws out water in the same pinwheel pattern—but I had just returned from flying over and then into a full-blown hurricane with the air-force hurricane hunters, and I had a feeling. Photographs of that storm, taken from the GOES satellites, showed a mass of clouds arranged in the precise same pinwheel shape you see in high-resolution telescopic photos of spiral galaxies. There seemed to be some cosmic significance here beyond the mere conservation of angular momentum. From certain distances a galaxy could be mistaken for a hurricane.
No one who has to deal with deadlines is allowed any such mildly cosmic insights. When camping, however, I tend to go right from the turkey tetrazzini to Alpha Centuri. I was thinking about our galaxy—a flattened pinwheel system of stars, gas, and dust—with Earth positioned about two thirds of the way out on a spiral arm. The evening promised to be clear, and I would be able to stare into the galactic center, the Milky Way, spread out across
Alas.
And so I had arranged to spend several days in the mountains, alone, with no particular goal and nothing to do. No Walkman, no book. Just me and my journal.
The first day, as always, was the worst. I worried about the phone calls I was missing, about the work I had to do, about the book and the outline. I slept badly. By the second day, however, my body began to fall into the desultory rhythms of camp life, and it dragged my mind along with it, so that I was thinking, rather lazily, not about outlines or commitments, but about moving to a new site, on a windy ridge. The idea was that the wind would scatter the deerflies. Still, sitting there on the ridge, being battered by a ceaseless wind for a couple of days, didn't sound like all that much fun, either. Which is when I hit on the perfectly obvious idea of moving up above the flies the way the elk do.
It was a reasonably challenging climb. I set up my tent and lay back in the bright afternoon sun, thinking about how much fun it was not thinking. My mind was puttering about, cleaning up minor details it had recently ignored. Every once in a while, I made a little note in my journal.
If I had been sentenced to sit in my chair at home, to empty my mind and think about nothing and everything all at once, I couldn't have done it. The phone would ring, and someone would say, "You are twenty days overdue on your mortgage payment, and a late fee has been charged to your account." The doorbell would ring, and a pleasant, older woman would ask me if I knew that "Satan rules the world," and then she'd try to sell me a Watchtower magazine, which would explain everything.
Even without these interruptions, I'd have found several hours of emptiness oppressive. Who sits for three hours without picking up a book, listening to music, watching TV, drinking?
What happens in the woods is this: The mind is forced to deal with certain niggling but elemental details. Those things we take for granted—shelter, food, basic conveniences, comfort, brute survival—require all our attention and must be attended to. When a storm is blowing in and the tent isn't set up, worrying about mortgages and outlines is a luxury. Later, such concerns
seem an imposition. Primitive necessity, it seems, can snap the thread of linear thinking. It can send us skittering from deerflies directly into the cosmos.
Or so I thought, lying on my back in the high-country wild-flowers. Directly above, the sky was a thin, shimmering blue, that bright, soaring blue you see high in the mountains, a blue that seems to rise forever. Staring into it, I had the sense of space beyond and a feeling that, if I really worked at it, squinted a little, I could see them up there, all those exploding stars and swirling nebulas dancing their mad galactic polka.
I was visualizing the shape of the galaxy—I have a lawn sprinkler that throws out water in the same pinwheel pattern—but I had just returned from flying over and then into a full-blown hurricane with the air-force hurricane hunters, and I had a feeling. Photographs of that storm, taken from the GOES satellites, showed a mass of clouds arranged in the precise same pinwheel shape you see in high-resolution telescopic photos of spiral galaxies. There seemed to be some cosmic significance here beyond the mere conservation of angular momentum. From certain distances a galaxy could be mistaken for a hurricane.
No one who has to deal with deadlines is allowed any such mildly cosmic insights. When camping, however, I tend to go right from the turkey tetrazzini to Alpha Centuri. I was thinking about our galaxy—a flattened pinwheel system of stars, gas, and dust—with Earth positioned about two thirds of the way out on a spiral arm. The evening promised to be clear, and I would be able to stare into the galactic center, the Milky Way, spread out across
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