It's raining tonite.
posted by jeremy on August 29, 2002
I hear the sounds of bike tires splashing thru puddles outside. I hear the creak of wet brakes. I hear footsteps on the porch. I hear the sound of keys, of the front door opening, of Debbie's voice echoing up to me thru the stairwell.....
Things die. One way or another this all fades to so much compost. An inevitable & beautiful system four billion years in the making. This resilience. This damnable fragility. Water, carbon. The slow development of intelligent molecules: This war of forms. The fine tuned symmetry of it baffles me, mystifies me. There is no room for god in my personal theology. The universe is bigger than one's hope for a deity..... & so I do not hope.
One night in my sixteenth year I came home to find my mother weeping, weeping like I had never seen.
My heart was broken before I even knew why.
"What..." I asked, sitting down next to her, putting my arms around her "...is wrong?" She jerked herself up without a word and pushed play on the VCR. A recording of a news broadcast came on. It showed several burning vehicles stopped, terminally, at a train crossing. My mother pointed at a charred van, choked out " Don...Mary Ann...theirs...dead.." & collapsed sobbing, back into my arms.
Don & MaryAnn Sheets had lived across the street from us my entire life. They were my parents closest friends, practically my god-parents. Twelve years after their death, sitting here, writing this, I can't say that I remember them as well as you might think I would. I remember mostly the shades of feeling they inspired in me. Warmth, protection, kindness. I remember how Mary Ann spent hours every day lovingly tending her flower beds. I remember Don's stoic silence. The measured cadence of his deep voice. His carefully chosen words. His occasional gruffness.
I must have watched that video tape a least a 100 times in the following weeks, looking for minutiae in the cessation of their lives.... An elderly couple, visiting relatives in the warmth of Florida, thinking death still 10-20 years off, a distant event, had been stopped by the most mundane of details: A fuel tanker had stalled on the tracks in front of them. Had they been talking? Arguing over the radio station? Or just sitting there, quietly, in the sunshine that poured thru the windows of their van? & how slowly did the knowledge of what happened next creep up on them? The commotion of a train rolling into their field of vision, its blaring horn.... A moment to realize the implications...Then an expanding ball of ignited volatile fluid & a short but impossibly hideous agony....
My mother, father & I spent years shaking this ridiculous tragedy from our minds. The random horrible nature of such an event.
A malevolent lottery. An evil prank by a humorless universe.
My parents, being Christian, were at odds with their god's will, but "to everything there is a reason... within His divine plan." Again & again they would tell me this in voices that convinced me only of their doubt...
My atheism began to take hold around this point in my life. The knowledge I had been accumulating... The theories of evolution & human development, of stellar formation, of the big-bang, of molecular chemistry. These facts, along with the distrust of a simple mythology, were already there. The random pointless idiocy of Don & MaryAnn's death was simply a catalyst.
Things die. Cells mutate; Devour themselves. Every so often I read the obituaries looking for patterns & always, I discern nothing but an impenetrable randomness: An infinite system complex beyond hope, beyond human comprehension, beyond any form of divinity. Things just happen. Things live & riot & love & laugh & procreate & find jobs & do dishes & shoot heroin & eat apples & drink beer & rum & cokes & foolishly spend their whole paychecks & build microprocessors & harvest crops & build bridges & go to the moon & have wars & purchase porn & drop bombs named Fat Man & other bombs called Little Boy & slaughter & slaughter & go to bad hip-hop shows & rape & play ping-pong & sometimes.... Things kill even themselves.
He hated me.
This suicide. This angry young man. His name? Sean. & why? Maybe it was for a reason I could never determine. Maybe I slighted him early on & never retained the memory of it. Maybe it was my clothes or my hair or my accent. Maybe I stunk. Maybe my poetry was too amateurish to bear. Maybe...
Maybe the truth of it was that we both adored, with a blind ferocity, the same girl.... the same woman. Robyn. She of the huge green eyes, funny but endearing stride. Painter of beautiful paintings. An alpha bitch & powerful. I was attracted to her merciless withering wit. I don't know what Sean loved about her... but I know he was convinced he loved her more.
Both of us all of 19 yrs old. Chasing this, my god, 24 yr old woman & I was winning her heart or something like that & he received only scorn or something similar & he hated me....
He was good looking enough. Fairly intelligent tho entrenched in a certain bitterness that I didn't realize, at the time, was truly felt. I thought of it more as a style, worn like a shirt or a kevlar vest. That is how I wore my romantic youthful idealism of the day. Like a ridiculous hat.
Cincinnati, Ohio. The City of Broken Glass. Everyone knew everyone else. We attended the same parties, moved in the same circles, lusted after the same girls, the same boys. Sean & I saw each other often enough & he would never miss the chance to drunkenly deconstruct my personality publicly, whether in front of me or behind my back. I had never realized what a fuck I was till he started doing this. Robyn would recount to me the things Sean had to say about my character, my lineage, my genes. I found it slightly baffling but, even then, he seemed pitiable to me. I defended myself only marginally.... except.... except for 3 or 4 times when I fought back with all the vehemence & wit my young mind could muster. I tore his ego apart & then I tore his worldview apart & then I walked away laughing, leaving him sputtering & seething. Broken, at least for those evenings. I would like to recount for you what I said, what he said, the exact details of what we argued about but I have no idea. Those exchanges are gone like an election & were probably just about as substantial.
I eventually won Robyn over to my world. A dubious prize for both of us. A brief and unhappy affair ending with me finding my things piled by the front door with a note reading ÂHave a nice life' but, as the years proved, that wasn't the end of us. Thru a series of strange coincidences I ended up living with her again in Seattle & that was a happier thing. we still fought but we also adored..... Fiery roommates with the tendency to take each other when drunk,
to whisper sweet drunken nothings as the sun lit the clouds above the wet evil streets of Seattle....
& Sean? He disappeared from our radar. Occasionally someone would mention him, maybe once a year. "How is that fuck?" I would ask. Still depressed, still sullen, still laughable in his misanthropy & still pining over Robyn....
The years rolled by quickly if roughly enough. I lost track of Robyn. Last I heard, she had married and moved to San Francisco. I scuttled about the country until ending up in Portland, this soft sweet city of ours & Sean was still forgotten until a couple years ago when I was talking on the phone with a friend residing back east... "& did you hear? remember Sean? He suicided. Shot himself in the fucking head..."
I choked on my beer & lapsed, instantly, into a silent responsibility. Maybe. Maybe. But no. But if & if. Yes. No. Bullshit. Enough connections weren't there. Nothing was solid enough to link me to his ultimate absolution of self. Still, I spent that night quietly drinking cheap wine and pondering my place, Robyn's place, in the order of events leading, within Sean's mind, to the taking of his own life. I know now, as I knew then, that if Robyn had found someway to love him, he would still be alive... but no, that's wrong too. He would have killed himself anyway in despair over Robyn breaking up with him, which she eventually would have. Or something like that. Or maybe not. Of course. Of course not. The shit. Fuck him.
I made a collage that same evening using several photos, one of which was of Sean playing guitar on a mutual friend's porch. In that photo he doesn't look like a person that would kill himself. His disease isn't visible. Within his life, but not... not in that photograph. Over the collage I scrawled the words:
ÂHis name was Sean. He was a suicide. I didn't like him.'
As a friend from Cincy said somewhat recently & vehemently, "What a great fucking eulogy, you fucking shithead.."
Things die.... & many things more have died within the context of this last century than in the last 5 million years. Things, entire specie lines, die like never before, excluding the 5 previous mass extinctions that have occurred on this planet. This... is the exact center of the sixth. 100 species go extinct, on average, every day. Mostly due to the clearcutting of rainforest or sub-rainforest.... as such are found within the Pacific Northwest. Our home.
On april 12, 2002, a woman I had never met found her own particular conclusion. Her name was Beth O'Brien. She was 22 yrs old.
The Eagle Creek campaign has been in the periphery of my life for over two years, due mostly to the involvement of a few close friends in the Cascadia Forest Alliance. I myself was never involved nor was I ever tempted to become involved simply because of my ongoing philosophical allergy... nearly visceral aversion... to investing myself in mainstream or activist politics.
But I watched, watched with fascination, the slow unfolding of that campaign. I have visited Eagle Creek on multiple occasions, explored the terrain, talked with the activists, attended several meetings. My friends kept me up to date on everything, the idiot intra-politics, the successes, the setbacks, the exact technical details of the direct action maneuvers.... I have spent a good amount of time among these activist & others over the years & have found something, nearly always, in the fashion of the activist mindset that I cannot push myself past: A certain amalgamation of dogmatism & fervor. Two states of the human mind that I have always distrusted, disliked, despised... but that is as it is. What can be done? If anything, I understand the necessity of the ends if not the atmosphere of the means. So I was not involved but still, I felt a certain kinship with the entire ordeal.
& in early April, when the sale was cancelled, I felt a great joy for those people & for the forest, that ancient chunk of biosystem. They had won an important victory. The unpopular nature of the sale had finally affected those at the higher levels of our state government, due solely to the efforts of these activist & most importantly, their consistent garnering of mass media coverage.....
& three days later, at some point in the afternoon, Beth O'Brien fell 150 ft to the forest floor, dying nearly instantly....
I remember my friend telling me about how he had talked to Beth on the morning of her death. It was just another day. She had complained about her allergies bothering her and I know that sticks with him, with both of us... How the mundane details of our lives ride us to our end....It's always just another day...
She had trouble prussicing up to the tree-sit. It had been a while since she had climbed & she wasn't experienced to begin with but she eventually made it up & was trying to get down a nightmarishly rickety rope ladder to the second platform & her death was in the details: she didn't have a safety on. Below her, an activist still on the line was considering telling her to wait up... To just hold on... That he'd try to help her... Just.....
But then she slipped past him.
Several weeks ago, I met her boyfriend in passing. This young man was just laying, despondently, in the corner of this house where I was visiting some friends. It wasn't until later that I would find out that this was Beth's boyfriend. He came out with a couple of us when we stepped onto the front porch to smoke some cigarettes. I remember his laughter as not being quite whole...skewed somehow....empty. The laughter, I suppose, of someone with heavier things on their mind than the simple conversation we were having...
When someone in this small community perishes, it moves you infinitely closer to the ones around you. The night I heard of her death, I was struck by two things....The irony of the timing of the cancellation of the sale & of her death. My friend & I drunkenly proposed, one afternoon soon after, that it seemed something had demanded sacrifice, sacrifice in exchange for the salvation of that parcel of forest. I do not believe in demons, but sometimes.... Sometimes I can almost imagine some thing. Something not quite animal, not quite energy, not quite dead yet not alive. Something out of my childhood dreamscapes. Something that creeps low to the earth... however. Whatever.
But mostly, I was struck by how fiercely I loved those that I loved. How earnestly I urged Debbie to be safe when she left for work that evening. How I myself rode my bike with a bit more caution. How I considered the exact shape of a friend's death would fit into my life. How terribly empty the bed would be without the warmth of another & ultimately, how this particular existence, this is our singular possession.
Things die. I accept this like I accept the sky & the stars, the radioactive inferno of our sun & the flag-ridden body of the moon. Death punctuates every life, I comprehend this but I do not love it: My love is for this world, this stupid & beautiful planet, this gorgeous yet tortured knockabout of Being....
I open the apartment door and look down the stairs to Debbie.... "What, baby?" I ask, puzzled at her sadness...
"I gotta do this thing. I gotta..." She tells me that she's just passed a freshly killed cat on the corner of 35th & Main. She wants... has... to move its corpse from the middle of the road before any other cars run over it. She can't stand the thought of any further desecration. Of someone finding their cat completely mangled. Of the corpse being further pounded into the road....
I go with her, after stuffing a couple of plastic garbage bags in the pockets of my raincoat. We ride thru the warm rain, not talking.
We roll up by the dead animal. I can see its soft grey fur moving wetly in the wind. There is no blood, at least not that I can see in the dim light. It could almost be alive but no.... No.
A car is coming. I quickly pull out the bags & use them to handle the animal. Its strange... The weight of something dead. It's body isn't stiff yet, still warm & I'm thinking of the subtle cues that separate death from life. I'm thinking of how I'm standing here in this darkened street with a broken bundle of muscles & nerves in my plastic covered hands & how this creature is almost here, almost whole.... but isn't. Whatever it was is gone. The mind of it slipped. Ceased. Silent.
I deposit the body in the grass at the side of the road & the car passes us & for a moment, I'm furious, thinking: You evil machines... you've fucking killed another of us.
Another cat emerges from the shadows & sniffs at the corpse. "Does it think of it as food or friend, you wonder?" ask debbie. "Who knows?" I say. Debbie reaches down & touches the cat, the dead one, barely, softly... "I hope whoever owns it, finds it." she says.
As we climb back on our machines, I think about this....
"No one owns it now." I tell her.
