Post Mortem

Its chest was hollowed out, as if the tiny heart had detonated beneath oily feathers the color of February slush. Like a window absentmindedly left open after a crime, the cavity revealed a portentous tableaux of sticky, coagulating crimson mush.

It had dropped from a branch of a springtime tree tentatively receiving its leaves. It smacked the grey cement directly ahead of my right foot on the Rickreall Creek trail, a perfectly timed landing at the toe of my athletic shoe. I gasped. I stopped. Two boys on bikes swerved around me from behind as they continued bragging and pedaling.

The bird lay on its left side, scaly feet scrunched up like an old woman’s arthritic talons. The skittering beat had ceased in its chest, but seemed to have transferred to mine. I stood there staring at it, catching my breath. The way it had fallen, so decisively in the center of my path, seemed like an avian exclamation point, or a period hitting the pavement. Pay attention, it shouted in silence. Why the chest? Had it been pecked away? Had this bird flown into a jutting branch, impaling its aorta? It appeared carved out, surgically. How does a bird die like this?

Rickreall Creek begins on Laurel Mountain in the Coast Range in Western Oregon, and flows through the Willamette Valley to the Willamette River, west of Salem. It passes through rural Rickreall, and the small town of Dallas, which has organized itself around the creek and paved a genteel recreational trail. In the summertime, young families wade the creek like it’s their small, personal river. Babies in diapers are held by ankle-deep mothers wearing one-piece swimsuits, who yell out caution to the older kids, neck-deep and half-naked between the rocks and rushing stream. 

The irony of Rickreall Creek in Dallas, Oregon, is that it is a central showpiece of natural flow, a tangible representation of movement and change in a town that relishes its predictably static touchstones: dependable rain, homogeneity, trucks, bars, churches, landscaping, yard sales. In order to endure the sameness, I go to the flow. I walk the creek trail through town most days, confronting the humility of water. Obstacles? Go around. Shapeshift. Be an element of flexibility.

The bipolarity of Dallas isn’t entirely its own fault. It’s situated in the Willamette Valley, which has two distinct seasons: fallwinter and springsummer. One is a dormant, wet, underground season, oppressively short on daylight; the other is the glorious growing season, with abundant sunshine and flora, and the fertility of nearby farms. Winter makes the residents rude, guarded, and hurried. Summer makes them chatty, athletic, kinder.

I arrived in Dallas in December. Easy to remember because they both start with a D, as in dreary, and vitamin D. I arrived with my right arm fortified in a pungent plaster cast, the result of ten hours, the preceding August, spent in a hospital ER in San Diego. The orthopedic resident on-duty pulled the three broken wrist bones into place and hoped for the best. Without medical insurance, you convince the attending doctors that a bill for surgery and hospital stay is more painful than the injury itself, and take the potentially cheaper option. He called my decision “the conservative approach.”

At the sink bank in the women’s restroom at the San Diego airport, I consciously sacrificed my wrist to save my head as I slipped on the floor and launched forward toward the granite. When I got off the floor, the right hand limply dangled from the wrist. I washed it anyway. I hurried through security to catch my connecting flight home to Tucson, until throbbing pain cut through shock. I requested a medic from a TSA agent. An ambulance was called. A fresh line of demarcation suddenly appeared in my life: before the wrist/after the wrist.

A functional dominant hand keeps you employed in your physically demanding job. Employment keeps your extended stay hotel bill up to date. Your extended stay hotel room is a savvy alternative to Tucson’s short-term rental market. Now I had no use of my dominant hand, and no employment. Savings leaked incrementally from my bank account. The cast stayed on my arm while my Medicaid application was stuck in eternal purgatory. For over four months, my arm atrophied in the cast.

A lifelong friend offered me a room in her home in Dallas, in a state with better-than-Arizona public healthcare. I arrived during the Pacific Northwest’s unrelenting drenching season, after a fourteen hundred mile drive through the length of California on I-5. 

From metro Phoenix through greater Los Angeles and up into the Central Valley, my optimism remained neutral. Saguaros disappeared, and accident law firms and plastic surgery clinics filled the billboards. A gas stop on Reservation land in Kern County featured shirts turning flannel, pickup trucks becoming more American, and the sky hazing with manure mist.

Tucson -- with its vivid murals, purple-pink prickly pears, the drifting scent of carne asada, shadowy Santa Catalina mountain peaks, painted adobe, and Old West ethos – had finally faded from view. I looked at my face in the car’s mirror. My mood was deepening into the plum shade of my hoodie. As I made my way northwest, my chest heavied and ached. An ache for 350 days of sunshine. An ache for 70 short miles to Mexico. My body’s visceral GPS repeated “Recalculating!” with increased alarm. I willfully ignored it. I filled the Rav4’s tank, bought an iced tea and a bag of Bugles. I ate them off the fingertips of my left hand, and drove north.

Google search: What is the meaning of a dead bird falling in your path?

“End of a cycle: Many traditions view a dead bird as a sign that an old habit, phase, or relationship has run its course and needs to be released.

Wake-up call: A bird dropping directly in front of you acts as a stark interpretation, suggesting you may be ignoring a vital issue or moving too fast in life.

Transformation: As old energies fade away, the space left behind allows for new beginnings and personal growth.”

The bird lay where it fell, most likely to be squashed in repose by subsequent teenagers on bikes, until a stew of blood, feathers, and little organs became a thin veneer over the concrete, diluted by April rain. I did not pick up the bird or try to revive it. I didn’t even move it to the grass, or under the tree. I just walked away. I don’t know why. The bird buried itself in my psyche.

The trail ended in a suburban neighborhood, where my count of fifth wheels parked in pressure-washed driveways averaged 6/10. Lawns were edged with OCD precision. Lavender swayed in the landscaping next to awakening flowers and, occasionally, a Dr. Seussian conifer tree. I strode into a welcome pocket of sun as the sidewalk inclined. It felt good to be swinging my arms again – both of them – without the cast making me hot and unbalanced. I was free again, healed, but now financially stuck in place.  A fish out of water, an artifact encased in a natural history museum. A suspended relic of my prior life, envious of the gliding, darting fish I used to be. A fish swimming in the Sonoran desert.

A glint of bright yellow against black caught my eye. In a neighbor’s Talavera bird bath, a petite goldfinch! An intact chest and a heart that playfully levitated it to the bowl, where it shared flickering gulps with a few bumblebees. Golden, like sunshine. Free, like a stream.

Google search: What does it mean to unexpectedly see a goldfinch?