"Do you think there's a dead body down there?"

Two weeks ago it was my turn to drive my son and his friend up the Olympic Peninsula to the tiny town where they volunteer at an Aero Museum.  I brought my own stalwart friend, Paul, who was willing to leave the house in the dark, before seven o'clock on a cold winter Sunday morning.  After we dropped off the youngsters at the museum, Paul and I had breakfast in my favorite coffee shop, right on the water, and then decided on a walk.  

We strolled along the beach a mile or so.  It was windy along the water, and the stinky cloud from the paper mill billowed horizontally.  We were grateful when the trail curved inland, out of the harsh wind.  We walked another mile up toward the highway.  Last month I had hiked that same path with my older son when he was home for the holiday break, and it seemed then that the trail ended at that main drag.  But we discovered this time that it does not.  The trail scoots along next to the road briefly, then curves under it and farther into the woods.  We chatted with a nice couple coming from the other direction and learned that the trial actually extends nearly to the other end of the peninsula.  Well then!  Only another four miles!  

As we walked the bit along the highway, I felt vulnerable, and thought about how easily a life could be extinguished here.  The guardrail is low, and as the cars roared along, I recalled an especially gruesome scene from Wolf Hall, which I'd been reading.  In this book, people drop dead or are burned at the stake or disemboweled or hung or beheaded on a somewhat regular basis.  In our ordinary lives, in this post-penicillin world, death often seems an extraordinary event.  I suspect that for most of human history, and for many, many peoples even now, death was and is a more ordinary, normal.  No more welcome than it is for us, but not, perhaps, as unexpected.  As we walked along, we talked about death, the illusion that we can avoid or fend off the end, pausing in our conversation when the traffic was too loud for us to hear each other.  I was relieved when we were far enough into the woods to hear quiet and birds again.

Along the way we passed a horse stable and then slowly caught up with a group of middle-aged women out riding.  After some friendly chatter, they moved aside to let us by.  But later the trail seemed end at a road.  The riders emerged from the woods shortly after, and gave us directions.  The gal in the lead told us that her horse had been anxious to keep up with us, which, naturally, we found delightful.  

As we approached the end of the trail we heard a dog barking in a yard up the hill.  "Is that dog loose?  Is it going to eat me?"    

"Yes.  That's why they keep the dog, Nicole.  To eat you."  

Finally at the trail head, I ducked into the bathroom (convenient!).  Through the wall, I could hear Paul talking with folks outside who obviously had a dog.  "Is that the dog that's going to eat me?" I hollered.  Laughter.  Later on the trail I met that dog, about the size of a house cat, and who, evidently, "thinks he's Napoleon."

A twelve-mile walk is basically a hike without any supplies.  And, hello?  Dumb.  I am fit, but by mile eight I was feeling lightheaded and thinking about lunch.  And water.  And my feet were hurting.  And my hips and knees, too.  

At one point, Paul said, "Only three more miles."  

"What? Where are you seeing the miles that you keep calling out?"

He stopped, turned around, and pointed at a post with a sign.  Large and obvious.  And I hadn't seen.

"You're like Robert Scott, in the Antarctic, who had tunnel vision right at the end," he said.

"But... how do we know about that?  Did he record it in a journal and then drop dead?"

"Yup."

Not sure about tunnel vision, but I know I wasn't seeing much more than the ground in front of my feet, and I was thinking only step, step, step, ow-my-knee, ow-my-hip, step, step, step. As soon as I became aware of my own thoughts, or, non-thinking, as it were, I remembered a fine short story by Wendell Berry, about a fella returning from the war, walking the road from the train (or perhaps bus) station, through farm country, his homeland.  The rhythm of the text evokes the rhythm of a long walk.  And then the antarctic business reminded me of an essay by Annie Dillard — although that one discusses an expedition to the North Pole, not the South.  And then I thought of a book.  

"Have you ever read Voyage of the Narwhal?"  I tried to describe the expedition which had came to mind, and a scene where the body of a woman is preserved for a museum (gross!) but, again, I was so tired I couldn't latch on to the right words, or even decide which parts of the story were relevant.  My thoughts seemed slippery, evasive, wandering from water (ow-my-knee) to books (ow-my-hip) to food (ow-my-knee).  

We were on the stretch of path that led out of the woods right up to the highway.  There was a vehicle parked smack in the middle of the trail, which seemed odd.

Then, as we approached the underpass we saw a police car with lights flashing, again, almost on the trail.  There were men milling about, and the trail was taped off.  

"Do you think there's a dead body down there?"  It just popped out of my mouth, surprised me, and I felt foolish for having said it.

"No.  Unlikely."  

Paul kept walking, but I couldn't make myself follow.  

"We have to get through," Paul said.  This has only happened to me one other time in my life, when my head is saying walk, you big silly but my feet, so, so far below down there on the ground, will not go.  I wasn't aware of being afraid, but a stillness had settled in me.  

The men under the bridge waved us away, indicating that we should cross over on the road, which we did.  But we still had to pass through the taped off area on the other side of the underpass to travel that bit of trail along the highway, before the path turned down to the water.  There were two more police cars along the way, but none of the men were in uniform.

And, yes, there was a body.  Feet in clean white socks were poking out from under a blanket, just like the Wicked Witch of the West, except that one leg bent at an odd angle.  It was hard to see, and hard to not look.  

I am not a big TV or movie person, but it seems like you can't turn on the boob tube and not see an ostensibly dead person.  I have a very low tolerance for violence and gore onscreen.  My boys think I'm ridiculous; I mute the sound if I'm alone, and if not, I totally close my eyes.  ("Can I look now?")  But nothing I have seen on film has evoked the feeling I had walking past that corpse.  I felt tearful, weepy, in a particular way that I have never felt as an adult.  There was something familiar but distantly, distantly, about the tears, and it was several moments before I could identify the emotion.  When we are children, and the world is large and frightening, unraveling, fragile, desperately wrong and unfixable — those were the tears that threatened.  

A tall gentleman walked along beside us a moment, directing us, moving the tape aside for us, and he said something about how we might want to turn our gaze away from the scene.  His words seemed a little ridiculous, frankly, but the fact that he spoke, his kindness, the timbre of his voice, his slightly southern accent, were comforting to me. 

And then we were two miles from the car.  We talked about lunch and about the scene we'd just witnessed, and agreed that whining about being hungry would be poor form.

The last mile, along the beach, was much more pleasant than it had been earlier.  The wind had died down.  I noticed that the billowing clouds from the paper mill were ascending directly upward now, rather than horizontally. 

"Well. The weather's improved," Paul said. "When we started out, I was kinda thinkin' this might have been a mistake."

"I'm still kinda thinkin' this might have been a mistake."

"Well, yeah. We walked too far, we didn't bring provisions, and we saw dead bodies."

"We only saw one dead body."

"So far."

We agreed that it had been an odd day.  

Our "walk" had taken up so much time, we only had an hour before we had to fetch the kids.  We went to a Thai restaurant — "We ate so quickly the plates were still warm when we left!"  I had to concentrate, focus, to hold myself back, to not shovel the food into my mouth.  It crossed my mind that the only other times in my life that I have felt so desperate for a meal were the days I gave birth, and I was amused at how cliche that seemed, how scripted.  But also: how curious.  

Then we were off to the museum, quickety-snip.
      
When we drove out of town and past the scene, we saw a tow truck back up to a red sports car.  And the police cars were still there, hours later.  The whole business was disorienting.  The milling about puzzled me.  Those men had been standing around, as if waiting, but not looking at each other, not looking at the body, not looking at us.  The white socks.

Even though my boys are grown and nearly-grown, I still was so very grateful that they didn't have to see that.  I don't think of myself as especially overprotective, and we sometimes joke around here that I didn't get the "helicopter parent" memo, but still — it was an unbidden, strange impulse, I kept thinking it, feeling it, for days: "Thank the gods the boys did not see."   

I thought about the family, the lives that were about to be irrevocably changed.  

Later we learned that it had been a suicide.  One of my former students recently survived a 25-foot fall from a theater lighting grid.  Leaping 22-feet off a bridge seems a pretty risky strategy for someone who is so very desperate for release from this life, so desperate that he would write "DNR," do not resuscitate, on his body.  

For the next fews day I felt disoriented, perhaps mostly from sheer exhaustion.  But on the whole, I recovered from my shock, that encounter with death, more quickly than I might have as a younger woman.  Middle age is funny that way.  We are more aware that one day it will be our turn, but also able to see death, such a tragic death, and feel deeply the sadness, incomprehensibility, and realize: This is someone else's tragedy.  It is not my tragedy.  Not this day. 

We walked past death that day, close by, felt so keenly it's proximity.  And we keep walking.