Colombian Hummingbird
Space is defining of who we are in any given moment. A bird falls on the ground in front of you and there is death not life. We become a part of what we see. This is why fancy new hospital wards have art in them now—it’s not because they want to support artists or because they are trying to modernize their look—although that is a plus—it’s because there is research and data that states aesthetics matters, aesthetics has something to do with keeping people alive.
There is a route I typically walk when I go to visit the house I grew up in. The walk takes about an hour and a half and most of it follows meandering, dirt roads along rivers and ponds. Hidden drive ways and trees cover once modest houses. But, a couple miles of the walk takes place on busier passageways or sections of road representative of societies destruction rather than the nature and preservation the area boasts.
About a mile from my house there is a maximum security women’s prison—outsiders know it as the prison Amy Fisher started her sentence, insiders know it as the massive city of lights they drive by at night with curiosity and fear of the unknown. The walk goes just up to the edge of the prison and turns right onto a road called Beaver Damn which is exactly what you think it would be—a road that leads to beaver built dams.
When I was a little girl the start of the road was marked by an old fashioned barn amidst a tall field of wild flowers in summer heat. Growing up it was a strange juxtaposition seeing the barn, a symbol of the once prominent country town, across the street from the indestructible and domineering prison—nature vs. man, life vs. death, warm vs. cold, desire vs. fear.
The barn isn’t there anymore but before the bull dozers came it was a refuge of sorts. We called it Cheese Heaven. You see, when I was young my dad believed in using live traps to catch the mice that got into the house—he couldn’t handle the visible death that came with snap traps so he used little cages with trap doors. He taught us that mice deserved to live too. He taught us that death wasn’t in him. Saturday’s and Sundays he’d get me to come with him to free the mice. We couldn’t just let them out in the yard, so we drove them down to that barn across from the prison and each time we let them out he’d say — look at em go — and we’d watch them scurry through fields of Dandelions and Queen Anne’s Lace into the old wooden structure. I’d ask if he thought they’d be okay and he’d assure me they would — iI’s heaven, he’d say, they find all their old friends and then sit around chomping on cheese.
In winter the flowers weren’t there but the barn was and the freedom was and we made up stories about the mice finding their parents in there—living in luxury—floating on mice lily pads and rubbing their fat bellies. When I was old enough, I told my dad there wasn’t any cheese but he debunked my theory and told me he put some there—like dads do—like parents do—like the world does—there’s always cheese they say.
Well, now twenty years later that barn, that mouse heaven is a water plant and it is brick not wood and there are no flowers and there is no field there is only tar leading up to a metal door and pipes that lead to somewhere we aren’t allowed to see. It mimics the prison almost— unbreakable, unlivable, undreamt. My dad sets a different kind of trap now.. Somewhere along the line he stopped believing mice should live. He started setting peanut butter traps—it’s a DIY thing. You take a metal rod and stick it through the mouth of a soda can and then you puncture a hole on the bottom of said can so the can slides and spins along the metal pole—you lay the pole over a large plaster bucket with water in the bottom. The last step is smearing the can with a spoonful of peanut butter. Then you wait. If something living, some kind of walker, tries to scurry across the pole to get to the can, which they do, it will fall into the water. Unable to climb out and with nothing to grab onto—they screech and splash until they no longer can and then they go under looking at the peanut butter they so wanted above. It was easier to handle for my dad because you catch multiple mice in one place and you don’t have to look. You just walk over with the lid in hand, cover it up and carry the bodies out to dump into the woods. At least their bodies aren’t crushed in the back of garbage trucks. The woods is better. The woods is where they are supposed to be.
So now I walk this walk and when I get to that corner of beaver damn, where the barn once was, there is no life left—no Dandelions or Queen Anne’s Lace, no whimsical fields, no ivy growing through the cracks of wood. Just a prison and a water plant that smells like toilet water. There is nothing there that reminds me of my dad anymore. There is no imaginative access to mice lily pads or cheese heaven. So, I am left to think about what is—the trapping and the killing. My mental state shifts. Every time a car passes I feel a negative energy like they might stop and bother me. I think about that girl on the news that morning who went running without her father somewhere out in Howard beach, along the marshes, and how that man raped her and killed her and left her in the swampy parts. I think about the highway that runs above and how there might be people in the cars passing who do bad things—who want to hurt me—who have hurt someone. I think about the silence and how it isn’t a country silence, it’s a deadly silence and then all of a sudden I get past the water plant and the prison is outside my purview, the looming highway is behind me and the dirt part of the road is in sight again—my footsteps make that familiar noise. I see wild flowers, I hear the river—the sound of crickets and tree frogs has overpowered the cars. None of the fear is there anymore, none of the death is there anymore. I am free again—pulling the honey suckle through my nose— inhaling the sun. Later, when I am home again, there will be an unrecognizable second, when I am cleaning dishes or taking off my clothes for a bath, and in that second I will wonder about the mice, the inmates and the girl who got taken when she thought she was in nature.
Space is defining of who we are in any given moment but it is us who create that space and therefore our responsibility to change it. We cannot just walk into the woods along the river to escape—we must stay in the spaces that make us uncomfortable—we must see the bird, the mice, the people and recognize that they are fallen, drowned, trapped because we built the tower they fell from, the bucket that drowned them and the cage that holds them and we set them up with purpose on each occasion. This does not mean we have power it means we lack responsibility. Power without responsibility is murder. We are all technically murderers so why are only some of us behind bars.
Transmissions Circa 2019
