Broken Land Research I

Meg Campbell

As if to say, “Oh you glorious figure!” I stop in Tuba City to buy ice for the corpse. It is warm, and the sun is doing a September sort of thing. The rays are single pane and not totally see through because of the scratches in the glass. This makes for more glint, more sparkle. I hate fall, but I enjoy this particular characteristic. That, and the histrionic display of color that happens before everything dies all at once. I adorn the aforementioned “glorious figure” with cold diamonds colliding quite shining blue in the extinguishing shimmer of summer.
          I feel a sort of, shall we say, unmistakable elation at having taken the time to take care of this very small corpse. Carefully, I put her in a tupperware. Carefully, evenly, I fill the cooler. Carefully, I tie it all together like a present, so there are no spills. And very carefully, I place the present in the bed of the truck.
          Since this is a situation that requires more driving, I drive away from the Safeway. I do what everyone else does. I put on music. I sing some words. I place my sunglasses on my face. I take off a layer. I think about this feeling of elation. And then I must pull over to look up the word. I want to know its origins. The feeling is like effervescence. A soda spring in the desert. I look up for a moment at a desert world. I find that the word elate comes from the Latin word elatus. Which means raised. A past participle, it came from the verb efferre, which in turn came from from ferre, meaning to bear, the prefix e from the prefix ex. So, one exits burden. Is raised. Is lighter. I am bubbling up out of the bench seat because I now have something to bear. Something to take care of. I press my hand against the wooden box full of ashes next to me. A memory, like a sweet sweet rope, pulls me back towards a time where I am not driving around with small corpses.
          They are like my little gods. I am driving around with small gods.
          I continue on. The earth flashes white. Flashes red. Flashes white again. I get closer and closer to a place. Gold collar of hills buttoned to distance. I arrive at the sea. Our great cloud harvester. I swim. I bring one god ice. I bring the other inside.



In a not-so-distant past I am questioning a lot of things.
          I am in possession of a genuine curiosity about why I am here on the planet.
          I really feel the question in my two hands. And I am walking around with it, which makes me feel a little like the flame of a candle.
          In a not-so-distant past I am spending time in a high country in a good house where birds hitting windows is a sort of regular punctuation.
          In a not-so-distant past I am sleeping and a bird hits the window at dawn, and when I look up they are attached to the window screen with their talons and upright, looking straight into my eyes. I wonder what it looks like for me to come into focus. Do you know what it’s like to make eye contact with a wild bird? Some kind of fleeting secret is shared.
          They fly away.
          I fall back asleep.
          It all feels like a dream I’m forgetting until I am driving down from a “love lake” and see a beige bird flying outside my window. Bird lands on telephone pole in a recognizable fashion. Rope pulls me back to morning.



Into the rectangle of light I descend looking up hurried words strewn together: “beige-spotted woodpecker-like-bird Colorado” and my screen is populated with northern flickers. Females to be more specific. I think about the flicker from the morning. I stay with her a little longer. I am tied in again. Tethered.
          In the subsequent mornings I wait for the flicker, the percussion of her beak against the house. And then I get out of bed and make coffee.

In a slightly more, but still not-so-very-distant past, it is February and the rain is swallowing everything. I am about to lose my outline. Which is to say, I am sitting on the floor of my bedroom, holding the body of my dog.
The power goes out and for days there is only candle light.



          Slack tide.
          In between.
          Bardo?
          Dispersal.
          Blink blink.
          I flicker like I am about to go out.



I was born in November, so I am accustomed to losing. But it isn’t until I lose the dog that I realize loving something outside of me is a non-negotiable for remaining. It feels like I am walking around godless. My own land inside of me, broken.
          I was born in November so I am accustomed to waiting.
          For three weeks, I spend my mornings waiting for the flicker. And then I get out of bed. I make my coffee. I’ve said this already. I sit on a front porch and I watch her and the rest of them move about. I take photos of them through my binoculars. I am interested in the other sorts of sounds they make. My ears attune to them when I am away from the house. I compare the color of their underwings to the color of a ripe hachiya. Flash of hachiya. Flash of hachiya. Or a vibrancy the hills make notions towards as the sun goes down behind them. This is a way I feel not alone. I have the thought, I wish I could take her with me.
          It is my last full day at this place in a high country. As in, tomorrow night I am driving away. I am feeding the horses, and generally checking on things. I realize it has been a day or two since I filled the silver water trough in the pasture, so I walk over and look in. A female flicker is floating face down in the water. She has drowned. This is confusing to me. I can’t decide if I am still tied in. I remove her from the water. I hold her under an afternoon sky that could release at any moment. I bring her inside. I don’t know what else to do so I place her gently in the freezer. I make all kinds of ice. And the next night, I take her with me.



It is a full moon and I am driving through a land that some people are trying to break and some people are trying to hold together. The people that are trying to break it are handing broken pieces of it to the people that are trying to hold it together.
          It is a full moon and I am feeling the own earth of myself.
          It is a full moon and I am driving some kind of forward, with one god in ashes and one god on ice.
          It is a full moon and I am still, somehow, unmistakably, tied in.

Meg Campbell resides in a small unnamed coastal town in Northern California. Her work has previously appeared in Terrain.org. She has completed her MFA at University of California Davis. When not writing: surfing, pedaling, conversing with small gods and good humans.

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