Tonic of Wldness

“We need the tonic of wildness,” Thoreau says, and I received a double dose not too long ago.

I was coming home from work and turning onto my street, where I live on a small square of property located in the small square of a neighborhood touched on all sides by the small squares of other neighborhoods which are themselves contiguous with the small squares of other neighborhoods—all of which are encompassed by the square of a small city.  In my small square of a neighborhood, we all groom and landscape our yards.  We all put out seasonal decorations.  We all keep our houses in good repair and make them attractive—bowerbirds not just feathering our nests but adorning them, too.  We all are friendly.  We are good neighbors in a tidy, tucked, fob pocket of a neighborhood.

As I approached my driveway, a deer, a six point-antlered stag, dashed across my neighbor’s front yard, stopped on my driveway, and stared at my house.  He stuttered his feet slightly, looked at me as I sat in my idling pickup at the foot of the driveway, then looked back at the house, disquieted, it seemed to me, at being half enclosed in the semi-square L formed by the house and garage, as if my house were an unanticipated obstacle in his intended route, as if it stood between him and the where he desired to be, an unhurdlable here hindering his arrival at there. 

He stared.  I watched, absorbed, taken from myself, made a secret sharer.  And in the tight knot of my gazing, in the compressed energy of my attention, I felt myself receding, a mere armature of my looking, all but undone, precariously present, little more than a sound check, a bit of static, an trace, a dwindled witness of something—I don’t know what exactly, or even approximately, but I knew there was something to know—something crucially beautiful and essentially true.  I wanted the house and garage to evaporate, to crumble to the ground, to go up in smoke, to be spun away in a tornado, to be out of his way.

But he was wiser.  Glimpsing the path around the garage, he trotted over, stopped, then bolted away, a sculptural presence suddenly released into a kinesthetic burst, a conjuration of muscled grace, an uncoiled spondee of strength, a strength that moved the prophet Habkkuk to implore God for “deer’s feet” to traverse and surmount the “high hills” of his life.  I imagined the stag crossing my backyard, out of my neighborhood and into the next, and the next’s next, then through the deserted fairgrounds, then beyond the limits of the city, through the corn fields, until entering, ungridded finally, unexposed at last, the forest depths.

His neighborhood.  To watch us as we sometime or other pass through, and struggle to get our bearings, and, maybe, right ourselves.