In his Opinion extracting the teeth of the Civil Rights Act, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts pointed out that times have changed since the Act was passed in 1964. "That was then and this is now," he all but said.
Marc and I went to the local dump yesterday, to deposit the pool cover that was saturated with the smell of carrion. An unsuspecting fawn had no doubt stepped en pointe onto the edge of the blue bubble plastic, gingerly, but not gingerly enough to pull back when the cover gave way, yet delicately enough that we failed to hear the splash and thrash which usually brings us dashing out of bed to the rescue. Although the past two days had been hot, we had left the pool covered, allowing it warm up a bit after the surprise of a rare, early summer storm that drizzled and chilled us for a good three to four days. I was filling my watering can at the rain harvesting tanks in order to soak some plants before the scorch of an anticipated, week-long heat wave, when I noticed two of our calico cats sitting at the edge of the pool, looking at the blue plastic as if ready to pounce on a trapped, errant lizard. Then I noticed the bulge under the cover, the odor from which I was unable to detect until I lifted up the edge and saw a deer's hind leg.
I called for Marc, and began reeling back the cover. The fawn, from one of two families that have been hanging around our house, still had its spots. Its mouth was open as if screaming for help. If we had heard it, we would have helped. Instead, we lifted it out of the water onto a rubber pond liner, and put it in the skip loader on the tractor. Marc took it to the back and dragged it up the hill a bit, so it could at least nourish some of the other wildlife.
The night before, I had dipped in the shallow end of the pool, pulling the cover back only far enough to permit me to do a few leg kicks from the edge. I looked down the length of the pool, contemplated opening it up to swim, and settled for pool aerobics instead. I saw no bulge; either the deer wasn't there, or it hadn't yet risen to the surface. I looked up stages of carcass decomposition on the internet, and concluded it had been in the pool more than a day.
Later, when we unreeled the plastic to cover the pool for the night, we realized it smelled strongly of dead deer in the second stage of decomposition. We folded it, removed it, and Marc later dragged it down the driveway to the gate. In the morning, we loaded it into the bed of the truck and drove the three miles or so to the dump. I went along to look for materials to use in my current project: deer proofing discrete areas of our yard, so we don't have to fence in the whole yard and deprive the deer of access to water in our pool and small pond. I suppose it would make sense to just build a fence and let the deer find the stock pond a quarter mile away.
I hadn't been to the dump in years. Marc and I had acquiesced--an outgrowth of a couple of surgeries to deal with my creeping arthritis--to a certain division of labor in our household which freed me from some of the heavier chores, such as hefting loads of scrap wood, metal and broken patio umbrellas out of the back of the pickup truck onto the junk heap at the dump, or engaging in political debates with Bill, the aging conservative dump manager. I had remembered Bill as a stocky, grizzled redneck type with ruddy cheeks, gruff manner and a sun-bleached glaze of right-wing judgment in his blue eyes. Marc's reports of his incendiary tirades, trading anti-liberal invective for pots of Texas chenille cactus hacked from our oversized plants, had discouraged me from helping Marc discard our unwanted junk, even after my hip had fully healed and I was better able than ever to balance, lift and heft. When I returned with Marc, Bill had traded grizzled for wizened, redneck for mountain man, and ruddy cheeks for a steel gray, straggly, foot-long beard that tapered off into two points.
He no longer looked judgmental, but had replaced the look with caustic taunts. He started with a double-edged compliment when I introduced myself.
"You're way prettier than Marc said you were," he said jovially through the passenger-side window.
"Oh well, at least he's honest," I said, surprising myself with my own double-edged retort. I didn't know exactly what I meant by the remark or where I might go with it, but Bill found a direction.
"No, he can't be honest," he said. "He's an Obama supporter."
I muttered something like, "Honesty goes with that territory," as I got out of the truck. Bill started pacing a bit to rev up for the mini-rant that was to come.
"He's spending your tax dollars visiting some black house. Some 300 year old place or something like that." I assumed he was referring to the slave-trade house in Senegal which Obama had recently visited.
"That's a part of history," I suggested.
"Oh, yeah. Those people's history." He was self-righteously agitated, and seemed fully satisfied dividing history into "us" and "them." I let it drop.
Marc has been letting it drop since the interaction with Bill right around the time Marc's father died. Bill and a visitor to the dump were tossing verbal darts at Marc about Obama, making no effort to buffer the pointed racial barbs. They were two angry old men attacking a liberal for his support of a black president. Marc said as much, and it seemed Bill had calmed down a bit after that. We spent the rest of our visit talking about the possible uses for some wrought iron fencing Marc and I were hauling back to the truck from a perilous hill of discarded metal. As we got into the truck, we overheard Bill telling his friend that the sun was actually cooling, and it was known that at some point in the distant future the whole universe was going to explode anyway (...so we don't have to worry about global warming, now, do we?). We got back home before our thermometer had reached 110 degrees, the second day of an upward trend that would last at least four more days.
This is now. Let's deal with it productively, using current information, enlightened awareness, and all the adaptive skills we can muster. And let's listen for the sound of frantic thrashing in the middle of the night, and be attentive to the silent cries of those drowning, and watch for signs of disintegration, and attend to the problem in time.
