Beyond Desert Walls: Essays from Prison by Ken Lamberton

For three days, there was a dead mouse on the sidewalk near my garage. On that third day, yesterday, I came home in the middle of the afternoon. I went out and scooped the stiffened mouse onto a paper plate and took it inside. It sat on the counter as I did my come-home routines. Fed/watered the dog. Closed the blinds. Went to the bathroom. Turned on some music. The whole time, I thought about the mouse, dead on a plate on the counter. I thought about how a dead thing can't really harm anything. But we act like it does. We don't want to touch it or witness it or be around it. We don't want to bring it into the house and know that it's sitting there as plain as a mouse as we go about our routines of living.

I eventually sat down at the kitchen table with my rotting friend. I brought my nose up close and you can imagine the smell, I'm sure, if you ever smelled rotten potatoes or rancid roadkill. I examined the fur, trying to find lacerations, a reason for death. I thought about the setting of its death. Near the garage. A bird, I'm sure, had the mouse in its talons or beak. Dropped it to its internal bleeding death. I stroked the soft fur that was contaminated with still, white worms. They did not move or seem alive. Dead larvae? I wasn't sure. I'm still not sure. My favorite thing, though, was the mouse's belly. How it moved at every jab and poke of my index finger. How soft it felt. I felt it was full of blood. I stroked its small, almost non-existent ears. Its teeth, kind of buck-toothed, seemed like a metallic grey. I couldn't open its mouth. I didn't really try. Its tail was curved towards its body, coward-like. The eyes were closed, coward-like.

I did this yesterday, before I even began reading Lamberton's book Beyond Desert Walls. When I read the first chapter or essay, I was astounded at the coincidence. I read about roadkill and taxidermy and dead animals. And hours before, I was poking at a dead mouse, bringing it close to my nose. It might as well be my lips. Lamberton wrote,

Killing was my way of dealing with an environment I didn't understand, a brutal, arrogant reaction to its incomprehensible and awful strangeness. And because everything was strange, I killed over and over again. It was my first religion.

This made me think of Gessner's "gross contact". Experiencing nature through the unconventional. Experiencing nature through all the senses. Through rule-breaking. Through solitude. All of these elements, ironically, got him in trouble in his personal life. When I realized that these essays were from prison, I had expectations. From the selection of essays that I read, those expectations were not met. Although the essays we had to read for class were interesting, I didn't feel that prison played a major role in the writing.

I did like Lamberton's constant struggle with obtaining a parallel between his personal and professional life. By the end of the book, he proposes that his professional life is his personal life--that teaching isn't just a profession, but something that his life naturally insists upon. This is a feeling that I can relate to. How I would love for all my passions to turn out to be exactly what I can make a living from. It is important for the professional life and the personal life to become intimate. Lamberton craved intimacy with nature, in his own way. He writes,

I desired romance. Even more, I wanted the kind of relationship where reomantic chance encounters would be the interlocking strands of some new and profound ecological vision, where I wasn't a mere observer but a participant, where I was connected and my place made sense.

Not only did he want his placement as a teacher to make sense, but his placement as a naturalist or wildlife "interactor". There is that awful wall between humans and nature when human immerses their body into the natural landscape. It seems that whenever I walk into the forest, I must be very quiet and pause at every sound. Of course, I naturally do it so that I can pay closer attention to whatever I disturbed, but I also do it because I feel like the intruder. When people walk into the forest, they do it to be alone sometimes. Any sight or proof of civilization turns out to be a disappointment: a soda can, candy wrapper, a blazed or marked tree, footprints, etc. This leads to another interesting, but longer, excerpt that I really liked from this book.

Joseph Wood Krutch was right when he wrote: "When all the 'collecting,' photographing, and experimentation is taken into consideration--the best friend of the birds is often the one who pays no attention to them." First we cut down their trees. Then poison them with DDT and shoot them as pests and for sport. Today, more wise for the experience, we love them to death. Why is it that even the footprints we leave behind cause harm? Why must human culture always have an impact? And here I am, just as guilty as the developers and tourists. Checking birds off as if they were items on a shopping list. Teacher, bird watcher, writer--but still a consumer in the end. Seems I can't escape my own greedy human nature.

As amateur naturalists or nature enthusiasts, it is difficult to find our placement in nature. The things we love are the things we scare away. When you are observing a bird and the bird knows you are there, you are not observing the bird, per se, as a bird being a bird as if you are not there. You have changed the equation by adding yourself. The outcome will be different. The bird is going to be a bit more careful and wary with its actions since you are there. You're observing it be wary of you. Depending on the animal...you can also watch it want to destroy you.

Seems like a huge metaphor for love.