Big Strong Longing
This is a field that I pass by when I'm out for my walk. There's a place near where I live called Robert's Bank. You drive past farms to the end of a road, and park. There's a dyke that winds past marshland bordered by distant ocean to the south and fields like this one to the north.
I walked there a lot this summer. You can see why. Also, I just love walking and thinking and talking to myself. But yeah, it's the nature thing mostly that draws me. Outside.
I've always loved the natural world and felt a Big Strong Longing for it. I lived in a place called Paradise Valley for four years, a tiny valley just east of the Squamish Valley. I lived in the bush. It brought me alive in a very extreme way. I feel deeply in love with all of it.
When I was a kid, I loved animals. Every year for my birthday in May, I'd get a Bugcatcher™, a weird plastic bottle-type container with a fake plant in the centre of it, a removable plastic lid, and holes along the neck of the bottle. You know, so the bugs could breathe. I'd rip out the plastic plant and throw in grass and leaves and catch bugs, like grasshoppers, or beetles, and worms and I'd put 'em in there. And just look at them for a while. Sometimes a few days. Then I'd let them go. Here's a picture of one. The Bugcatcher, I mean.
This one day when I went for my walk along the dyke at Robert's Bank, it was really hot. It was early in the day, too. I had the day or took the day off (I can do that sometimes) and it was gorgeous out, so how can I not? Sometimes I think we owe it the world to do that. To get out and bear witness to the miraculousness of nature, to it's confounding beauty. To bring consciousness to it.
When I was a kid, I'd find animals and bring them home. Like baby birds who couldn't fly yet, or mice or frogs or snakes. "Can I keep him?" I'd always ask. My mother would always put up with it somehow, sigh and make some basic rules: "He has to stay in the shed in a box" or "Only for a few days then you have to let him go." I brought homes kittens, and stray cats and she was kind of amazing about it. I think my mom loves nature, too, just never talks about it that way.
So there I was on my walk on this hot day. I saw a baby garter snake. Every time I see a snake I try to pick it up. Yes, the garters will freak out and probably squirt stinky defense liquid on you, but it's not big deal. A little musky. Whatever.
Anyway, here's the baby garter snake.
We got along well.
I often take a little side path that veers off the dyke path and down toward the marshy area. I mean, it's a dry path, narrow and well-used. You can sometimes see horse shit along that path. It's full of scrub brush and wild flowers and wasps flying low to the ground. I took this path on this day--actually I passed it on the way out and took it on my way back. I remember there was no one around. It was really quiet. The path turned around a tall bush and as soon as I passed it, I saw him.
He was just sitting there in the middle of the path. This baby bunny. He wouldn't move at all. Like he was really scared. He was really tiny. It made me think that he must be just a few weeks old and he was probably just freaked out because it was his first time seeing a person or something. I got closer to him.
So cute, right? Look at those ears!
I loved him right away. I wondered what to do. I hoped he was okay. I decided to pick him up.
You can see how small he is.
As I held him in my hand, I could suddenly feel all the things I felt when I was a kid. I was so excited. He would be my pet. He obviously is lost or something and is too little to take care of himself, so I could take care of him. I saw myself arriving at home with this tiny baby bunny wrapped in my hoodie, and me saying to my partner, "Can I keep him? Can I?" And I'd put him in a little cardboard box, with some... straw or something, And water. And I'd feed him bits of lettuce and eventually carrots (of course).
But I knew something was wrong. He was obviously in shock. He wasn't moving at all. His eyes were staring straight ahead. Sometimes they'd close a little and then open up again if I moved. Something was definitely wrong with him.
So I decided to turn him over and check him out.
He let me do it without protest, and to be honest he felt fine. He kind of splayed his legs out as I flipped him over, like any baby bunny would when someone did that. But then I saw. His neck was ripped open. Like someone had cut his throat with a knife. Or, more likely, that a hawk had caught him by the neck and was startled when I came from around that bush and dropped him by accident. He wasn't just in shock. He was dying. Probably a Marsh Hawk. AKA Northern Harrier.
I started crying. I couldn't help it. It was exactly the feeling I had when I was a kid, when the baby robin didn't make it and I found it dead in its box one morning. That I had failed them. That my friend was gone.
I didn't take any more pictures. I thought about taking him to Animal Rescue, and they'd fix him. But no they wouldn't. He was a bunny. There were millions of them in Ladner. And he was so close to being dead. I could feel how little Life Force he had left in him.
I put him back down, in a bit of scrub. In the shade.
Maybe the hawk would come back and eat him. Or another animal, like a mink or coyote would get him. He would be food for it. And then he'd be gone, rising and falling in and out of life, into another life, as a different form, a different being.
