Geiger Counter

Elephants at night...   I pulled up on the side of the highway and watched the horse-drawn wagon rumble, clatter and clop toward me. It looked like something from the Oregon Trail, with a pair of chestnut draft horses pulling it and a heavyset man perched atop the wobbling seat, leather reins held loosely in his thick fingers. In the back of the wagon were food, a bed, sparse clothing and a pair of sleeping, furry, muscular white dogs whose ancestors roamed the Pyrenean Mountains, fighting off wolves and bears.   As this little caravan of one plodded along in the breakdown lane of the Beltline Highway, SUVs and tractor trailers roared passed, so fast they could not see or smell the Earth over which they passed, so loud they could not hear anything but themselves and their radio rage. It was the Coriolis effect over and over again, interspersed with little spaces of relative silence, in which you were reminded that the wagons continued on, even when its humble sounds were covered by the highway’s roar.  “Why are you doing this?” I asked the man when he stopped to talk. “Why live in a wagon and ride across the country?” He had a bushy beard and a story he had already told to countless reporters in the small towns through which he had passed.  “Because I’m sick,” he said. “Sick of my job. Sick of divorce. Sick of cancer. One day I just picked up and left, and now I’m doing this.” Faced with all these Goliathan things, he had thrown his essentials into the back of an ancient wagon, hitched up his horses, and climbed, along with his ursine guardians, into the wagon. The two Great Pyrenees snored in the shade of the back while we spoke on the side of a highway on a weekday afternoon.  “They guard me at night,” he explained. “So I don’t have to worry about getting robbed, or worse. They sleep during the day.” And then he was on to the next stretch of road, clattering down the highway, on to the next time, and the next place, on a journey filled with slow romance and adventure.  This is much of life; seeing travelers come, seeing them  depart. I still remember the last night the circus left the farm where I grew up. When the final show ended, the field turned to a greedy maw of sucking cold brown porridge in the rain. The same field where corn grew for gummy, molasses silage that sat in mountainous rows under a slab of tires in concrete bunkers, then was dumped steaming in front of the mottled Holsteins and wooly Herefords. Rows you could climb in rubber duck boots like mountains. Spring plows sometimes kicked up sherds – they are called “sherd,” not “shards,” I learned from an archeologist - of dinnerware and hunks of brick. Proof that we lived on the fossils of other lives.  The earth was like a mossback owl, regurgitated old dinnerware through a soil gullet each year. But when the circus came to the farm, rainwater and moonlight and the weight of animals made the dark earth change that night. As the circus tried to pack up and leave, on to the next town and the next set of shows in front of the next crowd, the earth, which sent up old fragments each spring, instead grew wet and began to siphon and swallow, rather than regurgitate. The field, which sent up crops each summer, became greedy, became a taker rather than a giver, sucking everything down, from tires to feet.  When the muddy field would not relinquish the trucks, when it tried to suck them down, my dad went to get a tractor. But the mahout – the elephant handler - went the other way. And at 11 p.m., in a lightning storm I  saw a parade of elephants disembark from their trailers. They planted their grey reptilian footsteps in the mud. They looked in the full vigor of life already fossilized, a gentle nod to the eventual state of everything. And they put their heads against the truck, and pushed with their considerable might, knocking it out of the mud,  Liberating it for the time being. The tractor helped too, but the elephants really did thud across the puddled cornfield that night.  Steel they touched warbled and groaned against their strength and acknowledged them. Today it sounds made up, like a scene from a movie for children. But it was fully real that night, when I stood in a field on the farm where I grew up and watched those great beasts stomp across a puddled cornfield.  And I wish I could go back and touch petrified footprints in an old field, mammoth and eternal, canonized. But I remember the field is new each spring, Only the things that didn’t escape remain there. The elephants, the tents and acrobats, the clowns, and all of us, in our own way, we are all gone, off to the next town, and the next time and place.