Field Guide
By Mark Handler
Writing 212: The Art of the Essay
In the dirty parking lot of a Shell gas station, I saw a squirrel get flattened by a tire. The driver didn’t notice, of course. Just a small bump on the uneven concrete slabs that floored the yellow filling pumps. But I noticed. In fact, I couldn’t stop looking as it painted the dirty ground red, darker than I thought it would. I remember its tail sticking up from the ground like a rose finally breaking the concrete, or a furry flag blowing small in the summer wind.
The next week my dad and I returned after my thirteenth birthday dinner and I saw the squirrel again. This time his flag was no longer half-staff but had been completely smashed by the weight of another tire. I pondered what it would feel like to be crushed under the weight of a car, if death was instant, if there was suffering. My dad eased our car over the rigid meeting between old gas station concrete and newly paved asphalt, and I wondered how many vehicles passed through the station each day. Trucks, sedans, sports cars, motorcycles, trailers, and weary wayfarers in over-packed campers pausing to pick up a few bags of Doritos for the road. All of these plugging in gas nozzle to tank socket.
There was something seamlessly disjointed about the happenings here. The Shell station carried a mechanical feel with it— every bit buzzing with life, but everyone entranced by self-worry that much went unnoticed. Each driver and passenger just wanted to get to the next destination, so nobody dared pay attention to anything other than what lay in front of them— for me, it was the strange red form caught between the sun and the concrete.
My dad lined the car up with the stall and ushered me out to demonstrate the way adults buy gas. First comes the credit card, then the entry of your billing zip code, then selection of fuel grade, followed by a lifting of the handle and the clicking of position clip to keep the lever in place. I was disinterested. I glanced around the station, noticing its grit and greasy character. Red and green neon lit the storefront advertising cigarettes and tobacco. The ground itself was splotched with stains from dripping gas and cars’ exhaust trails. It had a worn disposition, a strange mix of a raggedy history and modern industrial peculiarity.
1.2 million dogs and 5.4 million cats die from moving vehicles each year. It seems to be a natural phenomenon, unchangeable even if measurable. The facts of life are simply facts. No reckoning persists in the animal kingdom.
One summer evening I was hanging out with my friend Hobie and his older brother Jason. We had taken our bikes around their neighborhood on a humid night, throwing rocks into the creek and talking girlfriends, though none of us had any. Jason was the closest. Everyone in school knew he’d been sneaking out at night to see the Athletic Director’s daughter, and their activities usually confined themselves behind the football field. “Is she a good kisser?” Hobie would ask. “Nah man I’ve had better,” Jason would say in reply. I kept my eyes on the road. “Y’all’ve done more than kiss, though… right…?” Hobie again. “Yeah I mean we’ve smoked a couple times behind the fence.” I fell back from the conversation as my eyes tracked a possum scrunched sideways beneath the curb. Its mouth was bloody and its fur looked like wet cardboard from the rain that had waterlogged its body. I stopped pedaling and just coasted while I passed its caked-up carcass. “Oh shit!” My head flung forward. Jason pointed at a squirrel paused in the road ahead. He sped up after it and like a deer caught by headlights it just sat there. As he rushed closer the treads on his tires moaned with hunger against the gravelly asphalt. The squirrel finally bolted for safety, leaping the curb and up the nearest tree. “Dammit!” Jason sputtered under his breath. Hobie and I caught up to him.
At the gas station our silver Mercedes gleamed in the hot sunlight. Atlanta’s August sun never seemed to mind the welfare of those on the ground, and the black asphalt didn’t care either. My dad was almost done rambling. I could always tell by the slight inflection in his voice towards the end of his final few sentences. I tuned back in to be polite, nodding my head and adding several, “mhms.” He’d say, “You know this stuff is important, Mark. One day you’re going to have to know this.” I sipped my Coke in reply. While we waited for the pump to click, a dusty maroon sedan slapped its front bumper off the curb as it pulled into the station. We both turned our heads. Its tinted windows and dirty rims dragged themselves to the other side of our stall. My dad turned, keeping his eye on the constantly escalating price of purchase above the credit card scanner. I shifted to gain a clearer view of the newcomer. The car’s back window rolled down a few inches, and I could see a curly-haired baby girl peeking out from her booster seat. The driver then shut the car off and climbed out. Clad in an old, rotting gray suit and worn shoes, he gave me a subtle nod. The suit looked like what the high school seniors would pick up from Goodwill for the senior night basketball game— a little bit dirty and tattered from several moth holes. I stared back in wonder. As he approached the opposite side of the pump, I peered up at my dad. He stood, resolute, shifting anxious glances between the numbers on the screen and the head of the man made visible by the gap above the stall. I noticed the front of the man’s car was boiling the air above it— made it look like everything behind the top few inches of the hood was under water.
Land bridges were an idea enacted by the Dutch. It followed that to reduce the senseless vehicle-related deaths of thousands of living creatures between the forests and grasslands, artificial overpasses and several tunnels were built. Consequently, countless creatures, big and small, have crossed the highway systems safely.
The road that connects my neighborhood to the main street I’ve probably driven over a thousand times. Its hills and winding turns inspire a feeling of wilderness, and the boyish Tom Sawyer in me is conjured most every time. It’s not uncommon that deer, frogs, stray cats, and turtles from the brook feel adventurous too and decide to cross the bending road. I remember a few months after I got my license, I was driving down this street when I passed over a box turtle. At first I thought it was just a rock, but I’d seen too many dried up, gut-stained splotches on the road to convince myself it was, just in fact, a rock. Ducking into the next neighborhood I turned around, hazards on. As I rolled up behind him I set my car in park, the right two wheels angled partway down the hillside so other cars could pass by.
I stepped out and approached the thing carefully, not able to remember which turtles preferred to bite and which preferred to hide. As I bent down to pick him up, he receded further into his shell. I had scared him. Gently, I turned around his dew-covered shell. My voice cracked an unfamiliar — “hey there” — as if it were caught between a curious whisper and suppressed shout, and I noticed two beady eyes blink back at me. He was much heavier than I thought, and for fear of dropping him I rushed over to the bank below the street and plopped him in the grass. A car passed by and stopped. The woman leaned over the passenger seat to ask if everything was okay. I told her I was saving a turtle. “Sorry?” she said. I hollered louder, “I’m saving a turtle!” Not knowing how to respond adequately, she slowly drove away with an awkward chuckle. Despite this weird interaction, I was immensely proud. Any cognizant person may have reached down their hand, felt the turtle’s weight, and considered its situation. But they didn’t. The cars in front of me didn’t even catch sight of him, unaware that turtles could cross a road. Why would they? The turtle’s home chose the wet grasslands and rivers below the street, away from the flow of modernity. I guess some things must stay archaic. But I felt as if I was wearing a cape, fists lightly perched upon my hips. I turned back around and he was gone. Smiling, I thought: Turtle Saver.
The man at the station across from us pumped his gas just like we did. Credit card, zip code, selection, pump, click. As he stepped back from the stall to let the gas flow, I noticed him trying to lean on the front of his car, but he quickly switched course to avoid a broken headlight. He was mysterious to me. His car seemed to monument the station more than ours, and when he picked up the phone, presumably talking to his wife, he spoke in a sweet manner, and the little girl in the back of the car stayed quiet as he smiled at her. He looked just like the people I had seen south of Downtown Atlanta that my dad had labeled “dangerous,” except I saw him more clearly now, sweat beading up above his brow. I considered his condition.
His suit, the discolored leather on his shoes, the bumper half hanging off his car, the flip phone he was using, his skin… none of it could have been more antithetical to us, but he couldn’t have appeared friendlier. As he leaned against his door and watched the cars stream down the road I stepped onto the raised platform between us. I wanted to see if I could cross just a little, not really for any reason — only to get closer. Passing through this dimension didn’t seem strange to me. I figured my nose would find itself pressed against some invisible glass wall halfway through, but I didn’t falter.
The moment I raised my foot onto the elevated concrete I felt two hands cup my shoulders. They forcefully directed me back down towards our car. I glanced up at my dad, confused. He shot me a stern look and ushered me through the out-swinging door. My choice was dictated for me before I could make my own, and my heart dropped a beat. I would never know what lay beyond the bridge.
Click! The nozzle snapped and dad loaded it back in the holster, not once looking at anything but the ground. He climbed quickly back into the car. A warm drop of water released itself from the canopy’s runoff and splashed heavy on my scalp. I kept looking at the man. The thick, humid drop combed through my hair and down the ridge of my neck. What was the true distance between us? Something had collapsed, burned down, and the rest gone unnoticed. We had arrived at the same conclusion that day, to get gas on our way home, yet we were two links in a chain disgruntled. Each of my father’s glances a tug, and each of the man’s kind gestures a pull— me in the middle. I was beginning to learn the ugly side of innocence. I did not understand.
Land bridges are great infrastructure for animals and humans alike. An overpass in Banff National Park reduced animal collisions by 94%, saving lives and minimizing medical/repair costs. In the U.S. alone, wildlife collisions cost more than eight billion dollars annually. Transportation agencies typically don’t have the funding to afford land bridges in the U.S., however, as they cost several million dollars. Because government funding tends to ignore seemingly less pertinent concerns, we wait, paralyzed.
As my dad started the car an easiness returned to his character. We glided out of the stall and carefully navigated the curb towards the exit. Out the window I could still see the caked and darkened spot from last week’s squirrel, and I wondered if it would stay that way forever. Saddened, I glanced in the side mirror. My dad started talking again about golf or stocks or something rather, and I fed him the “mhms” I had become so accustomed to. In the mirror I saw the fragmented man still leaning against his car. He stood there in his suit, motionless against the boiling sun.
A Word from Mark
Much of my experience in writing has been defined by not knowing. There is no be-all and end-all guide to writing or toolset to crafting the perfect essay, not even a chart to navigate “flow.” I think it is an inherent process, which is what makes writing so frustrating at times. But this leads to a personal style that you can confidently claim as your own, and that’s what I tried to amplify when writing “Field Guide.”
This essay does not have all the answers, but rather exemplifies a few strange occurrences designed to have the reader consider and question the writer’s intentions. I personally like to operate within the realm of ambiguity, probably as an easy way to avoid my difficulties laying out something coherent, but hopefully more so in light of the curious reader. As such, my experience in creative writing has consistently flirted with the deeper, darker sides of the human condition- I like to write about what I don’t know or don’t understand.
Professor Erhardt’s Writing 212 class provided a perfect platform for this, as she encouraged us to reach beyond what we thought we were capable of. Most times, I crashed and burned, hard, but was always willing to get back up again because of her encouragement. This essay was no different, and in many ways, I think it is still unfinished —but what writing this piece allowed me to do was explore multiple plot lines, consider and question the peculiar, and strive for something “different.” The task was to think about real social situations in the world where we felt somewhat displaced, or as the prompt put it, to write a piece of “social nonfiction.” We used the essay “Is This Kansas” by Eula Biss as a guide to thinking about situations in our lives that challenged our perception.
Assignment
Essay 4
In the spirit of Eula Biss, Ross Gay, Rahawa Haile, and David Sedaris, write an essay that uses personal experience as an entry point for exploring a social issue / phenomenon. “Experience” might include an event that involved you directly; something that you witnessed; something in which you participated, whether knowingly or not; and/or something requiring a fair amount of research.
For this assignment, we encourage you to pay particular attention to how individual and group identities function. We encourage you to consider the stakes of your writing, not just for you but for your audience and for all of the individuals and groups you might be writing about. We encourage you to resist the urge to oversimplify your insights and conclusions. Embrace nuance. Revel in discomfort. Ask yourself, in what spaces have I felt denied? What spaces have I denied myself? What spaces welcome me but deny others? Who do I deny? And why? And how do these spaces and identities overlap and contradict one another? Attempt to explore rather than capture or diagnose. Attempt to suspend judgement and bias, and know that this is almost impossible.
Dig into those commonplace books. Document those “stupid shower thoughts” and offbeat encounters in the world. Take risks, and write something that will knock our socks off.
Professor Commentary
Mark’s essay opens with a dead squirrel, a gesture to Durga Chew Bose’s “Part of a Greater Pattern,” which we read earlier in the semester. Much like Bose, Mark’s writing comes with an innate symphonic style. In “Field Guide,” he plays with scaling back the trumpets. The language is relatively sparse, a hum. With precision of sense memory, he narrates a story of disconnection. The happenings at the gas station are “mechanical.” Folks buy Doritos, fill their gas tanks, fail to “pay attention to anything other than what lay in front of them.” Even the weather can’t be bothered. “Atlanta’s August sun never seemed to mind the welfare of those on the ground, and the black asphalt didn’t care either.” Mark describes his own participation in this hum. After ignoring his father’s chatter, he “turn[s] back in to be polite, nodding my head and adding several, ‘mhms.’” The writing, even when its landscape climbs hills, is purposely flattened, like the squirrel.
Of course, Mark is Mark and the disconnection he writes about is not just sorrowful but hopeful. Disconnection allows perspective. Perspective allows us to see where we can build bridges. Mark punctuates memory with research about life-saving land bridges made for wildlife crossing highways. These literal bridges work to unite seemingly disparate narratives – roadkill and social stratification; sexual conquests and turtle-saving hero moments among them. Two of the bridges are tiny. The space between Mark and his father at the gas pump. The island of concrete between Mark and the man careful not to snag his suit on a broken taillight. Mark asks, “What was the true distance between us?”
It’s a question worth asking over and over, a question driving all of us facing the blank page or the tenth draft.