A Stranded Moose:

from SUCH DANCING AS WE CAN (2024): a shortmeditation on "creativity."

Stranded Moose

Having stopped to tow a woman out of a mud-season ditch, I came home, kicked off my boots, and brewed a cup of coffee. Oh, how gallant I’d been. Oh, how easy my life is.

This roadside incident brought to mind a local moose’s fix last fall. She’d stranded herself shoulder-deep in the bog at the southerly end of Long Pond. Of course, a car in the mud is one thing, a foundered moose another. One is a matter of inconvenience, the other of life or death. The animal was helpless, paralyzed.

Fish and Game officers came out with block and tackle but they couldn’t even reach her. Should they have let nature take its course, as sentimentalists like to say? Not by my lights. It was a kindness to shoot that poor creature dead, leaving her there for the ravens.

I can almost hear the officers’ words. “There’s was nothing else we can do.” I surmise a good deal of melancholy in that declaration.

Forget your Disney movies: the so-called course of nature is often, perhaps usually, cruel as can be. So yes, I’m glad that the moose didn’t live on to drown in the muck. What a death. Her great head dropped to the water, a hole behind each eye, her foot-long dewlap splayed among the pickerel weed. The dark, ever-garrulous birds started to gather right off.

Or so I say. I wasn’t there. The only part of that moose I ever saw, a ribcage, came almost eight months later when I came to paddle the pond for what’s called recreation. Now I recreate from some bones and from hearsay what I figure must have unfolded. How close am I to the truth? I haven’t asked anyone. Something in me, you see, is always in search of a story, the more dramatic the better. Musing’s often my muse, to give it a fancy name, and I don’t like to have it curtailed.

Such a pompous inclination may simply display male egotism, a craving to play a role: hero, even begetter. Whatever you do, don’t trust me.

I don’t even trust myself as imagination gallops from one inventive move right on to another one. To choose something wholly at random, I may be driving along and the regular whups of pavement seams will trigger a memory, maybe a bass drum’s thump in a jazz club back in my twenties. And if it doesn’t, who’ll stop me here from saying it does?