Magpie
Mount Wire, Utah
[Fight, in the small or large ways you can:
It is easy to forget all land was once sea. I found a shell as I was descending Mount Wire, which is a 7,000-foot foothill near Salt Lake City named after the man who invented the traffic light. The shell was small and bleached and an exemplar of the golden spiral. Mathematical, exact. I marveled at it—it was beautiful and fragile and tough as anything on this Earth, and I marvel at such things. Then I tucked it in my jacket pocket. This was Utah, and it was cold, although not as cold as home.
I came across Yvette when I was within a mile of the parking lot. Yvette was sixty-nine, an engineer and mountaineer, tougher than me by several leagues. She was yelling for her dog. “Fuck me,” she was yelling. “Oh, fuck me!” I asked her, gently, if she was looking for her dog. She said I shouldn’t. She said her dog’s name was Bender, which I heard first as Ginger, maybe because of the Front Bottoms song. She said I was so sweet.
With nowhere better to be—my friends were otherwise occupied—I bushwhacked to the first ridgeline, descended into a gully. Yvette had worried over coyotes. I had assured her coyotes were scavengers, but now I wondered. “Ginger,” I called, idiotically, and howled. “Awhoo!” But the hills stayed silent, and the sun continued to set.
I followed a flock (or whatever a squad of birds ten-deep is called; “flock” feels too proper) of black-billed magpies east. I watched a pair rise above the brush, flit on, flashes of blue and green and white and black, jewel-bright against the paling sky, twinned hopes. Their chirps sounded a little like barks. Only a little, but even this likeness was too much.
I followed them because I wanted to save Bender/Ginger, and I trusted animals to possess a wisdom beyond my own. I followed them because it was growing dark, the task hard, and I knew the person I knew then best would have stayed out until midnight, later, that she would never have left, not while a thing remained in need of being saved.
So I scrambled, crawled.
At some point, Yvette emerged onto the ridgeline behind me, silhouetted. She called out: “Bender’s going to the truck! Come back! I’ll wait!”
On the trek back—Yvette; me; her other, eleven-year-old, Spaniel, Xeri—I found another shell. “All this was once underwater, you know,” Yvette said, and then we shared our life stories. As one does.
I have since found out that the shells I found, according to Reddit, almost certainly once belonged to snails. But Yvette was right. The underwater part checks out.
Yvette offered me a ride back to town. My friends were bundled, browsing in a store downtown, and I was enjoying my time here. So I accepted it. Most people are better than most people think.
“What do you think of what’s next?” Yvette asked. We were stopped at a traffic light. I had just told her I was a teacher, and that teaching was hard. “What’s your read on the future?” I said it was complicated, scary. (I did not say: things would be, will be, rarely and terribly beautiful.) But so was everything else. (And so is everything else.)
