death on the asphalt

A childhood friend of mine moved into the area recently, and a couple nights ago we decided to go for an exploratory walk through his rural neighborhood. Eventually, we found ourselves wandering down a back road in the dark.

We talked of how the chorus of frogs and crickets in the humid night air reminded us of our youth in the Amazon, and of how good it was to live in a place where the artificial glow of a city did not choke out light of the stars. A place where we could wander an unknown road and feel somehow more fully alive.

The boots I was wearing were not yet broken in well enough for a long slog on asphalt, and as blisters began to form I started to think once more of the ugliness of roads - how their snaking black fingers make a web of death that blankets this entire continent. I thought about the hundreds of thousands of people who die on them every year, and the millions of animals, and of the wars fought over the dead-animal fossil by-products with which they are made.

And then we saw it - practically stumbled over it, in fact, in the dark of the night. A dead rabbit.

I mentioned to my friend how I'd once had the idea to photograph roadkill... to force myself to stop and document each asphalt death I saw. I would then blow the pictures up huge, rent a warehouse and have a gallery show. A carnival of the grotesque. A testament to the ugly collision of "progress" with a natural world that never saw it coming, and couldn't have done anything if it had.

So I took this picture.

As we walked away, I zoomed in on it in my viewfinder and saw, to my chagrin, the dead baby bunnies. But despite the pointless death of this creature and her young, I somehow found that I was not disturbed. 

Not really.

There was a time, possibly, when the death of a rabbit by the road would have had a visceral, emotional effect on me. Now, though, anesthetized as I have become by seemingly endless exposure, I am no longer able to summon the emotional wherewithal to feel anything for these creatures. Instead, a dull, intellectualized sorrow sits in their place.

When I mentioned my surprising lack of feeling to my friend, he shrugged it off. "It's not a bad thing," he said, "or a good thing. It's just something random that happened, like everything else."

I started to point out the reasons why I thought this rabbit's death ought to bother me, but he interrupted. "Okay, he said, maybe it is an unnecessary waste, a useless death, but..."

As he trailed off, I thought of how different we had grown. Both of us creators and artists. Both of us lovers of people, of the wild world, of literature and of deep thinking. And yet there, confronted as we were by the death of a rabbit, we had each chosen to mark the moment in different ways. He, to deny somewhat the wrongness of it, and I to fall into a deep, cyclic mental funk. 

I want to, as the poet said, "wail, for the world's wrong." But can't seem to muster more than a sullen, detached mental discomfort. 

My friend, on the other hand, accepts it all as part of a big, pointless mess.

We wandered on, somewhat lost, for another two hours. My blisters grew into a real, lingering pain. 

The rabbit rotted by the road. Was eaten. 

Was forgotten.