Roadkilled coyotes don’t make me nearly as sad as one might expect, given my obvious proclivities. I mean, from time to time I’ll come across one that really gets to me, that makes me rage or weep or wallow in survivor’s guilt.
But not always. Not even usually. Today, for instance, as I was driving between home and Barstow, I passed one who had clearly been there a couple days, lain up scooched against the asphalt highway berm, and I said to him “that is not a good place to take a nap, puppy dog,” and drove on another eighth of a mile before the oddness of my response struck me.
They are flesh and bone, I know, like us. Hath not a coyote hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Each end I see at the roadside is tragedy, and pain; I know this. And yet they don’t darken my mood.
It might be the stories. Take for instance the Diné story about Changing Bear Maiden:
Coyote traveled on and soon came to a hogan. There he met a girl called Changing Bear Maiden. He looked at her and right off said he wanted to marry her. She told him that the one who married her would have to be able to be killed for four times. He went outside after this and hid his heart and circulatory system in the brush. When he came back into the house, he said, “I can be killed four times and I will still not die.”
She killed Coyote with a club and took his body outside and threw him away from the house. After she entered the hogan, he came in behind her. She killed him for the second time and then did the same with him as before. Once again as she went into the house, he was following her. The third time she cut him into two pieces and threw him outside, but he was still alive. The fourth and final time she cut up his body into little pieces and ground it up on a grinding stone. As she took the pieces outside, she threw some to the east, some to the south, some to the west and the rest she threw to the north.
Once again Coyote came back into the hogan and said, “Now you are mine.”
There are a number of stories that include Coyote being killed, then jumping over his own corpse three times and rising again. This morning I imagined the coyote on Route 62 waiting impatiently for the traffic to subside so that he could do so without anyone watching. I know better. I’m an empirical materialist and I find immense solace in it. No meaning, no morals, the mere existence of unlikely consciousness in a physical universe a phenomenal stroke of luck that should awe each of us every moment for every moment of our participation in it. I don’t need pretend mythical Coyotes inhabiting my cerebellum. I know they don’t exist and I have chosen to populate my version of the world with them despite that fact.
There are times when I take the roadkills personally, but without sadness; a reminder to make the most of things. One moment the tang of the desert is in your flared nostrils; the next, your tang is in the desert’s. Each rabbit pursued could be the one that leads you into the pickup’s grille.
Barstow was nice. I pulled a few things out of the storage locker — not much left there, now — and hung out with a friend for a little while, talking. On my way home I was heading up the long slope that leads out of the Stoddard Valley toward Goat Mountain, and there he was again. I pulled over, walked up to say hello, knelt by him. His fur ruffled prettily in the wind; he still smelled only of dog and creosote. We watched the sky turn red. A few feet away was an elevation sign, the kind CalTrans installs at multiples of a thousand feet, or in the summits of passes. This one had miles of gentle sloping road heading away in both directions. It read “3305 Feet.” There are some things Man was not meant to understand.
Love it in general, tío, but can’t get past the phrase, “Barstow was nice.”
Human behavior and culture leaves behind it a wake of death. Road kill by automobiles, fish kill by poisons and sewage, blade kill from the props of planes and wind machines. I know there is death at many intersections between two different species, but the dust we leave behind is particularly deadly.
And good for you for visiting with the dead coyote on your return trip. Despite being an empirical realist you see the value of communicating with the dead.
I did get a kick out of “Hath not a coyote hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” Nope, no hands.
Hey Chris—thanks very much for the Twitter link. I’m seriously flattered, even if I’m concerned that your standards of taste may be slipping!