On Gravedigging
Gravedigging is not a traditional vacationing activity, but looked at rightly it can achieve some of a holiday’s goals. I cannot recommend it: not due to its effects (which can be positive) but for the fact that it requires a dead body, hard to obtain unless you are in a shady business — or a farmer. Farms, like cities, are full of life albeit a different sort; and like cities, death headlines here as well. You yourself bury all but the largest livestock, the somber reverse to the nursery-rhyme barnyard most imagine.
The rite of an animal’s burial is preceded by one of a few disagreeable occurrences, reliable stock events in the farmer’s almanack: an expected death of old age, a sudden death of sickness or accident, a death you yourself caused with the reluctant tug of a trigger. None of these things are more regrettable than the other: just real, vastly more real than most experiences one encounters in the manicured digital age and each deserving an essay. There is a dead animal before you, and you are left both with the duties of a mourner and a gravedigger.
Last week, it was a juvenile groundhog, huddled beneath a chair with inch-long claws out for our Australian shepherd, who dutifully barked and made hell. It’s unusual for a groundhog to come out this way, away from the fields and into domesticated turf patrolled by a hound and cats, and though you might not see the telltale foaming mouth it is prudent to assume rabidity. When you decide to end an animal’s life in such a state, a coolness overtakes you. I prefer not to hunt for game; the taste is foul and the quality of the meat, given the dominant use of pesticides on our fields, questionable. But I imagine that shooting an animal for threatening other animals — yours — is an entirely different activity. There must be even more care in lining up the shot than in sport, to minimize pain rather than maximize fatality; you do not close your eyes but close your mind, returning only when you have felt the butt of the rifle kick against your shoulder. If death was not instantaneous, you ensure it is with a second shot; and then the act is done.
Now you remove the shroud of an executioner and put on the black band. You might witness the death of a hundred animals, but if your soul is right the dull pain will still present itself as though it were the first. The wind sighs in the trees, but the animal is still. You feel your place in the world and it is something below a caretaker, more humble than that.
There is a detachment technology affords us that burying an animal strips away. We regain it when we flit through our phones, recline in our towers, sit in our jets. There is almost always at least one layer of machine insulating us from reality, increasingly more: on my flight back to San Francisco, a United Airlines pilot next to me commented on how the new 787s are fly-by-wire, as opposed to the old 747’s controls which were physically connected to the ailerons and flaps and would tug back. “You input the control with the yoke now and the computer decides…” he trailed off, my mind completing the sentence with “whether to do it or not."
There is no such cold servant between you and the body, which feels heavier at the end of the shovel than you expect. You try to gently pick up with the spade, as though gentleness counts at this point: perhaps it does, but not for the beast. You carry its dead weight to the selected site — near the house for beloved house pets, further afield for the pauper’s graveyard of nameless groundhogs, opossums, skunks. A suitable hole is dug; shallow enough to avoid hitting the clay and working a half-hour for an inch, deep enough to allow the earth time for its slow work, undisturbed by coyotes.
A grave always requires more dirt than you think, but when you tire after a dozen spadefuls, sweating beneath the midday sun, you take guilty pity on the creature. It is almost a transactional thing; you hope your future interment will be generous enough to place you beyond the reach of whatever future mobs you anger, if you do this creature that kindness. You dig a bit deeper, until water begins to pool at the bottom of the pit. Then — gently! — you place your charge within.
There is a hurry to scoop the earth back into the hole, over the animal; not so much that you can escape death but that the silent ground can begin its restoration. You save the turf for last, that the grass might spread its roots quickly and seal the grave — and then it is over. Your part is played, a burden lifted from your conscious.
It’s not a moment that clouds others; really, like the grave, it is self-contained. But it does come back to you, oddly at times when technology is hard at work to detach you from something. The United pilot has put on his headphones, watching a new series. The jet, capable of crossing oceans, is delayed by a thunderstorm currently parked over Chicago, hurling lightening bolts left and right and belting the aluminum roof of the cabin. Technology cannot intercede, here; it is just us and the earth.
Two states distant, a grave slowly becomes ground.
