Michelle Menting | Pavement | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

April 2020

Michelle Menting

Pavement

Fat evening of summer, we walked, my sister and I, the new blacktop of her road, after the earth of that same road, a logging road, becomes sealed, civil, easy with tarred petroleum. There we heard a chirping coming from the thicket — those grasping thorns that guard berries before berries. The sound was a trill on repeat. An offspring's noise. Some baby's cry. Raccoons, two of them, just weeks old, a few months, maybe. Motherless, for sure. Sometimes they come back, the moms, my sister said. Sometimes they leave to ward off danger, to tempt it farther into the woods, away from the kits. And sometimes they appear as lumps in the road a quarter mile down. We walked, my sister and I. We looked up the blacktop and back to the dirt, the brambled ditch. The chirping grew louder. The kits had scrambled up the blacktop, claws clambering. How could something so small hold so much trust within its tiny heart? One baby, then the other, the two of them following the two of us as we searched for their mother. We decided to wait. To let the babies wait. To see if their mother would return before taking a cat carrier full of ringtails to wildlife rescue. The trilling continued. We led the kits back towards the woods, past the brambles, back to their tree. The next morning, the trilling again, but lighter, slighter, and only single. He was still there — near the thicket, that oak tree — one of the kits. But to the side of the road, maybe ten feet up, his sibling, the one not spared. The body intact, curled, so trusting. The head dented and sloped as if struck by intentional impact. Evidence of tire tracks swerving needlessly, purposefully, were grooved into the earth. Sometimes they aim. My sister once said this or I once said this. I don't remember. It happens so often. What does it mean when repetition makes memories fade rather than tattoos them forever into your mind? With grapes and kibble, we encouraged the trilling kit into the carrier. We placed the plastic cage in my sister's Honda. We closed the door on his hungry cries, and we walked back along the road to scoop the dead kit into the gallon ice cream bucket we used for picking berries. We'd bury her later beneath spruce and hemlock, cinnamon ferns. Away from pavement.

A couple summers ago, I visited my sister in northern Wisconsin, not far from the Upper Michigan border. She lives near logging roads, national forests, and county-owned land. She lives near woods that are still full of wolves, bears, bobcats, and porcupines (thought their numbers are dwindling due to deforestation and development, and sometimes what is deemed "wildlife management"). Although the paved section of her road turns into dirt, in summer, traffic is high and often reckless: people take trucks and go "mudding" on the forest roads, or race beneath the pines into the wee hours. The noise and the ruts created from these heavy vehicles is annoying, but the real damage is to the wildlife, especially whatever creatures need to traverse the road. My sister and I came across two raccoon kits and, upon first discovering them, made the decision not to interfere in case the momma was just off in the woods and planned to return. We waited until the momma raccoon's return seemed unlikely, but by then one of the kits was hit by a vehicle. It made me angry on several levels. Of course I didn't want to interfere too soon and disrupt wildlife, but by waiting too long, humans disrupted wildlife anyway.

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