Population 485 (20 page)

It is the darkest secret you can hold.

Do you know how to tell if someone is dead for good? The distinction, if I may understate, is critical. And yet isn’t always easy to tell. Sometimes you bust through a door at four in the morning and find someone who might be dead, or might not. Do you start CPR? Or do you comfort the family and call the coroner? The text used in my first EMT class, the fourth edition of
Emergency Care and Transportation of the Sick and Injured
, decrees, “CPR and appropriate treatment must be instituted unless there are obvious signs of death, such as rigor mortis, decapitation, or other massive injuries not compatible with life.” Another passage excused us from heroic intervention if the body was consumed by fire, or exhibited signs of “putrefaction.” We were also directed by the authors to roll the body and check for
dependent lividity
, a condition in which noncirculating blood pools, causing dark discoloration of the dependent portions of the body. In contrast, areas of the body in contact with a hard surface—the scapulae and buttocks, for instance, if the victim is supine—are blanched, the blood pressed from the skin. Dependent lividity sets in fifteen to thirty minutes after death; if you see it, you can put your pocket mask back in its case and turn the defibrillator off. Rigor mortis kicks in several hours later. If a patient is stiff and cool, you have nothing to do. An excerpt from chapter 6 of
Emergency Care and Transportation
reads, “CPR should not be administered if obvious signs of irreversible death are present,” a directive that seemed to support the concept of
reversible
death. A little glimmer of hope amongst the rigor mortis.

So. We are given the responsibility of calling death by name. With our own hearts in our throat, we look for the signs, make the call. But here’s the kicker: Despite the training, despite the onus of the decision, we are not granted the authority to pronounce an individual dead. As soon as we decide someone is irreversibly dead, we have to summon the coroner to make it official.

It can be a nervous-making wait. On a muggy summer evening around midnight, Jack the feed mill guy and I find a woman sitting upright in a chair. She has no heartbeat, and blood has already pooled in her feet and lower back. But every once in a while she seems to breathe. Heartbeat without breath, that I’ve seen. But breath without heartbeat, that shouldn’t be. The woman’s seventeen-year-old daughter is right there. Looking at me. Waiting for a decision. The woman is hooked up to an oxygen system, a big hose running to a little mask over her nose. We’re told she has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and was expected to die in three months. I listen again, hard, for a heartbeat. Nothing. But every now and then, she seems to breathe. I’m just about to pull her from the chair when Don, one of the Bloomer medics, appears. Speaking low, I tell him what I’ve seen. He pulls the little mask away, switches off the machine. It’s an external respirator. She wasn’t breathing, it was the machine.

We call the coroner and gather on the porch. I go back in, ask the daughter how she is doing, if we can help with anything, or call anyone. She is phoning relatives. I sneak back in to the body, feel for a pulse once more. I’ve done this before. I have a terror of being wrong about this. We are so primed, so
taught
, to fight for revival, that when we decide not to intervene, it takes a long time for the doubt to dissipate. I’ll find myself riding home in the dark van, and suddenly I’ll shudder at the idea of the body in the bag, the hearse pulling away from the house, the heart squeezing and pitching, a muscly gray metronome…
thup…thup…thup…oops…oops…oops…

Sometimes I go to the forest and prepare to die. So far, I’ve simply fallen asleep, but it strikes me that sleeping directly on the dirt is good practice for the Big Nap. I usually conduct these rehearsals while hunting. I’ll put my rifle down and curl up on a patch of leaves, or settle against the base of a solid white pine—if the air is crisp and I can cop a patch of sun,
c’est magnifique
. Jack, my brother’s beefy half-Labrador mongrel dog, often tags along on these walkabouts, and if I stop to sleep, he drops to his haunches at my side, bull-chested and alert, sniffing and cocking his ears, seated but still on the hunt. As I drift off, I can feel him glancing down, impatient to move on. Eventually, he slides to the ground, drapes his jowls across his forepaws, heaves a deep sigh, and settles to his own rabbity dreams.

I’ve had the bug to sleep in the woods ever since I was a child. My brothers and sisters and I—five of us, at the time—rarely slept in the house during the summer. We would gather at bedtime and traipse off to the woods, trailing our sleeping bags and dragging our pillows in the dirt. Out beneath the trees in the Breeds Woods forty, we’d lie on our backs and pick out stars, and speculate on the nature of the satellites that moved through the branches on their slow, straight line. I don’t remember ever being caught in the rain, or worrying about bears or hydrophobic skunks. I also don’t recall the mornings…whether or not we trooped home en masse, or just straggled home as we woke. We didn’t always sleep in the forest. I can remember sleeping in the yard, although not often, because in the morning everything would be chilled and soggy with dew. I recall sleeping in the smooth concrete mangers of the cow barn, and we spent many nights atop the hay stacks of the pole barn, burrowed into the bales twenty feet off the ground. Our sleeping bags were lousy with chaff.

But back to the woods. To sleep in the presence of trees and in the proximity of the earth is to get a sense of what it is to be holy. They say when Christ needed to get his head together, he did forty days in the wilderness. I stop at forty winks, but I believe I get a taste of what he was after. When I sleep on the forest floor, I never feel as if I’m simply taking a nap. I feel as if I’m performing some sort of embryonic ritual. When I awaken, I feel as if some important work has been done. This is not rest—this is ablution. By placing myself on the altar of the earth and retiring all my defenses, I am receding within myself, plucking a little transcendence from the perpetually gnashing jaws of time.

I am on the verge of rhapsodizing, so let me reframe: I’m no tree-hugger. I’m a tree-leaner, and a tree-sitter, and a tree-seeker, but I also have the ability to appreciate a tree in the form of a straight set of two-by-fours. I do not believe the trees are sentient beings, nor do I believe they have a spirit of their own. The trees do not speak to me. But I am pleased to take their shelter, pleased when they reinforce my smallness, pleased when they give me separation from the everyday static jamming my head. There is a big old white pine I like, deep within in the same forty where we slept when we were kids. It is ringed with a blanket of shed needles, rusty orange and springy. They make a fine mat, and while the tree towers above me, I am equally humbled by the idea of the tremendous roots threading the soil beneath me, knitted to the earth, clasping the soil in a way we surface-running humans never do. Such gravity. I rest above them, and they feed me as surely as if they were joined to my own veins. I absorb their ballast, resetting my keel for the journey back into a spinning world.

You have to get right down there. Don’t mind the dirt—we need more of that, anyway. Our society has gone bonkers for cleanliness, but I fear—and research biologists are beginning to confirm—that all of this compulsive disinfecting will ultimately leave us vulnerable. I’m all for a little dirt in the gut, if only to hatch some resistance to a broad spectrum of microbaddies. So. Catch the scent of the earth. Smell that vital decay. Put your cheek to the rough skin of the planet. What you feel is time settling constantly into itself, and this is deeply reassuring. You belong here, you see. This is where your cells, your minerals, all the microscopic bits of you can best blend into the cosmos. To seep gently through the leaves in a graceful descent back to the beginning of things. I have come to think of my sleeps in the forest as a rehearsal for burial, and I have come to wonder why anyone would want to be sequestered in a casket, sealed away from the embrace of all this peaceful dirt.

The earth is a fine cradle. We are all bound to sleep there.

A regular contemplation of death seems a worthy exercise. There’s no need for a morbid obsession—death will find you in its own time, regardless—it just seems worthwhile to give it the odd ponder. Not its form, or nature, or significance. Based on what I’ve seen, the forms of death are infinitely variable; and its nature is—for corporeal purposes—quite simply final. And as to the significance of death—as a portal, for instance—I am resigned to discovering that one in transit. The contemplation of death may or may not lead to any sort of explication, but it does provide a preemptive psychological advantage, in much the same way you might nod to a policeman when you know he just clocked you a few miles per hour over the limit: If he pulls you over, it seems less ignominious to have met his gaze prior, to be able to say, “Well, I figured you had me,” than to have averted your eyes, pretending not to see him framing you in the radar gun. Death is coming. Why not give it a nod now and then?

As an EMT, you are at war with death. Collateral damage is inevitable. And sometimes, in the middle of the battle, you wonder why we fight at all. On a sweet spring morning, I am struggling to push a Combitube down the throat of an elderly woman when I glance up to see her husband, silent and teary-eyed in the corner, and I wish we hadn’t been called at all. I wish he had simply put the phone down and held her hand as she died. Instead we push back the little wooden table where their coffee cups still rest, and we tear at her clothes, poke and prod her, shock her weary heart, strap her to a plastic board and scream away, and she will die anyway. The first time you press on the chest of an elderly person, the ribs separate from the sternum, popping like a string of soggy firecrackers. There are times when rescue is nothing more than organized physical assault. Sometimes I wish we would just leave people be, let them slip quietly over the vale. Sometimes life is not ours to save. Driving east one day, I passed an abandoned farmstead glittering in the winter sun, and thinking of the hands that built the tumbled wooden buildings, I suddenly saw death as a peaceful thing, an opportunity to check out of the game, to dispense with toil and trouble, an inky comfort in the unknown. No more appointments, no more petty recriminations, no phones, no more hurry or worry. Gonna be easy from now on, as the song goes.

When my brother Eric died, we had a parade. First came the hearse, Eric’s little casket curtained within, then a heat-skewed line of cars that stretched the length of Main Street, headlights switched on and sapped by the midday sun. We drove from the city of Bloomer—population 3,085, Jump Rope Capital of the World—and rolled slow and easy up and over the middling hills of County Highway F, northbound.

It was June. Hot, and the corn was coming on. Twin Lakes Cemetery lay fourteen miles up-country, notched from a farmer’s field half a forty shy of the Rusk County Line. Ten miles into the trip, we banked through the cambered sweep of Morley’s Corner and strung out along the straight stretch running past the old Alan North place. The North place, with its patchwork pines and long dirt drive, was long ago flattened by a turkey farming conglomerate. My brothers and I always resented the giant irrigation circles that had replaced the tuckaway meadows, and by virtue of association, the men in the behemoth articulated tractors churning to and fro across the fertile dirt. Omnivorous dusty green bullies, they didn’t so much till the land as rough it up and leave it humbled. But today, as we filed down the two-lane beside the factory fields, the man in the monstrous John Deere, its eight-row cultivator tailed by a scudding dust bank, drew his rig to a stop smack in the middle of the field. The dust bank converged on the cab and rolled beyond, and still he held his place, the tractor idling, until the whole quarter-mile-long run of cars passed. I thought of the missing-man formation, in which a squadron of fighter planes performs a fly-over and one craft separates, veering to the heavens. Howling ballet, starring killing machines. But it tightens my throat every time. The figure in the air-conditioned tractor cab was indistinct, but I wondered who he was and what was in his heart as he held the clutch down, his steady foot restraining the diesel while it knocked and grumbled, raring to plow to the end of the row.

All around these townships, I see the dead. It is landscape as sepulcher. There’s the school sign erected in memory of Tummer Olson; there’s the ski hill where Lisa Stansky died; in that house we found an old woman gone in her bed; here is where Harry lay; there is the house from which they ran with the Jensen baby, too late. Bob shot himself in that cabin, the train hit Jake right at that bend. How important this is, this constant remembering, these unremarkable memorials. Every death is a memory that ends
here
. These are stakes to peg your history on. Be grateful for death, the one great certainty in an uncertain world. Be thankful for the spirit smoke that lingers for every candle gone out.

C
ALL

T
HE PAGER IS A PICKAX
hurled through the window of dreams. The signature
deedley-deedley-deedley-deedley
tones are a sonic cleaver, splitting the night wide open, driving straight to the base of my brain. I lurch in the sheets, heart drumming. The dispatcher’s voice blasts from the dark three feet from my head and I jump to the light and grab my pants.

“New Auburn first responders needed at the northbound rest area on Highway 53 for a person having difficulty breathing.”

The northbound rest area is eight miles away. By the time the second page bounces off the repeater, I’m sprinting across my backyard.

This kick-start thing worries me a little. When you get paged out from a deep sleep, somnolescence disintegrates like a crystal vase dropped on a parking lot. One minute your heart is idling in a nocturnal
lup-dup
groove, the next second it’s bucking beneath your sternum like a startled carp. Adrenaline floods your system like white-hot light. Usually you wake on reflex, ready to roll. But if the page comes while you’re swimming a particularly murky section of the sleep cycle, you’ll be utterly fuddled. There are times I hear the tones and burrow deeper in the sheets, thinking it’s too bad for the poor slob who’s gotta answer that, then they hit the tones a second time and I jackknife out of bed, panicky, realizing that slob is me. There are times my head crackles and buzzes, as if my cerebrum is wreathed in static, waiting to discharge. I hear buzzing when my eyes move. I feel that if I roll them too quickly, I’ll have a seizure.