The Rake in Winter

Another snowfall. I haven't seen the grass in more than a month. It's depressing and beautiful at the same time.

Looking out my window before the snowfall on Sunday morning, I noticed that a Canada goose was sitting on the ice in the same spot since Saturday. It was off by itself and only occasionally swung its neck but did not move. Later that morning, I noticed one of the Toulouse geese swimming madly in circles in the middle of the pond where the bubblers kept the pond from freezing entirely. I had never seen a goose act like that, disoriented, erratic, robbed of its bearings. I didn't know it yet, but I was watching the final hours of a creature whose nervous system was being destroyed. Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) moves fast and kills without ceremony.

By Monday morning the ice on the pond was covered with inches of fresh snow. There was a lump of snow where the Canada goose had been, and I assumed it had died.

This afternoon, I decided to walk out on the ice with the idea of removing the dead bird, an act of stewardship, a final care for creatures I had tended. I bundled up in my winter coat and L.L. Bean boots and headed outside. Before I walked out on the ice, I removed my watch, my wallet, my phone, artifacts of identity and connectivity, and left them on the bench in the duck blind. I told myself, you never know, a casual thought. I wonder now if some part of me already understood that what I was walking into would require a different kind of self.

As it turned out there were seven dead geese — five of my beautiful Toulouse geese and two Canada geese. I pulled four birds off the ice with a four-prong rake and threw them into the woods. Then I went back on the ice to fish the remaining dead birds out of the water.

You guessed it.

I was close to the edge of the open area in the middle of the pond, reaching toward a dead goose with the rake, when I heard a crack. The next thing I knew I was in the water. My first polar plunge. A moment of panic struck. Fortunately, I went in feet first and immediately turned around and grabbed at the ice with my hands. My heavy winter coat now weighed about three hundred pounds. The rake was nearby on the ice. I grabbed it, hooked it into the ice, and pulled myself out — soaking wet, quite cold, and, as it happened, still alive.

It is always just a moment.

It's funny to me now. And it was even a little bit funny when I crawled out on the ice, stood up, dripping pond water, and smiled at the beauty around me. It was a baptism of sorts, although not scheduled. My life did not flash before me. I did fear for a moment that I wouldn’t get out but decided I wasn’t going to let it end that way.

I had gone out as an act of stewardship, a final act of care for the birds and to prevent them from decomposing in the pond. I think it ironic, or an act of grace, that the very instrument that I used to reach out to the dead was the same one I used to pull myself back toward life. It is anti-climactic to say that I am a lucky (albeit sometimes foolish) fellow!

After stomping back inside, putting all the clothes in the wash, and taking a very warm shower, I said a thank you prayer and took a nap. I reported the incident to the New Jersey Wildlife Commission — the dead geese, the likely HPAI, the die-off. I did not mention my own experience on the water.

One Toulouse goose, two Canada geese, and a Pekin duck remain as of today. I fear it's just a matter of days for them as well.

The geese died of a disease that destroys neurological function. It robs a creature of orientation, of the ability to read its world and move through it coherently. They swam in circles and then they stopped. I nearly joined them in the pond, not from disease but from inattention to the ice beneath my own feet. What saved me was a rake and four seconds of will.

What the afternoon gave me — beyond a good story and a justified nap — was a reminder that fragility is not an abstraction. It is a crack you hear before you understand what it means. And on the other side of that crack, if you are fortunate, is the same world you left, but clarified. The ordinary and astonishing fact of being here at all.

And to think only yesterday I suggested that we need not fear the Reaper.