The Rake in Winter

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

Looking out my window before the blizzard on Sunday morning, I notice a Canada goose sitting on the ice in the same spot since yesterday. It’s off by itself and occasionally swings its neck but does not move. Later that morning, I notice one of the Toulouse geese swimming madly in circles in the middle of the pond where the bubblers keep the pond from freezing entirely. I have never seen a goose act like that, disoriented, erratic, robbed of its bearings. I didn't know it then, 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 is covered with inches of fresh snow. There is a lump of snow where the Canada goose had been, and I assume it had died.

On Tuesday afternoon, after the storm, I decide to walk out on the ice with the idea of removing the dead bird, an act of stewardship, a final care for creatures I have tended. I bundle up in my winter coat and boots and head outside. Before I walk out on the ice, I remove my watch, my wallet, my phone, artifacts of identity and connectivity, and leave them on the bench in the duck blind. I tell myself, you never know. It’s just 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 turns out there are seven dead geese — five beautiful Toulouse geese and two Canada geese. I pull four birds off the ice with a four-prong rake and throw them into the woods. Then I go back on the ice to fish the remaining dead birds out of the water.

I am close to the edge of the open area in the middle of the pond. As I reach toward a dead goose with the rake, I hear a crack. The next thing I know I’m in the water. My first polar plunge. A moment of panic strikes. Fortunately, I fall in feet first and immediately spin around and grab at the ice with my hands. My heavy winter coat now weighs about three hundred pounds. The rake is nearby on the ice. I grab it, hook it into the ice, and pull myself out — soaking wet, quite cold, and still alive.

It is always just a moment.

It's funny to me now. And it was even a little bit funny as 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.

I stomped back inside, put all the clothes in the wash, and took a very warm shower. I said a thank you prayer and took a nap. After the 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 in 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 my inattention to the ice beneath my 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 the fragility of life 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.