Finalist
Terrain.org 15th Annual Nonfiction Contest
1.
Every spring a few mosquito hawks drop in for a visit, but this year they’re bombing us in droves. Once temperatures reached the 80s, we opened the windows and sliding doors and in they bounced, not as single guests according to their usual custom, but ganged together in dense puffs. This winter’s record rains produced warm muds perfect for incubation in backyards like ours. Now the mosquito hawks—a.k.a. crane flies, skeeter-eaters, gollywhoppers, gallinippers—swarm in every room. The Scots call these invaders Jenny Long Legs. The Irish call them Skinny Philips or Pilib an Gheataire, depending on your Gaelic. I note these details not to show off any special knowledge, but to point out that our habitat is no unique draw for mosquito hawks, although they sure seem fond of the local Yolo County chardonnay, floating languidly in twos and threes trailing appendages in our wineglasses at dinner. Crane flies live almost anywhere when conditions are right, not just in places like Davis, California and Houston, Texas, but in thick hordes throughout Russia and South America. To borrow a phrase from James Joyce, crane flies are general all over the world. Yesterday I watched two bob and weave in a perfect pas de deux just the other side of my shower spray and wondered, whose shower is this? Are they invading my shelter, or am I invading theirs? Two perfect winged skeletons hang frozen on my bedroom screen, interwoven with the garden outside.
2.
At first Louis, my sleek black wiener dog, started rearing on his back trotters to kill something invisible beneath the deck. He snuffled a crack between planks, cocked his head sideways, and bam! All 20 pounds pitched into the wood. Prodding again with his front claws, he’d dive bomb, snort, repeat that a time or two, then lose interest. Something was lurking below out of sight.
One night last summer, dining out back in the Delta breeze, I looked up to see a large rat in the pink light of dusk, airborne in the space between honeysuckle on the trellis and a fragrant tangle of lemon branches. Rattus rattus, common roof rat, aerialist, firing up his Cirque de Soliel act right as we sat down to grilled salmon and asparagus. We gave our new friends a name, les ratons, as if they’d arrived in Davis via the Bois de Boulogne. Could les ratons be whipping up chocolate mousse in the neighbor’s yard? We weren’t taking any chances. The following weekend, Mondo came with his chain saw to buzz cut the trees, hauling away half a truck bed of branches and teeth-chomped Meyer lemons. Mom wept over the citrus tree as if she’d lost a child to starvation. Nevertheless, the critters seemed to vanish. History tells us Rattus rattus brings the plague. We decided les ratons had boarded the next Air France flight back home, and we were glad. Never mind that Louis’s nightly dig on the wood planks suggested otherwise.
Around the holidays, I spotted trails of little coffee-bean turds in the garage. Labels were chipping off our Costco stash of diced tomato cans, and clean holes were punched into tins of kitty’s chicken paté. Coiled metal shavings threaded the fresh piles of feces on the cement floor. Les ratons! Something fascinated me about their raton-esque determination. One night, ferrying empty bottles to the recycling bin, I locked eyes with un raton no more than a foot away casing the Friskies entrée selection by the backdoor. When the following evening I startled another raton, clinging magnetically to some rake handles, phantom wings lifted the critter straight to the rafters where she dashed into the loft. I remembered that scene in Walden, when Thoreau calmly notes a mouse climbing up his leg while he enjoys a light lunch in his cabin. Why fight the natural rhythm of things? I kept hearing an uncomfortable word, infestation. I averted my gaze.
Finally, I followed a line of droppings to the corner by the garage door where, beneath a pile of stiff drop cloths and the bric-a-brac of an abandoned mosaic project, I found what was once a fresh walnut wreath ravaged, nut by nut, by hungry ratons. In the dead center of every shell was a precision suck-hole. Nearby, untouched, was the catch-and-release cage I had recently scored at Ace Hardware. The sight of this devoured wreath, and the ingenuity of those teeth, finally convinced me to turn the matter over to a professional, the friendly pest control guy. I acquiesced to the cold logic of traps.
I’ll be honest. The sight of a raton freshly garroted in a snare haunts me. All it took was three violent deaths. The news moved swiftly across waves of raton ultrasound, and in no time the garage was ours again. No more lines of coffee-bean turds. Just silence, smoothly labeled tomato cans, and something like grief in my own heart, for what are les ratons other than something that is, well, inevitable?
The other day I spoke with a carpenter about building us a new deck, tearing away these sun-weathered, dachshund-pocked planks and shooing the rats off to some other shelter.
“Everybody has rats in Davis,” he said. “Even the big new houses at the Cannery have rats,” referring to the luxury subdivision on what was once the Hunts tomato plant at the edge of town.
Get used to it, he was saying.
3.
Last April I joined a few dozen book lovers at the community theater for an evening conversation with two novelists from our town. The writers lounged onstage in baggy jeans and, fresh off grueling book tours, they were practically giddy to be hanging out with hometown fans. When the reading wrapped, I barely registered my friend Kitty’s quick report: there was a murder downtown last night. The Compassion Guy! What did she mean—the Compassion Guy was dead? I put the information aside and walked home. The night was black and warm, the air molten with honeysuckle. Starlight was my guide, this being the kind of town that removes all but a few streetlights in courtesy to the local stargazers. I strolled along in gauzy britches on pillowy slides, grateful.
Two nights later a 20-year-old college student was knifed to death a few blocks away. Two days after that, a homeless woman across town was gored through the canvas of her tent. Students were told to shelter-in-place in their dorms. No one could even whisper the words we were all thinking: serial killer. Soon even the Guardian of London was talking about our little town, and the Compassion Guy.
What kind of person gives up everything for a radical experiment with shelter? David Henry Breaux. David Henry Breaux. David Henry Breaux. Chant the Compassion Guy’s name and your brain might scramble his memory with that other guy, the one who escaped the shriek of locomotives to build himself a rough cabin by Walden Pond. David Henry Breaux was a Stanford urban studies graduate who arrived in our town with an audacious plan to seed this place with compassion, inspired by a TED talk from a former nun named Karen Armstrong. He sold his car, gave up television, renounced all his possessions, and after a brief interlude of couch surfing with friends, planted himself permanently outside with a spiral notebook at the corner of 3rd and C. David Henry Breaux was tall and beautiful, walnut-skinned, with a white streak pointing like lightning into a globe of salt-and-pepper hair. For years he stood patiently in sandals, guileless, in the green shade of majestic elms, gently asking each person passing by, What does compassion mean to you? With a pen and paper, he took dictation for 3,000 strangers.
“By asking people the question,” he told a host on community television, “I found a lot of positive energy was being created.”
The Compassion Guy rallied with local artists to get permission from AT&T, the property owner at 3rd and C, to create a rambling rose-adobe and mosaic piece of street art known as the Compassion Bench. Here he dwelled in a microclimate of his own making, passersby entering on one side and exiting with more kindness on the other. He fashioned himself Gandhi in the age of YouTube. He broadcast a live-feed about unconditional love. He launched a GoFundMe. He went to Louisville to stand on the corner where Thomas Merton was enlightened. He published his spiral notebook. Had he been born heir to a prosperous pencil manufacturer in Concord, Massachusetts a century and a half earlier, and not to a violent father and schizophrenic mother in 1960s Duarte, California, the Compassion Guy might have changed the world. Instead, one night sleeping outside by the merry-go-round in our Central Park, he was gutted by a 21-year-old biology major who was hearing voices, his own childhood a journey through hell from El Salvador.
Once on a Sunday morning, seated outside over crêpes with friends downtown, I watched David Henry Breaux at the corner, locked in urgent conversation with a young woman. Towering over her, he straddled a vintage pink cruiser with a bouquet of spring flowers overflowing the panier. I knew nothing then about the Compassion Guy, but something frightened me about this exchange. Were they arguing? Was he pressing on her something she didn’t want? Was he a clown taking a break from entertaining folks across the street at the farmer’s market? My mind wrestled with those purple irises in his basket. A stabbing in my gut said some boundary was being breached. Beauty was misaligned with transgression.
It’s now been a year since he was found lifeless by the merry-go-round, and I’m still suturing my heart in memory of that urgent man on his pink cruiser. I asked a few long-time activist townies, “Who will carry on the Compassion Guy’s project?” They seemed not to understand the question. Maybe the answer travels on a different kind of wavelength. Joan of Arc heard voices. Thoreau might have too. Why wouldn’t a saint or a sage appear on a streetcorner in my town? If a mosquito hawk can transmogrify on a screen mesh, and if Rattus rattus can fly, why wouldn’t compassion be a tall man on a pink bicycle, intense, like an elm?
At home east of the rain shadow in California’s Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, Judith Frankel writes essays and poetry about loss, family, and place. Her piece “Dog Park Dharma” is now live in Story Sanctum. She holds BA and MA degrees in English from the University of Illinois.
Header photo by Jessica Christian, courtesy Pixabay.
