XIV. Planetary Bodies

A Memoir in Animal Encounters

First, I want to welcome all the new subscribers who have found their way to my little corner of the Substack-sphere by way of a recent note about my encounter with a deer, and how that moment brought about both grief and longing for a more authentic life. I am so heartened by the shared humanity that post stirred up- by how many of us have encountered something sacred in moments of connection in the wild (or even with our own children) that we intuitively knew would be corrupted by anything that interrupted our reverent attention.

I think you will find that this theme comes up again and again in the memoir that I am currently sharing here with my community. I am so delighted that this space is growing. I appreciate each and every one of you so much.

Welcome to Chapter Fourteen of my life story, as told through incredible animal encounters ranging from coastal Massachusetts to the plains of Africa to the Alaskan tundra.

Every Wednesday I write and release a new chapter in this unfolding narrative, and I am often as surprised as you are by what comes out on the page. If you’re new here, and would like to catch up, you can find the previous chapters here. However, each one is presented as a stand-alone story, so you can also just dive right in- I trust you’ll put the pieces together on your own.

I have no business having even one of these ridiculous encounters in my cache, let alone several dozen. I know, I know. Alas, this is my life, laid bare for you.

Chapter Fourteen: Planetary Bodies

March 1993, Tucson, AZ

When I was twelve years old, my mother took me to the labor and delivery ward in the hospital for the first annual “Take Our Daughters to Work Day”, a project founded by Gloria Steinem to let little girls know that they could, in fact, be anything they wanted to be when they grew up.

I left knowing that women were the most powerful beings in the world, and that I definitely didn’t want to give birth to a baby.

I was invited into two different deliveries- a vaginal one with a mother who was very loud and impossibly strong, her body morphing and contorting into a lifegiving portal right before my eyes- a transformation that left me absolutely reeling- and an emergency cesarean section that completely rewired my understanding of the human body.

It was a sacred education for a pre-pubescent girl.

I distinctly remember standing on a stool at the foot of the bed in the operating room, swimming in scrubs that were three sizes too large for me, my shoes and hair covered by a gossamer thin surgical cap and footies, my baggy, latex hands clasped behind my back, staring at a scalpel poised to slice through the swollen abdomen of a naked woman who’s upper torso was hidden behind a curtain.

“She’s not going to faint on us, is she?” The masked surgeon asked my mom, who was standing right beside me with her hand on my shoulder.

She told him I’d be fine. I wasn’t so sure. I’d never seen the inside of a body. Well, once my best friend’s little sister had fallen on a broken tree stump when we’d been building a fort in the desert, and I had seen the inside of her armpit, but that was different. There weren’t organs in there, or a whole human. Just lots of blood and dirt and shredded flesh. I’d been very calm when I had helped her navigate the path back to my house, even though I was absolutely freaking out inside, so that was something. Maybe I wasn’t a fainter.

I pressed my lips together and remained stock-still as he made the first cut.

The skin peeled back on itself, blood blooming in the tidy, straight incision, revealing a bumpy yellow layer underneath, marbled through with red veins. My mom whispered in my ear each time the scalpel made a new cut, “Subcutaneous Tissue…fascia… abdominal muscles… peritoneum… uterus.”

Her words stitched me back into my body, even as the mother’s was cleaved open.

I had no idea there were so many layers under our skin. It made me think of a globe we had in my classroom with a wedge-shaped cross section removed, showing the earth’s crust, mantle, outer core and inner core. This woman’s abdomen was as stratified as the planet, and I was descending right down into it.

The surgeon cauterized the “bleeders” as he worked his way down, sending wisps of smoke up and out of the cavity like tiny geothermal vents. The room was wet with the smell of iodine and blood and stainless steel and burned flesh.

He occasionally grabbed a clean, white cloth off the tray next to him, soaking up the blood until it no white remained, and then tossed it behind him unceremoniously. I wondered who came and cleaned those up, and if anyone had ever accidently left one inside of the mother. As I was pondering this, one of the cloths hit me square in the chest, the force of the damp “thwack” nearly knocking me off my stool. I looked at my blood-stained baby blue scrubs and up at my mom, my eyes wide.

“You ok?” She asked, smiling and raising her eyebrows. I nodded solemnly.

She squeezed my shoulder, and I looked at the scene on the table again, and saw that the doctor was pushing the blade into the woman’s uterus, and I held my breath, hoping he wouldn’t cut the baby. Once he had carefully dragged the blade all the way across the exposed surface, he took great big forceps from the tray and opened it further and then reached right in, working the baby’s head out and then its shoulders and then it kind of slipped right into his hands. He cradled the head and neck with one hand and the tiny bottom with the other, and a nurse cleared its airway, and it began to wail and kick its legs, turning pink and then bright red.

A baby girl. Warm and loud and bloody and beautiful.

The molten core of this woman’s body was alive. I wiped tears from my cheeks with the back of my rubbery hand.

Why did girls need to be reminded that we could be anything we wanted to be?

How had we forgotten?

We were planets, teeming with life.

---

September 2004, Gloucester, MA

I stepped out of the beaten-up truck and into a gust of cold autumnal wind blowing right off the Atlantic Ocean. The salty air filled my lungs, and then right behind it, the overwhelming stench of death.

My coworker, Alison, handed me a stained leather satchel from the cab and slung her camera bag over her shoulder. I followed her to the rocky shoreline with my head down, ropes of hair whipping right out of my ponytail and into my eyes.

When we got there, she fished a tin of Vick’s VapoRub out of her pocket, pressing it into my hand.

“Put it under your nose,” she said. “It’ll help with the smell.”

The odor was so noxious it made my eyes water. I unscrewed the cap and applied a thick layer of ointment to my upper lip, grateful that the mentholated fumes covered up most of the gaseous ones. The insides of my nostrils felt unnaturally frigid. I shivered and zipped my coat up all the way to my chin.

“At least this one just died,” she announced, yelling over the wind. “I once had to do a necropsy on a humpback that had been sitting on a hot beach in North Carolina for a full week, and I almost passed out.”

I scrunched up my nose and turned my attention to the fin whale at our feet.

Though it was only a juvenile, it was enormous, probably 50 feet from snout to tail.

I dropped to my knees on the rocky beach and laid my hand on its upturned belly as Alison stepped back and snapped a few pictures.

I had never actually touched a whale.

I had seen hundreds, possibly even thousands, but I had never felt their skin under my skin. I knew the distinctive briny smell of their first exhalation after a long dive, and knew that when you made eye contact, you would catch a glimpse of the whole universe in the depths of their gaze. I had been close enough to see the barnacles on their bodies reach their feathery feet into the surrounding sea as they opened their mouths to scoop up red clouds of krill. I knew by the subtle curve of their backs if they would fluke up during a dive, or slip under with a less dramatic arc, but I did not know what those impossibly broad backs felt like.

She- for I could now see her mammary slits and knew her to be a female- was rubbery-soft on her exposed flank. I slid my hand along the length of her left side and remained low as I made my way to her throat. My fingers trailed along the accordion-like ridges there, slick on the peaks and rough in the little valleys. The rising and falling of my hand reminded me of when I used to stick it out of the car window when we were on road trips as a child. I closed my eyes and imagined those pleats expanding to accommodate a great gulp of seawater and then contracting to push the water through her baleen, tightening again as she swallowed the fish that remained trapped in her mouth.

Now, she looked like a deflated balloon, billowing with the waves that rhythmically crashed on the beach. Her right side was still in the water, and because the tide was rising, we knew we had precious little time to determine the cause of her death before the ocean reclaimed her battered body.

I stood up, drying my stiff hands on my jeans, and turned back to Alison.

She lowered the camera. “It’s your first necropsy. You should cut.” She nodded at the leather bag that I had discarded on the rocks. “The knife is in there.”

I walked over and unzipped the satchel. There were a number of things inside, but the knife handle drew my attention. The blade was sandwiched between a couple pieces of cardboard held together with duct tape. I picked it up and slid it from its makeshift sheath, admiring the long, serrated edge. It was rusty, which I found disconcerting until I realized that we were not doing a sterile procedure here.

Alison had coached me on what to do in the truck, so I turned to the whale and located her genital slit, nestled right between the mammary glands, and poised the edge of the blade just north of that, right on her slowly undulating abdomen. I pressed down, but nothing happened. I pressed harder and harder still, until it finally punctured her thick flesh, jerking my body forward.

“Sorry,” I whispered, tears stinging my nose.

I took a deep breath and tried to slide the edge up her abdomen but had to saw back and forth instead, bracing my other hand on her belly for support. I began to sweat with the effort.

Her skin did not peel back tidily, nor did blood pour from the incision.

But the layers were there, just the same. I imagined my mother’s hand on my shoulder.

Subcutaneous Tissue…fascia… abdominal muscles… peritoneum.

Beads of sweat bloomed on my brow. Alison was now in the water in her waders, examining the whale’s right side.

Suddenly, she broke the labored silence and shouted, “Got it!” which startled me so much I dropped the knife.

Inside the whale’s open abdominal cavity.

Shit.

I looked up as Alison yelled against the force of the wind that there were ship strike abrasions near her head. This poor young female had been killed by a boat- she had obvious blunt trauma to the head and a broken jaw.

“We can wrap it up here,” she said, coming over to where I was squatting in the sand. “There’s no need to examine the stomach contents or organs. The tide is rising really fast anyway.”

I raised my empty hands. “I dropped the knife.” I said, making a face.

“Ok…. can you get it?”

“I dropped it inside the whale.” I confessed.

She huffed a laugh and leaned over the incision, peering into the bottomless hole.

“And I’m assuming you don’t want to fish around in a dark whale carcass for a serrated blade?”

“I’m sorry.” I said, fighting back a laugh myself.

“No worries, it was a crappy knife anyway. Just leave it.”

Still, I felt terrible, walking away from her that day, a literal knife in her belly. I wanted to cover her in seaweed and cockle shells, to lay hands on her and bless her beautiful life. I didn’t want to be a scientist right then. I wanted to be a high priestess. I turned around one last time and whispered a benediction in my mind, the wind howling into my upturned face.

May you settle to the seafloor. May you find peace. May your body will teem with life anew. Somehow, somewhere in the stratosphere, you will keep on spinning. But now, my love, now your body may rest.

---

August 2011, Bellingham, WA

I poised the tip of the trowel right above the soil, neatly cutting into the earth as I pushed down on its handle. I was crying and I didn’t quite know why.

I dug and dug, down through the crust and into the mantle, right to the core of the bed where the forgotten potatoes had grown large and unwieldy.

I dropped the tool and brushed the soil away with my fingers, marveling at the size of the roots, not one potato but two that had merged together. I wiggled them loose and freed them, cradling them in my hands as I lifted them into the air, shaking the remaining dirt from their flesh.

I should be happy here, in my new life, I knew that. I had a husband now, and a home, and a garden. The hens cooed in the fenced yard just next to me. I could see neighbors mowing their lawns down the row of houses next to me. Responsible humans doing responsible things. And look at me: I had grown potatoes! What an achievement!

I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy.

I laid back on the grass, hands on my abdomen, and closed my eyes.

There had been a quiet rhythm I had gotten used to in the last year, living this domestic married life, the life I thought I wanted after so many years in motion. I painted the kitchen, bought good smelling candles, decorated the walls with thrift store artwork and a large mirror and an oversized clock a friend had insisted would “elevate the space”.

I went to work five days a week now, I had a regular paycheck. This was what I was supposed to be doing, right? This was the goal? I had sown my oats, and now it was time to… what? Germinate?

But my husband and I had just returned from a two-week road trip around Banff and Jasper National Parks in BC, happily living out of the bed of my truck with nothing but the beauty of the world to elevate the space, and it had been so much better and wilder than this. We had eaten freeze dried vegetables and canned tuna and lots of bread and peanut butter and woken up in the middle of the night to stars so close I thought I could gather them up in my outstretched arms. We had no schedule, only to be present to the landscape, to move slowly through the world, to savor each bite. We made love on a glacier and kayaked on crystalline turquoise lakes, and something inside of me had woken from its slumber. I remembered. The whales came to me in my dreams, and I swore I could hear snapping shrimp, and the keening cries of shearwaters and ancient, throaty spouts laced into the high alpine soundscape upon waking.

I laid on the grass and imagined that I was a beached whale, animated only by the prosaic, suburban tide around me, lifeless inside.

How sweet it would be, to let the waves claim me, to settle into the sea. To leave the noise behind, to be swallowed by silence.

But I wasn’t dead. Not yet.

I made my hands into fists and then stretched my fingers out again, pressing them into the soft flesh of my belly.

I descended.

Down and down. Subcutaneous Tissue…fascia… abdominal muscles… peritoneum… uterus. Crust… outer mantle… asthenosphere… lithosphere… inner mantle… core.

My body and the earth became one thing.

There. Movement. Deep inside. Not a baby, no. Something closer to lava. Heat, desire. Longing.

I did not know it then, but this heat would soon light my whole life on fire. Soon I would leave that whole domestic story behind. I would uproot the garden. Soon, we would sell the house. We would sell everything, even the large clock on the wall. We would move to Africa first, then to Alaska, then New Zealand and Spain and Central America.

I would yield to the molten hunger inside of me. Creation demands birth; it will not be denied, no matter how afraid of it we might feel.

But first, I needed to remove the blade of conformity that I had unloosed inside of me, sharp and foreign in that wild place.

You don’t belong here, I thought, flinging it onto the manicured lawn.

I breathed into my body. You are a planet, my love. And planets are ever in motion. Go now.

Live.