Still I Wonder
I didn’t mean to kill her. I just didn’t know what else to do. She was there at my car when I got off work, her and her little brood tattering about making darling little baby duck noises. I imagined another ending, but I just didn’t have the time or expertise for saving baby ducks. Maybe they didn’t need saving anyway.
Could baby ducks go up the outdoor escalator? Or be shepherded to the loading dock and into the elevator? Upper campus would be gentler than this desolate University of Washington parking garage below Padelford Hall, a creepy, terribly ill-conceived building from an architect that also designed prisons.
There was no logical way to guide the ducks out of this brutal parking structure. Besides the elevator and escalator there are outdoor stairs or a meandering path that makes you go backward before you can go forward.
My pal Polly was busy busting her dad out of the hospital and didn’t need to be bothered with a silly baby duck situation. I phoned another friend, but they only advised throwing rocks to move them along. A crackly voice through the emergency call button speaker said to call animal control.
Sitting on a concrete parking bumper I watched the mama and ducklings for a while. All of us together in a place none of us belonged. Imposters. Where was the wonder of wonder in watching these pale-yellow delights? Left only with the wonder of uncertainty, I sat alone.
After considering options, I didn’t intervene. I scooted them along safely away from my car and went home. Why couldn’t that have been the end of the story? I got a cute video and had a laugh. Why didn’t it end there as a sign from the universe of rebirth and renewal?
Pulling into work the next day, there she was, the mother duck. Schmooshed. Unrecognizable except for her bill, feet and a few feathers. I considered taking a picture, but nobody needed to see this, I didn’t want to be seeing this. And it felt disrespectful to the duck. But I forced my gaze at the result of my choices.
I had no tobacco and still no one was around to bum a smoke from and still I wondered what to do. Nobody smokes anymore anyway. I gathered some tree detritus blown up against the curb to use for a blessing.
With a box from the loading dock recycle dumpster and an ice scraper from the car, gently as I could, I got her into the box. She came home with me, all the way wondering what happened to the little babies, and also not wanting to know. My heart impossibly wished someone extended them the kindness I neglected.
It was Syttende Mai, the 17th of May, Norwegian Constitution Day. The parade was maybe one of the best of my life celebrating and being so damn happy at living a life that not everyone gets to have. Fortune finds you my Aunt Zona told me once.
Fortunate indeed to land in Ballard, a place with the lore of having a church for every bar. Though these days more people go to bars than church. Original occupants were Xacho-absh, Duwamish Lake People. Octogenarian neighbor Linea likely never knew of these folks when she recalled her Scandinavian settler days past where “everyone looked the same and nobody had a dog”.
The next day, together with my husband and the dearest of neighbors, we gathered in our traffic circle. The poor mother swathed in a floral nʉʉhkwitubitʉ, a waist wrap from old powwow regalia.
Hitting pavement with the shovel startled us. Made sense. Despite the trees and abundance of irises, the traffic circle was only a layer of dirt over the road. Below that were the old trolley tracks
Standing in the middle of the circle looking east or west the street bulges upwards straight down the middle. The asphalt entombs the tracks creating terrible drainage leaving rain swept gravel along the curbs. Student drivers grind tires over the gravel while learning to parallel park. It’s a popular street to practice on since it’s so wide from the days of the trolley.
The scheme of Šilšul Territory land grabber Harry Treat, the Loyal Heights Railway took dreamers for a three-cent ride nearly all the way to Golden Gardens. On Sundays Mr. Treat picked up passengers at the terminus in his horse-drawn buggy to give you his financing pitch for $250 home site on the bluffs. Treat named the line for his youngest daughter, Loyal, possibly at the annoyance of older sister Pricilla Grace.
It was a blustery month. We fought the wind to light some cedar with a Bic lighter I’d beaded. Even with a kitchen torch we barely got it going enough to give us all a little smudge. And there we laid the poor mother to rest. As close to the land as we could get, amid urban layers of man’s attempts at progress.
If only ruminating thoughts began and ended like that trolly line. A finite stop where you could just get off and bury the past sealing in hurts and grudges. Seven generations it’s said to soothe assaults given and gotten. But despite filling the spaces of my soul with distractions of life, still I wonder.