On the ridge above the valley where it’s rumored to be, I’ve discovered yet another carcass. This one is a songbird, small and stiff beside the trail, only half the length of my hiking boot. Tawny down still soft to the touch. Rabbitbrush, yellow with spring, forms a circle of sun around the body, the scent a musky tang on the tongue. The sagebrush here is the same kind that grows in my mother’s garden.
I want to tell you something: all life has meaning.
Below the songbird, my valley laid out in chapters; a patchwork landscape of farmland, buildings, and bones. Every inch familiar to me—except for the hole. I’ve never looked for it. People say write what you know. History is full of dead things—it’s so easy to tell a story.
This is how it starts: on February 21st, 1997, on the Coast-to-Coast AM radio show, a man calls in identifying himself as Mel Waters. On his property a few miles outside town, he says an inexplicable phenomenon has been unearthed: a bottomless pit resistant to measurement or identification. They call it Mel’s Hole. Mel’s Hole spouts black beams and twists metal and possesses nearby radios with songs of a bygone age. Mel’s Hole may be alien; it may be a well-kept government secret. Another resident (unnamed) has thrown the body of his dead dog into the pit. He claims to have later seen it, alive and well, trotting the countryside with a hunter. When he calls to it, the poor thing doesn’t know its own name.
When we think of resurrection, it’s usually more ceremonious than this. Christ, after three days on the cross. Odin. Osiris.
Octavia Butler said write what scares you, but what creature doesn’t fear death?
History is full of dead things. So is the valley. When I came across the songbird, I was in the dirt looking for bones, which is what I do sometimes when no one else is around. I grew up in an archaeologist family, which must account for at least part of this desire to classify. “Mel’s Hole spouts black beams and twists metal and possesses nearby radios with songs of a bygone age.”Skull casts on the kitchen table. The other part, I think, must be the unknown. Fear and fascination are so often sisters. The truth is I’ve never been close enough to death to see it in detail, never entered a graveyard because I knew a name on a stone. I’m piecing together death’s face fragment by unburied fragment—how things end, how they begin again. How to make ourselves last, because if we don’t, does it even matter that we were here?
I want to tell you something: all death has meaning, too.
In 2014, the local paper publishes an article debunking the myth of Mel’s Hole as a geologic impossibility, due to the heat and pressure of the surrounding earth. In all likelihood, says the geologist, the urban legend was woven around an old mine shaft in the valley floor. Darkness, that old unknown, begs to be given meaning.
There’s more to this story, but I always come back to the dog. Some furry dead thing free-falling into blackness. Surely the owner must have believed in miracles, to let go of something he cared for over such a vast emptiness. Otherwise, what could have possessed him to do so? Curiosity? Or was it just the easiest way to bury the thing, without the cost of a shovel?
The sagebrush that grows in my mother’s garden smells like the valley, which smells like the garden which smells like my mother. My mother is an archaeologist which means she unburies things, which means she knows how to piece together death’s face. My first pet was a stick bug—a slow, spindly thing—and we buried her under that sagebrush.Here’s the problem with miracles: we want them too much. We’re the only species this intent on making ourselves last—resurrection, immortality, some loophole in the fabric or metamorphic strata of the valley. Fountain of Youth, Water of Life, a dog and a bottomless pit. We want to believe there’s a way we come out on top of all this.
But why can’t a dead thing just be dead?
On the ridge, the songbird carcass has begun to decompose. Its wings are tucked so gently into its sides, its body so perfectly centered in the halo of rabbitbrush-yellow, I have to assume someone else moved it into the sun. A picture of silence, a thing yet to be buried and unburied, taken apart or pieced back together. Still, all around, life goes on. Spring has always been the season of resurrection, balsamroot and yellow bell, swallowtails flitting between flowers.
It’s possible that in three days’ time, this songbird might wake upand fly away. It’s possible, if I dropped its little feathered body down Mel’s Hole, tawny down rippling in the swift rush of air, that it might reappear later, in the countryside, and not know its own name when I call it. But it seems unlikely. There is a pattern to these things, the angle of the sun and the slow softening of muscles. The way winter melts to make room for the green and new. And I want to tell you something: it doesn’t matter that we were here. It does matter. It doesn’t matter if it matters, because the point is we were here, and that should be enough.
I’ve never looked for Mel’s Hole; I don’t feel the need to. It’s not a question of believing in something—it’s just not the same as the bones, not the kind of loophole I’m looking for. I’ve spent twenty-two years weaving my own body in and out of this valley, dragging my own brittle bones up and down the ridge trail, past the garden, past the sagebrush where we buried a slow spindly thing I used to love. Twentytwo years watching things die and grow back and flit between flowers. People say write what you know. Patterns are comfortable; they let us feel we’re part of something, even if it’s only the earth our bodies are buried in. The oldest story in the world is the one that starts with I am here. And we go from there.
We buried that stick bug under the sagebrush in my mother’s garden. Her name was Cami. She lived on my bookshelf in a terrarium with three crooked sticks and a bright pink slotted lid. She died on a Monday, and when we buried her, my brother might have cried even harder than me. Thirteen years later, I still remember that—I still remember, and now I’ve written it down. See, we already know how to make ourselves last. It’s easy to tell a story. As easy as moving a dead bird off the trail.
The point is, I don’t need a miracle. I don’t want to wake up one day in the countryside and not recognize my own name when it’s called to me. When I die, let me stay dead; let me be part of that oldest story that begins with I am here:
I am here on the ridge trail overlooking my valley. I am here and have just discovered a bottomless pit way out past the house where the rabbitbrush is musky and blooming. I am here and I am writing about my mother’s garden and a dead dog and a hole in the ground. And after I’m gone, this story will begin again and again and again, but let me stay gone. Let me be a name on a stone and the bones in the ground.
And maybe, move me into the sun.