Two weeks ago, I fell into Henderson Inlet. It was a casual fall. One moment I was standing on my board, paddling, and squinting into the distance. My friend Sophie and I were passing through Cormorant City, a section of the inlet where the forest trees are stained white with birdshit, and the cormorants fly overhead bearing thin, leafy branches for nest building. It’s an intense operation. The water is littered with these branches, and the sound of the cormorants coordinating with each other is metallic. Collectively, they are a machine, engineered for building and breeding.
Anyways, I fell in there, in the cormorant water, for no discernible reason. One moment I was paddling, and the next moment I was falling. Oh shit, Sophie, I heard myself say, and then I fell in.
Falling in felt different than I’d imagined. The water didn’t shock me. It disoriented and then reoriented me. Somehow, without consciously choosing, I’d transitioned from one element to another.
My week had been piled with deadlines, with one thing after another thing, and then other little things piled on in between. I had considered not going on the water that morning, had worried that paddling would just be yet another thing on top of things. And so, falling in felt honest. Like, an accidental but true commitment to the moment.
The rest of the day after my fall I felt wonderful. I felt that feeling you get from cold water, from salt, submersion, negative ions—whatever it is—when your muscles relax by 5% and your nerves hum. The feeling kept reminding me that I’d fallen in, kept connecting me to submersion, surprise, letting go.
-
I wanted to write a love letter about falling in, and I started to think about the phrase falling in love. How we talk about falling in love like love is water, but we don’t speak of falling in joy, falling in calm, falling in grief. But we do those things. We fall in. Or we keep ourselves from falling in.
I was thinking these things, and writing them down as little notes, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to write it out—partly because of all of the things, but also because I had the sense that more was coming.
And then Bigfoot, our favorite chicken, died.
The news came in increments. My phone rang while I was standing in the middle of an abandoned orchard up the road from my home. The call was my wife telling me she was worried that Bigfoot was gone. She had found feathers. How worried? I wanted to know. Actually, she was certain. There were so many feathers. I would see when I got home.
I didn’t believe her. I walked home not believing her, imagining the smallest, most negligible pile of feathers—feathers that could have belonged to anyone, or that could have meant some minor skirmish. Bigfoot is, like, dog-level pet, I explained to my friend who was on the walk with me.
It’s dangerous to love a chicken so much, I had told myself many times over the last year. Chickens, in my experience, have no set lifespan. Some of them last for years, but many die suddenly or disappear. Before Bigfoot, their loss never troubled me much. It was sad in the distant way that all death is sad.
We had loved Bigfoot in a way that started small and just kept growing. It started with her happening to have the best name of all the chicks—Bigfoot—which made no sense because she wasn’t big and neither were her feet. As the chicks matured, Bigfoot stood out more and more as the chicken who enjoyed being held. She didn’t flee when my children approached, and so they held her every day. In our pandemic landscape, the flock had replaced our colleagues and classmates. Other chickens in the flock retained their names, but there was a way in which Bigfoot became the only chicken.
One day, my 8-year-old reached the end of his strawberry popsicle and offered her the last few bites, which she pecked and swallowed with gusto. It seemed that she recognized him—his gait, his voice, who knows—because he’d appear in the yard and she’d come running towards him. We were forever moving her out of the driveway before we left the house, and the day before she disappeared my son had picked her up and placed her next to him in the backseat. Someday, I told him, we can take Bigfoot for a ride, but not right now.
I started to understand that Bigfoot was really gone when I came home and she was not in the yard. I kept thinking she’d materialize, that she’d step out from a patch of tall grass and announce herself as she so often did, but the yard was strangely quiet. The other chickens scratched at leaves along the fence line, ignoring me.
And then there was the pile of feathers. It was undeniable. I saved the news until my children were together. My 8-year-old fell to his knees. He gestured to the sky like people do in movies. My 12-year-old first called for her insistently, and then began sobbing. The sobbing lasted 48 hours.
I want to say they didn’t take it well, but then I wonder why we say such things. They took it well because they felt it. They fell into their grief. Because there is no falling into love without, eventually, falling into grief.
It is dangerous to love a chicken because it is dangerous to love.
Places to Mourn
My friend and once-neighbor, Kathy Gore-Fuss, has set up an installation at 1511 Quince St NE Olympia. It is a space for people to grieve and reflect on what they’ve lost over the past year and over a lifetime. It will remain until the flowers have run their course. We left a little tribute to Bigfoot there.
Everywhere Else
I’ve had some freelance work lately that has pushed me to new places and filled me with joy. I got to write about parenting and gaming for WIRED, which was extra fun because that is so outside my niche.
On a lark, I reached out to author Gina Frangello to see if she’d talk to me about the critical response to her memoir Blow Your House Down. She said yes, and then Bitch Magazine said they’d run it, and here it is. Apparently I am a serious person who interviews serious people, and that makes me giddy. All I had to do was ask.