The Wilderness Between

Here I am. The steps again. I’m glad the weather has warmed. I was not quite ready for fall. My trees here are still mostly green. I hear from second years that the trees at Chatham change all at once. One day, I’ll walk up my steps and nothing will be green. Oranges, reds, yellows, browns, maybe, probably. But no green.

I am interested in watching how fall treats my ivy. I wonder if I will watch it brown. More likely, I expect that it will be green until the snow covers it, but once the snow melts away, the ivy will be gone or brown. Some part of me suspects that the ivy is actually inching into itself. I seem to feel that it was a wider patch last time I sat here. Perhaps I will make a marker to see if the ivy really is shrinking.

I’ve been finding wildness in the strangest places lately. I mean, there’s this piece of wildness between campus and home. There’s the large “weeds” that have sprung up between two plates of concrete in front of my apartment building. And then there’s my friend’s fishtank.

I am not a friend to fish. I had many as a child, and they all, without exception, died. Because I didn’t realize—and I guess my parents didn’t either—that you had to change the water out. All my fish suffocated in their own feces. How terrible. I hope hell is kinder than me.

But my friend is a meticulous fish keeper. He keeps a constant level of water. He cleans the tank weekly. He buys the expensive fish food, and even little fish snacks. Recently, he bought a second tank to keep crawdads in to feed his fish. Now, I thought these were just regular house goldfish. I mean, sure they were black and blue and orange with electric accents, but they were in a tank. How wild could they be?

They are savage.

The first crawdad was eaten by eleven fish in four days. (The fish were still young, still remembering their hunting instincts.)

The second crawdad, significantly larger, was slowly eaten. They were cruel. First, the fish bit and pulled off its claws. Then, slowly, they picked off its legs and antennae. After that, they left the crawdad on its back for two days; all it could do was blink, wave it proboscis in the water, and wait for death.

It was horrifying. For two days, I checked on the poor crawdad at regular intervals, hoping that one of the fish in the tank had had the decency to put it out of its misery. But, no. On the third day, the crawdad was simply gone. A few pieces of its picked-clean exoskeleton drifting along the bottom of the tank were all that remained of that poor crawdad.

When I asked my friend why he fed his fish live crawdads, he told me that he thought it important to let his fish keep at least some of their natural wildness. And I really admired this answer. I had never thought of fish in a tank as wild. But they really are brutal. I still may not like fish, but I respect them now. Damn.