I Am Watching You Disappear

Text and photos by Jeff Sharlet

I found this line copied from a poem as I was cleaning my late father’s storage unit, but I didn’t write down the poem’s name.

Yesterday, across a field of tall silver grass, I saw a fat brown bear turn and shuffle into the dark
between trees; and above a black water beaver pond, a red hawk, turned dim dusty orange by
the strange blue stormy light; and in an old churchyard a gravestone that read, arching over a
carved rose blackened by lichen, “transplanted to bloom above”; and on the road home, a dead
milk snake, all bright white teeth between scaly patches of the fading red.

She said she’d never been to New York, she just thought the jacket was pretty. It is. I asked if I could take her picture.

“But I’m not pretty,” she said. I told her I thought she was. “Ok,” she said. “I’ll close my eyes and think so.”

We went for a walk in the woods and came upon an old graveyard, far from the road. A cemetery named for the family that once owned the land: Wight. Which is also a word for a ghost, or an undead thing. 

The graveyard was on Wight land, but its inhabitants were Sargents, another family that has drifted in 

this town through more than 200 years. The house in which I write this once belong to Sargents, 

according to an 1856 map, and across the road, above the swamp, up a path marked by two crooked 

stones, lie many more Sargents, their markers mostly nearly blank now but for lichen; or worn down to
jagged stumps, like rotten teeth; those buried earliest now sliding down the hillside, year-by-year, as the
land rolls on, leaving the bones behind. 

On our walk this morning, in the Wight Cemetery, among those Sargents—their burying
ground close to a cliff’s edge but even and thus stable for now—we found lying flat the plain white stone
of Lydia M. Delano, 1844-1876. Or rather, the top two-thirds of the stone were yellow with age it was
the bottom third pale like white skin that hasn’t seen sun. The stone had been unearthed, taken. We
knew from where it came. Not our hill but three miles up our road, amidst apple trees, where it had long
stood alone. We investigated. Sure enough, it was gone. From its dry socket emerged a snake, which
settled across the gap, as if to guard the grave still beneath. 

I took photographs of each of these sites—Lydia M. Delano’s stone where it now lies, and the
land on which it once stood, but maybe they’re not mine to show. We looked through what records we
could find online: Lydia M. Delano, born Lydia Sargent. Called home to kin? Wrenched from her last
stand apart? Driven down a dirt road, carried along a wooded path, laid, not to rest, amidst family and
spring columbine?

On the way out of the woods, I took—and present instead—this. 

But my blood pressure is creeping higher. I don’t know why. I’ve been sitting on a couch for hours,
trying to “catch up,” falling behind. You know what I mean. 

Maybe you don’t: the balance of hustle and heart, not the metaphorical one but the real thing,
the two-fist organ in my chest with one part-dead wall, heart attack at a young age, doctors never could
explain. Day like this I get to thinking about that part-dead wall. Wondering which side I’m really on. 

It’s dark but I leash up the dog and set out for a walk and then I start trotting. Running. Away,
or toward? I don’t know. But I don’t want to turn back. When I hit the end of the road, I cut left into
the woods and down a trail to another dirt road, dark and silent as the last. The dog wants to go home.
Me, too. “C’mon,” I say, pulling her deeper into the night. 

Three miles out, a mile point that always makes me think of Three Mile Island, which makes me
think I need to lighten up. But it’s these dark dirt roads that calm me. No point in turning back now.
We’re on a loop, I tell the dog. If we keep going, we’ll come to the beginning. She agrees. 

There’s just one passage of paved road, Rt. 132, but it’s a tough stretch. Quarter mile, no
shoulder, steep climb. Very few cars, though. Run it fast and maybe we won’t get squeezed. We get
squeezed. Once, twice. Second time a truck stops. So do we. Truck rolls down its window. Strange place
for a conversation. 

“Hey.” A man’s voice. 

“Hey.” I have a man’s voice, too. 

Then: “That is the cutest dog! What kind?” 

I tell him. 

“Drove by twice to see him,” says the man. 

“Her.” 

“We lost ours,” he says. “Cute little pug. Disappeared, Christmas Day.” 

Sorry, I tell him. 

“You lost?” he says. 

Long stretch of country highway, nowhere I could turn. No, I say. The dog whines. “Gotta keep
moving,” I tell the dark. I can’t see the man. I imagine he nods. Rolls up his window. We start running,
faster now, until we get to this dirt road, where I pause to take a picture by headlamp, another three
miles til home. Then we start running again, toward and away, listening to the coy-dogs howl.

Burn pile. A heap, a thicket, a bristle, a mound—as perfect (at a distance) as the pale pink rose of a moon
blooming, north and east and distant from the sun on my shoulders. Tomorrow it’ll be full, a “crow
moon,” a “sugar moon,” a “sap moon,” if you measure the sky by the maple. 

Evening run. The hour adjusted. Daylight Saving. Yesterday would have been darker. Soon it
will be. I waited too long, sitting inside, reading stories. Stories by students, end of the term memoirs
and reports: a ghost, a prank, a janitor; a shotgun, a rifle. Violent men and nail salons, musicians, quiet
fathers and broken mothers, beloved brothers: patterns emerging or being sighted for the first time.
Maybe simply being named. “Juvenilia,” literary biographers call the stories we tell when we’re young.
Tales of becoming. 

A student searches for an ancestor, a judge in Salem, and wonders if she’s bound to follow
Hawthorne. An honest question. What debt do the stories that precede us, the ones that make us, come
to collect? We imagine ourselves free, cutting our own paths, as if we are not always walking or
running or resting alongside roads laid across the land by others. 

The moon is butter now, the sky pewter, pitch pine and white spruce charcoaling as the day
moves on. I realize I’ve not thought once on this run, as I usually do on these roads, of the fear I’ve been holding away with an outstretched arm.  It’s just there. I’m in its orbit now. 

My route takes me full circle through the hills, a lap around the waxing moon. Tomorrow the
day will be longer. The moon fuller. A “worm moon,” the last moon of winter.

Venus, rising or falling.

Found, by my boy, on the tree-bare hilltop above our home, to which we climbed this afternoon through thorns and over mossy warrens he named fairy castles. Deer skull,
newly revealed, after a long snow-covered sleep through winter. Our first year in
Vermont, I noticed in our local paper, around March, April, the late news of bodies:
winter accidents, lakes and rivers, those who had fallen through. When the ice
melted, the bodies rose. In the woods and fields winter’s kill met the sun. Signs of
spring: bird song, tree buds, bones. The new and the old. In the town we lived in
then there was a little stone house by the cemetery, a winter home for the dead who
couldn’t be planted until the ground warmed. 

Today the sun was bright on the hilltop. The skull fairly gleamed. My boy was
filled with joy. “At first,” he said, “I thought it was fake, because the lines looked like
letters.” He was learning to read. “It looked like something was written.” 

Sharon, Vermont, birthplace of Joseph Smith, whose parents took him west, to New York, where near
Palmyra he found the sacred spectacles, and the Book of Mormon, which took him west, to Illnois,
where in Carthage, Illinois he was then taken by a mob of men in blackface from the jail in which he sat
under charge of treason. Or rather, he fell out a window, shot, and died, and then they shot the body
some more, after which Brigham Young, pictured here at the memorial for Joseph Smith in Sharon,
Vermont, took the Latter Day Saints to Utah. I took this photograph of this picture because when we
visited the memorial, my eldest would not get out of the car, and I wanted them to see what they were
missing. 

Yes, she’s carrying. Because, she says, “You never know when they’ll come.” 

Outlawed in the Vermont Constitution, 1777. This house is for sale.

Bethel. Black flag. No mercy. “High as fuck.” Asin9ne.

Jesus on Church Street in Burlington, “down from the hills.”

The edge of some woods, good ground for hiding a tent, outside Brattleboro. 

Late one night in a CVS parking lot, the 24-hour, to which he’d all but coasted on the last of his fumes,
hoping for enough deposit bottles and cans to buy more gas. We passed an hour. He showed me some of
his things. His car was filled with his things. He told me where some of his things had sat in the
apartment in which he had lived before. He told me which trash cans in town had been good for finding
things since. There were things he wanted to show me which he couldn’t find. He couldn’t find enough
cans, at CVS. They’d taken steps, he said. They didn’t want him sifting their trash. Trash wasn’t what it
had been. Nothing much was, he thought. He told me he was an optimist. He said he’d find something.
He always had. A month later, CVS got rid of its trash can all together. 

Blossom on a blade of orchard grass, common as rain. It grows green then silver, then purple and now
brown, drying on a riverine stalk of burgundy. Also called cat grass and cock’s-foot, though my cat
shows no affinity for it, and I don’t see the metaphor of a rooster’s spur. It’s an immigrant, “introduced.”
As if a farmer once some 200 years ago announced its social debut on the local green scene. “Common”
is not in its name, as with so many other plants I come across--common yarrow, common mugwort,
common reed, even the not-so-common common elephant’s foot. But “common” fits its “distribution.”
(The term used for a plant’s local range. As if it had been doled out. Arrayed, as if the weeds and
wildflowers were, as the believers maintain, a matter of design.) Common, as in everywhere, every day,
an adjective suited to both space and time. A term not of dishonor but of recognition: a democracy of
vegetation.

Wild ginger. I’m learning the names of growing things and trying to teach them to my children. I tell
them this is science. Really, we’re studying history, the traces of those who looked and likened and
named before. We don’t know what their names were. Just these names they left behind. 

Today we found jewel weed and bloodroot and fleabane. Hog peanut and elephant’s foot. A
green-shouldered golem of metaphor shrugging up from the ground. I promise the kids a dollar for each
name they recall. Iolanthe (which is not their real name) claims forget-me-nots and ostrich fern and
cinnamon fern and interrupted fern—they call it backstroke, for the way its fronds unfurl like a
swimmer’s arms—and more, nine dollars. Aster (which isn’t his real name, either) takes zigzag,
honeysuckle, and golden Alexander. Three dollars. They like the numbers more than the names, but
prefer both to actual cash. 

Today my wife and I found wild ginger, a low leaf with jowls that grow toward each other to
reveal a heart. Could we eat it? It smelled like the thicker root we bought in the store, but we couldn’t
be sure. We gathered some in the net our son had brought for salamanders. Then, behind, a crackle.
Heavier than deer. Our kids were far ahead on the trail. I glanced back: bear. Jet-black, long-necked.
Thirty feet off? Closer. Practically peering over our stooped shoulders. 

Could he eat them? 

“Bear,” I said, in a voice that wasn’t calm. My wife bolted. “Walk!” I whispered. You can’t outrun
a bear. Don’t make it think you’re trying. 

My wife reconsidered. Bear! Maybe a closer look? There are bears here but not usually close
enough for examination. Wouldn’t the kids like to see it? She gestured to them. Come closer. I waved
my hands. No! We walked. Was it following? Look. Don’t look. Look again. “Aww,” whined our boy
when he learned what he’d missed. The thing most worth naming. 

The septic systems of Fairlee, Vermont, have been overwhelmed by urban refugees come north to second
homes, filling the lake with cyanobacteria blooms. The problem, it seems, is “nonconforming lots.”
Unzoned construction. The problem may be these people, leaving their first homes. 

That sounds wrong. As if I’m speaking of migrants, fleeing Haiti, Honduras, El Salvador. North
heats South, South runs North, North sends in the Border Patrol on horses. The second homes of
Fairlee complain of discrimination: there’s a hold on building new rec rooms. A “moratorium.” The
newspaper reports “serious threats” to leaf-peeping. It’s the weather. “Trees are going to shut down,” an
arborist declares. “The spread of diseases and invasive pests and the northward creep of tree species”—

We need some new metaphors. 

A nonconforming lot reported in Pawlet, Vermont: a “gunfighting school.” A 70-year-old
Newbury man deemed fit to stand trial: shot and killed his daughter one day as she brought him cookies.
A 30-year-old Randolph woman deemed fit to stand trial: stabbed to death her boyfriend, magnificently
monikered Concepcion “Coco” Cruz, because he would not accompany her to the store. Says she
remembers only waking up on the kitchen floor holding two steak knives, puzzled by their missing
blades. Extinctions: bridled white-eye, scioto madtom, flat pigtoe, little Mariana fruitbat (known also as
“the flying fox”), ivory-billed woodpecker, last seen in 1944. A panic attack strikes my firstborn: short of
breath, shaking, certain for a moment that if we do not turn off all the lights, right now, everything will
end. But this fear, as everything will, passes. 

A friend is moving to Michigan. Deep into the northern woods. He wants to be close to the
border. Just in case. He says he has a mug that declares that Lake Superior holds 10% of Earth’s fresh
water. He sends me a picture. (Of the mug.) He says that when my kids are 40, 50, there will be seven
times as much severe weather. 

“We have plenty of water in Vermont,” I tell him. I don’t mention the blooms. 

“Everybody already knows about Vermont,” he answers. 

Craig’s List advertisement for Mattress by Appointment, Essex Junction, Vermont

Then two goldfinches startled across the light, and a clutch of five sparrows parted ways like the fingers
of an outstretched hand, and some heavy-winged blunderbuss of a bird, not a goose or a duck or a heron,
launched itself across the swamp grass from behind the boulder. None of this splendor glimpsed here.
All the birds uncaptured, as they must be. Instead, words: an unlikely convocation, finch, sparrow,
“blunderbuss,” and the unseen, unheard mover of air and sound that sent them skyward. It wasn’t me; I
stood still, rooted. But there’s a house, the only one on this stretch of road, and now someone is
shouting, a woman, older, smoker: “I can’t FUCKING see!” See what? I can’t say. I’m still standing here,
rooted. You don’t bother a woman shouting in her own home. I used to knock on the doors of strangers,
a journalist, a reporter, hello, may I speak with you. I don’t so much anymore. What remains? Rock,
tree, sky. The birds we cannot see.

Across the river, once a golf course, not any longer. A hundred species stretched up, brown and golden
and green. Wind moved through the tallest grasses like waves, and made them good to walk through,
since they’d brush against you softly, whisper your name. Ellery isn’t their real name, which I never
share, any more than their features. My child, my eldest, like me in the way we’re both overtaken by
moods. When we fight them, we lose. When we listen to them, though. Ellery listened. They saw the
wind ripple through the tall grass and ran to it and called it their own. Laid down like the bed had been
made. It had. They dozed. Their little brother grabbed great big tufts of thick grass, performed a drama
in which a spy shot him and he dragged himself to a hill and rolled down to safety; rehearsed it a few
times. The wind hid his voice. Ellery dreamed. Of what I can’t say. We’re alike but their dreams are
their own. All I have is this picture, which gives nothing away.

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