Barry Lopez, the late nature writer, used to stop his car and get out to remove dead animals from roadsides. For him, this was a spiritual practice, “a ritual of apology and an acknowledgment of my own complicity.”
In a short essay, “Apologia,” Lopez, details this work as it transpired during a car trip he took from his home in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon to visit a friend in South Bend, Indiana. He describes where the animals were hit, the positions of their broken bodies. He details their wounds: the jackrabbits lying “like welts of sod,” the porcupine with “blood-flecked teeth,” the bloated pronghorn antelope, “legs splayed rigidly aloft.” After he has dragged a doe off the highway and down a long slope, he realizes that one of her legs has remained on the road. He goes back for the leg.
He is hours late getting to his friend’s house. But he does not explain, at least at that moment, the reason for his tardiness. Nor does he apologize. An apologia is not an apology; it is a defense of one’s conduct. Lopez knows he’s a little weird, but he does what he is called to do, because, “I want to remind myself of this specific, terrible cost for a way of life we insist upon.”
Reading this essay, I refected on some little acts of my own that I feel self-conscious about doing if I think someone’s watching but do anyway, like caressing the trunks of certain trees on my walks or stopping at flowers that bloom along roadsides or in gardens and inhaling their fragrance, which, without my small devotion, wafts only to the grateful air.
I hope we all have these private acts of appreciation or mourning or respect. We need not parlay them into a literary work that others will admire. But we must absolutely keep on doing them.