PERMANENT EXHIBIT

Descending into the valley always feels like entering a secret world—but only when I’m on my bike. Today, along the shoulder of Catawba Road, I noticed green plant life receding. Streams slowing. Brown stalks on tomato plants. The bottom half of a creek bed was bone dry, its boulders chalky with dust. Someone said recently that the insect world already sounded like autumn, and though I couldn’t identify a single contributor of the endless buzz that engulfed me, I had to agree. Ash trees, a friend told me, are the first to turn; I wondered if that explained the yellow leaves on the parking lot behind the old Christian Science Reading Room. I climbed a gravel road, dodging the bigger rocks, the way the spaceship in the game Galaga has to swerve to avoid the bombardments of insectlike aliens. I scanned the woods for the owl I’d seen a few days before, the one who, in the dappled light falling through the forest canopy, flapped itself up onto a maple branch, turned its head to look at me, then flew deeper into the woods. Today, though, I didn’t see it. Twenty-one years ago, on a cold January morning, I saw an owl—it was snow white, and though I might have been high at the time, I’m as sure about this fact as I am about my own name—near the “Right Loop” trailhead at Tsali Recreation Area in southwestern North Carolina. The owl landed on a branch about fifteen yards away; we looked at each other for so long, I thought it was daring me to move. I caved; it flew away. The Tsali Recreation Area was named after a Cherokee Indian named Tsali, who, after Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, refused to leave the mountains where he hunted and tended a hillside garden and lived in a cabin with his family—at least until a group of armed U.S. soldiers rounded them up. According to one account, a soldier jabbed a bayonet into the back of Tsali’s wife, which prompted Tsali to communicate, in Cherokee, to his fellow men, to overpower the soldiers; in the resultant scuffle a soldier’s gun went off accidentally, two other soldiers were wounded, and one of these eventually died, and in order to save his friends and family, Tsali surrendered himself as a sacrifice. According to another account, one of Tsali’s men slipped out a hatchet he’d hidden in his shirt and sunk it into the head of one of the federal troops; he and the other men were later captured—by a group of Oconaluftee Citizen Indians, who had been granted permission to stay—and tied to trees, where they were shot by a firing squad. You can visit Tsali’s grave—which is fenced by an iron gate and marked by a boulder bearing a metal sign—in Robbinsville, North Carolina, and afterwards you can visit Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, where you can stand beneath 400-year-old yellow poplars, some of which are more than twenty feet in circumference. During your visit, you can also read the poem “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer, which begins with the line “I think I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree” and ends with “Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.” Presumably, Kilmer would have been happy to know that a National Park—one that now is home to the largest stand of virgin forest east of the Mississippi—had been named for him, but probably sad to know that, seventy-five years after the park’s opening, the forest’s hemlocks were devastated by the woody adelgid, and because the decimated trunks posed a safety hazard to the 40,000 hikers who visit the park annually, and because it is unlawful to use a chainsaw for any reason within the park’s boundaries, the U.S. Forest Service used dynamite to fell them. One of my father’s patients claims that there are secret Indian burial mounds at Joyce Kilmer; as a kid, I could never figure out why Indian burial mounds didn’t get ransacked, in general, and by me, in particular. I don’t know how long you have to be dead before it’s okay for archaeologists to dig you up, but I like to think about in-the-future humans plundering my grave, wouldn’t mind donating my body to science, as long as my skull became a prop on someone’s desk, like the skull that used to sit on the desk of my Uncle Rick-Rick, who used it as a macabre puppet and referred to it as Mr. Bones. Perhaps I could arrange for my skull to be turned into a kind of permanent exhibit; using animatronics, the skull would live in a cube—in a museum? a cemetery? the family graveyard?—where its jaw would move, and speakers would play words that I’d written, and perhaps it would even read what I’m writing right now, and tell the story of the dead snake I saw on Catawba Road, and that I had seen it alive, in the same place, two days before: enrobed in lustrous black scales, and presumably attracted to the heat-conducting properties of the asphalt upon which it laid, in a luxuriant tangle. It seemed stupid to feel sorry for a dead snake, but no stupider for the wasps in the attic of my garage that I’d sprayed with Raid. I’d opened a hinged door in the ceiling and blasted a stream of poison at the nest, an assemblage of hexagonal paper cells affixed to the outside of the attic’s vent. Immediately, the foam I’d shot dripped like toxic spit back onto my head; in my haste to lay waste the wasps, I’d forgotten about gravity. Neither had I expected that, as soon as I sprayed the nest, I would feel anything but relief, or that, when I shut and secured the door, I would do so not only because I wanted to avoid getting stung, but also because I didn’t have it in me to watch the writhing of insects as they died, or to imagine how, moments before, they had been so industrious, so inexplicably engrossed in their building, with no way of predicting, in the end, what was to come.