Quincy Gray McMichael has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest
Monongahela Hiking Trip by Jon fisher
As I stretch my shoulders, arms aloft, the Monongahela Forest yawns through a narrow split in the trees. Across the road from where I sit, the tranquil understory draws my eye past the weathered porch railing, my ever-growing grass, baby blueberries, high-tensile farm fence, and the last lilac bush. I spot a fiery flash among the scrub and shadows, a thin flag of tabby-tail above the green. Shredder, the orange cat, shoots from the underbrush and across the gravel—a one-lane road over which an unreasonable amount of traffic travels daily: jacked-up pickups (with trailers and without, sometimes hauling race cars, sometimes excavation equipment), four wheelers, the occasional roving motorcycle, a few stalwart commuters, and far too many rusty trucks packed with baying bear dogs.
In years past, this dooryard thoroughfare seemed quieter. Of course, I was busy building fence and hauling water and planting gardens and shepherding pigs from paddock to paddock. I woke up before dawn and loaded coolers and crates and chalkboards for the winding drive to market. I worked—nose down, straight through to dusk—planting asparagus, catching rabbits, castrating bawling piglets. My attention, then, was on other things. Now—whether I like it or not—I know I live on a to-and-fro road.
My hair and every maple leaf in view stick straight out to the left as the wind blows in with a burst—in time with the clang of my maternal grandmother’s Arcosanti bell, its long form both elegant and awkward: the geometry of its cast cup oxidized blue, the sheet-metal clapper an iridescent brown. I do not know when or how she acquired this bell, but I love hearing its high desert song in my low mountain home.
With an unmistakable feline-footed ba-bump, Shredder jumps up onto the wooden railing. Tail still high, he ambles along the wide board before settling down on the leeward side of a post. There he sits, his tail waving in the breeze, gazing out into the verdant grass, or beyond—at who-knows-what in the depths of the woods.
Another gust, and the clanging song resumes, again snaring my attention. Was this unusual bell a gift? Did my classy Granny have a secret appreciation for counterculture artist enclaves? She never talked about the work of architect Paulo Soleri, or any impressive, experimental intentional communities, or even the Arizona desert itself, but perhaps she visited once, on a whim, en route from Phoenix to Sedona. Did she stop at Arcosanti to marvel at that yet-unfinished, iconoclastic wonder and bring home a handmade wind chime? These questions, and the bell, ring on.
This place is so damn green. Every shade and hue is represented: the undersides of the maple leaves have a white tinge visible only when a shift in the wind tosses them, and I can see their light petticoats—just for a moment, before the kelly of their skirts drifts modestly down again. I look up from my perch on the porch. They say, you know, if one is to be a writer, one must write every day, best at regular intervals, as if to make it a practice. They also tell me that, if I am to keep my eyes keen and my head clear, I must redirect my gaze again and again, from the blue light of my computer screen, to—in this case—the green prongs of grass and the bushes beyond, all of which come into focus when I draw my eyes upward toward them.
For me, porch-sitting is a burgeoning habit. I can only do so much writing in my head while schlepping buckets of feed, digging hole upon hole in the cider orchard, tucking infant onions into the soil before each shock of green wilts into a limp leaf. Just this morning, I stood in the upper meadow, shovel handle leaning against my thigh, one frantic fingernail typing urgent epiphanies into my phone, shorthand for later. Writing, too, is new. If I want to get these words out, I know I need to farm less and write more.
The high hum of the cicadas rings loud over the post-rainstorm afternoon breeze. I wonder how many of these insects reside on the land I steward, this stolen land for which I pay tax to the government that—long ago, yet not so long ago—facilitated its theft. They say—the scientists, again, full of advice about not only blue light, but also bits of wisdom gleaned from entomology—that the cicadas only come to visit once every seventeen years. Now, I know for a fact that some of these cicadas set their alarm clocks short, because I saw a few emerge last year. Though not more than a dozen.
Perhaps they hoped to burrow up out of the ground a year early, to get a jump on the others, afraid of a leaf-juice shortage. The more I listen to the sound—the closer I focus—the greater it becomes. My magic magnifying mind scoops the high hum into the echo chamber of my head and it rises, shouting down every other sound in earshot, creating the ultimate white noise effect.
And, in this very moment, as I glance down at the motion of my fingers, listening distractedly to the cicadian pitch, and then up again, at the green, I feel the wind return. With force. It enlivens the blowing tarp—green—that hangs over the driveway gate, also green. Despite the persistent overnight rain, I can still see patches of dust on the tarp’s vertical surface, not yet fully washed from yesterday’s trip to the vet to find out that Buckshot, my male livestock guardian dog, weighs in at a staggeringly healthy one hundred and forty-eight pounds and that, yes, he does still have ehrlichia, a tick-borne gift from his time as a pup in Virginia.
I will spend the next twenty-eight mornings sliming my hand down his throat, catching the electric blue capsules when he inevitably spits them out, bitten and spilling precious antibiotic powder. We will each feel equally disgusted with the other and I will resign myself to fashioning cute tea sandwiches, crusts still intact, with pâté as the glue holding the medicine—my secret—inside.
Three years ago, when Buck first came to my farm, he and his mate Read were young, lean, and cautious. They wore vigilance like their thick, matted coats. Once I gave them a good brushing and fattened them on rich meat, they made themselves at home. The dogs could see their help was appreciated. They have become my eyes and ears in the pasture. Other than the occasional possum or skunk, the pair kills relatively few intruders. Their bite is grim, but their collective bark is convincing enough.
I hear the rain as it approaches. To someone with little porch-sitting experience, rain may sound like an odd wind afoot or even a vehicle slow-rolling down the dirt road. The thick air hums with moisture. I welcome the afternoon rains that arrive on these dead-hot late-Spring days; short storms whirl in with water on air and give everything a drink. I can hear each droplet hitting each leaf, but then the rapidity of the drops rises into a whirr, coming closer, my anticipation increasing. I second-guess myself and think, is it a car? My other cat, Duncan, looks up from the blue hand-me-down dog bed near my chair; he hears the approach too, and wants to be at the ready, whatever is coming.
A robin—flame-breasted and mammoth, as they all are this year—flies from the fence post. Read is not the only one eating her share of cicadas this spring; many animals recognize the benefit of a flying capsule of fat and protein, though Buck won’t touch the buggers. This morning, when—in the spirit of waste not, want not—I piled handfuls of crunchy cicadas in his food bowl, he sat and tipped his giant head to one side, imploring me to reconsider. Before I could, Read ran over and devoured the humming heap in two gulps.
Once aloft, the robin weaves, as if ducking the drops, confirming my instinct. The rain is here. I can see it now, the drops thicker and closer and louder—not quite a wall, but water on the move. When the wet hits the old sheet metal roof, my shoulders relax, and the cat rests his head. The familiar patter soothes us both.
But quiet still feels unfamiliar to me. Even the sound of rain on tin—lauded as the old-time remedy for insomnia, nerves, or whatever ails you—cannot stop my mind from racing. Even as my fingers tap the keys, as my mind finds words to weave the story of the downfall of this farm, of my collapsing body, of my stubborn dedication to work above all else, I catch myself making mental lists of chores undone. I keep looking up, checking the sky for the soft color of early evening, eager to set aside this new practice, this peaceful vocation, for the heavy labor that is my perennial undoing.
As quickly as it arrived, the rain passes. The only sounds now are the glugging of the gutter and the freshly sharpened click of the fence energizer, spiking with each moistened surge. The cicadas are quiet for the moment; only rain can shush their ceaseless song.
Shredder observes the rain break and darts down the porch steps. Though not a prissy cat, he doesn’t regard water the way Duncan, still sleeping, seems to relish it. Why is it that longhaired cats—the ones that look the most like drowned rats when wet—take to the water with natural ease? Angela, my childhood Maine Coon, would join me in the bath when my mother left the room: her spreading whiskers testing the steamy water, its moisture deflating her tufted fluff, revealing her slim cat-hips and skinny, dripping tail.
Shredder, though, is long and rangy, short-haired, and a proper orange—not the boring beige that sometimes passes for marmalade tabby. As he hits the wet grass, he doesn’t stop; no flick of foot, no hesitation—his quarry is in sight, though I cannot see it from where I sit. He dips his face into the green lawn.
Two bites and he has dispatched his prey, swallowed, and is on the next cicada. The rain, I realize, stuns the large bugs, renders them without defense, leaves them lying within reach. He scouts the ground, strides to the right, and closes his jaws around another unhappy target. The silent ticks may be winning, but the cicadas seem to have met their match.
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