Near my parent’s house are vineyards. A few of their neighbors have vineyards in their back or front yards, but to get to the true concentration of vineyards, you have to walk out the front door, turn right, and walk about 200 yards to a bend in the road. Then, up a small curb and through a cut down fence is a truck-made road.
Down a small corridor of trees is a wall of vines. During the rainy season you can see clear through the wall, all the way to Piner Road. But during late spring and all through the summer into fall, you can’t see anything but wall after wall of vines.
In the summer, to set foot in the vineyards is to scatter multitudes of jackrabbits in all directions. Of course, you can’t see them for long, because they duck in and around the maze of vine rows in ways even the Mexican migrant workers who plant the vines couldn’t know. The rabbits don’t hop as much as they glide, their ever-bent legs propelling them along the dirt; not making a single sound.
Walking alongside the rows of vines is like walking down the hallway of a Baroque Palace. Each row, or door, presents a different, yet quite similar, ornate entry. Typically, again during the summer, whatever jackrabbit happens to be scattering in door way at that particular time, framed by vines that by this time of year are fully grown with hard, compact, light green vines laying heavy on the vines. The dirt is dry and like powder, which fluffs up from the heels of the scurrying rabbits.
The vineyard is a world unto itself. And despite the long meditative walks I take through them at sunrise or sunset, that world, much like any world, is filled with peril and danger that can turn any living creature into carnage at any moment.
On any typical day in the vineyard I can find evidence of this. The wing of a blue jay, blue as the outer reaches of the ocean, lying still, its shoulder still attached, a pile of feathers a few feet beyond. A baby snake, still, it’s head bowed in and partially embedded in the powdered dirt. A nearly hatched egg, pecked through cleanly, remnants of would be feathers inside.
Recently I was walking up that tree-lined corridor that leads to the vineyard for a short evening stroll and I saw something from the corner of my eye falling. I thought it might be an oak ball, and in a split second, I thought perhaps a baby bird had fallen from its nest. I looked into the brush where the mass had landed to see a half eaten mole, its fur moist, the lower half of its body gone.
It reminded me of my family’s childhood cat, who, in the same neighborhood, used to deposit the heads of moles, gophers and rats on my family’s garage door step. Sometimes he’d leave the clean licked acid filled stomach as well. But this was different; this was carnage dropping from the sky, landing just a few feet from my head. I looked up into the tree but there was nothing. But later, after I’d finished my walk and was headed out of the park, the mole was gone.
Before the vineyard was a vineyard, it was a field. And empty field that separated my house and a group of kids I played baseball with virtually every day of the summer. This wasn’t ordinary baseball though. This was 2 vs. 2 baseball played in my friend Danny’s backyard.
Usually, I could hardly wait to cross the field to get to this baseball monstrosity. I would alternate jogging and sprinting, the dry, armpit high weeds poking my arms and legs, leaving itchy stickers in my shirt, pants and socks. I would run not only out of excitement, but also of fear. Fear of the old lady who owned the field and would sometimes stand on her porch and stare at whomever crossed her field. Fear of the trees that looked like they could reach down and devour you should it suddenly animate. And fear of what hid on the ground, the real fear of sound. Bushes rustling and moving off in the distance. Usually these were just lizards big enough to make a sound. Occasionally these were mice or rats or the cats that caught them. But worst of all were the opossums, as big as cats and as filthy as rats.
Luckily opossums were reclusive and skittish. If I spotted one is only far in the distance, running away from me. Sometimes they appeared in my family’s garage where the sole responsibility would naturally fall on my poor Dad who was likely the most fearful of any of us.
But one time, as I plodded home through the field, my legs tired from another 10-hour session in 100-degree heat, I nearly stepped on a gored possum. My memory is nearly stepping on the thing, but somehow, in midstep, stepping on air itself, and thrusting myself 3 or 4 feet beyond the monstrosity. My heart racing I sprinted past the body, but then racing back to take another look. It must have been recently killed, because I didn’t see it on my way to Danny’s, and besides that the thing looked alive save the giant gash across its body. It didn’t move. It was dead, but even it’s eyes, which were open, were radiant with fresh terror.
I went home and told my Dad who feigned some interest, but not enough to go back and look at it that night. The next day, on my way back to Danny’s, I studied it more closely. It was less fresh, in the same place, indeed dead and not going anywhere.
Throughout that summer I would locate the possum, watching it slowly decompose through the 100 degree days of July and August, until the beginning of September arrived and with it, the end of 10 hour baseball games.