A Death in Spring, 2020
While jogging on the Chester Creek Trail last May I heard a gunshot. Close. I slowed down, then heard voices in the woods. Through the bushes I could see someone doing CPR on a body. A cop in a mask called to me from across the creek to ask if I’d seen anything. I said I hadn’t.
Later the cops said it was a suicide.
The next day I went back and found the trail into the woods where I’d seen them pumping on the person’s chest. The ground leading to the spot had been disturbed by long, uneven gouges I figured were made by the gurney’s wheels rolling unevenly through the hard-packed gravel. It must have lurched and shook as they got it out of there. When I got to where the tracks ended I looked for blood but didn’t see anything besides a bunch of trampled ground. There was a garbage bag hanging from a tree and I looked inside and saw empty Corona beer bottles and a Starbucks cup.
I walked away and as I was leaving the woods an old lady wearing a mask and riding a tricycle rolled past me, her wheels retracing the path where the gurney must have lurched in fits and starts from the weight of the body and the gravel in the wheels.
Life goes on.
I walked into the parking lot of a nearby apartment complex, where I learned someone is desperate to find their missing parakeet. There was a sign taped to one of the light poles offering a $100 reward for the yellow-headed bird whose photo was on the sign beneath three different telephone numbers. In the picture, the bird appeared to perched atop a tartan flannel pattern, uncaged. It looked like it was smiling but I don’t think birds can smile.
I thought about how a hundred bucks is a lot of money these days, and how much someone must love that bird to post three different telephone numbers.
I wondered if anyone knew about the suicide. I wondered if anyone was looking for the person who killed themselves on a lovely spring day with a lonely shot fired next to a spruce tree where a bag of garbage was hung. I wondered about the bird.
I paused to listen in hopes of hearing the parakeet, but all I heard were geese and robins and chickadees and the faint murmur of the creek and the low, subaudible hum of the city through which the greenbelt runs like veins.
The apartment complex had a dumpster and over the dumpster a pair of tennis shoes hung from a wire. Next to the dumpster were a pair of Dynamic VR25 Tubluar S downhill skis and taped to the skis was a note which read
Skis — Free
- Wash
- Sharpen edges
- Add poles, boots to fit bindings, sox
- Bus ticket or rider from friend to Hillside or Alyeska after snow in end of fall
- HAVE FUN!
As I walked away from the skis I passed a pair of Somali boys who were carrying piles of junk. Spring cleaning. I wondered if one of them would be interested in the skis, which are more than 30 years old and would be considered antiques on the slopes of Alyeska, where a midweek lift ticket costs $62 and a night’s stay in the hotel will run you $200.
I imagined one of them reading the note, grabbing the skis, washing and sharpening them, adding poles, boots and sox, and then — on the first big snow of winter — hitching a ride down to the resort to fall in love of skiing like that 90s kid who once paid $250 for that pair of brand-new Dynamic Tubular S’s, which Ski Magazine said had a softer GS-like edge-pressure pattern than the D model and “shapes up as a good choice for soft snow.”
Someone loved those skis so much they held onto them far past the end of their useful life, and then when the time came to finally set them free, they offered them up to the world hoping some kid would come along and rekindle the joy of flying down a snow-covered slope atop a pair of Tubular S’s while you’re young and the snow is soft.
I walked away and considered briefly the white basketball shoes twisting in the wind on the line above my head and wondered who wore them last. Did they get them up there on the first try? Did a bully throw them there? A bored kid who found them in the dumpster?
Someone lost their bird. Someone’s skis got old. Someone’s shoes wore out. Someone killed themselves in the woods and someone else tried and failed to pump life back into them.
Dreams. Realities. Yesterday’s happiness is tomorrow’s regret. Times change. Memories fade. Lovers leave and leaves fall and before we know it we’re taking our memories to the dumpster hoping someone will pick them up and make them real again.
I went back to the trail alongside the creek, my head full of missing parakeets and skis and how someone’s child blew their brains out onto the gravel near where I was jogging yesterday and how all that’s left of them now are gurney gouges in the gravel and a bag of beer bottles.
As I walked I saw a little boy and a little girl riding bicycles with their mom. The boy was wearing a wide grin and his mom asked if he was having fun and he said “YES! and his mom laughed and I smiled and walked home to start dinner.
I never heard the parakeet, but I took down the number just in case.
About the author: Matt Tunseth is a freelance writer from Alaska.
