Shock is your friend, it wraps around you in heavy layers, a shawl woven for protection, a thick, supple insulating layer that holds you tight in its embrace. It is here to build up the boundary walls that comprehension will slowly, slowly sink through. This is the wise pacing of shock, it allows a measured integration of news that cannot be held. 

She trots back with her stunned dangling prey, to the porch if we are sitting there, or into the house if that’s where we are, and performs the act of eating the still-living rodent, crunching into the skull like a piece of candy, a sound we can hear all too clearly. From the underground tunnels and soft meadows straight into the jaws of death, it was a swift, precise transition between worlds.

The navel of the North American continent, like a bowl between two rising edges, every drop that falls from the sky rolls towards the center, streams to creeks to rivers — from the wide curve of rising lands, all water pours inward in two massive channels to carry it, the Missouri River and the Mississippi. You would think that the spot where these channels meet and merge would be a lively, jumping, rumbling piece of land. I expected the ground to shake with the collision.

I could feel and hear and see the hydrodynamics at work here in front of me as the two continental flows met and reconfigured their calculus. One river was moving faster than the other. The shore line is always a drag on momentum, so this river in front of me was snagging itself on two different speeds deep below, and delivering up to the surface a great release of tension.

The bushes rattled with grasshoppers alarmed by my walk, the birds of the marshland were calling and flying, and I got my toes and hands into that cool silken mud, that sticky with clay jet black silt from the ashes of life. Soft and deep like a pudding, millions of the smallest particles of earth, just a few elemental atoms bonded with clasped hands layered together like a gossamer mud