NEWS COLUMNS
A Brief Selection
Cultivating Hot Dogs
The Chapel Hill News
Spring 2007
Nearly twenty-one years ago, two pairs of handmade hot dogs, linked to each other with butcher's twine, disappeared into the back of my mother's freezer. They were the only four left after a high school graduation party I threw. For thirteen years they were forgotten, and for the last eight years I've tended them lovingly and obsessively at the back of my own freezer.
Now they're two months shy of their 21st birthday, and I think I should do something for them. Something to commemorate this milestone, which of course means nothing to them. I'm not even sure it qualifies as a milestone in the world of processed meat. Is there some other moment I should be marking for them, some point they officially pass the point of inedibility, some point when they're no longer merely hot dogs but something else, something greater? How do you know when that happens?
For the moment, until I hear otherwise, I will mark their 21st birthday as a special day without meaning but of much importance. On that day, I will acknowledge their significance and pledge to preserve them. Let it be written.
I've written about these hot dogs before, and I wouldn't be surprised if one or two of you have already muttered, "Oh, no, he's on about the hot dogs again. Will he never quit that obsession?" And to you I say, No! Never!
The other night I had this liberating and consoling thought: No matter what happens, I'll always have the hot dogs. I mean that if every dream, ambition, hope, and goal I have for my life come to nothing, I will still have the hot dogs to assure me that I did not pass on without leaving a sign, that I was here, that my thrashing and praying left behind four peculiar echoes, four chunks of frozen meat preserved by my heirs. Four nasty-looking, unrecognizable chunks of meat, true, but who can control their legacy really? If I have any legacy at all on that last day, I'll be doing pretty well.
I don't require that my hot dogs become famous. Fame could endanger them; they might be thawed in the klieg lights. They're perfect as they are: skillfully made by a local butcher, forgotten in a freezer just as I myself came of age, and preserved now in nothing fancier than a plastic bag stuffed behind the good gin. They are precisely what they are supposed to be. They are not the Famous Sentimental Weiners of Pittsboro, they are not (yet) Evidence of His Creeping Psychosis, they are not Dogs With Great But Unfulfilled Promise.
They are, instead, merely remnants of me that I refuse to relinquish, that I refuse to let be spoiled by unfair expectations or by giving up on them in the interest of freezer space. They're mine, I'll do what I want with them, and all I want is to possess them, to say, "I made this." And if someday they can save the world, I'll consider that option.
I will not justify the hot dog and I will not explain it. The hot dog is its own explanation, its singularity is its justification. There aren't a lot of things that are uniquely ours for as long as we want them, things only we understand perfectly. If you've got one, man, hold onto it. Not all of them do well in the freezer, and not all of them can be carbon-dated, but they can all be preserved in one form or another.
And if, like me, you plan to charge $5 admission to see your frozen legacy at its 21st birthday party, I say you're within your rights. Loyalty deserves reward sometimes.
A Tree Full of Vultures
The Chapel Hill News
Winter 2007
The turkey vultures have returned to the open woods behind the Kiwanis Club here in Pittsboro. This is my third year of watching them. There are nearly three dozen birds, black shadows on the limbs of the long leaf pines just down the hill from the playground where my daughter likes to swing.
I watch them come in at dusk, and in the mornings I watch them go back out. In the evening they circle down on diminishing columns of hotter air, round and round until I can hear the air hissing in their wings. The next morning after the sun warms their perch, they take off slowly one by one. The night's kill lies forgotten, the waste beckons. At first it appears they might drop straight out of the sky, being so large and so awkward and so ugly. But when they finally catch a thermal and rise far into the air with surprising speed, they're beautiful.
I love these turkey vultures. I know they mate for life, and that their sense of smell is singular among vultures and rare among birds. I know that despite their common roosts, they are nevertheless fundamentally independent creatures. It's getting on to breeding time now, and soon I'll watch the ritual of their soaring, synchronized mating flights.
The human mind is strange, strange enough to make one vulture a portent of death, and a couple dozen vultures an occasion for wonder. The vultures fill the sky above my daughter on her swing, and I'm glad, but I still have bad dreams about the lone vulture who flew low over my dad's pickup on our way to a fishing hole, so low I could look up through the windshield and pick out the lines and wrinkles on its red skin.
On the list of things that distinguish man from other creatures, two seem the most important: language, and the desire for knowledge gained by reason. It's language and its figurative forms that trained my mind to dream on a sky full of vultures and to indulge the pathetic fallacy of admiring the loyalty of a bird's mate. We possess a great gift, this urge to see beauty where we choose, and in choosing we describe who we are.
A few weeks ago a cloud of smoke from a chemical fire rose up on its own thermals and into the air seventeen miles to our east. I heard about it on the radio while still in bed, and I immediately went to my computer and began calculating wind speed and directions. I searched every news source for a list of the chemicals involved in the fire, without success. I decided it was still safe to take my little girl to her daycare, a little operation on the Haw River a few miles closer to the burning chemicals. I interrogated the other parents and the woman who runs the place for more information, opinions, predictions. I sniffed the air for evidence.
Lewis Thomas, in his essential essay, "The Hazards of Science," suggests that the human urge to acquire knowledge is innate and irresistible. Even so, what is known is so little next to what is unknown. The possibility of limiting knowledge - of declaring certain avenues of inquiry off limits because we don't want to know -- horrified him. It horrifies me.
The questions we ask, whether we are scientists or vulture-watching dreamers, derive from our characters, from our lives, from what we think we need or want. One scientist asks how to make grass greener. Another asks how to enrich uranium. Still another invents a new and specious theory of life's origin so his faith won't be tested. One more asks how to keep our arteries from clogging so fast.
We have chemical fires because we want greener lawns, more tomatoes, and cleaner clothes. There is waste and we must put it somewhere. Chemical fires are a natural part of a chemical society, as surely as brush fires are a natural part of grassland and forest ecosystems.
We don't ever escape the brute reckoning of nature, and we won't for as long as our ignorance dwarfs our imagination. We will never imagine the questions that might save us if we won't consider the consequences of the answers we already have. For now, we are as vulnerable as children.
The turkey vulture is not just a portent of death. It makes a living off death, as so many of us do without thinking about it.
Copyright © 2007 Duncan Murrell
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