Yonsei Memory Project is proud to present new essays in a series called “Valley Writers Respond.” In early May, 2020, Yonsei Memory Project invited writers based in California’s San Joaquin Valley to reflect on the current moment, utilizing a single word as a prompt for writing. “Valley Writers Respond” was inspired by a strong desire to do something, to help tend to each other, to create understanding even through difficulty as we all find our ways through a pandemic. YMP has never shied away from deep truth-telling, and now, while so many are in duress, we turn to art and artists to hold space for us to process.

In “Valley Writers Respond” three Valley writers share their wisdom in short original essays. The project includes essays by Samina Najmi, Will Freeney, and Steven Church. Steven Church, an editor, essayist, and professor, was invited to reflect on the word, “wonder.” Here is Steven Church’s offering.

Understanding the Fox

by Steven Church

May 26, 2020

The other day my mother came to visit. She stood on the porch six-feet-away and we talked through awkward cotton masks and I realized that I haven’t touched or held her now in almost 60 days. She lives a mile away. She lives six feet away. She lives six feet of miles away.

Six feet is significant, it seems. With that semblance of safety, we forget it is the depth we bury our dead.

Six feet is also, roughly, the length of a fathom, that ancient unit of measurement used to gauge the depth of a body of water. A fathom was the length of the leadsman’s outstretched arms. He’d drop a weighted line off the side of the boat until it dragged bottom. Then he’d reel it up, one fathom at a time, calling out the numbers as he pulled the rope from one fist to the other, his body making a T with each count.

To fathom is also to understand, often expressed in the negative, as in, “I can’t fathom how our lives will be different after this,” or “I can’t fathom how difficult it must be for others with less privilege,” or “I can’t fathom how quickly some seem to accept 2000 dead each day as a new normal.”

To say “I can’t fathom,” is to say my arms are not long enough to embrace this idea. My arms cannot measure or contain it.

In some cities today, bodies are not being buried. We don’t have the people to process their deaths. We don’t have the space for what remains. We cannot hold their loss. They are stacked, wrapped in plastic, piling up in refrigerated trailers in a parking garage. And in New Jersey, a morgue worker buys yellow daffodils and, each morning as she counts the dead, she places a single flower on each body. Sometimes she uses other flowers if the shop is out of daffodils. “But they have to be yellow,” she says.

The first week of the shelter in place order in Fresno, my seventeen-year-old son came down with a respiratory illness. Dry cough, body aches, stuff that wouldn’t normally worry us too much. But things were different now. He was staying at his mom’s house when the symptoms started so that’s where he stayed, along with his twelve-year-old sister, for the first ten days or so. When I visited them, I’d stand on the porch of their mother’s rental house—just a block away from the house we lost to foreclosure in the market crash of 2008—and I’d talk to him through old single-pane glass. I pressed my fingertips to the window and asked how they were doing, how their day was going, how they’d been spending their time; and I’d watch their distorted faces make muffled words, but I could barely listen. It was almost too much to take. I blew kisses that bounced off the glass. It felt like I was visiting them in some kind of bizarre living museum vitrine—Contemporary Broken Home, circa 2020, Covid19 Pandemic—and I didn’t know when I’d ever get to touch or hold them again. 

On my walk one morning during our sheltering, I noticed a freshly cut tree stump sticking out of a neighbor’s yard and I stopped to count the rings, dark for winter, light for summer, until I lost track as the years blurred together or were interrupted by scars. My father used to joke that even a stopped clock was right twice a day; but I didn’t know if this stopped clock, this arrested development, would ever be right again. How do we move forward? How do we develop thick bark, that woody armor necessary for survival?

To stand six feet from someone is also to put a fathom between you, to put an understanding between us. It is to say, “I see you. I love you. I understand this distance is necessary. I understand this distance is temporary.”

The other day as I drove to pick up my children from their mother’s house, I crested the hill where three lines—Palm Ave, the Santa Fe tracks, and a man-made irrigation canal—intersect. Just above the trees a large raptor circled slowly and ominously—probably a red-tailed hawk, the apex urban raptor around here. And I wondered what it was hunting there above that tangle of lines. I doubted it was fishing the canals, which, in the Spring, are fast-moving, dangerous and polluted irrigation ditches. And there was nothing for the bird to hunt on the street or the tracks, no fields nearby or ground-squirrel burrows that I could see. As I came up the small rise, I gazed over the bridge railing there and saw in the water a pair of geese and their two goslings huddled against the concrete canal bank. As the raptor circled closer, its shadow whirling over the asphalt, one of the geese raised her wings in the air, shielding the goslings and trying to appear bigger and more intimidating, trying to say, “Leave us be. Our children are not expendable.” 

It was 2pm on a weekday. I don’t remember what day it was for sure because right now, during the Great Weirdness of 2020, time seems to slip and slide away from me. I forget what day it is, how far we all are into this practice of self-isolation and social distancing from other humans, how long we’ve seen other people, even family members, as virus vectors. It’s such a strange mix of fear and boredom, of stagnancy and angst.

But I remember it was 2 pm and I remember this: Andrea stood next to me at the dining room table. Perhaps we were sorting mail or wiping down groceries with a bleach-soaked “wipe.” It’s funny how some things fall away and other moments rise up, imprinting themselves on your consciousness forever. It’s funny how the eyes play tricks. At first, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. Sleek body, four legs, brownish red, big poofy tail.

“Holy shit. There’s a fox!”  I barked.

“No way,” Andrea said, smacking me on the arm. “You’re lying.” But I wouldn’t lie about something like that.

“Right there!” I say as the fox loped across the street, behind my car, and disappeared into the neighbor’s  yard.

I didn’t appreciate the CGI fox in the film, Wild. But I understood it. Because if you can’t capture serendipity, you have to manufacture it. But part of me just wanted to hear Cheryl Strayed’s voice, her words at least, telling me about the fox, the blessing, the omen—just enough for me to imagine it and nothing more. I wanted to see it with my mind’s eye and let it exist in that realm of mystery, where it seems foxes always exist—at the edges of your peripheral vision, in the penumbral regions of experience. Andrea says that foxes are magical, but of course they’re not. They’re perfectly natural, highly adaptable creatures who thrive in urban environments, often in the shadows. It’s true, though, that to see one always feels as if you’ve been visited by a ghost or some other ambassador from the other side. It always feels magical, like the fox has been watching you all along, waiting to reveal itself—as if it has chosen you, at this particular moment, to receive its blessing. And I’ll tell you, dear Reader, I did feel blessed by this long-bodied fox with his pointy nose, short ears and that wild reddish-brown blast of a tail. Its coloring wasn’t CGI-red but greyer or mottled like a tree-trunk, perfectly suited to its urban environment. And I felt suddenly and seriously lucky. Foxes are solitary and fiercely territorial; so, in a city, their home range may be quite small, and chances are that if you see a fox in your neighborhood it is a resident fox who lives nearby, probably in a hidden backyard burrow. It is your wild neighbor. And if you see another fox, chances are you’re seeing the same fox twice. Wildlife sightings are up all over the world now. Friends and family have also reported fox sightings in Fresno. They seem to be everywhere. The experts say that there aren’t necessarily more animals roaming free now in the Age of Pandemic. They haven’t suddenly decided to emerge from the shadows because they think we’re not looking. They haven’t actually chosen us. It’s just that we’re paying more attention. We’re finally looking. We’re taking the time to stop and stare out the window or to look up at the sky. We’re choosing to allow space for wonder[1] in our lives. We’re allowing space for the fox. And this may be the most important survival skill we can cultivate.

[1] Writing Activity: “Wonder” as a word is, well, quite wonderful. It is a verb (to wonder), a state of mind, and a “thing” in our collective consciousness. Ask yourself what it is like to feel “wonder” and when was the last time you felt it? Think, if you will, of the 7 Wonders of the World. List as many as you can come up with off the top of your head. What do they have in common? How are they different? Are there only seven? What makes something a “Wonder of the World”? What makes something a Wonder of YOUR world? What would be your list of the 7 Wonders of the Coronavirus Pandemic? How would that list be different if there wasn’t the pandemic?

STEVEN CHURCH is the author of 6 books of nonfiction, most recently the collection of essays, I'm Just Getting to the Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear, and Fatherhood. He is a founding editor of the literary magazine, The Normal School and he Coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.