Nature’s Mistakes

Peggi skiing in Durand Eastman Park

I started reading Thomas Merton’s first journal. He has seven that were published after his death. Before converting to Catholicism and becoming a Trappist monk he lived a bohemian-style life in downtown New York where he hung around with the early abstract expressionists. His free-flowing thinking, all on the page, feels very contemporary. In a passage about the New York World’s Fair I was thinking, “hey, I was there” but he was referring to the 1939 World’s Fair, not the one in the sixties that I visited with my father. He described an attraction called, “Nature’s Mistakes” where they had animals on display that were misshapen and had missing limbs.

Peggi and I did see a display very much like that at a carnival in Paducah, Kentucky. We were four hours out of Bloomington, Indiana on our way to Mexico. We eventually drove to Oaxaca in Peggi’s orange Vega but this was just our first stop. We had found a campground there and we took in this nearby fair. It got real creepy after dark and this tent with crazy stuff in big bottles of Formaldehyde was the creepiest. I distinctly remember a cow with an extra leg sewn on its backside. This was not “Nature’s Mistake,” it was man’s mistake.

The snow is so deep that the deer have been taking our flattened path through the woods. We found bright red blood in the snow next to each step of one them. I know we scare the shit out of them as we ski by and they sometimes scramble up the hills in the deep snow. They are so much more vulnerable in the white winter months. Coyotes could certainly spot them much easier. I was thinking one of them may have stepped on the edge of a short tree stump buried under the snow and skinned its skinny ankle. The deer are responsible for killing the little trees as they rub the bark off them so it is poetic justice or maybe there is such a thing as nature’s mistakes but I kind of doubt it.

3 Comments

3 Replies to “Nature’s Mistakes”

  1. I think I need to read Merton’s journals. He was the quintessential 20th century western spiritual man. He had a major interest in Buddhism that might have caused a conversion if he hadn’t been electrocuted in Thailand in his sixties. He had just formed a close relationship with the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh and other Buddhist leaders. A very interesting guy all around.

  2. I love Merton, or I did when I was younger. He had such contempt for cities. Did you know that? If you “have to” live there, he wrote somewhat scathingly, as if NYC were a cess pool… Meanwhile, I am reading Nouwen. Today’s reading: “Stop wandering around… Your whole life you have been running about, seeking the love you desire. Now is the time to end that search.”

    P.S. the blood of that deer you saw in the park — what an image, and what a drawing or photo that would make.

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