I was out in the field on a cold, blue morning. My dog was ahead of me, trotting down a dirt-and-gravel path. In the near distance, the charcoal edge of a tree line marked the start of wooded trails. In the far: the violet shadow of mountains. We were out early because I liked to witness that moment when the fog lifts from the earth—the slow pulling back of the veil—and because my dog can be wary of strangers. Five years ago, at the shelter, I said, Show me the one who does not want to be the world’s best friend. I believed it was a sign of intelligence to hold onto a little wariness. They brought me to a kennel where a large russet dog was sitting on the concrete floor, staring at the wall. As soon as he turned his heavy red head in my direction, I knew.
We were walking in a conservation area. Six hundred acres of land. Some of the trails snaked through forests; others hugged hillsides that overlooked a great river. We were nearly to the place where one of the paths forked, a slender trail branching off into the woods, when I heard the siren. It sounded like an emergency siren, and it was so loud I wanted to press my hands to my ears. Ahead on the trail my dog froze. He lifted a large red paw. Small, black birds shot out of the treetops, screaming. I waited for the siren to stop, to reveal itself as an accident or a brief test of some system. But the siren wailed on. The birds rushed across the sky in dark streaks. My dog bolted into the woods.
Months earlier, on a night walk around our neighborhood, we had passed a house that was under renovation. The street was dark, but inside the house was ablaze. A man and a woman stood in an unfinished front room. Pink fiberglass insulation lined the walls. This gave the room an alive look. The man had his hands around the woman’s neck. They were both smiling. I could not determine if she was in danger, or if this was some kind of experiment they had mutually agreed to engage in.
What would I do in an emergency—a true emergency? That was a question I had been asking myself as of late.
When I first moved to this town, I read reviews of the conservation area online. Visitors complained about biting flies, about mud, about animal scat that gummed up their shoe soles. Things they were not apparently expecting to find in nature. The most memorable review was left by a woman passing through on vacation. She described walking out in the field on a Monday morning. Everything was very quiet. She couldn’t even hear any birds. She was debating what trail to take when, out of nowhere, she heard the thundering of many hooves. The ground trembled. She looked all around, expecting to see a herd of wild horses or perhaps deer. The sound grew louder. The earth quaked under her feet. The animal rushing seemed so close, too close to escape, it would surely be here at any moment. The woman curled up on the ground. She wrapped her arms around her head and braced herself for the onslaught. The hammering hooves, they were on top of her, they were everywhere. She closed her eyes tight. She screamed. She tasted dust. When the thunder finally passed, she stood up and stared out at the empty fields. She brushed off her clothes and ran to the parking lot. She checked out of the local inn and drove back to the city. A herd of ghost horses, she wrote in the review. Clearly.
She gave the conservation area three stars.
The first time I went to the conservation area, I listened for the thunder of ghost horses. I thought about the histories that we put into the land and the histories we don’t. The histories that exist here without our intervention or knowledge. The histories that rear up before us when we least expect it—even when those histories are exactly what we should have been expecting all along.
I felt stalked by the sound of the siren as I chased my dog into the woods. We raced down a shadowed trail until we were deep in the forest. I called for him, my steadfast companion, but he kept on running. I watched, helpless, as he leapt over logs and small burbling streams, his red ears flapping. By the time I caught up to him I was gasping and he was standing stock-still in a small clearing papered with wet leaves. There was something strange about the light sifting down through the twisted branches. I was so distracted by this light that I didn’t even realize the siren had stopped.
There, in the woods, I witnessed something that changed me. I thought about writing my own review, but I kept getting hung up on the number of stars. Also, the problem of attempting to bend an experience into language. In the days that followed, my dog shed his wariness, as though this incident in the woods had touched something in his core. He now approaches the world with a gentleness, a mild curiosity. I watch to see what I can learn.