Teapot Trail

The day was off to a bad start. I made coffee, and immediately spilled the full cup, drenching the couch, a throw pillow, books and loose papers. I read too much news and felt sick. Collapsing glaciers and heat domes and rising measles cases. A kid in Ohio who died by suicide. He was an honor student. Haitian, and recently told to self-deport or wear an ankle monitor. Someone commented online, Good. Now we don’t have to pay for his flight back to where he came from. 

I shut down the news and forced myself out the door. 

Someone had invited me on a group hike. The trail wound through woods and past overgrown meadows. Our guide was clipping branches hanging overhead before they could whack us all in the face. Every few minutes she’d point out something of interest. 

An old rock wall lined with barbed wire. (This used to be a place where someone kept cows. But if there’s only a rock wall and no barbed wire, they kept sheep.) An outcropping of rusty appliances. (People used to dump trash here.) A giant clump of poop. (Possibly, black bear.) 

What. 

Everyone in the group stopped. Someone took a picture with their phone and confirmed it. Yes. Definitely black bear. I pretended to be blasé about it. So, if you see a black bear, what do you do? Run? 

The guide raised her eyebrows. Don’t run. Never run. 

What you’re supposed to do, apparently, is make noise. Make yourself look bigger. I mulled this over for the rest of the hike. How do you make yourself look bigger? In the morning I was still thinking about it. The night before I had bad dreams. I was alone and lost in the woods and along came a bear. 

This actually happened to me once in real life. I was eleven years old and it was a man not a bear and no place to run. What I did that time was make myself smaller, and in that way, I saved myself. But what about the boy from Ohio? What could he have done to save himself? 

There’s a teapot, the guide told us. Somewhere along the trail. 

She didn’t know where it came from. Who set it down or why. And now she couldn’t remember where it was. Help me find it, she said. I kept my eyes along the trail’s edges and found more bear poop. 

A few other dumped appliances. Some tossed beer cans. The guide clipped a pricker branch. We weren’t always good stewards of this place, she said. But we’re getting better. 

Are we though? I wanted to say. But I liked following this guide, how confidently she marched forward, how thoughtfully she wielded her clippers. I found more beer cans. But also, flowers. Absurdly colorful mushrooms. Stone walls where I could imagine cows grazing, or sheep. 

And then at a bend in the path, the teapot, looking like somebody had thrown it away, or planted it.