Nature's Social Union

 Driving through Providence tonight I took an unnecessarily round-about way home, just because I knew the way and it would save me having to plug directions into my phone. This familiar course took me down Blackstone Boulevard—a highfalutin tree-lined avenue bisected by a long island of park-like foliage. As I was carefully picking my way, trying to keep my speedometer within reasonable distance of the allotted 25 mph (a restriction they enforce in this spot with exceptional zeal), I was suddenly beset by the kind of frumpy dismay the squares must have felt when Marlon Brando's The Wild One came to town. 

You see, I was suddenly and unwillingly surrounded on all sides by men on ATVs. And I mean literally all sides! Several of them were gunning the motor while racing through the middle of the island that runs between the two sides of the street. Another was directly behind me, popping a prolonged wheelie. I harrumphed and continued to putter along, as I had been doing, trying not to go too fast and risk being flagged by the cameras that surveil the street. But due to the noise of the ATVs, I soon no longer had the road to myself. 

First, a house cat ran out from the island into the street shortly ahead of me. I was able to slow down enough that it got away. Then more animals streaked across the road, fleeing the roar of the ATVs. I saw a rabbit dart into the road, but it was too fast for me to register it or swerve out of the way. I felt the horrible and unmistakable thud underneath my left front tire. I muttered some expletive, and felt a lurch of dismay. The needlessness of it! The waste! The irrevocability! And all because some ATV enthusiasts feel entitled to barrel through a park at night inhabited by animals. 

I pulled in at home feeling shaken. I had a strong inclination to hobble out, shake my fist in the air, and bellow something about "you meddlesome kids!" Or "Yes, Janet, life's pretty cheap to that type!" Though of course, I have no reason to even assume they were kids. Many of the most obnoxious people I have seen tooling around on loud motorcycles and such vehicles in Providence have been unmistakable boomers. But whatever age they may have been, I know that all of my own precocious boomer instincts were aroused. I wanted to write a letter to my congressperson. A letter to the editor. Anyone!

I am aware of the ludicrousness of my position. Matt Yglesias likes to cite an incident that allegedly happened in some hipster neighborhood, in which the gentrifying yuppies issued a public complaint about the noise caused by their working class neighbors' affection for muscle cars. This would of course in ordinary circumstances be an open-and-shut case of boomerism and karenism. Except that, these were young clever people, who would never be caught in commission of a knowing act of karenicity, so they chose to denounce their neighbor's hobby specifically for being a form of "toxic masculinity."

So color me hypocritical. But I can't get past the fate of that rabbit. The annoyance to me I forgive. The vague sense of menace I felt from having an ATV-er ride up behind me on only two back wheels I attribute wholly to my paranoia, stodginess, and the unpleasant impression that the original Mad Max movie made on me once upon a time. But the bunny was innocent, damn it! And I was made to be the unwilling instrument of its death. I saw it coming. I couldn't get out of its path. Wham! My journey continued. The bunny's had come to a perpetual stop. 

Pulling into the parking lot at home, I thought of what the poets had to say about moments like this, and some of their lines came into my head. For whatever reason, the moment of fatal encounter between human machine and small mammalia has been curiously productive of poetry. There is Larkin finding the hedgehog that got caught between the blades of his mower, for instance. And of course, Burns accidentally halving the nest of a mouse in his field, while going about his plowing. There is something eerie and wrenching about such moments that I don't blame the poets for having noticed. 

Such affairs are an instant of contact between two wildly different and generally non-overlapping domains of values. In the human world, my accidental killing of the rabbit barely registers as an occurrence. No law will punish me. But for that rabbit, it was everything. It didn't know when it set out into that quiet park this night that it would be for the last time. Had it darted a few seconds earlier or later, I might have missed it. Getting out of my car at home, and finding no trace left on my wheel, I wanted to say—with Burns—to the rabbit's absent ghost: "I'm truly sorry man's dominion/Has broken nature's social union."

Because it was man's dominion and his technological fury and noise that broke the tranquility of the park that night, that stirred the animals from their peaceful endeavors, that sent them scampering into the road to be smashed by onrushing cars. But it was also man's dominion that put me behind the wheel of one of those cars, that led me to take the long way home, that put me on a street I hardly needed to be on, and within the chassis of a metal contrivance that meant doom to any small rodent that crossed its path. 

And so, as much as I wanted to shake my fist at the ATV users, as inclined as I was to make this post a J'accuse, it was really me. I killed the rabbit. This post is really a m'accuse. Perhaps there is no other conclusion to be made than that we all should tread more softly, and treat with more care the creatures in our way, whether we travel by motorcycle or ATV or car. Perhaps there is no better lesson than the one Larkin took from discovering his accidental murder of the hedgehog in his lawn: "we should be kind/While there is still time."