By Rawlins Gilliland, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX –
I had always gone to the woods when I needed to think. Especially when it's gray, cold and overcast, when the trees create a mysterious dreamscape. When everyone else stays away because the day isn't "pretty."
And so it was as I parked my car and entered the trailhead. I went toward the outer loop, the longer paths that are too tedious in warmer times. Walking briskly, I rounded a turn that offered on one side an open area where tall grass prevails. Looking to the distant fading afternoon light, I could see a stand of mostly dead trees, maybe 50 yards ahead. Winding in and out of the view, I was surprised to see a man half-slumping beside a tree. How was it that I was not alone in this remote wintry retreat?
As I came closer to the area where he remained standing still, I became increasingly wary. Something felt off kilter, odd. Finally, 20 feet away, I stood looking, with his back to me. And then I noticed the gathered skin at his shoulder and looked up and saw a red something on the branch far above him and I followed the thin red line from the branch to his shoulders and realized this man was dead. He had been hanged or had killed himself. I was alone with a corpse, a murder or suicide.
I began to back off and then run, barely breathing, with internal tremors creating a staccato teeth clatter. Night fell as I took the police to him. They asked me to "identify" the man. It felt uncouth, looking into his face. As the police and homicide detectives talked about him in uninvolved disinterest, I became increasingly protective and would not leave.
Hours later, my final act was to guide the medic crew to the site. In the damp misty-floored winter night woods, rolling a cadaver gurney to the scene was laborious, dreary and slow. In the distance, like a strobe, flash bulbs repeatedly illuminated the still hanging man in profile above the ground vapors. It was judged a suicide.
For several days I returned to the scene, to make sense of the experience and demonstrate for an unknown dead man that this was hallowed ground and he was not forgotten. Each visit I followed the deep-rutted, dried mud trail - formed when they wheeled him out. On one return, I actually stood where he had stood and looked up to see what he must have seen. I am not sure why I did this. I just felt the need to absorb the aura of the spot, to connect, to provoke cathartic response.
Ultimately, despite immersion therapy and the determined will to reclaim this beloved trail as my own, it was lost to me. Gone was the joy of euphoric escape. Rather than lose myself in reflective thought, my thoughts remain pre-programmed, and I inevitably wonder who this young man was and who else knows or cared that he died. I wonder what had happened, what he was thinking as he took that walk, then took his life, just before I took that walk in the woods.
Rawlins Gilliland is a writer from Dallas.
Read part 2, "The Value of Perception Versus Perceived Value"
Read part 3, "At Home in the Woods"
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