The Weasel’s Grip

The summer I learned that a story could mean more than homework was the same summer I worked as a lifeguard and my parents threw me a surprise party at the pool while I was on duty. I was sixteen. It was the same summer I went hiking with Luke, who pulled impossible things out of his backpack each day as we went deeper into the mountains. He was the mountain man version of Mary Poppins. Day One: jars of delicious chili. Day Two: a hardcover dictionary (for Scrabble). Day Three: a watermelon. Day Four: a tattered copy of Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk.

Luke was in college, and to me, his mind was the brilliant brain-equivalent of his gigantic backpack of surprises. He pulled the book out while we were sipping mugs of hot orange Tang. (Don’t knock it until you try it, but only try it in the cold mountains after hiking all day). He began reading Dillard’s essay “Living like Weasels.” There was just the glow of a lantern, the quiet mountains around us in the dark, a weird orange warmth in my belly, and Luke reading, “A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks?”

I was all in.

The essay tells of Dillard’s brief encounter with a weasel in a copse of suburban wilderness near her home. Dillard describes a weasel’s general ruthlessness, its violent propensity, its instinct to attack or defend by biting throats. She sketches weasels as ten inch, furry ribboned, ground dwelling vampires with hyper-present zen focus. She recalls the tale of a man who once shot an eagle out of the sky and attached to that eagle’s neck, teeth still embedded, was the dry, white skull of a weasel. That image I have never forgotten—or more so, that same weasel set its metaphorical fangs in my imagination and did not let go.

When Luke finished the story, I knew something had happened. I knew I had gone somewhere and had returned. I had the weasel skull souvenir to prove it. I had the weasel skull’s memory. I had latched myself to the eagle’s throat and, yes, I had died, but for a while I had also soared. I had seen things with my weasel skull eyes that no ground dwelling weasel had ever dreamed of seeing. This was Dillard’s goal of course, her thesis, if you want to call it that. The world is always more if you can seize the moment—bite hard!

To a sixteen year old who spent his days spinning a lifeguard whistle and thinking about his ’96 Bronco, this was an awakening—a laughable one maybe, now, years later—but at the time, I was sincerely moved by the sudden understanding that the world was more than my limited experience. I am thankful for that understanding. I keep it in my weasel skull, which has since taken me to a few places I might not have travelled otherwise.