Essay: Enriched

6/24/98

Because I write feature stories for the weekly newspaper, to keep my clip file current, I collect multiple copies of the editions in which they appear. The practice leaves me with a large stack of papers missing a single page. For most of the year, they accumulate in a box in my home office. I don’t take the papers to the recycling center.

As temperatures climb and the abundant rains of spring yield to the Dog Days of Summer, I move them to the shed, then use them in the garden. In the past month I’ve spent many hours spreading newspapers on paths between asparagus and sorrel, cabbages and coneflowers, then covering them with thick layers of bark mulch. As pattypan squash take hold, and vine of buttercup and butternut get ready to run, I plaster their hills’ sloping sides with more papers and bark.

I’ve spent so much time mulching this year that I’ve worked my way pretty far down in my old newspaper piles. Far enough, anyway, to reach a sheaf of papers published on November 6, 1996. The banner headline read, “Teen Falls into Abandoned Mine Shaft.”

I’d forgotten the story until I unearthed it. Horrifying as the headline sounds, the event had a happy ending. Remarkably happy, considering that 16-year-old Eric Nunn fell 100 feet before plunging into a deep pool of water that had partially filled the long-abandoned shaft of a mica mine.

That the water was there was the first fortunate thing. That Eric was able to grope his way to a ledge to climb up on was the second. The third was that his brother had been exploring the woods with him and could run for help. Even so, getting Eric out of that black hole was anything but easy. Rescuers rappelled down, then lowered a rubber raft to move him to the center of the pool before lifting him out. He was hypothermic by then, and they didn’t want to take him back into the water. Four and a half hours after he lost his footing, Eric was back on solid ground. At the hospital, he was treated for hypothermia and a cracked sternum — his only injuries — and released.

I must have had 20 copies of that newspaper — more extras than I normally request. And while I was in a hurry to get the mulch down before the sun topped the pine trees that screen my garden most of the morning, I remembered the story as extraordinary. Resting my back, I reread it.

It included a detail I remembered — that one of Eric’s rescuers was a carpenter, the son-in-law of one of my neighbors. The carpenter made the front page a second time about a year ago, when an explosion and fire destroyed his cabinet shop. That story also involved a narrow escape. A moment before the explosion, the only employee at work that morning stepped outside on break.

Near-disasters like these probably wouldn’t merit so much as a three-paragraph story in a daily paper. But in small communities like ours, they’re front page news — and more. They lay hold of our imaginations. We discuss them with strangers in supermarket checkout lines, with the neighbor who’s painting his porch when we walk by, in phone calls with friends.

But time passes, seasons change, and once vivid events recede. They’re overlaid by other incidents, some as arresting, some merely new. Our lives are busy; only when slow, quiet tasks consume us — mulching paths, picking peas, snapping a bucket of beans — do the old stories resurface.

They do so, not isolated the way they appeared originally, but connected to others and to other things we’ve stored away, cohering the way iron filings, a paper clip and a nail do to a magnet. The difference is that filings, clip, nail and magnet remain what they are, distinct from one another, while our minds’ alchemy blends stories and experience to create the texture and substance of our lives. Just as these newspapers, so full of the life I’ve known in this community, will blend with bark above and soil below to become a richer soil, nourishing seeds I’ll plant in other seasons. I’ll consume them again as zucchini and sugar snap — and perhaps also as a story.

A couple of weeks ago, the Class of 1998 graduated from the local high school. Burying the last of papers that contain Eric’s story and the photo of him with his rescuers, I wonder whether his was one of the young faces I studied in the newspaper’s special graduation section.

How often does Eric think of his plunge into darkness and resurrection into light? Did that experience change his life? And, if so, does he recognize it yet? Or does that realization lie years in the future, perhaps to break over him on a summer morning in his own garden when he’s covering newspapers with mulch and remembers the day it was his picture and story on the front page.

He may recognize then that the icy liquid that seemed to roll like water off a teenager’s back wasn’t on the surface at all, but has been an undercurrent ever since in the ebb and flow of his life.

I don’t know these things; can never know them. But I enjoy the speculation. Ducking into the shed for another armload of newspapers, I’m grateful that the commingling of thought, old newspapers and shredded bark of trees enriches more than earth.