A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [56]
The class laughed. Dr. Kline didn't. He smiled absently, and entered into his lecture as though he hadn't heard me. I thought I was safe. Then he stopped mid-sentence, turned, pointed again, and said, "That's okay, Derrick. They wouldn't hire you anyway." I realized my error then, and realized it again when I received my next test back.
The other incident I remember just as clearly. I sat at the computer at work, debugging. I was bored. It was afternoon. I was twenty-two. It was June. Along the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, thunderheads move in almost every afternoon between May and early July. They materialize, darken the day, spit a few drops, open the sky with lightning, then disappear like so many dreams.
Turning away from the computer I saw through my own narrow window (at least it opened) the green, the blue, the flashes. I looked to the clock, the screen, the window. An hour passed, then two. I looked again at the clock and saw it had been only twenty minutes. I willed the second-hand, the minute-hand, the hour-hand to move faster, to deliver me to five o'clock when I would be released as from my prison term. Then suddenly I stopped, struck by the absurdity of wishing away the only thing I've got. Eight hours, eighty years, it was all too similar. Would I wish away the years until the day of my retirement, until my time was once again my own? At work I tried to keep busy to make the hours pass quickly. It was no different when watching television, socializing, moving frenetically—there are so many ways to kill time.
I remember staring at the computer screen—light green letters on dark—then at the clock, and finally at my outstretched fingers held a foot in front of my face. And then it dawned on me: selling the hours of my life was no different from selling my fingers one by one. We've only so many hours, so many fingers; when they're gone, they're gone for good.
I quit work two weeks later—having sold another eighty of my hours—and knew I could never again work a regular job.
A couple of years ago I decided to clean the barn. I'm a sloppy housekeeper, and an even sloppier barnkeeper. All the animals, who freely wander in and out, share the barn with piles of beekeeping equipment and extra hive bodies, firewood, books, magazines, tools, nesting boxes for the hens to ignore, and boxes of food pulled from dumpsters (for birds).
If ever a place was described in the mythology of mice as the Garden of Eden, this was it. Mice especially love making nests in hive bodies. They chew holes in the honeycombs, bring in straw and piles of pasta for warmth and food, then urinate everywhere so the boxes reek and are sure to be rejected later by bees. Mice don't seem to mind the smell. Perhaps they think the same thing about our habitations.
Moving hive bodies, I found many nests of baby mice: pink, hairless, wriggling. Dogs, cats, and chickens huddled round as I picked up each box, then darted in to snatch mice that were old enough to run and simply swallow those too young to move.
I had conflicted feelings about the killing. I don't like to kill, especially when it doesn't lead directly to food, but I must admit I've picked up from bees a certain antipathy toward mice. Not only do mice destroy stored equipment, they sometimes, especially in winter, move into occupied hives. They've been known, albeit infrequently, to kill entire colonies, or drive the bees away.
The discomfort with killing them arose from the fact that my dislike of mice is general, not individual. The babies being swallowed two or three at a time by the dogs, or pecked at, aligned, and swallowed whole by chickens had never harmed me, bees, or anyone. I've not before hesitated—or at least