On August 4th, during a wonderful Arts festival, I was asked how I would define myself. Immediately I thought of the things I do. The person who asked stopped me mid-sentence and clarified her question. How would I define who I am inside, not what I do. Well, that seriously stumped me. I still don’t have an answer. I believe I stammered something about being a storyteller. I thought about my love of trees and the forest, but didn’t know how I would put that into words for a definition of who I am.

As some of you already know, later that evening, a local man I know, and his dog, were killed by a hit and run driver.  Being a small community, everyone is impacted. Being totally honest, sometimes I liked that old brindle boxer more than I liked his human companion, but no one should be left dying and alone, on a narrow forest road in the middle of the night.

This morning I walked to work. The road has no shoulder, the woods come right up to the edge, and with our rare sunshine, it was a beautiful walk. Until the first car passed me. They were polite, going slow, moved out around me. But still I couldn’t help but imagine the force of impact if they hit me. How it would feel to hit pavement, to be dragged, to be left? There isn’t a whole lot of traffic on this road. I could have been there for a while. As a writer, I wondered how I would describe such a thing and was unsettled by the thought, as if I belittled what he went through.

Further down the road, a memorial has shown up where this man and his dog died. People have been leaving mementos that reminded them of him, or that they knew were important to him. The dog’s brush is there with a package of dog treats. A shed snake skin because the man volunteered at a Reptile Zoo and had great compassion for his charges. An amethyst necklace. A ceramic dragon. A photo of him with his son. Flowers of course. Apples. Candles. A feather that looks like it came from a hawk.

Things that define him to those who cared for him.

So how do you define yourself? What would people who care for you leave in remembrance, leave as reminders of what they saw in you?

Paper and pen. Rocks (I’m always hauling home interesting rocks). A pot with a little tree maybe? Favorite books. Hopefully a bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate. Garnets for sure. Tiny ones gathered from our river.

It’s a very strange thing to think about and makes me feel uncomfortable, maybe slightly maudlin or self-centered. But do think about it. How do you define yourself? How do you want to be remembered?

I’ve come back to the beginning of this piece, for me anyway.

As a storyteller.

Every so often I digress from writing to share a story.

A few years ago beavers  built this huge dam in the creek on our property. We didn’t mind because, after all, we had moved into their backyard. At the same time though, we didn’t want our place flooded. So once a week my father and I would hike  to the dam. I would walk out onto the dam itself with a hoe, and pull up the new construction, handing my father sticks and branches and small trees. It was a compromise of sorts. They could have their dam, but we kept it at a height that prevented flooding.

So here I was on the dam, hoe in hand, dipping into water that rushed between my chore boots and over the top of the dam. I scooped into the water and came up with a salmon instead of a branch. Amazingly I hadn’t impaled the salmon, and since I was in the middle of lifting upward, all I ended up doing was scooping the salmon up and over the dam. It splashed away into the beaver pond and my father said ‘that’s a fishing story no one is going to believe’. Catching a Coho salmon on a hoe.

With all that work on the dam, though, I never saw a beaver. I tried. I’d sneak down there late at night, I’d sit by the dam for hours trying to be still. Nothing worked. And then one night the river flooded. I’d been working on running the emergency operation center all day, it was late at night, and my husband came to get me because my car wouldn’t make it through the water. Driving home in the big truck, the headlights picked out a beaver. Swimming across the road with a big branch. Taking advantage of the floodwaters to move construction supplies. All those hours I’d spent hiding by the dam and all I needed to do to see a beaver was drive down the road.

A man I knew did an experiment to see what kind of wood beavers preferred for eating, vs. what kind of wood they preferred for building. Using 2×4 lumber, he built a framework that held branches from multiple species of trees and set it up near a dam. In the morning the branches were all there and the lumber had been taken and incorporated into the dam. The beavers prefer milled lumber when available.

This same guy also tried an experiment for sound. Beavers build because of the sound of running water. The more water flows, the more they reproduce to get help to dam that flowing water. So he took a recording of running water and set the tape recorder by the dam. The same dam with the lumber-loving beavers. He wanted to know if they would continue to build even if there was no actual water physically flowing over the dam. If it was purely sound that made them work.

The next day he found the beavers had dammed his tape recorder, packing mud all around it.

Pretty smart.