Longform - Smokies - Tessa Fontaine
AFTER SEEING
When a concussion left her with the fog of double vision, a North Carolina writer took to the mountains in search of restoration.
BY TESSA FONTAINE
THE EGRET IS standing perfectly still. She’s 2 feet tall, bright white, with long spindly legs. She peers down into the creek below her, using a kind of zoom vision that allows her to switch back and forth between telescopic closeness and a macro perspective instantly. Egrets are part of the heron family, differentiated largely by coloration. In a wildlife rehab class I took a year earlier, the instructor told us to always wear goggles when approaching injured egrets and herons. They have dagger-like beaks. They go for the eyes. Sometimes, our instructor said, lowering her voice, they keep on digging through an eye and scramble the brains.
I hold the dog’s leash so he remains close and still, but the egret gets a glimpse of us. The S of her long neck is twisted, just slightly, so she appears to be looking at us and down into the creek at the same time. Don’t move, I whisper to the dog. He sneezes.
Sun and shadow pattern the ground like fancy lace curtains. I can’t look for long. I train my eyes elsewhere, step slowly and try to trust my feet. It’s fall. A few leaves are still holding their green while others are oranging themselves into the postcard this place is known for, firestorms in the layer of trees overhead. We’re in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on the Gatlinburg Trail. The dried leaves make a nice crunch underfoot.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a shadow diving toward me. I startle, duck, throw my hands up to protect my face, expecting a collision. Nothing happens. When I glance toward where the thing seemed to be coming from, there’s nothing there. It’s clear that there was nothing there to begin with. I’m not surprised.
Just over a year ago, I was in a car accident. I was stopped at a light, and someone going 40 barreled into me from behind. My car, a rental, accordioned, and my brain smacked against the container of its own safekeeping. That’s what happens in a concussion, sometimes—the injury results from your brain ping-ponging inside your own skull.
My movement has startled the egret. She takes off from her spot in the creek and flies upstream, white body mirrored in the water below. I imagine her camera lens eyes tracking both the fish beneath her, some sleeping in shadowed banks, and also what lies ahead, and maybe even the two strange creatures watching from the dirt.
I keep walking, and that’s when the next strange thing happens: The world flattens. It’s as though what’s in front of me and what’s below all become one flat plane, indistinguishable in space. Flaming red leaves, which I’d noticed fallen on the path, now float free-form in space. I clench my fists, as if holding tightly to air will keep me rooted to the earth. In my stomach, the flip of dislocation, a panic, a burst of anger. Count to five, I tell myself, closing my eyes, and when I open them, the leaves are on the ground again. There is a ground again.
What I can do is walk. What I can’t do is track moving objects. Or read. Or look at screens, turn my head quickly, see what is in my periphery. Or see the world without ghosts streaking across my periphery, smears of light or shadow like comets.
Nobody really knows how to help a brain get better after a bad concussion, but there’s some evidence that spending time outside can help. For me, this was not an unwelcome suggestion—I already spent a lot of time outside, trail running and hiking and sitting by creeks and gardening. But my experiences outside had always been within the boundaries of my comfort zone, the space where all my senses are working properly, where I can trust my eyes to keep me safe. I’ve harbored this belief, which is admittedly anthropocentric, that before my concussion, I knew exactly what was going on around me.
But now? I can’t trust my eyes.
It would be nice to say that I am the kind of person who thought, Wonderful, what a learning experience—I’ll rely on my hearing instead! But what animal invites handicap?
I was afraid.
The first days after the accident, I stuck close to home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, walking the familiar paved trails behind our house with metered-out trash cans and children on scooters. It was nice there, easy. When we moved shortly thereafter to Asheville, North Carolina, the new paved trails close to our house, and their trash cans and scooters, soon became familiar. I was continually aware of my periphery closing in, or my double vision, another side effect of the concussion that made most things appear as soft repetitions of themselves floating out to the side, wing-like.
The asphalt was all wrong for my eyes. Too orderly. Too human.
Soon, I was going farther, turning off the highway and into Bent Creek, an experimental forest in Pisgah National Forest, and then farther east, up the Blue Ridge Parkway into the Smoky Mountains, to dirt paths that led into that mist. I like the mist. It comes from the overwhelm of trees and plants sighing off water vapor. The shroud of fog limits all our vision equally.
Before I left for today’s hike, as I was outfitting the dog in his collar, my husband whispered to him: “You’re going to go pee on some of the oldest mountains in the world.” They both smiled at the idea. And for good reason—the Smokies are 200 to 300 million years old, and it’s because of their age that they’re not as tall as some of the big mountains out West. I think of my grandmother, who started getting shorter after she turned 70. It was like her wonder and majesty were becoming more compact. The feeling I got when I was around her—a kind of calm, a trust in the world of her experience, of her knowing things beyond what I could know—is not unlike how I started to feel the longer I spent walking the trails of the Smoky Mountains.
The dog approves of our increase in mountain time.
Because the egret has flown on and the planes of the earth have returned to their proper axes, the dog and I head deeper into the woods. We pass hardwoods, thick-based and sturdy—birch, buckeye, maple. We pass thickets of azalea that, when they are in bloom, become tunnels of purple or white flowers, and walking through them is a wormhole to the divine.
I startle at the sound of leaves crunching in the trees. Bear? I’m equal parts eager and afraid. There’s an abundant population in these mountains, and a myth that black bears have bad vision. The myth, I read, came from hunters who found that though one tiny wrong move while you’re scoping a deer can startle it away, it’s much harder to spook a bear. Bad eyes, they concluded.
I started learning about animal perception during a visit to the library. I was looking for some materials on peripheral vision. The librarian brought me down to the children’s section and handed me a book—Eye Spy: Wild Ways Animals See the World. As if a children’s book could explain my brain, my eyes. But then I opened it. I sat on a tiny child’s chair, banged my knees into a low table and flipped through the pages. Each page depicted the world as that animal saw it.
Here, you are an owl. You see a little bit of color, but your vision is mostly geared toward sharpness at night. You’re farsighted and can spot prey very far away, though you can’t see it very well once you’ve caught it. Once it’s in your talons, you use special feather sensors to know exactly how to eat it.
And so here I am, on a trail in the woods—is there an owl here? Can it see me, even though I can’t see it? I stop walking, hold still and listen. Even the quiet has a sound. If there’s an owl, it can spot whatever made those leaves rustle. It can read these woods in a way I can’t now, and in a way I never could.
I look where the crunch of leaves came from, but I don’t see a bear. A little animal, then, disguised on the forest floor—a small bird, or mole, or mouse. Mice, and other prey animals, can see almost 360 degrees around them because their eyes are on the sides of their face. Their vision isn’t particularly sharp, but they are able to monitor what’s happening on all sides, watching for a predator, understanding the full scope of the world around them. Predators, though—eagles, mountain lions, wolves, bears—have eyes on the front of their faces.
Turns out the hunters were wrong: A bear’s vision is great, along with its sense of smell and hearing. Bears, like us, have eyes on the front of their faces for binocular vision. And a deer, used to being a prey animal and therefore wired to flee, can run at the slightest provocation, while a bear doesn’t have the hardwiring to get out of a hunter’s way.
The dog trots happily along, and I make a sound I know calls birds in—psshhh psh psh psh—a ubiquitous sound of distress. I wait, hold still. A blue jay shoots past me and lands on a branch not far ahead. In addition to seeing all the colors we see, birds also see in ultraviolet. They have the most developed eyes of all vertebrates.
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper,” William Butler Yeats said. What can’t I perceive? I bend toward where the dog is sniffing, trying to understand what is so exciting, but I smell nothing. My ability is limited. But it’s not just the injury that has limited it. It has always been partial.
Earthworms have no eyes at all, but five hearts. I use my shoe to brush away some of the leaf debris on the trail to look for worms. Beneath me, the earth must be teeming with them, aerating the soil, tunneling their way around the world. With my eyes closed, I try to imagine having five hearts, and the sound of all that blood, pumping.
On one of these walks, I see a small brown salamander, tan on the tip of its nose and tail, darker brown across its body, almost the color and pattern of tree bark. It’s shiny and holding still and, so the dog doesn’t notice, I move away from it quickly. Salamanders are famous in these mountains. I like thinking about how many generations they’ve been here, watching the mountains change as they, too, have changed. I like to think about that one little salamander I saw, and her mother and her mother, sensing this place in ways I can only imagine—the feel of algae beneath their feet, the cold rush of the morning’s first slide into the creek.
The longer I walk along these banks, listening to the crackle of leaves beneath the feet of unknown animals, the further I get from the idea I’d clenched in my fist for all these years—that before this accident, my senses had been unlimited. I’d like to say that nature healed me, or after enough walks, my vision went back to normal, as if normal were the optimum and only acceptable state. But it hasn’t. I still close my eyes when things are moving, especially screens—when I tried to watch a rock-climbing film in 3D with panoramic moving shots, I nearly passed out. Reading is a challenge when the words are dense, or the text is small. And my peripheral ghosts persist. They aren’t as startling anymore, though. Sometimes I kind of like them. They make me think that there might be a world of unseen things flitting past all the time, and I’ve just been given a glimpse. A hint at something magical.
The longer I hike past egret and birch and salamander, the more hours I spend in awe of these mountains that have witnessed this planet reinventing itself over and over again. It allows me to let go of the fantasy that my past self’s vision was perfect. That my future self’s understanding of the world is predictable. Because the more I open myself up past the belief that I am damaged, the less I am upset about what is lost.
What I’ve found is so much bigger—the fact of birds sensing magnetism, of deer seeing best in shades of blue, of all the critters in these ancient mountains seeing me as I can’t be seen anywhere else.
Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she teaches creative writing at Warren Wilson College.
Taylor Bruce