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Bangor Metro >  JuneJuly 2006 >  Existential Moose

Illustration by: Leslie Bowman

I used to see moose almost every summer day when I lived in the country.  I hadn’t thought much about it in a long time until I was on the bus last week returning home after a visit with my kids. A woman in the seat ahead of me called out, “Look, look, a moose!” all the while flailing her arms toward the opposite lanes of I-95. All of us whipped our heads to the left. The police blues were flashing from multiple cars. The traffic had been stopped, and cars, pickups, vans, semis were being ushered through one at a time, while a yearling moose stood on the edge of the road, under a clean, cloudless sky and a bold sun, just being its unruffled self, oblivious to all the to-do. 

All of my moose encounters have been with moose certain that they are in the right place—no matter what the rest of us (including all the vans and police cars and bus riders on this particular day) may think.
I am delighted to be reminded that moose are my role models. I had almost forgotten. They are the most in-your-face examples of being so right with oneself, no matter the world’s perception.

My children were maybe four, seven, and eight years old when the road washed out by Fish Hatchery Brook. The town’s one-man road crew/maintenance worker/snow plower arranged a makeshift, narrow, planked walkway across the divide so we had a way out, at least on foot. We walked the half a mile down each morning to navigate the bridge to meet the school bus at the next driveway another quarter mile down the road. 

We took to heading out early to see the moose that were partying in our road, licking the winter’s salt, generally just hanging out. Unlike deer, they didn’t ever jar at our arrival. It always seemed that they figured if you were on the road with them, well, then, you were intended to be there, too.

This is a good thing for me to be reminded of as new people begin to enter my life in meaningful but unexpected ways. I am reminded to be open to whatever crosses my path—to pay attention in that almost inattentive way that silence and country roads (and moose) teach you. I grew up in a big city and live in a small city now. Both were/are the absolute right places for me, but I also now know that the years in between on that dirt road slicing through the woods taught me how to be truly present for the living of each day. 

I have been waking early these days since my bus ride—four-thirty or so—and driving into the country. I don’t seem to care what “country” it is. Some days I head north, others west. Every once in a while east, but
never south. 

This morning I drive to a small stand of fir and poplar, beside an abandoned shack, on a small road off Route 15. I sit on the front stoop of the old building.

The sun climbs up over the roof of chipped cedar shingles and shines on the quiet, looping road. I hear a leaf curl in the slight breeze. I am practicing being present for the rightness of it all.


Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and visual artist. Her work is included in the recently published anthology The Other Side of Sorrow and in the current issue of Utne magazine. She will be reading at the Davistown Museum in Liberty on July 22.