The Evidence

One long-ago February, when winter’s white enveloped the north, one of our daughters came with her family to visit us in Florida.  The favourite activity for our grandson and granddaughter was going to the ocean, to the beach.

On one such occasion, my daughter, my wife, and I took a walk after the kids had finished splashing in the water.  Their dad stayed with them, helping build grand castles in the sand.  We hiked through the dunes on the first leg, planning to come back along the shoreline.  I led off, sinking ankle-deep into the soft sand, feet clad in sandals to protect from the heat and the sandspurs. 

After a few minutes, we came upon tracks in the sand, apparently made by some small creature, perhaps a mole.  What made the discovery unusual was that they suddenly stopped in a small depression in the sand, as if the mole had simply vanished.  The tracks ended without a trace.

My daughter suggested what might have happened.  The mole, she reckoned, had been taken by a predator, likely one of the falcons that frequent the area.  Indeed, on closer inspection, we could detect brush-marks in the sand—caused, we figured, by the beating of a bird’s powerful wings.

We continued on slowly, backtracking along the poor victim’s trail.  It occurred to me that, a scant few yards before the depression in the sand, the mole likely had no inkling it was about to die.  It was gloriously alive until it wasn’t.

Our backtracking ended when the trail curled away from the beach, into dense, long grasses, whence the mole had come.  We soon forgot about it as we continued our stroll, eventually heading back along the water’s edge to our grandchildren.

A few days later, I chanced to hear someone airily proclaiming on the radio that, if we suddenly discovered the world was to end tomorrow, the internet everywhere would be overwhelmed by people calling home to say all those things they had forgotten to say while there was still time.  Social media sites would crash from the traffic.  It made me think again of the wee mole whose tracks we had seen in the sand.

When it left its burrow for that final time, I wondered, did it have its life in order?  Had it said all those things that matter to those who matter?  Or were there things it had left undone that should have been looked to sooner?

And that led me to wonder about my own journey through life, leaving tracks in the sand for some celestial eye to see.  Am I also subject to a mortal strike from some hidden foe?  And if that were to happen, am I prepared and at peace with those who care about me? 

I wondered, too, if the life-tracks I’m leaving behind, right up to the moment they stop, will be visible to some other onlooker, as the mole’s were to me?  Will the living of my life have made a positive difference in any way? 

Or, conversely, is all trace of me destined to be scrubbed from existence when some cosmic judge, weighing in on the worthiness of my journey, decides to erase it completely?  I hope for the former, of course, yet am fearful of the worst, when a grand, stentorian voice might grandly pronounce: We had to destroy the evidence!

_{© J. Bradley Burt 2021}