Confronting Phobia

CW: death, wild animal death, suicide

As I stumble my way through this strange, new, virus-ridden world, I continue to pursue growth in art, this time through a visual storytelling class. Artmaking can be a transformative process, and it can go deeply into the squishy parts of ourselves. The instructor asked us to examine our dreams, and, in particular, our childhood dreams. In examining my dreams, I found ongoing themes of death. As a child, I had recurring nightmares of being surrounded by dead fish. I developed a longtime phobia of dead things. By the time I was a teenager, I was unable to bring myself to look at anything dead, and I would run into the street to avoid dead birds on the sidewalk.

All of this was brought to the forefront of my mind on a recent road trip to Utah, where Mather had an unfortunate encounter with Bambi, leaving him drivable but wounded in the grill:

Eric and I were very sad about what we did to Bambi, and it cast a pall over an otherwise great vacation. Moreover, it reminded me of the times when I was a child, in Schenectady, NY, when our neighbor would shoot deer and drain them in his back yard. Little girl me was horrified by the sight of the dead deer so clearly visible from the yard where I loved to play. I would have to stay inside because it scared me so much.

The tree where our neighbor would hang his deer is the Y-shaped one in the upper part of this photo, and you can see how readily visible it was from our yard.

I particularly love this picture because it shows me learning to be both the photographer and the cyclist that I am today. It also shows what a hot car my Dad had... We sure loved that beautiful thing! When I was 3, he taught me to say "Dodge Dart GT V8 convertible." Photo by Rev. George Klohck, painstakingly and lovingly restored by your author

So, I made the daring decision to use my photography to confront and work through my fear of death and dead things. I was unable to take a picture of what was left of Bambi, and it was dark in any case, but I made myself photograph this roadside raccoon.

I found that not all dead things were disgusting and ugly, that sometimes a pretty thing can retain some of its beauty even in death.

When I told my instructor that I was having trouble finding subjects for my project, she suggested that try visiting the beach. That sounded like a pretty great idea conceptually, and it turned out to be rather a storytelling gold mine.

After work on a Friday, I secured my camera and tripod on my bike rack and rode Scheherazade out to what seemed like the nearest appropriate location, Albany Beach, on the San Francisco Bay. Almost immediately, I found the remnants of some dead thing, apparently avian.

A older white woman with a broad-brimmed and a very large Dalmatian walked up and asked, "What is that?"

"Part of a bird, I think," I told her.

"Yeah, looks like a chest," she agreed.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

I explained that I was an art student and that I was looking for dead things to photograph for a class project. I have found that explaining that I am an art student will cause people just to nod their heads and accept whatever strange behavior I might be displaying, whether it be squatting with my tripod on the median in the middle of a busy boulevard, introducing myself to roboticists and asking for their photograph, or trotting around on the beach staring down at piles of washed-up kelp. At least here in Berkeley, everyone seems to take these behaviors pretty much for granted for an art student.

"There was a giant washup of dead fish here a month ago," she told me. "Hundred-year-old fish."

Her Dalmatian came running up to me barking and I scolded him. She quieted him while I explained to him that I didn't have any food (which was probably actually not true--I likely had a Clif bar or two in my hydropack).

"Why were there so many dead fish?" I asked. Her Dalmatian sniffed my hydropack.

"We've been dumping untreated sewage into the Bay," she explained, "and filling the water up with nitrogen. It's causing an algae bloom that's killed fish from Lake Merritt up to the San Pablo Bay."

"Wow," I said. A Labrador Retriever came bounding along and distracted the Dalmatian.

"Sturgeons," she said, "That's the kind of fish they were. Some of them were 100 years old."

While some of the details she gave were speculative, I was able to confirm the algae bloom and mass fish dieoff last month in an Oaklandside article.

So, it appeared that I had missed the best opportunity this year for photographing dead things on East Bay beaches. While the dogs chased each other, I walked up and down the beach, loaded down with camera and tripod, deliberately looking into clumps of organic material. It was a strange experience for me, because I ordinarily avert my eyes from these things. I don't like to look closely at anything that might be a dead thing, and am constantly looking away from rocks, pieces of wood, piles of garbage, bags, etc. There I was, staring right into piles of washed-up kelp, and not finding anything dead, just gull feathers.

I had combed almost the entire beach when I took a short side trip along the embankment, among the piles of rubble between the bike path and the Bay. There, at last, as the sun was setting behind Mt. Tamalpais, I found an appropriate subject.

Editing this photo was a disgusting chore.

As I was packing up Scheherazade, a man in a green hoodie was packing up his kiteboard. He was white, about 40, with a short red beard and sparking blue eyes.

"Get any good pictures?" he asked me.

"Well," I hesitated, "'good' is maybe not the right word. I'm an art student, and I've been trying to take pictures of dead things for a class project."

"Did you find any dead things?" he asked.

"Oh, yeah," I said.

"What?"

"Hmm... Cormorant, I think?"

"Did you get a picture of the cormorant in that beautiful moment when the sun poked through the clouds just before it set?"

"No! I tried, but I was just a little too slow," I sighed.

"That was a beautiful moment," he said, and I agreed it had been. We were silent for a moment, each remembering a magical experience we had enjoyed, but not together.

"Since you're fascinated by dead things," he told me, "I was out here kiteboarding with my buddy one time. He went in first, and he came back and he said, 'There's something out there, and I think it's a body. Call 911.'"

"A human body?" I asked.

"Yeah, it looked about human sized. I had been hoping it would turn out to be a seal, but it was a human."

"Yikes."

"Search-and-rescue came, but it was really search-and-recovery by that point. The really creepy thing about it was, you know, he had been floating in the water in that dead-man's float, face down, with his arms hanging down below him. So, when they turned him on his back and put him on the stretcher, rigor mortis had set in, and so his arms stayed sticking up in that same position."

"Like a zombie!" I exclaimed.

"Yeah." He shook his head, reliving the haunting memory.

"Suicide?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "Because I was the one who reported it, I got a call later from the East Bay Regional Park District ranger, since it's their jurisdiction. He told me that they had found a suicide note and an empty bottle of Jack Daniels."

"He just drank himself into a stupor and went out into the Bay." He pointed out to the end of the Albany Bulb peninsula. "It was right out there by that tree."

I told him that this was a fantastic story and that I wanted to use it for my class project, along with a photo of the tree. I thanked him for the story and wished him a good weekend.

I hope all of this has been creepy in good way. It's been creepy for me! Thank you, my friends and fellow photographers, for bearing with me as I take on such a difficult subject. Since returning from Utah, I have had beautiful dreams of hiking through dramatic, wide-open landscapes.

Photo by Eric Zuckerman, processed by your author, Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Beth Zuckerman, self-portrait

I am a high-energy creature of passion, a photographer and an aerial dancer. I share with you my journey as an artist.