Becoming Animal

Image by Simmons Buntin.

Years ago, in a dark noisy pub, the man I was talking to reached over and put his fingertips to my cheeks. He was saying something about intimacy and the many ways of it. We’d met a few weeks earlier. He was kind and smart and we’d been laughing a lot together. His touch was light and gentle. Just ten fingertips. They transmitted so much.

I will not touch my face. I will not touch my face.

At first, my boyfriend—not the man from the pub—was almost too lackadaisical. He said, If you don’t do it all—wear gloves, wear a mask, hand-sanitize—it’s not worth doing anything. I said, Why not just go into the store and lick all the counters and the cash register, then? For a day, he went around pretending to lick every surface. We laughed.

That laughter feels now like a song from a nineteenth-century phonograph.

Before introducing me, my host asked the middle schoolers what they knew about ecology.

This was in late February, a few days after the CDC reported that COVID-19 would likely become a pandemic. I was invited to the school in Patagonia, Arizona, to share a recent project: I’d created a stencil image of a Gila topminnow, an endangered guppy-like fish native to the Sonoran Desert, and spray-painted it on a bike path along a river in Tucson. The river is fed by treated wastewater, which in recent years has become cleaner, thanks to improvements at the treatment plant. Several species of fish have returned to the water, including the native Gila topminnow, which had been gone for seventy years.

“In what ways are you connected to nature?” my host asked. The consensus: in every way.

We went outside and spray-painted the topminnow on the school sidewalks. The kids were creative with the paint, mixing greens and blues. They wore masks to avoid inhaling the fumes. The spray cans