In Zero at the Bone, Tucson
writing instructor Erec Toso describes how his brush with death
reveals the poison in our daily lives – complacency.
Summer rains wash over the desert; life stirs, and snakes wait for
prey. When vacation ends, Toso dreads returning to work at the
University of Arizona – the traffic, the meetings, the rigid
schedule. After his first day back, he takes his boys swimming and
is bitten by a rattlesnake while walking home from the pool. The
poison of the desert takes hold while his wife dials for help.
Toso slips into a mental fog, the scent of death drifting
around him, paramedics working as if he were “no longer there.” His
leg swells up to his rib cage, and he can barely eat for three
days. But the fog lifts, and he realizes that “being alive is a
hell of a thing.” After four days in the hospital, he goes home,
but he can’t work or drive. So he writes.
Toso is at his
best writing about the desert. It breaks his heart to see the
ground go under the blade, the snakes displaced, the rivers sucked
dry.
The wash behind his house
brings traffic from the hills – coyotes, bobcats, javelinas. There
are confrontations; the family cat looks like a “prizefighter with
a broken nose. … He was lucky. Other cats have never come home.”
When we build in the desert, its creatures roam the edges
of our cities. Toso holds out hope but has no answers, exploring
the contradictions of our love affair with the Southwest while
healing from its venom. “I have to speak up for the desert, for
what we are losing,” he writes, “even if there is no hope that
anything will change, and do so with as much care as I can muster,
with as much love as I can stand.”
Zero at the
Bone: Rewriting Life After a Snakebite Erec Toso 210
pages, softcover: $15.95.
The University of Arizona
Press, 2007.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A snake in the grass.
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