puppy
by Heidi Biggs
Sarah Grew, Language of Lines (detail), oils, encaustic on panel, 24 x 24 inches, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
puppy
Heidi Biggs | OCt 2023 | Issue 28
I am following the Mississippi River down by bike. The sun is harsh, burning my nose and lips when I forget to apply sunscreen, so bright I squint through my sunglasses. There is chafing under my nose from it constantly dripping in the cold. It’s November. A cold snap. And the river is historically low. Not the hot and fecund place I was expecting, the Mississippi in winter is cold and retreating. I enter the occasional scent bloom of evergreen as my tires crush carpets of fallen orange cypress needles. The wind cuts across my path. My legs constantly turn the pedals because the land is perfectly flat.
This day is gray, I’m riding 70 miles across the Yazoo Delta. Across the spot where in 1927 a flood of the Mississippi River devastated the Mississippi Delta. I wanted to feel the distance of the flood in my body and contemplate the fragility of infrastructure. The lack of redundancy and the loss of what was before, a big old sponge—a wide and wild wetland. As I ride, the clouds break at the horizon, showing slivers of blue sky. The fields are brown, in some cases, a heathered blue. Every once in a while, an electric green. Sometimes boggy wetlands, cypress knees and browning needles, or small creeks dance at the side of the road like partners to my ride. The water is always circulating somehow.
My route meanders between old roads, big roads, and dirt roads. I roll by a singular derelict home and its accompanying tall and leafless shade tree. There is a graveyard of a thousand automobiles parked back off the dirt road in tall grasses. On the outskirts of a three street town, there are enclaves of trailers, bunched together. I pass an abandoned church, stark and simple, falling down alone in a field. Other homes stand regal and large, brick way back on property, looming at a distance. Outside town at the start of the day, two little boys ran at me through the big yard of a brick house, yelling, charging across the lawn until one reached the lawn’s threshold and spilled over—one foot stepping into the street. The other snapped, “what are you doing?!” and they forgot me in the shock of transgressing some mother’s rule to stay in the yard.
*
After a morning spent back on dirt roads, I spent 12 miles on a road riding on the one foot shoulder where semi trucks would pass close enough to blow me with gusts of wind as they passed. I listened backwards for their approach, gripping the handlebars too hard, looking over my shoulder often, and praying that no oncoming traffic blocked them from moving into the oncoming lane to pass me. My body aches from the tension. I stop to take a leak on a small side road, hiding from vision over a small hill behind a tuft of grass, taking care to aim the stream away from my shoes as it blazes out a divet in the gravel. I check my phone and there are 3 miles left. I can do it. I get back on my bike and keep riding, square ponds I think are for catfish farming dotting the landscape out to my right.
I finally turned onto a country road again and stopped right at the turn off, leaning against a concrete edge to a short bridge that crosses a ditch on the side of the road. Exhausted, tense, hungry, I pulled out some pizza from the night before which I wrapped in an ice bag I pilfered from the hotel I’d stayed at the night before. Two men rolled to the stop sign I was sitting by in a dinged maroon truck, rolled down their window, and asked, “Where are you headed?”
“I’m going to Yazoo City, I started in Memphis, and I’m going all the way to Jackson,” I replied. Their expressions didn’t move, they seemed unimpressed, “Oh right, sometimes we see people going across the country” replied the passenger while the driver looked down the road to check traffic. “Well, be safe!” the passenger yelled with a wave as the driver pulled out to the bigger road. I looked at my phone, it’d been twenty minutes already. Maybe that was my signal to get going too.
The smaller roads come with less traffic but more dogs. As I got going, not far in, I was confronted by a loose pack. A man leaned out of a passenger side window of a silver truck while it rumbled by and warned, “be careful.” These dogs, which bike store mechanic referred to as “southern dogs,” run at you together, all sizes, pitbulls and mutts, with puffed chests, huffing and barking, mean. As this pack approached, I did what I’d learned to do during the trip: slow down, stop, stare them down, and they dispersed. I think it’s something about the movement of the bike they want to chase. In this pack, the last dog chasing was a dachshund fiercely yapping and snapping at me long after all the big dogs had turned back, bored. I laughed at its harmless tenacity.
It stopped chasing, finally, when two more dogs began running toward me. Tensing up, I slowed down, ready to stop, but surprisingly they wanted to run with me, not run me down. They were happy, stretching their bodies, keeping pace—on one side loped a floppy brown lab puppy, on the other streaked an older Australian shepard. The older one gave up quickly, but the little puppy kept running, its eyes looked bright, and playful, this was a game to it. I didn't know what to do. We turned onto another road, was he going to get lost? I stopped and gave him some pets and said, “now you gotta go back,” and “you’re going to get lost, I’m worried about you.” I started pedaling, he kept running. I yelled, “GO HOME” but he wasn’t hearing it. I gave in, then, I grew attached. I thought, are you my dog now? Is this what dog love feels like? Then, I could see him growing tired. Falling away. And when he finally stopped I watched him fade back, sitting in the middle of the road, cinematic. It hurt somehow, even if it was inevitable. I hoped he got enough food from his owners to make up for all his running. I hope he found his way home.
When I was a puppy, my body also wanted to go forever. I started riding in college, and I was obsessed. I raced, I toured. It was all I wanted to do. I was one big tank engine, always pushing forward, not heeding signs to stop. After long rides, I was a blizzard of buzzing cells. I liked how when riding, the mind goes blank, blanker blank, the thoughts pass pass pass, the world turns under the horizon, pains seep in, no avoiding it, just accept it. It will pass at some point. And when the ride is over, the accumulation of all the motion is held in the vessel of the body still, moving, like sea legs. I had been in the wind, I had been vibrating with the road, I had been a beating heart, the muscle fibers of legs, the subtle sway of the bike rocking between pedal strokes.
This puppy reminds me of a shadow body that walks around with me, in my memories of myself at a younger age when I too was endless. I would get into the ‘on’ position and everything felt so good for a while, until I crashed. I broke my elbow, then six months later, my arm, then nine months later my knee, then I quit cycling. I didn’t know how to rest. It’s scary to walk around not knowing the ends. Not seeing them. And falling repeatedly over them. Now I’m back out here. Alone, meeting the world on the curve of my wheel watching days slide by on the horizon line, in the winter, in Mississippi, trying to double up with the river. Trying to find a more sustainable way to be out here, asking a river for advice.
Heidi Biggs (they/she) is a writer and academic living in Atlanta, GA. They have an interdisciplinary background, holding a B.A. in Literature, MDes in Interaction Design, and PhD in Informatics. They are currently a research scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology exploring intersections of storytelling, theory, design, and technology in relation to climate change. Their writing and research explores queerness, embodiment, land histories, and ecological entanglements and they believe we need new kinds of stories to imagine new worlds.
Sarah Grew creates art based in painting and photography, that expands into installation and environmental art and contracts into collage and printmaking. Her work includes a range from public art projects to wall based pieces belonging in private collections nationally and internationally. In researching the concepts that enrich her work she has become a beekeeper, studied native plant habitats, and worked as an Artist-in-Residence for a recycling facility in California. Recently, she was an artist in residence on a science research boat studying the effects of climate change on the plankton food web. Previously, Grew was awarded residencies at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Playa Artist Residency, the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Joshua Tree National Park, the Collegeum Phaenomonologicum in Italy, Brush Creek and the Ucross Foundation. She has also received several support fellowships from The Ford Family Foundation. Currently, Grew is working on a several of time-bending projects; paintings that examine modes of expressing time through layering visual art technologies from different periods and concurrently, a photography project using early printing methods to speak to climate change and the fragility of our planet.