There is a dead beaver at the edge of Southern Illinois University's Campus Lake, just lying there among the big pale rocks, letting the water lap around it. I once lived in Carbondale, walked around this lake three times a week for twenty years, and never once did I see a dead beaver. I saw them alive, saw their complicated domed houses and dams, even the trees they'd gnawed upon. But never a dead one.

The two-and-a-half hour drive down to Carbondale from central Illinois is drizzly and a little cold. I'm going down for the walkathon my thirteen-year-old daughter has helped her school organize to raise money for Habitat for Humanity. I can't get the heater set right, though, and my windows keep fogging up. I'm either too hot or too cold. Everything looks like Sweden, grey and stern. It's weird. Sweden is weird. How can such a fabulously
progressive welfare state have such a high rate of suicide? Probably it's the weather. And whenever the weather turns Swedish around here, I feel melancholy and a little foreign. I kind of like it.

I am thinking, though, all the way down and once I get here, about how I would rather be in D.C. today, maybe, at the big peace rally against this crazy idea of a war on Iraq. Wondering what the weather is like in D.C., I pull onto South Forest Avenue, the odd little one-way street upon which my daughter and her father live, and that missed -- by one block -- being chosen as part of the
Carbondale Historic District. Looks like they're not home, so I head on to the lake. Further up South Forest I pass Buckminster Fuller's former home, a
drooping, dilapidated geodesic dome (the super-efficient structure Bucky is famous for popularizing) to which the city and the university administration have paid zero attention since running Fuller out of town in 1975 for his embarrassingly peaceful anti-war activities, leaving Carbondale and Southern Illinois University to become famous instead for their violently wild Halloween parties (also banned now). The Fuller dome has spent 25 years as a student rental, and the inevitable abuse shows.

Approaching the lake, I finally notice that the trees are still green down here. I speed around the slick blacktop curves of the lake road, surrounded by the
green lushness of poison ivy-blanketed oaks and poplars, swerving to miss the abundant chipmunks, mulling over the incongruencies between Carbondale's weather zone six, and the zone seven I've just left where leaves are turning already to yellow and red. It's a big difference.

And here I am at Campus Lake. The idea is to walk around the circular trail as many times as possible. Here is the whole school, walking in groups and taking breaks at the table set up with bottled water and cookies. Here comes Molly, flush-faced in a black knit hat, her beautiful long red hair damp around her shoulders.

"You can't walk with me," she declares as a greeting. "I'm going with Katey and Tali. I'll go to lunch with you after." And she's off. Thirteen. What a marvelous age. Jeez. But she calls over her shoulder as she's walking away, "Look for the dead beaver."

"OK," I say, smiling wanly. "Bye."

She has her back turned again before I can get my hand to my mouth to blow her a kiss. It's probably better this way. She'd just be embarrassed.

I turn on the trail and go the opposite way, so maybe I'll get a glimpse of her as we cross paths. I love this trail. It's blacktopped all the way around its
2.2 miles, and just hilly enough to feel once in a while like you're getting a work-out. The woods around it are downright verdant. I've always loved watching
the turtles sun themselves on the logs at the edge of the water, though they're not out today -- too chilly. There are always ducks and baby ducks and beavers (alive until today) and snakes, and in the summer it's the only place un-buggy enough around here to get a decent woods walk without spider and tick terror setting in.

I pass a lot of kids. I pass over the little wooden bridge, stop to look at the green water in the creek below, the lake all grey and glassy out beyond it. I
remember when I used to run this trail -- instead of walk it -- in my early thirties, back when I could wear tight little shorts and a sports bra and feel sexy the whole time, listening to Nine Inch Nails or the Indigo Girls on my walkman and looking at the cute guys as I jogged. Those were the days. Now, in my big baggy sweatshirt, I try to do the walking meditation I learned from Thich Nyat Hahn: Breathing in (take a step), "I have arrived"; breathing out (take a step), "I am home." Over and over. I do this for a while, then say, "Screw it," and focus on looking for the dead beaver.

I pass the place where another Bucky dome used to be. This one was a picnic shelter. It's gone now, after falling into decay. I pass the pretty lake-front dorms, Thomson Point, some impossibly perfect-looking young students walking around in sexy clothes, looking for guys. Through the trees, I see the
relatively new and colossal, rusted, ugly metal sculpture over there by the relatively new Science Building. I remember the summer they installed it. I
happened to be working for the campus paper at time. I called up Acting University President Donald Beggs and asked him, "If you can afford that colossal, ugly metal sculpture AND the new Science Building, how come you can't afford to buy Bucky's old house and fix it up? He's our most famous alumnus, you know!"

"Those are fiscal matters," he told me, then slammed down the phone. The paper wouldn't print the interview.

A little farther around I come upon the boat docks. Some boys from the school are sitting in a paddle boat, pointing sticks at ducks and making shooting
noises, talking in some kind of pathetic-sounding white-boy ghetto-speak, probably pretending to be gangstas. I decide to ignore this. I cross by the
wide, low place where my friend Steve, once a design student of Fuller's, told me they'd constructed a whole little city of geodesic domes one semester. The domes were all white, he said, magical, scattered oddly over the long green.
They would have class in them. Or meditate. Or make out. The university tore them down right after they threw Bucky out of his job. There's no trace of them now. I think about all the protests on this campus back then, during Vietnam. I think about my daughter, who I still haven't passed yet, trying to make some kind of difference out here today. And, of course, I think about all those people way out there in D.C., wonder how they're fairing, whether or not the press is even covering them.

Then I walk onto the levee. There is one more abandoned Bucky spot here, right before the rocky embankment, but it's empty of dome now, too. This is my least favorite part of the walk, this levee. It's all exposed to wind and eyes, the last stretch to cover before you get back to the parking lot. But you can see the whole lake from here, the swimming platform, the sandy beach, the dorms across the water. And then there it is, on my right amid the rocks: the dead beaver. It looks really fat, really lonely, like it's been there awhile, all forgotten. Seems strange that the groundskeepers haven't come to take it away. It's stubby little beaver paws are propped on a rock, like it's been praying. There are no insects on it, though. It just looks slick and fat and sad. I pick up a fallen leaf, mostly green but there's a touch of yellow on its tip. I walk over and lay this leaf over the beaver's tiny cupped hands, sit down on a rock beside it, watch the rain run like diamonds off its fur. I think for a minute, then decide that, no, I don't have the guts to drag it off into the woods and bury it. Or maybe I'm just too lazy. So I get up and pick my way back over the big rocks. Then I stop, look back at it and raise my hand to my lips, feeling like a little bit like Nixon. "See you later, Bucky," I say.

Author's Biography

Margaret Howard lives in Illinois with her children, Molly and Anthony, where she tries to make nori rolls without destroying the carpeting. 

She teaches writing online for The Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth, hypertext fiction and poetry for Writers.com, and composition in face-to-face classrooms at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. 

Margaret received her MFA from SIU Carbondale in 2000. She is currently attempting to study yoga, write more poems, and not think of John Ashcroft every time her phone line crackles.

E-mail Margaret at  marhowa@siue.edu

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