Lee Running | Verge
I haven’t always been a runner. Despite my last name, I have never been fast or coordinated. I started running when I got a job as an art professor at a small college in Iowa. The year I was up for tenure I had to do something with my body that didn’t involve my ‘hobby’ which I affectionately called ‘Preemptive worry.’ I started training for a half marathon.
Iowa is a perfect place to learn to run. The state has low elevation gains and hundreds of miles of rural county highways. I thought of my long training runs as therapy. Logging miles along endless corridors of field corn stilled my frantic mind and refocused my breath.
The first time I was run off the road it was dusk in late September. I had just passed a 4-way intersection several miles out of town when a pickup, with two young white men in the cab, pulled up close to me. I could smell the heat of the tires as they swerved into the gravel, just far enough to force me off the edge of the road. In my memory, I can hear them laughing as I tumble over the shoulder into the space I now know the department of transportation calls the “verge.”
I fell because I was pushed, but also because the grade is very steep. This grade is functional, making sure that the vehicle that goes over the edge, won’t pull back onto the road. It’s a space built to make a boundary. Built to hold banks of plowed snow, electrical infrastructure, and the residue of car accidents.
Crouching in the sharp stubble of mowed crabgrass, I was breathless and furious. I was so angry. Shaking with the adrenaline of the run, and rage at the pickup drivers. I tried to still the heartbeat in my ears to listen for the truck’s return. As the sun continued to set, the silence deepened. I stood up slowly, assessing the road rash on my hip and knee.
I limped towards home in the shelter of the verge, my eyes level with the road. When I was back at the intersection I clamored back onto the shoulder, where I could jog again, slowly. In 6 weeks I finished the race.
In the months that followed, I couldn’t stop noticing the verge I had been pushed into. What was this space? This nonspace between every road and field. This same verge is present in every city, rural, and suburban place in the US. I now know it is the longest contiguous wild space in our country.
As an artist, I’ve taught a lot of drawing classes, and I often tell students that learning to draw isn’t really about learning to draw, it’s about learning to see. I think this is the greatest skill art can teach us. More than rendering an object, or building a symmetric form, making art teaches us to focus, and observe.
The thing about seeing in this way is that once seen, something can’t be ‘unseen’. My eyes had a deer filter on them. I caught stark white ribs pushing through a stand of grass. Was that a trash bag caught on a fence? No, it was a deer body, crumpled and dry. Slide 5 The postures these bodies held in death were surprisingly human and emotional. They reminded me of Renaissance paintings. Figures caught in moments of ecstasy, their heads thrown back. Or saints crying out in agony, their legs tangled, chests forward, mouths open.
And there were so many of them. How could there be two within a quarter mile of each other, on opposite sides of the road? How could I identify 10 within the 5-mile loop I was running just outside my small town?
The author CJ Hauser writes in her brilliant piece The Crane Wife: “If you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive?”
Surrounding the small town where I used to live, and much of rural America is an agricultural monoculture. Feed corn is the primary crop, genetically modified to push out any other crop, or native plant, often called a weed. This corn isn’t raised to feed humans, but to feed the animals that feed humans. Pigs, cows, and chickens. It also feeds the deer.
These large ungulates, whitetails in the east and midwest, and mule deer as the population push westward are close relatives of Antelope, elk, and moose. In the late 1800s, they were nearly hunted to extinction. I have met century farmers in Iowa who have ‘deer pastures’ on their land. Places on the farm that their grandparents set aside for a breeding pair of whitetails to re-populate a species decimated by hunting at the turn of the last century. Deer were brought back from the brink by these efforts and the removal of bears, cougars, wolves, and many coyotes. Deer are considered a symbol of American wildness. Some of their fiercest protectors are the hunting community. A constituency working for land protection to keep wild space for prey.
I learned that deer are synanthropic. This word describes an anomaly in our time of species loss. A tiny minority of animals that have adapted to thrive in the human-centered landscape. Other synanthropes include rats, pigeons, and raccoons. Deer are some of the largest. They are found everywhere there are people, but ‘edge landscapes’ are perfect for them. Land between cities and rural agriculture, between agriculture and industry. Here deer can gorge in the fields during the day and bed down in your manicured lawn at night. In our human habitat a deer population can double in just a couple of years.
One of the courses I wish I could replicate in my own teaching is Sal Montano’s brilliant anatomy course. I took this class multiple times while studying at Pratt institute in the late 90’s, and it was one of the places I learned to see.
In the course, we drew from models in the studio. Limber yoga teachers, a 70-year-old male dancer with a cane, and a nursing mother with her baby. We looked at the structure and scale of the human body. Bones were the anchor for everything. In every body we found the pelvic crest, the triangle of the sacrum, and the angle of the clavicle. We learned to draw these bodies from the inside out.
On Saturday mornings we traveled to Columbia Medical School and a model came with us. In a medical theatre, we drew from cadavers dissected by medical students, and from life. Montano reminded us of the privilege of this experience. Each body is an individual, someone’s child, someone’s parent. What a powerful gift for these bodies to be shared with us so we can learn. On these precious mornings, we carefully rendered a muscle’s attachment to the bone and then invited the model to move through basic motions, from sitting, standing, and lying down. So we could see the shape of the living muscles change under the skin.
On the way back to Brooklyn we stopped at the natural history museum and drew the bones of mammoths, bats, and apes. Marveling at the common interior architecture of all living things. The structure inside my hand mirrored in a bird wing. The perfect sculpture that is a pelvis, all holes and curves, replicated inside the body of a mouse, a canine, and a horse. The idea of the signature of life began to make sense to me.
When I started to see the scope of roadkill deer, I wanted to get close to these bodies. I was interested in them for so many reasons. A deer spine is the same length as mine, and I felt a kinship there. But I was also fascinated by how closely we used to live with them. When I spent time in archives there were bone and horn tools, buttons, and instruments. I took a class from the artist Shanna Leino and learned to make bone needles, tools for bookmaking, and adornments.
How had we gotten so far away from these animals that are so like us that they thrive in our habitat? I wanted to learn from them. My empathy had been triggered, and I felt like I couldn’t let this relationship go.
I started talking to friends, biologists, land managers, conservationists, hunters, and eventually county sheriffs. How could I move these deer to safety, and work with their bones?
If the deer is recently killed, I get a salvage tag and move them to a site at a restored prairie. To lift their 110 pound bodies, I could be carrying an adolescent, or myself.
At the prairie I lay them down under chicken wire for a season. This protects them from too many scavengers and allows the insects to do the work of cleaning them.
When I find a clean skeleton in the verge, it often rests in a bed of hair. A reminder that they are mammals like us. I am amazed at the efficiency of the insect world. Nothing with food value is wasted. These artifacts remind me of momentos, the hair of a loved one, saved in a locket or a braid after they have passed.
When the skeleton is brought to the studio. I begin what I affectionately call “bone laundry.” I soak the bones at a very low temperature in soap and water, until there is no grease left in them, and then scrub them clean, soaking them in peroxide before setting them in the sun to dry. This process harkens to a long tradition of women’s work, cleansing, organizing, sterilzing.
Once clean, I can assess the damage to this body.
Which leg was broken? Which side did the vehicle come from when all the ribs were broken? What raccoon gnawed the shoulder blade before hauling off the whole left front leg?
Once the damage is assessed, I begin repairs. Working from wax replicas of each bone, I cast the missing or broken bones in glass. Then I fuse the glass and bone together, marking the place of repair with a thin layer of gold. I then suspend and re-articulate the skeleton. This time standing on two legs, where the sculptures stand shoulder to shoulder, with us.
Why do I engage in this laborious repair? This death has occurred. This violence has already happened. I repair these skeletons to build empathy in the space of an exhibition. Through my ‘seeing’ of these animals, I ask that others see them too. Together we can ask the question: What kinds of violence do we accept? What violence do we assume is not our business? What other beings do we extinguish in public, and walk away?
I have never hit a deer.
Many people have shared stories of deer strikes with me in my exhibitions. Strangers will tell me about the terrifying thud of a hundred-pound body leaping into the passenger side of their car. The impact forces the vehicle out of control. Seeing a flash of eyes in headlights milliseconds before a body flies into the windshield, shattering the glass, and obliterating the driver’s view with blood and fur. People tell me they don’t remember coming to a stop, or exiting their vehicle, just standing, or crouching, in the verge, breathless and shaking. One woman told me she collapsed beside the doe she had struck, holding the broken neck of the huge animal in her lap, and wept.
I have never hit a deer. But I have had a windshield shatter.
Many years ago, a man I loved shattered the windshield while I was driving our car on a highway. This was only one incident in a chain of violence it took many years to leave. The windshield was shattered from inside my car. I know the terror of feeling your vision suddenly obscured by broken glass. I know pulling over while crying out. I know opening the driver's door, my thighs quaking, the February wind blistering my wet cheeks. I know I didn’t have a coat on. I was so scared. I watched him cross from the passenger seat. I pleaded while he took the wheel, closed the door, and drove away. I stood in the verge for a long time. I know that many, many, cars drove by, and no one stopped.
When I am working in the verge, alongside the screech of the road, the urgency, and the energy of the wild world courses through me. In the verge I think about the imperative of safe passage. I think about the possibilities of what wild spaces can be. I think about how connected we all are.
I hope that we can imagine, and remember, ourselves as connected to wildness. That we can be less afraid of the complications that wildness in our midst presents. Wildlife needs a safe passage through the landscape that transcends state borders, and county lines. Animals need to be able to see our infrastructure, from the land, the water, and the sky, to be able to navigate our human-centered landscape. Animals were here first. They need to be able to be protected from us, so they can move. So they can hunt. So they can be hunted. So they can thrive.
If we reimagine our systems, we can imagine ways that animals can live with us, safely. Imagine ways that animals can protect themselves, and their young, from the reality of an American highway. So we can reintroduce predators and biodiversity that will help with population control.
The verge, this vast corridor of wild landscape could shift from a place of violence, to a place of passage, food, and protection, for wildlife. They just need us to witness them and give them a way to get to the other side.
I want to imagine a time when a woman, driving across the country at night, can see the flash of the eyes of a family of deer in her headlights, and not feel the terror of possible impact, but know that this mother and fawn are walking along a fence, to a wildlife corridor. All of us moving safely through the night.
Lee Emma Running makes sculptures and drawings using roadkill animal bones, glass, paper, fabric, fur, raw pigments, and gold. Her training as a traditional papermaker allows her to manipulate materials and process as well as maintain the discipline of a fine craft. Her sculptures, installation and performance work are deeply connected to place. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at the National Taiwan University of the Arts, Taipei, Taiwan, The Morris Graves Museum, Eureka, CA, The Dubuque Museum of Art, Dubuque, IA, Western Carolina University Fine Art Museum, Cullowhee, North Carolina, the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, and The Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City, KS.