By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I walk to relieve stress, so when I spotted a raccoon carcass on what what is known as the reservoir trail, you can imagine my surprise. The animal’s body, or what was left of it, was upside down in full view of the walking path in between McLoone’s and a patch of grass.  “Oh my god,” I said to my friend.  “Look at that dead turtle.”  These were obviously not the words of a keen naturalist. (At first I thought it was some kind of dinosaur fossil.)  My friend pointed out that the thing had teeth that didn’t look like a turtle’s.   When I looked it up later, I learned turtles don’t even have teeth.

For me, nature’s not necessarily bad.  Seeing ducks sleeping with their heads tucked into their feathers as they float aimlessly in the water can be as good for mood elevation as 20 minutes of yoga.  I draw the line, though, at death on the path.  As I walked, I became obsessed. What had happened to the poor creature? Had it frozen? Been mauled by a hostile goose? I couldn’t focus.

I use a fitness tracker on my iPhone so I can record my steps every day.  But when I looked at it at the end of my walk, the tracker was frozen at 3,053 steps.  My friend had close to 8,000.  It didn’t make sense.  It was if my phone had picked up on my emotional state and gone into shock after the sighting of the raccoon.

All the things my friend and I were talking about fell away: getting older, our kids’ reaching an age that seemed like it was us just yesterday,  the real reason we don’t call our in laws.  I began to muster all my conversational energies on behalf of the dead raccoon.  We should call someone to get it, I said.

I’d like to think I wanted the raccoon gone for humanitarian reasons.  It was a living thing.  Its demise shouldn’t be advertised to the world.  It needed a little dignity.  Or  maybe it was just that I thought the carcass was disgusting. Well there was that.

And there went my nice calm walk.  Every time, I circled the track after that, I was terrified I was going to see the raccoon. If I was five, it was the kind of thing that would have given me nightmares.  I am 57.  I had to contain myself.

Ultimately, my friend switched position with me on the pavement, so I’d be on the inside of the track and she’d be on the outside, closer to the site of the raccoon casualty.  Look at me, she advised, when you talk.  You’ll forget about the raccoon.  She’s a psychologist, so she has some understanding and appreciation of people — particularly of me, it seems — and of science.  I was an English major. While I’m okay reading about death in books.  I’m not so sanguine about it in life.

Eventually we met up with a public works  groundskeeper who told us he’d be in touch with the vets on call.   It’s hard enough to see an animal floating on the water, he said. But this….  I wanted to know if the point of the vets was to diagnose the raccoon.  If it was rabid, could they figure that out after death?  Would there be a public health warning?   No, no such thing, he said — apparently, there are vet-specific scoop-up bags.

I never did figure out the reasons behind my phone’s step counting problem.  But I’m beginning to appreciate how in synch with me my phone was in those moments around the reservoir. Oddly enough when I checked my steps later in the day after I’d done some errands, it was working.  It showed I had 5,088 steps.