Thursday, October 05, 2006
The Break
I’ve had some sad news today, and I’ll be busy and preoccupied for a few days. Given all that, I will not be updating for a short while, but believe me, I will be back soon. In the meantime, I’d like to leave you with something for the hiatus that jives a little with my own mental state right now. I wrote this a few weeks ago and each time I reread it, it brings up a series of feelings and emotions that seem particularly relevant to where I am here and now. So, here it is, and I hope you enjoy it. Either way, I’ll see you here again soon.
The gig was, I went to the depo with the client. I’d keep the process moving, maximize opportunities, minimize damage, and take lots of notes. It was boring as hell but usually the people were nice, and many of them were folk I’d never have met otherwise. This guy, though, was one of the special cases - he got a home video depo. These got set up only when the plaintiff was so sick that he wasn’t expected to make it through to trial, and since there would be causes of action that survived his demise (like consortium) and some that were triggered by it (like wrongful death), all the lawywers wanted to make sure all the testimony was well-preserved for the record, fully crossexamined and appropriately refreshed. Which is all well and good until you factor in that the plaintiff was too weak to visit the bathroom alone.
The home video depo is a complicated affair. Mine usually happened in remote corners of the state: Victorville, Oroville, Lewiston - places where folk retired to after a lifetime of pipefitting or high rigging, way out in the boonies where they’d once built a dam or a silo or something. Plaintiffs were pretty much stuck at home by this stage of their disease, unable to withstand the rigors of driving to Oakland to spend four days in a court reporter’s office. Instead, six or ten lawyers drove out to whereever these guys called home, to drink their wives’ coffee and breathe the worn-out air of their sitting rooms. I was always very busy at these events, making sure that everybody behaved themselves and the testimony was as clear and damaging as possible - but there was only so much I could do. When you get right down to it, there’s only so much anybody can do.
This guy I have in mind lived up in Lewiston. For those who haven’t visited, there really isn’t much of a town in Lewiston. My motel had a poster on the lobby wall that featured a mock-up of a box of “Spotted Owl Helper,” and the only businesses around seemed to sell used stuff back and forth between themselves. Chickens outnumbered people, and there weren’t that many chickens.
This guy, as I call him, lived at the end of a rough and dusty dirt track in a decrepit doublewide. He was too sick to stand up more than a couple of times a day, so we set up around his easy chair and sat close so we could hear him. His oxygen tank was huge and it sat right next to him; the tubes up his nostrils had been there so long they’d formed permanent divots in his face. Like all my clients, he was a thorny old dude with no patience for soft-handed pencilpushers like me, but I was on his team so he took out his short-tempered aggravation on the others. I had to stay right on him to keep him in line, and it was an uphill battle every step of the way.
No one I represented at a depo believed me when I told them how hard it would be to get deposed. It’s just talking, right? They all knew how to talk. They didn’t expect to need my help. But when we went on the record with the cameras rolling and the reporter typing away, and defense counsel started in with the intense scrutiny and mindnumbing detail that characerized those proceedings, and the deponent started getting confused and bored and anxious and tired, and then veered got off point or got defensive or forgetful, and then they started saying things that would hurt their case and I had to jump in every few seconds to rehabilitate, move to strike, make objections, counsel and advise, or go off the record for a private consultation.... well, they realized then that talking can be harder than a hardworking man figured it was.
We’d been at it all morning and hadn’t gotten far. The client called for a lunch break and the other attorneys were glad to consent. I shoo’d them out of the room and came back to check in with him. He was digging under his seat, his skin bluish and mottled and his hands clumsy and trembling. This guy just looked like hell. With one hand he yanked the oxygen tube from his nose; with the other he fished out a pack of smokes he’d secreted under his ass and jammed a cigarette into his mouth. I had stuff to go over with him, but when he started lifting a lighter to his cigarette I got scared. The oxygen tank was right next to him and the tubes , still hissing gas, hung around his neck. “Can you hold off on that till we talk?,” I asked with partly-concealed anxiety. “This comes first,” he told me sourly, trying to work the lighter. “You bastards are sucking what little life I have clean out of me.” I told him I’d catch up with him after lunch, stepped outside, and hoped for the best.
Lunch was usually a burger or burrito at the least noxious-looking stand in the vicinity, but Lewiston didn’t offer that convenience. Instead, I had brought along a grocery deli sandwich and a little three-bean salad I’d picked up the day before on my way into town, anticipating the dearth of services. I got into my car, drove a piece down the highway to a state fishery, and had myself a little picnic. The area lay beside a dammed stream in deep redwood forests that smelled of sap and oxygen, and I easily found a lonely rock by the water’s edge whereat to take my sustinence.
As I ate my unimaginative repast, the cleanliness of the earth and stream refreshed me from the inside out. The stream was calm and flat, a perfect reflection of tranquility. Under its semisilvered surface, fingerling trout schooled and swirled, metallic and impossible, bright hyphens of thriving life. As I munched my perfunctory lunch alone on the riverbank, I lost myself in the patterns of their movements and left my morning’s labors swirling downstream.
A sound overhead caught my ear: the sound of a raptor aloft, one cry, questing and unfettered - but subtlely different than the calls I’d heard before from the redtails and harrises and other hawks back home. Scanning the sky, I soon saw why: this was no hawk - it was an osprey, a sea-eagle, resplendent in white plumage with a cruel curved beak and anxious talons.
As I watched, the osprey circled, motionless, climbing; then it stalled, and then it fell like an amazing glorious rock, like a meteor, like broken hope. It dropped straight down, a streak of white, headfirst, heedless, wings folded, talons outstretched, into placid waters that splashed up in shock upon its impact.
It was oly a second or two later that the bird emerged again, water dripping from empty claws. As it lofted itself back into the air with powerful flaps of broad winds, it shrugged itself dry with a fluid movement that rippled from its beak to its tail, and droplets shimmered from it like rain. I ate and watched the osprey dive for submerged prey again and again, each time emerging unvictorious, each time shuddering away the crystal liquid from its fletch. Beneath it, the water always instantly returned to glassy smoothness, leaving no trace of the violence done upon it, and the fish continued swimming in their familiar way, untroubled by the hunter overhead.
I finished my sandwich, my salad, my lukewarm bottle of water. Still the osprey circled, dove, and emerged from the water already in flight. It would hunt until it fed, but my lunch was over. I stood, unnoticed (or, more likely, ignored), and returned to my dusty car. The drive back to the doublewide felt tragic, but at least it appeared that my client had finished his smoke without untoward incident. I stumbled through the debris and detrius of his front drive and we had our conference. The depo concluded uneventfully. I have no idea how his case turned out, but I’m pretty sure that osprey eventually got its lunch.
