It Hates Its Double Bond

*

All movement begins with the meat, even when you have to account for nerves and tendons and the control freak of a spinal cord. The force lies with the meat. Much of what happens in the body relies on the fragile nerves, the position of bone in a joint, the stretchable tendons and ligaments, but a show of brute force from the muscle can really be something next to all this chatty intelligence.

Most of the body’s muscles are voluntary, forming flesh that lends curve and bulge and solidity to the body. They are the ones you can summon to help with lifting, pushing, and moving. The calf, the bicep, the everywhere of flesh-on-bone and potential for movement along and in the body. When movement is desired, the tiniest of messages forms in the nerves of the muscle and builds as it drives itself toward the central nervous system mothership where its language will be understood. And, if everything is working properly, the spinal cord understands and sends the signal back to the muscle, which has been contracting, shortening, gathering its force as the signal gets stronger.

Movement, in most cases, is a partnership. A tussle, if you’re inclined to view your body as an argument, a push and pull between back and front, side to side, and all the other directions that are invented with a spill on the ice, a letting go of the hips toward a hip-hop beat. The role of an agonist muscle, a muscle initiating and following through with a movement, is to be opposed. Take the quadriceps, the bulge of the front thigh that spirals from the knee to the hip in a graceful diagonal. That diagonal is part of the reason the quadriceps loves to initiate movement. Contracting, pounding pressure and microscopic tears into itself, as you run. Lengthening into a fluid backbend. Spiraling outward, extending the leg to the side, spinning the head of the femur in the hip socket. Spinning the femur head the other way in an internal rotation, and now you’re a Bhangra dancer pushing the front of your bent leg into the opposing inner thigh.

But Bhangra dancing and backbending and running are not forms recognized as right and proper by the body. It’s judgmental in there, and a right and proper state must be maintained. Enter the antagonist, the force whose intention and responsibility is to put the muscles back to their static and stable position. The antagonist values safety and protection more than bodily expression. Don’t move, and no one gets hurt.

The hamstrings are the quadriceps’ antagonist. When the quads contract, the hamstrings lengthen. When the quads lengthen, the hamstrings contract. When the quads leap, the hamstrings are there to catch them. And on and on, in a coil of movement and stasis, around the femur, grounded by the knee and hip. This tugging partnership is constant in the body, a moving from and toward an origin, a position free of injury, a place of belonging and balance.

*

My father works at a natural gas plant, which, like most complexes that handle flammable materials, is in the absolute middle of nowhere. I visited it once with him to retrieve my mother’s Christmas present, hidden in a storage room somewhere deep within the mass of control stations, winding white pipes, and an enormous tank holding liquid natural gas the color of Mountain Dew. The plant is surrounded by a fence whose night-vision cameras send warnings to operators when movement is noted on the periphery. The fences and cameras are a way to provide greater monitoring for security violations, anything that might threaten a combustible plant holding stores of the nation’s energy supply. Because the plant is located in a flat space between corn fields, woodland, and prairie, movement outside the fence and its accompanying alarms are constant.

My father and his co-workers love these cameras. Thanks to increased homeland security, they have watched coyotes teaching their kits to hunt mice. They watched a bear roll onto his back in the field and lazily paw handfuls of oats into his mouth. They watched kestrels breach the fence and build a nest in the gravel driveway, a nest that was ceremoniously encircled with orange traffic cones until the eggs hatched. They spend inordinate amounts of time, especially on overnight shifts, watching animals move through their industrial farmland space.

The highway my father drives to work is accurately nicknamed “Deer Alley.” It is bordered by forests on both sides, and not widely used, due to the parallel freeway. In the morning, often there is shattered glass left in the lane, a deer’s twisted, hardened body on the shoulder. It is a common sight, a common occurrence, on these northern rural roads.

Last fall, my father spied a deer dead on the shoulder and told his co-workers. One of them drove out on the field abutting the highway on a four-wheeler, latched the deer’s body to the back, and dragged it a mile or so back to the plant. The men placed it in the field and waited for the carcass to draw hungry animals. They trained the cameras on it and watched wolves appear first, skinny, gnawing wolves with matted coats and those dainty front legs that got lost in domestication. In the morning, bald eagles found what was left, losing much of their majesty as they perched awkwardly on the carcass and tore. At one point, they looked up from their meal, and if eagles can shudder, they shuddered. A golden eagle bigger than both of them together swooped from above, and they vanished. The golden eagle was the last to lay claim.

They watch them, these men in their flannel shirts and flame-retardant jeans, these men with their plastic mugs of gas station coffee, these men swiveling around in chairs to check pressures and gauges and molecular balances and storage capacities. On the overnight shift, these men watch the motion detectors, and every night, there is something new. An animal doing something expected or unexpected. A way of being surrounded. An understanding in this enclosure of molecular manipulation, that animal behavior can be noticed and monitored and enjoyed, but not controlled. An understanding that movement will always find ways to return to the origin, the right and proper place, to breach the agonist fence.

*

Many people who move in unusual ways, such as dancers or athletes, experience slight damage to their bones caused by a request for movement that overrides several protective mechanisms. Muscles contract and lengthen according to what is required of them at a given moment, but the nerves will generally only allow them to use one-third of the force they could be requisitioning. The result of using all the force capable in a group of muscles would be breakage of the skeleton. Nerves, while always trying as best they can to protect and warn, are tenuous and fragile, and their efforts can often be overcome by a little force.

That’s where going against the body’s best intentions, its desire to protect from damage, comes in. Even a nerve can be trained to give up. When I learned to walk, I walked on the balls of my feet and never stopped. I like this most of the time, this semblance of floating, walking nearly on tiptoe as my feet barely glance on the ground. Dancers do this all the time, connecting to the ground with those hard joints at the forefoot, driving their body as a flexed point into the earth in order to pivot and bend and create a form.

Moving on the front half of the foot, or on the divot caused by a bend at the joints of the toes and the forefoot, is not entirely respectful of the form of the foot and how it would like to move. It does, however, allow the mover to flout the rules of force and how much of it can be exerted from the muscles onto the small bones of the foot.

A common dancer’s injury – and one I share, not from dancing but from a negotiation with injured muscle and nerve – is an avulsion of the fifth metatarsal. Avulsion is a forceful tearing away of structure, a way of asking the body to destroy part of a bone in exchange for greater movement, more force, from a muscle. What happens during avulsion is this: an outward turning of the ankle or a tendency to place weight on the forefoot overrides the muscles’ tendency to protect the bones. Without the time needed for the nerves to jump into protective action, the muscles take one for the team. But it is just a little too much, and the tendon running between the fourth and fifth toes acts as a handsaw and scoops out a divot of bone from the fifth toe.

So what of injury? What of the history of a broken back or fused neck, a dislocated knee that never healed, synapses that had to relearn walking and balancing and the fine art of not tipping into a doorframe? The dance here is not so much an act of overruling the muscles’ desired force and position, as it is about finding a different, less-traveled route of motion. If the body is broken or damaged, the nerves silent or firing erratically, the meat rarely knows. So movement occurs through pain and damage, or occasionally, outside the bounds of pain and damage if the body can be adjusted to sneak under its own fences.

This is not all pretty and easy. Moving through or outside of injury, fracture, and rupture is not always a dance, not always something beautiful. Pain is often meaningless. But when the body has made its choices, its decision to try different motion as a replacement for the lost established form, it’s best just to go with it, to find where the full range of motion lies outside the confines of the original structure.

This is the story I tell myself, a story about a dance to find movement that was lost when I was a child. A way to go from horizontal to vertical, from a burned field of brain to an outward stretch of the arm. A way to always be unfinished, always in motion, always different, always returning. This is the purpose of dancing through damage: the return to a form that was lost in earlier movements while bucking its attempts to be found.

*

One summer, my father and I traveled the back country roads that lead away from the Lake Superior shore. Many of them were unpaved and bumpy, and a rail line crossed the pathway three times in a wide loop. We stopped for the train at the third crossing. Many of the open cars were filled with coal or taconite pellets on their way to Michigan or Ohio. Interspersed like bullets between several cars were closed black cylinders. White lettering and unmistakable symbols on their sides indicated danger, unpredictability.

My father, as a rule, loves unpredictable chemicals. I remember a skit he participated in at one of my school presentations. He was working as a chemistry teacher at the time. He stood, six foot three in his lab coat and goggles, at the front of the auditorium. Before him was a filled beaker to which he was poised to add a vial of some mysterious liquid. His students surrounded him, dwarfed in their oversized white coats. “Watch out,” he warned. They leaned in closer. He scolded them again, and they bent deeper toward the beaker. He shifted the vial between his hands and said, “Okay now, come close, you have to see this.” They tore off running down the aisles of the auditorium, shrieking with simulated fear. The audience, many of them who had known this tall joking man for years, all got the joke. He added the vial to the beaker, and the liquid bubbled and steamed over the table. The audience gasped and laughed. It was only dry ice, stage fog, the stuff of rock stars.

The black tanks being pulled along with the train carried propylene, and my father shuddered, even making a shuddering sound in the bottom of his throat. It was the same sound he makes during a gruesome scene in a movie. He said, low, almost in a cartoon villain’s voice, “It hates its double bond.”

Propylene is a manmade chemical, as is any molecule that ends with the suffix “ene.” The “ene” means that humans gave a molecule a double bond. It only wanted one. When my father said it hates its double bond, he meant that its natural state is to do anything, find as much movement, to return to its single-bonded way of being. He shuddered because when a molecule wants to return to its natural state, it will move as erratically and occupy as much space as it needs to do so. Boom.

His tendency to see the world as a living, moving place is perhaps a result of a lifelong fascination with the sciences, but also probably stems from the fact that if you live in one place for your entire life, you begin to understand it as the sum of its movable parts. While his plant prepares for disaster and trains carrying unpredictable chemicals lumber across farmland, he can tell you, as anyone living in rural northern Minnesota can tell you, that nature always wins and nature is always changing the moves of the game.

*

I think of this drive and those black tanks of anxious liquid when several months later, an earthquake and tsunami strike northern Japan. By the second day, more than a thousand people have been torn away from the earth, by the earth, and by the next week, it will be ten thousand. Particles struggling to be what they are will escape from a nuclear plant on the coast. Did you know that during a strong earthquake, the soil moves in waves, tenting below your feet? Do you think you could recognize this as your same ground, have the skill and balance to surf its mounds of dirt moving you onward? Experience shows that undoubtedly you could not.

Liquefaction is the name given to this quality of earth to act as a fluid. When the plates move and grind and try to release pressure stored between their edges for eons, the layers of earth above shake violently. And buried in that soil, as they are buried in nearly everything, are water molecules. As the pressure rises in the agitated water molecules, they desire to do what water does. Flow: outward, away. They desire to move. Because they are trapped in the soil and cannot move, they do the next best thing. When shaken, water overrides the ability of solid earth to act as solid earth. The molecules make the soil mimic their movements, their quality of being. And the earth above moves in waves, a vast deadly ocean.

The tendency of many things is to revert to liquid, when at the end, when agitated, when put into a state that forces them to recognize the pressurized fluid at the core of what they are. Because nearly everything is born of water, a triangular incarnation of hydrogen and oxygen. A return to the beginning. A desire bigger than anything conscious. An acknowledgement that the world must move, and that when it does, our desire to live on places and call them home counts for very little. An acceptance that something that began long ago is still in process, that giving a name and attaching an emotion to a place, a life, means nothing to plates of rock grinding under enormous pressure, causing a movement of earth that means living on an unfinished planet.

So, perhaps, beginnings matter because always, everything has been left unfinished. Everything exists inside a bubble of potential for movement, expected, chaotic, choreographed or accidental. Everything can change, even earth, even water, where movement is the way to transform. Here is the planet, here is your home: a great laboratory with incomplete tests, half-filled vials waiting for their reactions, petri dishes exploding in growing color, a scientist gone missing, research subjects finding ways out of their cages.

*

Watching, being caught up in movement, implies that I am looking for something. I’m looking for something to break me out of my own locked movements, or I’m watching for some quality that implies my movement is not entirely unordinary. When we watch movement, we are looking at the outward ripple and sway of flesh, but we are also observing, consciously or not, the neural impulses and firings, the body’s responses to the signals, interactions of agonist and antagonist muscle, the means by which the structure contains and exercises the transient life force.

How movement happens, why it’s so fascinating to watch, tells the story of a body’s origin and journey. The way we are constantly interpreting intent and motive and potential based on the neuromuscular language of the body. The way we use a stretch of the limbs, the flexing or extension of a muscle, to make ourselves understood as a physical presence. The way we carve out a place of belonging and occupation through the expressions and abilities of our flesh.

If I move oddly and perhaps sometimes dangerously because I had to relearn movement, what does it matter? It matters to me. It matters how I navigate and occupy space if I am to be part of it, if I am to fill and own and occupy it, to exist as part of a moving world in a physical way. It matters that I not fall at unexpected times in inappropriate places.

Humans might anthropomorphize or attribute human tendencies to nature, but we know when we’re understood, when something looks back and understands us. It’s too easy and really quite cruel to say that because we seek to be understood, we misperceive a gorilla, a dog, a vast red cavern, a fissure in the earth, to look back at us, and that this is a mistake. We developed in this ecosystem, sharing molecules with these beings and these landscapes, and our lines are perhaps a little blurred. We are not entirely ourselves, we are this animal, we are that mountain and tree, all at different times. But to be something, to form a part of it as it forms you, is to understand it a little. It is not to be understood by it.

Consider it – to be understood. To be looked at, gazed at, not just acknowledged, but understood. To have another being or structure hit the nail on the head, grasp the significance, the meaning, of you. You don’t even know the meaning of you. So you move. You move to transmit the meanings of muscle length and position to and from your spinal cord. You move to show your space that your body, its placement and belonging and separateness from the thoughts that fill your head, has meaning. The ground moves to spill its insides, its vast world of pressure, its embodiment of all that is temporary on the planet. Molecules move to find their origins, their meaning all encapsulated in what once was and should be. Animals move to insist on a claim to a world that puts up meaningless and ineffective ways to keep them out.

None of this is true. No one, man or mineral or animal, walks around with meaning saturating their every move. But humans, at least, walk around drenched in the need to be understood. And perhaps something in the attempt of a molecule to break its chains, the thrust of the earth toward water, the breached fence an animal leaves behind, is recognized by our muscles, our nerves, as a form of understanding. A way to say, yes, the need to move, like that, to break the borders and open the fences, is something I must do.

Natalie Vestin is a writer and health researcher from Saint Paul. Her creative essays have been published in The Iowa Review, Puerto del Sol, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Prairie Schooner 2012 Creative Nonfiction Prize, and the 2012 Sonora Review Essay Prize.

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