A Crossroads of Man, Technology, and Nature

Ayten Salahi
AP-1
94598962
618

We live in a world in which human beings have been given the power to destroy nearly everything that once was, or will ever be. We have manufactured weapons of unfathomable devastation, and we have designed innumerable plots to do none other than defeat our fellow human beings. We are a powerful species, and consequently, we are held responsible for the deterioration of our world. Such corrosion of a once pristine and primitive life has been delivered by the hand of our ever-strengthening technological advancements, and our ever-weakening regard for nature. William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark” tells the brief and mundane tale of one such intersection of technology, nature, and mankind. Stafford uses the unexceptional story of a drive down Wilson River road to discreetly convey the intrusion of an increasingly technological world upon both nature and mankind’s moral cognition.

“Traveling Through the Dark” is written in a deceptively straight-forward style, and Stafford’s complex, didactic message is thus shrouded beneath a superficial layer of colloquial diction and simple poetic structures. The reader is meant to believe that Stafford’s blunt wording says it all—that his poem does nothing more than tell the story of a man pushing road kill out of the road and into the river. Yet underneath this façade of simplicity, there is life, depth, purpose, and symbolism in every living and nonliving creature of “Traveling Through the Dark.” Stafford breathes life into each entity within his work, and he does so by personifying them—the dead doe, the car, the wilderness, and himself— with individuals powers that operate exclusively from the others. Each creature has a distinct power that the others neither have nor can control.

The relationship between the narrator’s car and the narrator can be described as the relationship between a predator and its prey. The car is depicted as a beast that can aim its parking lights, purr its steady engine, and exhale its warm exhaust—a predator who snaps his head towards his prey, aims his focus—the headlights—purrs in anticipation—the engine—and releases a warm breath just before he strikes. The prey, the narrator, does nothing but stand “in the glare of the warm exhaust”—unsuspecting and helpless. This car, this predator, symbolizes technology’s unwavering hold on the human race. Although we may believe we are in control of where technology will take us, we are powerless without said technology, and are therefore at its feet.

In contrast, the “heap, [the] doe, [the] recent killing” is personified with a very different strength. This “heap” of lifelessness is revived as Stafford apprehensively describes the dead doe as no longer merely a “heap,” but as a “her.” Immediately after acknowledging that this “recent killing” was in fact a female deer, the narrator uncomfortably recognizes that “she [is] large in the belly.” This interaction exemplifies the quintessential male response to a saddening and uncomfortable situation, and in such symbolizes an instantaneous moral response to the death of a pregnant female deer. This response symbolizes the eternal power of nature and its link to both death and the conscience—a power that forced the initially indifferent narrator to hesitate beside that mountain road, and to “think hard for all of us.”

The fourth stanza embodies the collision of each of these entities: man, technology, and nature. Here, the narrator is literally surrounded by each force. He is underneath a spotlight, being targeted by the warm, red exhaust of the purring predator, and being judged by the reclusive, listening wilderness. There, he could “hear the wilderness listening.” There, he “thought hard for us all.” There, he pushed the doe “over the edge and into the river.”