The Last Word On Nothing

Since I published a book about beavers two years ago, I’ve heard from dozens, maybe hundreds, of readers with their own beaver experiences to share. This is a wonderful perk of authorhood: When you tell your own story, you attract others. I’ve gotten emails from folks who have hand-fed blackberries to wild beavers, who have seen beavers build dams entirely of rock, who have watched beavers frolic like seals in the Baltic Sea. Just last month I received the unsolicited memoir of a guy who once resuscitated a drowning beaver. Yes, mouth-to-mouth. 

Most writers, I’m sure, get some version of this correspondence. Still, there’s something about beavers — their human-like family structures, their penchant for construction — that seems to foster personal connection. They enter lives in unexpected ways. They channel joy and grief. Today, I want to relate one such saga, courtesy of a woman named Brittany. I’ll warn you that Brittany’s story is about illness and death. It’s also about life and love. And beavers. It’s definitely about beavers.

To begin at the beginning: Brittany grew up in Cuba, New York, a small town near Buffalo, the middle of three children. Her younger brother, Zach, was the sort of troubled, likable smartass we all knew in high school — quick with a joke, surrounded by friends, short-fused, prone to starting bar fights. His blend of charisma and anger reminded Brittany of Tony Soprano. “I don’t know if there was a funnier person,” she told me. “He was also a bastard.” He organized riotous backyard wrestling matches and doted on his beagle, Ralphie; he also drank away his money and got arrested the night of Brittany’s bachelorette party. “One time I said something that pissed him off,” she recalled, “and he took a full plate of lasagna and threw it at the Christmas tree.”