Dripping amongst the bent and splintered trees, we stand around a puddle. A dozen or so mobile phones are pointed at the ground, clicking photographs as sympathetic murmurs and gasps escape awestruck mouths. My phone is idle in my hands when I see it writhing on the dampened lawn. It lies on its back, like the trees, but it’s moving, swiping its legs in the air like a dreaming dog.

Some of us are laughing, but we all feel badly. We wish there was something we could do, we say. We asked one of the firemen to help, but they said just leave it.  We make jokes.  We wished we knew how to give a squirrel CPR, we say.

We’re all drawn to this broken little life, huddling around it. We don’t want to leave it. We don’t want to help it.

One of us bends down next to it, and strokes its sopping fur. It twists recklessly, rolling to its other side, stretching its forearms out. It doesn’t know it’s being comforted.

You know, you probably shouldn’t do that, I say. I step over a puddle. You don’t know what’s up with it. You might be causing it more pain by doing that, I say, amazed at myself. She looks up at me, and agrees. She says something like, Oh yeah, I didn’t think of that.

What I say next still astonishes me. I say, You know the best thing we can do is just leave it alone. If it’s going to die, it should be allowed to die with dignity. Several of us find this hilarious. We all think, Who is this guy, Champion of Squirrels? I’m serious, I say. They stop laughing, and I can’t believe myself.

This one guy with an umbrella explains that he saw it drag itself out of nearby puddle. We all think its probably choking, that it had been drowning, and was probably thrown from a tree. He says once there was a family of squirrels in his attic or something, when he was a boy, and the mother squirrel died. He says he never forgot that, the baby squirrels alone and helpless.

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When the rain started, I was making the long walk down Reeves. I had just come from work, parked the car under a tree and had a quick doze. I noticed the darkness of the sky, and figured that it would rain. What I didn’t notice at the time was that there was no one around. There were no cars passing. I made my way past the usual baseball field, oblivious, lost in whatever I was listening to on the ipod. When the rumble of the thunder gave way to rain, I was drenched within seconds. I thought I’d play it cool. I’m not about to start running. I won’t melt. But only after the wind began, knocking my ipod off my ears and rendering my glasses useless I thought, this isn’t normal. I started running, first toward campus, then back to my car. I didn’t know what to do. For a moment I couldn’t breathe, the lateral rain was in my lungs. This is the moment when things changed, when I stopped thinking about how wet I was going to be during three hours of European history, stopped thinking about the computer getting wet in my bag, and the primal anxiety to seek out shelter kicked in full force.

I tried to find an alcove in front of this building that I pass every week, but never ever stopped to learn what it was. I pinned myself up against the brick and watched the world erupt with chaos, circular winds hurling rain in all directions.

It lasted, I don’t know, three or four minutes. Before the rain stopped, I legged it toward campus. The metal roofing of some small building had been torn off and thrown onto the back of a car. I had to climb over the branches of two trees down in front of the music building. It looked like a war zone; trees uprooted or cut down. I wandered through this unfamiliar campus, taking pictures with my phone like a tourist.

Later, on my walk back to my (miraculously preserved) car, another sight gave me plenty to think about. From the baseball field that I had walked past just moments before the storm touched down, two sets of metal bleachers had been lifted up and thrown onto Reeves, one resting on the other side of the street, and the other taking down part of a fence before pinning itself against a tree. I thought back to that moment of terror, when for a moment I thought of running back to the car just to keep dry. I don’t know when the bleachers went, but I could have been running past them in that instant. And I wouldn’t have seen them coming.

You could feel your life, walking around the quad that day. As if life were something tangible, something you could pick up in your hands, like a squirrel.

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I put down my lukewarm latte and I reach into my damp bag. I tear off the thick paper back cover of a notebook and brandish it before our growing numbers. I ask, Do think this will hold it? We think it probably will. Let’s move it over there, under a bush, we say.

I crouch and set the notebook cover beside the squirrel, and one of us gives it a gentle shove. I lift it up onto the makeshift stretcher, gripping the sides of the paper gingerly with my fingertips and make for a row of bushes alongside Powdermaker.

This relief effort attracts a lot of attention. Look at this guy, people say. What are you doing? You want rabies, son? Are you stupid?

I’m scaring the poor thing. It starts pitching itself more violently, and I fear that I’ll drop it. I gently lay it down again near the sidewalk. One of the more vocal critics chimes in with a brilliant observation. That’s thing’s dead, man (Only he didn’t say “thing”). Its neck’s broke, man. I say, I don’t think it’d be moving this much if it’s neck were broken. I look back at my group. Someone is carrying my bag for me, and we all hover over to where our broken charge now lies, like a cloud of ministering angels.

I say, Maybe I’ll leave it here. I don’t think I can carry it any further, don’t think the paper will hold it, I say. Here, let me, the guy with the umbrella says. He picks the squirrel up, folds the paper under its body and grips it firmly, and puts it down by one of the split trees.

I walk off to see if class is still on. I leave the squirrel, now surrounded by just two people, the guy with the umbrella talking of taking it somewhere on campus where it could dry off, maybe find someone that could help it.

Class is cancelled and I return to the tree, where I find no sign of the guy with the umbrella or the crowd or the squirrel on the back of my notebook.