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"I only went out for a walk, but finally decided to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in." --John Muir

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Irruption


Last week, a large flock of white birds alit across the road from my house, each bird like a single feather, circling slowly down on a coil of unseen currents in the air.  A small temporary lake of snowmelt in the empty cornfield was their resting place.  Once they were all down, to an undiscerning eye they simply looked like stubborn patches of snow in last year’s furrows.  Their thick bodies and long necks were impossibly white against the dark soil. They were tundra swans, migrating, to my delight, from my old stomping grounds:  the marshes of the Mid-Atlantic. Each spring, 70,000 of these swans travel 2,000 miles to their breeding grounds in the tundra of Canada and Alaska. They stop just twice on their route, always in the same places: once in eastern Pennsylvania, and once in the Great Lakes.  If you live in Wisconsin, every year you can count on tundra swans to signal spring, and then, on their return route, to bring winter back again. 
            
But last week we were thrown off course--not by the ice and snow and below-average temperatures--but because my husband turned to look at the bird feeders that hang from our porch and saw what looked like parakeets:  four finch-sized birds, two of them with orange rumps and breasts and caps, the other two olive-green, all with dark wings.  One hung upside down and stuck its pink tongue out.

Photographs revealed the birds’ curious bills, which overlapped at the tip.  They were not parakeets but Red Crossbills, a non-migratory bird that breeds in the coniferous forests of very far northern Wisconsin and Canada.   Although they are a fairly common bird, Red Crossbills are not a local resident.  They were with us only for a morning, busily eating sunflower seeds beneath our large, old white pines, which I imagine must have looked to them from above, in the farm fields of central Wisconsin, a little bit like home.

What we had witnessed was likely part of an irruption—that’s irruption with an ‘i” not an “e”:  a dramatic, irregular migration of large numbers of birds to areas where they are not typically found.  Irruptions occur due to poor food sources.  In my Audubon guide, a map shows that Red Crossbills can irrupt across almost the entire eastern half of the United States.

I had not heard this word before, and I like it very much:  the idea that animals can irrupt, can break or burst in, enter forcibly or suddenly, as if they had something important to tell, doing what they want despite our human notion of balance and regularity.   I will watch for irruptions now, for unplanned things, as closely as I watch for each season’s parade of long-time friends.


Saturday, April 6, 2013

Naked


“The first thing I did was take off my pants.  Naturally.”  So said Edward Abbey, when one summer he  reached a deserted mining camp five miles below the Native American village of Havasu, on a branch of the Grand Canyon, where he lived alone for thirty-five days.  My husband and friends hate this line, because I say it all the time.  “I just want to move to the desert and take off my pants,” I joke, whenever I get exasperated with life, my career, my own drama.
           
Today I am leaving the desert, and I want to say goodbye, so I get out of bed an hour before sunrise.  My traveling companions sleep tight—they will be off to greater travels in a few months.  My husband says, “It’s so early . . . ” when I rouse him, then rolls over.          
           
I walk through an unfamiliar neighborhood, past squat, earth-colored ranch homes, at a time of day that would be mostly unfamiliar to me anywhere.  It makes me feel slightly uncomfortable.  A coyote wails, loudly and rooster-like, more deranged than usual.  I’d like to see him in the distance, over the low desert plants, but I imagine him close:  waiting at the trailhead, daring me to cross into his territory.  Every dog in the neighborhood responds, more odd-sounding than the coyote—their wild canine barking muffled by stucco walls.
           
At the trailhead, I press my nose to the map, attempting to review, in the light of the just-two-days-ago-full moon, the trail I hiked once already yesterday.  I can’t see it, which, combined with the coyote and the general strangeness of the place and time of day, makes me a little afraid.  I hesitate.
           
But we need a little fear in our lives, I think, and anyway, soon enough, the world will be almost too beautiful to bear:  my husband will appear, stirred by the coyote’s wail and enough concern for his wife to follow me on this humble pre-dawn hike; and then the sun, sending its unfathomable but undeniable warmth across 93 million miles; and then, one-by-one, six hot-air balloons.
           
“They look a bit like some kind of alien spacecraft,” my husband says, turning from our perch atop Sugarloaf Hill, sunblind, to view the balloons hovering high above the sleeping tourist town.  And there it comes again:  the naked mind rotating between so many things—night and day, fear and beauty.