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from Winging Home
After years watching the birds sparkle throughout
the trees of the Plateau, flitter and flash, trill and boom
from the reeds, flare and croak, lumber and dive, shiver like
leaves in a rising storm, scatter light like birches in a
mid-day sun, I have observed that each species of bird lives
on a parallel earth. Some of them are worlds of pure blue
light. Some of them are intricate contraptions of wood and
grass, bound together with thought and aimed at the sun, to
catch it and turn it into sound. These worlds bellow and hush.
They sigh around Leandra and me as the wind catches the crowns
of the trees and we walk, as tiny as shrews, on the forest
trails among the Oregon grape and the soapberries. All of
these many delicate, baroque, wild and roaring worlds are
far older than ours. We are the new kids on the block. With
our mammalian squeak and roar we are just learning the ropes.
The birds have forgotten these beginnings. It’s like
what the Egyptians said to the Greeks, when Alexander invaded,
in his rush for conquest. “You Greeks are such children,”
they said.
We’re not that much different than
birds, though. We touch and sing with our fingers and the
whole length of our sinuous bodies, just like they do. It’s
just that birds don’t collect Depression Glass. They
don’t line their houses with Nintendo Games and Archie
Comics. They don’t fill out credit card applications
promising an introductory rate of 3.9%, which reverts to 19.9%
after three months. For a bird, there is no body and no mind;
there is only the bird and the planet, spinning among the
stars, heaving through the seasons—snow sifting through
the trees, the sun drifting as rain over the slopes. We can
see it, because it’s not foreign to us: we step out of
the house on a winter evening, and the green sky floods over
us like a lake and we walk out chill onto the lakebed, and
feel as large as the universe.
We have a word for this kind of existence
that bridges our political and social intrigues with what
we see and touch, hear and taste and smell: spirit.
No wonder angels are painted with wings.
No wonder air and sky blow through world religions like light
through a stone doorway: if we could ever introduce the concept
of words to birds, they would consider it spurious, something
too reckless and poisoned to contemplate, such as the civic
administration of a Nazi Gauleiter would be to us.
*
We live on a blue planet spinning in space,
with broad savannas and steppes, river deltas by the sea,
cities, farmland, and the ocean breaking in surf on the shore.
Of all the ways we could look at the world, that is the one
we walk through.
The birds have their own worlds, too —from
the high skies of the eagle, to the dense thickets of the
evening grosbeaks, with their yellow eye-patches like zinc
sunscreen, crossing the whole plateau by hopping in an unpredictable
pattern in depth and width and height from branch to branch
through the trembling aspens. These avian earths all live
inside each other like the folded and infolded leaves inside
a black bud casing in the winter, sheltered from the aurora
and the nights of piercing cold that freezes steel. Each is
as vastly varied as are our vistas of the earth: the white
beaches of the Bahamas with the cruise ships anchored offshore;
the heat-blasted deserts of Afghanistan with the mountains
like ruins of hope.
The robins, for example, live in the free
love of an Oregon commune: you grab a bite to eat, you relish
it, you sleep with who you want to sleep with, you take money
from your relatives and give it away to your lovers and the
friends of your lovers, history flows off of you like spring
rain driving horizontally across the Plateau, and you feel
no guilt. In contrast, the blackbirds, who arrive almost as
early in the spring, don’t care to think about communes.
They vote for the Republican Party. They sent their sons to
Vietnam and welcomed them home – when they come home—as
heroes. They don’t want to change the world. They live
in Antelope, Oregon and wear Korean-made plaid shirts. They
have big belt buckles. They drive diesel trucks. They are
generous and look after their own. They belong to the Elks
and the Chamber of Commerce. Their wives drive the kids to
hockey practice at 5:00 AM.
*
The blackbirds come when the night snow
turns to slush by mid-morning and to damp, old grass by noon.
They come when I haven’t even thought it might be spring.
The first to arrive are the males. They spill in one morning,
in a colourless light under a cover of thin, low cloud that
all winter had been a liquid falling over the earth. On mornings
like that, I walk through a vast space; nothing separates
me from the farthest distances. The mountains thirty kilometres
to the north, rising blue out of the black morning trees of
the Plateau, or the river fifty kilometres to the west, curling
green and cold over its sandbars, are as close as my fingertips.
My breath freezes in front of me. The cold cuts through my
jeans, and suddenly the blackbirds are there, as if they have
stepped out of one of those hidden-animals games for children,
where pheasants and foxes and bears are standing within the
shapes of the trees and bushes and clouds and the game is
to spot them. They were there all along, their dark outlines
obscured by washes of paint, but now they are visible.
The spring light lies over the blackbirds,
wet and cool. Their wing-patches are pale when they come,
like the flanks of farm-bred salmon, like ice-cream advertisements
left in a shop window all summer, like leaves that have lain
under the snow since October. Day by day, as the light rises,
the birds colour up, a little brighter every day. By the time
the catkins on the willows break their wing-casings along
the shore and the yellow pollen streams in a thin wind through
the air, the wing-patches are a brilliant red, like the gills
of trout in mountain water. By then, a ring of willow pollen
floats around the base of each reed, rising and falling as
the surface of the lake buckles and ripples with the wind.
The blue heron glides in slowly behind a screen of trees,
his blue-grey feathers the same colour as the water and the
air. He seems like smoke, just on the edge of vanishing. He
stands for hours in the shallows. I can only see him by knowing
where he landed and froze his clattering motion—like
a folded card table. Then I make out his stillness.
*
All winter, the snow blows in a thin stream,
six inches over the ice. The whole lake is in motion. In late
February, tall single reeds, twice their normal height, rise
taller each day, pushed up through the two feet of clear ice
by new shoots anchored in the soft clay and silt of the lake
bottom. I know the blackbirds have arrived when I see the
first one, on the tip of the willow by the lake, framed against
those reeds. Perching up there he looks out over white, green
and violet ice: ice full with light, ice rotten and half-rotten
and splattered with pools of water and drifts of snow. The
crumpled golden manes of last year’s thicker reeds mound
up over the shallow water and the muskrat houses, each with
a shadow of snow from the winter’s drifts. Among the
muskrat houses lie black mounds of compressed reed-stalks—like
scraps of retread tires shredded off transport trucks on the
highway—which the muskrats have pushed out of their houses
onto the ice during the long winter. It’s a mess. Part
of being a muskrat is to go on latrine duty. When the ice
finally melts over the shallowest water, the muskrats sit
on its crumbling lip, washing themselves. They are supremely
happy.
The blackbirds look out over all of this,
as they will for the rest of the spring and the early summer,
when the water is blue and black and white and reflecting
the sky. For the moment, though, the blackbird’s posture
on the willow is completely out of place: there is no lake
before him, no blue catch of water, no spill of sky iridescent
as the wings of a beetle, no whip of waves in storm, and no
female nesting among the reeds, just a single blackbird, and
then later in the morning another one, stationed twenty yards
along, and another, and another, with pale wing-patches like
sentries outside of Moscow in the winter of 1942, staring
out over the milky ice.
The robins have gone their silly ways, and
our world, which is the intersection of all worlds, fills
with blackbirds. They flash onto the inky, sodden earth of
the garden, pecking for weed seeds. They flock and scatter
like leaves driven by the wind—in still air. It is unnerving.
There you are in the complete stillness, and you catch in
them the edge of another world, torn by storm. They tumble
over and over and flit and flutter and rise up. They sing.
Most of all they sing. In fact, in March and April the blackbirds
have a song in every slot on the hit-parade chart. There is
no escaping their songs. They pre-empt the news. You might
as well forget about the Sports report. And these are not
single vocalists, like Frank Sinatra or Emmylou Harris, and
not rock bands with a lead singer, a couple buddies on guitars,
a bassist, a drummer, and lights and noise and dry ice, either.
These are barbershop quartets, and quartets of quartets, and
mass choirs, in the wind and sun and rain, in the stutter
of lawnmowers, the starting of cars, the slamming of doors,
and the barking of dogs.
Every morning at dawn, as the light lies
like the ghost of evaporated grass among the reed-beds, the
red-winged blackbirds leap up in small black swarms, like
gnats, their calls unheard through the thick yellow light.
By midmorning the males float together into the lodgepole
pines among the houses. Motionless among a tree’s branches,
clustered close to its trunk, each bird at right angles to
the bird next to it, in a multi-story column of balance stretching
fifty feet up through the central column of the tree, the
blackbirds sing. They are perfectly placed. They have arranged
themselves in a ladder of music, a physical representation
of chords and chromatic scales and octaves. They look like
something you’d see on a music teacher’s wall, next
to the posters of famous musicians dressed in black suits,
looking artful and smiling as they cradle Yamaha trumpets
and clarinets and violins. I’m positive that if I moved
just one of those fifty birds even two inches up, down, right
or left, the balance would be shattered and the chorus of
birds would make no sound. Their beaks would open, their lungs
would flow with wind, but the result would be silence rather
than music.
*
If you can call it music, of course. Forget
about this thing we have about birds making music. Blackbirds
don’t make music. They yell. They all stand completely
still as the tree sways and pitches around them and the wind
flows through the needles, and with knees clenched and wings
folded they yell their high warbling trill as loud as they
can. The result is deafening. It continues for weeks. You
can’t hear yourself think and you can’t hold a conversation.
If you manage to have a thought, it is shattered into a hundred
pieces before it can lead to a second one. You get nothing
done. Day after day the birds stand there, clutching the branches,
completely unmoving, while all the rest of the world is in
motion. They are like ships—charmed coracles in the Irish
Sea in bad weather, full of snakes going out and saints coming
in. Even the leafless aspens, presenting scarcely any profile
to the wind, sway and toss, bend and tremble, like charmed
ropes. The blackbirds must get awful cramps.
By dusk the songs are done and the blackbirds
are rising up and sinking down again in the reed-beds. The
tall, flaming candle of the pine off the corner of my balcony
is dark and silent in the absolutely airless sky. The shallow
waves have hushed against the shore.
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