"Four and Twenty Blackbirds/Baked in a Pie"

Seriously, a squad is circling the house. Yesterday’s cutting of the dead tree has triggered a convention of birds: 3 kinds of woodpeckers came at once, including the small black-and-white striped, downy woodpecker. There were two of those and woodpeckers with red on their heads in two versions, also cardinals and brown birds of all kinds. This morning, black birds zooming past the windows. Maybe they are migrating. These are not starlings. I’m going downstairs and take a look.

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Downstairs I see that the tree was rotten at top and bottom. In fact, its rotted bottom sticks out of the ground like a scraggly tooth, broken off, uneven. I kept this tree as long as I could because it attracted woodpeckers but the rain of Hurricane Fay so saturated it that it fell and was caught in a net of grape vines. Nobody could walk there until it came down.


BEING CARIBOU: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd (by Karsten Heuer)

I just turned the last pages of this astounding book that, in the way the best books always do, hurt me with its beauty.I have never left any fictional character more reluctantly than I leave the caribou that have filled my mind for two days. As I read, I became caribou, too, a knot in my throat at the thought of leaving this herd for civilization, not wanting any break in the oneness of my travel with Karsten and Leanne who went with the caribou through wind, rain, snow, rivers, ice, bear, wolves, past fleabane, and through mountain passes.

When Heuer speaks of the necessity for closing down in order to navigate civilization’s roads and lights and sirens and phones, all of that, he speaks of going back to civilization as moving “toward hurry and disconnection,” which is how I feel in front of a tv or a computer. We have fallen out of Eden and into pizza and television and our lives as consumers, something never dreamed of by our ancient ancestors who in a time and place now nearly unimaginable must once have run with the caribou in a fluid oneness that left nothing out, not the trees or the sun or the clouds or the bugs or the cold and heat. I know we had that oneness once; otherwise it would not have been possible for me to be caribou myself for these two days. Karsten Heuer has captured not only the wildness of the Alaskan caribou herds; he has documented the wildness within us, too, that dimension of oneness we all long for.