Birds and Hope

Creative nonfiction
by Adrienne Ross

In February 1996, I was traveling through Cannon Beach when a record storm slammed into the Oregon Coast, sending rivers raging past their banks, flooding freeways, and stranding travelers. During the reprieve between the first crash and the storm’s later onslaught, I went walking along a beach strewn with flotsam and broken branches. Waves that had begun miles away released onto the shore sea birds killed in the night’s storm. I walked past broken-necked grebes amid bramble, black scoters limp and tangled in bull kelp, gulls covered with blood and sand flies. My surgical scar was but two months sewn into my body. The scar pinched with every step I took to reach a rock haystack, remnant of headlands eaten away by wind and waves. There I searched for orange sea stars, purple anemones, bits of shell, and smooth ebony stones exposed by the low tide.

In a wave-cut bowl hollowed in the rock, I saw a duck atop a shifting slope of sand and broken shells. She seemed asleep. Her bill and cheek were curled under a protective wing. Her webbed feet stayed tight against her belly as I approached. Rain and ocean water beaded on unruffled brown feathers along her breast, flank, wings. She was dead. I shivered, goose bumps under my damp blue-jeans. I lifted the duck off the sand and held her. I looked for an eye ring, an eye line to use as a field mark, but found none. Perhaps she was a tufted duck blown far from her winter range. Perhaps a scoter. Perhaps a scaup.

Every ending is a change of skin. I was used to death dressing animals in broken bones, split feathers, dirt, hungry ants. Whatever this bird was, she was strangely, impossibly perfect. Above a wing locked by rigor mortis, one eye was exposed to stare unseeing at the storm’s wreckage, as if she were dreaming, about to wake for flight, as if death was an open window under the sky.

Mud and salt water seeped through my worn boots. Rain spattered my hands and face. Time to leave. I stayed. Questions formed within me like lines of hunters in the dawn. Inexplicable events inevitably shatter trusted (and therefore unexamined) notions of fairness. Was it fair that the duck I held had survived howling wind and waves only to die in a rock-and-barnacle refuge after the worst had passed? Was it deserved that a routine medical examination had led me to three hours of surgery for endometriosis, an illness I hadn’t known I had? Was it just that this same illness had ravaged my fertility, and with it my assumption that a child, a family, would be part of my life? What else couldn’t I trust? Eventually, I returned the duck to the shattered seashells, twigs, seed cones, slick emerald seaweed. The storm returned by mid-afternoon. It raged for a night, and a day, and nearly a week.

Three years later, I was crying by a grave in Seattle’s Jewish cemetery. Grass grew between beds of bones. Beyond the graveyard’s walls, Prisms and Jeep Cherokees and buses turned wheels and miles down Highway 99. A few weeks earlier, the rabbi of my congregation had been killed in a car crash, leaving a wife, a son, and a community of mourners. And me. Flocks of questions that had surrounded me since my surgery rose and took flight with renewed vigor, hungry ghosts that found meager sustenance in the spiritual truths Rabbi D. had tried to inspire. Doubly isolated by a skeptical nature and a lack of Hebrew, I had nonetheless tried to find a spiritual route for navigating questions that had flown far off-course to vast, solitary places: who was this God who greeted travail with open, indifferent hands; who neither rewarded healing nor granted hope; who wanted my faith when I wanted proof of a just world, or at least a good explanation for random, miserable fortune? Weeks had turned to seasons. I cried, raged, prayed, honored these questions above love, good work, community. My interactions with Rabbi D. had been clumsy with silence and failed words, but I remembered how his eyes had widened when he translated my Hebrew name to mean “fantastical bird.”

The graveyard was slipping into twilight. A narrow place. I was alone save for a mob of crows screeching caw-caw as they flew between gravestones. Crows are lesser tricksters than their raven cousins. Ebony; raucous; never alone; unwanted messengers. Their calls reveal less than they seem to know. I turned to leave. Crows caw-cawed. Crows swarmed. One crow shrieked at me. Its black head bobbed as it strutted atop a gravestone where stones were placed in the Jewish mourning custom, and where the shadowed name carved there was my own: Ross.

It was weeks before I could look at crows without being terrified that I was about to die. From terror came acceptance, perhaps not the kind intended by the angels said to follow my footsteps out of the graveyard and, in the weeks that followed, away from a fruitless search for reasons, causes, justifications that would take an eternity to discover. I had only my time on an earth where death was inevitable, and so were the broken dreams and sturdy joys of any life. I began a slow walk back to the world around me, the world as it is, where I might want what I could call fairness, but where life and nature simply are as they are. I never returned to the graveyard. After a time, it seemed a garden where shoots broke through the compost of old resentments and reached the sun.

The next winter, twilight was darkening across Bow Edison Road when a falcon streaked across the last brilliant light to rest atop a telephone pole. I slammed on the Saturn’s brakes and jumped out onto the farm road, gravel and dirt turning under my feet. I shivered in the wind, trying to hold my binoculars steady.

Every winter, the Skagit Valley filled with rough-legged hawks swaying on telephone lines, snowy owls gleaming in muddy fields, bald eagles atop hemlocks, red-tailed hawks perched on barn roofs, all the birds of prey that live in the valley year-round or leave their northern breeding grounds for a warmer place to hunt voles, gulls, salmon, steelhead, dunlin, rock doves, ducks. But I rarely saw the swift-falling angels of death, the falcons: merlins, peregrines, prairie falcons, gyrfalcons, North American kestrels.

I studied the falcon on the pole, looking for field marks to check against raptor portraits and winter range maps in my Field Guide to North American Birds. There was something odd about the falcon. Russet brown feathers covered her back, but she was not as small as the North American kestrel (the sparrow hawk). She had neither the size of the gyrfalcon (the broad winged death that rode on the wrists of emperors and kings), nor the black crown and nape of a peregrine falcon. Unlike the North American kestrel, she had a single thin, black line down her cheek. I checked the Field Guide. I studied her for a longer time. I checked the Field Guide again. She was a Eurasian kestrel. She should have been in Europe, Asia, Africa, or perhaps flying east across the Bering Straits as far as the Aleutian Islands, but instead she had continued on, following the long, strange curve of Alaska and British Columbia until she arrived at Washington’s Sammish Flats at the intersection of Bow Edison and Sullivan roads. In her own place, she would be ordinary, unremarkable. To me, she was a rare sighting, and a falcon at that.

I stood along the winter road, watching the kestrel. She had the quality I admire most in wild creatures: the unsullied knowledge of who she was, how she must live regardless of where she found herself. Snow geese called across the sky’s solitude. The first stars rose. The kestrel flew off to find a night roost. By then my scar had long since slipped under my skin. I no longer wandered labyrinths where unanswerable questions prowled like minotaurs waiting to waylay foolish travelers. For the improbabilities of existence are as common and startling as the flight of wings, breath, the inexplicable joy of being alive. In the end, all that matters is the only life there is to live.

Copyright © 2007 by Adrienne Ross