People in general--except I guess for a rare, not very sociable set of us--seem depressed by this kind of day, the leftover snow exuding its raw breath, saplings and treetops restless with wind-shiver--never mind the woodcock whirring pale orange out of hiding on old leaf-litter, first baby leaves of wild strawberry, buds fattening on most branches. It has been a serious old-fashioned winter. Still I felt more alive than on any other day of the whole past week, reminding me more than anything of the kid I once was.
It's natural to wish setbacks on any part of the business world and government that works to sell out these nooks of wilderness. Many of the threats to them come wrapped up in the knot of technologies that speed up all artificial, commercial processes as if their perpetual growth were everybody's dream. What happens when we run out of growing space? What prices will we pay along the way to that end? How universally will we know we've maxed out? I have to trust the earth will know and will react, lapsing into its own episodes of dormancy and spurts of violent weather to re-balance moisture, temperature, or soil compactness. But the behavior of our societies seems at least as chaotic in terms of the long-range effects on lands, waters and atmosphere. What gives me hope is any evidence, even if theoretical, that conserving wild lands proves obligatory for us and our descendants for our survival. Industrial ventures and our own proclivities for growing bigger and bigger suburbs could mess up our own support system so completely that all we'll have left is the semi-wild, which, with any amount of vision, we'll learn to work with and blend into in all of our designing.
However, feeling myself hidden from sight of all but wild animals, I say I will be like one of them. I'll carry my load over my own shoulders--off-road vehicles mean to me nothing so much as filth, ruts, erosion, expense and fatness--and will keep comfortable through the heat of my own body when I go out practicing my choice vocation. Chilly-fingered but snugly clad in layered clothing that included snow pants normal to the skiing season, sitting on a parka against the damp, I attempted a little detail work, all about dead wood. I wanted the dead wood of spruce, especially to celebrate the adaptation to bitter cold through miniaturization of all plants including the wet-loving black spruce in a spruce bog. The season was early and conditions too cold and damp for working much with watercolor--it would dry too slowly--but I'd craved getting out there on a trial first visit of the new spring. A friend's husband long ago called these conditions pneumonia weather. In any case I could see, a little better than before, what I still needed to do on the page when the sun's been at work for us for a while longer.
No birds or beasts showed themselves as I crouched; that's pretty predictable. But I'm normally poised for surprise by warm-blooded kin while I'm in those secret places. While at the laundromat earlier I had read about a prehistoric bird in Roger A. Caras' Source of the Thunder: the Biography of a California Condor, ©1970 Little, Brown of Boston. I encountered this passage about the condor, a survivor from times before the last ice ages --a species which has been, to the extent possible, safeguarded from extinction in patches of California, Arizona and adjoining desert lands, a little fringe of the American expanse it once occupied. The condor was long ago widespread in North America and was, Mr. Caras says, the thunderbird of native Indian legend. The Indians of our region depicted the thunderbird in their art.
Several times she lifted her wings, spread her tail, and felt for a hopeful, even encouraging current of air. There was no such encouragement to be had. Finally she could take the strain no longer. The demands of her parenthood were too great. She lifted her wings straight up, reaching with them nearly five feet above her back. She extended the feathers of her tail, elevated it as well, straightened her legs, and pushed down hard against the perch. Then, in one coordinated movement, she brought her tail and both wings down sharply, shoving with all her might at the same time. Her full twenty-two pounds were instantly airborne and as she started to lose precious altitude she raised her wings again.
...After the initial twelve beats though, she was able to glide for a thousand yards, then she beat twelve more strokes to gain altitude. By this time she had passed over the ridge to where a rising thermal from the steep wall beyond surged beneath her. She rocked slightly and then lifted. She banked a few degrees to the left to adjust her direction, caught the thermal again, and curved off in the most magnificent soaring flight to be seen in the world of birds today.
When she flapped, the whooshing sound her wings made could be heard fully a half-mile away. Now, in soaring flight, at ever increasing altitude, the sound was less and was heard by no one but her. It was like a soft wind in a pine tree. Forty percent of each wing was open slot area, finely adjustable to her minutest flight requirements. Her extraordinarily long primary feathers, each an elastic and flexible wing in its own right, turned on their axes and were thrust automatically forward at a slight angle. She was moving at a speed of thirty-five miles an hour and still accelerating. It would be half an hour at least before she would move her wings from the horizontal again.
The whole day served to remind me that movement paced at the speed of a searching hand or a foreleg striding, or a raptor soaring home, may be ultimately the most justified--that slow and steady like the tortoise may win the race, because whatever burns the hottest at the mid-levels where we live tends to burn itself out, and so the tremulous water will be left alone attracting whatever grotesque or camouflaged creature comes to drink it or enters it to get across. The meek will probably inherit the earth.
http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/tanya-beyer.html
