Where diet is concerned I relate to the idea of cheap junk food easily gotten from vending machines during the work-week. Fixing my diet to banish those snacks shouldn't be all that hard to do. My other risk factors beyond the dietary ones for heart attack are relatively low. A person with the means to stay home for days on end and put together delicious wholesome food high in vegetable bulk and low in the wicked fats, free of preservatives would be at a greater advantage. (Are there some eaters who will never rid themselves of cravings for favorite mass-manufactured snacks?) At any rate I'll be glad if ever that printed matter from the doctor's office gets here; I surely might learn something.
It seems likely to me that high cholesterol in my case (it's 240 so not extreme) is the result of age, heredity and having more than enough to eat out of what's promptly available and moderate in calories (I have always fought back against getting too fat.) Worsened circumstances would come from the loss of freedom to move, maintain muscle and reliably use the bulk that's my body and heritage. Hardship would follow, but not devastation, from no longer having a car to make my basic rounds, but I could, if survival required it, take up the ancestral way of life driven fully by calories and what muscle, joints and discipline are strong enough to accomplish. One goes along in the habits of life that promise predictability and security, but a lot of the time I think I'm watching and waiting for enforced forms of outer and inner change. Any of us does what we have to do and changes mainly when we're scared out of old habits. Nature around and within us threatens to rid us of corrosive but comfortable habits.
As the natural world changes through the pressures imposed by human usage, I watch from all my vantage points, including a trusted variety of printed news sources. Old scenes, lost and faded glories of nature help to remind me of what tomorrow would be without that color palette of seasonal wildflowers, that summery array of explosive rain clouds, those migratory species of warbler or breeding duck. Other people's descriptions of a rare sight--like the lynx that spurted across the Trans-Canada highway in front of my sister's car, eluding my niece's camera by running straight up a rock wall--give me hope of a world in which there will indefinitely be some of these creatures and a few appreciative souls to report on them. We can't indefinitely, willfully act on the world to assuage our limitless hungers without it reacting to stifle those hungers. What's coming is corrective, whatever it may do us out of.
October is coming soon with Octoberous looks that are familiar yet worth rediscovery. With the frosts of autumn this homeland will likely again see the young of big northern-nesting sparrows--the white-throated and white-crowned and the Harris' sparrows, scratching in old leaf carpets by our pathways-- and will hear the soft, solemn, drawn-out 'chee-ee-eep' that identifies them. Wild songbirds along American back-roads are to me as spellbinding as the English author J.A. Baker must have found the peregrine falcons in his book The Peregrine, Harper & Row Publishers, 1967. I lately read a gift copy from my Aunt Mary Jo, from cover to cover despite my unfamiliarity with the birds of Europe, where I have never gone. But the earth is in so many ways small; what's ever repeatedly traveled over the relatively short stretch of ocean between North America and western Europe has kindred on both shores.
Speaking of being fit to travel under power of heart and lungs, Mr. Baker some fifty years ago found himself so needing communion with the migratory falcons of the British Isles that he flung himself in search of them by bicycle along rural roads near the eastern coast. His book is almost entirely word-pictures of his region, its weather, tides and bird movement as seen by a person impelled by the same energies as falcons:
"...Head to wind, like a compass needle cleaving to the north, he drifted, steadied, and hung still. His wings closed and curved back, then opened and reached forward, splaying out wide like an owl's. His tail tapered like a dart, then opened in a broad spreading fan.... When he banked in the sun, he flashed from blackness to fire and shone like white steel. Poised on two thousand feet of sunlit air, he commanded the birds of the valley, and none flew beneath him. He sank forward into the wind, and passed slowly down the sun. I had to let him go. When I looked back, through green and violet nebulae of whirling light, I could just see a tiny speck of dusk falling to earth from the sun, flashing and turning and falling through an immense silence that crashed open in a tumult of shrilling, wing-beating birds....
'At three o'clock I had a pricking sensation at the back of the neck that meant I was being looked at from behind. It is a feeling that must have been very intense to primitive man.... Two hundred yards away, the hawk was perched on the low horizontal branch of an oak.... For more than a minute we both stayed still, each puzzled and intrigued by the other, sharing the curious bond that comes with identity of position. When I moved towards him, he flew at once, going quickly down through the north orchard. He was hunting, and the hunter trusts no one."
The book ends with the author and a peregrine tensely at rest five yards from him: "I know he will not fly now. I climb over the wall and stand before him. And he sleeps."
Over a length of time the author had accustomed the wild peregrine to his slow approach and even his usefulness in scaring up small birds good for preying upon.
A comparably taut encounter--all about remembering the eternal in a moment--with one of our American heartland sparrows is exhibited here, hand-illustrated in watercolor and pencil, as inspired by autumn conditions in the arboretum of Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. The original 12 x9" watercolor has now sold, but prints at 10 x 8" or smaller can be ordered. The title is "Startlement: Harris' Sparrow on an October Shore."
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