27 July 2008

Ice and water

Those who know me know that my favorite TV show is Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch. I am a dedicated fan, enthralled by the men who make their living pulling king and opilio crab out from the depths of the Bering Sea.

The fishermen are truly men above men. Courageous, confident, daring...vulnerable. To challenge an insurmountable sea bares wide their humanity and their fragility. It achieves that masterful dichotomy of heroic accomplishment against the purest demonstration of human frailty. As true to form as Greek mythology, Eastern legend or Western folklore. I watch each episode in sheer awe.

There are few facets of our world left upon which we human animals have not worn a careless track, even in some cases to defeat or extinction. We often rage against the very universe that supports us.

The Bering sea is not exempt of human mistreatment. But its freezing spray to encase ships, the monumental rise of waves, and the roll of sub-zero waters that sap a man's life in seconds are reminders that we are not the masters of this universe, merely some of its smallest members, and tender ones at that. That which is sacred remains the vast expanse of green sea, the Aleutian gray sky, the scream of gulls and the pink barnacled shells of crab.

And the thickening of ice in sheets that extend like solid ground until the fishermen can even step over the side of their ship and walk on the surface of the sea, miles away from any shore.

Sherri

17 July 2008

Texas

Flat land draws more of the sky closer to the ground. Austin is like that. The sky comes clear down until the sides fall away so that you can feel the curve of the earth under your feet as if the rest of the planet extends down from the capitol of Texas.

Trees grow in wide rolling hills here. Live oak, elm, maple and lacy willows in colors like crayons – spring green, mint julep, sea foam, emerald – and flowering trees in veils of purple pink ivory blossoms.

But it’s hot. And wet like breathing inside out, body fluid and organ warm, and flowing with a deep rhythm so that my own pulse flutters sparrow-fast and the jackdaws, flycatchers and mourning doves quicken into a single, held note.

Down from the capitol building, there are bats under the Congress Bridge. I watch them at dusk emerge in a cloud to feed against the fading sky. I am told it is the largest urban population of Mexican Free-tail bats and that these are the mothers, their offspring still tucked away in the man-made crevice of cement and steel that has become part of the regular migration path. Texas Capistrano’s swallows. I am down-river from the bridge, the crowd too much of a deterrent for me, but I am delighted at the flurry of erratic wings on the hunt.

And I wasn’t bitten by a mosquito even once.

Sherri

28 June 2008

Birdsong

Yesterday in the early morning when I looked at my bedside clock for the millionth time since my husband was away and it wakes me to reach out to his side and find it empty, and it was 4 a.m. and that morning bird began its early song and I remember thinking that the birdsong would keep me awake longer but really that was the last conscious thought I had before my alarm went off at 6:30 and the day began in earnest.

It is still dark at 4 a.m. but not like winter dark. In the summer it is much more gradual, the light spread thin, a quiet refusal to retreat entirely. The bird begins its call.

It is a robin. An American robin, different from the European robin since it is related rather to a thrush than the little robins over the pond. Lang Elliott, an authority on birds (what would that be like - to be an authority on birds?), qualifies the dawn call of a robin as a "more animated, excited territorial declaration."

Some 5-ish years ago I worked a graveyard shift at a women's care facility while I was in between jobs. It was summer and I kept the wide windows on the west side of the front office thrown open all night since they were high enough to be inaccessible from the outside. The robin's song became my touchstone. It signaled the shift from one side to the other, the ramping upside to the quiet slide down into dawn. The pitch and timbre translated into a desperate stand against the vestiges of night. And a call to the sun.

It speaks to another time, years ago, a time of desperation and my last failed stand. I had lost everything. I couldn't sleep for the terrors that waited for me in my dreams and the weight of my grief and shame and of a nameless, bottomless, demoralizing despair. I paced. Tried to read. Listened to Eric Clapton, Bob Segar, Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana—Cobain newly dead. In the dark, pre-dawn, I would give up and stand outside with my back against the peeling red paint of the door to the sleeping quarters and smoke, lighting each new cigarette off the last, until the black shape of the Wasatch Front deepened, its topmost edge backlit gold to fire-white, the sky fading purple, violet, lilac to the spread of peach and pink and then, at last, the sun would break over the peak to another day. And then, at last, I would sleep.

I did not hear the robin before. But there were many sacred gifts I missed back then, back in those old bad days of old bad ways of ignorance and self-will and despair.

A restless night might lay on me still. And it is a comfort to hear the robin call up the sun.

Sherri