A few days ago, a friend texted me that a red-flanked bluetail had been spotted a couple of miles from where I live. I had to look up what a red-flanked bluetail was. Turns out that the red-flanked bluetail—also known as the orange-flanked bush-robin—is a small songbird with red flanks (or orange flanks, I guess, depending on who’s looking?) and a blue tail (which isn’t always a big deal?). More to the point, the species normally ranges throughout Asia and Europe, so in the Seattle area it is quite the rarity.
News of the bluetail left me largely unmoved. I like birds a lot, as people who know me know, but I don’t chase rarities. I don’t have any profound philosophical reasons for this. I’m just lazy, and the thought of skulking around the suburbs for hours only to stand among the peering hordes just this side of some befuddled schlub’s property line so I can stare at some distant smudge in the bushes is not why I got into birding.
On second thought, there might just be a tiny bit of philosophy undergirding my studied disinterest.
My preschooler is awed by many things, some of them more generally relatable than others. A spider in the sliding-door track. Mist coming through the woods. Irish butter. And rocks. For a long while now, her favorite miracles have been rocks.
She doesn’t anthropomorphize them, turn them into pets, or expect unreasonable things from them. She respects them as they are.
To her, all rocks are “peshal” (special) and deserving of her regard. They don’t exist as proof of some epic backpacking trip, or as mementoes of places we have traveled. Her rocks come from someone else’s lawn, from the parking lot at Noodles and Company, always from playgrounds, always from hikes.
Because of her, I find rocks on the bathroom floor, in the laundry basket, nestled inside cups in the kitchen cupboard. She got a new coat recently and it has a little chest pocket, which for adults might hold your ID or your sunglasses. She unzipped the pocket and announced, “this coat has a rock pocket!” It always has a rock in it, always a different rock, which she takes out and holds and gently puts back.
She genuinely loves rocks, and maybe she will be a geologist, or a rock climber. I try not to overthink it. For now, I think of the rocks as a testament to her character. She loves and honors the smallest, most lowly things, the things most people don’t think about at all, except in the context of kicking them, or removing them from one’s path, or maybe making them the path upon which to tread.
Right now, she does not need all the information I have about rocks. Some of this information I am saving for later, when she is older, and she can understand what rocks represent, rather than what they simply are.
Rocks are hard, but they soften under pressure. They do not give in easily, but when they are forced to do so, the Earth itself shakes. Rocks harbor life. They make up the surface of this world, and they give us purchase in an otherwise uncaring universe. They are strong. It takes a lot of power, by which I mean violence, to break them. When they do break, they are never really destroyed; they just become something new. Even when they are pulverized into dust, drowned in water, tumbled in mayhem, they do not fail but become other, stronger rock — metamorphic rock, or concrete.
Rocks and the minerals in them are the mountains and the seafloor. They are food for trees and crops; they are our roads and sidewalks and trails. We can move them, but it is hard work.
We can learn a lot from rocks. We can learn how to be crushed, tossed, drowned and then remade into something new, and even stronger. We can learn how to let time shape us, and to let experience soften us. We can hold life, and provide it safe harbor.
What would happen if we all looked for wonder in such forgotten things? What if we found purpose in the objects and the lives that the rulers prefer to ignore, or do their best to destroy? What if every rock on this rocky world really was “peshal,” and all of us were too?
Images: Some favorite rocks in Colorado Springs, by the author
What follows is a poem about the Voyager spacecraft I wrote a long time ago, when the world and I were very different than we are today. For a multisensory experience, you can read along while listening to a splendid set-to-space-noise version here.
“Whether we like it or not, there are things out there, not alive, that think about us,” wrote a contributor on the internet anthropologist Katherine Dee’s substack. He was talking about the networks of technologies designed to stalk our movements and use the information to influence our decisions and command our attention.
In the age of these infinitely networked technological megafauna, how do you know if anything you are dealing with on the internet is under human control or driven by its own opaque desires? What is watching you? How will it act on the information it harvests?
I have begun to mentally categorise these nonhuman entities along the same lines theologians once taxonomised them in the old grimoires:
I’m in my office. It is snowing lightly outside, and suddenly I hear them — a flock of sandhill cranes flying overhead. So I step outside for a moment to observe their formation and remember that the world is still a beautiful and wondrous place.
This realization is what is keeping me grounded amidst the alarming and increasingly dystopian news that keeps coming. Yes, I will stand up and fight as much as possible.
But I am also taking time to stop, breathe and listen. I filmed the video here (turn the sound up!) while skiing earlier this week. I noticed a sound, so I paused to look up and listen. The noise is so distinctive, a gentle trilling sound.
There is now a population of cranes that winter near here, but this time of year — spring — also marks the mass migration of larger populations who stop at Fruit Grower’s Reservoir on the South slope of the Grand Mesa on their migratory route. It’s a sign of spring, just as much as the apricots that are now blooming down the road from me. (I hope mine can wait a little longer, so as to avoid a freeze.)
Spring seems to come every year. The apple tree in front yard has leaves. The season of direct sun in the living room: over.) Everyone else has started taking their dogs for longer walks. (The season of walking my dog in relative peace: over.) The trees shed their pollen and my nose runneth over. (The season of clear breathing: over.)
The famous cherry blossoms of Washington will reach peak bloom in the next few days, but in the meantime the non-famous trees of Washington are putting on a show. That apple tree will put out its pretty little flowers soon – I can see the buds from my desk. A neighbor’s dwarf peach (that’s the picture above) is putting on a show already.
I had more trouble than usual figuring out what to write about this month. So much is happening on so many fronts here in Washington these days that it’s hard to get your head around and exhausting, too. Too big to tackle in writing while I’m living through it. So I try to be grateful for moments of good news as I wait for peak bloom.
I always knew flying squirrels lived among us, probably of the southern variety, in the trees at our cabin-in-the-woods in central Virginia. But those buggers are hard to spot. They’re night-owls, first of all, and they’re pretty small. So, I was delighted to see a whole nest of them in our woodshed this winter. (Okay, truth is my husband found them when I wasn’t there one weekend and bragged about his discovery, and I only got to see them by pics and video. Had I been there, I surely would have plucked one out of that nest and kissed it on its little velvety head, so perhaps it’s best I was elsewhere.)
When I saw there were numerous squirrels tucked into the nest together, I assumed they must be pups (also called kits, funnily enough) and thought, huh, why would they have babies during this cold, hungry season? Then I read that the adults commonly come together in the winter to stay warm; nests have been spotted packed with as many as 50 of the things. (This one had eight or ten.)
They don’t actually fly, of course; they have this flap of loose skin on each side of the body attaching fore leg to hind leg, and it creates an airfoil so they can glide in a downward direction (steering with their tail), usually 25 feet or so but sometimes more than 200, or so I’ve read. They have white bellies and pink ears and glorious huge eyes allowing them to see in the dark, all of which makes them extra cute. (Big eyes is one of those traits we humans especially love in other creatures, as it projects innocence and childishness and a request for love and care, in a way.)
Flying squirrels have an impressive repertoire of calls, more than any other type of squirrel, with some utterances out of the human range of hearing. If I’d actually been there with the nest I would have recorded these calls, but I wasn’t, so I couldn’t, so I’ll attach someone else’s recording of their chirps. (Scroll down to “Voice.”)
I’m hoping next time I’m at our cabin the nest is still there, overflowing with little warm bodies. At times like these when the world feels like its imploding, it’s comforting to find wild things living their lives as if nothing is wrong.
Decades ago when I was hoping to become a scientist, I got a master’s degree dealing with the actions of water in the desert, part of which was studying the hydrology of flash floods on unvegetated bedrock. One term for the result is a “slot canyon.”
When people died in a flash flood in a narrow canyon in Zion years back, NPR brought me on to explain what happened and why. I told listeners that these desert rainstorms touch ground far away and run fast over forty or fifty miles, finding people in a dry, sunlit cathedral dazzled by the convoluted walls around them, perhaps wondering what could have formed such a place. Water and debris arrive in what is called a “flood bore,” either a towering wave or a long, inescapable slope: ankles, knees, and once it’s to your waist you’re ass over teakettle. It keeps rising ten to forty feet or more, a maelstrom of mud, water, and boulders leaving a log jammed between walls sixty feet up in the air. No skill or strength can save you. Everything is up to the flood.
The best chance you have is scrambling to a high ledge when it hits, and hoping it’s high enough.
I interviewed workers on body recoveries, usually Park Service or land agency employees (those now being fired) telling me of a wedding ring being the only thing still on a man, or how three people were all swept together under a ledge miles from where they started as if the water took them in its hand. I was told about a person’s face like a mask, only the face, no bone or anything else. The flood seems to have some kind of agency. Anything in the way enters into the equation.
