What Is It, about Birds?

There’s an idea that things come in threes: unfortunate happenings, maybe, or if you’re spiritually inclined, messages from the divine. I’ve had three startling encounters with birds—starting with a flock of pelicans many years ago, and now suddenly, after a very long lull, two encounters in the last few months that rather shook me. I’ve been asking myself, What is it, about birds? I can’t dismiss the thought that they’re saying to me that there’s something I should be doing, besides wondering.

Is that what Job is also thinking when he says (KJV, 12:7): “But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee”? Apparently, humankind has been looking to nature for more than food for a long time. Since I’m a writer, I figure life out on paper, and since I might as well not waste all that wondering, what I wonder becomes some finished piece of writing.

I am spiritually inclined. I’ve read scripture, mythology, the ideas of religious thinkers from different cultures and traditions and have found sustenance for my mind in all of them. Birds are often seen as messengers or portents of something to come. As I began to contemplate writing a novel, I wondered if I should do something spiritually inclined in it (knowing what a minefield that could be)—and then one unsuspecting day at the small house my husband and I were living in, a flock of pelicans flew into our yard, circled above my head, and began talking to me.

I kid you not. It could have been a scene in a Hollywood script—I’m standing on our small front deck, pelicans circling over my head, and then three more pelicans fly in tight formation down our long, pine tree-lined driveway and join the others. I was alone when it happened, and then and there, the novel I’d been pondering sprang up loosely formed in my head, eventually to be titled A Notion of Pelicans. The pelicans had so upended my thinking about the natural order of things—that presumption that critters and people have no communicative truck with one another—that I put them into the story.

Now, the longer I think about the things I’ve experienced—the more I phrase and rephrase in telling about them—the richer the memory becomes. I’ll share, in the excerpt from my novel below, exactly what I experienced with the pelicans, filtered through the eyes of Lavinia Hansen, a woman in the book who was born in the mid-1800s. She is sitting alone in a clearing at the edge of a high bluff.

Lavinia likes to write things down and so has a journal with her as she waits for her husband, who is off walking a newly purchased tract of land. What she experiences—what she sees—is what I saw, standing and looking up at the pelicans, and it has the same effect on her. Lavinia knows (as I myself learned, doing research for the novel) that pelicans are a symbol for Christ, and she takes their appearance as invitation to found a church. Any church? No, Pelican Church. Here’s how our shared experience is described in the book:

   –   –   –

            “Lavinia knew—she was not like her husband. Henry had eyes for distance. She saw the particular. Earlier, she’d examined the clearing, back and forth, had collected every detail and written them into the book. She closed her eyes and listened to the wind in the trees, its tug at her ears. In her mind she saw a picture—in this place, a white house, green shutters, and she herself picking peonies beside a picket fence. Huge whites, vibrant pinks, drooping on the stem, like infants in her arms.
             A beating of wings, a nearing din, brought the moment to an end.
             Her eyes opened, her head tilted back. Above her, against a sky gossamer blue, a flight of birds was assembling. Large and white, powerful, they merged into a turning circle above her head. Her breath caught. The birds formed a rotating crown—a moment later, seemed pearls on a string. One snip, and they might be flung off and away. Lavinia had never seen such birds—only their feathers in ladies’ hats, their images in books—and if she had, she wouldn’t have expected an exhibition like this.
             Short of leg, bright orange of beak, the birds were pelicans. Careening overhead, they rode a draft that swirled and dipped. The great wings, ten feet from tip to black-fringed tip, turned in slow arcs. The pebbly voices called rhythmically out. Each bird cast down at Lavinia one comprehending eye, and as they wheeled above her, eyes flickering and turning, she was cut free from the earth and lifted up into a living web.
              In the southern sky, more pelicans appeared. As if on cue, three birds in a tight V-shape, a blazing arrowhead, spun in and melded with the circle, just as, like a single entity, the others began to peel off and disappear above the trees. Disarray erupted overhead as the circle unraveled and thinned. Seven eyes, flickering overhead—four, three—until the last strange cries of the pelicans wove away beyond the treetops.”

  –    –    –

I was moved by my experience with the pelicans to dare to write a book about human hope and foibles, set around a church. Lavinia is moved to give up her personal hope of a house with a picket fence and instead to found a church where she’d imagined her house would stand. Such is the power of pelicans. Even seeing a picture of pelicans now fills me with happiness. Sometimes when I feel sad, or discouraged, or useless, the memory of the pelicans circling above me will pop into my head, and I see the blessing of it. “Yes,” I’ll think. “It really is pathetic how I forget that I have been spoken to by pelicans.”

There’s a lot to make me sad, and discouraged, and feeling useless. I look around at the trouble everywhere—people in danger of losing housing or medical treatment, images of global starvation, of people mostly brown-skinned rounded up like cattle, and I despair. There’s a temptation to pull up the moat and look to my own. My husband and I are retired, looking in fact to move closer to my family homestead. So I’ve been doing reconnaissance—driving to different communities to tour houses we might like living in. I’ve been on the road, back roads through woods and swamp. This brings me to my second startling encounter with a bird. It’s not a happy one.

I don’t know how to speak of this. I’m not naïve—I know nature is red in tooth and claw. I eat meat. I know where it comes from. But I can’t stand to see an animal suffer or die. I can’t watch documentaries about animals hunting and eating each other. I leave the room. The pragmatic part of my brain has to hold, for a while, the hypersensitive part’s hand.

This second encounter begins with my having looked at a couple of houses that weren’t right. I was happy anyway, on my way to spend the night with a dear cousin. That’s when it happened. I watched a bird get hit by a car, and the memory has been haunting me. What could I do, but try to file it in my mind where it wouldn’t hurt?

Well, that wasn’t enough. Birds immediately began to fly, left and right, into the path of my car—in town while shopping, out of town looking at property, anywhere I went. I don’t mean “sort of, almost” flying in front of my car—I mean, death dives toward my front end, suicidal moves toward the windshield. “Okay, already,” I finally said one day, exasperated, when it happened again. “I know, I need to put it down on paper. It’s what I do, and I will. I’ll pay homage, proper homage to the dead.”

I got home and sat down to write the scene that follows, adding it to a short story I have been working on for a good while. It’s titled “What’s Left.” The main character is a college professor named Laurel. She’s troubled, in the same ways most of us are, or will be. Laurel’s primary trouble at this point in her life is aging—her body is changing, weakening, and her mind, before so dependable, is becoming more porous. I gave to Laurel the unhappy story of my second bird. Here’s what she sees. Here’s what I saw:

   –   –   –

            “Laurel had been driving one late afternoon in the spring, coming home from town. It was that time of day when the sun has lowered behind the still-leafless trees and shines yellow shards of light through them. The highway was clean and dry, and she was feeling relaxed, sun and light and her hands on the wheel. Suddenly, a hawk rose from the ditch on the western side, strength in flight, its brown wings flashing. It rose, to her horror, into the path of a string of cars approaching nose-to-tail from the north—no room for the first driver to slow down, if he’d wanted.
             The accidental bird, beauty on wings, hit the grille direct-center. Its left wing took the brunt, and Laurel felt it in her own left arm, weakened since a fall out of her shoes ten years ago. The broken wing flapped out of synch as the hawk dropped into her lane and, stubborn, amazing life, propelled itself in a jagged line across the lane, disappearing into the opposite ditch just as she reached the point of impact.
             She’d been thinking about the hawk ever since, pictured it in the ditch, its broken wing tucked, its breath shallow and rhythmic, smelling the surrounding grass in whatever way a hawk smells. Laurel had been spared hitting it—that was the best she could say about it. Since then, birds had taken to flying into the path of her car every time she drove, so she wouldn’t forget, as if there were something she should do in memory of the broken-winged hawk, fierce and delicate and frail and strong.”

   –   –   –

I was left wondering what sort of portent the broken-winged hawk was. Will it surprise anyone, to learn I fell out of my clogs one year and injured my left arm, that it plagues me more and more, the older I get? Birds still kept careening in front of my car. What is it, about birds? I’d bang my hands on the steering wheel. “Really?” I’d say. “I wrote about the hawk! What do you want?” This brings me to my third startling encounter with a bird—this one, a robin.

A week ago, I was driving on a back-country highway. Birds were feeding, the way they will, along the margins and occasionally popped up as I passed—at times towards my car, at times away. None of it was alarming, but I was thinking about the dead hawk nonetheless, and about how sad the world is just now, and how I worry, and how little I’m able to do about any of it.

And then, I saw the robin. It was flying like a bullet across the road a few car lengths ahead of me. I was going to hit it, smack dab in my windshield. I began to groan in dismay—and then, the bird stopped, mid-air, its dark wings spreading into two glorious fans as it pivoted 90 degrees. It seemed to hover a moment, looking dead at me, and then it flew straight toward the car. Just as it should have hit the windshield, it rode the current of air up and over the roof. It must have heard my scream—I was that shocked. The bird had flown at me, not away. I was left with a powerful lesson. Take life head on—it’s the only way.

Should I be wondering about my sanity? Thinking that writing about love and death and injustice and hope is a poor excuse for action? No. I submit to my nervous half that it’s what one writes that matters. We are what we are, no? I was born believing I was meant to write. I’ll do it until I die and pray it makes some difference. I ran across a quote somewhere, attributed to the 18th century poet and essayist, Dr. Samuel Johnson, and I identified so strongly with it that I wrote it down on a sticky note and keep it in my pending file of things I’m working on. Dr. Johnson said, “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

I’ll read it and think, “Yes, I’ll keep to it.”

What is it, about birds? Portents? Messengers? Did the broken-winged hawk prepare me for the robin? I don’t know, but I’ll be paying attention when any bird crosses my path. There’s a legend that a robin was flying past the Crucifixion of Christ. It saw the man suffering on the cross and was moved to pull from his temple a thorn that had come from the painful crown on his head. Blood from his scalp was on the thorn, and it dripped onto the bird’s breast, turning it red. The bird had been moved to lessen the man’s suffering. My death-defying robin went a good ways toward lessening mine. The least I can do is try to do the same, every time my fingers are on the keyboard.

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