Even though the air temperature was 93 degrees F, where I sat, under the shade of a large cottonwood tree, it was pleasant, especially when the wind gusted off Quiver Lake. There I could sit for hours watching the white caps roll, with swallows foraging for insects just above the water and turkey vultures soaring beneath billowy clouds. But it was late in the day, and I needed to return home, an hour away in Macomb, for dinner with my wife, Julie.
Quiver Lake, an Illinois River backwater, at the cabin
Just when I was about to slowly stand up, several red-winged blackbirds and common grackles flew across my view, then landed in a silver maple tree just above the water’s edge. More calling blackbirds then arrived from further up the shoreline toward Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge to join with those perching in the maple tree, but some of the original birds flew onward to other trees down the lakeshore. This loosely knit flock was the first gathering of blackbirds that I had seen this summer. The flocks often include brown-headed cowbirds, rusty blackbirds, and European starlings (this species, though, is not in the blackbird family), and they usually begin coalescing every year sometime in the middle of July just after the breeding season is completed. It is a benchmark in the year, an event that I use to mark the seasonal progression, a moment when I begin to think of the fall and coming winter—though summer’s heat and humidity may be extreme—and what surprises the following year may bring, both good and bad.
But it’s obviously easier to look backward than attempt to predict what may come to pass. For example, one year ago, I could not have anticipated how abruptly we would move from our primary residence in the rural countryside of Mason County to the small western Illinois town of Macomb. Such thoughts were, of course, in our minds as a distinct possibility for several years; but the fact of the move, and that it happened so quickly after the process had begun in October, shocked and transformed our placid lives in a way that has yet to return to an equilibrium. When we return to Mason County to manage our remaining affairs or to visit the cabin at Quiver Lake, we still cannot help but feel, even after six months, that we are back home.
Last July we had not yet even talked about taking a trip of a lifetime in the coming November to visit several southeastern states, waters with wild manatees and alligators, and to spend a late afternoon drinking wine and watching hang gliders above northwestern Georgia’s Lookout Mountain. The thought had never entered my mind at any time in the past, let alone last July, that in recent weeks a black bear from Wisconsin would swim across the Mississippi River twice, into and out of Iowa, before entering western Illinois, all the while traveling quickly in a purposeful southern direction, passing around ten miles west of our new home in town, then swim across the river again to Missouri north of St. Louis, and all the while be tracked by the media and thousands of people concerned about the bear’s welfare (Bruno the bear he would be dubbed); in October, I would discover through an internet search that a good childhood friend, Sigi Bigelis, had been dead from cancer for five years, sadly answering a nagging question in my mind of why we had lost touch; I’m sure that few last year would have predicted the world would soon be in an upheaval from the deadly coronavirus (COVID-19) and plunged into a self-inflicted, deep economic recession from governmental mandates attempting to control the virus’s spread, perhaps permanently changing the way people interact in public, from wearing face masks to social distancing to relegating handshaking as a thing of the past; and I never expected to be witness to widespread civil unrest, racial tensions, and domestic violence at scales and intensities not recalled in my memory since the late 1960s.
The prosperity of last summer seems more than a lifetime ago. But from those good times, well before everything had collapsed amid the virus and social anarchy, NASA—ever optimistic about the future—announced concrete plans to not only return to the Moon by 2024, but to use the new Moon missions to establish a gateway toward sending astronauts to Mars, hopefully still within my lifetime (effects from the COVID-19 pandemic apparently have not significantly altered those plans).
And so, the next year will unfold as it will, no matter what I do, say, or think, just as the case has always been. But with so many negative arrows hitting their targets, it’s a struggle to remain upright and positive, even with NASA in my corner, especially with multiple daily reminders of life-threatening dangers ready to strike by merely breathing the air at a supermarket checkout line, while at the same moment attempting and often failing to stay at least six feet away from others, reminding myself not to think of them as walking contagions, and keeping my hands away from my face.
Under my cottonwood tree at Quiver Lake with its floodplain forest wilderness along the Illinois River, I feel safe from threats, finding solace in nature as I always have. Surrounded by such peace, I am always reluctant to leave; but leave I must, in order to live, just as I must confront the world outside and all that it may hurl in my direction.
Thank you for this thoughtful description of our reality cushioned by the beauty of nature. I am on Sanibel Island where the people show a caring attude for each other in this place of beauty. Your words make me homesick to return to Quiver Lake.
Posted by: Diana Waren | July 16, 2020 at 03:10 AM