The River Landing

If a Tree Falls

The sun had already been up for a couple of hours when I finally ventured out on the morning of July 17^th, coffee in hand, to check on the neighborhood bird life.  But the birds were not so active or vocal.  Even the robins, whose songs usually were the most dominating throughout the day, barely made a few calls.  Of course, the breeding season was winding down, and many bird species were beginning to prepare for fall migrations.  I had barely gotten used to the summer bird community of my new town, having moved to Macomb only in late February, and I now regretted not spending time outside just after sunrise listening to the morning chorus.

          The strange quiet reminded me of a time three years ago, waking up one winter morning to find the hearing in my right ear muffled and down to only about thirty percent capacity.  After a few days with no improvement, I feared permanent hearing loss.  Months thereafter followed, trying every solution in the general practitioner’s tool box, before being referred to a specialist (Dr. Gary Shaw of Graham Hospital in Canton) who suggested that nasal surgery with a tube placed into my eardrum was the only viable option to restore my hearing. 

            I was fully conscious during the tube placement, which involved drilling a hole through my eardrum; the pain was at a scale unlike anything I have ever experienced, and it sounded like ten 747 jet engines screaming at full throttle.  I tried to remain as stoic and still as I could manage; my wife Julie could not watch without crying.  And less than a year later when the tube needed to be reinstalled, she could not be in the same room.  As if that were not bad enough, soon after the initial tube placement I would find myself on a hospital cart saying farewell to Julie (there are certainly cases of patients not waking up from anesthesia), then being wheeled into an operating room full of strangers in masks; I watched the anesthetic flow into my veins, and then…blackness.  My nasal passages would be excavated and widened using surgical tools inserted through the nostril.  Recovery took weeks; and in the end, my hearing returned and I could breathe better.  I felt thankful for the expertise and knowledge of Dr. Shaw, the many years he spent learning his craft, and to live at a time and in a country where such a complex surgery could be available, attainable, and successfully completed; because it was not so long ago that a simple ailment such as a toothache might have meant an agonizing, prolonged death from infection.  So I looked forward to the following spring, when I would fully hear bird songs again, and appreciate those songs as never before. 

          And yet, it still was not long before I once again began to slip back into the old pattern of taking life’s simple pleasures and comforts for granted.  To ease my conscience, I decided that such a state of mind must be a natural tendency and necessary for a relaxed life.  Is the better alternative to live as if each moment were the last, as if everything familiar and loved could vanish without warning in mere seconds, living life always at a high state of anxiety?  And now, the COVID-19 pandemic has descended upon the world, being a grim reminder once again, like the 9/11 attacks in 2001, not to take anything for granted, not even something as simple as a reliable supply of bathroom tissue.

          So at the very least, as I lie in bed each morning, hearing the first northern cardinal of the day singing as if it knew that that song would be its last ever, I’ll take a moment to really listen.  For if I did not acknowledge this bird’s efforts, would it then be completely ignored?  I am reminded of the age-old question:  If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?  Imagine a continuous bird song chorus each morning tracking the sunrise the world over, moving from east to west across the continents, shifting each year between hemispheres;  and, wildlife notwithstanding, much of it not heard by anyone.  But the songs are still there.

 

[Audio extra:  On June 13, 2020, from a canoe I recorded the morning songbird chorus in a flooded forest along the Illinois River at Chautauqua National Wildlife Refuge.  To hear the recording, click this link: 

Download Sounds of a flooded forest at Quiver Lake-Chautauqua NWR 13-June-2020 ]

   

 

From a Gathering of Blackbirds

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.