Night Vision

Headed to my first social gathering in months I passed a mob of day-trippers, their cars crammed into roadside lots and illegally parked along the risky shoulders of 101. People were walking from their vehicles toward Short Sands; some wearing facemasks, some carrying surfboards, mostly pale-skinned urbanites looking seriously determined to hit the forested stretch of beach. All seemed starved for some semblance of normalcy.

Peak season always leaves our coastal communities dazed and abused. This year was worse, by orders of magnitude. Covid-weary tourists were initially grateful for the reopening of local amenities, but crowds became increasingly perturbed at safety protocols. Trash piled up, mailboxes were pilfered, firewood stolen. Public restrooms got so nasty that some workers refused to clean them for double the pay. Toilet paper speckled our great outdoors, along with spray-painted tributes to vainglory.

Back in March I hoped the summer sun would lighten our load, provide temporary relief from the pandemic. Sunshine did lift spirits, yet it was coupled with more civic discord and frazzled nerves. Want for wellness is evidenced in weekly routines, with supply chains and public services weakened by shitty support for essential workers. Systemic racism and brutality provoke destruction and ongoing conflict. In fretful moments it feels like America is spiraling toward mass ruination.

As the sun-tide ebbs, I’m hopeful our coast will become less loud and frenetic, reclaiming space for people to rebalance. That’s the usual rhythm, though the footprint of tourism is expanding, and less air-travel combined with remote schooling could extend this growth. Plus a new wave of retirees and second-home settlers is rolling in from places experiencing social and environmental upheaval.

Even if calm returns, not every north coast resident welcomes the recurrence of long nights and short gray days as much as I do. Many struggle with seasonal affective disorder, vitamin D deficiency, predisposition to colds and flu, plus lethargy from diminished exercise. And now there’s covid.

With the world in tumult, on many fronts, this year’s transition toward the dusky months adds layers of worry. We need medicine to help us navigate the darkness.

North of Falcon Cove I spotted the body beside the road. I turned around, parked, and carried the ruffled cadaver beyond the maul of traffic. Those huge half-lidded eyes seemed aware of my presence, like glossy obsidian discs. Apparently the death had happened just before I arrived.

Nearby I spied a discarded pack of cigarettes, opened it and shook a few granules of tobacco over the animal as I sang a song.

I’ve encountered plenty of roadkill. Coyotes, deer, rabbits, squirrels, mink, birds, frogs, newts and other animals. Sometimes, when I’m not in a hurry, I move them to prevent further damage. Once, at a rest stop in North Dakota, I paid my respects to a Red-Tailed Hawk. Another time I bore the remains of two coyote pups into the state forest adjacent to our farm.

This was the first time I’d ever crossed paths with an owl — specifically a Barred Owl (Strix varia), so named because of patterns on their breast, belly and flank. I’ve long thought of these quilled creatures as “Bard Owls,” because that’s how I first heard their name and I come from a long line of unorthodox spellers. These creatures are in the same family as the owl who whispered wisdom to Athena-Minerva, mythical patron of poetry, handicrafts, and strategic civil defense. Whenever I hear them that relationship hoots in my mind.

Carefully I wrapped the body in a clean cloth towel. I felt moved to carry the owl with me to an event organized by a friend who’s familiar with the medicinal forces of nature. A dozen people were meeting in his backyard, on the edge of Astoria. Our host, a playwright, had reached that liminal place in his writing where he needed to hear the script spoken by a cast. So he called friends together. The play’s rite-of-passage theme, and my experience of reading it aloud with others, reminded me of the ritual roots of theater.

Most of the participants were strangers to me. I learned that some knew our host and his spouse by way of their shared participation in the Sundance and other indigenous ceremonies. A few folks lingered after the reading, and I brought the owl from the car. As we admired the bird’s beauty I kept focusing on those remarkable legs, covered with tiny grey feathers that looked like fur. While people spoke I touched the talons.

My question was what should be done with the remains. I learned from the group that their ceremonial elders associate owls with death, and so keep them at a safe distance if possible. One person shared a story about discovering a dead owl and being advised in a dream that same night to bury it. Our host held the same general view.

Yet among these gracious thespians I felt no hint of the uneasiness one associates with bad omens. There was nothing like the kind of paranormal drama said to accompany the incautious mention of a certain play by Shakespeare, for example. Everyone was relaxed and affable. In fact one actor spoke lovingly of the creature as a relative. Another referenced traditions in which owls play key roles, rumored to flip the switch of societal power. “I’ve heard that working with owl medicine can shift the status quo for good or evil,” she said. “Big change, like Donald Trump.”

Her words conjure up a popular scene from MacBeth, especially a made-for-mature-television version produced in 2010. That particular production seems apropos, wherein the lead figure is cast as a Stalinesque strongman, and the fateful trio who foretell of his rise to tyranny sport uniforms of institutional authority. I’m imagining an updated script in which the fates leave the stage in order to usher their beastly brew to audience members. With cultic zeal they intone the ingredients — each eye of newt, tongue of dog, and last breath of humanity — all scraped off the wheels of our social order.

I’ve never seen my playwright friend paint with macabre colors. I like his plays the way they are, surreal without being fearful. Though he keeps owls at arms length, he walks a line I imagine is well-travelled by owlish allies.

Kind respect was all I felt from new friends gathered around the corpse. Two things happened as I sat cross-legged. First, I knew the right thing to do was take the body back to the forest, fully intact. What was needed was simply to honor a life that ended because of mindless traffic. Second, I felt washed in a cool wave of connectedness. The sensation was a refreshing contrast to the hot summer sun, not a feeling that made me shiver at all.

After dark, Jennifer and I entered the woods near where the owl died. She stood by as I placed the body in a natural earthen grotto, unburied amid a tangle of logs and spreading ferns. It seemed like a good place, unlikely to be found by any human.

“Some people believe owls are harbingers of death,” Jennifer observed. “Yet this owl is the one who died.”

I sang quietly while scattering tobacco — a short service, five minutes max. The next evening Jennifer and I listened to the first winged bard we’ve heard in a while, calling from evergreens close to home.

Such formalities over roadkill may seem silly to folks who ridicule sensitivity, a fashionable habit in certain circles. Dismissiveness and contempt is often directed at people who care about the ways we tread upon the planet, how we treat the least among us. Pleas to improve our collective behavior are deemed a weakness by these players, even a threat to consumption and the pursuit of profit.

Good words help counter bad-mouthing. So I compose prose-poems in my mind while tossing slugs to our hungry ducks, watching blood drain from drakes in the killing cone. In my world it would be cowardly not to take stock of such slayings that connect with our domestic economy.

Also I think about owls as I observe the weedward trajectory of mice flung from traps I baited with sunbutter. Often the little corpses are caught in a tragic pose, but sometimes they look restful.

This morning I found a juvenile mouse in the pantry, fallen from a distance that to humans would be a five-story building. Still alive, one of her/his tiny inflamed legs remained caught in my trap. As I carried the creature outside, she/he looked up at me with bright black eyes and tried to crawl up my arm, never biting. “Adorable” is the best word I could think of to describe this furry one; the same word came to mind with the owl. It can be an ominous word that takes courage to use, sometimes. I sat the relative down in the grass and went to the greenhouse to get our hand hoe, recollecting the quick maneuver I learned in biology lab.

Maybe what we two-leggeds fear most isn’t death, but the submerged iceberg of remorse that perches in the path of our violence. By turning our empathy off we become ravenous brutes who devour life’s web of relationships. Humanity will only survive by retrieving our lost grief — through fellowship, mending safety nets, collaborating with gifts of science and art. On a personal level I’ve stopped eating as much meat and am studying up on humane traps, imagining the catch-and-release of mice in the forest, far from human dwellings.

In 1820 a celebrated thinker wrote “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” Apparently what Hegel meant by those words is that men only come to understand the formative logic of our actions at the close of a historic age, in hindsight. To me that sounds like we don’t know what we’re saying until we reach the end of our sentence. Hegel could have just as credibly proclaimed that it’s only during mankind’s moon-time that privileged white noblemen are able to gather in our red tent and philosophize about the month’s chores.

Dude penned his metaphor about Minerva’s owl — a mythic creature he only knew through indirect acquaintance — during a time of great transition when industrial machines replaced human labor and manufacturing became concentrated under corporate control. To convey his opinion Hegel probably used a quill, which went into decline two years later, due to the mass-production of steel pens. Today we tap at keyboards and scurry about the internet, sharing words through social media riddled with click-bait from traffickers and trolls.

Nightfall may indeed offer us 2020 vision to reflect on what often feels like the end of days. Perhaps big-name leaders and pundits will launch new armed convoys of thought. Maybe future audiences will quote them as much as we do Shakespeare.

Yet bards come in all shapes and sizes. Many go unnoticed, some shunned. If we pay closer attention, I bet little bits of backyard wisdom would help bring balance to everyday life. That would increase humanity’s chances of a meaningful future.

Insight is not simply summoned by studying the textbooks of history, for this exercise always omits important details and context. Knowledge also comes from our deep ongoing connection with creation. It gestates in the awareness of every moment we inhabit nature’s womb.

Revelation is endless, and owls can be mighty active at dawn.

– for Keyaho Rohlfs