Years ago, I wrote a column about a heron.
Well, it was partly about a heron. It was about how a certain heron’s return to our stretch of the river heralded summer’s coming end and fall’s approach. It was about how this one huge bird, gangly and goofy on the ground and spectacularly graceful in the air, was our own dependable reminder of the passage of time.
So much for the column. It neither made nor will ever make a ripple on the waters of literary memory, which is certainly no loss to posterity.
But I think of it now with nostalgia — not for the deathlessness of the prose, but for the life it celebrated.
A contractor doing some long overdue repairs at our home a few days ago found a heron near the water’s edge. Fully grown, wings spread, and stone dead.
He said he thought it had been shot.
I hope he was wrong, and am almost positive he wasn’t. I hope something else happened to it, some mercifully quick stroke of sometimes merciless nature, but I can’t imagine what that might be.
The worst part is how easily I can imagine it the other way: Some sick loser, probably drunk or maybe just in a perpetual snit at the world, seeing the heron stalking silently along the shoreline on its morning or evening fishing rounds and finding such a big, easy target too tempting to pass up. Shooting it not for food or even for “sport,” but just for …
For what?
Let’s forget, for now if not for long, the prospect of somebody blasting away in a neighborhood full of families and children and pets.
Let’s just contemplate for a moment the conscious and deliberate act of aiming a gun at a heron on a river bank, and putting a bullet through it.
In “Shoeless Joe,” the W.P. Kinsella novel that gave us the movie “Field of Dreams,” a little boy proudly shows his mother a bird he has killed with a rock. She looks at him coldly: “Now bring it back to life.” He spends the rest of the book in mystical absolution for that bit of thoughtless destruction with one act of supernatural resurrection after another, until he finally reconciles with his long-dead father.
Opie Taylor kills a mother bird with a slingshot and later, under the angry reproach of the normally easygoing Andy, resolves to raise the baby birds to maturity.
Nothing about this heron’s death feels mystical or childlike. This isn’t a backyard in Mayberry or a cornfield in Iowa.
The old chief in “Little Big Man” tells his adopted white son that the native people of the Plains believe everything is alive — not just people and animals and plants, but water and clouds and air and soil and rocks. The white man, he says, believes everything is dead, even people. Even his own people.
You don’t have to share Old Lodge Skins’ racial views to share his perplexity over what looks like a total deadness of soul and spirit.
Forgiveness is a moral imperative of the faith to whose tenets I ostensibly subscribe. Right now, it’s just not happening.
Right now I desperately need to see a heron fly, to hear that startled and startling screech as it flaps its ungainly way up from the water or flushes out of a tree; to see all those awkward first motions turn into that smooth, slow-winged glide as it soars away, its cry receding with distance.
Maybe it’s trivial, in a troubled world, to mourn the death of one bird in this march to mortality we living creatures all share. But that one shortened life gave one small part of creation a little more beauty, a little more grace, a little more simple joy.
Bullseye. Congratulations.
Dusty Nix, 706-571-8528, dnix@ledger-enquirer.com
E-Mail
Print
@Nyx.CommentBody@