Is There Method in Your Migration?
[For Josh]
Through my library window this morning, I spied above me several murders. One after another, a dozen crows each, they jagged toward some unknown conspiracy convening somewhere to my north-north-west. They came our way for years, in October-November, until bird flu knocked them from the sky a decade or so back. They must have resurrected.
Taking their hiatus for granted, I had not, in earlier seasons, caught a bizarre peculiarity in their flight plan: On what might have been a lengthy, strength-conserving pilgrimage, they seemed bent on divebombing each other at every turn. Darting in collision, chase within chase, wave after murderous wave. What were they after?
We live beneath a sort of Canadian geese trade wind. Those long-necked honkers cross bi-seasonally, cheering each other in that near-tidy ‘V’ that poets and life coaches celebrate, windbreakers tagging in and out like Tour de France bikers. Not so this morning’s raven murderettes. No team spirit I could discern. Not a flap of decorum I could see. If they didn’t betray the semblance of a general direction I’d wager each blackbird just happened upon the caravan overnight and hitched aboard in search of trouble.
Did you just peck that guy? Is that bird tag you’re playing? Or is all this faux nastiness about elbow room? (If you even have elbows.)
In a blog post last year, I shared how an airport stranger gave me my first Jeffrey Archer novel. As the Crow Flies is about a street vendor who parlays his wooden vegetable barrow into sixty years of unexpected adventure. Was Archer being ironic? When those of us who still repeat that euphemism “As the crow flies,” do we envision something beyond a beeline between two unnavigable points?
Which way is your crow flying?
Are you ‘hearing’ and there-ing, deliberately random, randomly deliberate?
Are you a crow at all, out for some airborne mischief or just a little wing room?
Or Canadian at heart, veering proudly with the ‘V’ Team.
What if crows, like wind, like nuclear particles, like the magnets we suspect birds navigate by, generate energy in collision?
What if the rest of us need a periodic kick in the britches (or peck in the pecs) to keep us juiced for the journey?
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