the hand of winter stretched out
his grey gloves and poured snow
out of his pitcher it fell upon the
world in cold numbing waves it
washed away all the colors of fall —

it beat back my favorite lilies into
the hand of white dust like people
are prone to beat one another into
the dust for a sense of self worth. I
don’t understand why winter thinks

he needs to be such a bully he beats
his cold fiercely upon the land blasts
his wailing banshee winds upon the
zephyr and rips remaining leaf missives
from trees with such force they yelp.

_________________________________________________________________________________

To read more of Linda’s verse on WIZ, go here and here.

For late November, Crossfire Creek was running high.  Usually, a few flash floods in October knock things around a bit, then bone-dry air siphons the water off into the sky, leaving the creek bed bare except where beavers have gardened two springs to create a year-round water park half a mile long.  As I stood on the bank above a pond contained behind one of the lower dams, I turned to see a young couple I didn’t know walking toward me down the trail, my neighbor’s Welsh corgi, “Goliath,” loping ahead.  November weather in the Four Corners region sometimes runs to the mild side.  The couple wore short-sleeved shirts and were holding hands as they strolled.  Seeing the dog, I supposed the pair to be relatives of my neighbors whose house lay east of mine across a city block’s worth of pasture.  I greeted them and Goliath.

Upon reflection, I’m tickled at how the couple’s relationship to my neighbors was glaringly obvious to me, not because of any physical resemblance they bore to my neighbors but all because of that small detail of Goliath’s presence.  Had he not been there, I’d have supposed nothing about the couple–certainly not their relationship to my neighbors. Stocky but diminutive Goliath is not a wanderer; I’d never seen him in the canyon before that moment.  His accompanying the couple was probably a considered choice on his part. After all, the surrounding desert is predator-dense.  Plucky as he is, on his own he’d be no match for the coyotes, eagles, bobcats, and the occasional cougar that patrol the desert looking for their next feed.  He knows that. He stays pretty close to home performing his duty of keeping my neighbors’ twenty acres in order in company with a mixed breed named Buddy my neighbors acquired two years ago.  Buddy came with a sister, Precious, but Precious developed a bad habit of chasing another neighbor’s horses.  One day, she took a lethal kick to the head, and that was that.

Seeing Goliath triggered pangs of sadness and envy, not just about Sky’s death. The apparent normalcy and leisure of the scene contrasted with my own life: a young couple, at their ease, loose in the canyon, holding hands as they strolled along, escorted enthusiastically by a dutiful dog.  Because of Sky’s chase-and-kill instinct, I couldn’t bring her into the canyon.  I missed the companionship of a dog in my wanderings.  A dog reveals the landscape in ways you wouldn’t see it were the dog not highlighting with its lively athleticism the surrounding contours. And I hadn’t felt the level of comfort in my married life that I imagined this young couple enjoyed since just before my special needs daughter was born nearly two decades ago.

The couple introduced themselves by way of announcing their relationship to my neighbor–of which fact I was already aware.  I told them I knew Goliath and where he lived.  “What did you say his name is?” the man asked.  “Goliath,” I said.  “I would have never guessed,” he said, looking at the squat, compact dog.

The topic being dogs, I told them my own had died just the night before.  The woman murmured in sympathy.  “How long had you had her?”

“Almost fourteen years,” I said.

“Oh, that’s almost as long as a child,” the woman said, her voice soft.

“It is. In fact, I have a fourteen-year-old daughter,” I said, holding back on expressing my anxieties about her. Too complicated a story.  But I appreciated these strangers’ interest in my grief.

We spoke a few more words between us then I went on my way, heading north on the trail and homeward.  Goliath started following me but the couple called him back.  Just as well. My mind being in the state it was, for simplicity’s sake, I wanted aloneness for the remainder of my walk. I headed up the steep part of the trail that I take to the rim, stopping to sit on a lichen-encrusted stone where I sometimes rest and look back on immature cottonwoods growing along a spring, where also grows, in the summer, wild mint, wild roses, watercress and water grasses, including that ancient, single-stalked plant with telescoping joints, horsetail.  Those young cottonwoods had lost all their leaves, but as I looked at them, a piñon pine standing a few feet away caught my eye.  The November light silver-plated most of the tree’s needles, almost like an ice storm would do.  The low-angled sunshine got into the depths, thinning shade and shadows that usually hang about a tree’s inner branches.  So the piñon stood, well-lit in places, clear to its trunk.  My light-tuned eye savored the shine. I remembered noticing the tree in this state last year during approximately the same pitch in the sun’s angle and wondered if this is the only time of year this particular tree–along with many others, no doubt–is so transfigured. Interesting to mentally map this tree yet again in its same place but at a different spot in the year.

Then I went on my way, satisfied and somewhat soothed by events as they’d happened, climbing the steep wind of the former ATV trail.  I crossed the spring again higher up, just a few feet away from where it plunges off a stone lip and transforms into a thin waterfall whose voice dominates this part of the trail.  Then up an even steeper section where last year I found the Pure Life water bottle .  As I breasted the last rise before the ground relaxed into a gentle slope, a hard gleam of light from a juniper tree next to the trail caught my eye.  Unlike canyon light on the cottonwood leaves, glazing pine needles, glinting on water and hanging about stones, this reflection had a distinctly artificial sheen to it. My mind snagged on it and curiosity sparked.  Did I want to know?

Probably, someone had left a pop or beer can jammed into a fork in the tree, or maybe something else. After a moment, I stopped thinking and simply followed my curiosity, approaching the tree cautiously then circling to the side turned away from the trail.  It took a moment for my mind to register what my eye saw. A camouflage-printed, latched, plastic case hung on the side of the tree opposite the trail, tipped at such an angle that the afternoon light hit it and cast the plastic glare that my eye detected. Oh, I thought, someone hid their camera here while they went into the canyon. Best not to touch. I don’t know why my mind didn’t accept that explanation and leave well enough alone. My hand seemed to reach of its own accord and lifted the case.  A thin twist of wire tethered it to the juniper.  When I raised the case, I discovered a cable running from its bottom and up into the tree.

Awareness dawned: This is some kind of monitoring device. I backed out from beneath the branches the way I ducked in and circled back to the trunk’s trail side.  Now that I knew what to look for, finding the lens peeking from beneath a stringy, mad wig of juniper bark was easy.  I stared at it grimly, looking it straight in its artificial eye.  I felt extreme distaste for its presence in a place that for me has become a sanctuary.  When I was a child, cameras were a relative rarity.  Four decades later, they’ve become prevalent, for good and for ill. The line between “security” and “intrusion” has grown increasingly hazy and is more freely crossed.  I have a unique image which I feel more inclined to protect than I do my written words, for various reasons. I had no idea how long this equipment had been planted in the tree or how often I’d passed it, unaware.

The camera contained no “Property of” statements nor any other way to identify the device’s owners, although its location on the trail twenty feet down from the carsonite sign forbidding the use of off-highway vehicles suggests it might be the BLM’s doing.  Probably, there was no sound device included, just a lens and video recording equipment. So there was no use lecturing the wired tree. But if the camera had been able to read my mind, its lens would have cracked.

I’ve hiked Crossfire since the notorious September 2007 closure of a seven-mile stretch of the canyon to motorized vehicles. Some months, I’ve gone down as often as three or four times a week. I can say with certainty that at this trailhead violations of the 2007 prohibition have been few and far between.  If the BLM had indeed planted the camera (or cameras, since what’s to stop those with a mind to monitor public spaces from installing more devices in rocks and trees) to track offenses, the low and mostly nonexistent number of ATVers who drive vehicles past that point hardly justifies the camera’s constant intrusive presence.  There simply haven’t been that many scofflaws interested in making a statement in that way. In the meantime, plenty of foot travelers, like myself, have passed the camera without knowing we were photographed or noticing the tree’s unnatural eye.  I may be old-fashioned, but in non-posted environments like this one, I think it impolite verging on violative to collect someone’s picture without his or her knowledge or permission. If the canyon were posted as being under camera surveillance, I’d at least have the freedom to choose whether or not to enter it and have my image collected.  In most other public places where cameras collect images for security reasons, their presence is advertised and obvious.  Every time I pull up to an ATM, for instance, I’m aware of the prominently visible camera and I consent to having my presence recorded.  But here in the canyon, I find the use of a hidden and undeclared camera an obnoxious trespass.

Yet on another level, the sentry tree interested me.  It’s another artifact revealing how people have used the canyon for a broad range of reasons stretching back into prehistory.  About a mile and a half up canyon along the north branch of the bottom trail is a (to me) fascinating bridge built over an arroyo to help make the crossing safer for ATVers. It’s part of the “improvements” my neighbors made to the canyon that got them into legal hot water with the BLM. Interested parties, some members of the Great Old Broads for Wilderness included, find the bridge another example of heavy-handed human intrusiveness.  I wouldn’t have built such a structure myself but now that it’s there I find it something of a delight to come across out in the middle of nowhere.  In fact, all over the canyon, scattered across the ground, is a trove of wonder-sparking and telltale artifacts: lithic flakes, pottery sherds, arrowheads, and prehistoric pueblos, fallen down or half-buried.  In some places, they’re just sagebrush-feathered lines of rocks running across the ground or depressions marking the remains of subterranean structures.  There are more prominent, tumble-down towers and other sorts of rubble mounds all over the place. Flat-rock-lined, subterranean cysts dot the trail here and there. Petroglyphs adorn the rock faces.  In a few places, you find modern graffitti carved into the sandstone.  Like swallows’ nests, cliff dwellings and masonry fill cracks and wrinkles in cliff faces. Many of these use juniper and pine support beams.

Cattlemen’s barbed wire fences and gates mark off canyon sections.  In fact, one of the men who runs a herd of cattle in the canyon recently repaired–I would even say “remodeled”–a barbed-wire gate on his fence line that has been prone to collapsing.  He reinforced one of  the two gate pillars with a green, metal fence post and strengthened both posts with taller and sturdier juniper logs, cut, I suspect, from dead junipers another man left strewn about the trail after illegally “topping” them for fence posts.  The rancher strung taut wires between the two, tall pillars to provide tension and support for the pillar logs and wove a juniper branch into the lintel wires so that horseback riders will know to duck when they pass beneath the wires. It’s kind of grand. Then, of course, there are the cattle themselves, present in Crossfire off and on from about October through May every year. Let’s not forget the beavers, who have completely modified Crossfire Creek’s character, changing it from an ephemeral stream to a series of year-round, dam-reinforced ponds, in the process completely altering the creek’s liquid voice.

I’ve heard rumor of an old trail that Ute Indians stamped into the canyon making visits to my neighbor’s grandfather way back when. Crossfire has old mines in it. There are dozens of other signs of human presence, here-and-now and from long, long ago. In the overall scheme of canyon use–especially since its closure, in the political and ideological struggle for rhetorical control of its ground–the camera was just another artifact of human utility. I might even go so far as to say that, like the contested bridge, the camera is an attempt to “improve” the canyon.  But to my taste, it maintains a far more intrusive presence on the trail than does the bridge.

I stood in front of the camera a moment or two, knowing that my discovery of it had become a recorded fact.  I waved to the lens to punctuate that record then left, considering the new dilemma finding the contraption had placed me in. Some months back, one of the neighbors who’d been convicted of constructing the trail asked if I thought the canyon had cameras in it.  I’d dismissed the idea, believing it over the top. Who would go to such trouble, and for so little gain? Now I had hard evidence that the canyon was indeed wired. What were my obligations to my neighbor and to “the truth”?

Complicating the question were a pair of misunderstandings between myself and my neighbors since the canyon had been closed to OHV travel.  Although the Great Old Broads for Wilderness published a victory article announcing their part in documenting the “damage” two of my neighbors had done widening the trail for ATV use, and other groups like SUWA have described their own roles, some neighbors believed I–a recently arrived “outsider”–was responsible for the canyon’s closure.  The narrative for what actions gave rise to what results, including the closure, is still emerging, but I had nothing at all to do with the ATV prohibition.  It was as big of a surprise to me as it was to my neighbors.

The second misunderstanding was more serious.  In the spring of 2011, I discovered that when the BLM began investigating who’d build the ATV trail into the canyon, some community members thought I provided information that led authorities to two of my neighbors, Dustin and Ken.  They were arrested in the fall of 2010 for their work on the trail, fined $35,000 in total for destruction of government property, and placed on probation.  The Blanding community still feels the burn from Operation Cerberus, the 2009 federal raid that rounded up several locals for violations of antiquities laws and that led, at least indirectly, to the suicide of another of my neighbors, a beloved community member. To this day, the town’s anger still waxes hot.  My neighbors’ arrests for their work on the ATV trail made matters worse.  I lived blissfully ignorant of the arrests until I asked one of the neighbors involved what was up with the presence in the neighborhood of all the official-looking vehicles.  He told me, in somber, cautious, but truthful tones that he and his father-in-law were being prosecuted for building the trail.  At the time, I wasn’t conscious of having knowledge that they had built the trail.  Later, I remembered conversations with one of them prior to the 2010 investigation that could well have caused them to think that I did.  At the next opportunity to speak with one of the men, I asked if he had an idea who’d turned them in.  He said he didn’t, and really, he wasn’t interested anymore in knowing. He just wanted the ordeal to be over.  I said, “Well, it wasn’t me.”  He said something like, “I’ve figured that from the conversations we’ve had about all this.”  I told Mark about this interchange, and the next time he saw that neighbor he likewise told him that I had had nothing to do his and his father-in-law’s arrests and convictions.  Mark reported that the neighbor said that he knew that now and had told other community members to “lay off”.

Damned camera.  As if I didn’t have enough on my mind.

I broke off looking into the prying eye and walked home in mixed mood.  I’d been away from the house longer than expected and had to return to tasks waiting there.  It was Thanksgiving, and I had a grave to dig in hard ground for a dog who’d lived perhaps too long.  While I was at it, I might as well lay to rest in that same plot the remains of fond hopes that life would ever turn smooth and serene. Current developments had burst the seams of those old, constricting desiderata.  If I kept trying to force them to fit, they’d only slow me down and eventually choke me into unconsciousness.  They’d almost certainly become delusional, and we didn’t need any more delusions in the house.  By whatever power, we’d been sent into deep layers of life where there are no guarantees of peace and safety, only the incessant call for prodigious effort.

Hang peace and security anyway.  I’ve tasted the lotus blossom of peace. My mind savors it a moment then spits it out in impatience and boredom.  As much of a strain as these events have so far proven to be, clearly, they’re only the opening steps of the journey.  That’s both unsettling to know and exciting. Getting anywhere from here will require loose-fitting clothing and non-restrictive language that allows for free movement and is roomy enough to suit big changes in the ways we see the world.  Rapid-paced technological advances have given the impression that progress just happens as the result of free enterprise, occasional outbursts of genius or perhaps heaven-bestowed inspiration. More compelling advances occur where trenchant events exert enough strain to compel us to abandon ontological settlements that no longer hold up.  Old narrative stances for new–that’s where Mark and I are now, trading up to a world that we hadn’t known existed and whose vicissitudes we’ll perhaps survive if we can get across the wreckage of ideals that we thought we had the right to have and hold.  And making a go of that, my friends, requires better wording–flexible, recombinant, adaptive language by which power we can make something more of ourselves.

.

Contested Bridge in Crossfire Canyon

Camera hidden in juniper tree in Crossfire Canyon

In which I make my way into Crossfire Canyon and meet a wondrous bird.  I muse upon the experience of eye contact with other species, referencing N. Scott Momaday and Martin Buber.  I see the light, loose and free in the canyon–it’s beautiful. Part one here, part two here, part three here.

As I worked my way down the trail, I discovered that my right knee was finally healing from a months-long bout with tendonitis and perhaps nerve damage.  As recently as two weeks earlier I hadn’t been able to raise that leg very high, so I tripped frequently over stones in the trail or fell on my backside on that more difficult-to-negotiate rock outcrop down which I had to lower myself to get where I wanted to go.  But this time, no trips, no falls.  Still worried that I was inviting further trouble, I forced myself down the trail. As I walked onto an overlook I frequent to see what’s happening in the canyon below–whether or not cows are lounging on the trail, for instance–something fine happened.

A mature golden eagle flew across my line of vision, very close and nearly on the same horizontal plane where I stood.  I halted and reached after the bird with my gaze, wondering if it would do something I’ve witnessed several times since I began hiking in Crossfire Canyon.  Knowing that eagles can see our eyes far better than we can see theirs, I maintained eye contact, looking steadily at its head.  The eagle appeared to be fleeing in a straight line angled slightly away from me but then turned in a slow, tight arc and circled back.  I kept still, moving just my head to follow its flight and maintain eye contact.  The bird dropped in altitude and swooped in so closely that I could see its yellow feet and curled toes and talons tucked up against its body.  I heard the “whush whush” of its infrequent wing beats.  The eagle circled six or seven times, keeping me at the center of its flight.  During its last couple of passes, I remembered my manners and removed my hat so that the bird could see my entire face.  After another minute or two of what I supposed to be eagle-style, close-in inquiry, the bird spiraled north along the cliff faces.  It rose above the rim, disappeared, and I was gone to it.

What was the bird’s intention as it regarded me from its wheel in the air, holding me at the hub of its interest?  This episode was the third or fourth time I’ve met with eagles in this slowly turning fashion, eye-to-eye, spinning in an orbit of mutual encounter.  As the eagle left, I felt soothing effects from the bird’s attentions but avoided the temptation to think of it as awareness of, sympathy for, or interest in my suffering. Nature is not sympathetic, like a kind nurse.  It’s ready to make hard use of me at the least lapse in judgment. Were I to fall to my death from the overlook, that same eagle might not hesitate to strip me of morsels of my remains–in particular, those very eyes by which we had spoken. What we’d said to each other I didn’t know, but it isn’t necessary to know.  In The Man Made of Words, Scott Momaday says of pictographs in south-central Utah, “We do not know what they mean, but we know that we are involved in their meaning.” The same is true of those moments of eye contact with other species–an event that occurs more frequently than humans realize because too often we look at other species seeking only our own images. Animals are all the time looking at our eyes to judge our intentions or to express concerns or interest. The philosopher Martin Buber understood something about the quality and intensity of animal eye contact, saying, in his remarkable treatise on relation, I and Thou, “An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.” He goes on to describe what he thinks an animal’s gaze means:

The language in which [the mystery of becoming] is uttered is what it says–anxiety, the movement of the creature between the realms of vegetable security and spiritual venture. This language is the stammering of nature at the first touch of spirit, before it yields to spirit’s cosmic venture that we call man. … Sometimes I look into a cat’s eyes. The domesticated animal has not as it were received from us (as we sometimes imagine) the gift of the truly ’speaking’ glance, but only–at the price of its primitive disinterestedness–the capacity to turn its glance to us prodigious beings.  But with this capacity there enters the glance, in its dawn and continuing in its rising, a quality of amazement and of inquiry that is wholly lacking in the original glance with all its anxiety. [Speaking of the cat] … The animal’s glance, speech of disquietude, rose in its greatness–and set at once.  My own glance was certainly more lasting; but it was no longer the streaming human glance (pp. 96-97 in the 1958 Smith translation).

Animals as small as hummingbirds and lizards have engaged my attention by way of their gaze touching mine.  I wouldn’t presume to fix and so impose myself upon the meaning of such encounters, but I do know that during that moment of contact, fleeting though it may be, that creature and I are involved in something. In the case of this eagle, were I dead and my eyes fixed, its interest in them would be of a different and, to our thinking, brute nature. But we were both alive, looking across at each other, the eagle aloft in its element and I rooted in mine.  I’ve seen, I think, how golden (and bald) eagles display anxiety.  They catch sight of you and rise quickly into the air well out of the reach of both your weapons and your eyes.  I don’t think this most recent encounter had anxiety to it, though there might have been a tension between us, an uneasiness braided up with the magnetism of curiosity.  And though the eagle’s interest was not sympathetic, I might risk calling it “considerate” in the primary sense of the word “consider”–”to contemplate”–and maybe, too, in its possible root sense of searching the constellations (sider, sidus) to determine position and calculate direction or to glean intimations of other kinds of relation from circling fields of stars.

The eagle gone, I returned to the trail and continued down, pausing now and then to watch the few leaves remaining on cottonwoods ripple in cool breezes running up-canyon. The low-angled, late November light flickered sharply on the trees’ scale-like leaves like sunshine on wind-ruckled water.  When cottonwoods sport their autumn regalia–full coats of yellow, heart-shaped leaves all a-flutter in the wind, sunlight flowing over the tree like firelight over gold–I feel a spike of pleasure, hard to contain.  Something about how cottonwood trees’ leaves glitter when they’re all stirred up with breezes puts my mind in a prickle.  Even when the trees’ plumage is sparse and turning brown, like it was that day, there’s a kind of native beauty to how sunlight and currents of air play around the largest of Crossfire Canyon’s trees.  If I had not needed to portion out my time, I could have spent an indefinite amount of it standing there mesmerized on the trail, lost in the light fantastic of wind-shimmied cottonwood leaves.

This time of year, mid-morning light, wide-angled as it is, shines with brief intensity.  In only a few hours the west canyon wall would sheathe the sun.  A shadow would begin to form on the stone, almost as if seeping from the rocks.  It would lengthen, darken, spread toward the ground. A chill would set up in the shadows while the east wall and its talus slopes and bench remained brilliantly lit, the stones seeming to stand up on their shadows and the juniper and piñon pines taking on a polish, a forest of glowing detail and eye-straining intricacy.  Winter dusk that falls early upon low ground in late fall and winter will gradually fill the canyon wall to wall, while up on the mesa daytime blazes away a few hours longer.

But at the hour I was there, autumn light glazed both of the canyon’s sandstone faces.  Just at the rim, the ripest blue sky, a broad vein of turquoise bluest were it appeared to just touch the skyward stones and the canyon’s tree-line fringe.  I’ve never, ever gotten over the color of this planet’s daylit sky–that blazing blue.  It has never grown old. And here, at the November sun’s downward slide toward winter’s solstice, that cool but deep blue went in at the eye and provoked a physical response, a warmth that ran deeper than a blush, throat-down into the upper chambers of my chest.

To read part five, go here.

It’s here I pause with each December, where
the snow-trimmed walls of timeworn brick align
beneath the windowsill and winter’s bare
limbs bend beneath a delicate and fine

glossing of frost. It’s here I garner all
my thoughts of months gone past, beside the sheers
and yellow paisley chair. A woolen shawl,
a pearl and knit of smiles and raveled tears,

is wrapped around my shoulders. Nothing speaks
but morning’s melting icicles and wind
that steals the breath of graying skies. The creek
is frozen into timelessness and thinned

with dying grasses every shade of brown.
I take my stock of daisies dried and pressed–
my verses, scratched impetuously down–
time balanced here on its mid-point of rest.

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Karen Kelsay has been published in a variety of journals including: The HyperTexts, The Flea, The Raintown Review, The New Formalist and 14 by 14 Magazine. She is the editor of Victorian Violet Press, an online poetry magazine. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

How ugly you all are,
An all-over ugly!

Iris bulbs unearthed and scythed
Of top leaves,
I lay your twisted, tuberous
Bodies across a gutted paper sack
And take a moment to grimace
At your grotesquery.

Dirt clings to your stringy reaching roots.
Not even warm water and bleach
Can pretty the rough hide of your skin.
Poor horrid hags!

But wait—don’t droop,
Shrivel dry in shame.

For I know your secret.

You keep it like a locket,
Or maybe a pearl,
Deep in the water of your flesh—
A tiara of petals, jewels of silk,
A blush pressed within paper wings.
Each spring, you rise
Slim-necked as swans and slender-leaved
To curve rainbows into blossoms.

Yes, majesty resides in these lumps,
These commoner dumplings—
Children of the coronet.

Who would guess such a spectacle
But those who’ve already seen
The princess curled within the peasant—
The goddess in the hag flower.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah E. Page graduated Cum Laude from Brigham Young University with a B.A. in English in 2007 and is pursuing her Master of Science and certification in Secondary English at Southern Connecticut State University. Her poetry has been published in Noctua Review, Mormon Artist, Inscape: A Journal of Literature and Art, and included in the anthology Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-First Century Mormon Poets. When not scribbling novels or taking pictures of the ragged aster and other weeds running rampant in her garden, she enjoys getting lost on long walks in the Naugatuck State Forest.

After the electrical storm
rattles the windows
and spikes the sky ocher

and I go out in the dark
to douse the garden hose
superfluously watering the roses

a shock
to be blinded
by moon
full in the face
in the closed corridor
at the side of my house

and it is clear to me
like cool white fire
the you I know
still glows
in dark somewhere

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To read Paul Swenson’s bio and more of his poetry on WIZ, go here.

Photo by Bresson Thomas.

*This is, of course, a variation on the common adage to “make like a tree and branch out,” and the less common adage, used primarily among canines (the dogs, not the teeth), “make like a tree and bark.” Puns about leaves will not be tolerated.

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Professor Percival P. Pennywhistle despises children and loathes nature, which often gets on his shoes and under his fingernails, but he recognizes that both are important enough to be addressed, and so he writes poetry and other things for children, some of it about nature. Bits and pieces of his work can be found here, and he can also be reached on Facebook and via email at pennywhistlestop@gmail.com. The poems published on WIZ come from Poems for the Precocious and Alphabet Stew: Poems in a Particular Order. Other projects in development include Mythiphus, Me Grimms and Melancholies, Kid Viscous and the Mysterious Substance, Jonah P. Juniper and getting Ben Crowder to be his illustrator.

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To read Sonnet Mondal’s bio and more poetry, click here.

Like most folks, my husband, kids, and I greet spring’s arrival with relief.  The relaxing of winter’s grip, the first crack of color between sepals clutching flower buds, the sun’s liberating warmth all lighten the load my family balances gingerly as we carry it through winter’s dimly-lit cellars.  But as daylight’s gold, pink or orange borders stretch from their winter proportions to become a mazy, five in the morning ‘til nine-thirty at night field of shimmer and electrical storms, we pay particularly close attention to a tweak in light that occurs around April’s third week.  At a certain change of pitch in the sunshine’s angle and intensity, hummingbirds return to traditional nesting sites in our southeastern Utah neighborhood from snowbird resorts in Mexico.

Three species of hummingbirds frequent our feeders during the summer: black-chinned, broad-tailed, and rufous.  The black-chinned birds arrive earliest, weeks before the other two species.  Perhaps because they’re here earlier and leave later than do the rufous and broad-tailed birds, the black-chins become quite familiar, granting wondrously close contact for a wild species.  We provide them sugar water. In return, they put on Punch-and-Judy-style performances around the feeders.  Beyond that, they instruct us in the finer points of animal communication systems.  ACSs are an intriguing topic, and I’ll explore what hummingbirds have taught me about them in another post.  This post is about how to free a hummingbird from your house should one happen to fly inside.

As spring temperatures warm up, our black-chinned population becomes hyperactive.  It isn’t unusual for the greatest number of black-chins to show up at our feeders for their pre-torpor toddies just before sundown, with a few contemplative individuals lingering on the clothesline strung around our deck to gaze at the sixty-mile view as twilight falls.  The more birds that arrive during hummingbird happy hour, the more furious the territorial displays, with hummers zinging about like bullets at the OK Corral.  During the day, we prop open our front and back doors to cool the house or invite in fresh air.  But in late afternoon and early evening, when dueling reaches peak intensity, we sometimes discover that some high-velocity bird-fight has bumped a flying ace inside the house.  I’ve removed several birds from the house over the five years we’ve lived in their domain, two birds so far this spring.  All rescues to date appear to have been successful, though I always worry with these light-as-a-feather creatures that any help I try to give could go horribly wrong.

One evening in mid-June I was working in the garden when my husband and two kids came out to tell me that a hummingbird had become trapped in the kitchen skylight, where the birds often wind up when they fly in one back door or the other. The kids had a butterfly net and wanted to know if I thought that a good tool for sweeping the bird from the skylight and bringing it outside.  Generally speaking, small nets and winged creatures are a bad mix.  I went upstairs and asked the kids to find the flyswatter, but it was not in a ready-to-reach spot, and looking at the bird, I could see it felt panicked and exhausted.  It was either a female or immature male black-chinned hummer—hard to tell the difference, young males and females bearing such close resemblance.  Its bill opened as it panted and it banged its head repeatedly against the heavy plastic bubble of the skylight—to its eye, the only seeming path to freedom.  I asked for the net and a chair.  Climbing onto the chair I raised the net and tilted it so that its metal rim brushed against the feet of the bird.  Previous experiences handling a white-throated swift and insight gleaned from other hummingbird rescues have suggested that birds have a perching reflex.  In the case of a frantic hummingbird trapped in a skylight, if you touch its feet gently with a wire or metal rod having the diameter of clothes hanger wire or the wire handle of a flyswatter, the bird will often stop flying and perch on the wire.  This provides it some respite as well as enables you to get it into position to remove it from the skylight trap.

It took my coaxing the bird to perch four or five times before it stayed long enough that I could catch it.  I prefer to catch trapped birds with my hand, but before I describe how that happened, I’d like to explain why catching a hummingbird by hand is risky business—for the bird.

Male black-chinned hummingbirds average around 3 ¾ inches long crown to tail tip and weigh approximately 0.12 ounces, about the heft of one-and-a-half pennies, with female hummingbirds weighing slightly more. By comparison, another spectacular migratory flyer and cousin to the hummingbird, the much larger white-throated swift, sports a wingspan between 16-18 inches with the whole bird weighing a mere 1.6 ounces.  How such near-weightless creatures row hundreds of miles of airspace—which in the Southwestern U.S.’s springtide include very rough and prevailing wind currents—is one of the great prodigies of nature.  When we admire Canadian geese flying overhead in the spring, long necks outstretched, broad wings paddling the air sturdily, plump bodies seeming far more capable of sustaining long-distance flight, we find it easy to accept that they’ve come hundreds, maybe a thousand miles or more.  They look built for it.  Some pennyweight hummingbirds travel as far as Canadian geese.  While in some ways hummingbirds appear barely there, once you know something about their migratory habits, it’s clear that those little bodies pack a lot of fire.

Another prodigy of creation, the human hand, while bearing in its bone articulation of arm, wrist, palm, and fingers some resemblance to the skeletal structure of birds’ wings, works on mechanics closer to those of birds’ feet in that a human hand can exert a grip and a bird’s wing can’t—unless you count how their wingtips appear to handle the air and wind currents as they fly.  But birds’ feet can and do grip (hence the perch reflex).  Human hands have a far less powerful grip strength than that of an eagle’s foot and talons. Still, studies of and medical or professional standards for the average grip strength of men show it to run around 106 pounds of pressure, with women’s average grip strength measuring around 70 pounds.

NASA’s requirements for grip strength of U.S. Air Force personnel, including air crewman, is quite a bit higher than what’s thought average for the population at large. NASA’s standards relegate to the 5th percentile that 106 pound average grip strength for the general male population.  A right-handed grip strength of 134 pounds is the mean for Air Force male personnel, and a really powerful grip in the 95th percentile runs around 164 pounds—a crusher.   Left-handed grip strength for men is 96 pounds in the 5th percentile, 124 on average and 154 in the 95th percentile.

For women Air Force personnel, grip strength in both hands averaging 58 pounds is ranked weak, with 73 pounds being the mean or 50th percentile.  87 pounds of grip strength is 95th percentile for women.

For a woman, I have large hands.  My open hand’s span from thumb tip to the end of my little finger measures 9 ¼ inches.  The length of my hand, from the bottom of my palm to the tip of my third finger, is 7 ½ inches.  Despite my being middle-aged, my grip strength is probably somewhat above the women’s average of 70 pounds of pressure that some studies and standards report to be average for the general population, especially in my right hand—the hand I use to feed my disabled daughter.  For years, that right hand, via pinch grip, has squeezed rigid plastic cups to squirt into my daughter’s mouth the liquid diet we feed her.  Years and years and years of three times a day pinch-grip exercise—my strength in that hand might have a bit of a crush to it.  And since I’m right-handed, that hand would probably be the one I’d use to try and tackle a hummingbird.

But consider a hummingbird’s 0.12 ounces weight and 3 ¾ inches length in a human hand as large as mine with a grip or crush strength of 70 pounds or higher, and perhaps the danger to the bird comes clear.  If out of excitement I close my hand too quickly or too hard around that featherweight body or simply overestimate how tightly to restrain the bird, my hand will do it terrible harm.  Furthermore, in order for a bird to breathe, its sternum (breastbone) must have freedom of movement to rise up and down.  Given human hand strength, suffocating or injuring a hummingbird by hand will be only slightly more difficult than harming a large sphinx moth, some species of which display flight behaviors similar to hummingbirds and run near to the same size.  And an injured or badly frightened bird is at risk of dying of shock—just like we are.  The bird in my skylight already and obviously showed signs of being quite stressed.

When the trapped hummingbird perched on the net’s rim long enough that I could catch it, I happened to grab it with my weaker left hand, very quickly, very lightly. Later, I realized that my left-handed catch possibly reduced, maybe only by slightly, chances of injuring the hummer’s delicate wings, organs, or skeleton.  Right away, I stepped off the chair and headed for the back door and out onto the deck.  The deck is roofed, so I went to the edge where there was clear view of the early evening sky.  I opened my hand flat and within half a second the bird righted and flew nearly straight up into the sky to reorient itself.   When it swooped down, it became engaged right away in another chase as one of the males spotted it and came to teach it its place. I hoped that the trapped bird’s being swept up in a familiar social ritual so quickly after its frightening ordeal in the house might have helped it feel safely back in a natural situation.

Here are a few tips for freeing trapped hummingbirds.

1. Don’t use a net to catch a trapped hummingbird.  Nets have enough play that a struggling bird may do itself injury.  Or if the bird becomes too badly tangled, you might injure it as you try to disentangle it.

2. If a hummingbird becomes trapped in your house in broad daylight, lower the blinds over the windows and open all doors to the outside so that the bird can see and read currents of light that start running through the house the moment you open the doors.  Hummingbirds are smart about light—their migratory behavior is intertwined with the sun’s movement.  Most will figure out that a skylight, despite how it appears to frame open sky, is a false lead.  They’ll look for other possibilities and try following the light currents flowing through open doorways, freeing themselves from your house without your having to touch them.  That would be the best way to help a trapped bird.

3. If a hummingbird becomes trapped in your house in the evening, it’s harder to get it to fly out on its own because open doors might not admit enough light for a frightened bird to discern light currents that it can follow.  Then you might need to catch it with your hand.

4. If you must catch a bird by hand, use a very light, loose grip—just tight enough to prevent the bird’s struggling while you get it outside.  Try to hold it most securely on its sides and think to provide enough space in your grip for the bird’s sternum to move up and down so that it can breathe. Otherwise, you run the risk of crushing or suffocating the bird.

5. Try to avoid lingering over the feeling–if you get it–of having such a vulnerable and wild creature in your hand.  Try to avoid taking time to wonder over the beauty of the bird.  Hurry and release it as soon as you are able to get it to a location where it can see the lit sky and fly safely.

6. Though it’s hard to resist, try not to get too curious.  Refrain, if you can, from examining the bird. Especially don’t hold it near your face to look at it.  Hummingbirds are very aware of faces—humans’, other animals’, and other birds’.  Eye contact affects them strongly.  Also, animals that spend much time around humans have made the connection between our hands and our mouths.  They know that many things that our hands grab go into our mouths, and since they feed by mouth themselves, they’ve got some idea of how that food-to-mouth function works.  Some of our hummingbird neighbors buzz around our hands as we pour nectar into the cups, drinking as we pour.  Probably, those birds are at least vaguely aware of the connection between our hands and their mouths.  In spite of their seeming frenetic, attention-deficit-like behavior, hummingbirds pay very close attention to you when you’re around—including to the movements of your hands—so I think there’s more reason to suppose that a hummingbird enclosed in your hand feels fear than there is to assume that it doesn’t.  When you examine or admire it or sentimentalize over its appearance or condition you prolong its elevated heartbeat and other harmful effects of fear.  For a hummingbird, the human hand can prove a more threatening trap than can a skylight.

7. Don’t expect a released hummingbird to thank you for saving it, though it almost certainly has learned something momentous from the experience it’s had with you. If you’re at least as smart as a hummingbird, you’ve probably learned something, too.  That provides meaning enough for the encounter.

For many of us, there are ways in which releasing a grip and freeing a bird is a more psychologically and spiritually vital choice than is the act of closing a hand around a bird to restrain and rescue it. If you wind up having to hand-rescue a hummer, try to be attentive to how rapidly your brain and hand transmit information back and forth while you have the bird in hand.  Sensations, emotions, and thoughts that you rarely have or perhaps never have had before may shoot head-to-heart-to-hand like lightning bolts.  They could prove seductive and get a hold on you. The trick is to avoid making the rescue about what you feel from handling the bird.  What’s best for the hummer—releasing it as soon as possible and not indulging in the rush of having it in hand—could also prove liberating for you, especially should you become caught in the grip of your power over the bird. Opening the hand and freeing it helps you to see the bird, hummingbird culture generally, and life’s broad spectrum as something you’re a contributing part of instead of experiencing the capture as an interlude of intimacy over which you hold control.

The mechanics of the hand and its genius for grasping have developed tendons and ligaments at every tier of human life, including in how we think. How many commonly used words carrying the meaning of “understand,” like “comprehend” (com, “with” or “jointly” + prehendere, “to grasp”) are etymologically anchored in the concept of grasping or holding on?  (Hint: Lots.) Consciously springing that gripping mechanism can help us opposing-thumbs folk wing free of those pesky skylights in the mind.

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Photos by Saul Karamesines

Sorry it took so long for me to find you, OMK.  Best wishes for a sustainable presence in the Web.