From Word To Word

I am not a birder, not in the sense that Dave Humphrey has described in a recent post, where the bird watcher is the one who is always watching.  I need nature to be a little less subtle before I realize that I need to be watching.  This past week at camp, it managed to be sufficiently blunt.

Outside of the main lodge at our camp is a covered pad that we call the breezeway, for the very good reason that it funnels the predominant wind and creates air movement even on the stillest and hottest of days.  This is where people congregate after breakfast to drink their coffee and chat before the day’s programming, which is also often held on the breezeway when the weather is good.  This year, we were joined by a pair of barn swallows that had made their nest behind one of the emergency lights on the ceiling, sheltered from the rain and protected from predators but completely unavoidable to the human population of the camp, even to someone as blind to these things as I am.  Each morning we were treated to the sight of the adults winging between the trees, circling the pillars, and swooping beneath the ceiling as they performed the interminable task of feeding their young.

As remarkable as this aeronautical display was, it was the chicks that I found most interesting, or, more precisely, it was the development of the chicks into fledglings and then into independent juveniles.  I am not sure when they were hatched, but when we saw them first on the Monday morning, they were still just bits of fluff that could be barely seen above the nest.  On Wednesday, they were already sitting the edge of the nest, and there were feathers poking through the fuzz, which would periodically be dislodged by the adults and drift to the ground below.  On Friday morning, the first fledgling left the nest, and all five were flying with the parents by evening, distinguishable from their parents only by size.  When we left on Saturday afternoon, the nest was empty.

What struck me about this maturation process was not merely how quickly it took place, but that it took place in exactly the week that I was there, in a place that I could not avoid seeing every morning, as if it was somehow being enacted just for me.  I felt like I had been made, without any intention of my own, an audience for a performance, but a performance that had nothing of the performative about it, an absolutely naive performance. The performers did not know themselves as such.  Nor did they know me for their audience.  They acted only according to their instinct, but to me, the audience they had unsuspectingly created, they told a story that was more simple and beautiful and compelling than anything I had ever seen on a stage.

In this respect, they were capable of something that will always be impossible for me.  I will never be able to live the performance of my life in this niave and unsuspecting way.  I will always know myself to be a performer.  I will always know that there is an audience, even if it is only myself.  My story will never attain to this kind of simplicity and naivity, however much I may wish to the contrary.  This impossibility ensures that my story, and all human stories, are essentially tragic, ensures that human stories are by definition the only stories capable of tragedy.  Perhaps this is why I was so captivated by the swallows and by their performance, because it was a story that neither invited nor avoided tragedy, but one that was entirely and essentially innocent of it.  No human story can hope for this kind of innocence.