Mike Bates Murres Can't Dance

Vol. 12 No. 2

As the pandemic deepens, on some days the Andersons are the only voices besides Melville and NPR in my head. As I make my way through Melville’s cavernous sentences, the sounds of the Anderson children splashing, shouting, and whining by day are replaced by the tinkling of wine glasses and what sounds like lovemaking in the hot tub by night—dear God no more children.

Inscription Carolyn Adams

By now it is clear that Mr. Anderson runs the show. He is in charge of the equipment. Mrs. Anderson is his helpmate in his home building projects. He instructs her on how to drain the hot tub and hose the deck. She must be his second wife; no first wife would put up with so much mansplaining. What deal was struck with the devil, that Mr. Anderson took on the role of the shepherd and overseer of the family, and Mrs. Anderson the patient listener?

By August, I hear a tinge of anger in Mrs. Anderson’s voice. Is it the beginning of rage? Will it lead to a showdown?

My therapist once gave me a book about women who, seemingly without warning, leave their husbands after years of marriage. The husbands all had the same incredulous reaction, “I just asked her to make me a sandwich, she got up, picked up her purse, and walked out the door.”

I want to yell, Run, Mrs. Anderson. Just run. Run while your legs are still strong enough to carry you, run before you boil over, run before you end up in a made for TV movie.”

I've been caught up in a bad soap opera. Not one authentic word coming from the other side of the hedge. Everyone is playing their part, every line scripted, a parody of a happy life. Why don’t I believe all this happy togetherness? Why is it my version of hell? Why am I waiting for this happy family to implode? Has the

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pandemic turned me into a misanthrope? Certainly, the Andersons have. One day I surprise myself by shouting out loud, “I want none of your happy shallow life Andersons, none of it.” There was a moment of silence on the other side of the fence, as if they were considering what I said, before the cacophony began again.

Brady and Bethany are growing taller. When they jump high on the trampoline, their heads pop over the hedge and they smile at me with frightening toothy grins.

In the end, I exact a double-edged sword type of revenge. I adopt Fergus, a corgi that barks at nothing and howls at the moon. He ruins the Anderson’s most intimate moments, and mine too.

Mike Bates

Murres Can't Dance

The murres returned to the rock yesterday.

You know, that species of marine bird often referred to as the penguin of the northern hemisphere, the common murre? And that massive intertidal monolith, the looming hulk of basalt rising some two hundred thirty-five feet in the shape of a French haystack above the Oregon coast that serves as a marine rookery during the summer months?

Those birds returned to that rock yesterday, and the spectacle was magnificent.

I’ll admit there may have been a time when my response would have been the same as yours, somewhere between “say what?” and “so what?” To hear the common murre described with reference to the beloved penguin might very well be a disservice to penguins as far as I was concerned. The common murre might look a little bit like the penguin all dressed up in a cheap imitation of black tie, and it might dive deep beneath the ocean surface for food, just like the penguin, but everybody knows that murres can’t dance.

Pop culture notwithstanding, the common murre can do something a penguin can’t. The murre can fly, if you want to call it that. They’re not exactly aerodynamic, and their narrow wings have to beat furiously just to keep the silly birds airborne. Think hummingbird, and you start to get the picture. But where hummingbirds are highly maneuverable, the murre, not so much. The murre’s neck is long and its tail short, so its wings give the impression in flight of being set back on the thorax, behind the bird’s center of gravity, as though pushing the bird through the air rather than providing lift.

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CIRQUE

The murre seems to have one speed in the air, fast. It’s a dead sprint whenever one of them launches from point A to point B. And since point A and point B are very often the same place, the nest — or what approximates a nest in the murre world, when they’re at the rookery, the only thing you tend to see of the silly birds during the summer months is one or two or three individuals, and sometimes the entire bloody colony, launching themselves for a madcap dash out from the rookery and after a wide, torturous loop, a madcap dash back in again, one, two, maybe three times before returning to the nest in a touchdown that resembles something between a controlled crash and a “seat of the pants” landing.

Let’s just say you won’t see many Hollywood executives lining up to make a feature length movie any time in the near future about a misunderstood common murre with happy feet attempting to find his place in this bewildering world. It’s just difficult to get excited about a species of bird that can’t dance, doesn’t fly very well, and, I might add, makes a mewing call when it’s in the rookery that sounds rather like a cat in heat. But something happened to me this past year that would change all that, a couple of things if I’m honest. I found myself anticipating the return of the murres to the rookery this spring with all the eagerness of a celebrant awaiting a papal mass. And when they finally made their appearance, those plump, little birds with stubby wings and a grating call didn’t disappoint. Their return took on all the pageantry of a biblical epic, something like the exodus of God’s chosen people out of Egypt, their forty years of wandering the wilderness, and their crossing of the Jordan River into the Promised Land all rolled into one, all of it with the pomp and circumstance of a Cecil B. DeMille blockbuster.

In May last year, in the middle of lockdown, I had what’s known in our culture as “a moment.” I won’t bore you with the gory details, except to say that, for me, the experience was transcendental. One minute, I was outside on our deck soaking up the bounties of spring, the sights, the sounds, the fragrances, and physical sensations of life returning to the coast after an extended slumber. And the next, I found myself in the embrace of an intention that seemed to me in my state of euphoria to connect

everything on this planet as both a means to an end and the end itself. I refuse to call the experience religious, given the obsession of religious leaders in our country with the myth of American exceptionalism and the preoccupation in some of our houses of worship with politics as a tool to force God’s hand on the timing of the “Second Coming,” and I’m hesitant to acknowledge that it might have fostered even a shred of spirituality in my life. There are far too many people purporting to speak for a “higher power” these days, when the most I can claim is I had a personal and intimate encounter with nature. The only thing I’m prepared to say is I found myHigh Tide self occupying all my senses afterward, that all important gift of sight I’d relied upon my entire life, often to my detriment, together with hearing and smell and those tactile faculties, touch and even taste. I was a child, again, immersed in a world of color, sound, fragrance, and texture as enchanting as if I had been experiencing it all for the very first time. Even something as fundamental as breathing, the simple act of exchanging gases in the lungs, old for new, would become a journey of discovery as cool air would enter my lungs with a sensation of alacrity and spread with an invigorating jolt to every nerve ending in my body. And the birds as the loudest, most gregarious, and hardest to ignore visitors to our little corner of the world, after tourists, of course, particularly the birds of the rookery, would come in for my scrutiny. The things I would see, hear, smell, and feel over the next six months would begin to change my perceptions of birds, all of them, not just the murres. It was more than just that convenient metaphor of a marine rookery for the human condition, that familiar insanity of thousands of individuals going about their lives within the boundaries of a geographically confined community. I would observe among the birds of the rookery acts I could only interpret in terms of those higher human virtues, fidelity, nurture, persistence, cooperation — among species and between them, and courage, as well as acts suggesting those petty human vices, anger, distrust, and selfishness. *

Matt Witt

Vol. 12 No. 2

I might have been a little bit suspicious when I saw a group of northwestern crows engaged in a bit of slapstick if I hadn’t been introduced to that peculiar ethology as a child watching Looney Tunes. But I started to become intrigued after watching a gull venting its kidneys, quite literally, on an eagle after chasing the eagle down for the pleasure. And I was almost convinced when I heard a song sparrow compose its mating call from the collection of peeps, pipes, pips, rolls, twitters, chirps, whistles, and clucks in its repertoire of musical elements. But I wasn’t sold until I saw a pair of house finches engaged in a public display of affection, touching beaks in the tree just off my deck like a pair of love birds — an impression reinforced a couple of days later when I interrupted the pair in the throes of a lover’s quarrel.

The more I watched the birds, the more convinced I became that they’re not so very different from us. And the more I recognized in their behavior, the more I wanted to watch. I was caught in a cycle of operant conditioning, proof of that article of faith that one must love the imponderable to understand it only to find in the process of understanding that one has grown to love it all the more. Over those short months of spring and summer last year, I convinced myself that birds of the Northwest Coast, and in particular the birds I saw nesting out on that rock were capable of a range of behaviors I attributed to consciousness, including empathy, play, adaptability, and affection.

All of them, except those ridiculous murres, if I ignored their similarity, whenever a bald eagle appeared, to the denizens of QAnon reacting with agitation to each new conspiracy theory involving that cabal of devil worshipping pedophiles running the country, the deep state within the deep state within the deep state, or something like that, from the basement of a Beltway pizza establishment. And even the murres, I suppose, when I tried to reconcile their peculiar routines in the rookery, in particular their tendency to launch themselves from the rock at random intervals and race in circles around the rookery with a viable survival strategy. Common sense would suggest the silly birds should have been conserving calories for the trials ahead, just like every other creature of the wild when they aren’t nurturing their young or foraging for food. And yet there they were, every day, several times a day through the spring and summer, taking a mad dash or two around the rock as though they had nothing better to do at that moment than stretch their stubby wings with a bit of exercise after a day caring for the kids.

Spring would arrive late this year. After a string of bright, warm days in late February, the weather turned cooler, again, and by cooler, I mean downright frigid given the high humidity of the coast, and a stiff breeze blew down from the north almost every day. The rookery would remain unnaturally still well into April.

Even those ubiquitous gulls seemed to be taking their own sweet time, and a good many of them winter within sight of the rock. A handful had taken to roosting on the rock around the middle of March or soaring above it on that cold north wind. More would join in a slow trickle through the last two weeks of March and into April, and by the last week in April their numbers had reached critical mass, a full complement of western, California, and ringbilled gulls, hundreds of them roosting upon the rookery, or soaring above it, or shuttling off to their favorite sashimi bar for a snack of herring or sardine and their favorite stiff drink, sea water, shaken, not stirred.

But those goofy common murres, they were all but missing in action. Apart from a couple of brief appearances, they were conspicuous by their absence. They showed up a couple of times in February and March to fly around the rock in their usual state of confusion. Then after an hour or two they’d disappear to whence they came somewhere out there in the water beyond the rock to do whatever it is the crazy birds do when they think nobody is watching.

I’d been down at the foot of that rock as early as the first of April in years past for the local observance of “Hands Across the Sand,” the global day of activism in support of our oceans. Just two years ago, the air was so full of nesting murres that a tufted puffin I might have been watching when I should have been projecting my intentions in a global moment of silence couldn’t make its way back to the nest through the flak. It has been disconcerting the last several summers to find adult murres washed up dead by the dozens, victims of malnutrition through those critical months at the nest as the forage fish, herring, sardine, and anchovy, on which the birds rely for sustenance, have moved farther out to sea with the rise in the surface temperature of coastal waters.

It wasn’t until the last week in April that we were able to get back out on our deck, my wife and I, with the aid of blankets and a space heater. I was pleased to learn through my trusty binoculars that the murres hadn’t traveled far, not more than a quarter mile from the rock, floating out there just beyond the surf. But their absence from the rookery had become a personal obsession, by then, and I spent the week speculating whether the murres might be trying to tell us something, as the canary in the coal mine,

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so to speak, about anthropomorphic climate change.

Then, yesterday, dawn broke under a thick blanket of mist. The sky cleared about noon to reveal a fine spring day redolent with life and resplendent in warm shades of green and blue. I joined my wife on the deck in shorts and shirt sleeves, a glass of iced tea in hand, and my Audubon guide in my pocket for those all-important distinctions after months of indolence between a northwestern crow and a standard crow, or the pelagic cormorant with the curious white patches on its flank and the Brandt’s cormorant, or even a male Swainson’s thrush and a female song sparrow.

I’d wandered indoors mid-afternoon to refill my iced tea when my wife called out, “come quick; you gotta see this.” I rushed out with her summons to see the murres rising from that black slick parked out there beyond the rock. At first, it seemed the birds were content to tease themselves from the water, as though pulled from it in strands that would break of their own weight as they lengthened. Except that these strands consisted of birds, silly murres to be precise, not twined fiber, wings beating in their furious way as they circled above the rest of the flock.

One strand rose, and then another, and then a group of birds, and then the whole crazy flock; what was left of it in the water by then, lifted en masse to form a dark cloud on the horizon. Half struck out south in a wide loop clockwise to the west, and the other north in a wide loop clockwise to the east only to splinter into smaller groups that separated in every direction as they approached the rock. Within seconds, the airspace around the rock was filled with the crazy birds to an altitude of a couple hundred feet above the surf and a radius of a quarter mile. My wife would speculate there were hundreds of them, thousands, and she might have been right. I’ve never seen so many birds in one place at one time.

No sooner had the murres splintered than a couple of strands met head-long along the northeast exposure of the rock, at the point two hundred feet above the surf where the basalt wall pivots inward. One strand of birds making their approach counter-clockwise from the south and east turned back on themselves in a hairpin maneuver I would have thought impossible for those clumsy little birds while the other strand making their approach clockwise from north and west shifted direction up and over the rim as momentum of near collision carried birds from both strands to the summit where they hovered like angels teetering on the head of a pin.

The entire sequence felt like more than just your ordinary murmuration, that instinct of birds to mirror each other in flight. I could have sworn there was intention in their movement, purpose in the apparent chaos, as though some master choreographer found a way to express the order of nature with the apparent confusion of a thousand screaming murres. The implications were almost too much for my fragile senses after the cold, dark months of winter. It was good to be back out on the deck again attempting to commune, through the murres of all things, with that intention I’d encountered in my moment of transcendence.

The weight of the procession would begin to carry the birds over the summit after little more than a couple of flaps of their inadequate wings, and they spilled down the sheer drop on the southwest side elevation. As more birds gathered at the summit, that trickle would become a steady stream, as the murres tumbling from the summit formed eddies in its wake that spread out in the air above the base of the rock. I couldn’t tell you whether every murre out there made that short jaunt up and over the summit, though that was my impression. My gaze was diverted by the commotion developing in the sliver of space a hundred feet high and a couple of hundred yards square right in front of us between the deck and the rock.

When I attempted to focus on individual birds, I could just make out patterns in the confusion, circles of swirling energy, or parts of them at any rate zipping around in front of me in three dimensions. If a murre here or murre there, or a lot of murres here or there, left the circle they were in or flew across the motion of the circle they were in — into the path of another circle, that seemed to be okay. Since so many of the birds seemed content to break rank,

CIRQUE

Low tide: Sea Foam and Basalt (first appeared in Ilanot Review) David A. Goodrum

Vol. 12 No. 2

it was easier just to pull my gaze back a bit and take in the entirety of it, hundreds of crazy murres darting about like charged particles forming a part of the organic whole.

The effect was mesmerizing, the energy, contagious. The movement evoked celebration, not rote. Those birds were caught up in the moment every bit as much as I was. Each and every one of them seemed conscious of its own small role in the spectacle, willing participants in a solemn observance, a pilgrimage, perhaps, to that altar where it had begun for most, if not all those birds when they were brought into this world. It was a pageant, a procession, a joyful expression of gratitude before the existential act of reproduction, a supplication of thanks to that intention that binds life together as means and end, and a prayer, perhaps, that the season would usher in a new generation of birds.

And they weren’t done yet, those murres, not by a long shot.

As quickly as they’d assembled out there in the first place or reformed into a procession for their assault on the summit, the murres were at it again. A change of direction here, an adjustment of elevation there, the reassignment of birds from one group to another, and all a sudden the murres had reorganized themselves, this time into a half dozen circles arranged in what felt like holding patterns in the airspace around the rock.

From the corner of my eye, I noticed movement again along the northeast elevation at the point where the birds had just made the ascent to the summit. When I looked in that direction, I saw a clutch of a couple of hundred murres hovering at the point where the wall pivots inward. As I watched, twenty to thirty birds separated from the clutch and landed where the slope flattens, and then almost as soon as they’d landed, launched again to fall like rocks until their stubby wings established enough lift to carry them back to the staging area while another group of murres flew in to take their place.

Just then, one of the bald eagles that has taken up fulltime residence along the coast happened to make his first appearance of the day. As the big, bad predator lumbered across the quarter mile of open space between its forest aerie and the rock, its cold eyes surveying the chaos for opportunity, the gulls put up the alarm, and the murres scattered to the four winds — most of them at any rate. But those stubborn murres were a persistent bunch if nothing else. No sooner had the eagle departed, its victim twitching in its talons, than they began to regather from wherever it was they’d scattered to resume where they’d left off. Within minutes, murres could be seen shuttling on and off the rock again, determined, I figured, to complete the last leg in a ritual that for me had taken on the gravity of a year-long pilgrimage from the rookery and back again.

The sequence would repeat itself several times over the next hour or two. The eagle would appear, the alarm would go up, and the murres would disperse in a panic only to regroup as soon as the eagle had departed at the point where they’d left off. I’d already had enough. Two, maybe three, minutes had passed from the time the birds had first stirred themselves from the water to the time the clutch had positioned itself in front of the rock, and another ten minutes before they assembled again after the eagle appeared. It might as well have been two or three hours as far as I was concerned. I was exhausted. I mean, who can say for certain how time passes in those moments of rapture or whether it passes at all?

We would share a libation or two, my wife and I, hers viticultural, mine herbal, careful to check back in with the birds from time to time to confirm our good fortune. Afternoon softened into evening. The sun continued its relentless descent into the sea. The temperature cooled as the light of another day in paradise faded to dusk. I retired for supper certain that I understood the common murres just a little bit better.

It’s accepted fact that birds don’t have souls, or some nonsense to that effect. To impute an act of worship from the operation of blind instinct, and not just worship, but devotion to some nebulous intention that sounds suspiciously like the Earth mother, Gaia, why that’s preposterous, right? You might as well come out and say it; you’re thinking I’m just another one of those crazy Democrats, a liberal — a socialist if the popular invective is correct, a tree-hugger, and a vegan, no less, one of those whack jobs who thinks nothing of pushing his elitist views on real Americans happy to look the other way if it means they can purchase what they want when they want it without thought for the environmental cost — though I’m inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt if you’ve managed to read this far.

You’re probably right, not that it matters, not anymore. I’m beyond caring.

This morning, I woke to see what looked like murres nesting up there on the rock. I grabbed my trusty binoculars and rushed out onto the deck. Sure enough, there they were standing upright on the rock, shoulder to shoulder, three to four rows deep like good little soldiers, on every patch of open ground not already covered by beach grass or occupied by the gulls. The murres are back, those remarkable little birds, and I couldn’t be happier.