by Brian Doyle
But I bet someday the word will come back. I bet one day a woman will be walking along the creek and when her child asks the name of the creek the mother will open her mouth and inside her will still be the kid down the street she once was and out will come the name of the creek again, salty and wet and amazed.
Raptorous
I have been so hawk-addled and owl-absorbed and falcon-haunted and eagle-maniacal since I was a little kid that it was a huge shock to me to discover that there were people who did not think that seeing a sparrow hawk helicoptering over an empty lot and then dropping like an anvil and o my god coming up with wriggling lunch was the coolest thing ever. I mean, who could possibly not be awed by a tribe whose various members can see a rabbit clearly from a mile away (eagles), fly sideways through tree branches like feathered fighter jets (woodhawks), look like tiny brightly colored linebackers (kestrels, with their cool gray helmets), hunt absolutely silently on the wing (owls), fly faster than any other being on earth (falcons), and can spot a trout from fifty feet in the air, gauge piscine speed and direction, and nail the dive and light-refraction and wind-gust and trout-startle so perfectly that it snags three fish a day (our friend the osprey)? Not to mention they look cool, they are seriously large, they have muscles on their muscles, they are stone-cold efficient hunters with built-in butchery tools, and all of them have this stern I could kick your ass but I’m busy look, which took me years to discover was not a general simmer of surliness but a result of the supraorbital ridge protecting their eyes.
And they are more adamant than other birds. They arrest your attention. You see a hawk and you stop what minor crime you are committing and pay close attention to a craft master who commands the horizon until he or she is done and drifts airily away, terrifying the underbrush. You see an eagle, you gape; you hear the piercing whistle of an osprey along the river, you stand motionless and listen with reverence; you see an owl launch at dusk, like a burly gray dream against the last light, you flinch a little, and are awed, and count yourself blessed.
They inspire fear, too—that should be said. They carry switchblades and know how to use them, they back down from no one, and there are endless stories of eagles carrying away fawns and foals and kittens and cubs left unattended for a fateful moment in meadows and clearings, and falcons shearing off the eyebrows of idiots climbing to their nests, and owls casually biting off the fingers of people who discover Fluffy is actually ferocious. A friend of mine from the Oregon forest tells of watching a gyrfalcon descend upon his chickens and grab one with a daggered fist as big as my friend’s fist but with much better weaponry, then rise easily into the fraught and holy air while, reports my friend with grudging admiration, the bird glared at him with the clear and inarguable message, I am taking this chicken and you are not going to be a fool and mess with me.
I suppose what I am talking about here is awe and reverence and some kind of deep thrumming respect for beings who are very good at what they do and fit into this world with remarkable sinewy grace. We are all hunters in the end, bruised and battered and broken in various ways, and we seek always to rise again, and fit deftly into the world, and soar to our uppermost reaches, enduring with as much grace as we can. Maybe the reason that so many human beings are as hawk-addled and owl-absorbed and falcon-haunted and eagle-maniacal as me is because we wish to live like them, to use them like stars to steer by, to remember to be as alert and unafraid as they are. Maybe being raptorous is in some way rapturous. Maybe what the word rapture really means is an attention so ferocious that you see the miracle of the world as the miracle it is. Maybe that is what happens to saints and mystics who float up into the air and soar beyond sight and vanish finally into the glare of the sun.
An Leabharlann
One time I was in Connemara, that tiny remnant of the Gaelic kingdom that once ruled all the green rocky sprawl of the Irish island, when I finished the books I had brought to read while traveling, and realized, with a start, that I was well and truly screwed as regards reading material, for I had already read the books my companions had, one of them twice, and the cottages where we were staying had nothing whatsoever to read, not even old magazines, so I wandered off in search of the local library.
This turned out to be a small cottage with a small librarian and a sweeping view over the sea behind it—“Bertraghboy Bay,” said the tiny librarian, “which is supposed to mean yellow sandbank according to what’s in your guide books and such, but it doesn’t mean that at all, and in fact means something more like a great place to find the oysters. Names mean more than the words that compose them, you know. But you know that, as a literary man. No, I am afraid we do not have any of your books, but yes indeed, if you send them to me we will happily shelve them, although where to do so is a mystery at present, as you see. We are sold out, as it were, in the matter of shelf space for books, and given the parlous state of the economy, and the ruinous political management of the district, I cannot imagine that money will be miraculously found for the expansion of the library system. But having too many books is a happy problem, is it not? Because the books do wander out every day, and most of them come back. I used to be much more fidgety about retrieving them from those who kept them too long, but I gave that up years ago, on the theory that if it took some fella in Errisbeg longer than a lady in Crumpan to read such and such a book, well, then it took him longer, and as long as he did return the volume eventually, all was well. Here and there someone would lose a book, twice into the waters of the bay, but almost always a new copy would appear somehow, and to be honest it seems to me if a book goes into the bay it’s a good death for the book, and surely we owe the bay a bit of thanks after all it’s given us, don’t you think? Not to mention there may be a well-educated lobster tribe down there, and good for them.
“How did I become a librarian? Well, now, I’ll tell you, and it’s a strange bit of a story, for I think it all began with the very word itself. I was just a bit of a boy with not a word of the imperial English in my head when my grandfather first took me to the library. It wasn’t this building, no, it was a smaller one, someone’s old cottage, as I remember, and it was no bigger than two crows standing back to back. I remember as we walked up to it my grandfather said, with real respect and reverence, an leabharlann, which is the Irish for the library, and the way he said it, slowly and gravely, has never left my ear. To him and so to me it was a holy word, a sacred word, a crucial word. Your library is where the community stores its treasures. It’s the house that imagination built. It’s where all the stories that matter are gathered together and celebrated and shared. It’s exactly like a church, it seems to me. People come to it communally for something that’s deep and ancient and important beyond an easy explanation. Who you are as a town is in the library. It’s why when you want to destroy a place you burn down the library. People who fear freedom fear libraries. The urge to ban a book is always an urge to put imagination in jail. But in the end you cannot imprison it, just as you cannot imprison the urge to freedom, because those things are in every soul, and there are too many souls to jail or murder them all, and that’s a fact. So a library is a shout of defiance too, if you think about it: dorn in aghaidh an dorchadas, a fist against the dark.”
The Bullet
Here’s a story. A man who was a soldier in the American army in Iraq tells it to me. A friend of his, one of his best and closest friends, was nearly pierced through by a bullet fired by a sniper. The bullet entered the friend’s upper right chest, just below the collarbone, and plowed almost through to the back, just below the shoulder blade. American surgeons removed the bullet and discovered it was a 5.56-millimeter cartridge manufactured in Lake City, Missouri. The Lake City Ammunition Plant was founded by the Remington Arms Company in 1941. Today it is operated by Orbital Alliant Techsystems, which averages five billion dollars in sales annually and earns an average of about half a billion dollars annually. Half of the one hundred biggest weapons and ammunition manufacturers in the world are Ameri
can companies. Orbital is one of these. Orbital sells 1.5 billion rounds of ammunition a year to the American army and to the armies of other nations around the world. Some of that ammunition is lost or stolen or shuffled clandestinely to all sorts of revolutionaries, criminals, gangs, and thugs, including some that call themselves freedom fighters or insurgents against economic and cultural imperialism, though in many cases they are actually fighting to impose their own chosen form of oppression and tinny empire on the people they live among, people whom they are not averse to slaughtering for advertising reasons.
So let us review: an American soldier, age twenty-two, is nearly pierced by a bullet made in America, sold for a profit in America by an American company that makes half a billion dollars a year selling bullets and other weaponry to armies all over the world. The vast majority of the companies that make a tremendous profit every year selling bullets and weaponry all over the world are American. Most of them are publicly traded companies in which many other Americans are heavily invested. So the bullet that nearly pierced an American boy, a bullet that caused him enormous pain, a bullet that permanently affected the use of his arm and shoulder, the bullet that cut a scar on his chest he will wear until the day he dies, was made in America, by American workers, and paid for by American investors who profited handsomely by the sale of the bullet that executed its purpose by punching a hole the size of a quarter almost all the way through a boy from America.
A 5.56-millimeter bullet can penetrate fifteen to twenty inches through “soft tissue”—soft tissue meaning, for example, a boy. The bullet is “prone to yaw,” which means that it skews easily from a direct path, and it is also liable to fragment at what is called the cannelure, a groove around the cylinder. When a bullet fragments on delivery, the fragments slice and tear and rip and shred everything in their path, including bone. A 5.56-millimeter bullet can punch nearly half an inch into steel, and punch right through a bulletproof vest, and punch right through a human being of any size and shape and age and nationality and gender and religion and sexual orientation and combatant status, or not.
Rarely does a writer speak bluntly, ahead of time, to people who will type furious outraged insults in the comment section, after his article is posted, but I will here and now.
Dear outraged shrieking lunatic, you who are about to lecture me on how this was just an accident, and how it’s a necessary part of the capitalist system, and how I am clearly a yellow liberal pansy: Are you only stupid, or are you insane? What part of all this makes sense? What part of all this is not about profit? Why should America be the biggest weapons dealer on earth? Why do we lie about how this is directly linked to murders all over the world, and how our own kids suffer and die from American weapons and ammunition? Is profit share more important than the lives of uncountable thousands of people all over the world who die from our weapons and ammunition? Are there no other products that all those American employees could possibly design and manufacture? Really? Have you ever been nearly pierced through by a 5.56-millimeter bullet? No? Then how do you have the unmitigated gall to say anything to me, you pompous ass?
Fishering
In the woods here in Oregon there is a creature that eats squirrels like candy, can kill a pursuing dog in less than a second, and is in the habit of deftly flipping over porcupines and scooping out the meat as if the prickle-pig were merely a huge and startled breakfast melon.
This riveting creature is the fisher, a member of the mustelid family that includes weasels, otter, mink, badger, ferrets, marten, and—at the biggest and most ferocious end of the family —wolverine. Sometimes called the pekan or fisher-cat, the fisher can reach three feet long, tail included, and weigh up to twelve pounds. Despite its stunning speed and agility, it is best known not as an extraordinary athlete of the thick woods and snowfields, but as the bearer of a coat so dense and lustrous that it has been sought eagerly by trappers for thousands of years—one reason the fisher is so scarce pretty much everywhere it used to live.
Biologist friends of mine tell me that Oregon has only two “significant” populations of fisher: One in the Siskiyou Mountains in the southwest, and the other in the Cascade Mountains south of Crater Lake. All the rare sightings of fisher in Oregon in recent years have been in these two areas. In the northwest coastal woods where I occasionally walk, biologists tell me firmly, there are no fishers and there have been none for more than 50 years.
I am a guy who wanders around looking for nothing in particular, which is to say everything. In this frame of mind I have seen many things, in venues urban, suburban, and rural. While ambling in the woods I have seen marten kits and three-legged elk and secret beds of watercress and the subtle dens of foxes. I have found thickets of wild grapevines, and hidden jungles of salmonberries, and stands of huckleberries so remote and so delicious that it is a moral dilemma for me as to whether or not I should leave a map behind for my children when the time comes for me to add to the compost of the world.
Suffice it to say that I have been much graced in these woods, but to see a fisher was not a gift I expected. Yet recently I found loose quills on a path, and then the late owner of the quills, with his or her conqueror atop the carcass staring at me.
I do not know if the fisher had ever seen a human being before. It evinced none of the usual sensible caution of the wild creature confronted with Homo violencia, and it showed no inclination whatsoever to retreat from its prize. We stared at each other for a long moment and then I sat down, thinking that a reduction of my height and a gesture of repose might send the signal that I was not dangerous, and had no particular interest in porcupine meat. Plus, I’d remembered that a fisher can slash a throat in less than a second.
Long minutes passed. The fisher fed, cautiously. I heard thrushes and wrens. I made no photographs or recordings, and when the fisher decided to evanesce I did not take casts of its tracks or claim the former porcupine as evidence of fisherness. I just watched and listened and now I tell you. I don’t have any heavy message to share. I was only a witness: where there are no fishers, there was a fisher. It was a stunning creature, alert, attentive, accomplished, unafraid. And I think maybe there is much where we think there is nothing. Where there are no fishers, there was a fisher. Remember that.
Tyee
I have been writing too many condolence letters lately. I am using the same sorts of words and the words have become husks of what they used to be. Like the people I am writing about. Who are there on the page, illusory but adamant. Good thing for ritual. How else could we say anything without saying anything? Could it be that most of what we say aims at something other than what we say? Could that be? We use words so casually, such flow and fluidity and panache, but what we want to say are the rocks in the stream, the occasional brilliant bird, the serpentine mink, the lugubrious heron, the drowned ancient fungus-riddled salmon. I am writing about tyee, the great chinook, the king of fish, and he held adamant behind a boulder for a while as he began to dissolve and now his time has come and he slips away and I type this to his widow using words like my most sincere sorrows, and she knows and I know what I mean. But, for a moment, all I see on the page is the weary dignity holding in the pool.
Everyone Thinks That Awful Comes
by Itself, But It Doesn’t
I know a guy whose wife fell in love with another man. She told him about it first thing in the morning on a summer day. She then went to start the coffee.
What did you do? I asked.
Just lay abed, he said, listening to her puttering in the kitchen. Everyone thinks that awful comes by itself, but it doesn’t. It comes hand in hand with normal. No one talks about this. You’re watching the basketball game when the phone rings and you find out your grandfather didn’t wake up this morning. At the scene of the terrible car crash there’s a baseball glove that fell out of one of the cars. The awful is inside the normal. Like normal is pregnant with awful. We know this, but we don’t talk about it. A guy has a stroke at his desk, but no one knows
because he has the door closed, which everyone takes as a sign he’s on an important call. I just lay abed. It wasn’t heavy, like I couldn’t move or anything. It wasn’t dramatic. I was just listening. She got the coffee ready and I shuffled out and we had coffee and didn’t say anything. No words came to mind. That’s another thing no one says—that when you are completely shocked and horrified and broken and aghast, you don’t actually rage and weep and storm around the house. Or at least I didn’t. Maybe some people do. But I don’t think so. I think probably most people are like me and just continue along, doing what they were going to do. I took a shower and got dressed and went to work. My brother says I must have been in shock, but I don’t know about that. I mean, I was shocked, sure I was. But I think it’s more that there had been a terrible car crash and I was noticing the normal. It was a Saturday, so the kids were sleeping in. I go to work on Saturdays, so I went to work. Lovely day, one of those days when you see dragonflies all day long. Dragonflies are very cool. People think you look for metaphors after something like that, but I think we just keep walking. That’s what I think. I mean, of course I thought about stuff like should we get divorced and how could she fall in love with another guy and how come she fell out of love with me, but mostly I thought about the kids. Sometimes I thought about the other guy, but not so much. I did wonder if we could ever get it together again, but not too much. I went to the bank and to pick up a suit at the tailor. I had a hard few moments there, because the tailor gave me an envelope with the stuff that had been in my suit pockets. This was my best suit, so I wore it for dates and weddings and wakes. There were a couple of Mass cards from funerals and wedding invites, but also there were two tampons just in case she needed them, and a photo of us at a wedding on the beach, and a ring our daughter had given me, one of those rings that you can make whistle. That ring nailed me. You would think it would be the photo of us beaming on the beach, but it was the ring.
