Week 7Spring Week 7
In the green morning / I wanted to be a heart. / A heart.
—Federico García Lorca, “Ditty of First Desire”
Tennessee’s Lost Cove, a hidden nook on the Cumberland Plateau, is one of the most biodiverse tracts of land in this country. Its more than five thousand acres are home to some of the last remnants of virgin forest on the Plateau—oak, hickory, maple, buckeye, tulip poplar, sourwood, basswood—and a number of rare plants, including some that grow nowhere else. It has long been a refuge for Haywood and me, too, but it became especially beloved during the pandemic: a place where we could be alone, a way to give our sons some time away from us.
When we borrow our friends’ cabin, we fill their birdfeeders and sit in their porch rocking chairs. We watch vultures and hawks riding thermals in the sky. Haywood keeps hoping to explore the trackless cove someday, but I worry about stepping on a fragile, irreplaceable snail or lady’s slipper. I am content to sit on the porch and listen to the crows calling to one another from the tops of trees so tall it’s impossible to see them among the branches.
Like the rest of Tennessee, the Plateau is now stricken by regular droughts, and my friend is always concerned about the birds. “Please keep an eye out for the pileated woodpeckers while you’re there,” she will text before we head up the mountain. “I haven’t seen one since the drought. I’m worried.”
Often there is no sign of a pileated, but on one visit in the midst of the breeding season, I heard their unmistakable cry. I was determined to get a picture to send as kind of a thank-you gift, but the bird kept eluding me. Pileated woodpeckers are gigantic, one of the biggest birds in the deciduous forest, and they have distinctive red crests, too. How hard could it be to find one when I could hear it perfectly plainly?
Very hard.
I began to leave the dog on the porch while I searched, though Rascal is offended at the very idea of being left behind when I am heading into a forest full of intoxicating scents.
For three days, I walked up and down the nearby paths, several times a day, without so much as a glimpse of my quarry. Then, early one morning, I startled a woodpecker busy yanking big hanks of wood out of a long-downed tree. In an instant, before I could register anything more than his unmistakable red crest, he was airborne. With a kind of stupid awe, I watched him fly away. Absorbed by the grace of his undulating flight, I never thought to reach for my camera.
This will make me sound like the worst sort of crank, but here is the truth: the only reason I carry a cell phone is to have a camera in my pocket, ready to record something extraordinary. I can’t see the point of taking selfies. This pronouncement is surely an irony coming from an essayist, someone who keeps her finger on her own pulse for a living. As a writer, I err toward earnestness, but I’m at ease with this particular irony. The visible world is astonishingly, heartbreakingly lovely. Why waste it looking at myself?
On the other hand, what good is having a camera in your pocket if you don’t take it out in the presence of something wild and beautiful and rare? I stood that morning, motionless, while the most primeval of all the woodland birds disappeared into the forest. I walked out of the woods with not a single image to commemorate the encounter.
I was angry with myself, trudging back toward the cabin, but it wasn’t long before I began to reconsider. Even when it is pointed in the right direction, a camera has a way of stunting sight. How truly valuable is a device that makes you take your eyes from an experience so momentary you might miss it altogether? I saw a magnificent pileated woodpecker that day in the woods. I am grateful I didn’t miss it.
While I stood there, stunned, my camera still in my pocket, a group of whitetail deer galloped through the trees at a full run, close enough for me to see their bobbing tails go by but so well disguised I had no idea of their number. And darting among the golden seed clusters at the tops of the elms, goldfinches were feasting, so exactly matched to the flowers that I never saw a single bird. I didn’t need my camera—I knew them by their call.