Week 13Summer Week 13
The remnants of the hurricane arrived days after we understood it was coming. Even a direct hit on the Gulf Coast means that the worst of the weather will take a while to get to us in Tennessee. We knew it was on the way, but we did not fully grasp what it would bring: ten inches of rain overnight, two tornadoes, outmatched rivers and creeks, roads submerged in the runoff. Rain was coming in through the tops of our closed bedroom windows, and Haywood and I spent a good part of the evening moving furniture, tying back curtains, and setting lasagna pans on ladders to catch the blasting water. Tornado sirens always make me wish our house had a basement, but even with the sirens going off for hours, I was glad we didn’t have a basement to fill up with rain that night.
Out in the pollinator garden, the young ruby-throated hummingbird who had claimed our feeder kept steadfast watch over his personal nectar source. The rain was blowing horizontally, but he clung to his perch and simply shook off the raindrops from time to time, shivering and ruffling his tail feathers. Male ruby-throats don’t have that telltale scarlet gorget until after their first molt, so I knew this territorial fellow was hardly more than a baby. He had never attempted the long migration himself, and no hummingbird lore had told him to fatten up for it. But the days were growing shorter, the slant of light changing, and so his body had signaled him to feed as often as he could. Any day he would start flying south.
I don’t tend to anthropomorphize the creatures in my yard—partly because I find their alien ways so interesting, and partly because thinking of them in human terms only makes the constant tragedies feel more tragic—but it can be hard for me not to see them as metaphors. I watched that hummingbird hunched down in a cold rain, resolute and undefeated, preparing in his unconscious way for a journey whose dangers he couldn’t predict, and I thought, “I should be more like that.” Flexible, adaptable, untraumatized by change.
And then I thought, “Stop it. Nature is not a sermon.”
What I imagine is happening in the minds of the creatures in my yard is merely that, an act of imagination. I am guessing. I am projecting from my own experience, an experience that is entirely unlike the hummingbird’s experience.
Then I opened the newspaper to find a front-page story about the wildfires that had earlier engulfed East Tennessee. A federal review had identified a calamitous failure of imagination as a chief reason for the fire’s deadly magnitude. “It was simply impossible for the park and first responders to imagine and react to this combination of conditions,” said the wildfire expert who led the review.
That’s when I understood: imagination isn’t necessarily a wrong-headed way to encounter nature. I took my cup of coffee to the window, where a steady rain was still blowing. The little hummingbird sat unmoved at his perch.