My daughter was six years old and we were spending the winter in Nelchina when I sent the new CD-ROM-equipped computer back to the company. She sobbed as I packed it. The thing was still under warranty, and I had been in line on the toll-free technical support number for hours trying to find out why it stranded itself mid-program, abducted by aliens, lost mid-thought, an ugly gray error message on its face. No one but a recording talked to me on the phone, so I boxed up the parts and pieces and sent them back, promising Kari another computer someday soon. But I understood her tears. She clicked on the word wolf and out popped a howling picture. She clicked snake and the thing gave us a list of options: do we want to see snake eggs or hear a rattlesnake rattle? There was suddenly in our very house access to latitudes and habitats past the end of roads, an instant hot desert or green forest inside the hundreds of frozen pastel miles of our December.
This computer, when it worked, took us to objects and animals we could see, hear, even dimly touch in the virtual skittering of the mouse. Beam me down, Scotty. But encountering this genie-in-a-box for the first time, I could only think of one experience I wanted it to visit for me. Could it play the song of a meadowlark? There was find and there was play, and then here was the little yellow-and-brown-speckled bird, a photo, and here came those seven or eight notes with their impossible intervals, competently recorded but lacking the life of the meadowlark. This is why I did not cry.
My lack of knowledge about meadowlarks is pretty appalling, given my hunger to hear one. The sound of a meadowlark is a very early memory from eastern Oregon where I grew up. For me, the meadowlark’s song is associated with the smell of freshly cut hay, that warm exhalation of breath from the earth. The birdsong has the hot sun and the green smell in it, but somewhere since the childhood moments that formed this memory, the song’s parts have failed to add up, to make sense. Now I hold on to the meadowlark in the hayfield as a moment that made me: my own creation myth. But the meadowlark didn’t come that way, packed with the importance that distance and separation from family and farms and even the dreadful hot days would slowly give it. As with some canonized family story told until memory will no longer support it, I begin to question. The first hay cutting in Oregon is not made until after Memorial Day, and I am not sure if meadowlarks are singing then.
Curious about this once I got the idea of meadowlark back in my head, I called Althea Hughes, who lives up at Gakona and knows a lot about birds. She told me what I thought I knew, that there aren’t any meadowlarks around here, and that they’ve only stumbled into southeast Alaska, far south of us, a few times by mistake. Early in the twentieth century, one was spotted near Craig. As was the custom in those days, the bird enthusiast “took it” the next day to prove to the world he had seen it. A meadowlark’s song, says Althea, is supposed to be more dramatic in the western species than the eastern and is probably associated with their mating and nesting season in the spring, though she hadn’t been able to find any literature that said it was, or that limited the occasions for meadowlark singing.
I’d like to know more about meadowlarks, almost as much as I’d like to hear one. I believe I should know a lot about the things I love, but I often don’t, and sometimes I’m not even sure how I come to love them. Perhaps my first memory of a meadowlark was just sound, then I learned it was a bird singing, then I learned the bird’s name, and so on, detail by detail. Was it luck to be able to say the meadowlark was what I wanted to know about and not the hayfield, to be able to separate them? And was the longing to hear meadowlarks already an ingredient of the first meadowlark song I heard, or does every loved moment grow with loss, as in summer, as in childhood, as in how eastern Oregon was when I heard meadowlarks, as in every story about meadowlarks, all mixing into and appending this longing? Will this kind of desire for lost moments accrete in my daughter around the nervous clicking of a hard drive as it searches for a picture of snake eggs?
I like to think a meadowlark is more “other” than a computer, more unlike me, so that loving its sound is less narcissistic than loving a computer, which is the corporeal form of a human idea. Put grossly, the distinction is between art and nature, art being a human order or vision imposed between what is and the observer of what is. Mathematics, which allows the binary movement to express itself through all the circuitry and logical arrangements I do not understand and which enabled this interactive encyclopedia that so entrances my child, is also an interpretation of our experience with the world and so by this definition is also art. Nature, in this broad dichotomy, is what comes to us without human filter, though there is a sticky little philosophical problem involved: that sensory perception of any kind is already a filter. We can’t get to the world from here, with our Midas touch of mind, so perhaps nature is what doesn’t come to us at all, even though we are nature, too. Perhaps we have to wistfully but resolutely accept nature’s separation from ourselves, as celebrated in the Bashō poem whose first line Robert Bly borrows as the title for a book:
The Morning Glory—
another thing
that will never be my friend.
But most of us have faith that what we touch and see and smell is truly out there, and most people would agree that a meadowlark is nature and a computer is not. None of us can satisfactorily know what nature is, just that most of us must have it in our lives and want our children to have it. I believe I have to go to nature to see a meadowlark, but I am not sure what I have to do to hear one.
One July my firefighting job sent me to western Colorado. On a day off I chased a meadowlark from fence post to fence post for several hundred yards on a deserted ranch road without hearing so much as a peep out of him. At least I thought it was a him—I don’t know much about meadowlarks. A meadowlark pursued by a panting middle-aged woman may not feel like singing no matter what the season, or perhaps the birds don’t sing past springtime, and the summer hayfields have only been tumbled into their song by my untrustworthy KitchenAid bread hook of a memory.
I can’t remember when I last heard a meadowlark, and that is part of the problem. I live where meadowlarks are merely accidental and I go Outside to the Lower 48 infrequently and usually in the winter. So although it seems that I heard a meadowlark with my father in 1987—the last spring he was alive, when he could still drive the van and we went up the Owyhee River to go swimming—I am not sure. I thought I heard one when I visited with Carol Shultz at her ranch the same spring, when the snow was still around her high-pasture fences. Two years before, I went to Idaho in midsummer and worked at the fire center in Boise. I got off shift at three in the morning, so buzzed up from the work that I had to walk around for a while before I could go to sleep. There were hayfields, the smell of them rising with the sun. The meadowlark song is there, tangled with my senses, but its sweetness cuts through these memories, making them unreliable. I am sure I heard a meadowlark by a big globe willow tree on the road between Greenleaf and Wilder, west of Boise, but I cannot imagine why I would have stopped a vehicle on that narrow little highway. Decades past childhood, birdsong stitches me together like a quilt; I do not know fabric from thread.
The sound of a meadowlark, for those who have not heard it, is like whistled lace. It is sweet and sour and piquant on the tongue. Each time I hear one is like the first time I heard human voices in harmony—the joy of it so in the moment that it made a physical hurt in my chest.
We, as human things, can and must go to art to see and hear what we have made of meadowlarks. And art then earns some kind of credit or ownership for bringing our attention to birdsong, which is so unowned as to break our hearts. Art must try to get at the bird, to bring it out from behind the camera or brush or violin or eyes or ears. I believe we should be able to do this part by part—a meadowlark’s song is music, as mathematical as any computer. In some technically perfect future, we may reproduce the meadowlark’s song so perfectly that, like some music, it will return in my mind at unexpected intervals, so beneath thought that I will not remember the moment of its source and will be bowed again by its otherness, beauty, and distance from me. But the computer and the television, even the marvelous nature documentary, cannot at present do this because the sound of the meadowlark only lives in whole moments, sewn into the fabric of walked-through landscapes. The song is inextricable from the story it inevitably becomes in memory. And whatever part of direct experience survives in this memory makes it so superior to any entertainment or education we have planned for ourselves that we are compensated for not being able to hear the bird itself apart from us. What we may make of this birdsong, even longing, is the art that drives us back to nature, that not-art, that thou art.
The Peterson and Singer bird identification books—illustrated by paintings—are superior to the modern Audubon field guides, with their color photographs, because identification clues are stressed in the brushstrokes, analogous to the way literature teaches us to recognize our lives through focusing on details and themes. Paintings of birds teach our eyes to discern the differences among species, genders, and phases, leading us back through the bird in the hand to the bird in the bush. Where we will again be reminded of why we wanted to know.
And that is our nature in nature—to have to try to see what we cannot perfectly see because the definition of seeing is the fabrication of understanding from unorganized possibilities. Art is how we attempt to see, and how we try to get at what we have seen and heard and touched in nature. Art is universal, doomed by definition, and meant to be cherished—not for itself but as the only tool we have to touch the world. I am not puzzled when art turns to art or language turns to language for their subjects; I am only puzzled when I’m told there is no escape from this tail-eating discourse. If I walk outside, the slightest flower that blows reassures me—not that I won’t die, but that I am not the center, and therefore my powerful, wonderful, dangerous eyes will not destroy or encompass the mysterious nature that sustains me.
And then I see the computer as a valiant mimetic tool, useful in the still life of its description and only wrongheaded when I make it the object of my desire to contain the ever-changing meadowlark and its ever-changing idea within me. I cannot have the meadowlark.
Barry Lopez retells a Nez Perce story of how Coyote loses his wife and accidentally ensures dead people will stay dead so that we can never have them back again. Coyote is about to bring his dead wife back, past the dead country’s threshold, but he breaks the rules by looking at her and touching her too soon. He cannot bear not to look at her. He cannot bear not to touch her. Sometimes Coyote is so much like us that I forgive him, though he is the reason that every moment I live is the last time I have that moment. He touches her; she disappears, and the country of the dead disappears, its old friends and flickering fires. Morning comes in this world, and Coyote hears a meadowlark.
For this American Orpheus, memory and a momentary experience intersect on the invisible vertical axis that is our true life—deep rather than long, lyric rather than epic. Though we seem to go only forward and in a line, we live deep and surprising moments at these intersections that are not at our beck and call. I wish to be a servant to such moments, the last one and the next.
In recent years, out in the mixed deciduous and spruce forests of the Alaska interior and so far only in the spring, the varied thrush has helped to heal the absence of meadowlarks in my life, if not the absence of hayfields. A cousin of the meadowlark, the thrush has a throaty, tangled call that keeps you awake in the never-dark of late May. Camping last spring in a small birch grove up the Nixon Fork River with our neighbors and mesmerized by the campfire and the amazing sleepless goofiness of my daughter and two friends, we stumbled off to our sleeping bags at 2:00 a.m., only to be serenaded for hours by our local thrush, directly above the tent, and its answering partner, some hundred yards away. The impact of each close blast of thrush music stunned me half awake. Mysterious cup full, I thought of meadowlarks grown ephemeral and stylized for me in their long silence. With gratitude I relinquished them to the woven story that begins with thrush song and wants to return.
I cannot say what sights and sounds of this world will rive my daughter past what she can know, bring her to faith past all the silly schematics of belief, but I hope that childhood midnight of dying fire and singing bird might be one such moment—remembered but not within mere reach, not even from the perfect digital throat of the future, so that she will have to come outside again and again, drawn through all the made moments she can summon, to the banks of this deep and unruly life.