ONE HOT SUMMER night, I was lying on the bed next to the window, which I had opened so I could enjoy the ocean breeze and listen to the waves. As always, Wesley was chattering and exclaiming to me about all kinds of things as he played on his perch. Outside, I heard a screech, very soft and very, very close. I sat up in the dark to come face-to-face with a lone female barn owl hovering right outside the window, looking in at Wesley. I couldn’t believe my eyes, a wild owl inches from my face! I held my breath as she hovered then flew to a nearby fence to rest, as hovering is hard work for an owl. She continued to offer soft screeches.
Unsure of what was happening, Wesley let off a loud screech in response. She liked what she heard and came back to hover. I remained completely still so she wouldn’t be afraid. But she didn’t seem too concerned about me; her focus was on Wesley.
She was beautiful. Should I let her in? What if I let her in and then closed the screen again? Would she panic? Would they mate? Then what? I could keep her and try to tame her, but I couldn’t imagine submitting a healthy wild owl to a life of captivity. And Wesley had no idea how to survive even fifteen minutes outside. He was afraid of the trees when they moved, as if they were monsters. Even if I had started rehabbing him the way they do with owlets that have been fed with owl puppets, he still would have been imprinted on humans and extremely vulnerable to them. He would have come down to humans when it was not appropriate to do so, assuming that they were all friendly, and probably would have been shot as a trophy by some ignorant person. He had not had the opportunity to learn from owl parents what to avoid—traffic, power lines, great horned owls, fire, so many dangers.
In rehab centers they teach the owls to hunt by introducing dead mice first, then pulling them on a string to get the young owl to chase them, then eventually using living mice. Also, the owl has to be exercised to build up enough muscle to have the endurance to hunt for hours at a time. Even with birds just in from the wild for a short recuperation, it’s essential to get their muscles and endurance back into wild condition. In rehab centers where I had worked, we would chase the birds while waving towels over our heads to keep them flying in order to gain strength. We were exhausted, too, after these training sessions.
I’d have to do all that with Wesley before I could even think of letting him go in and out, and I’d have to move to an area far from traffic and dangers. I already knew that Wesley could never hunt enough to provide for a nest. So he’d always have some dependence upon me, and if he were flying outside, I wouldn’t be able to keep him safe. No, it wasn’t possible for him to go off with her, and even if I could have kept his female admirer and tamed her, then what would I do with the babies when they grew up? It would be a real mess eventually. Yet in that moment I felt an ache in my heart—I wanted them to be together. I wanted to see them together. She seemed to be from some other world, like a fairyland—a visitor from the other side.
I decided not to interfere. I was content to enjoy the magic as the two owls talked to each other. Over and over she returned to the window. Finally, she flew off and I lay awake in the dark feeling more alive than I’d felt in a long time, blessed to have been so close to this beautiful wild creature. This was the first but not the last lonely little lovesick female to visit, attracted by Wesley’s calls.
MY JOB AT Aerospace turned out to be perfect for me, and I didn’t end up needing those fancy clothes I had bought after all. Sometimes my work entailed climbing around under the floor of the computer room laying cables. In fact, my office mate wore the same thing every day, a pair of New Balance sneakers and a USC sweatsuit. It was a wacky, think-tank type of atmosphere much like Caltech. I loved it.
I was also enjoying life at my mom’s house. Her dancing partner and boyfriend, Wally, came over to visit one night and as I went downstairs to defrost Wesley’s mice for the evening I saw that my mom and Wally were in the kitchen about to prepare dinner. Wally didn’t know about Wesley. I took Mom aside and whispered, “What should I do? I need to feed Wesley!”
“Just take the mice out, hide them in a paper towel, and stick them in the microwave. He’ll never notice,” she said.
Okay. I covertly slipped the mice out of the plastic bag and quickly wrapped them in a paper towel. But as I went to put the four mice in the microwave, Wally walked over to the stove, located beneath the microwave, with a large black skillet.
“Oops, ’scuse me,” I said, startled. I fumbled my hold on the icy white mice, which slipped out of the paper towel into the skillet with four loud plunks. My mother and I froze. Wally just stood there, skillet in hand, staring at the mice with an uncomprehending look. Then both Mom and I came to life, shot out our hands, grabbed the mice, all the while babbling things like “Okay! Hey, Wally, what kind of salad dressing do you want? What do you want to drink? Why don’t you get yourself a glass,” hoping to distract him. It worked.
Just recently my mother and I confessed to Wally about the mice-in-skillet incident and he replied, “No. I don’t believe you guys. I was looking right at them? I don’t remember a thing!”
NOW THAT I was making better money, I could go out more often. I went out to eat one night with a large group of friends and found myself sitting across from a man named Guy Ritter, a drummer and the lead singer in a hard-core heavy metal band called Tourniquet. Guy and I hit it off right away and he asked me on a date. I had finally found a man who could scream louder than Wesley.
The first time my mother heard a Tourniquet CD, with Guy’s low growls and high screams, she sat down as if weak in the knees, saying, “Oh, Lordy, Lordy.” When I told her we were dating, she brought her hand to her forehead and said, “Another musician!”
Guy and I had a lot of fun going to his heavy metal gigs with mosh pits, where adolescent boys flung themselves into each other, butting chests, banging their heads up and down. Guy would head-bang so much during his concerts that the next day he’d lie on the couch with ice packs around his neck, moaning.
I didn’t tell Guy about Wesley. He thought I kept my door closed religiously because my room was messy. I don’t know what he thought about the strange noises emanating from there, but he had the good manners not to ask.
My mom had developed a good relationship with Wesley by standing in the doorway and talking to him in a sweet voice. He threatened her if she tried to come in past the door, but he still enjoyed having her stand just outside his territorial boundary, talking to him. He would respond with chirps and chatter, relaxed enough to stand on one leg, groom himself, and eat in her presence. She began to offer to take care of him so that I could go off on trips. She had to wear eye goggles, a heavy coat, gloves, and a helmet when she went into the room, so those were by the door in case Wesley ever got off his leash and she had to chase him down, catch him, and put him into his carrier. Thankfully, this never happened, but she was prepared.
Mom could defrost his mice and, using barbeque tongs, toss each mouse to the platform on his perch, where he’d pounce on them. While he was distracted with his new meal, she’d use the tongs to collect the old scraps from yesterday’s meal and any mice that he’d thrown off the perch, put them in a garbage bag, and take them out of the room. She had quite a nice system in place, I thought. And it gave me a new measure of freedom because not only did I trust Mom, Wesley did, too, and seemed content with her company when I was gone. She had become part of his “inner circle”—the people he would trust to a certain level and who could even touch him if I were holding him and they approached quietly and gently. I could feel Wesley trembling, yet he seemed determined to allow them to pet him no matter how frightened he was, as if he were actively and deliberately fighting his instincts.
Guy and I went camping together and took road trips, laughing and joking, playing loud music and singing. I told him, “You have to meet my grandparents. My grandfather has been a drummer all his life. He played in big bands during the Depression when he was only thirteen years old. He made enough money to support two families, his own and my grandmother’s, saving both families from losing everything during the Depression—and he was just a kid himself. Then, in the ’40s and ’50s, Grandpa played in big bands with legendary performers like Frankie Carle and Horace Heidt. He raised his sons to be drummers. So there are a lot of drummers in my family.”
We went to visit my grandparents and they liked Guy a lot. After making him feel welcome, Grandma went into the kitchen to make tea, and Grandpa and Guy started talking about music and telling jokes. I sat gazing at Grandma’s collection of hundreds of owl figurines. Having spent many years on the road with Grandpa, she’d buy owls from local artisans wherever they went. Friends and family also had been giving her owl memorabilia for years. I had always enjoyed visiting Grandma’s house, and even as a child, I was fascinated by her owl collection. But now, of course, it held special significance for me. Because of my fear of those anti-captivity animal extremists, I never mentioned Wesley to anyone, and nobody in the family but my mom and sister now knew I was taking care of a live owl. The thought of losing him was more than I could bear. As much as I wanted to tell Grandma, I held it in, worried that she might accidentally reveal his existence.
When my grandmother came back into the room, Grandpa’s eyes lit up. He said, “Here comes my queen!” and looked completely smitten, as if just now discovering her great beauty. They never grew “old” to each other. My grandparents had the best marriage I’d ever seen. When my grandparents were on the road while Grandpa was playing in the big bands of the ’40s and ’50s, the bands attracted such huge enthusiastic crowds that even after gigs, the performers sometimes had to spend the night backstage because it was impossible to get to their cars. All that attention and glamour didn’t sway my Grandpa one bit. He was absolutely devoted to Grandma and never looked at another woman. Grandpa lived the Way of the Owl.
On the way home, I decided to tell Guy about Wesley. I turned to him and said, “Um…I have a secret. I need to know that you won’t tell anyone, not even the other band members.”
He looked concerned. “Okay…”
“I have a barn owl living with me in my bedroom.”
“No…really?” he said, incredulous. “You have an owl?”
“Yep. That’s what all those weird sounds are coming from my room.”
“That’s an owl? I thought owls hooted.”
“Not this one. Barn owls don’t hoot.”
“Well, what are we waiting for? I can’t believe you’ve never showed him to me. I want to meet him. Come on, hurry up, hurry up!” He floored it all the way home.
“Okay, Guy, now calm down. Wesley’s a wild animal and he’s not used to men. You can’t breach the doorway because that’s his territory and he’ll go into attack mode.”
“He…he attacks people? Has he ever?” he asked.
“Yes…uh, well, he attacked my last boyfriend, actually.”
“Great,” he said. “Well, tell me what to do.”
I took a breath, “You should tell him he’s handsome.”
Guy looked at me, “You’re kidding, right? You want me to tell him he’s handsome?”
I coached him on owl etiquette just outside my bedroom so that Wesley would know we were there and understand that I was relating to this other person. Then I slowly opened the door.
“Hi, Wesley! Someone’s here to meet you.”
Wes had heard Guy’s voice on and off for months so he knew there was another person in my life. They looked into each other’s eyes.
“Hi, there. You’re so handsome, Wesley! You’re beautiful…My gosh, Stacey,” Guy said in a hushed voice, “he’s gorgeous. I’ve never seen a golden and white owl before. This is an owl? Wow, he is actually handsome, to tell the truth. He hardly looks real.”
Many people were surprised by Wesley’s looks because barn owls are very different from all other owls and people’s expectations of what they look like. Wesley did not have ear tufts and he was not darkly colored like most other owl species. Most owls have colored eyes with black pupils, but Wesley’s eyes were solid obsidian black. His face was exotic, heart-shaped and pure white. The contrast was stunning and caught most people off guard.
To my amazement, Wesley did not go into his attack no-nos but just watched Guy carefully. Guy stood at the door for a full hour talking gently to Wesley, and they seemed to understand each other. Wesley had never responded this well to anyone other than Wendy and my mom and sister. I was very excited that things were turning out so well. Guy thought Wesley was the coolest creature on earth and I could see that he would have no problem living with him, if we got serious and decided to marry. (Women generally look at their boyfriends as potential husbands and fathers, no matter what we say.)
After Guy and I had been going together for several months we decided it was time for me to meet his family in Oregon. Guy’s dad, although not actually a logger, worked in the logging industry, which made me nervous. He was an engineering specialist in the factory equipment that turned logs into paper, so logging provided him with his livelihood. There was a well-publicized antagonism between biologists and loggers at the time. Biologists were warning the public that the old-growth forests, a delicate habitat that can’t be replaced, were disappearing at an alarming rate. The streams and rivers were silting and warming up, destroying the salmon runs and the entire ecosystem because of runoff from clear-cut areas. The apex predator of these forests, the northern spotted owl, was endangered. (The apex predator is the very top predator in the food chain of an ecosystem. In the Australian bilabongs, for example, it’s the crocodile.) When the apex predator is thriving, then so is the environment. But when the predator is faltering, biologists know that means the entire system is falling apart.
Most of the loggers didn’t understand this “canary in the coal mine” connection and thought the entire issue was about saving the owls, rather than their habitat. Because the loggers had been told to stop destroying ancient forests before the forests were completely gone, they would lose their livelihoods sooner than if they kept cutting down trees until the entire ecosystem went extinct. Focusing on only their own livelihoods, they didn’t want to be told what to do, got angry, and took it out on the owls. Some loggers actually killed them and tied their bodies to the backs of their trucks to protest the government’s and the conservation groups’ efforts to save this ecosystem before it was destroyed entirely. They didn’t understand—or they just chose not to—and they reminded me of the buffalo hunters of the nineteenth century determined to hunt down every last animal. They failed to see that they were going to have to find something else to do anyway after the last buffalo was gone.
As soon as we drove into Oregon, I began to see threadbare tree lines with nothing behind them but stripped land. Hundreds of miles of priceless virgin forest had been wiped away, with just a thin veneer of trees left standing along the roads to fool tourists and others into thinking the forest was still intact. It wasn’t. Oregon would have been one of the most magnificent and sought-after tourist spots in the world if the old-growth forests had been saved.
Guy and I decided we just wouldn’t mention my owl to anyone. The people in his community wouldn’t understand. His own parents might not understand. Guy, on the other hand, had spent his youth hiking and camping in the old-growth forests. He loved them passionately and did not want to see them destroyed.
By the time we got to his parents’ house at around 4:00 a.m., we were exhausted from driving straight through the night. We crept in silently, and I went to the guest room while Guy went downstairs into his boyhood bedroom. He left a note for his parents saying when we’d arrived and please not to wake us up. As nervous as I was about making a good impression on his parents, I still had no trouble drifting off to sleep.
I woke up when Guy’s mother, Aileen, poked her head into my room.
“Stacey? Hi. I’m Aileen, Guy’s mom. I’m so sorry to wake you up like this, especially since we haven’t been properly introduced, but your mom is on the phone.”
I was wide-awake now. Wesley! Was he okay?
“She says she, uh…” Aileen looked at a note in her hand. “Well, I’m sure I misunderstood her, but I think…she’s asking me to ask you what…uh…what setting to use on the, well, the…the microwave. The microwave?”
I nodded encouragingly.
“On the microwave for the…I couldn’t understand her very well, but I think she said mice. Mice?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
“Okay then. Um, what setting to use to defrost the mice? Defrost?”
I nodded. So much for owl secrecy.
“Okay then. What setting and for how long should she…uh…well…uh…defrost them…for the…owl?!” she blurted out.
“It’s for Wesley. I wrote all this down for her. She was only supposed to call for emergencies. I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, well, that’s okay, but what should I tell her? She’s on the phone right now.”
Great.
“I’m sorry, Aileen. She’s supposed to set the microwave to defrost for twenty seconds. Then she’s supposed to take the baggie with the four mice in it out and let it sit until there are no hot spots and no frozen spots. She can kind of mush the baggie around in her hand to make sure they’re completely soft so he has no trouble swallowing them whole.”
She looked like she was going to faint.
When she left to deliver the message to my mom, I buried my face in my pillow.
“Noooooooooo,” I groaned.
It turned out that owl secrecy wasn’t necessary. Guy’s parents were wonderful. We had a lovely ten-day visit way out in the country next to the McKenzie River, hiking around the old-growth forest with long flowing curtains of moss hanging down from the trees and huge yellow slugs and tiger salamanders. We picked wild berries and drank from ice-cold streams. It was a kind of paradise.
Aileen became so interested in Wesley that she decided that if I was recording his vocalizations at home (I left out the part about him mating with my arm), I should also have recordings of the now very endangered spotted owl, which they occasionally heard when they were sitting out on their deck. She and Guy were sure they could get the sound on a tape recorder if they tried. I thought the folks at Caltech would be thrilled to get a recording of the vocalizations of this species.
I went to bed fairly early, and the next morning I woke up to find a tape on my nightstand labeled, “Sounds of the Northern Spotted Owl.”
I got ready as quickly as I could and went to the kitchen, where the family was already gathered for breakfast.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Guy and I went out last night and captured spotted owl sounds for you!” Aileen said.
“Really?” I was amazed.
“Yes, we drove around until we found a good spot and recorded them.”
Guy nodded enthusiastically as he stuffed his breakfast into his mouth. I was really touched. Here this family in the logging industry had gone to great lengths to accept and include me.
On the way home, we visited Wendy at her new house, a cabin in the Oregon woods. She was glad to meet Guy, since I’d been telling her all about him on the phone for months.
“Come on, Stacey, wait till you see this!” With Annie at her side, Wendy led us out back to a fenced pen that held Courtney the dog, a gigantic brown Norwegian rabbit, and a young fawn. The fawn was beautiful, tawny with a few spots and large brown eyes. We all took turns bottle-feeding her.
“The kinship between these animals is amazing.”
As Wendy said this, the older female bunny, who was the biggest rabbit I’d ever seen, named Fierce Bad Rabbit, pawed at the fawn’s knees and the fawn buckled and lay down. Fierce Bad Rabbit then hopped onto the fawn’s back and stretched out to take a nap.
“Two weeks the fawn got out of the pen and a strange dog spooked her and she ran off. The next day, Courtney disappeared and all we found was her broken collar. Annie and I were heartsick. Three days later, Courtney appeared in the yard with the fawn trotting behind her.”
Wendy laughed. “In the wild, a deer and a canine would be enemies. When the fawn is older, I’ll take her to a captive refuge. She’s a nonindigenous Sika deer. They can’t be released because they might interfere with the indigenous species here. But I know Courtney and Fierce Bad Rabbit will miss her.”
The fawn got up and grazed on some of the grass at her knees and Courtney began to graze the grass with her, but the dog’s lips curled as if to say, “I don’t know what that deer sees in this stuff.”
Wendy’s husband barely spoke to us throughout our visit. I could tell from both Wendy’s and Annie’s faces that things might not be so good with him. I was sobered by what I saw and worried about my friend.
After two days of driving, Guy and I completed our long journey home. At first I was worried about Wesley’s reaction. I had never left him for this long. But my mother had spent a lot of time talking to him so he wouldn’t feel lonely and abandoned. He was relatively calm when I got home and had not gotten crazy wild as experts warned he would if I left for too long. Yes, he was a little wilder, a little harder to handle, and a little bit more nervous, but that was all. He tried to act cool and a little distant—he sulked a bit, too, and didn’t carry on about greeting me but was so happy to see me that it didn’t last long.
Wesley always slept on the side of his perch nearest to me, facing me. But on my first night back from the trip, he slept on the opposite side with his back to me, the way he did when he was angry. I tossed around and couldn’t sleep. Finally, at around 3:00 a.m., he moved back to his old spot as close to me as possible, and I fell into a peaceful slumber.
I thanked my mom profusely. How many mothers would put up with feeding mice to a wild animal while her daughter was gone, especially since she had to wear eye goggles and use barbecue tongs to feed him, because he would attack her if she got too close? Not too many.
The next night, Wesley and I were back to our old ways. He did everything he could to lure me into a mating frame of mind but to no avail. He made elaborate nests, with magazines that he selected and pulled off of the top of the toilet, then dragged into the cupboard and shredded apart. He then commenced his incessant, ear-piercing nesting call. Ah! That reminded me of the tape of the spotted owls given me by Guy’s mom. I could hardly wait to hear it and I wondered how Wes would react.
I popped the tape into the player and settled back to listen.
“Okay, here, Mom, down here.”
“Where are you? Ouch!” [Bushes thrashing.]
“Turn on the flashlight, Guy.”
“No, Mom, I don’t want to scare them away.”
“Oh, here you are. Okay. Start taping them.”
“I am. Shhhhh…”
[Long silence.]
“Are you getting that?”
“Yeah, this is great…she’s gonna love this.”
[More silence.]
[Crash, shriek, crash, rustle rustle rustle of bushes.]
“What was that??”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, just go. Go go go!”
[More thrashing.]
“Ouch! You just stepped on me.”
“Well, don’t stop like that.”
“I can’t see. That’s why I stopped.”
“I think that was just a deer.”
“Well, it better be just a deer! Get me out of here.”
“Don’t push me.”
“Sorry.”
[More thrashing around in the underbrush and oooches and ouches and finally the ding ding ding of a car door.]
“Get in! Get in! Just go, go!”
“Okay, okay. I’m going, geez!”
[Click. End of tape.]
DURING THIS PERIOD of my life, deep bonds were forged and broken. Wendy’s marriage ended, and she and I spent many tearful nights on the phone. Through this difficulty our friendship became stronger than ever. And although Guy and I had wonderful times together, our dating relationship began to wane, which was painful for me. I visited Grandma during this time and told her that Guy might not be the one.
“Stacey,” she said, “I knew your grandpa was in love with me when he dipped my braids in the inkwell of his desk. He sat behind me in the fourth grade. We never dated anyone else.”
“You and Grandpa are like a pair of owls,” I told her. “I have always hoped for a marriage like yours.” We had a long visit, and as I gazed again at her owl collection, I thought about telling her my dearest secret.
“Grandma,” I said.
“Yes?”
“I have something to…to show you. You must come visit me sometime.”
“I’d love to,” she said.
Guy and I broke up, though we are still friends to this day. That night I cried into Wesley’s feathers and poured my thoughts out to him. As always, he watched me with his deep black eyes and listened to every word I said.
I had been at Aerospace for almost five years and had become an expert in UNIX operating systems but was still being paid an entry-level salary even though my skills would bring nearly four times that in private industry. I struggled with whether or not to leave, exploring my options when an event of historic proportion overtook my decision.
The Rodney King police brutality verdict hit the streets the afternoon of April 29, 1992, and Los Angeles soon erupted into rioting not far from where I worked. Black smoke blew ominously past our office windows. I took our computer servers down to preserve data and directed members of our department to organize into caravans to drive people home. We searched for anything useful as weapons for self-defense. Among the staff there was still debate about whether it was safer to stay or go. Then the power shut off.
We quickly evacuated the office and our caravan threaded through out-of-control traffic, with cars running stoplights and blocking lanes, even driving on the sidewalks. From the freeway we watched Los Angeles burning. Almost every block as far as we could see had a building on fire, as if the whole city had been bombed by some foreign air force. The freeway was almost stopped and it was a vulnerable feeling, just sitting in our cars, hoping that the rioters didn’t come over the walls and start killing the unarmed people in the cars. No one knew what was going to happen next. There wasn’t a police car to be seen all the way home. Huntington Beach was a ghost town.
I was worried and shaken but happy to be safely home with Mom and Wesley. He was hungry, as usual, so I went to the freezer and discovered I was out of mice. This was not good. I drove around town, but all the businesses were shut down and the nearest pet store was dark, though cars were still in the parking lot. I banged on the glass double doors.
“Jason! Jason! Are you in there? It’s me, Stacey! I need mice!” I saw movement in the shadows of the store and Jason appeared and let me slip inside.
“Hi, Stacey, go get them, but be quick. Most of the animals are out, but we’re still evacuating. I just got a call from a friend of mine in LA and the rioters burned down his pet store.”
I headed for the back of the store where the mice were but stopped short. In every aisle a man was sitting on the floor with a gun across his lap. “These guys are spending the night to guard the store,” Jason said.
As it turned out, Jason’s animals were under no threat; the rioting never spread this far south. In the days that followed, Los Angeles continued to burn, and for months tensions were high. The commute into LA no longer seemed safe, and the whole incident finalized my decision to leave Aerospace. Wesley and I moved shortly thereafter to a wonderful community in north San Diego County, where the air was clean and crime was low, and there were so many computer-related jobs that I could almost take my pick. I found a two-bedroom apartment in La Costa, up in the hills above a small river gorge. At night I could hear coyotes and wild owls calling from the canyons around my new home.
I was reading a book at dusk when I heard something that made me jump out of my chair. It was the same earsplitting mechanical noise Wesley always made when he wanted me to join him in a nest, but it was off in the distance. Before Wesley was a part of my life, I would never have tuned in to such a sound. I dropped my book and ran outside. In the darkening sky far above me was a lone male barn owl, swooping gracefully in large figure eights, screeching in that unearthly manner all the while. From a nearby tree a female owl screamed in response. Then she shot straight up into the air toward the male. They circled each other closer and closer, and locked talons. They spun together, broke off, circled in the air, locked talons, and spun again. Their magnificent dance continued for several minutes before they flew off together, to mate.
UNCLE WARREN PHONED to tell me that Grandma had been admitted to the hospital. Though it was supposedly nothing serious, the whole family visited her often, myself included. Grandpa was always there early in the morning until very late at night, when they kicked him out. When they’d let him, he sometimes spent the night. But Grandma did not get better. Her kidneys began to fail. On my last visit with her, she was heavily drugged. I bent down and told her, “Grandma, I wanted to surprise you when you came to visit me, but I’ll just tell you instead. I have a barn owl. His name is Wesley. He lives with me in my bedroom.”
Her eyes lit up for a moment and she said, “So did I.”
I didn’t know what to think about her comment, and she didn’t elaborate, but fell asleep.
She died shortly after that.
A few months after Grandma’s funeral, I told Grandpa that I had a real live barn owl named Wesley.
“I tried to tell Grandma about it, but I don’t think she understood.”
“You have a barn owl?” My grandpa had a funny look on his face.
“Yes, and Grandma said she had one, too, but I think she meant in her collection.”
“Oh, no, Stacey, we had a barn owl. A real live one. His name was Weisel.”
“Weisel??” It sounded a lot like Wesley, the way he said it.
“Yeah, you know, like wise ol’ owl. Wise Ol’ Weisel.”
“Wow, Grandpa, that sounds an awful lot like Wesley.”
He thought for a moment. “You’re right, it sure does. It sure does. Well, I’ll be.”
“How did she end up with Weisel?” I asked.
“She’s always been an owl fanatic. Some neighbors found a barn owl being savaged by two dogs and ran between them to rescue the owl. The dogs bit them up pretty bad, too, but the neighbors finally got the dogs off. Then they didn’t know what to do with the owl.”
“Did the owl attack them?” I asked.
“No, he seemed to understand that they had saved his life. I think he was in shock pretty much. Anyway, one of the neighbors remembered that your grandma collected owls and thought she might take this guy in. They were right of course. His wing was really a mess so we rushed him right to the vet. In those days there was no wildlife rehab place so it was up to whoever found an animal to make sure it was taken care of properly. The vet fixed him up as best he could. The wing wasn’t broken and Weisel could still fly, just not very well. Then the vet sat us down and told us everything that had to be done to care for the owl, and he told us it would never survive in the wild again so it was up to us.”
I shook my head in wonder that my grandmother had had an unreleasable barn owl, too.
“Your uncle Warren and I built him a huge aviary around a tree!” Grandpa continued. “That guy had it pretty good.”
“What did she feed him?” I asked.
“Mice! What else do you feed an owl! And I fed him, not your grandma. She wasn’t too keen on those mice.” He smiled.
“So really Weisel was your owl as much as hers, wasn’t he?”
“Yep. He sure was. He had a grand old time in that big tree of his. We also put in extra perches for him. The aviary was huge. We had him for the rest of his life, old Weisel.”
“Grandpa, why have I never heard a word about him until now?”
Grandpa reached over and hugged me.
“Stacey, all of your grandma’s animals were like human children to her. Whenever one of them died, she was so devastated that she never spoke of them again.”
At home I told Wesley of my sorrow as I had done many times in our years together. “Wes, I am so sad that my grandmother and I never figured out that we both adopted barn owls.” He preened himself and then my face for a moment with gentle movements of his beak.
Wesley groomed on and off all day, but about twice a day he had a serious total body grooming session during which it was hard to distract him. He went over every feather and it took at least an hour. I plunged my face into his sweet-smelling feathers while he did this, and followed his beak with my nose.
His body was perfectly synchronized. When Wesley pulled a feather that was ready to come out, he invariably also pulled out the exact opposite corresponding feather on the other side. If it was the third secondary flight feather on the left side, a few minutes later out would come the third secondary flight feather on the right. And Wesley could move entire sections of feathers into reach by shifting the skin underneath. One whole side of his body would suddenly move closer to the front so he could groom it with his beak. Then that patch of feathers would ripple back to where it belonged. I knew his grooming routine intimately.
“Someday I will tell Grandma all about you, Wesley. Perhaps we will walk together, Grandma and Weisel, you and I.”
Wesley opened his wings and began to arrange his long, breathtaking flight feathers. These were not replaced very often—only one pair of feathers every six weeks or so. When the time came he would work at loosening one of these beauties—pulling his wing way out and yanking and worrying the feather until it would finally come free. Then he would hold it and play with it. I always tried to take the used flight feathers before he could ruin them, because they were treasures to me. But this time, Wesley was one step ahead. He held the old feather out in his beak. Surprised, I took it and thanked him, making much of his gift, and placed the feather in a vase where he could see it. But Wes wasn’t finished. The equal and opposite feather had to come out, too. Wes swung around to his other wing and presented me with the matching flight feather, his deep obsidian eyes locked on mine.
Grandpa still played and taught drums and continued with his life. After an appropriate time had elapsed, the predictable “casserole brigade” started appearing at his doorstep. Unfailingly polite, he thanked each lady for her kind attention, but told her there was only one woman for him and that was Grandma. He had lived his lifelong love. This was the Way of the Owl.
THE YEARS I spent in labs and lectures and reading textbooks deepened my view that the universe is a place of wonder and meaning. Science has made many thrilling discoveries, but along the way it has also opened up myriad, endlessly branching questions. It’s like we are scrabbling in hard dirt with our hands, trying to reach China, and have barely broken the the surface. Many scientists consider the idea that there may be something more that science will never be able to explain. At Caltech, a sizable group of physicists felt this way, some with Nobel Prizes. The more they gazed into the vast stretches of the universe, or the vast empty spaces within atoms, the more wonder they felt. They formed a group that met once a week to discuss the spiritual side of their experiences.
I gazed into the universe of Wesley’s eyes almost every day for nineteen years. We communicated—spirit to spirit. I can’t really explain it, but things occurred to me when I “listened” to him, thoughts that were not my own. Perhaps he was as thoughtful as I, but in a way that I could never touch or understand; perhaps he understood and saw things that I can’t. When I would look into his relaxed, at-peace-with-himself eyes, I felt like I was looking into something inscrutable, unobtainable, deeper than we can possibly imagine, an old soul that reflected something bigger, ineffable, eternal.
Even though I had been trained to exclude thoughts about spirits and unquantifiable, immeasurable feelings that could taint scientific conclusions, Wesley’s presence in my life influenced my thinking. Now I see that to exclude a certain kind of idea is itself creating a bias. What if the truth screams as loudly as a male barn owl crying for a mate, and we miss it because we have not allowed ourselves to listen to the channel it’s on—or we’ve tuned it out? Wesley helped me feel God—to “get” the idea of God and the soul in a way that I had not before and couldn’t get from a theological sermon. I’ve decided not to discount those feelings and the wonder and gratitude that comes with them.