Just now, out walking my dog, I saw a bald eagle take a baby crow from the nest. No shit. A metaphor so apt and obvious that I’m almost embarrassed to point to it.
The crows had been sounding the alarm and chasing the bald eagle around for a few minutes before I arrived. In that time the number of them participating grew from four to probably a hundred. Wheeling and screaming and beating their wings against the killing machine, so big and perfect it looked like it had jumped off a postage stamp. It turned away from the giant white pine roost one last time, then came back with wings spread wide and talons open, taking a wriggling black mass in them as it went.
Only one baby was taken from the nest this time. This time. In the end the crows’ numbers were enough, massed together, to drive away the merchant of death. But the damage was done. “Could’ve been worse,” to quote a recent statement.
We think of crows as symbols of death. (The name for a group of them even suggests it: murder.) But these crows were fighting for the living, desperately and ferociously, with everything they had. We know that they mate for life; we know that they mourn their dead. I do not know if they still stage their elaborate funeral ritual when there is no body to grieve over, when one of their young is plucked from the nest to meet a grisly fate.
I walked past the pine tree, where other people had gathered upon hearing the deafening cries of the defenders, and continued on my usual route. At the usual intersection, my best friend from the group—who I call John Rain Crow, in homage to Stephen King’s Firestarter villain—broke off to meet us. I threw him his allotment of treats; what else can you do, in the wake of death dropped from the sky, besides care and comfort with whatever meager tools you have? But he didn’t stay to eat them, as he usually does. He picked them up and flew away again immediately in his agitation.
I do not know what to do about tragedy. I don’t know how to close the distance between myself and the grieving, whether it’s seventy feet up a pine tree or thousands of miles away in Texas. I have cried my impotent tears of rage since yesterday and still I overflow with despair and hatred and the shock that enormity brings. I woke up today and brushed my hair and teeth and went to school to teach, like any other day, like a school is still a school. (A fucked up blessing: a student of mine who is too poor to have a working cell phone didn’t know anything had even happened yesterday.) Tomorrow teachers all over the country will go to school again, and try again, and again, to do the impossible task of explaining the inexplicable to children, all while wondering if they will be next to be called to use their own bodies to defend those same children.
There’s no pithy ending here. It’s all so fucked up. I don’t know what else to say.
It is all fucked up. We are headed toward species extinction, one vapid, spineless politician at a time.
I appreciate you writing and sharing this