Who Doesn't Want To Live With The Brisk Motor Of His Heart Singing
Most of the world is time when we're not here.
Most people have been stuck inside doing very little of what they want to be doing for almost a year now. Maybe you’ve heard about this.
One of the few upsides to being trapped like this is that it gives one plenty of opportunities to assess, in minute detail, everything about one’s home environment. In my case, those examinations revealed so many things that my wife and I disliked over so many months that we ended up moving a few weeks ago—five years in a place means an awful lot of forgotten dusty corners and detritus piling up, and a lot of opportunities to feel like the walls are closing in.
Luckily these observations are not limited to the inside, and I’m guessing that whatever you can see out your doors and windows is getting to be pretty familiar territory for most of you. Same here. Prior to the move, I noticed something I don’t recall ever seeing in the winter before: a few hummingbirds determinedly making their daily rounds to my next door neighbors’ plastic feeder and privet hedge. After taking in the proffered nectar, they’d go up and sit on the powerlines that ran between our buildings, talking to each other in a tuneless pew pew pew pew, out of place but seemingly unbothered.
Fascinated, I found myself in front of the computer typing away into Google like that crummy Holden Caulfield: “Where do hummingbirds go in the winter?” (Quarantine has us all blue as hell, doesn’t it?) Turns out that just about all of them do flee the colder latitudes and head to the southeastern United States or even Mexico and Central America, making the return journey between February and April to start breeding. Astonishing, that something so small can do so much. When will I learn?
The sole exception for us here in Seattle is Anna’s hummingbird, which sticks around even in the absence of flowers and turns carnivorous, pulling up earthworms to eat when it can’t find sugar water from friendly humans. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by that; one of the most memorable Jim Harrison novellas, The Games of Night, hinges on an incident with a carnivorous hummingbird.
I yelped at my wound…and Nestor laughed saying the wound was good luck which I doubted. He said that the local Indians…believed that hummingbirds contained the soul of thunder in their bodies.
I won’t spoil the story for you by providing further context. But this passage is a useful reminder not to underestimate any creature with that kind of reputation.
Since the move I no longer have the privilege of watching those particular birds go about their day. So I recently did the logical thing and bought a feeder of my own, a big heavy bit of glass decorated with wire dragonflies. I got deep into the hummingbird blogs to prepare—the ways the ratio of sugar to water should be adjusted in the winter (1:3 instead of 1:4, to keep the nectar from freezing and to give the birds some extra calories against the cold), the tips and tricks you can use to lure them to a new feeder (plenty of flashy red in the vicinity), and what not to do (no red dye in the nectar, you idiot).
And then the waiting game began. It has occurred to me that they might be wary of people, given our relative sizes, so I’ve stopped hanging out on our little balcony during sunny hours when they might come by. It’s also occurred to me that endeavors of this sort tend to have a “watched pot” feel to them, so I’ve done my best not to idle and stare at the feeder hoping for a bite, stealing sidelong glances out the sliding door instead. The wisest bit of self-advice that occurred to me—and by definition the hardest to follow—was that it’s not good to get all of one’s hopes bound up in some other living thing that you have no chance of fully understanding. So I’ve decided to diversify my portfolio and leave a little pile of peanuts on the other side of the balcony for the crows.
The crows also won’t visit if you’re watching too closely, which I know from years of past experiments, so the first day I left those peanuts out just before retreating to my office to teach. An hour later they had been devoured. I don’t know about trees falling in the forest making sounds but I do know those peanuts were gone just as soon as I stopped looking. I have repeated that exercise daily and not been disappointed.
But the hummingbirds are a more timid sort and are not so quickly wooed. Fortunately I have discovered in the course of my adult life that if I have been pondering something, there’s a good chance that Mary Oliver has written a poem about it. Hummingbirds are no exception; there are at least two, knockouts both, in which hummingbirds play a central role.
1994’s “Hummingbirds” speaks to the same skittishness I have experienced in trying to befriend such alien creatures. Oliver writes:
they paused in front of me
and, dark-eyed, stared –
as though I were a flower –
and then,
like three tosses of silvery water,
they were gone.
Like many of her poems this one is about its title, but also about much deeper matters, rendered equally consequential in the poet’s mind. She continues:
Alone,
in the crown of the tree,
I went to China,
I went to Prague;
I died, and was born in the spring;
I found you, and loved you, again.
Later the darkness fell
and the solid moon
like a white pond rose.
But I wasn’t in any hurry.
Likely I visited all
the shimmering, heart-stabbing
questions without answers
before I climbed down.
Shimmering, heart-stabbing questions without answers. Will the hummingbirds come? Will they stay, will they accept me? Will my life ever again extend beyond the confines of my apartment? Will I still remember to take delight in these little mysteries once it does? Will I still remember to take delight in anything once it does? Will they like the sugar-to-water ratio I prepared?
Of course the thing about poems is that when you open them looking for answers you tend to find even more questions. In the case of Oliver’s other piece, “Hummingbird Pauses at the Trumpet Vine,” well, it’s questions most of the way down.
Who doesn’t love
roses, and who
doesn’t love the lilies
of the black ponds
floating like flocks
of tiny swans,
and of course, the flaming
trumpet vine
where the hummingbird comes
like a small green angel, to soak
his dark tongue
in happiness -
and who doesn’t want
to live with the brisk
motor of his heart
singing
like a Schubert
and his eyes
working and working like those days of rapture,
by Van Gogh in Arles?
I like the title of this one because it captures the fact that hummingbirds rarely stop; they only pause, bouncing from one beautiful sweet thing to the next for all their frenzied days.
Look! for most of the world
is waiting
or remembering -
most of the world is time
when we’re not here,
not born yet, or died -
a slow fire
under the earth with all
our dumb wild blind cousins
who also
can’t even remember anymore
their own happiness -
I am trying to remember not to get too hung up on missing the hummingbirds, on the idea that they might be flitting in and stealing nectar when I am not there to witness it. Most of the world is time when we’re not here, Oliver reminds me. Before we’re born, after we die—we’re going to miss far more than we ever experience.
On Tuesday night, after three days of ceaseless winter rain, the clouds parted for a few minutes, and I walked for a few minutes through the neighborhood. Returning, a flicker of motion caught my eye. I glanced up, and in the streetside hedge beneath my balcony were two hummingbirds, and a third swooping down from somewhere that could only have been up there, where I live.
Maybe it’s enough to know that it’s all happening out there anyway.
Look! and then we will be
like the pale cool
stones, that last almost
forever.
I’ll talk to you next week.
-Chuck
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PPS - If you liked what you read here, you might also like my book, A Good Place for Maniacs: Dispatches from the Pacific Crest Trail, available online wherever books are sold.