April 30th, 2020
Nesting Hawk, April 2020. Photo: Dave Phillips
Flowers, Birds, Long Walks, and Long Cycles:
Bright and Dark Thoughts in the Time of Covid-19
As I wander through my neighborhood, I can almost forget the danger. The rumble of passenger jets and cars is mostly gone; the new dominant sound is birds singing. Like neighbors I encounter, I walk in the streets, only rarely giving them up to a car. Strangers wave and say hello, as we pass each other from a safe distance.
Since the stay-at-home order took effect, neighborhood walks have been one of the few legal cures for cabin fever. Every day, I squeeze that exception for all it’s worth. And as soon as I began my new habit, I noticed things I hadn’t been looking for.
Birds: the usual suspects, of course, but I began to see, hear, and understand in ways I never had. The neighborhood’s formerly generic doves are three species, each with its own call. I’m used to goldfinches mobbing a feeder with thistle seed, but now I also hear their squeak in tree after neighborhood tree. I’ve learned the “Chip, chip” of ladderback woodpeckers; if I stop and wait, I’ll see them at their carpentry. My favorite stop: the tree where hawks are nesting.
And flowers. This year, domestic poppies are everywhere—as if to mark lives lost—but my eyes keep turning to uninvited species. Plants with names such as globemallow, filaree, scorpionweed, tumble-mustard. Most with tiny flowers, or they’d be welcome visitors rather than weeds.
The birds and wildflowers I see on my walks are gritty survivors, who’ve learned to live in the cracks of human civilization. As I walk, I worry that humanity will suffer a similar fate. We are ruining our planet. Once it’s wrecked we won’t vanish as a species, but we’ll wind up living in the cracks of what we were. I worry, because every archaeologist knows that civilizations eventually fail. I’d like to hope that ours can be the first to learn from the mistakes of the past, and persist, but perhaps that’s beyond our species’ grasp.
Dark thoughts on a bright spring day, I tell myself. I glance up at the sky—so much bluer than usual—and continue my search for little surprises.
Dave Phillips
April 30, 2020
