Mourning Dove by Meera Subramanian
In homage to Barry Lopez and Amanda Stronza. And the flying creatures.
The familiar thud on the kitchen glass, but louder, heavier. When I look up, I still see small gray feathers suspended in the air. The stickers that help birds see the glass we like to look through, which I found through the American Bird Conservatory, have helped. The thuds have diminished this season, even as we’re in the thick of migration. I suspect that one of the raptors I’m so enamored of was in pursuit of this dove, frantic, flying fast, until the air became glass and she was downed. Other strikes this year were just stuns. Five minutes later, and the feathers lifted the life back into the sky, airborne again. Not this time.
In the summer of 2021, I had great plans to attend the The Art of Mending show at the Brick House Museum in Kennebunk, Maine. Covid thwarted the plans again and again. I watched the video of exhibition, glad for it, at least. The show was curated by Scott and Nancy Nash of the Illustration Institute / @illustration_institute. They’re friends. (Scott designed the gorgeous logo of RESP for us.) They’re the kind of friends you see once or twice a year and hours pass in an instant, so enlivened and wide-ranging is the conversation. They told us about the show when it was still in the planning stages. In these times when it can feel like too much is broken or breaking, they sought out those who were focused on repair.
From Apologia by Barry Lopez, with woodcuts by Robin Eschner
One of the people they found was Dr. Amanda Stronza / @amandastronza, an anthropologist, conservationist and photographer in Austin, Texas whom they’d come across on Instagram when she started honoring the dead animals she discovered in her meanderings. She created memorials with the flowers, cones, seeds, leaves and whatever natural bits she found around the lifeless body. I took it today as inspiration. It seemed the right thing to do, when I lifted the dove from below the window and carried her to the edge of the yard.
Amanda, in turn, was inspired by Barry Lopez, who wrote about his tendency to stop when he sees roadkill and remove the body. “I carry each one away from the tarmac into a cover of grass or brush out of decency,” he writes in his short book Apologia. “Who are these animals, their lights gone out? What journeys have fallen apart here?”
A journey fell apart here today. More than one. It’s likely there’s a mate nearby, a mourning dove in mourning, their broods fledged but their bond still strong. The hawks won’t come back for their quarry, but perhaps she’ll be sustenance for someone else, a scavenger furry or six-legged, the cycle continuing.
I always try to deny dawn. She slips under my eyelids and I reach for my eye mask, craving one more hour of unconsciousness. But I hear birds. Knew the light was illuminating the unexplored forest behind the house I now find myself living in. Discovered myself pulled up and into clothes warm enough for the cool morning, lacing up my hiking shoes before I quite realized it. My eyes don’t read so well in the morning anymore, but before I walk out the door, I squint at the map for the Perimeter Trail that loops around Sewanee, hugging the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and figure it should be due west of the house. Why walk along the lanes to find a proper entrance? I tuck my pants into my socks (the default fashion for us in Cape Cod’s tick-infested landscape. Are they here or am I liberated?) and cross the bit of backyard grass and enter the woods. Ten steps in, I flush a herd of white-tailed deer twenty strong, their cotton-burst butts bounding down the hill of the small valley, then up the other side. A hundred feet in and I find a brook I can step across with one stride. Twenty more paces and I’m on the trail. I take a right and go. It’s good to be back in church.
Just before I left Knight Science Journalism fellowship up in Cambridge, 
Here on the edge of the plateau, there is the added orientation ease of heading towards the almost horizon that appears between the boles of upright trees, that indicates the drop-off of slope and the potential payoff of views. It’s why I went right. But I am distracted. A russula mushroom there in the duff. A widow-maker tree defying gravity until her uprooted roots decide to give out completely. Rounding a bend and finding myself below a sandstone overhang like a chiseled layer cake of rock, seeps staining spots dark, the smell of iron in the air. Did I gasp? I think I gasped. At a fork I go left, each rock outcropping greater than the last. I scramble up a rock to pass through a tunnel of stone and then the sound of water pulls me forward until I’m below the spray of Bridal Veil Falls, oxygenated, awake. [update: that wasn’t Bridal Veil, I discover later. Just some unnamed cascade. Just as lovely, if not as spectacular.]
Home growing up and home now means inhabiting the edge dividing land and sea. We go there to eat sandwiches in the cab of the truck, sheltered from the icy wind that lifts the waters of Barnstable Harbor into whitecaps. Beyond the water, the dunes of Sandy Neck glisten white with snow, the Handy shack popping out in dark relief. Before the first bite is taken, a flash of fur to the right. A fox, tiny, on the hunt, nose to snow, a few steps, another sniff, more steps, her footprints left behind in the layer of snow.
Go with your love to the fields.
