Asakiyume mita

Went on a bike ride with Waka in the sensual hot 'n' humid, where you really feel each patch of shade, like you're diving into cold water, and then into the heat again, and in all these places, so many smells--the smell of baking soil, of flowers and black raspberries and pine needles, also the smell of creosote by the train tracks, and the smell of swampy still water, and here and there the smell of garbage cooking in the sun.

We passed a father having a picnic with his daughter out the shaded door to their ground-floor apartment. There was a blanket: dad was sitting on this, very still--I thought he was meditating at first--and there were many small bowls of things to eat. On the threshold of the door was the daughter, three or four, with wild curly reddish brown hair, not quite ready maybe to be lured out.

This dramatic wildflower turns out to be butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa). How pretty!



And on the trip, there was some underpass art...





The other side was a celebration of bees and beekeeping:



Also on the ride, a trailside water tap, where you could get a drink of water, and air pump, in case your tires were low, courtesy of a car dealer; also a scrapyard with the cars almost lost in wildflowers and tall grass.

Song sparrows, catbirds, and swifts were all singing out. At the place we stopped to buy a drink and a bite to eat, the woman behind the counter had a tattoo of utility polls and the swooping wires strung between them, with birds on them.

Yesterday at dusk, two wood thrushes were competing to see who could claim to have the best voice in the darkening trees:



After listening, I closed my eyes a while, then opened them, and the sun was rising.



That's life in the land of hours and days!

The song of the wood thrush: it’s entrancing, enchanting--and nourishing? Consider the case of Brian Blessing, the new music teacher at Powell Middle School. Maybe being a music teacher had something to do with it, or maybe not. Maybe it would have worked out the same for you or me, if we’d been in Brian’s position (God willing, we’ll never be in Brian’s position).

And that position was, bundled into Allan Wilson’s car, with one of Allan’s brothers on either side of him, headed for the spur of track that serves the sawmill. There Allan intended to make Brian understand, in a visceral way, that it was a bad idea for Brian to flirt with, let alone go out to dinner with, Allan’s ex-wife Marnie, who taught seventh grade in the classroom next to the music room.

Just when it was seeming that assault and battery might progress to homicide, a police car turned onto the sawmill access road, spooking the Wilson brothers, who shoved Brian into a decrepit shed beside the tracks and took off.

Back in town, no one knew what had happened to the music teacher, and as for Brian himself, even when he managed to find his way back to consciousness, he couldn’t muster the strength to lift himself up, and his broken jaw and cracked ribs precluded the sort of loud hollering that might possibly have caught someone’s attention, if they had happened to be walking along the spur line behind the sawmill.

So Brian lay in that shed all night, and all the next day, and the following night, and the day after that. No food, no water. Several times a day the shed shook as railroad cars loaded with lumber rolled from the spur line to the main tracks. The rest of the time, Brian could hear the sounds of the sawmill’s operations--and birdsong. From before the sun rose, cardinals and song sparrows, catbirds and starlings, robins and orioles. And the wood thrush. Adrift in a sea of pain, Brian clutched at the wood thrush’s song. It soothed his wounds and thirst like springwater; it filled him and satisfied him like bread.

Finally, five days after the Wilsons had grabbed him, Brian was discovered, a delirious wreck, so the medics first assumed, when Brian tried to tell them how he had subsisted on thrushsong, and yet at the hospital the doctors confirmed that he was not dehydrated. His blood sugar levels were normal, and there were no ketones present. Very strange, everyone agreed.

Brian was never quite the same after that, and I’m not talking about the limp. I’m talking about his diet. He’d always bring a sandwich to school for lunch, often something from Subway. But during the green months, from May to September, if you caught him at home in the early morning or around suppertime, you’d see him sitting outside, facing the trees, an empty plate balanced on his knees and an empty mug in his hand, listening to the wood thrush.


photo by Lloyd Spitalnik