An unhinged account of insomnia and uncertainty

YouTube link: And unhinged account of insomnia and uncertainy

~5 1/2 min. Produced, written, and spoken by Yours Truly

Just birds

I left the coffee shop by the back door in the middle of the afternoon. The winter sun was already low in the sky. As I turned up the alley, I was thinking about the barista who would very soon be moving on to another job.

And then I saw a hawk swoop down in front of me. I’m only guessing that it might have been a young Red-tailed hawk. It was quite small. The hawk dropped rapidly from a wire and glided low ahead of me through the artificial canyon of brick buildings on either side of the rough asphalt and dark puddles of the alley. Then the hawk glided on past 9^th street and into the alleyway on the far side, swooping suddenly back up and alighting on one of the many wires that crisscross the alley.

I walked along the alley at my own pace. I eventually approached the place where the hawk was resting, swiveling its head as it looked around. Perhaps it was looking for mice down among the garbage bins. Whatever else the hawk might have been doing, it was being a hawk. I peered up at the hawk. I saw white and gray speckled feathers on its back. A grayish tail, I thought. Then the hawk apparently decided that I was too close and it swooped down again, gliding low with hardly a wing beat through the alley , and then, eventually swooping back up, this time coming to rest on top of a telephone pole.

As I walked forward again, I saw a man with two young children walking towards me. As they got closer, I realized that I knew the kids from chess club at New York  Elementary School. I called out to them and point towards the hawk. The young boy spotted the hawk right away, but his sister couldn’t see it. I explained just which telephone pole the hawk was sitting on and then she saw it, too. They looked at the hawk for just a few moments, and then, with their father, they went in through the back door of one of the shops. It was just a hawk, after all.

I walked on towards the hawk, looking around from its perch. I got my device camera out of my pocket to try to take a photo. But again, I got too close and the hawk flew down ahead of me, this time landing in the branches of a tree behind Wheatfields bakery. And then, once more, as I approached, the hawk flew off, this time up and over the building. I walked around the building, looking for the hawk, but I couldn’t see it anywhere.

I thought again about Abbi, the barista I had just left at Aimee’s. She had been closing up for the afternoon. I wished she could have seen the hawk. I wished she could have been standing next to me as I pointed ahead to where the hawk was resting, looking around, being a beautiful, breathtaking hawk, flying with amazing grace through the grimy alleyways of Downtown Lawrence. But Oliver had seen it. And Isabella.

But still, it was just a hawk.

I dropped a few things off at the public library and headed for the river. There were pigeons resting on the cable over the dam. Then they took off and were flying around and around  as pigeons will, their wings all catching the lowering sun at the same time as they all turned together. And there were seagulls circling over the river as well, dipping down to the surface of the river from time to time. Fishing. Being seagulls.

There were maybe seven or ten Canada geese swimming just below Bowersock North, the hydroelectric plant. They swam off as I slid down a rough gravel path toward the water’s edge. The swimming geese caught a swift current that ran between two limestone islands and sped away. I saw a Great Blue heron just standing on the edge of one of the low islands of limestone boulders across from where I stood. Herons can just stand where they stand for longer than I can watch. Sometimes I will walk away down the levee trail and then the heron is still standing where I left it when I come back. A heron being a heron.

I climbed back up the levee and walked downstream for a short way. Many more geese were resting below the levee along the edge of the river, but I decided against clambering down the limestone boulders to get closer to them.

I turned back up the levee.

As I crossed the Kaw River Bridge, I could see two bald eagles ahead of me, sitting in the tree where eagles often perch in winter, just beyond the outwash of Bowersock South. And I saw a woman I knew approaching me on the bridge. She waved, and then, when we got close to each other, we stopped to talk a little about the birds. She pointed to bird sitting on a rock in the middle of the river. It might have been a heron, but I couldn’t tell from that distance.

They were just birds, after all.

We parted and I walked around to the promenade of what used to be the Riverfront Mall to get a better look at the eagles. When I got there, I saw two young women with cameras walking towards me. Just I had gotten too close to the eagles in that area the day before, they, too, had apparently gotten to the point where the eagles resting in the tree had then flown off downstream.

I hung back as they walked on towards another eagle resting in a tree farther down the promenade. They crept closer. One woman focusing the long lens of her camera. The other taking pictures with her device camera. The eagle looked to me like a juvenile. When the young eagle had flown away, I went up to the young women and told them about the eagles I had seen the morning before. I, along with some friends, had seen as many as 13 eagles at one time just off the bridge by Bowersock South. I explained how it was a favorite spot for eagles to fish when the river was frozen up above the dam. Amazingly, it was almost twice as many eagles as I had ever seen at one time before. The previous day I had seen eagles watching from the trees. And eagles swooping down to the surface of the water, talons extended. And eagles just circling around over the river, wings outstretched. Sometimes an eagle had flown astonishingly close to where we stood on the bridge. Very large, powerful, graceful, magnificent birds. And when we, too, had also gotten too close to the eagles as we had walked around to the promenade for a closer look, the eagles had all gradually flown off farther downstream. But we had gotten our closer look at some of the eagles.

I told my story to the young women on the promenade. They were glad for the information and I hoped they would see numbers of eagles for themselves some morning from the bridge as I had. The juvenile eagle and a mature bald eagle flew by, at some distance away, over the river a couple of times as I looked out from the promenade.

I finally turned to head for home along the railroad tracks, eventually connecting to the Burroughs Creek Trail. To my eyes, the tangled grasses and the small frozen meandering creek was quite beautiful. But it was just a wide drainage area, I suppose. The sun had already set just behind the horizon of bare winter branches as I neared home.

It was just a sunset. But I wished Abbi could have seen it the way it looked to me. In those moments, I saw before me an urban wetland in the shadows of dusk, and out ahead of me, wisps of clouds catching the colors of the sun in a darkening blue sky.

And I wished she had seen the hawk.

Cold - but not too cold

It wasn’t the coldest day ever, but it was close. I wore my usual winter wardrobe – two layers below and five above. And then I threw on my puffy down-filled coat, knit hat, scarf and mittens, and I stepped out into about fifteen degrees of cold. The arctic air was still headed for zero or below. As I walked, a north wind bit at my exposed nose and cheeks. I balled my thumb and fingers inside my mittens for extra protection. I walked more briskly than usual. By the time I reached the river, I was just holding my own, somewhere between not too cold and too cold. Tiny icicles were forming on my mustache from the exhalation of my breath.

Pigeons huddled together on the cable over the dam. Only a few gulls were circling over the open water flowing from the base of the Bowersock Hydroelectric Plant. I’d gone far enough for the day. I turned and headed for home. At least I would be walking with wind.

And then, after a few more blocks, I turned a corner. Half a block ahead of me, I saw what appeared to be a woman standing in the street. She was as well-bundled as I was. She wore a bright blue stocking cap with a pom-pom on top and it looked like she was focusing the lens of a camera on an empty bench over on the side of the street.

Then, out of the brown winter background, I saw a second woman wearing a long, quilted brown coat. And in the next moment, she had shed her coat, letting it fall down around her ankles. She stood there, wearing only a very pretty party dress. It was a dark red wine color, the full skirt with frilly lace beneath it flounced around her bare legs. The fabric of the skirt gathered at her narrow waist, and then the satiny cloth stopped quite short below a quite low neckline. The line was like the V-formation of geese flying south for the winter. Beginning at a point between her breasts, two lines of the edge of the wine-colored fabric extended sinuously  out and up to points well below her bare shoulders. From another perspective, the woman exposed much of her tender skin to the hard cold.

If like Joan of Arc, she had called out to me to follow her, I believe that I would have stripped off my puffy coat and my five layers and braved the elements with her. Instead, she stepped lightly over to the bench and sat down, her back straight, knees to one side, her hands in her lap holding the billowing skirt around her thighs. She showed not the slightest sign that she might be cold. Indeed, she faced the woman with the camera as if it were already spring. After a few clicks of the camera, the woman with the south-flying neckline stood up, slipped her coat back on, and then the two women walked over to a car parked in the lot across the street.

And so then I turned and walked up the slight incline of a street heading south. And then, to my further surprise, I heard honking. No, it wasn’t Joan of Arc. As I looked up, I saw a flock of geese flying towards me. They flew lower than usual, just above the bare branches of the tree tops. And the geese flew towards me in a V-line just like the neckline of the woman in the wine-colored dress. The angle of the V, the slight curve of each leg of flying geese out to the sides. It was exactly the same. Fractal. And then the geese banked towards the river and were gone.

Of course, I took it all as a sign from the universe. Or maybe just a wink and a nod. With the universe, you just never know when or where you will see beauty.