Spring Fever
Wherein I debate plinking a wild bird for a little peace-of-mind and sustenance.
A male robin showed up yesterday, and he has been going to war with his own reflection in the windows of the house. It sounds like someone is building a deck inside my skull. As a fan of quiet mornings, I’m a little peeved at this bird’s singularity of purpose, misguided as he is by a long evolution without reflective surfaces to confuse him. What am I to do?
How do you pick a bone with a robin who won’t back down from a fight with a structure approximately 60,000 times his size? I could open the windows and sock him a good one. I could stuff my ears full of cotton. I could get out the old lever-cocking spring air action Red Ryder with a jug of 4.5mm copper coated BBs and wipe him out at 350 feet per second, pick and gut him clean, then roast his ass with spring morels.
I could.
I wouldn’t eat a donut at gunpoint, but I would certainly eat a brace of robins wet aged and roasted to perfection with a side of asparagus tips. It is a literary writer’s duty to peck out a living however they can. The French novelist Honoré de Balzac was famous for his superhuman output, writing as he did for twenty hours at a plug while subsisting on gallons of coffee and the occasional braised pigeon who he live-trapped on the window sills of his writing room. A pigeon is not a robin, but you get the idea.
Back then even the writers were resourceful. It was eat or die. To be honest, I may have made up this stuff about Balzac trapping pigeons while he wrote furiously from his desk. For decades, so much has gone into my brain that I’m a little top-heavy over here. All I know is that I picked up the idea somewhere, the way an oyster does a grain of sand, so regardless of veracity, for the sake of polish we’ll print it here at Front Porch Journal.
One thing is definitely inarguable. The modern French know how to live, eating richly of foods that grow out of the dirt, while here in the nation of Wal-Mart we by all available evidence appear to know how to eat to die. With every trip I make to this giant money funnel in my rural town, I wonder how we are going to become a great nation again when most of us can roll faster than we can waddle. It’s a big problem. What we lack in the finer points of Cuisine minceur, we more than make up for in density. No wonder modern American cars have become so boxy. People need to get out of them now and then.
No doubt a strict diet of pigeon aux petits pois could set us on the right path. A classic spring dish of tender pigeon served with peas so fresh they make your bung pucker, only my case calls for the substitution of a battle axe robin who has been waking me up earlier and earlier each passing morning as the days lengthen.
Once my benevolent dictatorship commences in earnest, I’ll transform every feedlot superstore into enormous fitness centers. In no time my fellow countryfolk will be mean and lean and again greatness will be ours. Not incidentally, I’ll also be bringing wolves and elk back to the mountains I call home. The entire Northeast is primed for rewilding.
For all of my digital homeslices out there with refrigerators overflowing with farm-fattened chickens and turkeys, or, gawd-forbid, emulsified soy products giving you farts of teargas, being a skosh hungry is the crux of producing excellent sentences. The muses prefer we all suffer our share of privations. Beware of taking things too far, however. No need to chain yourselves to a rock like the Titan Prometheus, who evidently stole fire from the gods so us mortals could enjoy the transubstantiating magic of cooking. Before then things were awfully dark. Too much hunger staunches the creative juices, but so does not enough.
Speaking of dark, it has been the longest winter since the epic ones of decades past. I managed to get myself to Nevada for some relief, but a week hardly cut into the dismal sense that my life was doomed to soot-blackened banks of snow and days so truncated I asked the lord why didn’t he make us northerners like the bears, who sleep until spring. Per usual, no answers were forthcoming. I’ve spent months hatching an exit plan.
Back in December when my vitamin D levels were at their nadir and I could barely get out of bed, I promised myself that this was my last winter in the Far North. This is a promise I’ve sworn to before. Even if it means moving to the overcrowded southern states to wait tables at Cracker Barrel with a mind to pinch pennies until I can afford to open a franchise of pimped out car washes, I’ll do it. No joke, my malaise became so bad I dove into the genetic components, diagnosing myself as a carrier of the serotonin transport gene (5-HTTLPR). An answer provided zero relief.
My staying is not for a lack of trying to move, trust me. Plenty of times, I’ve left. Even went to the Louisiana swamps for three winters, where by golly I was blown away to realize the sun was there all along. This surprised me. I’ll never forget holding a pint of fresh Louisiana strawberries to my nose in February at a New Orleans farmer’s market. I had to calculate some deep math to account for when they would ripen back in my frozen forest.
The robin fighting his own reflection is a good metaphor for my entire adult life, a cautionary tale fairly shouting about how much trouble I cause myself. My private theory is that most obstacles in our lives are not in fact obstacles. They are perceptions. I tend to throw myself under the bus at this junction, but the ugly fact is none of us fully escape the confines of our self-generated realities. Anyone who has ever been stoned and noticed themselves in the mirror after ten minutes of looking has been close, though not like the lifelong meditators who are basically time travelers. A friend of mine, a retired vascular surgeon, told me he quit meditating after he looked down from the ceiling and saw himself sitting on the floor folded into the lotus position like a hologram. Said he loved his wife and kids too much to be messing with that stuff.
I honestly don’t know how to proceed. Every place I’ve ever lived is tied up in my cells. It’s not just dead ground or a tabula rasa for tedious inner dramas. Meaning, even if I want to leave, it always hurts. Zipping through whole ecosystems with nary a moment for developing intimacy is not human, at least until our national mores elevated consumption over reciprocity. Something has to give. I’m a guy who needs more warmth in his life, and not wood stove warmth. A few of my readers are plainsmen, some of them woodsmen who take no beef with winter. They are even sick enough to enjoy it whole hog. Good for ye, lads and lasses. I’m a chump, and I don’t care. After cutting my thousandth cord of firewood, the poetic novelty has worn off. Everything hurts with arthritis.
Gaining spiritual traction throughout the seasons is challenging. Our lakes froze solid this winter, and ice fishing, sometimes known as the moronic sport, is not my cup of tea. From the roads in my Starship Subaru (piece of shit), I saw lots of people fishing their holes while wearing fifty pounds of hand-me-downs. Tough folks, I thought. Probably content, too, and loaded on apple brandy.
In my blood there must be the nomadic gene too, because distant shores lure me even when my life is humming along without too much trouble. Though it is everything I’ve been waiting for, the urge is strongest in spring. My best guess is my ancestors were pastoralists who come spring headed into the high country, following green-up like the bison. As fall set in, they marched south to gentler grounds.
Someday, I will finally stop shadow boxing with myself the way the robin does, but right now I’m leaning hard into actions rather than suffering the over-examined life. Insights arrive unexpectedly. After reading an article last night about ADHD, my brain finally made sense of itself to me. If it is paperwork, I can’t find it. Once I’ve mastered a skill and it becomes repetitive, I’m so bored I could turn to stone. My pants may be tucked into my unwashed wool socks and my zipper down, but I can spot a fresh haircut a mile away and count without looking directly every hawk perched in their various trees over a spring hay field before whoever happens to be standing beside me is even aware that we are outside let alone surrounded.
There is a freak upstairs and I’ll be darned if I want it to be typical. It helps to be wired for danger. The flick of a deer’s ear through a forest of beige autumn leaves stands out, but I’ll admit that dealing with the nuisances of bills and emails and the claustrophobia of collared shirts is way outside my limited bailiwicks. Men, myself included, were built to move, to make and destroy stuff, and especially to go into the beyond yonder seeking adventure and blood. It’s true, or at least it was true. My chronic restlessness is a bona fide, not an ailment. It’s not one more thing for the DSM. If we pathologize any more human behaviors, we’ll have to start calling ourselves Homo neurosensis.
PITA would noose me if they got wind of my inclination to eat a pesky wild robin, but I’m thinking I can no doubt outrun whatever soy blob they send to dispatch me. These people have elevated outrage to farce. Besides, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 forbids the hunting of robins, and I’m a law abiding citizen. Both are there, though, in my chromosomes. The urge to hunt, the urge to go. Really, they are one and the same.
For now at least, I have to stick around. Since the resplendent sun is returning to our latitudes, I’m feeling less trapped. The lilacs are budding. In a few weeks they will bloom. Spring is a good season, maybe the best of them all. Each of us gets only so many springs. If everything comes together, where I’m going spring will be eternal. I’m enjoying how this one is pushing out the dark thoughts of winter. I’m even enjoying the robin who by now must have a really bad headache from throwing himself against my bedroom window over and over again. The son of bitch is medieval.
He’s lucky I’m not hungry.
Loved this wild romp through your mind!
As always, superb!