My mask is stuffed in the glove box of the pickup. I can’t get any more socially and physically distant than this house in the heart of the Coast Range, somewhere inside the slosh and roil of its left ventricle. A strange north wind limbers big trees on the ridge. They sigh with the effort, a sound of ancient wood resisting this new direction, this odd bend to their boughs.
From the valley floor, Raven gives voice to the strangeness of the evening. The evening must be very strange because Raven repeats himself. Seven short croaks. Pause. Seven more. Reprise. Raven has no human name. He isn’t Number 19, either. He is in the human-designated bird family Corvidae, our name for jays and crows. Corvids have big brains, count, use tools, recognize human faces, and talk a lot. Ravens even use humans as tools and sometimes lead hunters to their quarry, hoping to feast on the offal-filled aftermath.
“Corvid” looks and sounds a lot like “COVID.” But COVIDs aren’t as smart as corvids. Viruses also use humans, but their exploitation is a unidirectional machine approach. A handful of genes on a single strand of RNA implicates itself into our cells. Maybe after a few billion years of evolution, SARS-CoV-2 will learn the creative manipulation of ravens, who entwine themselves into the ways of other species with outcomes beneficial to both parties.
Occasionally I reciprocate to the ravens on behalf of humans by feeding them various animal remains. A few days back I found a Townsend’s mole dead as a gray stone in the meadow grass, expired for reasons I can never know. I placed the furry fist of her body face down on an altar of rocks at the edge of the meadow, her pink outsized hands outstretched. In this canyon-creased world where all things are part of an ongoing ecological conversation, everyone is both eater and eaten.
Raven’s nameless outpourings continue from below. He is smart and has something to say. I decide to strike up a conversation. We haven’t talked for a while. Why don’t you come on up?
He moves to the firs below the garden, clucks a few times. I remain silent. The Old Ones on the ridge sigh again, a cool exhalation of needles that brushes against my right cheek. His Blackness rises into the breeze, charcoal oars rowing across the camas-colored sky. Thirty feet above me he brakes and hovers in an airborne hunch. Something raspy emerges from my throat that sounds like hello. Wings extend as if reaching toward the edge of night. He reverses course, whooshing back toward the valley bottom on that mysterious north wind.
UPCOMING BOOK EVENTS
December 5, 2-4 p.m. Co-launch of Dancing with an Apocalypse with remarkable spoken word artist Jorah LaFleur, author of the new collection Covidian Times. Oakshire Public House, 207 Madison St., Eugene, OR. Open house format. At 3 p.m. we’ll take up the mics and read from our respective books. Grab a book and a beverage and chat with your buddies in their heated outdoor venue!
December 11, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Authors and Artists Fair, Lane Events Center, 796 W 13th Ave, Eugene, OR 97402. I’ll have copies of Dancing with an Apocalypse and my two previous books, Palindrome: Grateful Reflections from the Home Ground, and Blackberries in July: A Forager’s Field Guide to Inner Peace.