Birds I’ve Seen

Red Crossbill, May 24, 2020, Pine, Colorado

My impending fortieth birthday got to me. I had heard that’s a thing they could do.

Normally my birthday comes and my birthday goes and I embrace it with an appropriate amount of fanfare. My family takes me out to a nice restaurant, afterwards I get drunk at a bar with friends, then my wife and I go home and do something exotically naughty.

Fun, celebratory, efficient. See ya next year.

But for 40, I wanted something different. I wanted bells, I wanted whistles, I wanted something special. I just couldn’t decide what that meant. I waffled for months. Ideas that I came up with include:

• a big party
• going camping alone
• going on a trip with my wife, just the two of us, for the first time since our son was born
• doing shrooms
• hiking a 14er with a buddy (“14er” is what people from Colorado call mountains with an elevation of 14,000 feet or higher. “Buddy” is what we call a relationship forged entirely through alcohol)

In hindsight I may have been tip-toeing toward a mid-life crisis. Right on cue.

Just as I was zeroing in on one or several of the ideas on the list a global pandemic hit and everything went to shit. Suddenly my malaise didn’t seem particularly unique or rom-com cute anymore. It’s hard to focus on existential dread when all of society is neck-deep in the tangible. My plans withered away like everyone else’s did and the week before my actual birthday I took my wife and my one-year-old son to my parent’s house in the mountains for a few days, a lovely consolation prize.

One morning I got up early and went for a solo hike in Pine Valley Ranch Park, 883 acres centered around Pine Lake, where anglers enjoy the summer months and skaters flock in the winter. I walked around to the back side of the lake, following the Narrow Gauge Trail, and I pictured people out there on the ice, Christmas lights strung above the dock, hot chocolate for sale, a Norman Rockwell painting of rural mountain life. It was beautiful in my head. Then an older couple wearing masks approached from the opposite direction and I stepped off the trail to give them proper social distance; normal life seemed so far away I winced.

I kept on, watching the red-winged blackbirds flutter to the top of the cattails to chitter their availability. I encountered a trail called Buck Gulch which I took because it sounded too old-timey not to. I was rewarded with a lengthy encounter with a western tanager that didn’t seem to mind me one bit, and let me voyeur through my binoculars as long as I pleased. Tanagers are not uncommon – I had seen one in City Park down in Denver a few days earlier – but still: busy busy, canary-yellow body, red head, black back – as Bill Murray’s Herman Blume says of Max Fisher in Rushmore: sharp little guy.

I figured the tanager was as good a sign as any that Buck Gulch was the path for me but then I hit Strawberry Jack Trail and that sounded even more B-western so I took it hoping it would spit me out directly into the Gem Saloon where I could look Al Swearengen in the eyes and see if I had what it took not to blink. See what kind of man I had made of myself after these forty years. Instead, Strawberry Jack led straight up and soon I found myself with an incredible view of Pine, a bunch of little buildings clustered down below in the valley, the Platte River roaring in with a ferocity that it never shows in the city.

I kept going. There was a group of teenagers sitting on top of a massive boulder. I could hear them long before I could seem them. They were laughing and squealing in that conspiratorial way that teenagers do when they think they’re alone. But when I came into view they immediately went silent. There were two girls and two boys. Maybe they were smoking weed or flirting but when they saw me the fun died. It gave me a complex. How could it not? Everyone knows teenagers are a forty-year-old’s kryptonite. Except they don’t even use kryptonite as a reference anymore. They have some newer reference from a superhero universe I don’t even know about. Probably from that movie where Jared Leto plays the Joker.

I wondered how I looked to them, this bearded man with his binoculars and water bottle. What would I have said about me if I was a teenager and saw myself rounding the corner in the middle of the woods, alone? Would I think I was some kind of NARC, the fun-police here to ruin a good time? Would I go silent the second I saw myself, like these kids had? I wanted to tell them that they didn’t need to quiet down on my behalf, they didn’t need to stop their fun or hide whatever it was that they were enjoying before I came on the scene, that I was different, that I was cool! Instead I just said hello.

“Hi,” one of the boys said obligatorily, stilted.

When I was out of view they started laughing again.

I felt old.

Heading back down the mountain, I embraced the ease of the walk, the elevation not hitting my lungs as hard anymore and making me wonder psychosomatically if I had COVID with every laborious, high-altitude step.

Then I saw something stirring on the ground up ahead; then another something stirring a few feet beyond that.

A little alarm goes off in a birder’s head in those moments. It’s almost like you sense an interruption in the landscape, an aberration – something’s different, something’s unique. So you pay close attention, focus your eyes, until you find the source. I quickly locked in on a little sparrow-sized bird, orangish-red, hopping around on the ground, pecking at the dirt with its beak. That beak! Long and pointed, the top went one way, the bottom another, an orthodontist’s wet-dream. A few feet beyond a brown version of the same bird flitted in much the same fashion, clearly the female. They let me get within in a few feet of them, paying me no mind whatsoever, and through my binoculars I got a perfect look at both. I removed my bird-guide from my backpack. No mistaking it: red crossbill.

The beak was a dead give away. It’s adapted for extracting seeds from pine and spruce cones, its favorite food. I had come across the duo twisting pinecones apart like chortling frat-boys wrenching empties in half. I moved closer to them and they fluttered to a nearby tree where they clung to a branch together, watching me as I watched them. The trail was absolutely still, no breeze whatsoever. All was quiet. Life slowed down.

For two and a half months the country had been seized by fear and panic as a feckless moron botched a historic pandemic with staggering, hateful ineptitude. Nonstop fear and disinformation and finger-pointing and uncertainty. It was exhausting, and terrifying, wreaking havoc on a country’s ever-worsening mental health. Alone on the trail staring at two five and a half inch strangely-beaked birds, I felt a momentary calm for the first time in a long while. Like the world would continue to turn regardless of what we humans did. Like if I just focused on these tiny moments of beauty that surround us all the time, things might actually be okay. If I could just hold on to this feeling.

I couldn’t.

The next day the Minnesota police killed George Floyd and nothing was okay. We went back to Denver and joined the thousands protesting at the capitol, which was heartening. To see so massive a movement. We wore masks and did our best to stay six feet away from everyone and we held up our signs and we chanted and we tried to be good allies. We pledged to teach our son to do the same, the way my parents did by telling me about their marches and protests, by slapping me with a hyphenated last name and teaching me about injustice and inequality. I’ll never forget working at my dad’s civil rights law firm all those summers. Once he had me drop off a court summons to a suburban police department where a sheriff’s deputy had beaten my dad’s client, in custody. Can you guess what race his client was? The secretary at the station didn’t want to receive the papers I was trying to serve but eventually a deputy emerged and took them. There was no avoiding it. They had been caught and my dad was going to make them pay. I must have been sixteen. I remember leaving that station that day swelling with pride for my old man. Like he gets shit done.

And because of the protests in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain in our own backyard, etc. after tragic etc., Colorado quickly passed substantial legislative reform (my older sister, also a civil rights attorney, advised on an earlier version of the bill), part of which ended qualified immunity for the police. It was one of the most progressive responses to the unrest over racial inequality in the country. That’s a step in the right direction, right?

Still, all over America black lives are extinguished by police seemingly every single day and very few other states are changing anything. People just continue to get killed because they’re black and then onto the next one. The system feels so hopelessly broken. If you can even say that about something that never really worked in the first place.

So what next?

June 2^nd rolled around, my actual fortieth birthday, a milestone that had come to occupy less and less space in my mind the past few months. My wife organized a casual backyard hang with a few friends, chairs six feet apart, everyone bringing their own booze, an appropriate COVID-gathering to celebrate. But the night everyone was supposed to come over the governor instituted an 8 p.m. curfew. We canceled the rendezvous. It didn’t seem right celebrating, anyway. The world seemed too fucked. Those daydreams of exotic vacations and elaborate milestones seemed a lifetime ago, relics from a bygone era, like handshakes and sweaty nightclubs. This was the new normal.

My wife and I sat in the backyard while our son slept upstairs. We got drunk and listened to the flash-bangs downtown; we smelled teargas and watched police helicopters fly overhead and thought about all the protestors taking the fight deep into the night. I was 40, six years younger than George Floyd when he was killed. A global pandemic was raging with seemingly no end in sight. A wave of Americans was rising up to try to finish the fight for racial equality while another racist wave was rising up to try and stop them. In the mountains red crossbills were tearing pinecones apart while in Washington an emperor wore no clothes. Everything was inspiring and terrifying. There was so much hatred and beauty in the world.