Dandelion needed to get out of the house when I got home this afternoon, too early for me not to get some more work done. So I bribed him with this and that: toys, otherwise forbidden socks and shreddable bits of cardboard, the best of all treats from the pet store: dried unmentionable parts of cows (steers, actually, but already that’s more information than I wanted to mention) all of which bought me less uninterrupted time at the computer than I wanted. Although the day has been dismally gray and didn’t really suggest itself for a long walk, eventually I relented.
We took the usual route to the boat launch, where I’ve been pausing to assess the ice, or more nearly my confidence in the ice. It all depends on what the ice fishermen have been up to, which I read from their truck tracks. If it looks like someone drove out on the ice recently, I figure that anything that can hold up a half-ton Chevy will likely hold me and a small dog. Today it wasn’t so clear. Tracks in frozen-up slush covered with a dusting of snow – I am sure that these guys would think I’m ridiculously over-cautious. On the other hand, my mother would think I was dangerously reckless to edge out on to the ice even a few feet, to where I know the water is only knee-deep. Finally, Dandelion made the decision. Too much good smelling stuff back on shore, dead grass and dog piss, trash from the ice houses, and sticks and fallen honey-locust pods to shake and pounce on and bury in the soft snow.
As the dog was busy taking all of this in I heard a sharp, close “kiiiw” overhead, and looked up expecting a red-tail, but hoping for an eagle. It was neither: instead, a small, straight-tailed falcon, with rust-speckled pale belly, shot low over the trees and across the lake.
I recognized it instantly -- it was the second time I’ve seen a kestrel in the neighborhood this winter. The first time, I saw it punch the thistle-seed feeder by the back door, just out of the corner of my eye, and just in time to see it fly off with an awkward load, to the boat lift pulled up in the neighbor’s back yard: it had taken a goldfinch right off the feeder. Before that, I didn’t know that kestrels hung out all winter in Minnesota. And I certainly didn’t know they fed at bird-feeders.
I love seeing kestrels; they somehow capture that pure essence of wild-ness, despite their closeness to our everyday life. They were one of the things I enjoyed about my long commute from Northfield to Saint Peter ten years ago, seeing one every few miles, reliably holding down telephone wires along the route, completely oblivious to me, my car, and my binoculars when I stopped for a better look. Right there, a few feet away across the road, but so intensely and completely focused on small movements in the grass, or in the gravel on the roadside, that they might as well have been a hundred miles away. There is so much wild-ness in that intention, and in that focus, the reptile gaze that sees, reacts, hovers, strikes.
It’s easy to find, or imagine, that wild-ness in faraway places and unlikely things – in sheer cliffs, empty deserts, ocean storms, in the ferocity of snakes and cougars. But sometimes we can find it just right there, on a telephone wire, or at the bird feeder. I imagine it’s that desire for proximity to wildness that makes some people want to keep wolves as pets. As for me, I have a poodle, and a great pair of binoculars.
Of course, I can’t really claim any original discovery about kestrels here. My response to them, my sense of their wild-ness will always be drawn by my response to the amazing, visceral wildness of “The Windhover,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem. And I don’t mean that his dapple-dawn-drawn falcon is wild, I mean the poem itself, which is wilder than lions and tigers and Tyrranosaurus Rex all combined.
The Windhover
To Christ Our Lord
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird — the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
-Gerard Manley Hopkins
