Common Pauraque sketches, ink on paper.
The Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival ended, taking with it new friends and birding company and its hum of vendors and activities, vaporizing in a palpable whoosh. Its impact remained (and will continue throughout the year), as the Valley returned to its own hum and rhythms.
I stood near a levee near the Rio Grande, fully alone after four happy, hectic weeks, with the characteristic smoke plumes of burning crop residues on the horizon. Beyond the fields and mesquite and the silhouettes of flying cormorants (3 Double-crested, 1 Neotropic), the river wound, out of sight and inaccessible. There were two White-tailed Kites following one another, flying like gullish raptors (or raptorish gulls?). Mexico was so close, calling me to cross.
I was in a foul mood. I had spent eight hours sitting, hanging around, and generally feeling like a twitchy idiot, hoping to see a Rufous-backed Robin at the NABA Butterfly gardens in Mission, TX. Excepting the lovely Ruddy Ground Dove at Estero Llano at the beginning of my stay, this was the only species being reported that I had never seen before. At about 9 am I had a quick glimpse of two robins/thrushes – shadowy bits of robin-like shapes – way back in the tangle, but not enough to definitively call Rufous-backed. The bird was not seen that day, except a couple minutes earlier, a bit farther up the path, and then only briefly and by one person. Logic dictates that that was probably what I saw, but deductive reasoning is nothing in an empirical world, so for all intents and purposes I saw nothing. I knew it would probably resurface again, maybe the next day, when I would not be there. Beyond this irritation, a nagging issue festered in my mind. That issue was Mexico.
I glared out at a border of water I could neither see nor hear. I have visited the Rio Grande Valley a number of times, often walking along this river, working very hard to find new birds, these “rarities”, and have loved all of it. Blue Mockingbirds, Gray-crowned Yellowthroat, Rufous-capped Warbler, Golden-crowned Warbler, White-throated Thrush, Roadside Hawk, Crimson-collared Grosbeaks, Rose-throated Becards, White-collared Seedeaters: these are some of my most treasured visual moments. I dipped terribly on Blue Bunting, but that was all right, then, so why so thoroughly pissed off, now?
How odd, such deep fury, gathering under that gentle hazy sky. I hated birds, and birdwatching, and stupid little drawings of birds that every last one of my former colleagues probably felt sorry for me over, and while I was at it I hated everyone who got to stay on their path and keep painting and their teaching positions and their spouses and do normal things like have children and laze in the sun eating raspberries and shellfish, hearing the world out of both ears while drinking wine and not dreading their next visit to the dermatologist…perhaps you see where all this was going…and for that matter, cheers to the institutions that cemented a culture of painting that exalts free and liberal use of highly toxic solvents in crowded, under-ventilated spaces, full of drones who think it is really cool to be a painter.
My most crystalline, special hatred sprang forth for that very first day I held a paintbrush, loaded with oil paint, when the paint told me what to do and a twenty year love flowed from there, an unquestioned love that moved from wrist and fingers through to ferrule and gently splayed bristles, running along a track of pigment and binder, soft on one edge of a stroke and thick on the other. The paint whispered to me then as Mexico whispers to me now: Leave everything else behind.
The first day alone on a solo year-long project is perhaps not the optimal moment to collapse into a pathetic heap of histrionic self pity. The facts are there; I am not without reason to do so, but I made a vow that afternoon to not lose my mind on this trip. I dumped my grief at that amazing river and left indulgence in its flood plain, though I held on to a bit of my newly found anger. A movement caught the corner of my vision, and I was on it, bins up, without thinking. A Common Pauraque had lifted up from the road and into the dusk. To Mexico: please wait for me.
I’m sure Mexico was looking across the same river, and thinking the same thing
(I have feelings of bitterness as well. I hated my grad-school experience and have trouble not letting that past experience eat out my insides. But hey! We are alive, right!? I love the direction you are going in! & personally, I think it is way better.)
The Rio Grande Valley absorbs so many dreams and notions. It’s a place i which hearts are broken and hearts are renewed. I’m delighted that you were able to use its good offices to sail another set of griefs and frustrations down its shallow courses.
I live just south of the river at the other side of Texas–an hour from the Red River Valley. This river serves in many places as the symbolic border between Texas and Oklahoma. It’s not, interestingly enough, the Red River Valley from the song, which is a very goodish bit north of here.
I like this Red River. Like the Rio Grande, it’s not nearly as deep as its legends. On a Summer day, you can probably cross it by hopping from giant rock to giant rock in places, though on other days it’s wide and rolling. It’s not at all like the Los Angeles River, or any of those concreted southern California rivers. The Red near me will not have a riverwalk like in San Antonio. But it’s a place of alligator gar and red-tailed hawks and scissortail flycatchers.
I’d never sail a hope or dream into the Red, because it’s simply not navigable. It’s seen griefs taken directly from the Trail of Tears by which my own griefs stand as shallow as the river itself.
But I like its simple hopes and charms. They grow watermelons in these river bottoms, and call them “diamond”. The west Texas reaches undoubtedly are near prairie dog towns. They border it up to make this lake or that lake, and plant striped bass in the lakes–which in turn attract bald eagles. You’d never lose your sanity contemplating the Red River. It will never take your breath away. But you can stop on a July day too hot to think, and watch it gently roll. I like that.
When I was in law school, I was certain I was meant to teach law. I though to myself that I would practice but a few years, learn the trade a bit, so to speak, and then go east to one of those prestigious institutions that confer brighter ribbons than the serviceable but sturdy ribbons of my little Little Rock law school. Then I’d get one of those jobs in academia teaching at the modest but worthy kind of school I’d attended for law.
school.
But when I reached my 7th year of practice or so, and was living in Los Angeles, I found that I no longer had the burning desire to teach law at any cost. I weighed out the costs and the benefits and found that I was, as a simple practitioner, doing what it was I was meant to do.
Some 18 years later, I can probably muster up envy if I work at it–for those who are professors, for those who have children, for those who made more money, for those who helped more people, for those with more talent, for those with more skills at pulling it all together. Yet I have to work to muster this kind of envy–it’s no longer natural. I can long to be more generous more easily, and long to be more intelligent more easily,but even those longings are simply too deep a set of waters for me.
I suppose I have decided there are all kinds of rivers, and all kinds of pathways, and all sorts of things we do, and share. The novel “A River Runs Through It’ closes with the lovely line “I am haunted by waters”, but i find the varied waters liberating.
I cannot imagine what it is to lose a pathway to a physical condition–we all have known the equivalent of the person whose back gave out during ballet in Julliard. Your dilemma was more palpable, because you had been in academia for years.
Yet this weblog is a lovely thing, and would this weblog exist in that old world of yours? Who can say? I feel sad, a little, for anyone who feels sorry for you as you draw your birds and their ways.
Life is like a nocturnal nightjar–it rises up at the periphery of your vision. Can you see all its plumage? I hope not–ever. The things you can’t see, after all, are part of what you draw. The river will whisper them to you.
Usually your drawings and painting grab me and hold me. The Paraque did so, but then words took over, beautiful and engaging. Thank you for sharing.
Amazing eyes.