Columbus, Ohio USA
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Essays by the late Tom Thomson (1924-2015),
founder of the Short North Gazette and author of Birding in Ohio.
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The Artisans of Winter
January/February 2020 IssueTom Thomson (1924-2015) founded the Short North Gazette in 1987. Tom was also a poet, birdwatcher, and author of Birding in Ohio. He passed away in December 2015.
Tom’s essay printed below recalls his voice and spirit that continue to inspire us.
Here at the beginning of February, I look back on almost a month of deep freeze with one snow piling atop another. For me, winter has become tedious, a little too much like a burly rough-mannered guest who overstays his visit, but with a bit of arm twisting, I might concede there’s another side to this crusty old curmudgeon I don’t always fully appreciate.
For instance, on clear evenings, bright planets hang low in the eastern sky. Venus is one of them – astonishingly bright, inviting conjecture, encouraging legends and stories of gods.
And consider this. After each snowfall, the world becomes transformed, everything becomes clean, white, quiet. The north wind is sharp as a stiletto, the air is pure, having blown across thousands of miles of tundra, prairie, northern forests, lakes – and whistled down a few big city streets, too, I wouldn’t hesitate to venture.
Snow and wind, conspiring together, carve fantastic sculptures, abstract creations few artists would dare tackle. Perfect to the eye, smooth and rounded, sharp and ridged and crinkled, they are works of importance, collaborations by master artisans.
In the Clear Creek Valley, dripping water turns to ice, melts, refreezes again, with each cycle laminating the sandstone cliffs into giant murals of pop art, glazing Christmas fern and spleenwort, turning winter tree buds into shining pearls.
Clusters of icicles dangle from overhanging cliffs, hang from exposed roots of hemlock and hillside oak like glistening wattles.
Winter’s craftsmen have a sense of humor too. Big soft snowflakes can turn a small pine tree into a chocolate cupcake with white icing. Neat as you please.
Or, overnight, wind and snow working together can turn my parked car into a giant loaf of raisin bread with icing.
All over the valley the snow is dappled and crisscrossed with the prints of animals, small and large. Most are the signatures of shy, seldom-seen citizens of the night country. As the rabbit bounds, his hind feet track ahead of the front feet. Red fox prints are narrow, set nearly in a straight line and show the marks of unsheathed claws. The white-tailed deer leaves two cuts that look like I had brought the sides of my hands down hard in the snow.
Under fallen tree trunks, large pieces of stone, and beneath the leaf clutter, all the little ladybugs of summer are huddled together in tightly bunched enclaves. They sleep now, but they have internal alarm clocks that warm weather will set to ringing. Remember last fall’s woolly bears? In winter they tuck themselves under loose tree bark, in corners of cabins and outbuildings. In these hiding places they go to sleep and, in very cold weather, freeze solid. They become hard as cheese twists or pretzels. When spring comes, they will thaw out and go about their business of pupating, become a moth, laying eggs, becoming a caterpillar again.
In the cocoon, the moth waits. In snug burrows, small animals slumber. Under the hardened soil, roots and seeds bide their time. Tight-wrapped buds brave winter winds. All possess a secret beyond my understanding. The genie of perpetuated life lies patiently curled and waiting for yet another spring. If I could understand this process, I would be in the presence of something great.
A fluffed-up winter robin looks with wistful eye at the frozen ground, flutters to a hawthorn tree with its provender of fruit. Fiery-crested pileated woodpeckers, big as crows, carry Olympian torches as they go bounding across the valley, beyond the silver-gray hills edged with dark green of pines and hemlocks. Bright red cardinals and jaunty blue jays defy the bitterness of winter.Visions of the Moon
July/August 2019 Issue
I vividly remember one sultry August night with a full moon in Columbus, Ohio when I was a lad. We lived on West Eleventh Avenue across from The Ohio State University campus in a white frame house that had once been the residence of J.H. Schaffner, the noted Ohio botanist.
Impatiently I had been waiting for darkness. Finally, about ten o’clock I went out into the backyard and near an old pear tree stretched out in the grass on my back so that I could get a clear view of the moon. I had a small telescope and an inexpensive pair of binoculars with me. I was 18 years old.
Using first one instrument, then the other, I peered upward at the bright shining disk. I could see the shadowy outlines of lunar seas and the sharper delineations of mountains and escarpments.
The minutes ticked by and patiently I continued my vigil.
A neighbor, if they should have observed me, would surely have thought that I was moonstruck – or daft. Doggedly I kept staring upward, pinpoints of bright lunar light reflecting in my eyes.
It was about eleven o’clock when my heart skipped a beat. Yes, there it was! What I had spent all this time waiting for! It was the silhouette of a small bird transiting across the face of the moon. Not just any bird. This was a migratory bird. Probably a warbler, a vireo, or a tanager headed for Central or South America. And I was actually watching it, had picked it out of the darkness by catching it in my eye, momentarily, between my telescope and the moon.
During the next hour I saw others. All heading south. All filling my soul with wonder.
Occasionally, I could hear their faint chips and chirps falling out of the night sky. At long last, stiff and sore, damp from the dew on the grass, I went back into the house. Everybody had gone to bed and it was just as well.
If they had asked me what I had been doing and I had told them, they wouldn’t have understood. Oh, my mother would have understood the words I said; but she wouldn’t have understood the real meaning, the almost unbearable exhilaration I had felt at having witnessed such an event.
I made my way to my room. Visions of the moon and tiny birds flying across America danced in my head as I finally fell asleep.Sing Me a Song
March/April 2019 Issue
Carefree and joyous, the singing of birds is as symbolic of springtime as the leafing of trees and the blossoming of flowers. “The hills are alive with the sound of music,” the Trapp Family Singers proclaimed, and who can doubt that their hearts were cheered by the caroling of birds?
Bird song has been celebrated in prose and poetry throughout recorded time. The musical offerings of birds are noted in such diverse places as the writings of ancient Greek philosophers, the Bible, the legends of Native Americans, the literature and folklore of most nations and cultures.
It is easy to wax poetic about the most gifted avian singers. Witness John Keats Ode to a Nightingale, considered one of the poet’s greatest compositions, and To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley. But do birds have human emotions? Does a robin or cardinal really experience joy and exhilaration while singing? More and more scientists and behaviorists believe it is quite possible they might. Not exactly the same emotions humans experience but comparable at the level of the particular species’ cerebration.
Such a conclusion might be reasoned in the following way. It is readily apparent that birds (and all of the higher animals) possess such emotions and sensations as fear, pain, distress and nervousness, excitement, devotion to offspring and sexual stimulation – just to name a few. So why is it unreasonable to conclude that happiness, a sense of well-being, and satisfaction are not within a bird’s ability to experience?
Charles Hartshorne, author of Born to Sing, concludes that “the dominant emotions of birds, still more of croaking frogs or singing crickets, will of course be widely different from those of man, but not absolutely different or simply incomparable.”
Hartshorne studied under the celebrated Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard, and taught philosophy at the University of Chicago prior to becoming the Ashbel Smith Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas. He was interested in birds for much of his life, having studied ornithology at the University of Michigan Biological Station and had been a Field Associate at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology.
In 1988, the State University of New York Press published a book about Hartshorne titled, Hartshorne & the Metaphysics of Animal Rights by Daniel A. Dombrowski. That, as they say, sounds like a good read to me.
“Beauty (and freedom) is always a mean between the classical determinist’s supposed world and chaos,” Hartshorne writes, and he goes on to say, “My conclusion is that the evolution of song has been toward increasing sensitivity to the value of contrast and unexpectedness as balancing the value of sameness and repetition.”
To my own mind (and ear), there is more to bird song than any aesthetic qualities we may ascribe to it. The singing of birds and their attendant call notes are highly functional and perform a variety of roles, many of them of the greatest importance in survival value, all of them communicative in nature.
With most species, song is confined to or concentrated around the breeding season. This is not an absolute by any means, because song sparrows, house finches, and numerous other species can be heard singing at other times of the year.
It is well known that one of the primary functions of bird song is to proclaim territory. Such areas vary in size from an acre or two for a bird such as a robin to many square miles for a red-tailed hawk. Linear distances between territories are also important. Bluebirds and red-winged blackbirds, for instance, usually have adjoining territories from other individuals of their species at least two hundred yards apart, but occasionally the distance is half that.
The establishment of territory consists of staking out a claim, selecting one or more singing perches, chasing away other intruding males of the same species, and proclaiming this acquisition and dominance with a profusion of song. In nature there are many exceptions to any rule. Some birds, for instance, many of them non-singing species such as great blue herons, are colonial nesters.
The singing of male birds also plays an important part in attracting and acquiring a mate, and in many cases probably acts as a bonding mechanism. Although some birds are monogamous, the fatality rate of most species is so high, especially in small birds, that the chances of both members of a pair surviving for two or three consecutive years is very slight. So the courtship ritual of territorial procurement and an outpouring of song becomes an almost annual imperative.
Many shorebirds perform their courtship songs on the wing. Woodcocks are an example, even though most of their so-called song is produced by the rush of air through their wing and tail feathers.
A number of other passerine species seem to get carried away with their singing and they burst into song while they are flying. These flight songs are common with horned larks, yellow-breasted chats, indigo buntings, goldfinches, bobolinks, and a number of others.
Although most singing is performed by males, the females of some species do sing. This is true with the females of such species as the cardinal, mockingbird, rose-breasted grosbeak, gray catbird, Baltimore oriole and house finch.
Carolina wrens, cardinals and gray-cheeked thrushes also practice dueting or antiphonal singing. Such duets might possibly be part of the courtship ritual, in addition to reinforcing the pair bond.
It is less clear why many birds sing during the course of their northward migration in the spring. One explanation might be that even then the males are attempting to attract a female. It is also possible that territoriality extends to favored feeding areas. Or, maybe, they are giving lessons to any young birds-of- the-year that might be within earshot.
Most individuals of a given species have more than one song. Some birds have a repertoire of a dozen or more well-defined songs. In most cases, although the songs are different, the tonal quality and phrasing are usually typical of the species.
Aretas Saunders, an ornithologist who specialized in bird song, recorded 552 variations of song sparrow songs among different individuals. Margaret Morse Nice, whose intensive studies of song sparrows were conducted when she lived in Columbus, Ohio believed that simple songs are inborn, but that the complex songs of many species must be learned from parent birds or other individuals of their species.
Birds such as the mockingbird, gray catbird and European starling are adept at imitating the songs of other birds. Lesser degrees of mimicry have been recorded in many other species. There are also geographical variations in song. A rufous-sided towhee in Alabama might have a song significantly different from birds of that species nesting in Ohio.
In the Clear Creek Valley, I can be totally perplexed by the songs of cardinals and Carolina wrens who live next door to each other. They sound a bit alike to begin with but when they are influenced by each other's songs or when they deliberately set out to imitate their neighbor's song, I admit I can be baffled. Throw in a nearby Kentucky warbler who gets his two cents in on the act and anything is possible. To make matters even more interesting, in the valley they all have a slight accent, just the hint of a drawl, not southern, mind you. Neo-Appalachian is what I call it.
The outpouring of song delivered by one individual can be prodigious. Mrs. Nice reported that some individual male song sparrows sang over 2000 complete songs in a single day. Although many birds sing sporadically all day, the period of maximum song is usually during the early morning hours.
Exceptions, of course, include nocturnal species such as owls and whip-poor-wills. A few birds, however, normally regarded as diurnal, are also known to sing at night, especially if there is a full moon. These species include the marsh wren, mockingbird, yellow-breasted chat, common yellowthroat and cardinal. Artificial lights around shopping malls and car lots can induce birds such as robins to sing in the middle of the night.
Most young birds begin singing during their first year, in some cases soon after they leave the nest. Most often, song is initiated when the birds are about two months old, which is considerably younger than when Enrico Caruso started his career.The day starts on a note of despair: the sorrowing dove, alone on its telephone wire, mourns the loss of night, weeps at the bright perils of the unfolding day. But soon the mockingbird wakes and begins an early rehearsal, setting the dove down by force of character, running through a few slick imitations and trying a couple of original numbers into the bargain. The redbird takes it from there. Despair gives way to good humor. - Excerpt from E. B. White’s essay “The Ring of Time”
Citizen of the World
November/December 2018 Issue
It was early morning and it had sprinkled during the night. The light in the eastern sky was chasing clouds that were fleeing westward. Here and there were patches of cerulean blue, otherwise the sky was as feathery and gray as a dove’s wing.
In one place, above a wooded hilltop, the clouds were variegated and stippled, producing a scaled effect, like looking up at schools of silvery fish. There were other clouds, some almost transparent, shimmery, with the appearance of mother-of-pearl. Others were infused with a wonderful pink color. The light seemed to radiate from some point I couldn’t determine.
Then the sun appeared, a swollen red ball, over a foggy pasture, beyond a black woods. Bigger than when it’s overhead. Like a giant hot air balloon, hovering in the air. It teetered on the horizon – my horizon.
In New York City it was already an hour high. Over the mid-Atlantic it was mid-morning. In London, lunchtime. In Paris, time for an afternoon break. The end of the working day in Prague. In Ankara, it was setting beyond a mosque.
I continued my walk. The birds were singing with renewed vigor. There was an extra spring to my step. Suddenly, I had become a citizen of the world.
Fall Bows Out with Simplicity
November/December 2017 Issue
This essay appeared in the Columbus Citizen-Journal December 20, 1985.
Tom Thomson (1924-2015) founded the Short North Gazette in 1987. Tom was
also a poet, birdwatcher, and author of Birding in Ohio.
There is an austerity to the last day of autumn that suggests to me the adage that less is more. Complex events become more elemental; simple things assume greater importance.
I like the idea that the season recaptures nostalgic moments of early American wilderness, replenishes in our hearts a sense of fair play. As we approach the holiday season, it is also a traditional time for families and friends to gather to reassess and strengthen the bonds of love.
Little things take on additional meaning, I said. That is as true with man and his behavior as it is in appreciating the world of nature. I believe that consideration enhances respect, respect bestows affection and affection is the gateway to love. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, “Love, and you shall be loved.”
In the natural scheme of things there is also reconciliation. And, if we but look, there are events transpiring that tell us we live in a world of wonder. Consider as a work of art the twisting limbs of a great tree silhouetted against the sky. Look again at the sculpted convolutions of the clouds, the powerful surge of a river, the silvery slant of rain creating a Japanese print, the feathery flakes of a first snow. Each is skin to the other; each an essential part of the living Earth.
Bursting milkweed pods parachute their tiny seeds onto every breeze. Tamarack trees stand like golden towers in the woods, then drop their needles – even though they are conifers. The yellow flowers of the little witch hazel tree burst into bloom even though winter is just a whisper away.
Bright bangles of bittersweet, braided along the edges of country roads, intertwine with the brilliant red of sumac and poison ivy. Plump robins, sleek cedar waxwings and rosy house finches gorge on the ripe red fruit of hawthorn and coral berry.
Now that there is snow on the ground, other birds excitedly flock to our feeders. Nuthatches are windup toys that scoot in all directions. Chickadees are animated fluffs of never-ending energy. Blue jays are burly traffic cops throwing their weight around. Juncos are dapper in their neat tuxedos.
Most members of the insect tribe have taken a hiatus: returned to winter’s sleep, to egg, to pupa. Wavering lines of Canada geese materialize out of lowering skies, reaffirm the season, give us back a bit of wilderness. Small groups of elegant loons appear on our lakes, aloof and independent, agents of lonely spaces and sighing winds.
Late-autumn sunsets presage those of winter, are painted from a palette of orange and red quicksilver, invoke the swelling strains of a great symphony. This grand show is witnessed by the evening star and the chalky visage of the moon.
By those nocturnal lights the barred owl hoots his melancholy message, the rakish little red fox lopes through moon-shadows on his way to mysterious rendezvous.
Thus the rubric of the season advertises its attractions. Milkweed pod and golden tamarack; flowering witch hazel and gayly bedecked hawthorn; the autumn flight of waterfowl – under the eternal stars – an eternal chronicle of miracles.
Enjoy!Ill-Fated Birds
July/August 2016 Issue
Over the years, one of the best places in central Ohio to look for shorebirds was the sewage disposal plant along the banks of the Scioto River south of Columbus.
Overflow ponds, many of them filled with sludge, a by-product of the treatment process, sometimes attracted hundreds of these dainty and attractive birds. How incongruous, that these wild migratory birds should be attracted to such a place, considering the rancid smells and the evil appearance of the oozing and crusted black muck. Equally ironic that I should find so much beauty in such surroundings.
Some of the impoundments that accumulate rainwater also prove irresistible to waterfowl and herons. One spring there were half a dozen tundra swans that stopped over for a few days and it isn’t all that uncommon to see diving ducks – lesser scaup, redheads, and buffleheads – diving beneath the murky waters.
Sometimes when the sludge is of a thin consistency, sandpipers become trapped in the viscous substance. Even if its frantic struggles get it to more solid footing, the horrible glop will have ruined its plumage, denied it the power of flight, made it easy prey to disease, starvation, or death from four-footed or winged predators.
One day I saw a lovely Least Sandpiper, a bird I took to be a female because of her slightly larger size, meet its fate in this way. It was one of a flock of a dozen that flew onto the pond. Its companions landed on drier and thicker parts of the sludge carpet, then unconcernedly ran about on twinkling matchstick legs as they gleaned for insects and larvae. The ill-fated bird landed off to one side, smack into an area of repugnant slime.
I held my breath but it was obvious from the first that there was no hope for this little traveler. She was in up to her breast, and her struggles only made her plight worse. For a brief second she unfolded her wings, still largely unsoiled, raised them up over her back toward the sky. Then, in panic, her wings beat a desperate tattoo until they, too, were fouled by the filthy crud. Her pitiful flapping had only served to sink her in deeper. I stood transfixed, my 10-power binoculars allowing me to see every detail of her unfolding plight.
Within a minute, only her extended neck and head were above the surface. She remained in these circumstances for another ten minutes or so.
All my life, I have heard people say that wild animals and birds have no knowledge of the imminence of death. I don’t believe that for one minute.
I continued watching, looking deep into her small dark eyes. It seemed to me they shone with all the intensity her sludge- and slime-entombed metabolism could emit.
She was looking straight at me, and I was powerless to help because she was fully twenty yards from where I stood. Then for the briefest of seconds a strange thing happened. Have you ever been in your car, waiting for a light to change, casually glanced at the person in the car alongside your own and experienced a brief feeling of transference? That you were the other person and they were you? That’s what happened to me as I continued to watch the doomed sandpiper.
A vision of distant tundra dotted with wildflowers and multicolored lichens and mosses danced across my mind, and I sensed a tiny nest snuggled into the spongy ground. For the briefest of moments, I felt the liberating ecstasy of rising on the wind, ascending into the pale blue sky under the Arctic sun, setting off on monumental journeys southward and then, suddenly – this, a sudden miscalculation, a fatal mistake in a chancy world.
Then I was here and now, back to reality: no longer a traveler through shadowy dimensions of time and distance, just a man again, watching a drowning, suffocating bird as the excrement of the 20th century closed in over her head.
Suddenly she was gone and I was alone.
Once in that same place, in that neglected and mortifying toilet of civilization, I encountered a Great Blue Heron in a similar predicament, but this big fellow had managed to extricate himself temporarily from the suffocating black death. He stood on a more solid matting of sludge in the middle of one of the larger ponds. For a period of two weeks I noticed him out there.
He had fouled his feathers and the poor old soul had no choice but to stand there on his island of exile waiting the mercy of the Grim Reaper. And stand he did, sometimes on one leg, sometimes the other. In sunshine and rain he stood there, and as far as I could tell he hardly moved an inch from where I had first seen him.
Toward the last it was hard to tell whether he was dead or alive. Logic would tell me that he had to be alive or he wouldn’t be standing. I would have to look at him for minutes on end before I could see an almost imperceptible movement of the head or the burning glint of an eye. Each time I visited the forsaken place, I would wonder if he was still hanging on to his lease on life. Putting the binoculars to my eyes, I would sweep the area until I would find him. There he would be, a strange grotesque caricature of a bird, the butt of an insane joke.
His plumage of once fine feathers and great wing primaries hung on his frame of brittling bones and shrinking, drying viscera. The thought entered my mind that he looked like a living scarecrow, but I dismissed the simile. It was worse.
It was imporssible to believe that life still existed somewhere inside that wretched sun-baked heap of pathetic, filthy feathers which, toward the end, must have been draped on little more than a skeleton. Yet he persisted. He continued to stand.
Then one day I couldn’t find him. He had laid himself down to die. After much searching I picked out what might have been his remains, what looked like that but might have been almost anything, a discarded feather duster, perhaps, or nothing at all.The Sunshine Factor
January/February 2016 Issue
First published January 14, 1983 in the Columbus Citizen-Journal
There is no scientific law on how sunny days affect the way we feel. Yet common sense and experience tell us there is a relationship. Call it the sunshine factor.
This time of year, cloudy days seem to be the rule rather than the exception. Rain, snow and gloomy weather prevail. Sometimes, it takes an extra measure of faith to believe the sun still shines in Florida, much less above the heavy layers of clouds overhead.
How glorious, then, when a bright, clear day dawns. How fine when the stars blaze at night in a cloudless sky.
Spirits soar, smiles proliferate, hearts gladden. No matter that temperatures plunge, the reappearance of the sun is a tonic for the winter blues.
Along city streets, someone breaks into a whistled tune, eyes sparkle, laughter comes easier. And if it’s cold when we jog or take a walk, we are rewarded with hearty appetites and apples in our cheeks.
In contrast with professional meteorologists who are conversant with highs, lows, temperatures and the wind-chill factor, the sunshine factor lies in the domain of poets, philosophers and eternal optimists. It is the elixir that induces a cardinal or song sparrow into tentative melody.
On a ski slope, a wooded trail or a trip to the shopping center, it is calculated by subtle emanations from the heart. It causes the human spirit to take wing.
Rejoice in the Passage of Time
September/October 2015 Issue
Late October holds one moment when the year seems to balance between memories of the summer past and intimations of the winter to come. Such a moment sometimes arrives on the wings of a storm, after scud clouds have loosed their lashing rain and veered into the northwest, when leaves fly in flurries before the restless wind. Then, suddenly, an unfamiliar new chill pervades the warmer air and I become aware that the moment has come and that there is no turning back from the onward rushing season.
The excited cawing of a flock of crows reaches my ears, and I see their black shapes flapping helter-skelter over forgotten cornfields. A chickadee flits through an old apple tree, stopping long enough to hang upside down as it inspects a cocoon.
I walk on, happy and unencumbered, knowing that all these living things share with me the secret of the changing seasons.
If there is a Shakespearean irony to autumn, there is also the clean bright light and economical colors of a rare 17th-century Dutch painting. Landscapes are reduced to elements of simplicity and the horizon is drawn in one deft stroke of an artist’s brush.
Trees, divested of their leaves, are sharply etched against skies that can resolve from pewter gray to as clear and cheerful a blue as last summer’s chicory.
In deep woods, gnarled oaks are like ancient gurus who speak to me in a silent tongue and strew acorn amulets at my feet. Now, at last, I can fully see the victory of towering beech trees that have achieved freedom above the forest’s canopy.
The woodchuck readies himself for hibernation. During the winter his body temperature will drop to 37 degrees F. and his heart will slow to three or four beats a minute. Chipmunks, snug in their underground retreats, will spend their time napping and occasionally will wake to nibble on hoarded munchies.
In the hill country, the wild and lovely ruffed grouse forages on wooded slopes and in sheltering thickets. When the snow falls and his world becomes muffled and white, he will seek refuge under the protective boughs of hemlocks and pines.
I count my blessings that I am content to study and enjoy all these wild creatures of nature and leave them in peace for others to enjoy. More than that, I share Albert Schweitzer’s reverence for life – and in so doing I preserve my own sanity.
The years of my life are but a handful of pennies and I hope that I may spend them in a kindly way. On my walks I feel that I am an integral part of the living Earth, that I am a sojourner with each plant, animal and bird. The hours spent in the field alone and with loved ones, the procession of the seasons, the privilege to have spent a short time on a wonderfully alive planet: All of these things I proclaim without hesitation.
Enjoy!Advice From Dr. Seuss
July/August 2014 IssueTo the merriment of the creationists, it must be admitted that not a solitary soul knows for sure how the Earth was formed. I close my eyes and try to picture a cosmic event of such colossal magnitude, but my imagination falters, falls on its face.
It is difficult enough for me to imagine the coupling of my own parents and my resulting birth, so how can I expect to visualize the creation of universes, stars, and solar systems?
I look out from the Earth at the stars and everything seems reassuringly in place. The dark starlit sky is elegant and serene, a fantastic backdrop for the drama of humanity, a piece of stage magic capable of conjuring up gods and goddesses, not to speak of mammals and birds, dragons, scorpions, and a whole menagerie of other creatures.
Except for the occasional meteor that disintegrates with a whisper or stifled murmur, sidereal space is soundless, emitting not so much as the squeak of a celestial hinge. It is all illusion, and I am a sitting duck, a babe in the woods, my ingenuousness intact.
In my imagination, I fly back 6,000 years to the Euphrates Valley, gawk with the best of the stargazers and wizards. But, then, I pull up short. “You can’t kid a kidder,” I once heard my mother say to the manager of a supermarket. She was taking something back, something or other that she wasn’t satisfied with and she wanted her money refunded. That’s the way I am. I keep taking things back. It’s ingrained, inherited, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
It’s difficult enough consoling myself with the thought that the earth is a mere speck revolving around a third-rate star and that I am but one of over 7 billion fidgety and uneasy inhabitants on this sphere, stuck here, looking up and out.
I’m reminded of the woman Annie Dillard quotes in her book Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. “Seems like we were just set down here,” she remarked, “and don’t nobody know why.” I can relate to that.
Yet, I don’t want to be like the middle-aged woman I saw one summer day walking down the street talking to herself. Every now and then she would stop in her tracks, wave her arms, and stare directly up at the sun. I mean, for ten or fifteen seconds at a time.
“Don’t think I don’t know you’re up there,” she shouted. “Ol’ Devil, I know you’re up there in your city of flame.”
Then she would walk a little farther, stop again, stare directly at the sun, and continue her harangue. “Devil, I know you’re up there! You can’t fool me!”
I walked up to her and said, “Lady, you shouldn’t stare at the sun like that. You’ll go blind.”
It was as if I wasn’t there, hadn’t said a word. She continued down the street, stopping every now and then, repeating her
performance. I shudder at the physical harm she was doing to herself, destroying her eyes and, probably, her brain.
But, then, I shake off these kinds of memories, try to pull myself together. In spite of unanswered questions, I know that everything is all right for the simple reason that I care and, as a bonus, I have love in my heart. It is the same love that lures me to the endless night sky. It is the love that enables me to talk to the stars and the moon. The same love that makes the world go round. That, and the fact that I sometimes wear a hat with a blue jay feather stuck in the band. And, I whistle a lot.
So I go through life, whistling in the dark, halfway contented that I am doing the best I can, halfway discontented that I am not doing nearly enough. Sometimes, in a peculiarly perverse way, like so many of my brethren, I rejoice at the shroud of mystery and ignorance that clouds the human experience and distorts the world about us into man-made images of self-acclaim.
Then, every once in a while, I come across true genius and the self-depreciating words of a truly great man. I read an article about Theodore Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, and how he was once awarded an honorary degree by Lake Forest College. They asked him to give a formal speech befitting the occasion.
“No,” he replied, “I won’t do that, but I will say a few words on the spur of the moment.” He kept his promise, and the
appreciative audience gave him a standing ovation when he was through. Here’s what he said:My uncle ordered popovers
from the restaurant’s bill of fare.
And, when they were served,
he regarded them
with a penetrating stare.
Then he spoke great Words of Wisdom
as he sat there on that chair:
“To eat these things, said my uncle,
you must exercise great care.
You may swallow down what’s solid,
BUT
you must spit out the air!”
And
as you partake of the world’s bill of fare,
that’s darn good advice to follow.
Do a lot of spitting out the hot air,
And be careful what you swallow.What a wonderful message that is, especially in this day of pompous politicians and cardboard corporate bigwigs with their pious prescriptions for what ails the world. And, to my mind, the last few lines of the poem provide a reliable antidote to the even more obnoxious spin doctors and their hocus-pocus, hoopla, and hogwash.
I’m reminded of George Orwell’s 1984 where pumped-up militaristic propaganda gives the boot to truth and decency.
So let’s hear it for Dr. Seuss!
Hip-hip-hooray!The Country of Common Belief
November/December 2012 Issue
All of nature seems aware that this is a time of momentous change, that with each falling leaf the rigors of winter are closer at hand. Ants, heeding instincts from the ancient cellars of time, carefully carry aphid eggs into their underground chambers where they will tend them until the coming of spring.
Near the old bridge on Starner Road, shimmering bass, darters, and chubs seek out the deeper pools of the creek, where they hover mysteriously in the dark waters, waiting for their world to be encased in a heaven of ice.
It is a time, too, of expectatation, of pause, sometimes on hazy mornings the entire world seems to be holding its breath, waiting, reluctant to forego its lease on the good times.
Events that transpired early in the year fade, turn into moonlit dreams of semi- reality, fragment themselves, become shadows without dimension.
The bright leaf falls, but for many life-forms there is hope of resurrection. In nature, it is always so.
Just to view the turning of the leaves is an experience that surmounts what Loren Eiseley calls “the country of common belief.” I am humbled by the magnitude of the spectacle, and my first inclination is to grieve, to wear an armband of black crepe.
If the springtime was like visiting a nursery, then this must be like a respectful visit to a funeral home to pay last respects. But why are all the other guests so cheerful? A chipmunk sticks something in his mouth, then chatters and laughs at me before scurrying behind a crumbling fence of old field stones. A sassy titmouse dines on a spider, then takes time to jeer at my sadness. I change my attitude and move freely about, conversing with those present, remarking how life-like the deceased looks and what a good and full life he led. I join my friends, sharing in the wonder before me.
Star Topples from Great Ape House
December 2011 Issue
© Millard Draudt It seems people – myself included – always add “Ohio” after saying Columbus, not just out-of-towners, but folks who live here too. Don’t ask me why. I suppose it’s because there are other towns with the same name scattered around the country, but the only two that come quickly to mind are in Georgia and Indiana. My point is: We don’t say (all in one breath) Cleveland, Ohio, any more than we say Indianapolis, Indiana, or San Francisco, California. Yet we still say Columbus, Ohio.
I know not why. I care not. I do remember, however, that this provincial habit was a pet peeve of one-time Columbus Dispatch columnist Johnny Jones. He would get a puzzled scowl on his face as he repeated the often-asked question: “Why do people invariably say Ohio after saying Columbus? Don’t they know this is the largest, the biggest, the most heavily populated Columbus in the whole @$#*%! world?” After this outpouring of invective, he would roll his eyes under his shaggy eyebrows, toss down another drink, if he was at the old Press Club of Ohio (or anywhere else), then shrug his shoulders in helpless frustration.
It reminds me of the fact that people generally address their co-workers and everyday acquaintances and friends on a first-name basis. It’s just the opposite of how we are with Columbus. It’s Hi Bill! Hello Linda! So long, Jerry! Whatcha know, Jack? Without a clue or a care as to a longer, tedious last name. Surnames seem about as useless as appellations in the Appalachians, although probably for different reasons.
Enough about names. I set out to relate an amusing anecdote about my time spent here in Columbus, Ohio. So, onward down the slippery slopes of social dilapidation.
The late Earl Davis, superintendent of the Columbus Zoo, had his employees put up some outdoor decorations one Christmas season many years ago. This was in the ‘50s. Centerpiece of the display was a large, illuminated white star. The star of Bethlehem, if you will. Strings of bright, twinkling lights reached outward and downward from the highest structure to the roofs of lower buildings.
There was one natural and logical place to locate the star so that it would be at a high point, an apogee, so that it could be best seen from Route 257 which passes right by the zoo. Now where do you suppose that turned out to be? Why, it was smack plumb-dab on top of the Great Ape House, home to those other primates we share the planet with – the gorillas, chimpanzees, monkeys, and their kithin’ kin.
So? As smart asses are apt to say thesedays, “What’s wrong with this picture?” Why did this simple display of Christmas cheer and goodwill become a controversial topic that had most of the citizenry wagging their tongues? Beats me. But the newspapers were deluged with vehement letters protesting the decorations as a sacrilegious act. Some demanded Davis’ job; all insisted the star come down.
Davis told me that for the better part of a week the zoo phones sounded like a bunch of crazy Swiss bell ringers. Jangle! Jangle! Jangle! Ringing all day long. High degrees of religiosity didn’t seem to stem the obscene words of the callers. Accusing voices were suggesting that he was a communist. This was the Cold War in dead earnest, the kind of thing that lit up the otherwise deadpan visage of Joe McCarthy.
Creaky-voiced old women were calling to accuse Davis of believing in and advocating evolution. “This one old lady called,” Davis said, “and her first words were: ‘Do you honestly believe in God?’ So help me. Those were the first words that beat into my eardrums when I picked the phone up and said hello. It shook me up, I’ll tell you that.
“Another voice, this one sweet as AlaGa syrup, asked me if I didn’t realize that all the children coming to the zoo would be influenced by the star’s being atop the Great Ape House. She asked me if I had any children of my own,” Davis recalled. “Before I could answer any of her questions, she started getting nasty, her voice sounding like it was coming out of a lye can.”
Davis laughed, “She said she’d get my job if I didn’t take that star down.
I didn’t get a chance to tell her that the zoo’s closed during the winter months and precious few children would ever see the star unless they were driving by with their parents.” He paused, took a puff on his pipe, and added, “Even then, how would they know it was on top of the Great Ape House? Unless, perchance, their parents would tell them.
“Of course, we ended up taking the star down,” Davis sighed.
I asked him where they put it.
“On top of the bird house,” he said with a sad smile.A Magic Month
Columbus Citizen-Journal November 23, 1982
November 2011 Issue (reprint)
November is a magician. In its great disappearing act, every vestige of summer vanishes. Hard on the heels of milder October offerings come storms, pewter skies and driving rains. Cold clear nights witness the ascension of Orion the hunter. Lake shores turn to tinkling ice, morning dew to frost, drizzle to the sorcery of snow.
Prominent among these curiosities is the sudden appearance of wild waterfowl heading south. A distant rustle – like the faraway barking of dogs – grows to an excited gabbling, changes to a clamor. They are geese. A vee of them flies over, wing to wing, in relentless passage.
The flight of wild ducks also is wondrous to watch. From marshy hiding places, where legions of cattails nod, wigeon, teal and slender pintail leap aloft, wings splashing, pinions straining, as they climb high above the humble earth.
Swift flying canvasbacks, scaup and goldeneyes bunch together, wings flashing in unison. They race the wind, neatly tacking, coming about, before stringing themselves across the sky like skeins of thread.
Whistling swans follow the primeval urge that takes them from arctic latitudes to the bays and estuaries of our southeast coast. They fly strong, with long necks outstretched, engraved in startling white against the pastel colors of lowering skies.
On choppy, white-capped waters, loons ride the waves, fantasizing about silvery fish darting in the depths below. Then they dive in pursuit of their dreams.
Gulls flutter over the water, their hue and cry smacking of the sea, ports-of-call, the nature of change and matters beyond our full understanding.
Little Georgie Blount
February 2011 Issue
Sometimes I go over to Green Lawn Cemetery, which is not far from downtown. It’s a lovely place, a veritable arboretum and wildlife sanctuary. In addition to many birds, I’ve seen deer, foxes, a coyote, many gray squirrels including a white albino, red squirrels, chipmunks, striped ground squirrels, bull frogs, and snapping turtles. If I am alone, I am apt to talk to any of them.
I occasionally say hello to James Thurber whose ashes are interred there, and tell him how much I enjoy working on the articles I’m doing about him. If I’m in a good mood, I tell him how wonderful and exciting life is. If I’m in a more wistful mood, I tell him how much I sympathized with his “Life and Hard Times.” Sometimes I have a word or two with flying ace Captain Eddy Rickenbacher, but he’s pretty tight-lipped. Security conscious, probably.
Then there is little George Blount. He died in 1873 on Valentine’s Day, a week after falling from a stairway bannister in his father’s hotel in downtown Columbus. He was only 6 years old. It’s easy to talk to Georgie because of the elegant life-size sculpture that marks his gravesite. Truth is, I mostly just talk to him in my mind. Things like, “Hi’ya, kid, how ya doing?” or “I see you’ve got a nifty new hat on your head.” Stuff like that. Because the sculptor elected to put his cap in his lap, for years now unknown good Samaritans have kept his head covered with one kind of cap or another, sometimes draping a scarf around his neck, even bringing him little toys at Christmas time.
A Benediction
October 2009 Issue (reprint)Inexorably the season advances. Fall colors are fading, the leaves dance earthward now in flurries, hastened by wind and rain. Midas's touch becomes a shining reality under a grove of honey locust trees which seem to drop their leaves suddenly – as if on a whim – and the ground beneath is transformed into a pool of golden coins.
Even on calm days the leaves come drifting down as if by predestination, a silent and measured succession of them, a letting go, a self-inflicted amputation of leaf stalks from twigs and branches. Like dispassionate pilgrims on their way to an eternal shrine, they seek their destination, their place of final repose.
Down spin the shapely yellow leaves of the tulip tree. Then another and another to join the first and the others. Down come the crimson leaves of the sweet gum, scatter along the ground, accumulate in windows, give birth to a universe of dying red stars.
Some of the leaves are perfectly formed when they fall, others are marked by the wear and tear of blight, the ravages of insects, and the vagaries of weather.
But most will perish together, and the process starts within hours. They will trade their bright colors for somber shades of brown, crinkle and turn up at the edges. Eventually all are baptized by rain, become sodden debris to be further broken down by insects, rodents, mold and fungi and the great hosts of bacteria.
I sometimes think that the fallen leaves are a last benevolent gift to the earth. Having taken so much from the soil, at the last, the trees return the favor. Enriching the humus, the leaves become one with it in the age-old cycle of replenishment – I call it a benediction.
An Eternal Becoming
January 2009 IssueThere is an improbability about birds, not that they fly, but that they seem to exist in a world apart from our own.
I'm sure that Annie Dillard was also thinking about birds when she said, "The great hurrah about wild animals is that they exist at all, and the greater hurrah is the actual moment of seeing them."
She goes on to speak of their wariness and what a prize it is to behold them. That goes double for birds because of their ability to fly away when we most want them to stay. Oh, birds have wings all right and for some birds that gift makes the world their oyster. Many of our spring migrants spend the winter in the neotropics, exotic places like the Bahamas and Trinidad and Venezuela and beyond. Black-bellied plovers that nest above the Arctic circle travel as far away as the coast of Chili. Nighthawks and upland sandpipers spend their winters on the pampas of Argentina. That's tourism on a grand scale.
A scientist of the old school might say that these peregrinations really aren't made from free choice, that bird behavior is mechanistic, that they are captives of their own genetic makeup. That is undoubtedly partly true but when I look at the rush hour traffic on a freeway, I wonder who's kidding whom.
All birds aren't world-class travelers. Some of them stay at home, others make journeys of a more modest kind, say from Ohio to the hills of Tennessee, or the pine barrens of northern Alabama, or just to somebody else's backyard. Blue jays, robins and downy woodpeckers, for instance.
The greater triumph of birds might be that they exist in a world of fast-motion with sensory perceptions that are beyond our conception, a place where life is lived in a fast lane that we can only imagine.
No matter. One of the nice things about the study of birds is that we can bring our own personal interpretations and feelings to the subject. For me, there are many such threads and one of them is that birds are the perfect eternel devenir, an eternal becoming, an abstract link between ourselves and the natural world, embracing the past, the present, and the future. I hear the same mournful sighing of the mourning dove that John Audubon heard along the Ohio River. It is the same sound I heard as a young boy, hear now and, hopefully, it is a sound that will caress the ears of posterity for many years to come.
End of a Season
November 2010 Issue
The advent of cool days and frosty nights signals the conclusion of what is probably the least publicized of all concert series – the night music performed by crickets, katydids, cicadas and their friends. It is an ensemble of wide renown, acclaimed by critics for melodies hinting of moonbeams and starlight, compositions sure to soothe jangled nerves.
Those wise in the ways of the heart say these harmonies are perfect background music to share while walking in summer’s soft darkness, preferably with someone of similar inclinations.
Performances occasionally star famous soloists such as the horned owl of fortissimo baritone voice and the screech owl with quavery arpeggio tenor.
Maestros of the string section are crickets with their dependable chirruping. Like virtuosos everywhere, they are loath to play in drafty, poorly heated halls.
So the season draws to a close. Unemployed crickets go into retirement. A brave few, not ready to hand up their bows, seek the warmth and cheer of human habitation. They often prefer cozy spots like a darning basket or wood stacked beside a fireplace.
They strike up a tune or two for old times’ sake. Their cadences go well with firelight, books for winter reading, crisp apples and tucking children into bed.
As chill winds rattle adamant leaves in the blear outside, one gentle host was known to have confided to a tiny emigre, “It’s sure you’re good company, precious little inconvenience and we’re all in this together.”
October Makes Its Brisk, Colorful Entrance
October 2010 Issue
Photo © Darren Carlson October comes swaggering through Ohio country like a happy vagabond, his knapsack full of apples and nuts, his eyes reflecting blue skies by day, twinkling stars at night.
His morning breath accounts for frost on high ground, his voice is the murmur of cool night breezes. He sings a ballad centuries old; the lyrics speak of the cycles of life, the joys of the summer past, the rigors of the winter to come.
As his hands sweep through the treetops, the fire of the retreating sun seems revealed in one last farewell. Burning coals smolder in the towering oaks, candle flames of incandescent yellow finger through the beech trees, maples are enveloped in a raging red conflagration.
He sweetens the air with the incense of new mown hay, the muskiness of matted tangles of last summer’s flowers; he decorates early-morning spider webs with tiaras of sparkling diamonds.
Mighty Orion climbs the night sky with Sirus, his eager hunting dog. Once again the clamor of geese reaches my ears and I scan the heavens to share their exuberant flight. The small golden birds of summer go flying south.
On the ground, asters of a dozen colors are stitched along each fencerow, embroidered by the side of every country road.
Like many a roustabout, October is a jack-of-all trades. I follow him about, admiring his handiwork, acclaiming the wizardry of his achievements.
I discover too that he is a character of many moods. His sunny disposition can change to brawny determination in finishing a task once begun. Sometimes he becomes wistful, as if he were brooding over some dark allegation unknown to me.
In many ways he reminds me of those tanned sinewy men who work on the midways across America. They paint the carousels and Ferris wheels with joyous colors of red, yellow, blue – then, with practiced eyes, apply glittering gold trim. They tend the machinery, lubricate the clattering steel parts, operate the rides. After the show is over, they shrug, knock everything down, become cleanup men.
It is much the same with October – and we are the children who scream and laugh on the rides. With heady vertigo, we spin to the turn of the roustabout’s whirling
geometry. In our hearts we know the show will soon be over. Then there will be a new stillness where a short time ago there was gaiety.
The leaves continue to drift down through the month. The colors outlined so vividly against the sky become a mosaic at our feet.
Like old friends, we blow a kiss to the sad and happy vagabond, knowing full well that every kiss is a goodbye kiss.© 2017 Short North Gazette, Columbus, Ohio. All rights reserved.
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