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Many years ago, after maddening indecision and the escalating entreaties of my then wife, I finally agreed to move from the city to the country. Or more precisely, from San Francisco to a desert in northern New Mexico surrounded by the silence of lunar places and nights so black I remembered I had a childhood fear of the dark.
The night before we were to fly there to begin house-hunting, I had dreams of falling, and spent the night flopping around in bed like a fish on a dock.
Flying into Albuquerque, the plane hit a trough of air that pitched two glasses of water from the tray table into my lap and brought my lunch up to mid-esophagus. The airplane’s wings flapped like the arms of a man fighting for balance on a tightrope.
In the airport, I saw a man wearing a button that said “Welcome to New Mexico. Land of the flea, home of the plague.” We later learned that some of the state’s outlying areas—not far from where we were headed, in fact—have something of a problem with fleas that carry the Bubonic Plague, the same one that killed a fourth of the population of medieval Europe.
As I headed for baggage claim, in the back of my mind I heard the words of the poet Rainer Rilke reminding me that the purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things, and I had the uneasy sense that I had come to the right place.
I had a hundred reasons not to move—101 including the fleas—and a hundred reasons why I had to. Among those I was able to articulate to inquiring and skeptical friends and family were that I needed to be closer to nature and where the cost of living was more hospitable to a freelance writer.
What I was less inclined to try and explain was that I wanted a place where what was of value wasn't advertised, where there were no guardrails, where I might find an answer to the question “Is this all there is?”—and because my partner wanted to move and I didn’t want to lose her.
Among all the reasons and rationalizations, though, was an undefined yearning for change, and I knew in some private core of myself that it had something to do with surrender, which nature, and midlife, excel at teaching.
For a long while, I found living in the wilderness overwhelming. In my first few months there, I barely left the house for more than a few hours at a time and slept 12 hours a day.
The scale of everything made a mockery of my sense of perspective, and the 100-mile visibilities seemed to double the size of the world, making me feel very small. The passage of time, marked not in weekdays and weekends but in epochs, argued that even the mountains are mortal and that it's not time which flies, but me! The intractable silence of the place kept startling my reptilian brain into idle chatter. The Indian and Spanish cultures felt alien. There was hail the size of marbles, flash floods capable of carrying off children, livestock and large appliances, and thunder like gunshots going off next to your ear. Nothing looked familiar.
Moving here from the city felt like coming out of a movie theater in the middle of the day.
I wrote to a friend that I felt like a coward in the face of such grandeur, that its presence accused me of my own impotence, as well as a streak of hubris that I believe I developed as a result of being a city-dweller my whole life and being surrounded constantly by the man-made, where it's easy to imagine yourself being the king of the hill.
Jacques Cousteau once remarked that when you enter the ocean you enter the food chain, and you don't necessarily enter at the top. Here, when it snowed and the land filled up with footprints, I, too, saw clearly what my relative position was. I followed bear tracks for a mile along a mountain fire-road and mountain-lion tracks on the mesa running like a dotted line between the junipers. I saw blood on the snow and was left hyperventilating by the sound of rustling.
I suppose, then, that it was a sense of feeling out of control which made the incident with the magpie so unnerving.
One afternoon several months after moving, I was sitting at my desk and staring out the window at columns of thunderheads moving across the sky, while the wind pounded on kettledrums outside. Suddenly a bird flew directly into the window with a bony thud and bounced off, leaving a clump of feathers stuck to the glass.
I stood up reflexively from my chair. A meadowlark lay stunned on the ground. Just at that instant a magpie, three times the meadowlark’s size, barrelled down from a nearby tree and pecked the small bird to death as it flapped around helplessly. When it was dead, the magpie took it in its beak up to a low branch of the apricot tree, set it there, and flew off.
I stumbled outside, awestruck and horrified, wondering what act of carnage I had just witnessed. Was it the end of a chase? Some violent spasm of territoriality. Or was it, I even wondered, a mercy killing?
Four days later that clump of feathers was still stuck to my office window like a suicide note, and I was still rattled. It wasn’t just the violence, though, or the suddenness of it, but that I didn’t understand what it meant. My sense of vulnerability in being there at all deepened at that moment.
I tried to distract myself from it with the one activity that's always given me a sense of meaning and control in my life—my work—but it failed miserably. It was like being bitten by a rattlesnake: I panicked and ran and it only caused the poison to travel faster through my system.
Worse, it felt painfully familiar, that panic-stricken way of working. Only now, with the deserts and distant mountains standing as indictments of my restlessness and commotion, it also felt laughable and damnable, the emotional equivalent of a bad appendix—vestigial and possibly fatal.
In the city, such frenzy was reflected everywhere, and seemed normal. Not so there. There's more grace, I think, in a living acre of ground than in the lives of most people, including mine.
The fact is, the magpie incident pushed me deeper into a sense of loss and fragility, of not-knowing, which I did't like one bit. Maybe it was growing up in a culture that doesn’t know the difference between uncertainty and anxiety, and to which mystery is something to be solved, not serenaded.
Maybe it was coming from a family of scientists and sleuths. My father, for intance, frequently read to me from a book of “minute mysteries,” and I had to figure out whodunit. I thus learned that almost anything could be figured out, would yield to sheer determination.
Life, however, and certainly the natural world, isn't just another minute mystery to solve, and not everything can be figured out. Nor am I any closer to feeling secure in the world for having lots of answers. Making peace with the questions seems the better bet. Life, after all, doesn't end with an answer but a question: what next?
Indeed, in the months after I buried the meadowlark, I chose, quite uncharacteristically, to stay in suspense about what had happened to him, when one phone call to the ornithology department at the University of New Mexico could have settled the matter, as well as my sense of disquiet. But I didn’t call. I wondered.
One afternoon I even spent several hours speculating on the lives of birds—their compulsions and conspiracies—as I watched a group of grey juncos outside my house repeatedly flock to the ground, peck for seeds, and suddenly, as if on some invisible cue, explode into flight in every direction like shrapnel from a grenade, and then re-gather slowly on the ground like fallen leaves.
A few days later, while shoveling snow, I saw a magpie, perhaps the same one, drop toward the ground like a stone from some unseen place, and at the last possible second flare its wings.
Then one day, I stopped wondering. I called the ornithology department at the university and ended my little murder mystery. Magpies, the young woman told me, are thievish and opportunistic and will take advantage of an injured bird for the sake of an easy meal. That, she said with great certainty, is what I saw.
I hung up feeling oddly disappointed. Not in the cruelty of nature, but in the cruelty of certainty. The knowing, that is, put an end to the wondering, which in many ways was far more entertaining and instructive. In it, there was room for imagination and discovery, for the quest implied in question. The truth, it seems, did not set me free.
At the edges of ancient maps, cartographers used to draw dragons, to warn people away from the unknown and keep them safely in the village. In disregarding their admonitions, in literally moving into the unknown, I learned that in hanging onto the familiar, I had what was familiar, but in letting go, I had no idea what came next. Life became a cloud rolling overhead, changing shape moment by moment like a moving Rorschach. It was a gargoyle, then a fish, then a serpent, and there was no predicting. It was a hawk, a dancer, an airplane, a buffalo, an archer.....and the only thing I knew for sure about it is that I was, like the magpie, resourceful, and like the meadowlark, vulnerable.
For more about Passion! visit www.gregglevoy.com
