Article 4 - "AN EQUINOX OF THE SPECIES" April 2007 edition of First Church of The Streets

A long stretch of winter is like a vast universe of slumber, one that seems to reach on and on until it seems like one is doomed to a comatose state where everything is white and blank.

At least, this is how I was feeling at the end of this one particular March. And it hadn't even been that harsh a winter. Another winter where it had been yet the warmest on record: but of course, warmest is a relative term. And the lack of snow didn't help. At least, with snow, you could pretend that there was still some weather cycle that was still awake. But not this time. The lack of snow seemed to reflect how dormant everything was, emphasized it, and made me want to hit the snooze button until the flowers popped up in April.

    And, even though I was headed out on a trip out west, and the end of March was here, the feeling of somnolence was still with me. It was like sleepwalking in the middle of a world tour. Or maybe a fantasy on the holodeck featured in Star Trek Next Generation, where one could enact a whole life that wasn't theirs but it was happening anyway. The trees alongside the road seemed to concur with my feeling, because they weren't awake either. Here, in central New York, leaves were things that you didn't see until the beginning of May. And as the traveling pair of us headed further west, it seemed like the theory was just as true here as it was at home. Hibernation was still in charge, and spring was still on unemployment. The fifty-something degrees hid nothing. Everything was still asleep, including me.

    But there was some hope, at least, it seemed my dream state wanted to believe. As we drove, people seemed to be milling about on the streets as they passed. They wore a dazed look like they had been just let out of jail, trying to gain their bearings back. There appeared to be a lot of them, more than I had been seeing out and about in the previous months. This happy observation carried on even to places where I didn't commonly go to, as though they had identical lives and identities to those I was more familiar with. But to me, they all looked like prisoners relishing the first moments of freedom, from there until now.

    Along the way, the two of us stopped at a rest area along the road, just to get out of our car and stretch our legs, a somewhat common ritual that many of my fellow American car travelers seemed to share with me along the way of the years. We were near the town of Owego, about the halfway point to where we intended to go. And with the satisfaction of making good time, we settled into a parking spot to earn a long stretch and meet a new place along the way. The great thing about rest areas is that it is like adding another travel destination to the one that you already have, so that in a sense, your trip is doubled. That is, if you don't consider it a nuisance to get over with to get onto the real destination. It was like a reminder that the journey was as satisfying an experience as reaching the final goal.

    The lot had several cars in it, but unlike many of the rest stops I had been to, people seemed to not be by the restrooms or the dog walking area, but along the river in the distance. It was as though they were watching and waiting for something, what, I didn't know. But I still felt too tired to communicate, so I didn't ask. Instead, I ambled with the dog around the dog walking area, knowing that he needed this break as much as either one of us did. Afterwards, I joined up with my husband by the picnic bench, not to have a meal, but to join him in watching what was going on. We looked at the river, not sure which one it was. Through the trees, we watched the birds settling in their nomadic way for this temporary home, as temporary as we were in spirit.

After some time, one of the sentries on the river ambled over to us. She was in her sixties, wearing an expression that seemed at once mixed with the reserve she was taught to hold in public if she wanted to be regarded as a mature woman, and also the excitement of a little girl that she felt more entitled to show off now that she was of a certain age. Although she directed her conversation to us, it was as though we were the periphery, a sideline to her joke, for she kept her most intent focus on what was going on across the river. And she was insistent, but only for a second, as though her mission had been to recruit us to meet her pastor, but as soon as the introduction was made, she needed to go back to her private worship. In all that, pointing across the river on the other side of the bank, she asked one question: "Are you looking at the herons?"

At first, it took me awhile to figure out exactly what she was referring to. The birch trees on the opposite side of the river looked as wilted with winter fatigue as I was, too tired to hold any hope that spring would eventually come to hold any vestiges of a burgeoning vernal rite of passage. But in due time, I could see what she referred to, as though they were small specks of light just peeking through a room of darkness. They decorated the trees like belated Christmas lights, as though they knew that the trees needed more hope that life continued at the end of a long winter than when it just began. This, apparently, was the time that they usually came back, still on the same schedule despite the phenomenon of global warming. It was still the beginning of return at this late date, to hop to and fro through the branches of the high trees, looking to begin the springtime ritual of mating that helped them cling to their tenuous hold of survival and continue their line in the web of interconnectedness.

Hopping from one tree to the other, mingling and waiting to collect prey from the river below and move from one stage to another, they seemed to be oblivious to the fact that they were the star of the show to a bunch of bipeds across the river. Or maybe, they were well aware of us, and our antics. But to them it was irrelevant to their survival to know what we were doing; perhaps we were only a rival that they kept their sideways attention to, just as the gleeful woman in observation had regarded us. There were nests to be built, food to be caught, babies to be made. Not so much different from a busy city street where people ran to and fro going to work and making sure their own offspring were fed. Except a lot of us bipeds wore suits and uniforms, and called it "having a career". The herons, they just lived. Or at least it seemed to me. Maybe they had their own elaborate rituals, and we seemed the simple species. After all, we were just standing on the other side of the river looking at them. What kind of animal would make a life choice like that?

After watching them for awhile, it was time for us to leave. The herons stayed by the river, which we now knew was the Susquehanna, making its way down to the Chesapeake down the road apiece. Down the road apiece is what we were intending to do as well, migrating towards our springtime patterns of traveling the roads ahead of us, sharing in that moment the nomadic nature of the birds we had just met ever so briefly. It was like the beginning of spring, and suddenly, I didn't feel so sleepy. The beginning of a new season had dawned, and I arose to greet its sunrise as it crossed the meridian of the path I traveled..