Air Traffic

After the Kincade fire, flocks of waxwings descended upon the firethorn shrub outside my California cabin. Smoke and heat thwarted the birds till mid-November. Now they had arrived, and the berries were abundant—also, fermenting. The previous tenant had cut decals into the silhouettes of birds and smoothed them onto the windows that frame the garden. The first time I confronted these avatars, I worried they'd beckon rather than discourage their breathing relatives. But I'm far from an authority on animal behavior.My most prolonged attention to the lives of others took place decades ago in Massachusetts after I pocketed a notepad scribbled with my mother's grocery lists and within which, as I walked to the bus stop, I penciled visitations of squirrels and the occasional apparition of a red fox. In winter, my father sometimes drove my family six miles north to Walden Pond to watch fishers core holes in the ice of this small, frozen basin. When I was in elementary school, I didn't count the slick silver things dangling from rods and gasping to be taken out of their own element as worthy of mention in my catalogue of species. Nor did I think about the famous environmentalist who once lived by its banks for two years in a cabin a third the size of the one I rented for the same duration on the far side of the country.In Sebastopol, California, as in Wayland, Massachusetts, I often looked toward the trees. Aside from a flagstone patio I couldn't see from my desk, the outside was a frieze of needles and leaves. The scene beyond the cottage windows offered me the kind of world I had longed to look upon and somehow felt entitled to since I was newly divorced and my daughter five. In 1998, when I began teaching at the small university in Sonoma County where I remain—how is it that a job designed to be provisional has spanned most of my working life, while a marriage assumed to be permanent dissolved as quick as soap in a bath?—my daughter and I inhabited a one-bedroom home in El Cerrito a block from a bleakly commercial avenue commuters resort to when traffic clots the freeway as it approaches the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Still, the place possessed the virtue of an upstairs and downstairs. I often looked down upon the treeless streets from its box-like bedroom, fastening all of the yearnings of my mid-thirties on the afternoon sunlight that burnished the cream-colored paint of an otherwise featureless house to luminescence.When I signed a year's lease on the wine-country cottage in 2019, I felt I had finally arrived. Whether writing or preparing the next week's classes, I looked out repeatedly at the rambling garden. To take in its depth, I had to ignore the decals stuck on the glass. Of course I accepted these obstructions to my view, congratulating myself for privileging the safety of the avian immigrants that settle in trees only to lift and leave, seaming earth and air with a fluidity denied our lumbering species. But in the wake of the fire that burned through 77,000 acres, during November days as warm as you would expect July dusks in New England to be, the waxwings mistook the transparency of the glass for the translucency of air and smashed against the pane. Each evening the windows that gave onto the garden were spattered with bloody-looking bulls-eyes. Occasionally a goosedown feather clung to the juice, trembling in breezes too slight to sound in the leaves. I never got used to the soft thumps that accompanied these crashes. Each was like the first—a rude interruption. Eventually I learned to distinguish the sharp raps from the more muffled thuds that occurred, I assumed, when a wing rather than a head hit the glass.That fall, I looked upon the waxwings—or rather, their intrusion upon the divide that invited as it separated me from outside—with a mix of feeling I could not identify. I braced and winced, but whether for them or for me, I still cannot decide. Obviously, downing the berries they held in the tips of their beaks made them tipsy. I remember all too vividly two times I got myself drunk enough to yaw and pitch like they did. The second, in my early thirties, was not only wholly inexcusable but made me painfully if belatedly sure (as well, presumably, as the two men I sat with for 90 minutes, one with whom I was in love and the other whose good opinion I wished to cultivate) that drinking three whiskies in so short a time was both ill-advised and unendearing. Still, it seemed a different thing for a flightless human to bump into furniture or for an aircraft to mistake a mountain for fog in the dark than for the birds to lose their way. Though their eyes were equipped with many more photoreceptors than mine and navigation systems vastly superior, the waxwings kept hurtling into windows. Why didn't they learn to avoid what hurt them?Near the start of winter the berries thinned and the birds found other places to feed. At the end of November, a downpour released the rest of us from our state of distended vigilance. Before the rain, however, that fall in Sonoma County was a season of racking lulls. (So, too, all the autumns since.) There was no languor in the stretched-out vacancies between what meteorologists tersely call “events”—only heat and drought and a tamped-down but recognizable terror.The October night before the moving truck arrived to cart my possessions to Sebastopol, my brother flew out from Chicago to help me. While he sat in a silver lozenge riding the jetstream typing out his arrival time, the Sierras kicked up winds several miles below him that downsheared all the way to the parched flatlands of the Central Valley. The next morning, the Diablos skidded across the Sonoma Mountains and spit sand at Bodega Bay. I had not learned to distinguish offshore from onshore winds, to take anxious note of the times relative humidity drops to the single digits, or to keep one eye open during the nights when 40-mile-per-hour gusts force the bamboo beyond my windows into gracefully suppliant postures. But when the cottage began to smell like a fireplace, I consulted my landlords next door. They had initially appeared relaxed people; now they turned faces upon me so rigid as to seem set under glaze.Fear is gasoline. The shrill of the emergency alert late in the afternoon flushed me into a flurry of unproductive organizing. More deliberate of movement, my brother chewed gum with the vigorous nonchalance he affects when disturbed. Within an hour we had abandoned the cottage without so much as throwing water upon the potted maple the movers had set by the door. We headed toward San Francisco rather than Berkeley, veering away from the Richmond Bridge and the eucalyptus trees whose limbs blanch into smoothness where the brown and pink-toned bark peels in strips like skin. While I drove across the span of the Golden Gate, fire rivered grasses in Sonoma and goaded shrubs into turning cartwheels. A few miles from my cottage, flames dismantled house frames and gilded tree trunks before exploding them into brazier-size charcoal.For the next week, I idled south of San Francisco at the airy house of college friends. After they left for work each day, I walked aimlessly past buildings my gaze typically swept past whose names promised a grab bag of designless development: California Bank and Trust, Asurion, Starbucks, Paradise Valley Spas. For once, assessing them fireproof, I did not silently ridicule their frontages. The evening before my brother flew home during an hour the skies were not too silted with ash to ground aircraft, we walked to a Thai restaurant squeezed between commercial bulwarks. I could barely eat and spent most of my time checking the digital “Fire and Smoke” map, a patchwork of sienna-colored evacuation areas sided by canary blotches where it was “voluntary” to flee.In the end, everyone living in Sonoma County was forced to leave. I stayed with my friends after the order was lifted, so my return was quieter than the scree of sirens that marked my departure. By then, the fire was partly contained and the sleet-colored atmosphere had deepened into a hazy blue. When the warm afternoons ceded to dusk, crickets hushed the scratching sound of my desktop drive. I have always loved the tuneless singing of the insects Emily Dickinson called “a minor Nation” in the grass, but that fall I did not hear the “grace” she accords them. Nor, in my hurry to call Bodega Bay's coastline mine and to stroll with proprietary satisfaction past redwoods whose brick-colored bark incongruously reminds me of the bristles of fibrous doormats, am I sure I should be permitted any. In hindsight, I know that I embraced rustication with a Disney-like eagerness for illusion. Nonetheless, during the two years I drove the winding roads as a resident, I felt a highwire of disquiet run above the dazzle of autumn leaves.After the evacuation, the Sebastopol garden felt as static an illustration of natural history as a diorama in a museum. One day, a moth floated listlessly above a row of shrubs. Another, a hornet sailed by the door without zip. Eventually, a single scrub jay rasped in the intervals when a buzz saw cut its whining.Enter the cedar waxwings. They swooped down from a tree to fall upon the firethorn's outspread branches. Hundreds of leaves shifted as the birds feasted, a small but continuous flickering that made me think of ants milling around a nest. The waxwings’ staccato, unceasing movements were accented by their yellow undersides and black bandit masks. When they pivoted, the dash of red that edges their wingtips flared small and brilliant. When it was very quiet and I stood outside, I sometimes detected a faint scrabbling as claws met wood. The sound was no louder than the kind an insect makes as it bumps against a lampshade. For the most part, though, I worked at my desk and took in the waxwings’ bat-like cries absently.I was mulling over a sentence on a warm November afternoon when a percussive thwack jolted my heart out of rhythm. I looked outside the window to find a waxwing perched manikin-like atop the outside storage container flush with the glass. I could tell the creature was stuporous. I thought I saw its breast rise slightly as it tried to take in the air that had been knocked out of it. I went outside—to see if there was something I could do, I told myself. Just as quickly, I retreated to the cottage. For a half hour more, the bird remained in concussed, torpid splendor on top of the shed. Every few minutes, I stole a glance and looked away.Why, during that strange hiatus, did my thinking careen between the waxwing outside my West Coast cabin and the Old Sudbury Road where, half a century earlier, a car had struck a horse near the Wayland bedroom in which I slept? As a teenager, I often jogged along the tarred section where that riderless horse met its death. Now, shocked by the roaring noises around it and the blunt blinding light, it skittered over and over around the same curve in my memory. As if for the first time, I wondered what had brought the animal to that semirural throughway. I could not remember whether it had escaped a trailer or jumped the ring that corralled it or cantered out to meet the night from a stall left carelessly unlatched.More distinct is the flat ribbon of the Old Sudbury Road my feet pounded daily 40 years ago. I usually turned back toward home at the place where the tar meets the Concord River. If it was light when I began my two-mile run, I sighted my halfway point where the plush heads of the cattails rise in the marshes close to the section of the river Thoreau sailed. A decade after 1839, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he recalled it thronged by alders and birches and “maples full of glee and sap.”Long before he became a household name, Thoreau almost burned down the place he made famous. One warm summer day, he set sail with a friend on an expedition to locate the source of the Concord River. The first afternoon, the two caught some fish for dinner and began to roast it. Immediately, the dry grasses lit with flame. After it was clear they could not put out the blaze themselves, the naturalist ran two miles to warn the closest residents.The writer's panic subsided as quick as it arrived—at least in the retrospect of the journal he kept. Thoreau encountered a few people on his way home who met him with faces “sour” and “grieved.” But the majority, he insisted, were “highly elate” and found the spectacle an “opportunity” for “sport.” There is critique in this portion of the journal, but the naturalist absents himself from its limits. His interest in the woods is “deeper,” he insists. Onward he continues, setting his next comments in quotation marks as if to enunciate each word of his justification: “Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.” By his own admission, the fire burned more than a hundred acres. And yet, he repeats, “It has never troubled me from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it.” When after two years of successive evacuations I set eyes on these sentences, their central subject seemed not the trees or those who lay competing claim to them, but the writer who yearned to distance himself from people and property.A few years later, Thoreau tended a fire deliberately set—the kind we call a “controlled burn.” A man of long experience and great skill “as a burner of brush” supervises. In the next three paragraphs, Thoreau lays out a tutorial on forest management as deliberate as it is leisurely. But then comes the following admission, slipped as casually into this section of the journal as a blossom left to dry there: “In in the midst of the roaring and crackling,—for the fire seemed to snort like a wild horse,—I heard from time to time the dying strain, the last sigh, the fine, clear, shrill scream of agony, as it were, of the trees breathing their last, probably the heated air or the steam escaping from some chink.”When I lived south of Thoreau's Walden Pond at 16, what made me close my eyes against the specter of that actual horse snorting and whinnying as it was hacked apart on the concrete roadside? At 60, when I looked out upon the landscape in back of my Sonoma cottage, what forced me to turn my gaze from the waxwing suffering atop the plastic shed?Apprehended at close range, there is no grandeur in the things fire seizes. Seared air trembles over gutted spaces. Unnamable things lie scattered as if vomited up from a tar pit, littering the ground where houses used to be. After the Kincade Fire, trees shrank to sticks. The ground, clotted with carbon, blurred foreground and background into monochrome—as if with fire comes perpetual eclipse.That creature I saw designed for unchecked motion—a small, dazed thing breathing in visible heaves with no expectation it might summon the energy required to leave. What was the feeling that made me want to look away?Shame, I realized. It was shame.

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