Nat

My favorite of Gary Larsen’s Far Side cartoons shows several hawks, eagles, owls, and vultures in the branches of a large tree. It’s winter, so there aren’t leaves, and the birds are wearing James Dean-style leather jackets, sunglasses, and Walkman headphones. Most are smoking cigarettes. The caption reads, “Birds of Prey Know They’re Cool.”

The great thing about raptors is that they are hard to anthropomorphize. They are clearly just what they are. Perfectly designed for the way they live. Lethal. Graceful. I think of Blake’s line , “fearful symmetry.”

In winter, the highway I drive to work attracts many red shouldered hawks. They cruise the median, which is lush and wide, to hunt the many small animals that live there, undisturbed by predators from outside the highway. Mostly I see the hawks perched high in trees, but last week, one flew alongside my car, gliding over the shrubs looking for prey. It kept pace with me for several yards at 65 miles per hour, or it seemed to.

What eerie beauty in that bird. It made no sound, barely flapped its wings. It was speed and economy of motion. These birds are the only wildness I see on a workday. They remind me how much there is outside. Outside of my office building. Outside of my career, my species, my civilization.

I’m still waiting to see an eagle in the wild.

I only regret one life decision that I made while I was in college. I never went to study penguins in Chile or Antarctica. Tonight over coffee, I told my friend Brendan that in the mid-80s there was a lot of publicity about penguin research. El nino was a huge weather problem, and someone figured out that penguins were the only animal to adjust their behvior before an el nino pattern began. Soon, lots of organizations were offering grant money to determine how and why they did it.

To make a long story short, I could have applied to join researchers on a 6-month trip to live among the penguins at their nesting grounds in southern Chile. The most charming story I read about these penguins concerns their nighttime game playing. Because they had to sit on the eggs for so long to hatch them, the penguins had developed a game to entertain themselves. Each nesting pair built a small cairn in front of their nest with stones, and at night, the penguins raced around stealing rocks from other birds’ piles and bringing them back to their own piles.

After several weeks in tents in the fields, the researchers were able to join the game. One young scientist wrote about the poetic rush when she was finally in the game herself and she would race toward a bird’s pile, only to feel, literally, a penguin brush her leg as he raced by her on the way to steal her rocks.

I was desperate to do this, but I didn’t. “As charming as that sounds,”Brendan said tonight, “she was living in a tent without cooked food for weeks to get to those evenings. A lot of that life was just tedium, discomfort, and work.”

While I agreed, I still wish that I had played steal the rock from the penguins at night. But Brendan’s point is well taken: what we envy is sometimes just the best part of another person’s experience. And the rest of it may be nothing special.

I told him I envied two types of lives: those where the person races from one true adventure experience to the next and another where the person creates something of consequence for others to use or benefit from. He said that ordinary lives can be happy too.

I still wish I had played with the penguins when I had the chance.