If I had the money and time, I'd head down to Mexico this week to wander among trees filled with monarchs. Short on both money and time, though, I am lucky to have a viable, awesome alternative--a morning with the cranes. And, while I hate to dis on the butterflies, the cranes also come with an enviable soundtrack--that strange, guttural trill that both shocks and awes.
Avian shock and awe. That's what I need right now. A winged beast whose ancestor's 12-million-year-old bones have been dug up in western Nebraska. A dinosaur with wings, whose 12,000-year-old memory pulls it to the Platte each spring.
I need the dependability of the cranes' return because this has been anything but a dependable year for me. Too much ebb and flow, grief and joy, life and lamentation for someone who likes to keep things low key.
Come early Saturday morning, then--even before our most awesome newspaper carrier has placed the fragile remains of the Journal-Star on our steps--I will point my way westward, to the place where a half million birds wait in the shallows for the first signs of dawn, hunger and sky slowly rousing them. I will hear them before I see them, holding my breath to slow my heart.
And when the sun begins to paint the sky? Then, I will let the sight wash over me, winged waves framed by the notes of an ancient chorale as I calibrate my life again.
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