Vignettes IV

Some recent moments at the forest preserve.

The humid air moving off the pond smells like old mud and dry fish scales, translucent in the sun. It’s unpleasant: marshy green, but organic in a way that evokes earthworms drying after rain, very old and very still, except for the currents of carp far below. The taste it leaves in the back of my mouth is warm with hints of decay evaporating. The new words I’ve learned to choke up lately, though— these post-graduation colloquialisms, the search terms, the networking cordialities, polite and sterile and detached— are unpleasant too. Those are bitter on the tongue like dissolving sertraline, vanillin coating giving way to chemical fumes, the kind you’d do anything to forget. I do not think of that bitterness out at the pond. I breathe in the unpleasant swamp heat and feel it filter through me, water through gills, refreshing.

---

I’m out with my camera again with a shawl wrapped haphazardly around my head so as not to get sunburned when I see him: one of the fishermen lounging on the bench, all overalls and plaid and weathered skin, his pole leaning next to him in the sunset light. I plan to keep on walking, but he sees my camera— get any good shots?— and suddenly I’m in a world with people like me, pointing out birdcalls and the shapes of the tails that swoop by, the conversation coming naturally as it never has before. Forked tail, he says when I point it out, a swallow? I confirm and he laughs like an ancient tree, gnarled and wisened and always in wonder. I never know the names.

---

By now I’ve trained my eyes for movement, not color, as I stare into the endless spiraling pattern of leaves and branches around me. I scan while I walk and find that today I am still unlucky: still learning, I console myself, when I catch the delicate yellow-gray-green of a warbler at the precise moment it takes off. But then I hear something: a strange kind of yap or whine I’ve never heard before. I pause my footsteps, and there it is again; I think of the stray who would wander up to the door of my childhood home to beg with his loud creaking mew. Again, again. A lost kitten up in a tree? No, I think, the gossamer threads of my memory snapping into shape all at once. Catbird. Tracking the sound I find it, gray and unassuming on a high branch. It looks at me, right at me, but the line of my vision has lost its importance; I stand still to listen to it meow again.

---

To my knowledge I have never seen a coyote. I’ve seen warning signs on metal posts, read stories about their cunning, the false yelps of pain to draw in well-meaning dogs and their owners, but of mammalian wildlife I am far more used to the prey than the predator. I’m strolling along the path to the melody of some song I can’t stop humming when I catch a familiar silhouette out in the tall grass; he raises his head, new antlers still covered in fuzz, and I back away so as not to frighten the poor stag. Away, back along the trail from the prarie, into the woods again, still humming while the last of the sunlight dissipates into crepuscular gray. A howl stops me in my tracks. The pitch is odd, the keening too loud, quick staccatto barks afterwards that do not sound quite doglike. I hurry away; the howling grows distant behind me, but I still hear it a mile down the path. I never considered I might not be the most frightening thing in these woods.

---

When I first glimpsed it I did not understand its proportions, pointed and shadow-cloaked and small by the water. A friend gave me the name— green heron— and now I recognize it from across the pond. Orange, sunburst orange, neon in a tree: a Baltimore oriole, I’ve learned, and now I see flashes of citrus and think about migration patterns, Maryland, the distance between here and there. Iridescent navy in sunset light once caught me bewildered like a fishhook to the mouth; now I say hello to the tree swallows as they skim across the pond. Striking things, they are. How lucky we are that they are not so rare, once we know where to look.

Hello, Mr. Swallow!