In Care Of… (part 1)
We huddled like buffalo on a fair, mid-March evening along the Platte River near Wood River, NE. I wish this were more figurative than it was. “Yes, together, we must look like buffalo. As an individual, you look like a predator, like a coyote,” our guide said. And so we bunched together and trotted, only as fast as our slowest person — a middle-aged woman with a limb and a cane — the two hundred feet from the gravel road to the enclosed structure of wood and plexiglass to watch the cranes roost for the night.
In the blind, twenty-five of us, including students from my ENG 356 course, waited and watched the river jog through sentiment and anchored islands as various species of snipe zipped through the air. And then we waited more, a couple of people set up monopods and others watched the sky. And we waited further still. Eventually, entire minutes stacked on themselves, and we waited long enough that a few grew uncomfortable in the silence, itching for phones or an escape hatch or a tornado. What if the cranes don’t come? What if they opt for a spot a mile downriver? What if we scare them off? What if I can’t stand myself in the stillness? Why are we fidgeting? Where is my phone? What if I can’t Snapchat my friends? Or search through messages I’ve already looked at? What new meme am I missing?
Twenty minutes had probably passed by this point.
This post could be about how disconnected we’ve become from the natural world, how we’ve grown accustomed to technological wizardry, and how we’ve evolved (devolved?) into nothing more than widgets of an attention economy driven by views and engagement hours of digital ephemera. It could be about that. Right now though I’m not so sure. You’ll just have to be patient. First, let me tell you about the cranes.
They come in slow and subtle across the sky, a muted cacophony of punctured trumpets, in the distance like lines of braille, some slightly crooked as if a toddler wrote them, carrying messages I’ll never decipher. If I were to accept Zeno’s argument they may never arrive, a mirage of portioned progress receding infinitely. But they do, then, at once, as arrows shot through the twilight, spearheading the horizon, aimed with such conclusion, and alight, cheek by jowl into the Platte. Some dip their blood-tipped points in the running river, their marmalade eyes bull through murky water to gore root, frog, and rodent; others fan their wings, bustling the rusty fletching in the wind. Each one glinting in remembered sun, each one blinking in eons. Across the river in an empty cornfield, a sedge (or siege) — a group of cranes — dance like kernels popping.
Every spring the cranes, along with thousands of other migrating birds and waterfowl, make a pit stop in the Rainwater Basin, a 4,200 sq mi loess plain, architectured as a series of wetlands, which provide the essential nutrients, proteins, and minerals needed to build strength and energy for the upcoming journey. Scientists call this staging, like Thanksgiving dinner every day for three or four weeks. This migration is one of Earth’s last great migrations, a spectacle as bold as the red crabs of Christmas Island or wildebeest of the Serengeti. They have been doing this routine — nesting in Northern Canada, even as far as Siberia, then migrating through the flyway in central Nebraska, traveling between 150-400 miles a day, into Texas and Mexico, and as far west as Southern California, during winter — for tens of thousands of years, even beyond that, before humans learned to turn stones and snap fires. Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, who sojourned to the banks of the Platte every spring for close to twenty years, said the cranes speak “of far away places and of a world as it was.” But as much as I sometimes wonder about that world that was, here is the world as it is now: dams, roads, irrigation, electricity, gravel mining, chemical runoff, encroachment, agricultural and industrial geoengineering.
Nonhuman animals have been treated badly for hundreds of years, in real life and in literature. In literature they often serve as marginalized props, stereotypes, or objects, but never as full-fledged characters. Again, in real life and in literature, we still have a long way to go to appreciate what animals are capable of. But because the skillset of a crane doesn’t give it the ability to perform open heart surgery, unclog your toilet, or buy or sell shares on the stock exchange, our society continues to view and treat them, and all other nonhuman animals, as lesser creatures. Here’s a question: is part of the storyteller’s responsibility to give a voice to the voiceless? I think it can be, and certainly admirable to do so. But I also want to emphasize here that the cranes aren’t voiceless. We just aren’t listening.
Even when we think we’re listening, with the best intentions, our results can be misguided. To “humanize” may be detrimental to all of us, and this process starts when many of us are first learning to read. Look at the number of children’s books that anthropomorphize animals, that present the natural world in highly distorted ways, such as depictions of animals like humans (wearing clothes) and/or descriptions or references to human-like activities. According to a 2014 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, anthropomorphized animals may lead children to take a scientifically inaccurate view of the natural world by attributing human-like characteristics to nonhuman animals. The authors conclude, “Books that do not present animals and their environments accurately from a biological perspective may not only lead to less learning but also influence children to adopt a human-centered view of the natural world.” Gross, I think that’s what got us here. So is this post on how to write fully realized nonhuman animals into our stories? Is this post the “what we talk about when we talk about nonhuman animals” one?
Could be.
Jeremy Caldwell, Director of The Writing Center