In Care Of… (part 2)

One of the most distinctive parts of the cranes is their penetrating bugling. Sandhill cranes have a unique throat anatomy. For the first 9-10 months they produce only a series of trilled whistles and peeps, but as they mature their trachea extends and coils intrasternally (down the neck and into the sternum), which expands the amplitude and alters the pitch of their voice, causing a sound that haunts and resonates. Primordial is another word that comes to mind. It is hypothesized that this evolutionary mechanism serves as a form of size exaggeration to ward off predators. This pleases me, the idea of a larger-than-life group of birds making larger-than-life noises, as if planning and preparing never to be silenced, as if their movement is a movement to be recognized and respected.

An hour in the blind and the cranes have taken up half the river. Group by group, family by family is how it’s done. Because of the ashen and subdued colors of the cranes and backgrounded fields, it appears as if the bank itself was extending, slowly swallowing the river in chunks. Many arrived from neighboring fields after picking leftover corn. When they are in a hurry, they do so with grace and power. On the water they dance across for take-off, each synchronized thrust of femur, tibia, and tarsus leaving a small eruption. It’s majestic and remarkable, a 7-foot unfurling against the backdrop of Earth’s canvas. The crane's long, broad wings possess specialized adaptations for soaring, such as a fused wrist bone called the carpometacarpus, so even when they appear to be rickety kites on the windy plains, they still have strength and stability to maintain flight.

But here’s my conundrum: how do I use this wholly human means (writing) to fully realize nonhuman animals? As scholar Dr. Emily Knox has pointed out, “Writing, in contrast to oration, is a form of symbolic authority that acquires its power through material form. . . [and] is a performative action whose real-world effects outstrip the physical action of putting words to page.” In other words, the act of writing gives a shape and framework to the social world. So how can that social ordering be anything other than privileging humans? Take, for example, in this post, some of the ways I’ve been describing the cranes: as braille lettering (some as if written by a toddler), as arrows (“spearheading,” “aimed,” “blood-tipped points,” “eyes bull,” or bullseye, “gore,” “rusty fletching”), as ballet dancers, as rickety kites, as even some kind of social or political movement. Hasn’t all this figurative language anthropomorphized the cranes, comparing them with “intentional human-like activities” as the Frontiers article described above? Can’t I also be accused of anthropomorphizing? Is this, in the long run, in some way, detrimental to the cranes?

Of course, I know full well that they [nonhuman animals] are not us, nor even an other. A crane is not a zebra is not a naked mole rat is not a human. To quote Henry Beston, the early twentieth-century writer and naturalist, “The animal shall not be measured by man. . . . They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.” And yet, it is in that net that we, as writers, as storytellers, seek out the metaphors and similes, analogies and personifications, to reach out and connect, to bridge divides. Nebraska’s literary luminary Ted Kooser knows this better than most. In his poem “Etude,” the speaker watches a blue heron, another large bird familiar to Western and Central Nebraska. By the third line though the reader is pushed into metaphor, which likens the heron’s signature spear motion of catching fish to that “of a lover composing a letter.” But the metaphor doesn’t stop there. The reader is pushed further, and deeper, into the poem until it becomes a sustained conceit. Eventually, the poem establishes a correspondence between lover (as vehicle) and the blue heron (as tenor), with the result that the activities associated with each begin to merge. The heron wears a suit and works an office job, the lover “fishes” for the right words. For Kooser, when used properly a good metaphor becomes greater than the sum of its parts, and the effect can produce excitement and wonder. But what does all that excitement and wonder actually do? What can it do?

For one, it teaches and trains us to notice. And to notice is to give attention to, and to give attention is always an act of care. To “attend” to something comes from the Latin attendere, meaning to "give heed to" or literally "to stretch toward". It is the notion of "stretching" one's mind toward something. By the mid to late-14th century, the word morphed to "take care of, wait upon," taken from the Old French word atendre. Ah, another pleasure, both of these definitions, the idea of attention as a kind of gift, as an act of service to something other than yourself. If my formulation is correct, attention as an act of caring, to care is to stretch toward something or someone else and to wait upon them. To stretch and to wait. Stretch. Wait. What or who we attend to, give attention to, means to reach out and wait for their full being to be presented to us.

Tommy Orange, Pulitzer-prize finalist for There There (2018), recently said, “It’s just as important for you to hear yourself speak your stories as it is for others to hear you speak them.” So what stories will you choose to tell, for yourself and for others? How much care are you willing to give to all the characters of your stories, real or imagined? The cranes may not understand the stories we tell but they can reap the benefit. You, dear reader, and I can learn to write for the cranes — or Dwarf-Bear poppy, salt creek tiger beetle, or mangrove forests — and not merely about them. What that takes is a kind of care that only comes with patience and gratitude, an absorption of task so thorough as to unmask our sense of place in the world. We must learn and relearn the capacity to stretch toward all the characters in our stories, and we must learn to wait on them as if servants at court. Because when we pay attention and record and share our stories we end up putting a quarter in their immortal meter. And those quarters become the currency of our care.

I suppose this post was about attention after all. Attention is a limited resource, each of us only has so much to give, and because of its limitedness, it is an issue of political, economic, and moral concern. How much attention are you willing to spare in a world that has commodified attention? How far does your care go?

After the last bit of sun escaped over the horizon, we were ushered out of the blind and once again herded forward, this time back to our vehicles. Behind us, on the Platte, the conversation was still lively and boisterous. I hoped they never noticed our departure. They after all aren’t the ones who need to do the noticing.

Jeremy Caldwell, Director of The Writing Center