Sandhill Cranes

It is December, & seventy degrees. I block the sun with my hand & curse under my breath & feel estranged from all of the stories the earth has told me over the years. We would be doing campouts with the dogs of hundreds of miles by now, out under the wash of auroras & stars, curled up in the straw or leaning against the stanchions sipping instant coffee at some ungodly hour, miles & miles from anyone. We would inhabit that two & a half month epoch of endless shade on Stampede, caught between the ranges in the constancy of dull light, waiting for February to see the sun finally creep over the Outer Outers & fall voluminous over our upturned faces. All of the practice & pageantry of winter in the north, all that it asks of you & all that you glean from it, & here I sit instead finally, finally watching the leaves blush crimson.

Yesterday, in the driveway with the kids, suddenly the sound of sandhill cranes wound its way to my ear, arresting me wholly. If you have lived in Alaska, you know the significance of that-- how every sense of seasonality & passage & time that you possess & feel drifts among those calls. It is the very sound of home for me, a sound so richly saturated with the grain & texture of my Alaskan life that the heart soars northward in its recognitions. How we would stand on the bluff over Panguingue Creek & watch the vees fly south, thousands at a time, on the first clear day after the first cold snap, when the blueberries were ready but the cranberries still needed the frost. When the ATV was poised at the edge of the dogyard with the gangline laid out, & the birch leaves spiraled in painted vermillion to the ground, or dallied macescent on the silvered bark, flapping in the breeze. Everything, everything was in preparation for the winter when the cranes flew, & everyone who looked up at them knew what they foretold & then looked down again to busy themselves with renewed fervor. 

For me, it was the first varied thrush in spring, then the zephyr song of the Swainson’s thrush declaring summer. It was the sandhill cranes in their fluid echelons in that brief window of autumn, & the first full moon over a tundra buried in snow, all moonshadow & tinsel, that told me it was winter. Phenomena didn’t blink & flare in some recondite code. It was just witness, & then witness again, & coming to know as a result something so basic & meaningful as how the earth was turning beneath our feet. 

I have seen two chevrons of crane here, only two, both in December, & I wonder only if they, too, are keen on leaving. If they passed a while here or in the Niobrara country & thought better of it, heard the music of home & flew yet further, unable to rest in spite of all their traveling, unwearied because the heart & its compass do not stop longing for one another, mile after mile after mile.