I haven’t really traveled in the last eighteen months—haven’t traveled to ‘get out,’ as so many in Alaska often feel desperate to do after so many uninterrupted months.
It’s a strange thing—the notion of having to escape, having to break the routine, break being in the so-called monotony of one place. And it feels particularly telling when it is such a socially expected remedy for living in Alaska—as in ‘sure, it’s great, but you need a break. You have to get out. Find some sun. See the real world.’ People here refer to ‘outside’ as anywhere that is not Alaska—which I’ve always found a bit unnerving, while still funny—as if it’s a prison. It feels that—fate, life, the world?—is posing a bit of a question if you have to rely on getting out, in order to simply live somewhere.
It feels like there is another question the world is asking if we don’t have time and space to really know the world and the place around us. That we can often know more about where we’re going on vacation than we do about the places we call home, the habits of life around us. There is a bit of a dare—a socially implied expectation that to stay in one place for too long is unhealthy, a sign of strangeness, a judgment of not doing-moving-changing-traveling—as if you’re stagnating if you’re not getting out, going somewhere—both literally and figuratively.
I love being home. I always have. It’s why it made it hard to leave and uproot to move here so many years ago. And even with my love-hate feelings about Alaska ever-present, it’s probably part of why we still live here now.
Uproot. There are times when trees and plants need room to move, to extend their reach beyond a pot that is too small to contain it. But how often is it healthy to uproot a plant otherwise? A tree? How often it becomes apparent that society is clinging to ideals of the heroic adventure in guiding the trajectory of our lives—and how disappointed we are, or American society is, if we’re not always moving somewhere, going somewhere—a term that is a euphemism it’s deemed so matter-of-fact, so necessary to have a goal of elsewhere. Of needing to move away, to get out, to make our own way somewhere far from where we grew up, from what we know. Get out, don’t sit still, do, commit to constant-and-bigger-motion-towards-something-other-than where-you-are-in-the-present.
There’s a wider lens to this ethic that unsettles, that I think about a lot—of how little value we place—that sometimes we are even allowed to place—on honoring the land that we live on, of knowing it and all of its life more intimately. We move for jobs, for school, for income, for career, for marriage—we are told that we are heroes in our own story, and heroes go out to encounter the hero’s journey of life—it can’t be done in one place. And of course, there is so much to gain from being in a new place that I’ve loved and learned so much from. But the lands I’ve called home—Oregon, Alaska—were never my ancestors’ to begin with—which makes the word home wider, and more fraught. I don’t know how I can claim—a word I also find trouble with—a home in a land that was stolen. Yet in this country of lands taken by settlers—in reckoning with that history and identity—it feels horribly wrong to not place more value, more honor, more reverence to the lands we live on—of offering back our time and attention, to knowing the history, the people, the animals, the wildlife, the land itself. It takes time to know that—time to be still, to stay in one place, learn its rhythms and how it breathes. A state of perpetual motion keeps us disconnected in more ways than one.
An afternoon last week I was sitting in the tense quiet of three dogs sleeping, the latest snow, cold and quiet as well, all adding to the feel of early twilight. It was so still, in fact, that even the birds had stopped flitting to the feeder—usually so frequent with their jotting flights, landing with a cautious but steady gaze over to me—chickadees with impossibly slight small sticks for legs—as if a tired god had been desperate for rest and no longer able to muster the energy for detail, decided to stop at two pencil strokes—so thin they must be two dimensional. I marvel at the steady endurance of their bare pencil feet in the snow.
I’ve learned so much about the world around our home these months—so much more than I did in the many years prior—when work and school and commutes and scrambling for errands in the off-hours took priority. My capacity to notice feels wider, and yet more precise. I know the personalities of the birds that are around us through the seasons: nuthatches, flitting in the light with thorn-tip noses in small bursts of speed who, like my chihuahua, make up for size with attitude. They are always the first to arrive and to spy me as I set out new food, the boldest to come near me, the least hesitant when there is an opening between birds. Chickadees, both black-capped and boreal, are more hesitant but as frequent, watching intently from branches above before setting their round bodies off like soft floating bombs down to the plate. Boreal chickadees with their dusky brown hoods, part earth, part shadow. Steller’s jays that used to arrive daily and would eat from my hand last summer, familiar, with looks of recognition from their beads-of-water eyes, their hesitancy mixed with curiosity, possibly a greeting. Magpies are the regular visitors this year, their impossibly long tail feathers, fanning out into iridescence on their sweep up into the trees. The pleasing symmetry of their wings, heads, and bodies in what appears black but is actually every color imaginable when it hits horizontal light. The jays and magpies both waiting between visits in the trees, wiping their beaks from side to side on the branch they sit on, as if sharpening knives on a whetstone. A single robin, who arrived last winter and stayed most of summer, but has not returned in several months. Sometimes a few days will grow still and silent with no birds visiting, and then we’ll chance to see an owl fly by, a ghost made of shadow, making no sound as they fly through the trees.
The woodpeckers have been perhaps the most surprising. A pair regularly visits—a male and female—the male with a shock of red fire on his crown, the female less glittery in her even spots of black and white. They land vertically, often obscured by the branch they alight on, their head peeking from side to side as they wait for the nuthatches and chickadees to leave. They fly towards the railing with what looks like vehement determination, but have such a difficult time landing—they’re so clearly built to be parallel to the verticality of branches headed towards the sky—they end up over- or under-estimating the distance and force needed to land. Especially when there is snow on the railing—the deceptively tall snow banks fool them, and they are taken aback when they can’t gain purchase where they expect to, falling backward, almost as if they have no wings to support their fall. It’s rather comical. It seems like they have grown more accustomed with how to reckon the landing now, but still peek out from the vertical branches like a pitcher eyeing the catcher’s mitt. Once they arrive successfully, they nearly always move to stand smack in the middle of the plate. As I write, I can hear when they arrive, the tapping of their needle beak so loud in contrast to other activity, hammering sternly at the plate. Once I saw the male spear the nut with its beak, like a skewer, before flying off.
I’ve been thinking about this as a fellow writer I admire had written recently about the animals around us, how we think of them, how ancestors and other ages have thought of them, looked to them for wisdom. And it made me think of my love for the birds that arrive daily, the trees and their subtle shifting through the winter into inevitable (thank goodness inevitable) spring. Of how much more varied and beautiful, really, home can be when we live within a place steadily, the familiarity of it becoming a part of our expectations and routines—no longer a backdrop, but part of our interactions, observations—our lives. I used to love traveling and I do love being in other places. But I admit that being able to be home and to observe and to witness just the small space of this land I occupy is teaching me as much—making me wonder sometimes if just because we can is ever really a good reason.
When the woodpeckers first arrived at our house a few years ago, they were simply nuisances, banging on the siding below the eaves, an insistent tapping that announced that there are holes we would need to fill to keep them from hammering.
I’ve grown to re-think more about how we interact with animals around our homes—why the sudden rush to label nuisance, or to begrudge a few invertebrates that must be living in our eaves or house siding at times that attracts a hungry bird in winter. House ownership is an endless list of tasks labeled maintenance, but that’s not the woodpecker’s business. So now we try to just let them do what they need to do in the space that we call home, a place in which they also reside. And soon they started to come to the railing instead, to feast on the nuts rather than only the frozen bugs found in winter.
I know there are a lot of views on feeding the animals around us—and why birds almost get a pass, I’m not sure. Perhaps it speaks to the fact that we do have a collective awareness on some level that we need interaction—with other humans, but also with other animals. An acknowledgment that we are living alongside other beings, more than just occupiers of space—that company can be found in many iterations.
Woodpeckers are considered a symbol of protection and security in several folk traditions. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the sight and sound of a woodpecker hammering were taken as a lucky omen for hunters. Picus, the founder of the first settlement in what would later become Rome, was known for his skill in augury, divining the future from the flight of the woodpecker. Circe was in love with him, and when he rejected her, she turned him into a woodpecker for good. Later, he was honored as a prophet who guided travelers on their way, and who flew to the cave where Romulus and Remus, lived as children.
When I read that a year ago, when the woodpeckers were banging on the house—which they always had but being home we had never heard it as frequently—I felt gratitude. In an uncertain world, let alone a pandemic world, I’ll take any sign of protection offered. And I thought of how without having been home, forced to spend time in one place, observing the slants of light through the birches at different months, of admiring the trees and birds around the space we call home, I would have missed it all. Even though I could name the animals around us before, I did miss it all—the signs of security, protection, of myth and symbol, of bird, of tree, of soil, of root, of water, of ice. It was all so much more of a blur before, that now has definition—the reassurance of familiarity and observation in a deeper hue.
Carl Jung wrote about the symbolism of woodpeckers, that their association with protection comes from their creation of homes within trees, womb-like, protective and secure—he wrote:
This protective bird [the woodpecker] stands for….a liberating image of thought and desire born of introversion.
I loved that combination—of thought and desire born from introversion. That is what I so need at times—the images and desires that come from times of introversion, of observation. A liberating image. It’s liberating to be able to notice and know the homes that shelter us, the places that we think of as home. To bear witness to the place, the life around and within us. To read subtle shifts and outlines beyond the blur of constant activity, of work, of back and forth, of always needing to be elsewhere.
Being home is about place—it’s a world, and it’s many worlds—there is something much wider and precise and inherent in the word home. That the birds—and the birches, the fox, the moose, the squirrels, the alders—and particularly the woodpeckers drew my attention to all of this—and still does— is something I look forward to each day—with gratitude.
This is wonderful. I used to travel a lot for my old job, and when I left it the adjustment was huge. I hated the work—airports, airplanes, all of it—but I loved being in different places. I still do ... but what I realized I was missing after being "stuck" here was the solitude that came with being away. So I am trying to reclaim some of that. I do love to wander, but that need gets addressed locally, the places I can visit over and over again without getting bored because I never know what I might see, or notice for the first time. Or even just getting around my state of Montana with all its open spaces and wildly contrasting landscapes. Writing what, almost 200 years ago now, Thoreau said something about being able to spend a lifetime exploring just a twenty mile radius from where one lives is possible, and he was right. All the travel to other places was inhibiting my ability to connect to where I live, where I'm from, and now I'm trying to make up for lost time.