Earth Works: Selected Essays

Wildness

204 ope caught me by surprise a couple of weeks ago, when the last snow of winter hit town on the first day of spring. It was a heavy, slashing snow, stinging the skin, driven by a north wind. Because the temperature was near freezing, the flakes clung to everything. A white streak balanced on telephone wires, on clotheslines, on every branch and twig and bud. Many buds had already cracked open after a spell of warm days, so we fretted over the reckless early flowers and eager trees. By noon, snow piled a foot deep, and more kept falling. The few drivers who ventured out usually wound up spinning their wheels in drifts. Soon even the four-wheelers gave up and the city trucks quit plowing and the streets were abandoned to the storm. I made the first blemish on our street by going out at dusk for a walk. The light was the color of peaches, as if the sky were saturated with juice. The clinging snow draped every bush with a lacy cloak. Even fire hydrants and cars looked rakish in their gleaming mantles. I peeled back my parka hood to uncover my ears, and heard only the muffled crunching of my boots. Now and again a siren wailed, a limb creaked, or wind sizzled through the needles of a pine, but otherwise the city was eerily silent, as though following an evacuation . In an hour I met only three other walkers, each one huddled and aloof. The weight of snow snapped branches and toppled trees onto power lines, leaving our neighborhood without electricity. As I shuffled past the dark houses, beneath unlit street lamps, through blocks where nothing moved except the wind, my mood swung from elation toward dismay. The snow began to seem a frozen burden, like a premonition of glaciers, bearing down from the heedless, peach-colored sky. The world had been radiantly simplified, but at the price Wildness 205 Wildness of smothering our handiwork and maiming trees and driving warm-blooded creatures into hiding. Drawn by thoughts of family and candles and woodstove, I hastened back to my street, anxious to retreat indoors. Nearing our porch, however, I heard a low, steady whinnying from the hemlock beside our front door, and I paused. When I had first heard that sound back in January, I took it for a distant machine of some sort, a fan or a pump. But then, listening more closely, I recognized the single-note gargling of a screech owl. My wife, Ruth, and I had been hearing it almost nightly for two months, and one or the other of us would often wake in the small hours to savor this watery song. I never expected to hear it during a blizzard, but there it was, persistent as the purr of a brook. I squinted up through slanting snow into the dark boughs of the hemlock and listened as the screech owl, unruffled by the storm, went about its wooing. My mood swung back from dismay toward joy. At length I went indoors, chilled and reassured. Bird books describe the screech owl’s call as a mournful whistling, quavery and tremulous. To Thoreau it sounded “doleful,” like “the dark and tearful side of music.” At least since Pliny warned that the “Scritch Owl betokeneth some heavie news,” many have taken the sound for an ill omen. A Cajun forklift driver I worked with at a factory in Louisiana once told me that his trailer was haunted by a shivering owl. The blasted thing ruined his sleep with its creepy whispering. Had he ever seen it? I asked him. Yes, indeed, he’d even had it in the sights of his shotgun, but dared not shoot for fear of bad luck. I knew from his description—a ruddy bird as tall as a robin and twice as big around, with ear tufts and piercing yellow eyes—that he was talking about a screech owl. Indeed, “shiver” comes closer than “screech” to describing the soft, murmuring call. Every night since first hearing it in January, right on through the blizzard in March and up to the last week of April when I write these words, I have been listening to my wild neighbor without ever laying eyes on him. A friend tells me I could spy the owl if I probed the hemlock with a flashlight. But I am content to use my ears. Let it remain hidden, a voice calling out...