“I’m Dar.”
======
There’s this freaky thing about me. Wherever I go, birds of prey appear to me. It doesn’t matter what U.S. state I’m in or what time of year it is. When I look up, I see them in trees, on light posts, or in the air. I see hawks everywhere and sometimes even owls and eagles. I suppose if I lived out in the sticks, this wouldn’t be so unusual, but since I live in an urban setting, it’s a bit odd that I see as many as I do. And I see them every day, weather permitting.
A few people know about my weird thing with birds of prey and what’s interesting is that, when they are with me, they see them too. I point them out and I’m like, “There’s one. And there’s another. Oooh. Over there! Look. Another one.” So now I have been given the nickname “The Beastmaster.” Do you remember that brilliantly cheesy movie from the 80’s? That’s me. I’m Dar.
I think I started becoming Dar when I was a little kid. My paternal grandparents moved to the mountains of West Virginia when they retired. Their teeny little house was up on a mountain and only accessible by way of zig-zagging dirt roads. For me, this introduced a world of adventure. My grandmother had a bird feeder in the back yard, just beyond the kitchen window. She gave me a little bird identification book and some binoculars, sat me down at the kitchen table, and challenged me to figure out which birds were which on the feeder. I quickly learned about each kind of bird and my grandmother, who possessed the patience of a saint, would listen to me each time I said, “Oooh look!! A cardinal!!” and read the same description for the 100th time out of the book. Because of my enthusiasm for the bird feeder, my grandmother gave me the of chore dragging the ladder out from under the house and filling up the feeder each morning. This was my very first job and I took a lot of pride in my work.
The next thing my grandmother challenged me to do was sit outside at the picnic table near the bird feeder and see how close the birds would come to me. At first, they never came. They just sat up in the trees making a racket and letting me know they were seriously inconvenienced by my presence. My grandmother told me from the kitchen window that I needed to be still, like a statue, and they’d come. Keep in mind that I was nine years old or so and being still was not something I was used to. But I practiced and practiced, dead set on becoming invisible. I wanted to get as close as possible to those bright red cardinals and tiny little black-capped chickadees. I remember the frustration and heartbreak I’d experience when I’d go inside for lunch and all the birds would swoop down onto the feeder behind me. After a couple days and more practice, the birds started landing on the feeder as I sat just ten feet away. The first few times this happened, I held my breath in excitement until I felt my heart wanting to break out of my chest. I’d breathe out and they’d all fly away. I quickly got the hang of it though and started on my path of Beastmasterdom.
I took these lessons about stillness and ventured out into the dense woods around my grandmother’s house. When I graduated from the bird book, she gave me a book about animal tracks and I had to look up each and every kind of track I’d come across and report back to her. The most common tracks were deer, raccoons, bobcats, and turkeys. Every now and again, closer to the top of the mountain, I’d find black bear tracks and get a little scared.
Whenever I found a deer trail, I’d climb up into a tree above it and sit completely still, waiting to see what kind of creatures would appear below me. Some days I wouldn’t see much of anything, but other days would be busy, especially with deer and wild turkeys. To pass the time while waiting, I’d look up and around in the trees, identifying all the birds I could, again, reporting each kind and number to my grandmother. My grandmother had one of those air horns and that’s how she’d let me it was time to go home for lunch or for dinner. She’d blast it three times and I hear it echo around the mountain and I’d run home as fast as I could so she wouldn’t know just how far off I’d wandered. I’d burst through the screen door and, before I could catch my breath, I rattled off everything I could remember seeing in the woods.
My grandmother. She was born into a sharecropping family and grew up picking tobacco in southern Maryland. My grandmother, with barely had a 7th grade education, introduced me to books and to birds. I was always a bit of a loner and an introvert, even then. Not so much a weird kid, just more a quiet and observant kid. She saw that in me and nurtured it, introducing me to the bigness of worlds inside of me and outside of me. I know on many levels, my grandmother saw a lot of herself in me.
My grandmother was never in good health because of her diabetes, but we never discussed it. She was, after all, of hearty tobacco farmer stock and complaining was just not something she did. When I went away to college, I began writing letters to my grandmother and she wrote me back. Always. Her handwriting was truly exquisite and artful. You’d never know she only went to school until the age of twelve. And even though I was no longer climbing trees and filling the bird feeder, I still told my grandmother about all the birds I’d see around campus and outside of my dorm. I told her about the busy cardinals who brightened up my dismal view and I wrote her a letter just to tell her about the screech owl that had taken up residence in the tree outside my window. Each Thanksgiving and Christmas, I got a card from her with cardinals on it. It was kind of our inside joke, in a way.
As college went on and I neared graduation, I noticed her handwriting was getting worse. It was as if her handwriting was regressing to childhood, but I didn’t want to say anything. I kept writing to her and she wrote back less and less. She called me out of the blue one day and apologized for not writing. She told me the diabetes was making her fingers numb and that she couldn’t write well anymore. This didn’t matter to me, of course. There was no need to apologize. I kept up the pace of my letters and every now and again I’d get a card from her signed simply with “Gram.” And even in those four letters, I could see just how bad the diabetes was affecting her hands.
When my grandmother died in 1998, I was not expecting it. I know I wasn’t expecting it because her mind was still so sharp and her wit was too. The strange thing was, I woke up very early that morning and sat up in bed because I thought I heard her call my name to wake me, the way she did when I was a girl. For a moment, I forgot where I was and how old I was and then quickly fell back to sleep. A couple of hours later, around 7 a.m., the phone rang. Never a good thing at that hour. It was my father telling me that my grandmother had just died. I was devastated.
It was shortly after she died that I started seeing red-tailed hawks every single day and everywhere I went. I didn’t really think much about it at first and then it dawned on me - maybe it was my grandmother’s way of letting me know she was still watching over me and connecting with me through that bond we shared. I’m not really one of those woo woo type of people either, but I have to say it really felt like something clicked inside of me when I considered that possibility. And even if seeing these hawks all over the place is just pure coincidence, it gives me great comfort and I happily indulge myself in the possibility.
