The Furious Spinner

I'm sitting at my desk looking out at the gorge cliffs across the Columbia River. They're dusted with snow. It looks as though someone has sprinkled powdered sugar over them. Yummy. (I haven't eaten breakfast yet.) I've been up on and off for the past two nights, waiting for some publishing news. Guess I'm not going to hear, so I better learn to sleep.

A line of Canada geese fly overhead. Last night we watched the movie "Winged Migration." It's a documentary about birds and their annual migrations. There's very little narration, just film of the birds flying. Pretty amazing footage. The best part of the film was when the birds were flying. When the birds were on land, the film was more pedestrian—or else I had just seen stuff like it before.

As I watched, I kept hearing that women's round in my head, "There's a river of birds in migration, a nation of women with wings."

And of course I started thinking about all the birds of my life. When I was a girl, I was in love with red-winged blackbirds and believed I had a special relationship with them. They hung onto cattails in the marsh behind my house and seemed to be floating above the hummocks, splashes of black amongst the golden brown.

I put pieces of meat in the old junipers behind our house, believing the hawks that circled overhead took my offerings as soon as I went inside. When I got older, I learned hawks ate raw meat of animals they killed—and probably the birds I thought were hawks were actually turkey vultures.

At our elementary school which was out in the country down the road from where I lived, killdeer made their nests in the field behind our playground. At recess, the boys ran through the field giggling and smashing bird eggs as the distressed killdeer parents pretended they had broken wings in an attempt to lure the boys away. I fought with the boys. Tiny thing that I was, I was out there tilting at windmills, trying to save the killdeer. One day during this struggle, I looked down at the pink sweater I was wearing and saw a bird fetus on my sleeve. I screamed and screamed and ran for the school, ripping my sweater off. There was no baby bird. Apparently the stress of the bird butchery had caused the little girl that was me to hallucinate.

A few years ago, we lived out in the country in Skamania County in Washington state near a lake, pond, and the Columbia River. We moved there right after I had to quit my job because I was so ill. At first I could barely walk across the room, I was so sick. At night, I would listen to the flock of Canada geese by the lake cooing to each other as they fell to sleep. I threw bird seed all over the deck so I could sit on the couch and watch the birds come to me: juncos, sparrows, blue jays, chickadees.

The pond, where most of the wildlife hung out, was down the road and over a bridge: normally about a three minute walk. However, I got very dizzy when I walked. Just leaving the house for the porch was a challenge. Then I made it to the end of the driveway to the mailbox. Around the curve of the road. Each step just an amazing accomplishment. I gave myself pep talks each time I went out. I decided if I got so dizzy I couldn't walk, then I'd crawl home.

Finally I made it to the pond. A male red-winged blackbird greeted me (or more likely warned me off) as I stepped around the gate. A big cranky (great blue heron) stood across the pond from me, looking for food. Kingfishers flew in a straight line across the water. Ducks floated on the pond.

I tried to walk to the pond every day. It was a challenge for me, and each day it got easier—mostly. Sometimes I would go down to the river. There, cormorants, sea gulls, ospreys and plovers flew. Sometimes eagles floated on the thermals above the river.

But the pond felt more intimate. I recorded the sounds there once, and it was so noisy with birds that it was difficult to listen to. Real life was great: but the recording was obnoxious. Strange. Red-tailed hawks made their homes in the tall trees in the pasture beyond the pond, and sometimes I could hear and see them from my place near the pond.

One day I was walking toward the pond when I spotted a bald eagle in a tree next to the water. I walked slowly toward the water and then sat on the ground, so I could watch the beautiful bird of prey. Suddenly, the eagle took off from the tree and dropped down toward the pond. Without a sound, she pulled a fish out of the pond, yards from where I sat, then flew away. The water did not move: no ripples. It was one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed in my life. I was in awe. Still am.

One morning in the winter, I stood on the deck and invited the birds to come visit me. I especially wanted to see the red-winged blackbirds, my friends from childhood. That very day, a flock of red-winged blackbirds landed on my porch where I had spread out a banquet of bird seed for them. For about an hour, I was treated with a close-up view of my exquisitely beautiful friends.

In December, swans flew to Franz Lake which was a few miles down the road. The only way to view them was from a noisy turnoff on State Route 14. If it was quiet for a few moments, you could listen to the unique sounds of the swans, a kind of comforting gurgling. Plus, to watch them—even at a distance—was such a treat. They seemed so elegant as they dug around in the mud for food. Every once in a while a few of them would land at the pond near my house. I would hide behind bush and tree to watch them close up. Some day, I knew, I would write a novel about swans.

In the summer, hummingbirds flew up to our front picture windows, admiring themselves. I would wave them off, fearful they would try to fly into the windows. It happened once, and I wept as I buried the tiny bird in my flower bed.

And the swallows. Wow! Lining up on the telephone wires, then diving for mosquitoes and other goodies. We would stand on the bridge and raise our arms, and the swallows would dive at us. Their songs sounded like running water. We put up a swallow bird house in the tree near our porch and watched as the male found the house, then wooed himself a mate. The process was fascinating. The actual mating went on for a few days. They did it so quickly I wondered how they actually did it. I called up my neighbors and asked them. "Well, Kim, haven't you ever had that talk about the birds and the bees?" "But he's on top of her tail for just seconds." Didn't seem long enough to accomplish anything. However, the birds soon began making their nest. And she began sitting on something. Soon we could see the babies as they stuck their heads up and out of the nest. Mario and I were fascinated for weeks. One day while we were gone, the babies and their parents flew away. We had missed the babies first steps.

We had to move away because of the use of chemical pesticides in the area. I missed the pond and the birds more than I can articulate and was furious with the idiots who moved out into the country and then were surprised to find mosquitoes: and demanded the government spray chemicals.

One day the following fall, I drove by and saw a flock of swans on the pond. I had never seen so many, and I pulled onto the landing, parked the car, and walked to the pond. I was completely entranced.

I went home and sat down to write about seeing the swans, a nature essay. But I started a novel. Out of the blue. Swans in Winter I called it. I wrote all day. (I write longhand on yellow note pads.) The next day, I drove out to the pond, and the swans were still there. Again, I basked in their presence. Then I went home and wrote. I did this for fourteen days. I would visit the swans, then come home and write. I wrote so fast and for so many hours a day that I was often exhausted beyond words, and I would weep as I wrote. At the end of the fourteen days, I finished the novel: and the swans flew away.

I've always considered that novel a gift from the swans.

I never sold the novel. Yet. Don't know why. It's about a group of older women who decide to pose nude for a calendar to raise money to protect the land they love: they become Swan Maidens. (I actually got 13 women in my own community, most of them over seventy, to agree to do a calendar so we could raise money to prevent the county from using pesticides, but we never did it. It's still a possibility.) I think it's a beautiful novel—but then, I wrote it.

Now I live in town, and I don't see many birds beside crows—and I am grateful for their presence. I need to put bird seed in the feeder and lure my feathered friends back.

Perhaps I'll do that right now. All this talk of birds makes me want to go for a walk, even though it looks very cold outside.

Have a good weekend, all. Kevin, don't catch any Texas cooties whilst in the Lone Star state. Think, Molly Ivins, Molly Ivins, Molly Ivins, and you'll be safe.

P.S. In my novel Swans in Winter, my main character India Lake writes an essay about swans. I'll post it here, so you can have a looksee.

Swan Maidens

by India Lake

I dream of swans. They wing through my sleep, some white, some black, murmuring a truth I cannot yet decipher.

When I awaken I wonder what it is they symbolize.

I read about them. I learn their mating habits. How long their wing spans are. I watch them to learn their living habits. They float. They eat. They breathe. They are in each other’s company constantly. This is what swans do in winter.

I read more. This time I read stories about swans. Many cultures have written about them—told stories around campfires for millennia. For the Greeks, the swan was a solar symbol, related to Apollo who is a decidedly male god. To the Slavs and Persians, the swan was a lunar symbol. The People of the Yenesei Basin in Mongolia believed swans menstruated like women: decidedly female. In some stories the swan was a transmutation of the Sun and the Moon: therefore the swan was a hermaphrodite. In others, the swan is the embodiment of Desire, male or female.

I know swans are magnificent birds. They lift off from water with barely a sound. They dig around in mud all day, yet they do it with grace and aplomb. They talk to each other for hours, delicate coos of ohoooh, ohhhoooh. For hours they are silent.

I recall the story of the swan maidens. A version of this story exists in many cultures, although it may have originated in Siberia. The point of view of the story is usually male. A hunter stumbles upon six (or nine or eleven) women dancing in and around a lake in the wild. He sees their discarded garments in the grass: cloaks made from swan feathers. The hunter creeps down to the shore and steals one of the cloaks. Soon the women prepare to leave. They search for their sister’s cloak but cannot find it. They finally tell her that they must leave and she is on her own. They each throw on their cloaks; as they do so, they transform into swans and fly away.

It is then that the hunter steps forward and tells the woman he has her cloak. He will not return it, but he begs her to marry him and promises to make her happy. She has to agree; it is the only possible way to retrieve the cloak. They return to his home and marry.

I have always wondered if she looked for her cloak every day. Did she lay in bed plotting how she would find it? I would have.

Wouldn’t I?

The Swan Maiden has babies and lives many years with her husband. Does she slowly forget who and what she is? One of her children, most often a little girl, stumbles upon the cloak one day when she is feeling adventurous and wild, exploring a place in the house her father warned her against. The girl immediately takes the cloak to her mother. “Is this what you have longed for mother?” the child asks. “Is this what you have needed?” The woman exclaims in delight. Without a backward glance, she puts on her cloak, transforms into a swan, and flies away home.

The story does not end there. The hunter goes on a perilous journey to find his wife and bring her back home. Her father, the king, agrees the hunter can “have” the Swan Maiden if he can tell her apart from all of her other swan sisters. The hunter can and does, and he takes her back home where they reportedly live happily ever after.

I have never liked that ending. Storytellers warn against tampering with the elements of an old story. They are mythic. Time tested. All the pieces are symbolic and essential.

Or are they are part of the propaganda that keeps us in our place? Is that too harsh an assessment? I don’t like the ending of Swan Maiden. I do not believe it is a story about kings and hunters and babies and living happily ever after.

Isn’t it a story about losing one’s soul and finding it again? To the Celts the swan symbolized the soul. When the Swan Maiden came out of the sky to frolic along the shores of that lake in the wilds, why did they change from swans to women? Were they transforming from the wild to the tame? Or the tame to the wild?

And why did they leave a part of themselves vulnerable to theft? Was it a coincidence that a hunter is the thief? What part of us does that cloak represent?

Is it the part we take for granted, the part we don’t even realize is essential for our being until it is gone? Do we lose it when we fall in love and give up “that part” to be obliging? Is that what happened to the Swan Maiden? She decided she had to compromise. Why didn’t she just roar and go after the hunter and take back that cloak? Why did she agree to the half life the hunter offered? How could she? Because she has lost her cloak does she look at that hunter and believe he is her lost soul mate?

In the story, it turns out the cloak was always within her reach. It was hidden in her own home. Found by her own child. Is that it? Do we have to be childlike again to retrieve our lost souls? Do we have to become our wild adventurous child selves?

When we can do that—become innocent again—we find that which we have lost or carelessly thrown away. We know who we are again. We are whole and wholly ourselves.

Are swans then symbols of our true nature? Our souls? Desire? In the Arthurian legends, a Swan Knight roamed the wilderness looking for those women who had lost their way in the new world order. He looked for women who could not adjust to living in a “man’s world.” He was supposed to do whatever he could to make them happy again. I wonder if he succeeded. Could he change the world for them? And why was he the swan knight? Is there something about swans that can help us live in a world that does not always feel like our own?

From my spot near my home where I study the swans, I see one stretch her wings wide. I do the same. I hear my bones crack. Does she feel the same kind of relief I do from a kink in her lovely curved neck?

One day, the river where I love floods. Ponds become lakes, lakes rivers. Oceans. People talk into news cameras and point out the destructive power of Mother Nature. When the flood retreats, I find a dead swan caught on a barbed wire fence. I hold her in my arms, and I know then that she and hers are not symbols for anything. She was a wild creature, and now she is dead.

Wild is what I love. People are afraid of the wild. Even the word. Wild, to them, means something is out of control. To me, wild is natural. Wild equals nature. My passion is for the wild. For Nature. I ache for her embrace. I long to press my sole against her. When the swan died on that barbed wire fence, part of the wild died.

We need the wild. As a civilization we have lost our cloak of swan feathers: that part of our soul that keeps us wild. When part of nature and the Wild are lost, parts of ourselves are lost, too.

I am making swans a symbol again, aren’t I? I don’t mean to. Swans stand on their own. They have their own place in the cosmos separate from us. They have become part of our mythology. Have we become part of theirs? Maybe. They fly away every time we come near. Do they know we are looking for our lost souls; if they aren’t careful we will take theirs instead and fashion them into cloaks of feathers we wear when we have forgotten who we really are—when we have forgotten who our true soul mate is.

I watch the swans. They are whole and wholly themselves, it seems, yet part of a community. They preen and cuddle and eat. I gaze at their wildness and I dance. I feel myself move in ways I have not moved before. I feel desires I have not known before.

I watch the swans and realize we cannot find our lost souls or soul mates in a cloak of feathers or in someone else’s arms.

What the Swan Maiden lost when the hunter stole her cloak was her knowledge of her self. When the child returns the cloak to her, she is reunited with her self: with her own needs, desires, passions.

How many of us forget what we need or want? How many of us compromise our dreams away? How many of us stop letting our voices be heard?

It is enough that the swans exist. For me, the swans are a reminder to be my true self, to hold my cloak of swan feathers close. That isn’t their purpose, however. Swans exist in the wild as part of Nature. That is enough. They need no other reason.

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