Herding Blackbirds

It was an orange day of Indian summer. Down past Joliet deep into Will County I drove to see Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, recently designated on lands of the decommissioned Joliet Arsenal, an old Army repository of decaying dynamite. The bright light of early October raked across the sepias, yellow ochers, and burnt umbers of corn and soybean fields. I couldn’t find a way into the relatively new preserve, still surrounded by old, rusted barbed wire fence in a style preferred by military installations, such as my dad’s navy bases when I was growing up in Florida. So, like the velociraptors in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, I scouted along its southern periphery, looking for some break in the fence. Where the fields yielded to savannahs of scattered mixed hardwoods, all in the yellow finery of fall, I looked up to see thousands of little flying descendents of the long gone dinosaurs. These were blackbirds, streaming south in the sky like impatient freshets that bore cascading flotsam in a fast-moving creek. I parked my car and made my way toward where they were alighting in oak and green ash trees. Whole tree loads quivered and quaked with the nervous energy of migration. Stealthily cautious so as not to frighten them back aloft, I slowed my pace and tiptoed toward one of the trees. My advances triggered a tree-full to launch in agitated confusion, only to alight again in the next tree. Increasing caution failed to keep them close enough to satisfy my curiosity’s inspections. Forced evermore forward, they just scrambled en mass to the next tree. I felt like I was herding blackbirds like some kind of specially trained bipedal bird dog.

Sing a song of sixpence

A pocket full of rye

Four and twenty blackbirds

Baked in a pie

Two nights earlier I had been eating a fine meal with friends at Prairie Grass Café in Northbrook. The head of table was celebrating hangings of her exquisite artwork depicting roots, including a sweet potato, at a showing in the exhibit hall in Chicago Botanic Garden. I was having the Moussaka with braised lamb and tomato, potato, and eggplant in a hot pot pie of golden crusted béchamel when the best friend of my companion for the evening remarked, “Well, it does look like blackbirds baked in a pie, doesn’t it?”

I believe in signs. Like a neon marquee, that night signaled unequivocally for a release of emotion the likes of which I’ve not felt in ages. For three weeks now my companion and I have explored each other’s migratory flyways with penetrating looks like the one I had given the agitated flocks of blackbirds that crowded the fields along Midewin’s periphery. I attempt to fly up and away like those darting migrants, only to be lassoed by the dark embellishments of her spellbinding gaze. Like a sorceress brandishing the  accoutrements of her mysterious craft over an open hearth of steaming culinary potpourri, she burnishes and bastes my being with that gaze, making me swim in rivulets of flowing sauce, filled with flavorsome dark flakes that flit about like blackbirds, fueled by waste grain from the harvested fields. Born aloft by  the collective intent of those blackbirds, I beckon my percipient seer to fly away with me on rivulets of flowing air as we make our way south toward roosts along southern Illinois waterways.