Breathe

Breathe

by Elizabeth Carls

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten, Unsplash

Today I hold a black-capped chickadee as she takes her last breath. I discover her lying in the grass, in the deep shade of the house, not moving but clearly alive. I pause to sit with her, cradling her gently in the palm of my right hand. A small gesture of kindness to not let her die alone, I think. Cupped in my hand, she weighs almost nothing, her delicate gray wings are folded perfectly in place like hands in prayer. She shows no outward signs of injury. I wonder if she spent her whole life here in my garden as I look into her eyes, the top and bottom lids blinking slowly, meeting in the middle of the shiny black bead.

        As an ecologist, I don’t believe in God, but I believe in the soul of this chickadee. I whisper a soft apology to her for something I couldn’t have helped. Her cream-colored chest rises and falls, almost unseen, her death taking just a few minutes to complete. I imagine that I am a comfort to her, but perhaps this moment is really for me.

        I wonder, is it enough?
                                                                
~~~

It hasn’t rained in weeks. The young trees and perennials in my garden are thirsty from the drought. Patterns of precipitation are influenced by any number of climatic changes, including a shifting jet stream and rising ocean temperatures. Precipitation is variable, and therefore considered in terms of statistical averages. When average rainfall begins to decline over periods of months or even years it becomes a drought. It is difficult to mark the beginning or the end of a drought—it is an absence that arrives and departs gradually.

        The National Weather Service uses a complicated system of metrics to quantify the absence. They classify the current drought using a coded language with simple names like D2 and D3. D2 is severe. D3 is exceptional. There is nothing sexy about the metrics and numbers, and yet I feel D3—the exceptional absence—in my body.

        Here in Minneapolis, we have broken the record for consecutive days with a high temperature over 90 degrees F. We continue to establish a new record every day for twelve more exceptional days. On the 13th day a high temperature of 86 degrees F and a sprinkling of rain. A streak broken, but it isn’t enough.

        Petrichor, the name people give to the sweet organic smell of rain. The name is correct, but the people are wrong. Petrichor isn’t the smell of rain. Zoom in, see the small cloud of dust that rises from the Earth when a fat full drop of rain hits its dry and dusty surface. Inside that cloud is petrichor. It is the scent of parched, warm soil after a long period without rain—the smell of Earth when the rain finally comes. Petrichor is a thing I believe in.
                                                                
~~~

Three dead blue jays in just one day. I count them all except for the first one because when it’s just one dead blue jay, I don’t yet see a reason to count them. Number One I find freshly dead in the mesic prairie patch I’ve planted in my garden. Like the chickadee, this jay is pristine. I pick her up and can see no evidence of trauma, just a stiff and lifeless bird, still beautiful despite being dead.

        Feeling like I should do something, I make her a shallow grave under the hedge, gently covering her in a mound of mulch and last year’s fallen leaves. I tell myself there is dignity in decomposition, and I believe it.

        The second jay, Number Two, lingers before dying, ailing in the young crabapple tree and the bird bath that sits just below. Her world—food, water, shelter—reduced to just a few square feet of my garden. Her world wholly contained within mine. I watch her from my window on and off for several hours until she perches on the edge of the bird bath, sways, and falls to the ground. Then I go to her and lift her from the parched soil. She doesn’t struggle but settles in my hands. It takes two hands to cradle a dying blue jay. Her death now comes quickly, her strong black beak parted slightly, panting through her final moments.

        As she dies in my hands a feeling close to rage vibrates up through my body exiting audibly in a sound I cannot name.

        Because this is the third bird, the second blue jay, to die in my garden in just four days I feel thirsty for reasons, as if understanding why will give me something new to believe in.

        I call the local wildlife rehab facility, but they are in the business of rehabilitation, and dead birds don’t qualify for their services. You can’t undo dead.

        I call the School of Veterinary Medicine at the nearby university. When I reach the clinic, I am told they don’t treat wild animals; I am also told what I already know—they don’t treat dead animals. I ask and am transferred to the research center, speaking finally to a doctor, who, like me, is interested in answers. Because the university won’t allow him to work for free, we arrange to meet in a parking lot—a secretive liaison. I deliver the dead jay—our secret—concealed in a small white cardboard box. In the end the doctor has nothing definitive to say, just a jumble of familiar words like stress, heat, and drought.

        When I return home from the covert dead bird drop, Number Three is dying under the evergreen in my front garden. I selfishly let her die alone because I am hot. I retreat inside the house and take refuge from the guilt and the sun, soothing myself with the idea that this garden has all the things required for life and is therefore also a fine place to die.
                                                                
~~~

The National Weather Service issues a red flag warning after an extended period of drought has created substantial dry fuels and the current weather conditions are dry, hot, and windy. The parameters quantified: fuels with less than 8% moisture content, relative humidity of less than 25%, and ground level winds of at least 15 miles per hour (NWS). I question the need to quantify what I feel viscerally.

        There are 1,600 wildfires burning in Northern Minnesota and just across the border in Canada. The largest of the wildfires is named The Greenwood Fire. Naming wildfires frequently identifies their geographic location, but this practice also renders them familiar and perhaps therefore less frightening.

        The Greenwood Fire is started by lightning and burns for more than a month. When it is finally 80% contained, it has burned 26,797 acres of the Superior National Forest and its surrounding wilderness. The fire covers 42 square miles, and 400 firefighters have been deployed to manage it. Smaller wildfires pop up nearby. They have names too, like the John Ek Fire and the Whelp Fire.

        I want to speak the names of the trees that burn—Pinus strobus, Pinus resinosa, Pinus banksiana, Abies balsamea—to memorialize the standing dead.

        Air Quality Index measures ground level ozone and the load of particulate matter in the air expressed as parts per million—vague units in numbers difficult to fathom. When smoke chokes the sky, air quality warnings are issued with an easy-to-understand system of color-coding— yellow, orange, and at its most severe, red. When a red warning is issued, being outdoors and breathing the air is dangerous for people and blue jays and chickadees.

        While indoors, I once again wonder is it enough? Is it enough to count dead birds and recite the names of trees? Is it enough to be an eyewitness to death and still believe in beauty?

        Here in my city, over 200 miles away from any active wildfire, smoke fills the air, bending and twisting light in the dance of refraction. As the sun settles toward the horizon, its rays are contorted creating spectacular, painterly sunsets with deep rich hues of purple, magenta, and orange to match the red of warnings.
                                                                
~~~

The creek I walk beside is breathtakingly dry. The trees and the shoreline restoration plants wither. The once muddy creek bed is cracked and covered in a thin layer of drab green algal dust. Stones smoothed by time and the water that no longer flows here are exposed.

        There is something both sad and beautiful about a king fisher fishing in a bone-dry creek. She stands on a newly exposed stone, defiantly fishing where there cannot possibly be fish. One half of a mile upstream the lake is low, but not dry. There are fish there. Despite my training as an ecologist, I allow myself to anthropomorphize—it is her willful nature that inspires her to fish here and not there.

        I cling to both the beauty and the sadness of this scene for weeks, nurturing the relationship between the two. Without the sadness I risk losing sight of the beauty, and without the beauty the sadness turns into hopelessness. Hope is the thing I hold in my hands.