From the tree top

I climb into a bare-dead desert tree before sunrise and get out binoculars and a journal. The ground is frozen, sky clear, patches of snow crisp and white. It’s like hunting from a tree stand, and instead of a bow or a rifle, I have a pen. My favorite part of hunting anyway, was always the hunkering and the watching.

I practice paying attention, making a meditation out of these weekly treetop observations. I breathe and I watch: an animal. The tree has a good vantage of a local pass-through for deer, a canyon dropping below, a wooded, half-naked rim on the other side. Rarely do I see much moving, mostly birds. Once I watched fox kits play and wrestle. Another time a flicker landed next to me and stared quizzically for the longest time, as if asking what are you doing up here? 

This morning, my mind tinkers and scratches. After the election, it’s hard to keep quiet inside, hard not to think gender, woke, unwoke, privilege, or hate. You could fill a dictionary with newly loaded words. I shake off outside thoughts. I am standing on gray, weathered branches. The crotches and trunk I lean into are familiar. A raven calls from far away, almost beyond my field of knowledge. Sunrise reaches the canyon rim across from me, and a golden line trickles through juniper trees and boulders. Besides the turning of the planet, the only real action I see is a flock of around thirty pinyon jays flying tight together into the first warmth. I follow them with binoculars, each blue-gray body carried on wings shot through with sunrise. Moving in perfect tandem, the flock turns from upcanyon to downcanyon. I can’t tell what they’re looking for, or what repels them, what determines the twists or turns of their passage. They interact with the world as a single body, their chortling voices rising whenever the flock begins another turn.

Here I go again, wondering how we in this country have become two giant flocks, nearly half and half, flying straight through each other at seemingly cross purposes. If I step back as a natural historian, the singularity of the human flock becomes clear, differing only in small individual ways. We seem to make uniform movements, expanding as far as we can, filling every niche and ecosystem, bickering and writhing while performing this one task of spreading Homo sapiens to every place and every idea we can reach. To think we are truly divided feels narrow minded. 

The birds in flight, each communicating with those around it, remind me to pull, and pull hard. Every move is a course of navigation, every person a hinge inside an immeasurable flock. We are the ones making decisions one by one and together, a pure democracy.

Come back to the tree. Breathe. Let the eye roam one high desert horizon beyond the next. Feel the tips of cold in fingerless gloves. I touch my face to a branch tip, let it drag on my skin, scratching across morning whiskers. I come back to being what I am, a creature standing stock-still in the first morning light. I return to animal. This is how I know what to do. 

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CRAIG CHILDS is the author of The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light (forthcoming May 2025), Tracing Time, and many other books. He lives in southwest Colorado.

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