Tag Archives: Holy Cow

A New Life

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The coming days were flush with the banal.

Mazie and I, waiting for school to begin, shifted our ways to a local hotel.  They had a pool which Mazie was hot to swim in.  We joked about our big and fancy house. Poe, he stayed put in his hotel in Occidental.

On the last day of summer I took Mazie to the Harry Potter movie in Santa Rosa.  It was a dad daughter day and Mazie was pleased and funny and grateful, I think to have her dad’s attention.

On the first day at school, I drove Mazie from the hotel.  That first morning, nervous as heck, she asked that I walk her to the office, we check in, and then we walk out and as we did so she would peel away.  In that way, just as she dictated, I delivered her to her new school.

The kids were different, she later told me.  But she’s grown up resilient, and slowly, in her own way, she set to making friends.

Mazie and I would have breakfast each morning in the hotel lobby.  She would pack a lunch for herself from whatever she could scavenge from the hotel breakfast line: a piece of fruit, some juice, a PB&J.  I would then drive her to school.  In the evening I’d pick her up, we’d settle back into our hotel room, and Mazie would diligently sit and do her homework.

As for Poe, he became my own affair.  Some mornings and most afternoons I’d drive to Occidental and up into the meadow, where I would set with him.  I’d nap in the straw while he perched near me.  I’d feed him and talk to him.  He would sometimes mutter back.  I called Anna on the phone.  I wanted to tell her about the bird, but when we talked he would caw loudly until Anna would tell me to get out of the coop.  It was hard to talk with the bird near by, she said.

People seek solace and meaning and fire, and we each seek it in our own way.

I found it in dreaming of and fashioning for ourselves a new life.  I found it in Poe.

In the end, I think he just bugged her.

What Happens When You Believe

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I took a bunch of pictures to share, but now even that seems too much of a bother.

I had hoped that Poe could settle in at the Salmon Creek school in Occidental.  The school is set on 20 acres of meadow and redwood forest and wetland.  It also has an enormous fenced garden where I fancied Poe could hang out and regain a semblance of self.  Mazie and I took him there in the afternoon and set him free.

He enjoyed digging and exploring with his beak.  He hopped about in the wood chips and tussled with the greenery.  Mazie read quietly beneath an arbor.  Other ravens cawed out from the surrounding forest. Lovely clouds piled high in the sky and that afternoon the light felt marvelous and true.  I called Kerry.  We both were hopeful.  Perhaps Poe’s rehabilitation could become part of a school science program.  He could stay in the garden and mend.  And kids at the school could learn what it meant to be in close proximity to wildlife and maybe they figure out how to engineer some structure that would meet the needs of a wounded raven.

You see, this was all going to work out, or so it seemed.

But school would not start for a few more days.  The afternoon waned.  We gathered Poe into his carrier and in the setting light we drove up the hill and out of the valley.  Penny, the co-owner of the Holy Cow had offered her house up as a refuge.  She had an enormous chicken coop – the chicken hotel, she called it.  And hotel it was.  Ten feet high, fifteen across, open chicken wire walls all around facing out into meadow and oaks.  Poe took to the space immediately.  He ate and preened and hopped about in the straw.  Families and ravens flying over head would call out as they headed home to their roost.  Poe listened and called out in return.

Michael and Penny and I and even Mazie were elated.  Poe was safe.  I was safe, we all were, in the august darkness.

 

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Faith

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Is Charlie Brown believing again and again that Lucy won’t pull the football away from him.

My uncle once said that faith was believing in something that you knew was not true.  In this case, though, I really believed.  I believed it would all unfold as planned.

That first morning, Mazie and I, the raven in tow, made our way back to the Holy Cow.  Mazie and I settled down with cups of coffee and hot chocolate.  We waited until Michael the owner came around.

He remembered us from the month before.  Excited, grateful to have an ally, I ushered him outside and opened the car.  He looked inside and saw Poe inside the carrier.

Holy shit, he said.

He got it.  And I was so grateful to no longer be alone.  For he felt the awe.

I set to explaining how Poe had been held captive by the rehabilitator and that it was no good, and how –

You fucking stole him, he interrupted.  He grinned.  That’s so cool, he said, adding that we’d fit in just fine here.

He looked in again at the poor bird.  You can’t keep him in there, he said.  Bring him into the coffee shop.

And that I did.  And like that the three of us set at the table, health codes and wildlife regulations be damned, with Poe the raven holding court over all and customers coming forward and stopping dead in their tracks.  My god, each one said.

For those highly social birds are of their own world and not of ours, and though parallel, they scant intersect.  To be here in a coffee house on main street sebastopol, why to come full face with his claw-like beak and opal eyes and the impenetrable sheen of his blackness.  Poe was the ineffable born into flesh, and that day in the coffee shop, customers wanted only to be near him.  They wanted to touch it.

Mazie made friends with Michael’s daughter, Loren.  They made plans to get together and hang out.  They talked about the schools they would be going to.

Strangers approached and gave us their phone numbers, they had ideas of how to help.  They offered homes where he could stay.

That is what home feels like.  We had found safe harbor.

Arrival

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It rarely is what it seems.  And sometimes it holds everything that is.

You might as well all know. Mazie and Poe and I ended up in Northern California.

On that first night, we needed nothing more than safe harbor.  Mazie needed some emotional relief.  And Poe needed most of all to be released from his confinement.

We drove direct to the home of our friends Mary and Al.  They’re family friends and to tell the truth we had nowhere else to go.  We parked in their driveway at their small mid-century stucco home.  They weren’t home.  But they had a decent sized yard and so we took Poe straight back there and let him out beneath a towering redwood.  He hopped away distressed and set his distance.  I fed him bits of pizza and old meat and whatever I had with.  A cat appeared and I barked at Mazie to hold the cat back, but she had a hard time doing it.

I thought maybe Poe could hang out in this yard for the evening and that he would be safe.  But I was way wrong.  There was no respite to be had here.  I called Michael from Holy Cow and then Maryanne, but no one was picking up.  Spent, I rounded Poe up and put him back in the dog carrier.  Mazie was frazzled and upset herself.  She needed as much tending as the bird.  Why was the bird getting it all, she asked?

Because if he doesn’t get what he needs, he’s going to die, I said.

We piled back in the car.  Because it was now time for Mazie’s school orientation.

We drove the scant six blocks to Mazie’s middle school where, in five days, Mazie was going to settle in to where she was going to spend the next year of her life.

Mazie didn’t want people to see us with the bird.  So we left Poe in the car while we entered the school gymnasium.  It was filled with a crowd of white middle to upper income folk.  Which I guess is what we now were.  The principal, a warm and nice man, introduced the school and the various programs and what children and parents could expect.  It was going to be a wonderful year, he said.

As we exited the gym, tears welled up in Mazie’s eyes.  I don’t want to go to this school, she whispered.

Mazie and I no longer knew how to live in this world.

Guardians

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Poe ensconced with a wildlife rehabilitator in Flagstaff. And Mazie and I are camped out in Sonoma California, trying to piece together a new life out here for our family.

We’ve found house to buy. It’s big and green and old and wonderful. But after eight years at Hopi, it’s hard to imagine a life as wild and wonderful and full of serendipity as the one we now have. Is this it? After decades of wandering, are we now settling down? Where’s the adventure in it?

On a Tuesday morning, sitting in the courtyard outside the Sebastopol Inn, I call our friends Kerry and Kristina back home. I’m worried, I tell them. How are we going to make a new life for ourselves out here?

Kristina’s answer is simple. This thing that we need to do is too big, she says. We can’t do it alone. So we need to put it out there, we need to seek out our allies and be available when they present themselves.

As for Kerry, he points out that when driving into Walpi Housing in the middle of a barren desert, would we have ever imagined that it was an ideal spot for building large wooden structures, and butchering a cow, and raising a mess of ravens? Could we have even conceived of the adventures that awaited us there?

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Two hours later, Mazie and I sit in the Holy Cow coffee shop in Sebastopol. I’m despairing. Will I be able to talk to the ravens in our new home? I ask Mazie.

Daad, she says, and rolls her eyes in a way to indicate that once again I’m proving myself an embarrassment.

On the wall behind her hangs a large painting of a young girl cradling a crow. And further down, another canvas of an enormous raven perched on the body of a baby. I step up to take a picture of it and an older woman sitting at a nearby table asks if I’m interested in ravens.

She’s read all about them, she says.

Bernd Heinrich? I ask.

Heinrich is amazing, she says and we high five.

I tell her the story of the wash ravens and she tells me about herself. Her name is Maryann Markus. She used to teach, but she’s retired and she’s built herself a studio and she spends much of her time drawing nests. She is fascinated by ravens, she considers them her totems. There’s something I’ve never shown anybody, she says removing a velvet pouch from her purse. Inside, a hematite figurine of a raven. I squeeze it in my hand and rub it and squeeze it again. It’s heavy and has the dense sensibility of a low rumbling current.

She looks at me. It’s yours now, she says. They’re such powerful birds, guardians really. She asks if I’ve met Michael, the owner of the coffee shop and to fellow who did the paintings. She leads me to the back to introduce us.

He’s my age more or less, introspective and gentle seeming. Michael, too, says he can’t get his mind off these birds. He’s been fixated on them a while and keeps working them, making image after image. They’re deep, intense creatures, he says, and we’re afraid to let them into our lives. He says that the image of the baby and the bird scared people, but that they misinterpreted it. I see him as a protector, he says.

I tell him about the raven in our care and how our neighbor killed and maimed two of them. How I was fed up and in a weird way it was a last straw for us. I just wanted to get out of there.

But that’s all part of it, too, he says. You can’t run from that either. He says he hopes our move here works out well and that things take a good turn with the house. Before I leave, he gives me a hug.

I walk out of his office and see one more canvas.

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