Hummingbird Salamander(38)

I made for my car, all discipline gone, Shovel Pig smacking into my side. Shambolic. In sheer, instinctual panic. I ran. I ran and did not look back and I got into my car and I shoved the key in the ignition and I roared out of there without my seat belt on.

The calm, even breathing of the person I couldn’t see. The spiral of smoke. The firm, even tread. The sense of bleakness, of darkness, and the sound of the shoes or dress boots against gravel and dirt. A body at his feet.

It didn’t seem credible that the man I’d beaten up had anything to do with that specter, haunting me, invisible, from the other side of the fence.

But what did I know?

Nothing.





[44]


Much of Silvina’s journal described an epic journey down the West Coast. According to her account, she’d started at the border with Canada and gone as far south as Northern California. This was in the third year of her banishment after the trial. I would’ve been thirty-three at the time: oblivious, still learning the ropes at the company, not yet a manager.

I reread the story of her “expedition” over and over. Not just because it had been important to her. But because it was odd to see the familiar through her eyes and to realize how familiar it had been to her. That Quito had been where she had felt strange. That Argentina had meant little to her. And, after her trial, even less.

“For the first time, I felt, in a way, as if I was home,” Silvina wrote. “In those endless miles of coast, in the cold and the fog and the rain, I opened up what was closed down. I received and kept receiving. It was sunless. Bridges would appear monstrous out of endless shadow, almost brutalist. The smell of marsh water would hit unexpected and the richness of cedar. The hawks on the telephone wires felt like sentinels judging my progress.

“I would drive until I found a wilderness trail—through hills or along the coast. I loved lighthouses because they were always somewhere isolated. I didn’t like to see lots of people when driving. How can we pretend we are alone, but I wanted to pretend I was alone. Until I wasn’t.

“I saw deer and otters, a bobcat or two, and, once, a bear, in the distance. Just a smudge, a shadow. But that was enough. While in the trees, as I walked, so many birds, and under rocks and fallen branches a world of the small that carried on beneath our notice.

“I fell in with strangers sometimes. I could tell by the look in someone’s eye when they said hello whether they approved or disapproved of me. But I spent time with the disapprovers, as much as the other, because I was curious. And sometimes, around a campfire, they would soften. Others, never lose a rigid, guarded pose, and I would make excuses soon enough.”

She would stay in cheap motels and befriend strangers in bars and diners. Once, she stayed in a houseboat along a river delta for a month or two. A few times the folks she befriended in bars she would go home with. She described them, as above, with a miraculous miscomprehension. As if they were miracles, because most of the time she was out in the wilderness. As if, over time, she didn’t know what a human really was.

“I wasn’t searching for anything, and yet still I found it. I found a place to work and to live and to be at peace. A place to sever myself from the past and not to seek it out anymore. If I could exist only in the present, then my problems would be gone. Or would only ever be in front of me.

“I saw the naiad hummingbird at elevation, in the middle of the King Range, and I don’t think anyone was within one hundred miles. This was the off-season, cold and blustery, and I wasn’t really prepared, so I felt the chill too much and lost weight. But I was happy. The more my body reduced itself, the more my mind seemed to expand. The more I could experience what was around me. I did not bathe. I did not shower. I walked until I was tired and then tried to sleep inside my sleeping bag inside a tent. The food tasted like nothing to me.

“By the tenth day, animals did not appear to see me. I could walk by a deer and it wouldn’t run. The otters playing by the creek gave me a first and second look, then continued with their day. Or so it seemed to me.

“Yes, on the twelfth day, I saw the hummingbird. Coming across it with the overwhelming scent of cedar all around and the mountainside rich green with moss and lichen, and the trees, full of lichen, too, and ferns, so their leafless limbs burgeoned with life.

“I turned a bend to see a puddle or a pond, something caused by rainwater, in the middle of the trail, and bent down over the water, to drink … the naiad hummingbird. A female. The iridescent black wings. Her sharp, long, thin beak.

“She didn’t see me at first, her back to me, and I stood and watched as she stood there so defenseless, on the ground, drinking. Until with a little cry she sensed me and, alarmed, rose effortless and acrobatic straight up into the air and cursed me from above, hidden soon by the cedar.

“I hadn’t eaten all day. I had drunk very little water. I felt light as air, and in the moment of seeing the hummingbird, I began to weep with the beauty of it, which I cannot convey. I cannot get across to you or anyone the emotion of that moment. Because of the hummingbird on the ground, not in flight, and knowing that not one person in a million had experienced the miracle of such a small moment.

“So you can imagine how I felt when, later, I identified the bird and realized how rare the species was and headed toward extinction, and what I had borne witness to wasn’t just a minor miracle but, in fact, a moment that would replicate only another hundred or another thousand times.