West With Giraffes(63)
“Let’s wrap the tarp, too,” the Old Man ordered, and I wished to God we’d done it sooner. Once the dust gets in, it keeps going round and round if you’re moving, and we had no choice but to keep moving.
We rode for a good thirty minutes that way. Their sandpaper wheezing was gone and the wind was now barely more than a breeze. The giraffes, though, were still snuffling and sneezing loud enough for us to hear with the windows up, so we pulled over again and undid the tarp enough to peek in the trapdoors. Heads and necks hanging low, both giraffes were drooling spit, snot, and saliva. Their big bodies were trying to flush out the remaining dust on their own.
The Old Man ordered me to throw back the top while he filled up the buckets from the rig’s metal jugs. Soon as I was back on the ground, he crawled up the side with one of the buckets, eased it onto the cross plank, and with a grunt, sat down on the cross plank himself. Pocketing a couple of emergency onions, I grabbed the other bucket and followed.
“Stay right there,” he ordered as I hit the top rung of my side ladder. “Get their heads up,” he said next, “then hold them.”
Like I could do such a thing if they didn’t want me to. Setting the second bucket down, I waved an onion Boy’s way. Up his slobbery snout came. As I fed him the onion, I put my arms around Boy’s jaw as tender as I could without spooking him, ready to grab when the Old Man was ready. Cooing his giraffe-speak from the other side, the Old Man raised the bucket of water and nodded. I clamped. With a mighty heave, he sloshed the entire bucketful of water at Boy, hitting him full in the face and up those big nostrils. Boy whipped me like a bucking bronco, and then let go a sneeze that covered the Old Man with more spit and snot than I’d seen in my entire life. As the Old Man cussed and wiped and cussed and wiped, I all but bit through my tongue keeping a straight face. Then we moved to do the same to Girl, who’d seen all she needed to see and had her payback ready. The Old Man picked up the bucket and nodded. I grabbed. He sloshed. And Girl, shaking off my paltry arm hold, reared back and let go with the sneeze of all sneezes, sharing the wealth with me as well.
We slopped to the ground and plunked down on the rig’s running board. As we wiped at ourselves, we listened for more worrisome noises. But we heard nothing more than some righteous stomping and slavering. So we offered the giraffes new buckets of water, which they eyed a moment before gulping down, then stashed the tarp and pulled back onto the road.
We had to keep moving.
Soon we were into the worst-hit part of the Okie Dust Bowl. The farther we went, the more barren the view turned. At first, as the clouds began drizzling again, we didn’t much care. After an hour passed with us being the only vehicle on the deserted highway, though, the road itself started looking abandoned.
All of a sudden, we weren’t traveling alone. Wave after wave of small brown birds were flying along with us in the drizzling rain, sweeping into bubbles and ribbons, flowing close, then away. The miles ticked off and there they still were, a rippling flock with no beginning or end, going on and on across the flat, empty land.
Even the Old Man was impressed. “Now that is a natural wonder right there.”
The giraffes noticed, too, their necks swaying along with the endless bird wave.
“Where are they all going at the same time—and why?” I said, watching as the ribbon fluttered across the barren land only to sweep back again.
“Maybe it’s about something that just happened,” the Old Man said, his voice quieting as the wave whipped close. “More likely it’s about something that’s about to happen.”
“But how could they know that?” I said.
“Animal instinct. Built in since the dawn of little brown birds,” he said. “It’s not like we don’t have vestiges of it ourselves. Like when you feel somebody watching you, or why, at the last moment, you didn’t walk into that pole back at the gas station. Some people feel it so much they believe they got a sixth sense, a second sight, and you can’t tell ’em any different.”
Well, that made me twitchy as quick as you might think, wondering if the Old Man somehow knew about Aunt Beulah and my new mixed-up nightmares. His eyes, though, never left the birds.
“’Course, such people are called quacks or nuts,” he went on. “But seems to me, such things could be echoes of what birds and animals never lost—tiny leftovers, say, of some built-in survival instinct that thousands of years of human civilizing hadn’t quite quashed.” He shook his head as the birds looped over us in ringlets only to sweep yet again over the plains. “Yeah, I tell you I’ve seen strange things working with animals all these years, strange and wondrous things . . .”
We both fell silent, mesmerized by the rippling birds, so much so that I forgot about everything else. For two full hours, my sideview mirror was brimming with both birds and giraffes, framing it all like a picture, the giraffes’ long necks swaying along with the billowing birds, and each glance surprised me with what I can only describe as a jolt of joy. On and on it went. The sky kept drizzling, the giraffes kept bobbing, and the birds kept flying, giving the Old Man and me plenty of time to muse. I’ve been told since that there’s a name for something like it—a murmuration—a rare bird gathering that looks like a dancing cloud. Nobody ever explained the forever-flowing ribbon quite to fit my memory, though. Against the unforgiving land of my hardscrabble childhood, where the term natural wonder had no meaning, the sight filled me with a sense of exactly that—wonder.