HAWK

The first sunny day in weeks. To the beach with the dogs at low tide! I am singing softly to myself, then to the hawk who is circling, hovering, circling, hovering, lower and lower. A woman farther down the beach watches it, transfixed, arms outstretched in a gesture of offering and embrace. It drifts down the face of the cliff, hovering, circling, but it seems distracted. A man on a deep blue hang glider hovers and drops alongside it, seemingly unaware of the hawk. Two other hang gliders, one bright orange, the other, bright red, crowd its airspace. It has been raining for days and the hawk must be hungry. It must be hard to spot a meal through fog and rain. The hang gliders are hungry for sun, too, oblivious as they float and dip between hawk and prey. Another hawk appears. Two of the hang gliders are eye level with the hawks. Beautiful for the men - but for the birds? I want to shout to them to get the hell out of the way. One of my dogs is barking at him, she’s shouting louder than I can, and I’m concerned that the hawk will be driven away by all this commotion. I shout too loud at my beloved, terrified dog, and before I think, give her a light smack to shut her up. She is silent for the rest of the walk and I am ashamed - she is never silent around hang gliders. To her they are giant, menacing birds, and she must protect us.

As the hawk swoops down and snatches his lunch, a sleek Doberman Pinscher scampers straight up the hill toward the hawk, feints and continues up to the top of the cliff. The hang glider bobs in the wind. The hawk drops his prey – a huge gray squirrel who suddenly finds himself on the beach. The squirrel staggers, dazed, then scrambles back up the crumbling cliff. The hawk is perched a few feet above him, waiting. Two blonde college girls join the rest of us gaping as this drama unfolds.

“Is that an eagle?” one of them asks, wide-eyed.

“It’s a hawk, a red-tailed hawk,” I say.

“Scary!” says the other.

“Not scary,” I say. “A hawk.”

They walk on. The hawk swoops up again, narrowly missing the hang-glider. As I head back toward the parking lot I see a fourth hang-glider appear. He’s better than the rest, more skillful, floating and gliding and spinning. It looks like fun, but at the moment I hate them all. I look up at the cliff again. Tiny gray swallows and ring-necked pigeons are swooping in and out of the crevices in the chalky white shale. Their wings open and fold like scissors, like feathered origami, like a sudden thought that appears out of nowhere and disappears just as quickly. On the sand near the steps to the parking lot is a long, brown pelican feather with a splotch of tar across the middle the size of a large coin.

OSPREY

The beach in front of the house I am living in has wide, powdery sand, and piles of driftwood – whole trees with their long, sodden trunks and intact root balls. The side branches are gone, broken off along the river bottom and in the churning waves. On rainy days, the dog and I get wet. On sunny days we walk to where the river empties into the sea, just north of the astonishing McKerricher State Park, an anomalous, sudden, undulating stretch of sand dunes along the beach. There is a spot just below the bridge where the river empties into the sea. At low tide, you can walk up the river, picking your way along exposed water-rippled sand and slippery moss-covered stones. Sometimes there are sea lions that look like stumps when they bask in the sun. Sometimes you see their noses break the surface, sending tiny wavelets toward the river’s edge that merge with the pull of a rising or falling tide.

Ospreys are teaching their young to hunt. Before they dive, they hover, usually at the mouth of the river, motionless in the brisk wind, flicking the edges of their wings, tilting their fan-shaped tail, then plunging into the shallowest water, into the thin white foam, lifting out a tiny, squirming silver fish. Salmon fry? Not yet, though conservationists are working to restore the spawning habitat of this estuary. There are tufts of native grasses and sedges along the briny tidal zone, and gravel beaches farther up where fallen alders and willows create protected pools for eggs. There is a taciturn, old male osprey that often sits on the railing of the 10 Mile Bridge, surveying up river and down. Sometimes a kingfisher joins him.

Even at high tide, the beach is walkable. I have fallen in love, and the conversation is deepening into intimacy. Love takes many forms, I think, including the love of rivers, beaches and Ospreys. When I see the birds, I say, “I love you!” in response to their high, shrill, staccato cries. I watch their slow, leisurely circling overhead, their outstretched wings backlit and finely etched in white and dark brown. Love is seeing a beach littered with sand dollars. It is seeing my feet in the clear, icy water, the water so clean that I know how seldom I’ve been in water this clear, or known its smell. I think of the radiation from Fukushima that is surely in it. I greet the ocean, saying, “I love you! Hello! I love you!”

Sometimes I must step away and into the relief of being indoors, or I must close my eyes and be grateful for silence – again silence - because sometimes these trees and this ocean are too massive. The trees especially seem too green, too complex with too much life in and beneath and among them, and there are too many trees and at the same time never enough, because so many, many have already been cut and it’s unbearable, like losing all the lovers of all the lifetimes. The past two days there have been thunderstorms with howling wind and lashing rain, and only the dog and the leaking skylights keep my pounding heart from getting up and running away to join everything that is rampaging.

One day, after one of those spring storms, with everything washed clean, I drive from town to the beach with the dog. As I come down the grade after the bridge, the Sentry Osprey suddenly swoops across the road and comes to land on a nearby post, his outstretched wings suddenly looming huge in front of my windshield and in my peripheral view, the enormous, fleeting shadow momentarily eclipsing the road and the sun. At that moment, a beat up car pulls over across the road and a disheveled man hurriedly gets out. Waving his arms, he shouts to me, “Did you see that osprey, the way he swooped down and landed on that post?” The man flaps his arms again and makes the sound of a man imitating the sound of a bird’s wings flapping. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I saw it!” My own heart is still pounding with the thrill and shock of it, so close. The man shakes his head in wonderment, and says, in a loud, ringing voice, “I’ve driven this road for 20 years!” He gets back in his car and drives away. He just had to pull over and stop his car to say to a stranger, “Did you see that bird?”