Creek Running North

This morning, a sound out of place. Or out of time, more precisely. The barn owl was abroad. She sat in the cypress at the top of the hill, perched oddly on the top branch, branch ends below her pointed decorously earthward, moving in a breeze I did not feel. I craned my neck.

She screeched again, the same rasping, metallic splitting of the air that had awoken me from my plodding doze, made me stop. I wished I had brought binoculars with the leash and plastic bags to walk the dog, and not for the first time. A hundred fifty yards from me, she was a round white blur against a flawless sky.

I have felt these days a frustrating slowness. My dog is slow, and so therefore am I.  He once hiked five miles for each of mine, would run left of trail and right sweeping a 100-foot swathe for deer-ticks, would wait for me impatiently at the trail’s next bend and bow and prance delighted up the next leg. Becky and I had a trick we played, hiking a sixteenth-mile apart and calling him to one of us and then the other, and he would run six times over each foot of trail and sleep as dead in the backseat on the way home.

I remember seeing him look for me, one day, not finding me against a field of just-turned brown. He was a thousand feet away. He saw me, and his ears folded back and he covered the distance between us in a moment, fierce joy on his face and back legs reaching near to his ears as he bounded forward.

I cannot walk at more than a shuffle now if he is with me. His leash a shackle.

A body in motion will tend to remain in motion unless an external force is applied to it. Likewise a body at rest will tend to remain at rest. I have lately come to realize that the rest state of this body I inhabit is itself motion. I will tend to remain walking unless some external vector is applied to me. If a two hundred pound man heads west at four miles per hour attached by a four foot leash to a fifty-pound dog traveling at half a mile per hour up a slope of twenty degrees, what is the sum of the vectors? The answer: two hundred fifty pounds and leash at one half mile per hour west and uphill. Momentum must be conserved. Some other unaccounted force has been applied to counter the momentum of the heavier body.

The owl screeched again, and I strained through tinted glass to make out its face. What reason could this owl have for staying out so late? Her perch in the local date palm was intact, no fires nor clumsy gardeners had thinned the thatch of old dead leaves. Disorientation or disease? Displacement by another owl? Her song is the song of this neighborhood: I heard it first the nights we worked to clean our house before moving in. Soft wings carried her silently back and forth, and then the screaming, the clicking in between. That first summer I spent every night on the porch watching her.

A body, once set in motion, tends to keep moving. Take a stable system and kick out its underpinnings, and the balance of contrapuntal forces is undone, and a cascade of events follows. Add pain to a dog’s spine and his pace deteriorates, and his health in turn. Truncate a range of low hills with pavement, replace the native flora with interlopers, raise the temperature: some wildlife populations will suffer catastrophic failure.

Take my heart away piece by piece, thing by cherished thing: I walk. And Zeke is deaf, so he does not hear the owl, and he wonders why I have stopped in the middle of the street. Four feet uphill he waits for me, impatient. I follow him and catch up in a heartbeat, and he plods delighted toward the house.