Great Circle

The highlight of my summers every year as a kid was the annual trip to my cousin’s farm in Wyoming. He lived in Star Valley, a fertile river valley between two mountain ranges, and his farm was a boy’s dream world. Especially this boy, who lived in the suburbs where my most exciting activity was “toilet papering” a neighbor’s house. (Is that a strictly American ritual? Please tell me Aussie kids smarter than that.)

It was the best of me, it was the worst of me

Every summer, my mom drove me and most of my siblings on the 4-hour journey to Afton, Wyoming. On the way, I daydreamed of the things we would do: fish for trout in his well-stocked pond, milk the cows or torment them with firecrackers, float down the Salt River (which wasn’t salty), hunt for gophers in the wheat fields. One year we had to use the riding lawn mower to drag a dead calf from a corral to the family campground, where we burned it in the fire pit! Dead things and fire! Can you think of a more awesome adventure for a pair of 10-year-old boys? I left Wyoming at the end of every trip jealous of my cousin and angry at my unreasonable mother, who wouldn’t let me live with him despite my clearly reasonable arguments. The greatest thing about my cousin’s farm was that it gave me space to do whatever I wanted.

And the worst thing about my cousin’s farm and the annual trip was that it gave me space to do whatever I wanted. I probably looked forward to the hunts more than anything. If you want to explore who a boy is, put a .22 rifle in his hands. The rifle confers power that he hasn’t experienced before because drowning ants with a toxic brew of household cleaners and pee just didn’t have the same rush, you know? (What? I’m the only one who tried that??) Mixed with the hormonal cocktail swirling through his veins, a gun will teach a boy things about himself that he perhaps cannot learn in any other way.

The deed

One day during a summer visit, I was out in the countryside by myself with my .22. I happened upon a fallen tree, bare of leaves and dry in the early part of summer. Nestled in the branches at about eye level was a nest, and in the nest were three baby robins. They reacted to my shadow by trembling their useless wings, craning their necks up and peeping for food, their beaks open impossibly wide. I wondered to myself…can I kill all three of them with one shot? I lined it up carefully, adjusting the angle and height of the rifle to be just right, and pulled the trigger.

Yes. I learned that I could kill them all with one shot, and so I did, with no more forethought than when emptying my bladder behind a rock. I instantly regretted it. When I checked my handiwork and saw all three forms lumped together on the side of the nest opposite me, I felt a hollowness that haunts me to this day. My sore conscience served up visions of the Mommy robin coming back to the nest to discover her dead brood. She would have a worm in her beak, but would soon drop it. She would sit by them for hours until her genetic instructions kicked in and told her to get on with life.

Something changed that summer. It was the last year my cousin and I took our guns out into the fields, and soon the summer visits stopped altogether. Time put an end to the boyish pleasures, as it must, and I’m left with memories—some are sweet and some are so bitter that I still cringe at the taste.

Some things you don’t learn until you teach them

Raw olives are extremely bitter. If you taste one, you’ll wonder how in the world humans ever discovered they were edible. But with time, proper care, and just the right brine to soak in, olives become a delicious delicacy. So it is with memory.

Twenty years pass and I have a son of my own, “Tommy.” He is 8 or 9 during this summer (he’s 12 now), and we live in southern Arizona, where wildlife is present as soon as we step out our door. Tommy loves to go exploring in the dry river beds and desert areas outside our apartment complex. He brings home snakes, lizards, toads, and tarantulas; we keep them overnight to watch them and then let them go in the morning.

One day he discovers that the areas inside the apartment complex, covered with trees, are good hunting grounds as well. He brings home a baby bird—a feathered but pre-flight sparrow. We keep it for about a week, feeding it a mixture of water and bread from an eye dropper, and soon it responds to Tommy’s shadow by flapping its useless wings, craning its neck while peeping for food, and opening its beak impossibly wide. Tommy gets a kick out of playing mama bird.

We learn that, in the harsh climate of Arizona, parents or siblings will sometimes push the youngest and smallest birds out of the nest to maximize food and the survival chances of the stronger ones. It’s nature’s way of balancing the carrying capacity of an ecosystem.

Nature didn’t count on Tommy. He makes it his personal mission to scour the grounds every day and rescue nestlings that have fallen or been thrown out of their nests. Our living room is an aviary. Baby sparrows, pigeons, mourning doves, and once, a bat, took up residence in shoe boxes and kitchen mixing bowls. We learn of “the Bird Lady,” a wildlife rehabilitator on the east side of town that took such birds in and hand raised them until they were able to survive in the wild on their own.

At least three times a week during that month, we make the 75-minute round trip drive to deliver Tommy’s finds to the person who could care for them. She learns his name, shows him her inventory of birds exotic and common, and he learns a lot about himself—maybe things only caring for helpless hatchlings, despite his natural tendencies to aggression and destruction, can teach him.

His grandparents come to visit and they object to the regular drive and the time involved, which takes him away from them for far too long during their short stay. “You throw those birds in the dumpster and he’ll soon stop bringing them home,” mutters Grandpa. “Two hours each time?” says Grandma, incredulous. “Are birds worth it?”

“It’s not about the birds,” I reply. “It’s about Tommy.” What I didn’t tell them was this: It’s also about me because I remembered the three lifeless forms on the other side of the nest. It’s about me proving to myself that I could be as good at kindness as at cruelty. That I could exercise power to bestow and protect life as well as to take it. All that and more. The memory became less bitter that summer. I still don’t like the images associated with it, but I understand them. And I understand the boy who lived it. He has learned something about the exercise of power and about the ongoing battle with self.

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Joe is the father of five and husband of one with varying degrees of success (his words not mine!). You can read about those degrees and about his (mis)adventures in fatherhood at his blog, Fathered Five.