Cows, Kestrels and the Planetary Orbit

Phil Burpee, Comment

Summer is on the slide and the prairie is browning, looking for all the world like some great, tawny hide stretched over the flesh and bones of the world. Pretty much anything that wanted to make flowers out there has already done its thing, except for a few asters, the dregs of some blazing star, and the odd late arnica and wild sunflower. The balsam poplars down in the creek are changing their palette from shimmering green to a radiant yellow, chasing the Manitoba maple to the other end of the colour spectrum. The shadows in the coulees across the river deepen with every passing day, as the Sun rumbles steadily on down the skyline of the Livingstone, moving ever southward on its yearly journey to its mid-winter repose in the spires of the Castle.

The old time Blackfoot understood well enough that the West Wind, old Snoweater himself, had his home way up on top of Chief Mountain. I don’t doubt it for a minute. I can see with my own eyes that the Sun makes its seasonal home in the High Rock, from where it rolls down along the western slopes each night, around the entire world, only to reappear in scintillating splendour each morning amidst the symphony of light that is the dawn.

But now it is false Spring, that evanescent time of the year when temperature and daylight briefly fool wild creatures into thinking that true Spring has come again and it is time to posture and warble and parade their genetic wares. Mr. Meadowlark, who has been busily silent all Summer, has suddenly taken to hollering from the fencepost in that liquid metal cascade that is his song. Starlings have taken a pause in their preparations for flying south to nose around likely-looking eves and crannies in a half-hearted charade of nest-site surveying. Even the mustard and sweet clover are turning hopeful faces to the waning season, thinking maybe to squeeze another seed or two out of the year. None of this will last, of course. Late Summer may be running delightfully into Indian Summer, but the signs are there for those with eyes to see. Just as the Sun rose the other morning, a blanket of shimmering frost settled on my Chevy truck. The bees coming out of our hives pause when they come out the door to soak up a few rays before lurching off like miniature B-29s into the chill air, bent on an early hit on the late alfalfa blossom down in the pasture. Overhead a V of Sandhill cranes trills in excitation as the great red orb hauls itself above the eastern horizon. But they are moving southward, ever southward, and soon the swans will follow - it ain’t Spring at all.

Out on their Summer pasture, our cows are looking about as lazy as a lazy cow can look, which is pretty damn lazy indeed, unaware of the coming snows and seemingly without a care in the world. Their calves are fat and bright-eyed, and the ladies themselves are full of figure and sashay their mighty asses across the ground like so many heavy-weight ballerinas, resplendent in their bovineness, and seeming like queens of their particular world. They have dined their way through a few hundred tonnes of variously succulent grasses, sedges and shrubs, not to mention every available scrap and smidgeon of water hemlock, death camas and locoweed, and all they seem to do is proceed from strength to strength. I’ve told them time and again not to eat the bad stuff, but they seem to thrive on it, like some sort of post-holocaust cockroaches munching their way through a hellsbroth of poisons and paralytics. Sometimes when I eat their livers I think I can detect a slight neurological tingling and a light but chilly perspiration on the top lip, along with a mild out-of-body sort of sensation. I think this is maybe called homeopathy. Or maybe it’s just gas.

And anybody who hasn’t been too busy texting or preening in their rear-view mirror while they’ve been driving around these last couple weeks will have noticed another delightful sign of the calendar. Little flying jewels of blue and orange and ermine-speckled polka-dots are to be seen flitting from post to post or hovering like miniature gyro-copters above a hay field. The Kestrels are moving through our country, heading for Texas and points south. We used to know them as sparrowhawks, but this name seems to have fallen out of favour. In truth, I’ve never seen one catch a sparrow, but I have seen them snag a big fat grasshopper, or a plump mouse, hovering in place and picking the gizzards out of its prey on the wing. When these elegant little creatures show up, you can pretty much lay a safe bet that they have had their feathers ruffled already somewhere back up the line by the old North Wind. Along with them will also come, in due course, the Sharpies and the Falcons and the great Golden Eagles in all their majesty. A vast wave of winged blood and bone is sweeping down across the map ahead of the darkness and the cold. What they tell us is this - Fall is upon us.

It is, in fact, the time of the Autumnal Equinox - that time of the year when the length of night equals that of the day. This also occurs in March - the Vernal Equinox. As our planet sweeps in its stately course around our star, tilted in that cack-handed way that it is on its axis, we experience what we have come to call the Seasons. Now we are coming to the time when the Sun favours the southern hemisphere with its beneficent rays, and we are left to cope with the drawing-in of the light, and must summon all our faith to believe that the cycle will once again reverse in six month’s time. And even though this big, blue ball we ride is traveling more than one hundred times faster than a Jumbo Jet in its endless journey ‘round the Sun, it will still take us a full year to return to the spot where we are right now. It is a very long road indeed.

I try to remember to be amazed. The very fact of our existence and our voyage in this Cosmos is vastly more fantastic and marvelous and implausible and wondrous than all the wildest flights of fancy of science fiction, and all the self-absorbed roilings of inward-gazing religious orthodoxy. A cow may seem a dull and banal thing - but it is far from that. It is a self-replicating, sentient organism inheriting the 13.7 billion year legacy of a universe so sublime and so boundless, that we should by rights be rendered speechless with awe at the sheer fact of it. A moo. A cloud. The swish of a wing. A last ray of the setting Sun. This small blossom in the palm of my hand.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” - William Blake

Phil Burpee
September 25, 2011