Most days I wander around through a thick fog, aimless, just trying to feel my way across the landscape without stepping off some unforeseen cliff or into the clutches of invisible man-eating beasts. It is borderline impossible to get a simple task completed due to the constant interruption from the environment; rain douses my fires and wind demolishes my shelters. A constant shrieking howl of wind through the burned-up beetle killed pines make it unfeasible to even hold a thought long enough to follow the thread to its delicate ends. Even if I can, its spiderweb-thin tips flap crazily and shred in the storm, and it is useless to try and grasp them, for they always break within the clutches of my calloused and clumsy, freezing cold sausage fingers. Long-term goals are a long-forgotten dream; all the years of failure make it seem pointless to form them at all. No, the goal is to just get through the day without dying, and maybe be lucky enough to do the same again tomorrow.
Every once in a while, though, I stumble upon an aspen lined meadow. The sun shines bright but not too much so, the grass is green and full and soft to lay in, loamy and squishy but never soaking my clothes. There is a slithering stream full of cool, clean water. It is lousy with giant brook trout that never stop rising. The mosquitos don’t bite, and all the standing trees are bursting with life, reaching up and stretching out toward our great star in their selfish arbitrary race to be the tallest in the grove. Any dead trees lay bone dry on the ground and their wood burns long and smokeless in my campfires. All this is enough to bring tears of joy and relief, but the best of all are the birds. These birds make me weep with happiness.
Birds of every color and body plan fly freely and with gusto. Years of photographing them have left me with a sneaking suspicion that they enjoy flying, but here I know they do because they tell me so. They speak English and have the most amazing things to say. I am astonished by the thoughts they share; funny, philosophical, heart-wrenching, inspirational. Every bird with a unique point of view, distinct from the others. Every bird happy to share, enthusiastic to listen. I love these birds.
When I try to communicate with them, the strangest thing happens. Although they speak my language, when I open my mouth to vocalize, it’s all squawks and chips and chick-a-dee-dee-dee’s! I know what I want to say, but no matter how well I plan it out, it always comes out different than I had imagined. But I tweet on anyway — I can tell from their faces they understand, and they encourage me, tell me to keep going. The longer we converse the more confident I become, even though my words never sound quite right to me. We spend the evening doing this, the birds speaking in English and myself in Birdish, and I stay up as long as possible, knowing tomorrow the hazy hell will settle back on the land, and I will be adrift in hardship again. I don’t know where the birds go when the weather turns to shit, and when I see them next, I won’t ask. Because time is too short, and we have more important things to jaw. While most people interrogate each other with “what do you do?”, me and my birds prefer to talk about anything else. We want to know how each other feels, what we spend our time thinking about, our greatest adventures and deepest regrets. These are the things we discuss until our eyes sneakily shut against our will while the fire smolders and cracks and the elk scream and mew in the distance. In the last seconds of consciousness, one of us whispers a word, and we all meditate on it until we meet again.
I awake in the heart of the storm, but with renewed energy to keep trudging on. Hopefully, maybe in another week or so, I’ll find that meadow and my birds will come out to play, and that is enough to keep me grinning like the psycho that I am in the face of an infinity of bad weather.