Some (fun!) housekeeping: The paperback edition of Windfall hits the streets on March 19. To celebrate, I’m hosting a virtual event for readers of The Windfall Dispatch. You can ask me anything—about the book itself, about publishing in general, about my next project. I just need to know what dates and times work best. If you’d like to attend, click on the survey below. I’ll share the chosen date and time next week, along with a link to register. Can’t wait!
Hello friends,
Recently, I've been attending a meditation class on Monday nights, on the third floor of a 131-year-old building near the riverfront in downtown Portland. The class meets at about the same time that thousands of crows descend on the city's downtown to roost overnight in the trees along the river. If you're not acquainted with the winter crows of Portland, they can be unsettling in their quantity and cacophony. I'm not in the area in the morning, but I assume the crows are noisy when the sun rises, because the crows in my neighborhood are loud when they greet the day.
The building where the class meets is a lovingly cared-for remnant of Old Town Portland. At the entrance are bronze plaques showing the high water marks from the 1894 and 1948 floods. Inside are soaring ceilings supported by massive beams hewn from the old-growth firs that gave this city the nickname Stumptown.
The instructor who leads us in meditation encourages us to arrive early to settle in. So on a recent Monday, I settled in 15 minutes early at a seat near a window, where I could watch the crows returning to their third-floor roosts for the night.
The corner room where we meet is surrounded on two sides by large windows, partially covered in gauzy curtains and fairy lights. From the outside looking up, the room appears bright, twinkly and welcoming. It is equally delightful inside. From my seat, I watched as the sky grew inkier around the edges of the curtains. I noticed as class began that the sky was that indigo blue seen only in late winter and early spring.
I've been thinking about the crows since 2019, when I tried and failed to make a short film about their annual presence in Portland. I abandoned the effort when I realized I didn't have the cinematography skills to film birds at dusk. There are experts in capturing wildlife on camera, and I'm not yet one of them. One question I wanted to answer with the project was why the crows alight in Portland. These are migratory visitors from colder climates, birds who chose to winter here. I wanted an excuse to interview experts so I could learn what was so appealing about the city to these birds in winter. I still don't know.
Some of you may remember that I once wrote about a crow I befriended in my neighborhood in the spring of 2020, back when we were all so lonely for company. I began feeding mealworms to the crow and its family. I joked that it felt as though they were my only friends at the time. The crow—and now multiple generations of offspring—know me and Mojie. They know that we often head out for a walk between 8 and 9 a.m. They know I will break off bits of dog biscuits and toss them in the streets. They follow us on our walk, swooping down over my shoulder to alert me to their presence. They fly just close enough that I can feel on my cheek the disturbance in the air from the flap of their wings. Each time it happens, I am thrilled. Mojie is annoyed that I feed the crows her treats. If she were off-leash, she would chase them.
These crows we meet on our walks live here year-round. They raise their chicks in the maples behind our house and in the cedar out front. The babies sound a raucous 5 a.m. alarm in late spring, but who can complain about such neighbors? They don't know any better.
Downtown in the meditation studio last week, the migrating crows were noisy, too, but we began our meditation anyway. Sound, our instructor reminds us, can be as anchoring as the breath. At one point during the meditation, he asked us: Can you discern the separate caws of individual crows? This question thrilled me almost as much as the whoosh of neighborhood crow feathers over my shoulder on my walks.
When you catch yourself thinking during meditation, you can gently say to yourself "thinking," and then return to the rhythm of your breath or whatever anchor you've chosen for your practice, perhaps a mantra or the sound of a chime. I say "thinking" to myself often. I start over often, returning again and again to my anchor.
Eventually, the crows quieted. I thought of them ("thinking!") tucked in for the night, safely asleep in their roosts. I thought ("thinking," again!) of the difference between noise and sound. Mojie is untroubled by the sound of crows, but cannot abide the racket of a trash truck or the rumble of a bus on a busy street. When these noises bother her on walks, I say the word "noisy" out loud and give her a treat. "Noisy" from me is her "thinking," I suppose. An assurance that the disorder around us or in our heads is okay, and that we will return over and over again to some semblance of equilibrium. (Even when I'm not with the dog, I sometimes catch myself saying "noisy" out loud when I make unexpected noises around other people.)
I wonder ("thinking!") what all these associations mean for the quality of my meditation, even as I know it is the part of my brain that makes all the connections that fuel words on the page. I haven't figured out this contradiction yet. Perhaps it's enough to be aware I am "thinking."
Some view the downtown crows as a nuisance, including those who run the business district, which laments the expense of power washing all the bird shit away during the day. They also pay a falconer with a trained raptor to scare off the crows. I saw him once this winter in Pioneer Courthouse Square, and even though I wanted to know more about what he does, I gave him and his raptor a wide berth. It wouldn't do to be seen with a falconer, not by the downtown crows. Crows know us well. They can recognize the faces and mannerisms of the humans in their midst. If they don't like you or if you commit a cruel act, they remember it. They will exact revenge. They're social, too, spreading knowledge and gossip amongst their flockmates and to their offspring. This is why I couldn't approach the man with the raptor. What if my proximity got back to the crows in my neighborhood?
As the meditation ended, I noticed that the sky outside the window was dark. The crows were hidden in the trees, black as night. You might not even know they were there if you didn't know to look.
A few days later, a new bird appeared in my backyard, one I'd never seen. It was russet-breasted like a robin, but bigger, more dove-like in shape. And yet it had a sap-sucking, longer beak.
I'm not a whiz at bird identification—I know only the greatest hits, like robins and crows and bluejays and hummingbirds and hawks. Because we have many crows and outdoor cats in our neighborhood, we don't see many visiting songbirds.
Friends on Instagram suggested it was a cedar waxwing or a black-headed grosbeak. Friends on the East Coast thought it was a northern flicker. One friend in Portland pulled out her Field Guide to Western Birds, a vivid book that once belonged to her grandmother. I was thrilled when she sent snapshots from pages of colorful possibilities.
The best birder of the bunch suggested it was a female yellow thrush. Perhaps? I looked it up; the photo is of a bird in São Paulo. Did it fly all the way from Brazil?
I wonder ("thinking!") if I would have noticed this bird had I not been actively training to listen, see and feel more right now, in the present moment. I consider all those pages of birds on the internet and in old-fashioned books. I think about how so many other people out there spent their time patiently cultivating their own awareness, all so we could try to identify the bird I saw in my backyard while making breakfast.
Yours,
Erika
THE NEWS
All the links…
Sandra Day O’Connor was too ‘undistinguished’ to warrant a statue, Arizona Republicans say. Note that, as with all proposed statuary, it’s complicated. There are already unrelated plans for an O’Connor statue in the U.S. Capitol. But…wow.
What to do with all the clothes? A thoughtful essay from a clothing designer concerning climate change and radical acceptance, published by the creator of one of my favorite podcasts about fashion, Articles of Interest.
IVF and the Alabama ruling from a father’s perspective. This one ends with success, FYI.
I literally just went on a crow walk downtown on Tuesday at roosting time because I want to write something about our crows. Clearly crows are on the brain right now!
What a great post! So connected. I never knew that crows were a "thing" in Portland and I didnt know they were that smart. I live in Florida, we have a few crows, but I resonate with the cardinals. When I hear them call, they stop me in my tracks and anchor me. I typically put bird feed in the feeder because I think they are telling me they are hungry.