Gathering Anyway
The falcon was there when I got there, perched on the edge of the seven-story brick chimney. At first, I thought it was stone, or wood. It was that still. There was no sign of the huge flock of Vaux’s swifts that was supposed to appear and circle the chimney at twilight. The chimney itself towered into the light evening sky, secured by five black cables heading off in each direction from its midsection, attached to the roof of the squat brick building beneath it. It was a school the birds were coming to, a school that sat like a brick castle in a crater made by the sloping sides of Pettygrove hill. Chapman School was in that strange part of Portland where trees and warehouses bare themselves, and posture, threatening to outnumber each other.
The sky was pink around the chimney’s edges, rising to pale orange and into white. Parents and their toddlers, young couples, elderly people in camp chairs, all leaned into the side of the hill. They squinted, looking up. In the distance beyond the houses, beyond the river, the ripening hump of the volcano sulked, flattened, like someone who can barely shake off her own grievances.
I was watching the crowd when I saw a few of the birds, tiny and distant, like poppy seeds thrown against the sky. Each time they circled back, the sprinkling seemed to spread and grow in numbers The sky became suddenly full of tiny black Vs as, birds flying in between each other, dotting to cross-hatch. Sometimes the groups of birds would split and rejoin, or make a sudden switch-back. They whirled in streams. The swifts were swarming, in wide circles over the building, over the crowd. They were nowhere near the chimney. It seemed almost absurd, this gathering, people coming to watch tiny, black birds at the end of the day. After all, the birds were just doing what they always did, gathering together for the night. The crowd watched, muttered to each other, gasped when the birds passed by right above us. The falcon, standing on the chimney’s lip, shifted its footing, then stilled again to a wooden solidity. It was, in a strange way, like church.
• • •
My father teased me about Oregon when I moved here seven years ago. “You know,” he said, “it’s officially the most ‘un-churched’ state in the nation.” It’s no doubt that in Portland, where I live, the holy liquid of choice on a Sunday morning is a cup of Stumptown coffee. Strange then, that it’s here I’d find my calling as an Episcopal school chaplain. A chaplain is a religious professional, but also a professional outsider. Chaplains serve in places like hospitals, army posts and prisons, places where there is work to be done that doesn’t involve God or religion. And yet, the chaplain is there because the people there know that their work deals with questions of ultimate concern: with the meaning of life, with the effects of death.
That is not to say that I understand these things. In fact, I’m probably the least likely school chaplain to have answers. When people meet me, they take one look at my scraggly hair and pierced nose and try to be polite. “So, you’re like, a minister?” More often I get a wrinkled nose, or an open sneer. Later, after we’ve exchanged more niceties, traded jokes, maybe even poured a drink, then they’ll say it, those that have held back from blurting, “You don’t look like a . . . chaplain.”
Mostly, I’m a teacher. My students range from age seven to seventeen, and have many ideas about God. I teach my third graders, who are studying the Oregon Trail, why most pioneers would have carried a family Bible. I’m there when fourth graders study the Haida, the Chinook, and the Tlingit, encouraging my students to experience everything living as infused with spirit. With high school seniors, I read passages from the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita. I try to explain what it’s like to see God everywhere, not as separated, not as religion, but as the world itself. It helps that the land around us is so beautiful. Or as a student of mine once said, “I guess we don’t think too much about the environment around here, because we have so much of it.”
• • •
Back on the hill, the swifts were still growing in numbers. The group of dots was thickening, circling. A few began to dive, turning sharply into the chimney. The wide swaths of tiny birds narrowed as small groups broke off and dove down, past the chimney’s lip. And the falcon moved.
It darted forward, it grabbed. The crowd made a sound that only a group makes, a voweled breath. The falcon rose with a mound in its beak. It fluttered its great wings open once, twice, and sat down again on the edge. The closest line of dots had disappeared, and now, swirled in again, then careened off to re-circle.
When the falcon lit out a moment later, the crowd breathed a groan. The falcon’s hunger, the falcon’s murder. The swifts swirled and circled the chimney, wheeling and wheedling.
• • •
The first weekend of the school year, I went camping instead of to church, to a lake high in the Mount Hood National Forest. Careening down back roads and highways marked only by small brown signs, I arrived with friends at a dirt pull-out where we readied for a half-mile hike in. The path wove through fir branches and large green maple leaves, shiny branched shrubs growing everywhere they could, the dust rising under our heavy footfalls. As the path turned, I could see across a valley, trees freckled across mountains.
I wanted to clear my head. Over the summer, I’d forgotten about being a chaplain, forgotten about the hard stuff. At school, people began a conversation with me, the “how was your summer” conversation. Then suddenly, without a history of personal intimacy, we’ll be talking about their struggles in bearing a child, their friend’s recent illness, their mother’s death. That year it seemed cancer had touched almost everyone. They were talking to me, and not to me. They were talking to the person they saw in chapel, the person in the Episcopal vestments. By the beginning of my fourth year as a chaplain, I’d got it: this was a lot about death. When death happens, people don’t call the counselor, they call the chaplain. They don’t want to feel better, they want to understand.
Sunday morning my friends and I went down to the lake. We slipped in on the smooth, half-submerged rocks. The water-walker bugs cast rounded shadows, four-petaled flowers that bore no resemblance at all to their spindly legs and tiny, sticky feet. Finally, I dove into the reflected brightness, the chill sucking out my breath. The cold water, radiant in the sunlight, still shocked. It took me a moment to convince my heart and lungs we could do this, we were going to survive.
• • •
After the falcon, the sky near the chimney grew thick with birds, packs of them swerving, sliding sideways around it, stippling on the edges as they turned. A swarm swirled, whipping in one direction around the chimney and then doubling back. They flew off again over our heads, a faraway cloud of a few.
Then all the birds began to dive. One after the other after the other, the line swung back, twisted in, brothers and sisters still swirling across and behind the chimney, then joining the line that dove. All at once a group curved out again, black bits streaming toward the colored light, and curving back in a whirling screen. A circular, turbo-speed procession, smoke’s opposite. They were sucked down into the chimney as they dove, and dove and dove.
Down on the ground, it was dusky. By now, the sky had turned the deep blue dark of serious evening. There were only a few black spots left in it. Less than an hour from when the thousands of swifts had arrived, they were gone from the sky. People staggered to their feet on the incline.
Then, we applauded. One person began clapping, and it spread across the hill. Birds, doing what they always do. We applauded for their audacity. And our own, for gathering anyway.
Liz Harlan-Ferro lives in Portland.
