by Rolf Potts
AMY BUTCHER
Flight Behavior
The annual sandhill crane migration helps explain why and how we leave.
Ecstatic is not a word I would use to immediately describe Hal, though on a predawn morning in central Nebraska, standing together in an unheated viewing blind along the Platte River, it is precisely this word he provokes. He stands rapt before his camera, his fingers flitting over buttons he’ll soon use to focus and zoom and shoot, in clear possession of an enthusiasm I have seen only in the very young, and in this way, he defies expectation. Hal is seventy-six, for one, with hair the consistency of a child’s—peach fuzz, fading out—and a hunched demeanor that suggests, regardless of whatever might’ve come before, a life now lived stuck in stagnation. He is slow to speak, he tells me, and slower still to move. The skin on his hands is translucent, nearly blue, and covered in the minutiae of burst blood vessels and liver spots that conjure a certain sense of pointillism, as if he is a man made of many things—colors and experiences alike—though up close, as he is now, he looks remarkably ordinary.
Ordinary in a sense, although today, Hal and I are one with the Earth. This is what was advertised to us on posters—in the lobby, at the front desk, adhered with blue putty to bathroom stalls—and what our tour guide, Bill, reminded us as he led us first through prairie grass and then winding through mulch into these woods where we now stand. It was cold then, unfathomably dark, and carried with it the silence of 4:15 A.M., and so it was with some apprehension that we moved, sluggishly, via a small red laser attached by carabineer to Bill’s denimed hip, its beam so subtle in shape and shade that I worried aloud that I might trip.
Hold steady, Hal told me, simply, as if intent alone could do the trick.
We stand now in a place unassuming but miraculous: a small, thatched viewing blind not more than thirty feet from the winding bank of a particularly shallow stretch of the Platte. This is south-central Nebraska, the middle of America, the middle of absolutely nothing, a place that appears, in many ways, apathetic to either coast, thousands of acres of empty farmland giving rise to a Burger King and a Taco Bell, a few blinking traffic lights, and “Grandpa’s Steakhouse.” But every spring without exception, this town of Gibbon, Nebraska—or, more specifically, the famed Rowe Sanctuary, owned and operated by the National Audubon Society—manages to draw in several thousand people, all of them out-of-towners from the Florida Keys or Cincinnati, Dubuque, Iowa or the Carolinas. They come from Canada or they come from Texas, Washington state or Washington, D.C., flocking by minivan—almost always blue—to see what has been hailed as “one of the world’s greatest natural wonders” by National Geographic and “one of fifteen of nature’s most spectacular shows” by CNN. Gibbon, Nebraska is right up there with the aurora borealis, with South Korea’s Cherry Blossom Festival, with the Great Migration crossing, in which half a million wildebeests traverse the Masai Mara River, which separates Kenya from Tanzania. Just last week, in fact, the CBS Evening News aired a special segment on this very place, with anchorman Scott Pelley offering that it is, frankly, “awe-inspiring.” Despite the world’s often terrible or grizzly news, here, he said, was a blip of footage “of nature [going] along as planned,” complete with its own “rhythm, sound and beauty,” dazzling unique and indifferent to humans.
That beauty that Pelley speaks of—the thing that everyone has come to see—appears at first as a swatch of gray, uniform and blurred. There is a prehistoric cooing, a rising noise as the sky fills with light. And then, in one smooth gesture, an estimated six hundred thousand sandhill cranes lift their wings and then their legs to rise in unison above the river, the prairie, and bulbous trees. It is like this every year: for reasons we cannot know, Bill tells us, they select this particular stretch of river, this exact same swatch of trees and yellowed land, as their only prolonged stop in what will prove a several thousand-mile migration, a custom so engrained it is as if a part of bone, or beak, or feather.
I am not from this part of the country, though perhaps this goes without saying. I am from New England, a town thirty miles from a grocery store, a place whose economy thrives from felling timber, a little farming, some welding, some forestry. The woods there are dense and dark; there is no vastness like Nebraska’s vastness. There is no kindness like you find here.
Like the birds and nearly everyone, really, my time here in Nebraska is temporary. Unlike the birds, however, I have no final destination—no place I feel my body drawn to. I am young and often feel younger, explorative in the way I think the young cannot help but be. Upon arriving in this state two weeks ago, in fact, I had never even heard of the sandhill cranes, but since then, they are all I hear: they purr in every cornfield, every pasture, every plain. They purr, yes, absolutely; there is no other verb to describe their constant noise. The first time I heard it, it was like a choir—echoing, without barrier, across the infinite and vast nothingness. I rolled my window down, stopped my car along the shoulder.
Nebraska, is what I thought, simply.
And yet while my knowledge of their existence remains relatively new, I take great comfort in their migration. It is one of the largest in the world, Bill tells us, certainly the largest bird migration in North America, and in Nebraska at this time of year, it is all anyone can talk about.
Have I been out to the Rowe?
Have I made my appointment to see the birds?
An appointment, as it were, consists of twenty-three dollars paid in advance for a man like Bill, his carabineer, and expertise.
“Do not talk,” he advised us earlier. “Do not cough. Try not to sneeze.”
Any movement, however subtle, threatens startling the birds and, beyond disrupting their natural schedule, risks a premature departure before the sun is up for us all to see it.
“How disappointing,” Bill reminds us, “how sad to have all of this be in vain.”
Our viewing blind, then—and our careful concealment within its hay-stuck walls—is of particular significance: we must take on the appearance of the land, because it is precisely the land the birds know and trust.
“Keep in mind,” Bill told us earlier, “these birds are far smarter than we even know. We can’t even begin to mine that depth.”
That depth, he advised us all, is what has brought the sandhill cranes to Gibbon, Nebraska every year for at least the last several thousand. Likely more, he says, even if we can’t prove it. According to a poster hanging in the sanctuary’s gift shop, the oldest known sandhill crane fossil is an estimated two and a half million years old, or double the oldest remains of the majority of birds still alive today.
“Let’s put it this way,” he said, “these birds predate us all.”
Their antiquity, then, makes them valuable, their permanence a symbol of significance. The land here has been built up, the highway now an ashy stroke connecting eight hotels to another eight. And yet the birds continue coming, and with them, many thousands of tourists who pay great money and drive great distances to stand in a frigid viewing blind and watch them, to bear witness in this way, to take photographs and shape memories and buy postcards they’ll soon mail home.
And in this time, the birds gain back over 20 percent of their body weight, just enough to sustain them for the coming months as they travel farther north. It is here, in Nebraska, for these four weeks that span mid-March to early April, that the birds feast and rest, feast and rest. They eat bugs, Bill tells us, rodents, frogs, snakes. They eat seeds and corn and berries and, on occasion, the smallest of mammals. They spend their nights roosting in the river, so recognizant are they that they know that to remain alive is to hear predators coming: coyotes, foxes, bobcats, even the occasional raccoon. When they once again take flight, it is with the sustenance of Nebraska, the sustenance of America, this place that proves the only thing connecting the places they have been—namely, California and Mexico—and the places they will go: northern Michigan and Canada, Alaska, even Siberia.
“Siberia?” I’d asked
earlier, standing in the lobby, as we waited for the last of us to pee. That traced geography—to my mind—required a level of concentration I felt unaccustomed to at 4 A.M.
“Yes,” Bill said. “Yes. Many will go on to travel as far as Siberia.”
Siberia, indeed.
So I have paid fifty-six dollars to see them twice—once at dawn and once at dusk—and I’ve driven many hours and bought a guidebook and booked a hotel room beside a pool, because I trust, the way humans are wont to, that this payment will translate into experience: into the birds, unfathomably significant, and my place—there, beside them—as they rise.
As a tourist, I learned quickly, it is not possible to lodge within nineteen miles of the roosting birds or even Gibbon—proximity to this portion of the Platte is reserved for Nebraskans who’ve long owned homes along the river: families, mostly, it seems to me. Tourists are required to stay in the neighboring Kearney, pronounced carnie, in their Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson, Wingate, Best Western, or Ramada. There are, in fact, twenty-one hotels in Kearney, all of them seemingly apropos of nothing at most any other time of the year. But in spring, for these four weeks, they create a cluster of illumination—a modern-day Northern Star, instructing tourists where to go.
Kearney makes me think of a man with missing teeth, his denim overalls, his aluminum doublewide. I think broken lawn chairs in the front yard, a Chihuahua that barks until someone yells.
A woman in pink hair rollers, predictable stereotypes, predictable people.
But last night, pulling into town as late as I did at the suggestion of a bird enthusiast I’d met at a rest stop, I found first a Thai restaurant and then a Mexican grocery, an Italian buffet and half a dozen big-box stores: Target and Best Buy and Wal-Mart, plus a CVS, Rite-Aid, and Home Depot. Here, it seems, is what this part of Nebraska can offer visitors when it cannot offer the sandhill cranes: a good meal and a choice of rooms and your friendly neighborhood pharmacy, all conveniently located just off the highway.
And, when in season, of course, the sandhill cranes.
But it was precisely Kearney’s distance that made us nervous—what if we overslept? What if there was highway construction? Which is why, upon arriving a full hour early, I found myself in good company in the sanctuary’s lobby. And while one might argue that it is not terrifically easy to make a friend at this hour of the morning, I found I befriended Hal nearly immediately. We were the only two there alone, and we took notice of this immediately.
“Isn’t it a little early for someone like you?” Hal joked, implying my young age. Around us, older couples shared single Styrofoam cups of free coffee and embraced for warmth, and Bill began to take roll.
Indeed, our group of twenty or so bird enthusiasts had a median age, I’d guess, of sixty—mostly women in mauve windbreakers and men wearing navy sweatpants with bed-fussed hair. The women’s coifs were permed, or going gray, or nearly absent, trimmed so short along their scalp that they reminded me of my brother’s buzz cuts—how, when he was small, he’d sit at the backyard picnic table as our father ran an electric razor over his sun-soaked skin, blond hair falling in patches to the hot cement.
These women thought of children, too—they spoke at length about “grandbabies.” Their recitals, their vocabularies. Their voices peaked when they found a parallel: Susan’s granddaughter in Missouri was enrolled in a jazz and hip-hop class, just like Mildred’s granddaughter in southern New Jersey. And how about that, they clucked with joy.
These couples were lifelong bird lovers, watchers, amateurs, some, maybe, experts. I was, of course, no bird enthusiast, and in fact, remained rather indifferent about most things. I was the only one of us under forty, having turned twenty-seven the previous month. Hal guessed twenty-five and I felt a swell of pride that when I corrected him, as if those years could really matter. I spent them mostly fumbling, spending money I barely had.
How invigorating, then, to spend the past two weeks seeing what felt like everything: wind turbines churning in silent violence, wind turbines that rest, stagnant, against the sky. I’ve seen lobster crates roped down to eighteen-wheelers and lighthouses, erect and red against green earth. I am in search of ecstasy, though of course I do not call it that. And yet it is precisely that very term that implies what I am after: a concrete sense of experience, to feel outside myself. The town where I come from expects that all will choose to stay. It is a quiet but crushing confine, meant, I think, to provide comfort, though its comfort does not speak to me. In fact, the idea of lifelong stagnation is so great a fear, I fear it could crush me.
So there is solace in these birds; in their constant, annual movement.
And it is precisely this sense of movement that I have begun to actively seek. These two weeks, I have traveled 1,572 miles, some twenty-four highway hours, and spent the evenings in dimly lit bars at quiet exits just off the highway, and while not ecstaticism, necessarily, I’ve found the pleasure inherent to these experiences unparalleled to all else I’ve known. There is a quiet beauty in being lost, in being but one body flitting between two transitory spaces, and Hal champions me for this—how, despite my age and the early hour, I have shown up here regardless.
He says, “Birds aren’t normally of interest to someone your age.”
A real trooper is what he calls me.
But I am not the only one. At his last count, Bill informs us, the Rowe Sanctuary estimated a hundred and seventy thousand cranes sleeping beside us in the darkness. Two weeks ago, it was half a million, and by this time next week, only a few thousand will remain. It is a predictable occurrence—their departure from these Plains—and it is hard not to envy them for that freedom, how it is expected that they will go
Standing shivering against the viewing’s plywood, the window covers open, the sound near tangible, Hal tells me he was an army brat—a truth he shares with nearly everyone, he tells me, because it implies a certain sense of impermanence.
“We always lived all over. Every land you could think to live: China and Vietnam, very briefly in Korea.”
Texas, too, he says. And he spent a little time in western Florida.
“I didn’t much enjoy the heat,” he says, “which is why I live now in Kansas.”
I think about Kansas and imagine it an arid place, prairielike and hot. Not tumbleweeds, exactly, but lizards flat like pancakes on the roads, foxes and prickly wildflowers, certainly. Hal tells me that in Kansas, there are no lizards, and that the heat is only cumbersome in summer—the winters, he says, are cold.
“And anyway, it’s the change I like,” he says. “So I take the few months of heat like I take everything.”
This is not Hal’s first time viewing the cranes, though it is the first time he has come alone. Next month, he says, will mark the one-year anniversary of her death—his wife of forty-seven years. This springtime viewing of the birds in flight was something they did with regularity; last year, his wife was here to stand beside him, just like all the many years before, and they watched the birds take off together—their wings extended in perfect angles, their bodies gleaning, alit with light.
It was still so smooth in the quiet dawn, he said, that the water mirrored their departure.
“Birds everywhere,” he said. “On the ground, horizon, sky.”
He explained that during their most recent visit, Hal and his wife learned that the sandhill cranes are believed to pair for life, though their guide conceded it was nearly impossible to trace each partnership from year to year. Still, Hal tells me, enthusiasts take comfort in the birds’ likeness: their elegance so much like our own, we flatter, their shared inclination for monogamy. Very few roam alone, and there’s a lesson, Hal tells me, in that. His eyes narrow when he looks at me. He stacks his sneakers one on top of the other for warmth.
They are a creature, he reflects, open to love, to company lifelong and migratory, and I, too, prefer this idea of pairing, how the birds can be nomadic and, yet, not alone.
“I met my wife,” he say
s, “and everything about the world I knew changed.”
He meant, among other things, his world of impermanence. Unlike Hal, who saw in travel a certain freedom, his wife feared the dangers of mobility—she would not fly, would not board a boat, and once famously called the ranger’s station outside of Yosemite to inquire about the road’s stability.
Are they steep or winding? she wanted to know.
Hal tells me this and laughs; it is a part of her, he says, he learned to love. And it was worth it, all those years, to give up the open road, the atlas stained with grease and coffee, the paper-wrapped hamburger with its softened pickles and grated onions. It was enough to be beside her. But in the eleven months since her death, he has seized his own vitality—visiting first their daughter in San Diego, then their youngest son in Baltimore, and most recently, he took part in an eight-hour, elaborate bird-watching tour along the California coast, a package that promised viewings of more than a hundred and fifty birds. Hal counted a hundred and forty-four, but he says he wasn’t about to complain. When I ask him which was his favorite, he pauses.
“Hard to say,” he says. Then, “The pelicans.”
In June he’ll fly to Anchorage to spend four weeks in remote Alaska, camping outside of Denali with his two sons and both their wives. He did the same trip as a young man, he tells me, long before the government thought to expand Denali. It was smaller then; you could sleep beside the mountains.
By fall, he’ll be in Maine—more specifically, Kennebunkport—where he’ll watch the leaves catch fire, the most impressive display of foliage the nation has to offer. They are colors I know well, and when I offer this to him, he says, Soon I’ll know them, too.
“The things I never saw,” he said. “All these things I never did.”
However far from her I am now, I am reminded of a woman I met many months ago on a plane. We sat, stalled, on the tarmac of Charlotte Douglas International; she was but bone beneath her blanket. When finally I inquired where she was headed, her face lit, jubilant.