petrichor

The language of cranes we once were told is the wind.

The air is hot, heavy and smells like rain. Cottonwood leaves rustle and sing as the wind blows by in the crowded canyon where out from the monotony of the sagebrush steppe, life grows in a verdant mess; hungry roots soaking up what moisture they can from the low river bed. I drive with the windows down so I can smell the thunderstorm brewing. My truck has A/C but I’m old school, or perhaps just masochistic, I think as my legs stick together from the high desert heat. 

I’ve got a thing for summer storms. Maybe it’s because where I come from, the fecund rainforests of the coast range, all our rain comes with a cold lingering mist, summer being the rare few months where precipitation is absent from the weather report. Or maybe it’s because I yearn to find the edges, those spaces where one comes up against the raw power of life itself. 

Why am I here? What draws one to Land? Pulls at our tendons and vibrates our blood with a longing that whispers “come closer”? 

It isn’t a simple answer, nor one I fully understand. 

Three months ago when my bare feet first touched the mesa of wild onion, yarrow and biscuitroot, as the sun collapsed behind cumulonimbus clouds in an explosion of scarlet and tangerine, it was the Sandhill cranes that extended their welcome. 

I heard them long before I saw them; garbled trumpeting calls, emerging over me like heralds from heaven. I was low on the ground, my cheek against the rocky soil, and I rolled onto my back to find the source of the sound. It was so still you could hear their great wings cutting through the air, looking like prehistoric birds in their size and majesty, a mated pair circling the sky above me. Their call was jubilant and against the backdrop of a paintbrushed sky, there was a feeling of devotion as they midwifed the day to it’s close. I lay there long after they returned to their nest, long after the sky bled to black, gazing at the bright stars as the cranes song reverberated within me.

The language of cranes we once were told

is the wind. The wind

is their method,

their current, the translated story

of life they write across the sky.

Millions of years

they have blown here

on ancestral longing,

their wings of wide arrival,

necks long, legs stretched out

above strands of earth

where they arrive

with the shine of water,

stories, interminable

language of exchanges

descended from the sky

and then they stand,

earth made only of crane

from bank to bank of the river

as far as you can see

the ancient story made new.

- Linda Hogan

(Poem from Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas)

Sandhill cranes are among our planet's most ancient beings. In northeastern Nebraska, fossilized crane eggs and a wing from the closely related ancestor Crowned Crane are dated at 15 million years old. Fossil records tell us that this migration has been cyclically repeated for millions and millions of years. Cranes are described as birds who “follow the edge of winter”, and it is speculated that during the ice ages, they followed the retreating ice north - where Nebraska lies at the edge of the last glaciation. 

Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac:

“Our appreciation for the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history. His tribe, we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene. The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within the hills. When we hear his call, we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.”

Every year 400,000 to 600,000 sandhill cranes—80 percent of all the cranes on the planet—congregate along an 80-mile stretch of the central Platte River in Nebraska. They fly over fences, over border walls and dammed rivers, in an ancient ceremony that has existed for longer than we can conceive. Beginning in mid-February and ending in mid-April, cranes converge on the empty cornfields to feast on waste grain and prepare for the journey to their respective nesting grounds.  Cranes mate for life, with an average lifespan of 20-40 years, and both parents take turns incubating the eggs, looking after their chicks, and teaching them calls and dances. 

The Sandhill Cranes saxophone-shaped trachea is capable of amplifying their call to ranges of over two miles. Humans have deciphered only 16 of their vocalizations, noting they mean different things in different intonations and situations, but I imagine the nuance of Crane tongue is lost upon us. 

Aldo Leopold, writes in “Marshland Elegy,” 

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.”

Crane culture is one of ritual and expression. Young cranes begin practicing dancing for three years before they mate, taught by their parents who take turns dancing with them. Dancing is a way to express the intimacy of pair-bonding, acknowledging decades-old relationships, and is a way to ritually relieve tension and aggression between rivals. A bow is offered at the completion of the dance.  A female crane must be danced into egg production. The presence of her mate is of deep importance, the two must dance 2-3 times a day for two lunar cycles before anything happens. On a biological level, this ritual stimulates the hormones to prepare for mating. The two cranes engage in unison calling, where the female makes two calls for every one from the male, a synchronized duet signifying their bond.

Allison Hedge Coke is a poet of Cherokee, Huron, métis and European descent. For decades she has worked at the axis of migration and waterways, retracing indigenous crane clans and their stories. Hedge Coke says that the Chippewa call the cranes keepers of language, and that native crane clans were responsible for keeping the history of the people. The Hopi had a crane clan; the Mojave and Anishinaabe-Ojibwe still do.

Speaking on sandhill crane culture, she says :

“the rituals are symbols of how to keep a family strong.”

She continues,

“… if you remove a crane embryo from its kind, take the egg and hatch it elsewhere, the chick fails to fly where his lineage journeys. No, it has no idea where to go and will not leave without an adult leader teaching it to do so…

…Karine Gil’s work at the Whooping Crane Maintenance Trust and in the field following tagged cranes for four years has verified what Indigenous oratory has asserted, that the families of cranes are conditioned by their parents to know when to travel and where to go along their up to 10,000-mile stretch of seeking a place to feed, nest, raise young chicks, and return to warmer wintering ground every single year of their 30-some-year lives. The teachings create the united journeys and the learned behavior is shared time and time again to make the journey successful and to allow the cranes to come together for this significant shared work.”

I cannot release these words from my mind and they loop again and again, in-between the haunting call of the cranes that I recorded in that meadow and listen to over and over and over again.

As I think about the someday journey I will make into motherhood, I find myself asking more questions and compulsively digging into the ancestral dirt of the past. I am exquisitely aware of the lack of symbolic rituals and record keeping, the lack of cultural tradition, in how I was raised.

I grieve for all that I was never taught and the elders I never met. That I’ve been left to catch wisdom like feathers falling, like whisps of smoke while I learn to read with eyes closed and move with soft, bare feet. 

For my ancestors I am in a strange land, yet it’s the only home I’ve ever known and I fold my body like a bridge so they might meet me here. I was not taught to speak in my great grandmothers native tongue, but my grandfather taught me of salmon and elk, five generations under the cedars on stolen land. I was not invited here, nor were my great-grandparents as they sailed on wooden ships across dark waters.

This is the dance of the cultural orphan. There are no road signs or directions teaching us right relationship and diasporic healing. 

I am an apprentice, and newly so, to the cranes and their wisdom. There is a thread here that I cannot stop pulling, that I roll back and forth between my fingers at night when I cannot sleep.

We must forge a new way, a post colonial path, to wholeness, for if we do not,

who will teach the children?

who will hold the memory?

what stories will be told?

what horrors could be repeated?

From where behind you ancient light enters. A fissure in the propriety of reason.

- Kim Blaeser, “A Crane Language”

photo by Mick Thompson

The branching form of a family tree was referred to as a "crane's foot," or pied de grue, from which is derived the present word pedigree.

The Latin congruere, meaning an agreement, is the origin of the English word congruence.

My great-great grandfather James O’Connor arrived in Lewiston, Idaho, the traditional lands of the Niimiipu, in the early 1900’s from the craggy shores of Kerry County, Ireland. He was born in 1810 on land that knew all the songs of his cells and died at the ripe old age of 105, a world away in Moscow, Idaho. They were Irish immigrants who were poor farmers in the old country. They started a homestead and began growing potatoes on stolen land. 

Then there is Wilhelmina, who is buried in the Cameron cemetery in Nez Perce county next to her husband. She was born in 1858 in Szczecin, Prussia (what is now known as Poland) near the Baltic Sea and is one of the rare ancestors whose face I’ve seen from an old black and white photo that someone, somewhere, thought important to hold on to. Ironic that despite the photo, no one remembers her story.

The third line of peoples that met in Nez Perce, Idaho were the Fillitreauts, great-great grandmother Zelma and her daughter, my great grandmother, Emelda. How Zelma and her family ended up in Idaho is lost to me. Zelma was born in Quebec, where centuries earlier, an ancestor from La Rochelle, France arrived in 1663.

These threads, and so many others, tangled together to form the blood and body of my paternal Grandmother, who grew up near the Snake River and the smell of sagebrush, amongst the landscape I find myself in now. 

These ancestors who came from cultures once upon a time so vast and rich, have been watered down to be unrecognizable in my family tree. They all traded their culture in exchange for Whiteness; that bland flavor of domination and privilege. They adopted whiteness and no one remembers the old songs because they aren’t sung. They adopted whiteness and named their children Christian names that wouldn’t call attention to themselves, names that didn’t require tongues undulating and rolling against syllables like a formed memory of the land from which they once tended. 

I think about how the oldest ancestor here I have was born on turtle island 363 years ago, and how in the long continuum of time, that is but the blink of an eye. I think about how conversely- when we are born on to land, that land is all we know. We are raised up by that dirt and that sky, with the innocence of children who still know nothing of displacement and war.

Is home a place I was born, deep in the dirt and thick roots of the trees that raised me? Or is home across an ocean, a place I’ve never been, where people speak a language I was never taught, amongst the rolling hills and lakes that fed my kin since time immemorial? 

There are plants that act as bridges from here to there, like juniper or yarrow. I know the name for yarrow in gaelic and chinook and when I speak them aloud they make no preference to which I use, or if we abandon words all together and exchange greetings through gentle touch. Sometimes I leave home grown tobacco and other times baked bannock. 

I strive to be a noble guest and tend to any and all spirits who find me on this land. Am I called here, retracing the steps of those who came before me to offer, in some small way, repair? I do not know, only that this land asks for more of me.

I carry a bag of seeds and plant as I walk the ridge trail, the Imnaha so far below me that I no longer hear the sounds she makes as she glides through the canyon. Rattlesnakes bask between warm stones. The sun is hot overhead, I carry water and offer a drink to the thirsty. I carry a song and offer that too, to be carried on the wind, to say, I see you.

I suppose the other day was a premonition of what was to come, that swelling fervor that never fully cracked open and spilled out into the world. The static held and contained, pulsing and waiting.

Rain began to fall in soft patters that clinked off the roof of the truck canopy where I slept. As the thunder grumbled louder the melody became a cacophony as the sky broke up, alive with flashes of light.

In my half sleep, I thought to go out and dance, like the cranes, ceremonially cleanse my body in the storm. Instead I sit on the tailgate, still wrapped in blankets and sleep filled eyes and simply taste the electricity, content to be held in my den of sheepskin and goosedown. After sleeping in a hammock for days on the trail I'm grateful for the shelter.

How clean the world seems after a deluge, the world smelling of rain on pine duff, alive, hopeful, renewed. The storm passes and the sun crests over the mountainside, flooding the river canyon I camp in with light and birdsong and promise. 

---

References:

Hedge Coke, A. (2022, October 8). Migratory. Terrain.org. https://www.terrain.org/2012/currents/migratory/

Leopold, A. C. (1966). A Sand County Almanac. O.U.P.

Meillon, B., & Adamson, J. (2021). Dwellings of enchantment: Writing and reenchanting the Earth. Rowman & Littlefield.

Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, Ed. by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, The Univ. of Arizona Press, 2011

Shoumatoff, Alex. (2014, March 1). 500,000 cranes are headed for Nebraska in one of Earth’s greatest migrations. Smithsonian.com. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/500000-cranes-are-headed-nebraska-one-earths-greatest-migrations-180949816/