A storm had been brewing for days. You
could bite the air it was so thick. Sleep was impossible. Sweat was constant. Black,
muscular clouds, bruised, crazed, ready to blow, beat down on us as if we were
the head of a drum. My toes were sunk in the sand on the bank of the Wanaque
River.
It came from the west, right over the
river, emerging from thick and twisting thunderheads. It wasn't more
substantial than air; it was the embodiment of air; it was animate sky; more
air than air, more sky than sky. White and black, gleaming as a sunstruck
cloud, sharp as a slicing wind. Swinging from left to right, seeking and
gobbling its dragonfly prey. And that fast it was lost to my eyes downriver.
That was a swallow-tailed kite!
This Florida bird did not belong in New
Jersey! Its exotic home was a thousand miles south, casting its shadow on earthbound
alligators and colorful flowers.
Birders keep something called a
"life list." We record every bird we've ever seen. For the past fifty
years, alone in my room, no witnesses, I cannot bring myself to check the box
opposite the words "swallow-tailed kite." I am stopped by the barrier
between perceiving and accepting.
The part of my brain that instantaneously
assembles disparate details into a coherent whole and reports, "This is a
chair; this is a table;" told me "This is a swallow-tailed
kite." But bird-watching requires firing up the part of the brain that disassembles
details and analyzes each. That part of my brain that would have consciously
ticked off each detail – the snow white breast, the dipped-in-ink wings, a
storm that may have tossed the bird off course – that part of my brain was not
in gear. I was too awed by the whole to inspect the parts.
And it's more than that. Now that I'm an
adult and I've lived away more years than I lived there, I can recognize that
my hometown was special. We never locked the door; we were surrounded by
neighbors we knew and woods full of deer and berries and spooky stories. But
when I was a kid, my hometown felt like prison. Even as we kids enjoyed the
woods, the sleepovers, the close, warm kitchens full of kielbasa and lasagna
and paella, we yearned for anywhere else where everything, we were
certain, was better. Such an elegant bird simply did not belong in the turbulent
sky over the humble Wanaque River.
In the 1986 horror film The Fly, a
mad scientist tries to explain to his girlfriend that, thanks to an experiment
gone wrong, he is turning into a fly. She says, "I don't get it."
He replies, "You get it. You just
can't handle it."
A swallow-tailed kite in my factory-pocked
hometown? I got it. I just couldn't handle it.
Over seventy years earlier, a world-class
French scientist occupied that same rickety bridge between perceiving and
accepting. Anatomist Yves Delage wrote of his "obsession" with a
"disconcerting contradiction between" a mind-blowing artifact and the
"impossibility to find a natural explanation" for that artifact.
Moi aussi, Yves. Like you, that's how I have long felt about the Shroud of Turin.
