The present unpleasantness

Part 3 in a series covering my project of birding every county in Georgia

Brown-headed cowbird, Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, Catoosa County, Georgia. One of a species considered unpleasant by many, perched atop a cannon wheel.

WATCHING BIRDS IS very exciting but watching people watch birds is not. Therefore I was surprised when, in mid-June, two of my kids told me they wanted to tag along on one of my all day birding trips. What a couple of sports.

The day arrived. We woke well before sunrise and drove to the far northwest corner of the state, to Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, a series of preserved Civil War battlefields. The place is marked with monuments and signs detailing the movements of infantry and cavalry and tabulating the numbers of fallen. If you take your time and read carefully you can follow, to the hour and to the field, the battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga of September and November 1863. Thousands of men died in that place and tens of thousands were injured, with total casulaties adding up to a number second only to Gettysburg. In the end the Union prevailed, opening the door for Sherman to lay waste to Atlanta and subsequently scorch the earth on his way to Savannah in what may have been the war’s single most destructive campaign waged against a civilian population.

Henry and Kristen kept up with the birds for a while. They asked questions; we chased a summer tanager; I showed them how to distinguish between barn and tree swallows. Then they got goofy, which is simply what these two do whenever they are together, and I let them go. I love sharing birds with them but mainly I just want them to be outside, together, having adventures. And I want them to see me love something in particular, whether they love that particular thing or not.

View from the former field hospital. Henry and Kristen are standing against the monument on the right.

Well away from the road we came across a long grassy battlefield lined with monuments and overlooked by a small house that served as a Union field hospital during the Battle of Chickamauga. As we walked up the cut I paused to look north across the field. As if on cue, a sparrow of some variety popped up out of the grass and settled on a tall weed halfway to the trees, much too far away to ID through my binoculars. So I pulled up my camera and set it to full zoom and snapped a couple of quick frames, glancing at them just long enough to see that this bird looked new to me. At this point the kids made some noises and I set the bird aside, knowing I had gotten a clean profile, my best possible shot. Later, in the quiet of our living room, I realized I had seen my lifer grasshopper sparrow. 

A mess of brown-headed cowbirds milled around the house and a blue grosbeak’s sweet jumbled warble sounded from the far edge of the field. True to their nature, eastern bluebirds posed atop things: cannons, monuments, posts, signs.

I walked to a high place and turned, surveying the long lonely field and its silent monuments. As I stood there I realized that it was the congresswoman representing this very place who had, just a few months earlier, publicly called for a “national divorce,” and no one in her party leadership had called her out for it. After decades of political reliability and boring national elections, my beloved state of Georgia has emerged as a key battlefield in the information war rending the country along rural-urban lines, taking up more than its share of national headline space. 

I’ll skip the details. You know what’s happening. It’s exhausting, isn’t it? The present unpleasantness is exacty the kind of thing birding is supposed to filter out of my system. It is one reason I find myself so often leaving the house, the office, the city and heading to open spaces, wooded spaces, spaces dominated by water and sky where I might hear my thoughts and discern my feelings, empty my mind, and rest even as I cover miles on foot in a hot sweat.

But at Chickamauga it wasn’t working, and I knew it. So many reminders of human fear and folly, of a nation divided, caused my anxiety about my country and state to run through me like a river overflowing a dam. So I did what I had to do: I accepted it, or tried to. I let the noise and worry flow and I moved on. We looked around some more. An eastern wood pewee called plaintively from the far woods and the cicadas picked up. We left the battlefield and returned to the car. An hour later we arrived at Cloudland Canyon State Park, two counties over. Henry and Kristen hiked down the canyon to the base of the falls and I took the West Rim Trail. A mile in I finally heard something that cut through the worry: a broad winged hawk forty feet above me, screaming like a teakettle, waking me up and inviting me to taste once more the goodness of the world.