Hurdling through space 30,000 miles above Utah I am reminded of what I consider one of my more “brilliant” insights: airplanes are a kind of time machine.
The flying aluminum cans that transport us across distances that once required weeks, if not lifetimes, are not like the time machines of fiction. We can’t just transport ourselves to any place or time. If I could do that I wouldn’t be in this jet right now, knocking out a column. I’d be fishing the Flathead River 100 years ago at the height of the bull trout run, or hunting Irish elk somewhere in Eurasia during the Pleistocene, or roaming the Los Angeles basin sometime prior to European settlement when that place was still a paradise, the streams teeming with steelhead and the hillsides thick with quail.
That place only exists in imagination today. A short jaunt to SoCal with my daughters to see family reconfirmed that. Sitting in traffic for more than an hour while traveling less than 10 miles may be the definition of “Paradise Lost.” But that was my own poor planning, heading for Newport Beach on a hot Saturday in July.
The house I grew up in is now occupied by my sister and her family. Out by the swimming pool, where I spent the Julys of my youth, sis set up a telescope that we used to watch the red-tailed hawk nest that had been constructed high in a palm next door. We spied on the birds as they picked at the carcasses of cotton-tailed rabbits they hunted in the hills beyond the backyard.
Red-tails were the megafauna of my youth. There were occasionally coyotes in the hills and we sometimes heard packs howling on summer nights. But the hawks were always visible in the sky beyond the backyard. Air currents rose off the brown hillsides creating the perfect spot to hunt. I remember as a child watching the birds hover motionless for what seemed like hours. Then, when a rabbit or some small critter made the wrong move, they’d tuck in their wings and dive hundreds of feet to the ground in an instant. Most of the time their efforts were fruitless, kind of like when I’m hunting. But they were successful often enough.
The hawks behave differently now. The birds didn’t used to nest in the palms of the subdivision; they rarely ventured near enough to the houses for a close look. But that place has changed. There are more houses and apparently the birds have become habituated to human presence. The only thing they really need to fear are the mockingbirds, which are so plentiful in the watered, treed backyards that the place sounds almost like a tropical forest on hot summer nights. Mockingbirds are fearless and it’s common to see one or two relentlessly chasing hawks 25 times their size.
Whenever I go back I’m startled by the passion of those little birds. They sing all night in an improvisation of calls they seemingly never repeat. Maybe the mockingbird is nature’s version of what Coltrane was shooting for toward the end, when his music reached such a manic, frenzied state that he almost seemed to be grabbing the supreme being by the collar and demanding undivided attention.
At the beach I gave the twins a quick tutorial in the art of body surfing. But one afternoon isn’t enough. I bobbed in the Pacific for weeks at a time learning the subtleties of picking the right swell out of advancing sets, swimming in front of the wave to gain speed and then throwing my arms back and allowing myself to ride above the crashing surf all the way to shore.
But this trip in the time machine was too brief. You need to make the ocean your present to learn to body surf.