You won’t be ready for nature
Here’s a story about something that happened to me the other day.
I often find myself sitting in one park or another during the lunch hour. Portland(Maine) has many different city parks, large and small, although it sometimes seems that very few people have heard of more than Deering Oaks and the promenade parks. In this particular moment I was in Lincoln Park, which is quite an old park that dates back to just after the great fire of 1866. It used to be a bit larger than it is now, but that’s probably a story for another time.
The concrete paths in this small park are lined with benches which take a beating during the harsh winter months. I was sitting at one of these, reading a magazine about whatever is going on in the world today, when I noticed a pigeon sneaking up on me.
There was something a little bit off about this bird. The feathers on its wing were a bit untidy, and it lacked the usual radius of reticence that you come to expect from birds. It kept eying me as it tottered around, and I developed a nervous concern that it was coming to give me a peck.
I shooed the bird away, but it returned almost immediately, and again I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was trying to sneak towards me. I stood up and waved my magazine at it.
At this point, several things happened. A number of additional pigeons dropped out of the sky directly at my feet, beating their wings furiously and squawking. My sneaky pigeon lept straight up into the air and started to fly away. As I stepped back in dismay, a huge brown shape whistled past my left ear.
When I looked up, I saw a very large wide-winged bird chasing the pigeons. After a moment it swept up into the air and lit on a power line with a grace that made me realize immediately how much it wasn’t a seagull. When I got around the fence to get a better view, there was a red-tailed hawk staring down at me.
This was a juvenile bird with a bright white bib of feathers around its neck. But it was still the biggest and baddest bird I’ve ever seen in Portland. After a minute or so, it swooped down again to hunt for squirrels across from the fire station.
When you live in a city, it can be very easy to think of nature as a quiet, unobtrusive zest you install to improve your view. But it’s reassuring somehow to know that the unexplained, exhilarating wild can still come crashing through.






