Voices In Dark Skies

When I arrived at work this morning and stepped out of the car, a noise startled me.

A female mallard was flying straight at me, and she rose just a bit and swooped only a few feet above my head. The parking lot lights illuminated her sleek shape as she flapped her way out of my sight. I stood still and listened to her call, the urgent and rhythmic quacking. Who is she calling? I wondered. Perhaps she was just calling out to be calling out, an instinctive expression of herself through her own voice. Perhaps she was warning some of her kin about the old man who had inserted himself in her flight path. I like to think she was calling out to a specific duck, to her mate, who was somewhere nearby. Some need within her avian breast compelled her to sing out, to give voice to the language that only her kind can understand.

I kept looking west, searching for movement in the blackness above the parking lot, but I saw nothing else of her. The sight and sound of her had passed beyond my senses, and I wonder at this hour if she thought of me as I have thought of her. Of course, jaded souls will say that my wondering is ridiculous, that birds do not process nor revisit information as humans do, that I was a momentary blip on her radar, and that the little mallard dismissed me from her universe as soon as she was safely above the obstacle I presented. I disbelieve such things. I think to presume to know how an animal thinks or feels is the height of foolishness. And I do not consider it wasted time if I pause to speculate about what the duck might have been thinking, to whom she might have been calling, to where she was flying (and why), or whether or not she knows and experiences love with a male of her kind. Let the complete adults have their fun with my questions. Let them mock me. I will never willingly surrender my sense of wonder, and I will never allow people who willingly pay $8.00 for a cup of coffee in a gaudy paper cup to dictate to me what my perceptions should be nor how I should behave once those perceptions have gelled in my mind.

For some years now, I have been hyper-aware of how few people take the time to truly think about things before they try to formulate opinions. If you stand in a group and ask a question out of nowhere — “Why do you suppose women with red hair really do seem to be more gregarious? — the answers will come quickly and in battalions. But when the question is of more weight and substance than hair color — “Can we know that our sufferings have meaning, even aside from the pat answers we’ve been taught?” — the responses are no less swift and no less numerous.

But have the people tossing out the answers really stopped to think about these things? I do not believe they have. I believe people in this age have become convinced that to be unable or unwilling to articulate an instantaneous and reasonable-sounding response is a gross sin. It doesn’t matter that most snap-back answers are verbal Cool Whip. To be without a quick answer is much worse than simply offering a stupid response with boldness.

When is the last time you heard a person, after being asked an out-of-the-blue question, answer, “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that?”

I deliberately answer in just this way when I am asked a question that catches me off-guard, and I can attest that the people doing the asking do not like it. Not one bit. To deflect a question with a stated intention to ponder carefully what the other person has asked is to say, “I’m going to slow things down, and I’m going to dissect what you asked, and why you asked, and I’m going to draw my own conclusions.” Oh, no…they’re not going to have any of that.

Try it sometime. You’ll notice that the person who asked the question will — once you’ve stated your ignorance and your plan to ponder the question more deeply –give you the same tolerant half-smile that they would offer if you said you suspect ducks remember and think about the human beings they encounter.

And the more important the topic, the more foolish and robotic the rapid answers seem. Very few people treat any important topic with gravity. They’re deadly serious and humorless about subjects they’re told are important by authority figures and the media, but timeless, transcendent questions are treated with as much gravity as their decisions about which side dishes they’d like with their entree’.

For me, I notice that the ducks notice me, and I will not shy away from asking what they might be thinking. I might never arrive at a scholarly answer, but if I do, I will have arrived at it honestly. My questions are like calls in the early morning darkness. They help me to locate others who understand me, and they help me to orient myself to where I am, where I am heading, and what sort of landing might be up ahead.

~ S.K. Orr