There are certain manifestations that are rarely seen, or that somehow seem new no matter how many times they're encountered. They flit across the consciousness like flying jewels, seizing the attention, suspending the internal narration and allowing pure momentary experience to kick in. I call them Hummingbirds because-- as with their namesake-- beauty, wonder and maybe a small amount of terror are phenomena they invoke. As expected, many are animals. Some are seen only in recorded images, or in captivity-- a seahorse, an octopus, a giraffe-- but others are around you, lying in the margins of where you live. An owl or fox, butterflies, bats, grasshoppers, a toad, trout. People can be hummingbirds, too. Carrie Brownstein strikes me as one; Richard Pryor is another. Or inanimate objects, like a metal spinning top, a bead of condensation on a water glass, or an accordion. Very often they're places, and sometimes the verbs carried out there. It's this type of hummingbird I'm thinking of today.
The setting is a lightly traveled road between points on a map, on a day of late summer when leaves are just starting to turn. A new building, cheaply made for some commercial purpose, like some kind of professional office or agency, sits backed to a leafy thicket, unoccupied. It's early morning after a night of rain. Speckles of yellow leaves plaster the cheap asphalt of the parking lot. Beyond the lot, the landscape drops abruptly to the banks of a brook. The verb of the moment is "decaying," something this new building is already doing, and at the moment doing exclusively.
A small city, on the banks of a river, mid-October. A trellis crosses the river as does the highway. This is where you can find ironworks, thrift shops, body shops, no-name gas stations, laundromats, liquor stores, pawn shops. In some cities, these sit in older parts of town that the department of public works neglects. The once grand infrastructure crumbles enough to give the scene an air of antiquity, where you can feel awareness of driving through eternal space with time as a passenger. I crave these ruins sometimes, go out of my way to route myself through them.
Most of the time I can sleepwalk through life as though on automatic pilot. Hours can pass before it occurs to me to wonder how I have managed to avoid being squashed by a bus as I stepped robotically off a curb somewhere in the part of the day that is blurred behind me. What is it that forces my awareness of my surroundings deep into the background for most of my waking life? Animal behaviorists attribute what they call 'habituation to one's environment' to survival. It enables us to ignore the volumes of benign sensory input available for our receptors to process, leaving us open to perceiving threats and signs of danger as they occur. The real question, then is by what grace do I sometimes get to lie, half-asleep on a couch beside an open window on a rainy late spring afternoon, feeling every caress of a curtain-billowing breeze through an open window on my skin, aware of every gentle rumble of thunder as I savor the earth-flavored air filling my lungs?
Driving backroads of a state we'd never visited one afternoon last spring, we crossed railroad tracks beside a grain elevator, passed a drive in theater, auto-junkyards, orchards. It was getting late and GPS indicated the highway back to the motel was in front of us. Having passed through a forest of palmetto, oak and cedar draped with Spanish moss, the road suddenly became sketchy, and we came upon a junction. We were instructed to turn right and the road looked promising at first, but about a mile down, the asphalt yielded to dirt and in short order, the dirt to two ruts. The landscape thinned out again to orchards, and then hilly pasture. Every thousand feet or so, we were forced to either side of a massive puddle. Just ahead around a bend we could see what looked to be a cow or two milling with no sign of a fence.
We made it to the highway eventually, and once again resumed cruising speed. My mind went back to stolen moments before GPS, before I was licensed, that rare time or two of driving the family car through fields and woods, to get the feel of the steering wheel on an imaginary road. The quintessential Hummingbird
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