This is Summer

Farley and I are at Hileman Landing, swimming in our favorite spot. The mercury is rising the closest to 90˚F it has been this year. I am grateful for the sounds of summer: the bullfrog, the mourning dove, the song sparrows. The water feels warm and cool at the same time—the cold spots surprise and the warms spots caress. The heat of the sun soothes my shoulders as I stand up on the rocky bottom and listen.

I stand in the water of the Willamette River’s oxbow listening to these sounds and saying aloud, “This is summer, this is summer,” as if to invite it to stay with me long enough to make the coming winter bearable. The warm water reminds me of summers past. As I speak my mantra I am aware that in my years in the South, this was spring. Summer was something else entirely.

The warm spots remind me of the Tchefuncta River and the swims that helped the eternal summers to be bearable in Louisiana. In my mind’s eye I once again see Brown Thrashers poking around at my mother’s, beneath the lanky pine tree forest that was her yard. The Cardinals and Blue Jays provide splashes of color at her feeders.

What we called “Lake” Emfred is actually a bayou, branched off the Tchefuncta's  languid main channel. There are two docks next to the boat ramp, one high and one low. The high one on the left is where I would sit to watch for snakes and turtles in the black water in winter, and jump in cannonball style to cool off in summer. Across the bayou the cypress swamp gives the appearance of an island but with little solid ground between the many “knees.” You could pole a pirogue through there to the river easier than finding footing for a hike. Looking to the right of the dock, the bayou has better access to the larger waterway, still through a dark and tangled swamp, an area I loved exploring by canoe.

The three days per summer that I get to be in the water at Hileman take me back to that place of sense memory and I relish it. Most of my Oregonian friends would never swim here, since the bottom is muddy in places and the water is not crystal clear. Most lakes here are translucent and deep and quite cold. After our swim, Farley and I hike out to where the car is parked and meet a family heading in with swimsuits and fishing poles. They ask if they are going the right way to the swimming hole and I reassure them about their direction. They ask how’s the water, and I say great, adding a caveat, “But I’m from Louisiana, so my standards are not high!” We laugh and walk on.

The Predator and Its Prey

The sky was blue and the sun was out as I left my favorite coffee shop to walk back to my office. The new summer air had a mild warmth to it, with a coolness in the occasional breeze. Suddenly I heard a ruckus across the street, birds squawking loudly, and I looked over to see what was going on. There were two crows in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the record store, one attacking something and the other one standing by, watching with interest. The way the smaller birds were shouting I took the prey to be their fledgling. 

My heart raced, my hand clutched my chest, and my eyes were glued to the scene. The crow let up for a moment and the prey bolted. As it raced away I realized it was not a bird but a mouse. It scurried behind a nearby utility post that I knew would provide little protection. The noisy starlings were not upset because they were losing a fledgling; they were cheering for the crow, perhaps hoping for a bite of mouse themselves.

The crow bounced over nonchalantly to where the mouse had hidden. Within seconds, it had grabbed the mouse and pulled it back onto the sidewalk. The crow used its beak to hold the mouse and at the same time to pound it against the concrete. It didn’t use its claws, like birds of prey use their talons. With the crow’s method, the mouse got away several times, but it was never long before it was recaptured and pecked brutally again in its soft parts.

Time slowed down as I beheld this violent episode. I could not turn away. It was in fact over within the space of a couple of minutes. I turned to walk on only when it became clear that the crow had won. I was gripped by the horror of the mouse’s fate, eaten alive by this crow, whose motive was not at all evil, but only the satisfaction of its hunger and the nourishment of its body. The mouse had become a meal.

As I walked slowly on, a flood of thoughts and feelings swirled within me. I recalled Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Prodigal Summer, where her protagonist observes that in the natural world by the luck of the draw some are born predators and others prey. She realizes she must reconcile this reality as part of the design and function of nature, whether she likes it or not. Without one or the other, a delicate balance is thrown off. 

She eventually concludes that as a human manager of her own slice of the natural world, she must respect these roles even in the smallest decisions she makes. She decides she can kill the bugs the spider would eat but not the spider. The wolves in the wilderness she inhabits must be protected as the top predators, but she understands that she can take out a deer for her own sustenance and its population will adjust, because it is designed to serve as prey. It’s how nature works.

My mind bounced again. I tend to think of crows as carrion-eaters, not hunters, but I was reminded that they both hunt and scavenge. After all, they are omnivores and also opportunists; they make their living any way they can.

My thoughts skipped then from respecting the role of the predator to the sad fate of the prey. I couldn’t get the image of the mouse being eaten alive out of my mind. I thought, how in the world can this be okay for the mouse? I can’t imagine a worse fate. I began reflecting on my understanding of the physiology of the fight-flight-freeze response, gained in the course of my work with somatic therapy.

It occurred to me that the mouse has all the same equipment that we do. Thinking physiologically, I ran through the events for the mouse. It was scurrying away as a result of its sympathetic nervous system’s activation: its heart sped up, breathing became shallow, peripheral vision narrowed. All of its reserves and resources were turned toward the act of fleeing from the crow. And flee it did, several times. 

Once running (or fighting, if that had been possible) failed to protect it from the attack, the next step physiologically was automatic dissociation, or “freeze.” With this, the mouse’s heart rate and breathing slowed and endorphins were released to block its perception of pain. Fairly quickly, as the endorphins reached its brain, the mouse was completely sedated and lost consciousness.

As I went through these steps in my brain, I noticed my own release of a long deep breath, as my body began to discharge the impact of the scene I had witnessed. My heart had also sped up, my breathing had become shallow and my vision focused. As I became mindful of my breathing, it returned to normal and I once again felt the warm summer air. My vision opened up to the green leaves of the trees I walked under. I became aware that we can experience the brutality of nature as an aberration, but it is the way of the natural world, as seen in this predator-prey relationship. 

My thoughts settled into the understanding that this world is a complex web of living and dying; one life is given up to sustain another. And I could see that the design is a good one. In fact, how very merciful, in the end, that the prey species would be given such helpful protection from suffering in the midst of its vital role of nourishing the cycle of life.