Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk (Grove Press, 2014) is an extraordinary book, one that seamlessly fuses a number of themes.  It is a memoir about grieving for her father, dead from a heart attack while working as a photojournalist.  It is a book about raising and relating to another member of the animal kingdom, a hawk.  And it also compares and contrasts her experiences to those of T. H. White, who in addition to The Once and Future King and The Sword in the Stone wrote The Goshawk, a searing account of how not to train a hawk.

Holding these disparate themes together is a framework derived from the quest in medieval romance.  H is for Hawk concerns Helen Macdonald's quest for her rightful place in the world, a version of self-knowledge.  Because she is overwhelmed by her grief from her father's unexpected death, she decides to rear and train a goshawk.  Quests typically involve journeys into another world, one fraught with perils and ordeals.  The hero confronts death and then returns, much changed, to the journey's point of origin.

What Macdonald does, however, is go off in the wrong direction, thereby inverting and reshaping the romance tradition.  Rather than setting out on a quest for something, be it the Golden Fleece or self-knowledge, Macdonald escapes from something:  To distract herself from grieving for her father, Macdonald retreats from the ordinary world of people and disciplines herself to enter the world of her goshawk, sardonically named Mabel (from amabilis) because she is anything but amiable.  But the world of hawking is not only a matter of predator and prey in the here and now.  No small part of its appeal is that it offers a mode of relating to a past that extends back through the Middle Ages and beyond, back into the realm of mythology and the ancient Egyptians' worship of Horus (a deity Macdonald actually prayed to as a child).

Macdonald succeeds in entering Mabel's world by becoming a non-entity, invisible, and thus ignored by her hawk.  (T. H. White correctly saw this process as an ordeal, and he failed at it.)  Macdonald becomes exquisitely sensitive to every nuance of Mabel's expressions, seemingly proving that she could become like Mabel, "solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life."  What she didn't realize at the time was that "turning into a hawk" also involved loss, the loss of her own humanity and therefore her relationships to the human community.

Undistracted by quotidian life--she has no job, no friends, no children, no home--Macdonald is free to focus on Mabel.  One outcome I found delightful:  she has to discard the contemporary view that goshawks are sulky and murderous when Mabel and she engage in a game of catch with scrunched-up balls of paper.  When Macdonald tosses the paper ball to Mabel, Mabel catches it with her beak and tosses it back with a flick of her head.

Hunting with Mabel, however, takes Macdonald to the very edge of being human and then past that place.  That way madness lies, and indeed she comes perilously close.  She could always tell a hawk from a handsaw, she comments, but sometimes she was struck by how similar they were.  She is scared of people. Suffering from anxiety and depression, she drifts into states where she isn't certain who she was or what she was.  Far from her worth being proved by the ordeal of her quest, she is falling apart.

It might be argued that Macdonald loses control over her material as she struggles to convey her path back to becoming human.  Granted, no dramatic revelation starts her in another direction.  But I would suggest that this lack of drama, this rather messy, tentative turn indicates instead that Macdonald is reshaping romance conventions.  Far from a neat resolution of her ordeal, her conversion imitates life as we live it:  uncertain, non-linear, proceeding by fits and starts.

Mabel also helps, albeit unknowingly, by teaching her about death.  Every time Mabel kills an animal, that act pulls Macdonald back from her hawk-like mode into being human.  As a human, she begins to feel accountable for these deaths.  Mortality becomes real to Macdonald in ratio to her accepting responsibility for hawking with Mabel.

Another element in her conversion is attending her father's memorial service.  She is intensely moved by how many people had come and how much they cared for him.  She feels a sense of community at the memorial service, and that in turn leads her to a major realization:  she had taken the wrong path.  The wild would not, could not heal her hurt.  She couldn't become a hawk; she couldn't fly though a rent in the sky, as she'd dreamed, and bring her father back.  She needed instead to be in touch with people: "Human hands are for holding other hands.  Human arms are for holding other people close."

The passing of time transmutes her grief for her father into love.  She reestablishes human relationships.  At the same time, she continues hunting with Mabel, but with a difference.  Now, she begins to depart from accepted practice by letting Mabel fly free.  The loss of control scares her, but both of them begin learning the landscape, creating maps of magical places where they had earlier found game, places "glowing with memory and meaning."  And, wonderfully, their two maps coincide.

Grieving for the death of a beloved father; what it's like not to be a human; the relations between our species and another; the ordeal of becoming who you really are; and the emerging of love that passeth all understanding--all of these themes cohere in Helen Macdonald's brilliant reshaping of the medieval quest, H is for Hawk .


 

First-Rate Writing: Hutto's Illumination in the Flatwoods

Joe Hutto's Illumination in the Flatwoods:  A Season Living Among the Wild Turkey was published in 1995 and in a second paper edition by Lyons Press in 2006. Almost on a whim, Hutto saved some wild turkey eggs from being destroyed by mowing operations in Florida.  He got ahold of an incubator, marked them and turned them, and when the chicks hatched, he imprinted them on himself.  The chicks thought he was a turkey, and he in turn did everything he could to enter their world (which, among other demands, involved being sleep deprived for two years).  Hutto writes not only with insight but with love and wonder, and the result is a moving appreciation of a species entirely different from us, the wild turkey.

Hutto is more than an observer of their lives, he is a participant.  Among many other things, these turkeys teach Hutto how to live in the present by teaching him about "wild turkey speed and wild turkey time."

     Wild turkey speed is that speed beyond which an organism becomes stupid on a scale proportional to the relative increase.  In other words, stupidity is directly proportional to the square of one's velocity.  For this reason it is very difficult for me to travel at wild turkey speed.  Every day is a new lesson in this discipline.  Wild turkey speed allows one to utilize consciousness and sensory awareness to minimize one's expenditure of energy.  A wild turkey always proceeds as if he were in the perfect place at the perfect time.  All his needs may be satisfied here in this moment.  These opportunities are merely waiting to be recognized--a constant condition of sustenance through inquiry and discovery.  I find that it is difficult for me to avoid being goal oriented in our outings, betraying the moment for some abstraction up ahead.  An absurd and ironic result of this is that the rattlesnake, which serves as a perfect metaphor, is peacefully waiting to be understood and instead winds up underfoot.  There is no profit in this, and these wild turkeys constantly remind me to do better.  Their experience, which I believe to be vastly richer than my own, affords them an awareness and evolutionary maturity that is far superior.  I have made this natural world my devoted life's work, but they remind me that I am a clumsy pilgrim in a realm that can never truly be my own.

     Wild turkey time is more difficult to explain.  It seems to have something to do with a resolution of the time it takes for a grasshopper to fly and land, and the time it takes to get from the Cretaceous to the Holocene.  Wild turkeys exist on a vast continuum like continents and mountain ranges but only in this moment like the wind on your face.  And, as any turkey hunter knows, they exist only as a probability, a tendency to occur in a certain place at a certain time.  They behave at once like a particle and like a wave, and even a physicist would call them unpredictable.  A wild turkey suddenly is there like a gnat in your eye or he is an apparition that gives you occasion to doubt your senses.  In either case, he can be very hard to get to know.

First-Rate Writing: Aldo Leopold

Several passages from Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Oxford Univ. Press, 1949) have become widely known:  the one calling for a land ethic, for example, and the one about watching the fierce green fire go out in the eyes of the wolf he had shot when controlling predation.  But the passage that resonates most for me involves the "quality" of cranes (quality here carrying its Latinate meaning of what sort of thing something is) from "Marshland Elegy" in Sketches Here and There.  Not only do we begin to appreciate the quality of cranes in this wonderfully modulated passage, but we come to mourn their absence.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.  It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.  The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.

This much, though, can be said:  our appreciation of the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history.  His tribe, we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene.  The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within the hills.  When we hear his call we hear no mere bird.  We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution.  He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.

And so they live and have their being--these cranes--not in the constricted present, but in the wider reaches of evolutionary time.  Their annual return is the ticking of the geologic clock.  Upon the place of their return they confer a peculiar distinction.  Amid the endless mediocrity of the commonplace, a crane marsh holds a paleontological patent of nobility, won in the march of aeons, and revocable only by shotgun.  The sadness discernible in some marshes arises, perhaps, from their once having harbored cranes.  Now they stand humbled, adrift in history.

National Invasive Species Awareness Week

This week is National Invasive Species Awareness Week.  According to USA Today (2/25/2015), Chris Dionigi, director of the National Invasive Species Council, commented that invasive species are "one of the leading factors in the decline of species and the loss of biodiversity."  They can also damage crops, the fishing industry, and individual property, he said.

All too true.  But what this statement overlooks is that Homo sapiens is the most invasive species in the 3.5 billion year history of our planet.  We have migrated and established successful populations in every continent except Antarctica.  Our ever-expanding population has passed the seven billion mark.  As we devastate the earth, as we deplete species through over-fishing in the oceans and create dead zones with pollution, our destructive impact is well on its way to becoming comparable to the mass extinctions that have punctuated the history of our planet.

As Walt Kelly's Pogo remarked, "We have met the enemy, and it is us."  In the last chapter of Blood on My Hands* I suggest some steps we might take to save the planet before it's too late.  The first, of course, is to recognize that there is a problem.  Let us hope the National Invasive Species Council soon perceives the true dimensions of invasive species, especially ourselves.
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*The link to Amazon is http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_7?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=cox%20blood%20on%20my%20hands&sprefix=cox%2C+bl%2Caps%2C270

First-Rate Writing: Gertrude Harris

First-Rate Writing features a passage from one writer, a passage that I believe done so well  that I want to share it.  At age 40, going through a divorce, I realized the blindingly obvious fact that I would have to learn how to cook.  Back then, my English professor's salary wouldn't have permitted the contemporary, urban solution:  take-out or eat out.  Cooking was a craft employing tools, I soon realized, and, like any craft, good tools made a difference.  So I began to read not only cook books but books that described the equipment one needed to cook.

One of the most informative accounts I found was Pots & Pans etc. by Gertrude Harris (101 Productions, 1975).  For the most part, Harris is practical and down to earth, but she can also conjure up another mode at once informative and imaginative.  One passage that I've remembered for over thirty years concerns saucepans made not of copper but of silver:

In a booth at the famous flea market in Clignancourt in Paris, I once found four silver saucepans in heavy gauge in graduated sizes.  They had come, the dealer told me, from the kitchen of a "princely house," and I could well believe it.  In a long life of active coveting, I don't think I ever coveted anything more than those silver saucepans I simply could not afford to buy.  Some time later I asked a friend, the proprietor of a renowned Paris restaurant, about them.  His grandfather had two, he said; they had disappeared during the war.  "Ah, oui, Madame, silver saucepans . . . " he mused.  "To make a sauce in a silver pan is never to forget it, like one's first ride in a Rolls Royce!  The heat comes on so evenly--so evenly.  And it comes rapidly to a boil, not here and there, but all over at the same time, and as one stirs, it is like making music, for the sauce thickens almost imperceptibly, gradually, gradually, and just as it should, as one always hopes it will.  And the flavor, Madame.  It tastes only of the ingredients one has put into the silver saucepan.  Do you understand?  Just of the ingredients you want to taste, nothing else . . . une cocotte d'argent---"  A long pause, and I remembered that a cocotte was many things besides a saucepan:  a child, a little chicken, a darling, a sweetheart, and a "fast woman,"--all these, and perhaps more.  His tongue moved delicately over his lips, as did mine, I found.  "Copper, now, Madame.  Well, copper is superb.  A heavy copper pan is  . . . "   Gallic shrug.  "Yes, copper is superb.  Superb, Madame, but it is not silver."  

Turpin's Custom Rifles: David Miller Co.

The slightly awkward title of Tom Turpin's Custom Rifles:  Mastery of Wood & Metal David Miller Co. (Gun Digest Books, 2012) suggests that this volume on the David Miller Company may be the first of a series on custom gunsmiths.  If so, David Miller and his associate Curt Crum are a good choice to lead off:  a David Miller rifle has become synonymous with the highest quality. 

Turpin's book has an abundance of photographs documenting "all aspects of their work."  The difficulty is that this abundance ultimately leaves this reader wanting something rather different.  Crafting a custom rifle involves what David Pye* has called the workmanship of risk, for the quality of the rifle is continually at risk during the process of making it. To minimize this risk, Miller and Crum have devised a number of jigs or fixtures.  Turpin comments, "David once told me that he really felt empathy for a new guy who is just coming into the business.  His reason had nothing to do with the trials and tribulations of dealing with the public, or looking for business to earn a living.  His real reason was all the work ahead for the young man in just developing and crafting all the fixtures and tooling that he needed to succeed."

One problem Turpin faced in doing this book is that photographs of any one of these fixtures--the one to create a fore end tip with a widow's peak, let's say--doesn't have a great deal of intrinsic interest.   Turpin can show the tooling block created for the complete set of parts used for this task.  He can show a cutter about to cut the recess in the fore end and follow that with a shot of a mill squaring off the end of the stock.  But the static nature of photographs can't capture the dynamic process of crafting a rifle--as would, say, a video.

An even larger problem involves the actual subject of Custom Rifles.  Ostensibly, this book is about the mastery displayed by David Miller and Curt Crum in making rifles.  Having known Miller and Crum for many years, Turpin apparently felt no need to formally interview them.  The result is unfortunate:  we learn nothing abut how they feel about what they do, about how their sense of craftsmanship has evolved over the years, or about the challenges they still face after so much success.  The highest form of craft results from the harmony between hands and soul.  Turpin is content to photographically document the rifles that Miller and Crum have made, but he fails to explore their joint vision of craftsmanship embodied in their rifles.  If other volumes do follow this one, let us hope that Turpin will remedy this deficiency.

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*David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, rev. ed. (Cambium Press, 1995).
 

First-Rate Writing: Thomas McGuane

Thomas McGuane has written novels (Ninety-two in the Shade being one of his best known), screenplays, and essays on fishing and on hunting.  The quality of his prose often makes me sin in envy.  The following passage about field dressing an antelope comes from "The Heart of the Game," An Outside Chance:  Classic & New Essays on Sport (Houghton Mifflin/ Seymour Lawrence, 1990).  Its apparent simplicity is deceptive: 

The sun was up and the big buteo hawks were lifting on the thermals.  There was enough breeze that the grass began to have directional grain like the prairie, and the rim of the coulee wound up away from me toward the Absaroka.  I felt peculiarly solitary, sitting on my heels next to the carcass in the sagebrush and greasewood, my rifle racked open on the ground.  I made an incision around the metatarsal glands inside the back legs and carefully removed them and set them well aside; then I cleaned the blade of my hunting knife with handfuls of grass to keep from tainting the meat with those powerful glands.  Next I detached the anus and testes from the outer walls and made a shallow puncture below the sternum, spread it with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, and ran the knife upside down to the bone bridge between the hind legs.  Inside, the diaphragm was like the taut lid of a drum and cut away cleanly, so that I could reach clear up to the back of the mouth and detach the windpipe.  Once that was done I could draw the whole visceral package out onto the grass and separate out the heart, liver, and tongue before propping the carcass open with two whittled-up sage scantlings.

You could tell how cold the morning was, despite the exertion, just by watching the steam roar from the abdominal cavity.  I stuck the knife in the ground and sat back against the slope, looking clear across to Convict Grade and the Crazy Mountains.  I was blood from the elbows down and the antelope's eyes had skinned over.  I thought, this is goddamned serious and you had better always remember that.