The call of the Hawaiian crow split the air in the key of E. Half tone E, perhaps. Its oval yellow lit eye set at the upper edge of its slightly down curved generous beak clamped onto my gaze, startled me into knowledge no bird had ever come this close to me. Then it was gone, the koa phyllodes where it had rested just above my head bobbing in its leavetaking.
I closed my eyes to fix the image in my mind, and heard the crow call one more time. Opening my eyes I watched the bird fly off into the broad New Mexico sky. The leaf like phyllodes were just out of reach. My camera was not. I recorded their acacia curves, mentally placing the crow there in their scythe shapes.
I opened my messenger app and sent the image to Kai in Honolulu. Together we would ponder the meaning of this visit. To my knowledge fewer than a half dozen Hawaiian crow existed in the wild, all on Hawai’i island in the Pana’ewa forest. How would a koa tree come to grow in the high desert of Placitas New Mexico? Anyone I knew but Kai would either correct my vision to having seen and heard a New Mexico crow in a North American acacia tree, or simply take it to be a St Francis moment with birds in a place where the old saints had their way with people on a daily basis.
I made as complete a visual record as I could of the area where I was walking, an open space where the wilderness meets the edges of civilization and the sounds of the city are faint in the background, mere swooshes, heard artifacts of traffic on the distant highway 25. The sky dominates the visual plane, stretching its canopy from each far horizon. Cabezon peak is one landmark some sixty miles off, tilting ever so slightly atop its spreading base. Much closer, the rugged Sandias loom in snow speckled splendor, nearly majestic, my mountains as much as the Pedernal mountain came to be Georgia O’Keefe’s mountain. We claim our landscapes as surely as we do our human lovers, affixing them to our soul scapes.
Even as my car comes into sight, already the vision of the ʻAlalā was becoming more surreal. Again I heard the squawk of my bird. Setting the camera to video mode I turned the lens skyward to capture shape, motion, and sound. At this distance the distinctive beak and eye were not apparent. The crow circled and was gone.
Kai has a complex role in modern Hawaii, a place where the ancestors and the demi-gods are often the same beings. By day, dedicated to upholding the literal legal meaning of the purpose of the state of Hawaii: to perpetuate the life of the land in righteousness. The rest of the time, an artist and almost high priest of the streets, he has formed an interface with the unseen, be they spirit or the invisible humans among us. I will be waiting for his perceptions, whenever and however he may choose to share them.
At my car, a black iridescent feather lies upon the sandy floor of the parking area. It may be a wing feather, medium in length and tapered. It happens that I have a short length of string in my pocket. I use it to affix the feather to the rear view mirror.
At home, I feel myself moving in something of a haze or a cloud. Time is feeling compressed and in the mirror I see fresh lines in my forehead but my lips are full and my eyesight acute. The rabbits in the arroyo can be seen hunkering down beneath the junipers. I can hear the footsteps of a pair of mountain lions sauntering across the face of the rise opposite where I stand. I feel an urge to make dessert.
The pantry holds mixes from Trader Joe’s, cans of sweetened condensed milk, bags of raw nuts, a bottle of orange liqueur, a can of almond filling, honey, molasses, cardamom seed, anise everything. I settle upon making a blondie bar with layers of lemon cream and chopped dates and walnuts. It will be nutty and chewy and creamy and lemony. It will taste like you feel when you find a stream in the forest, mossy banked with fish and shrimp in the water.
Now I know why we should find a place to make a secret hideaway in Jemez Springs. A place where you walk out the door and wend your way to the river. A small place with words woven into the walls and poetry underfoot. It is because life has all these surprising flavors and mysteries. In the wild, in the city.
In Hawaii, I put broken crystal geodes and rocks with lines of brilliant minerals in them in pockets formed by tree trunks around the pond. Mosses grew tendrils that reached into the air, tendrils with tiny heads as if to breathe deeply of the forest mists. Candles in glass lit the paths. It was a living fairy tale. In my hand I hold a piece of quartz rock with dendrites. It looks like a jewel with dark moss captured within.
Here in the winter time, when the fog descends before the snow, can you imagine the onion domed open lattice gazebo that nearly floats above the arroyo? Balalaika music floats through the scene. Lovers meet there, so young their parents cannot absorb the images or the thoughts, but you and I remember that time.
It was the middle of the Cold War. We had been taught to fear the Russians. They wanted to bury us. And there we were, two girls barely twelve. The boys lived in the City. Their fathers were diplomats. Arslan was from Istanbul, Kolya from Saint Petersburg on the Baltic Sea. We held hands under the moonlight. We rode cable cars in the fog and imagined ourselves leading lives of intrigue as double spies and baccarat gamblers in Monte Carlo. We stole away from our parents’ houses for our secret assignations and snuggled close without daring to kiss. So we were not lovers yet.
Nor did we become lovers. That would all wait.
I see all this splendor in the mist as the blondie bars bake within the sounds of the balalaika. When I remove them from the oven some poppyseed strudel also comes out. Magic has fully entered the kitchen and I wonder if my lifetime allotment can be spent so frivolously. Laughter from the arroyo assures me it takes magic to make magic.
Opening the images of the koa and the ʻAlalā on the large computer screen, I examine the phyllodes, the beak, the eyes. Do I insist on seeing Hawaiian images here in my New Mexico home? What is this? I check for a message from Kai. He is asking about my parents. They are trying to get my attention, he says. They never even were in Hawaii, I say. No matter, he says. They are not of a place or a time anymore. Go out into the arroyo, he says. Ask them what they are saying.
I am non-compliant. Instead I go straight to the truck with Ulf my dog and drive. I cannot speak to why. It is a sense inside urging me on. What had been a light misty fog deepens as we go. I stay on the Jemez Springs road and drive through the small town. Before the hairpin loop that takes you past the the caldera I turn where the streets are named for minerals. By this time, the snow is coming down in those great saucer like compound flakes. Ulf is panting in the back, eager to get out. Soon, I tell him. Eventually there is a bend in the road with a place to pull over. Almost at the edge of the road, great folds have appeared in the earth. Trees grow amidst the folds, folds that look like origami rocks, rocks that are spires of folded minerals, reaching cathedral like into the sky. The mistiness has receded, and snow flakes are swirling around us like tiny water sculptures lighter than air. The trees are tall like the spires, trees that seem to have occupied this place for centuries, tall evergreen sentinels with great spaces between the branches such that their heavily textured trunks show through.
There is nothing to designate it as private land, a place a person could even own, but as Ulf and I wander deeper into it, a structure appears within. It is a great platform mounted on pillars and posts, massive as the scenery within which it sits. Boulders have been placed upon it as sitting places. It has a rooftop, and icicles have formed along it, shaped like upside down versions of the pointed rock spires around us. Although it is not weathered in appearance, it has the look of what will one day become a ruin, a human built place that time could not erase. It is not a place to live, and how does one get there, other than as we have?
The snow begins to blow about again, and balalaika music wraps around us like smoke from a hookah. I step closer to a ledge. Ulf barks and takes off, over the edge of this snow world. My breath catches and I call after him. I hear him barking deep in the cavernous spaces that must be below, hidden from my view. I whistle twice and like he had been attached by a great long leash, he appears just where he disappeared, studded with snow.
As happens when you stand still in the snow, I began to get cold, to shiver. My fingers that had been busy with the camera ever since we got here feel like they are turning to ice themselves. It was time to go back for our dessert. The world often speaks to me, or sings to me, but rarely like this. I do not hear music from another land that repeats here and there, or hear the footsteps of wild animals. Birds and trees from a place thousands of miles away do not appear in my path. I do not even drive for an hour in the truck without somewhere to go, or pull two desserts from the oven when I put only one in to cook. And I have never driven straight to an ice cathedral wonderland that I did not even know existed.
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