it’s all yours

This morning, swimming, I was thinking about an essay I’m working on. Right now it’s in fragments. It begins as sort of pure narrative:

When I began the season’s regular swims in early May, I saw kingfishers most days. Some mornings there were two of them when I arrived, a nesting pair. Small streams enter the lake along the shore where I swim and I often see fish surface near their mouths, feeding on insects. I’ve seen crayfish scuttling in the clean sand under the hardhack. In May, I saw the male kingfisher fishing to feed his mate. These mornings I only see one. The young have fledged, the season is turning.

But it doesn’t continue that way, or at least not yet. I keep writing out of the torrent of daily news–the fires, the boats carrying refugees off North Africa sinking, the missile strikes in my grandfather’s country. So the fragments accumulate and one day soon I’ll figure out what to do with them.

In the meantime, this morning, thinking about the essay, a bird flew over my head and landed in a branch on the cedar that is one of my sentinels as I swim back and forth in front of the empty beach. It was a kingfisher. It gave its rattly cry and then simply perched. As I swam back and forth, it watched, quietly. Maybe it wasn’t watching me. Maybe it was watching the lake entire, not a boat in sight, not the seaplane that either delivers or collects someone from one of the summer cabins at the far end. No other swimmers. No loon cry or the muttering of ravens. I thought some more about the world that feels so perilous right now.

Trumpeter Mountain, Dean River, Horsethief Creek, Casper Creek, Landmark Mountain, Deep Bay, Tugwell Creek, Donnie Creek, Ittsi Creek, Greer Creek, Rossmoore Lake, and hundreds more in British Columbia this summer of 2023, fires across Algeria, on the Greek islands, the town of Lahaina on Maui where fire decimated the historic town, leaving at least 100 dead and more than 1000 missing, echoing the Lytton fire of 2021 which turned the town to ash, and Paradise, California which burned in 2018, and Malacoota, Australia in 2020, and Pedrogao Grande, Portugal, in 2017, with 66 dead.

When I finished my swim, I walked out of the lake, just under where the kingfisher perched on a long branch. It’s all yours, I told it, reaching for my towel.