This morning we went down early for a swim. On Sundays the beach area fills up quickly, though today is grey and rain is suggested, if not promised. But around 7:30, I’d finished my coffee and I said, Let’s just go. So we did. And as I was finishing my first lap, swimming from the cedars in the photograph to another group at the other end of the beach, a kingfisher skimmed over the water and settled on a cedar branch. I haven’t seen you for weeks, I said quietly, pausing below it. Last summer at this time, one and sometimes two kingfisher(s) came almost every morning. In some mythologies, a kingfisher is a bad omen. In others, it is a calming influence, a harbinger of abundance, of love. I’ve missed you, I said to this morning’s kingfisher. (There are so many things I miss.)
This time last summer, I was writing an essay about kingfishers and war and climate change. Wild fires were burning across the province. The Russians had blown up the Kakhovka dam in Kherson oblast. In emails from my Ukrainian relatives, I’d learned that they’d left their village where my cousin was a school teacher. She said children had seen missiles overhead, on their way to Lviv. I felt I had to record these things.
This morning the kingfisher reminded me of last summer’s sleepless nights. I am sleepless this summer for different reasons but I am also grateful for the gunmetal flash of its feathers, its rattle, its all-seeing eye.
During the Second World War, a weapons program called Kingfisher was initiated, with various objectives, one being to deliver torpedo systems for planes and ships. The systems were radar-controlled and there were a number of versions, none of which were as successful as hoped for. Watching the kingfishers dive for fish near the beach where I swim, I understand something about missiles, their shape, their function. The birds plunge-dive, swift and clean, and are able to avoid body drag as they enter the water. A membrane protects their eyes. Their beaks are long and sharp.
The Astras, Bantams, Black Arrows, Bloodhounds, Blue Streaks, Condors, Dvinas, Exocets, Firestreaks, Gabriels, Hades, Kaliningrads, Long Marks and Mambas, Neptunes, Patriots and Pythons, Rapiers, Sapwoods, Satans, Siblings and Silkworms, Spartans and Zircons, they hurtle through the air like kingfishers, they detonate, they destroy. Swimming in the lake, I drift, I wonder what it would be like to be a child in a rural Ukrainian village, a missile streaking by on its way to Lviv. At home, the watermelons ripen, the wheat is golden in autumn sunlight, the overgrown cemetery holds the remains of my ancestors, the priest walks through the tall grass to open the church for mass.
–from “Kingfisher”, an unpublished essay
...Theresa Kishkan 