Green Space

There is a small park in the town in which I am currently living that is not so much a park as it is a grassy nipple risen up from a body of concrete. Mostly people go there with their dogs. The dogs play. The people watch. The dogs shit. The people pick it up (and take it home I presume). Sometimes people will briefly detour through off of Main Street. A few stop for a cigarette. For my part I go there to smoke joints.
The wondrous wisps of smoke that I let waft sublime about the park’s centerpiece, a statue of three civil war soldiers, would probably be considered by some an irreverent act. Like I’m wasting the freedom these soldiers and others like them gave their lives up to protect. But lets not kid ourselves. There is likely more than one war during which plenty of American soldiers got plenty high. And more to the point, I mean no disrespect. I’m just there to get a little high myself and to relax in one of the many ways I know how while I enjoy the relative peace and quiet of a collection of trees, grass and as of late some unblackened snow. A humble enough reason, I feel, for such a green space to exist. But the brick monument on which the statue sits suggests that such a reason alone is not enough.
According to one of the mounted plaques the park was established in 1910 and was primarily meant to commemorate the soldiers and sailors of the American Revolution. Like most short histories the plaque comes off a little one sided (and reads kind of like a synopsis for a Mel Gibson movie written by Chuck Norris chunked up with a lot of free nation this and struggle for independence that) but I get it, honoring the dead and all. But then it starts in on the history of the town, the majority of which concentrates on priests and pastors who brought “the gospel of Christ from America to pagan lands”. One of the few exceptions is the mention of the local 17th century poet Michael Wigglesworth.
I feel it unlikely that anyone but mental zealots and religious scholars (an unfortunate association) would be aware of old Wigglesworth. As far as I know he only wrote one poem entitled “The Day of Doom”. Despite the great title Wigglesworth’s poem, published in 1662, was not, as one might be wont to assume, a predecessor of our modern zombie movies. Instead, it is 224 fear-mongering stanzas of stupefying iambic heptameter that gets on about nothing more than the wrath of his god. (Well, I’m assuming a little here as I only got as far as stanza eight, stanza eight being a tidy little piece of work in which the poet asks atheists if they believe in his god now that in his apocalyptic fantasy the big boss has come back to reign down some good old fashioned death and destruction. After that I skipped to the end where Wigglesworth tells us that all the good people become kings and priests and live forever in heaven.) Lovely, lovely stuff but unlike the fallen soldiers I have to say that I don’t feel the poet’s efforts are really something to be honored in this slightly more enlightened age.
Then there’s the eagle emblem in the middle of it all. I feel that I would be in remiss to not point out a common misconception about the bald eagle in light of another more heartfelt reason that I have for visiting the park. That reason is a particular red-tailed hawk whose presence, however sporadic, I’ve grown quite fond of.
In movies, used car commercials, and, if I remember correctly, the GI Joe cartoon the sound of the eagle is passed off as a harsh but powerful scream. The “National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America” describes this sound phonetically as “keeeer” but the book is referring not to the eagle’s so-called majestic voice rather the red-tailed hawk’s. So unimpressive is the actual sound of a bald eagle there is no note of it in the guide at all. On my other favorite bird resource, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s impressive website “All About Birds”, they describe the eagle’s call as a “high pitched whistling or piping”. I don’t want to slight the eagle here as it is a spectacular bird but I’ve heard it’s call many times and to me it sounds like a cross between a sparrow’s chirp and a frog’s croak.
This common misconception got me wondering on how few of the townspeople here are actually aware that such a creature as the red-tailed hawk exists. How many even care? The question troubles me. After all, the red-tailed hawk is, or so I’ve been told it is, the most widespread hawk on the continent.
I have also been told that they prefer open spaces. I have a number of specific memories to confirm this having spotted them in places (as they come to me) like Alaska, British Columbia, Wyoming, Iowa, Ontario, and Manitoba. But I have also seen them around cities such as Boston, Montreal, Salt Lake, Anchorage and possibly Las Vegas (due to a hangover and a weekend of getting high I can’t really confirm that the bird of prey I spotted early one morning through a hazy hotel window was a red tailed hawk). One could look at this and suggest that it shows that the hawks don’t actually prefer open spaces. They could even suggest based on this that the encroachment of their habitat is no big deal. In fact, I would agree it reasonable to postulate that hawks could thrive in cities. Full of plump pigeons and starlings and no shortage of scurrying mice and rats there is plenty of food. Telephone poles make perfect hunting perches and have been credited with not only providing a look out but also a nesting area for other birds of prey such as the Osprey. There is even a non-fiction book by Marie Winn entitled, “Red-Tails in Love: Pale Male's Story - A True Wildlife Drama in Central Park” which is noted for its accurate observations of the diversity in a city's ecosystem.
I haven’t read this book and I don’t have the qualifications to back up this next statement but I simply do not believe based on my completely amateur (though numerous) observations that the ecological diversity in a city can compare to the diversity in any of the other more traditional habitats of the red-tailed hawk. Though the city hawks share the same ancient amber eyes as other more distant red-tails their numbers just don’t compare. A reality, I think, that is reflected by the imbalanced abundance of food supplies within urban areas.
If one were to conduct a survey in the town I’m residing in I would wager my left testicle that the number of adults aware of the existence of the red-tailed hawk would be roughly analogous to, though slightly lower than, the number of adults aware of the specific dedications of their civil war monument including the poet Michael Wigglesworth. My follow up question to this unofficial query would be what chance does the red-tailed hawk have when even tradition, in a country that seems so often to subsist on the opiate of patriotism, is so often neglected?
Perhaps Bill O’Reilly hit on the answer when he implied in his interview with Barak Obama that there’s no reason to care if a caribou is scared or confused by a pipeline. With the sustenance provided to us by our eternal economy (whose elixir certainly appears to be oil) what else is there to worry about? One baffled caribou or one neglected hawk truly cannot add up.
Despite that small truth the statement is otherwise a gross trivialization of deeper issues. O’Reilly, as haughty as Megatron, stands so overbearingly by his inflexible opinions that he hints at the same lack of confidence that Wigglesworth himself was rumored to have. They both hide behind the uncompromising rules of their religion, rules that seem to give a disturbing sense of superiority allowing a wish of death and destruction on all those who oppose them (google O’Reilly quotes and Katrina to see what I mean). It’s a seriously limited point of view and the caribou comment is a great example of this. I’ll get to why in a moment.
A similar misconception can also be found in the dogma of extreme environmentalists. Replace Bill O’Reilly with Paul Watson and you’ll understand where I’m going with this. These two zealots, like faith and doubt, are just opposite ends of the same type of conjecture. Like Watson, I do believe it possible that an individual can form a very real bond with say a seal that he or she might physically rescue. But you can be certain that the rest of the herd doesn’t give a flapping flipper’s fuck. They will not consider you a friend. You are not meant to be their savior.
If the hawk I’ve come to look forward to encountering on my trips to the park never shows up again because of an untimely death or encroachment on its territory or whatever else I would be saddened. But it would be a personal sadness, a remorse for a connection lost, and one that should not be confused with sadness for the loss of just any hawk. When the dog I grew up with passed away last year I truly mourned but, to make a comparison, you can be sure that aside from a very distant sympathy I would not feel anything if Paris Hilton’s chihuahua got ran over by her limo. Preservation with regards to the animal world, just like evolution, is a matter of species and has complex implications that most of us, if any, do not understand. This includes Bill O’Reilly, Paul Watson and myself. The only thing I will say with complete confidence is that if you’re only looking at issues from one angle or worse not looking at them at all you’re contributing very little to our understanding.