The Owl
Ishmael, Moby Dick’s well-known and ambiguous narrator, introduces himself in the first line of his story: “Call me Ishmael.” He explains he has “grown grim about the mouth” and that he is enduring “a damp, drizzly November in my soul,” so bothersome that he is tempted to fight with anyone he runs into. In this state, he decides to sail off on the whaling ship, the Pequod. There are times in our lives when solitude seems the best remedy. I found myself in a similar restless state in my early twenties, now nearly fifty years ago, when I decided to hike into the northern woods of Maine to restore something missing in my spirit. It was late September and the maples showed off their autumn reds and yellows and the evenings grew very cool when the sun sank beneath the horizon. After hiking in for three days, I had arisen around two in the morning to climb the summit of Mt. Katahdin where I believed I would have the privilege of being the first person in the United States to watch the sun rise. Perhaps that privilege would bestow some sort of wisdom into my confusion.
Hiking up the steep rocky slopes of Katahdin in the cold predawn presents an arduous challenge that was just what my flabby spirit sought out on this trip. I carried my small pack that included a two-quart aluminum canteen of water, my small camp stove along with tea and sugar, and an extra heavy shell in case I needed more protection from the cold than my shirt, sweater and light shell provided. Long pants were also included because as soon as I stopped walking I knew my legs would cool quickly. I also knew the weather was unpredictable and could grow very cold, or windy, or stormy without much warning, so I reminded myself as I climbed not to be a fool and press ahead if the elements turned against me. More than one person, especially one person alone, had died in these woods as a result of foolish, overly ambitious acts. I had studied the weather and believed it would be favorable, but the forecast I was relying on had been made three days earlier and was not dependable.
I made it up to the summit where, to my relief, I was alone that morning. Company there would have drawn me back outside of myself. While that was often a pleasure to me, it would have also violated my need to cleanse something internal.
My flashlight batteries still had some life when I arrived at the top. I filled my small pot with water from my canteen and put in down while I pumped up the pressure on the gas in my Primus Camp Stove. Opening the valve and hearing the hiss of gas meant it worked properly and it lit easily with a touch from the first match I struck. It still surprises me how comforting it can be when I am alone and my plans work properly. These silent and hidden anxieties advising me that the world may not be dependable usually linger remote from any conscious apprehension. Now my water boiled quickly and I could shortly enjoy my hot tea generously sweetened. I reclined against a large boulder, shielded a bit from the wind and facing east. I was an audience of one anticipating one of the world’s great miracles, one so repetitive and ordinary, we scarcely notice it.
From my aerie, the calm I had sought began to suffuse through me. No more than ten or fifteen minutes after I’d reclined, the brightening eastern skyline was altered by the first tiny curve of the sun. The visual symphony of dawn was beginning. I felt myself physically almost rushing towards our astonishing cosmic companion. I knew I was riding on the earth’s surface, moving at great speed even though the dawn there was still and quiet, save for the light breeze. Nonetheless I was whizzing up over the horizon as though on the most wonderful roller coaster. Once it began, the dawn rushed ahead, seeming to pick up speed so that the early curve of the sun grew quickly to a quarter, then a half a circle; at first blood-orange, then redder, then yellowing to white as it cleared the horizon. Its brilliance immediately warmed me, even this late in the year. I mused about the power of those mysterious rays pouring out of that huge orb eight minutes before they arrived and warmed me in my nook. Six minutes would have put me too close to be exposed at all, and ten minutes might have made the rays too weak to afford any warmth. I felt an odd appreciation to the universe for its apparent perfection as though it had all been arranged for my comfort that morning. No experience in any interior space could produce the awe and peace I felt resting there. I thought then of Bulkington, the helmsman of the Pequod, whom Ishmael sees at the helm of the ship during a storm. Ishmael hails his courage in a beautiful brief chapter called “The Lee Shore” for steering his ship out into the storm and resisting the temptation of trying to sneak into the false safety of the harbor. The only true safety, Ishmael recognizes, requires accepting a paradox. The only real security means not running from risk, but to steer directly towards it, and into the teeth of the storm.
Although my hike was hardly so dramatic, I did wonder if true peace could ever be found in safe harbors, hidden away from the wild outside. That morning, and this morning too, so many years later, I suspect not.
After an hour, I arose, stretched and began my downhill trek back to my camp to begin my return home. About half way down the mountain, I slipped on a mossy rock landing hard on my back. I was not hurt but my two-quart canteen split at a seam and the water leaked out. I was close enough to camp that it would not matter on this portion of my hike, but water in the woods is a very precious resource and I worried about hiking out without any means of carrying water with me.
It came to matter later that afternoon. I had gotten back to my base camp around ten or so and began my hike out shortly afterwards. As everyone who has hiked in the woods knows, trails look entirely different hiking out than they do hiking in. In those days, the trail markings were not so clear and I lost my trail sometime that afternoon. Because I had wandered away from my path, I also missed several springs that had been the reason the trail in followed the route it did. By late afternoon I was severely parched. I was not yet afraid, but could feel tendrils of worry groping up my spine as though warning me of a danger not yet present. By the time it had become clear that I was off the trail, it seemed to me too late to return uphill to search for it. I decided instead to follow the terrain downhill. By doing so, I felt certain I would come to a stream that would have to be a tributary of the East Branch of the Penobscot River, the main drainage on this side of the mountain. If I could get to the Penobscot, I would be oriented easily and could follow one of the many logging roads back to my car. It must have been relatively late in the afternoon when I first heard the welcome sound of tumbling water. I was now thirsty enough that every thought in my mind was of water. I began hurrying towards the stream, foolishly catching my boot in a crevasse between two rocks and painfully twisting my left ankle. Now every step caused a bright spark of pain that dashed up from that ankle to my hip and then somehow to my eyes. I would have stopped but for my urgent thirst. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, I scrambled down an embankment, gritting my teeth against the pain in my ankle, shucked off my pack and limped to the stream, where I plunged my face into a pool. Any urgent need, suddenly satisfied, creates a satisfaction impossible to completely convey. No previous swallow of water caused even a fragment of the satisfaction of those first swallows from that cool stream. Real need simplifies the world and orients the spirit. Despite the pain in my ankle, I felt joy as I lay back on the bank of the stream, my thirst slaked.
I knew I could hike no further that afternoon. The light was dimming and my ankle was too painful to walk on much further anyway. I took my boot and sock off and soaked in the cold water a while, then made my way back to where I’d left my pack. The embankment had lots of soft earth once branches from spring torrents were cleared off, and I could then stretch out with my sleeping bag covering my legs for warmth, my head resting on my backpack. The anxiety of being both lost and injured then returned. I might have a very hard day or two trying to find my way out of the mess I was in.
As I lay worrying, my gaze fell on the trees on the far embankment. They were mostly great, majestic white pines, all first growth forest that had never been logged like so much of Northern Maine. The tallest of these great trees was almost directly across the stream from me. It was an icon of endurance, of implacable power, standing as it had for perhaps 150 years. That particular tree stood twenty or so feet taller than those surrounding it and a single huge dead branch stuck out above the crowns of the trees around it. That dead branch held my eye, perhaps because any anomaly arrests our interest, or perhaps because death itself felt a little closer to me that afternoon. Although wind pushed the other treetops to wave and swerve, that branch stood, like any dead thing, entirely still in the midst of life’s movement, a silent silhouette against the dimming sky. I thought of the Easter Island stone heads, those imperturbable sentinels staring into eternity, another expression of the immobility of death. Then, as my eye wandered down the branch towards the trunk of the tree, an incongruous shape sharpened my attention even more. It was still, but stood up vertically from the branch and could not have been part of the tree. I thought it must be a great owl and shortly I had an impression of sunlight glinting from his eye. The sight of him produced an upwelling of gratitude I cannot really explain, but I ceased to feel alone in these woods. All sense of being lost seemed no longer to matter. It wasn’t precisely that being lost no longer mattered; being lost seemed to no longer even exist. I had companionship, another living being assuaged my isolation. Both the great tree and its visitor became to me fellow travellers in the world.
I lay as still as my companion who kept his vigil on that dead branch. Perhaps I was mimicking him, although if I was, it was certainly not deliberate. It felt to me more the impulse of companionship, hardly known to him of course, but an expression of my gratitude for his company. In that posture, my eye remained fixed on him, so remote, yet so immediate in my awareness. I saw his head swivel quickly and had the impression then that his two great eyes, immense and nearly taking up the entirety of his face, then gazed into mine. How could I tell? I could not, of course. Perhaps I had fallen asleep and dreamed. Whatever happened that afternoon, I could not deny that I felt myself altered by this curious encounter. Something inside me felt opened up and expanded, a love for being alive in the world.
I will try to convey then, the most significant of the various thoughts that floated through my awareness. Although my circumstances had not changed, a feeling of perfect peace and calm had supplanted my anxieties. This shift in my mental state felt like a gift from that owl. Despite more “rational” impulses, that sense has never entirely dissipated. Could I possibly have learned from an owl, so still and observant; so distant from me? I can only rely on the incontestable assurance I have, that in the days that followed, a sensibility took root within me entirely unlike any I had formerly possessed. So if it was not that owl, then perhaps it was the great pine, the forest, or the river, or my own lost state. I prefer to think of this awareness as a gift from another being also struggling to live in an indifferent world.
How I wish I could convey to you the nature of what came into me without the confinement of words or the restrictions of skepticism. How I wish I might simply pour my own experience that afternoon into you. “Be still,” the owl seemed to have said. In all of the agitation I had felt wandering through these great woods, I had been only thinking of finding my way out, of getting to some other, more hospitable, more familiar place. In some sense I thought, my whole life had been like that: fixed on being somewhere other than where I was, of finding something I didn’t yet possess. It had been as though the future always outranked the present in importance. But lying by that river, I felt not the slightest need to be anywhere else. All sense of being lost vanished, although I knew no more about where I was relative to anything else than I had known a few minutes before. Any need for some phantom assurance, such as my location, disappeared. Any need to “know” anything at all as I had anxiously felt throughout that afternoon quieted and relaxed. All that had agitated my mind had dispersed the way morning mists vanish under a warming sun without our noticing their exit.
“Be still,” that owl had said to me. “This dead branch; this great tree, and I, a pitiless predator, all of us by this rushing water; we are all of this world. Be still. This is how the world is.” Ever since that afternoon I have carried a fragment of that stillness within me. Each time I am able to resurrect some of that feeling, the same gratitude fills me once more.
