See accompanying video here: While. Waiting. To. Explode. – Calling the Crows

On The
Walk, Video, Afternoon:

Brisk, cold wind pushes us as we search out new places on the inner trails of the island.  We walk from home over Covey’s land to Little Trot John Park.  Pass by horse with the sharpest, most cutting eyes i have ever seen.  I don’t know the names of any of the horses boarded in the barns back there but i always stop and try to talk to them.  The one we passed on our way out to explore kept trying to eat my hand thinking i brought a carrot.  He was smaller, young looking, dark but not really black or brown.  Cole left me trying to get to know this horse, continuing ahead.

I caught up and we walked up and around into part of the Park where a few people on the island have gotten together to start a community garden.  It looked as though they were trying to kill the grass in a 30×40 section of land with cardboard piled a top with mulch.  There was a a decent rug too, in one spot.  There was no mulch on the rug.  We walked through the dieing grass, and down towards the transfer station in order to head into the marshy woods situated across from it.

It was the end of the trail we had blazed yesterday when we entered the woods higher on Brackett Street.  We were aiming to find another way back onto a trail we had already travelled.  We passed these amazing marsh plants that look like the above water version of sea anemones.  They were visibly succulent, low, flowering, yellowish green, with reddish buds — beautifully squishy islands in the marshy areas.  It was unfortunate to stomp on them, and i kept thinking of how maybe we should be trying to protect them more (instead of stomping them.)  Still we used them for stepping stones through the parts that were hard to navigate due to the stranglehold of the invasive barberry and bittersweet.

We meet back up with the marked trail that, we guess, the Peaks Island Land Preserve maintains.  The trail is marked with three vertical dots in white spray paint about 8 feet up on a tree lining the path.  A man we ran into yesterday had been going over these blazes with glow in the dark spray paint, he said, so his wife could walk the path at night.  It was a very remarkable gesture to witness.

Today, an even more remarkable gesture occurred.  As we walked up a branch of the trail we have yet to experience, we came across a wind chime.  It hung on one branch of a small tree that seemed to proclaim we had reached a high ground, a stopping point, a meditation spot.  However, in all of its perfectness, it had lost three of its rods to worn out strings and they lay in the leaves, silent.  Cole thought this sad and wanted to do something.  I immediately thought we should take it home and fix it and bring it back.  He thought we could tie them back on right there.  This was attempted but to no avail as the strings simply needed to be replaced and were too short to tie up.  Therefore, my first thought prevailed and we decided we would take it home to fix and bring it back for whoever it belonged to enjoy anew.

Taking up the sturdy, rusted, metal crate i had slung a stick through and carried in one hand — the stick was warmer to carry than the metal itself — and the not worn through string the chimes were hanging from in the other, we continued.  The chimes jingled as we shuffled through leaves back out to the main road.  Cole said he thought they were happy.  They certainly sounded happy to be moving.  It re-affirmed my belief that most things are happier when they’re moving.   Maybe happiness is created in moving.  Even if that is not true or relevant at all to the chimes, they made wonderful sounds being carried through the November woods.

The crows thought so too.  Before long, there were caw ca CAWS flying towards us.  They lighted in the trees above us, and had corralled Heta back, possibly from the road as we were getting closer to cars.  They kept following us and cawing, and cawing, and flying above us all the way up to the road, and even then on the road some too.  The jingling chimes went with us and so did the crows.

We cut back over Brackett, back over to where Covey boards the horses leaving the crows behind, still cawing at us but not moving into different territory.  We were back in the horses territory and there was another really striking darker and slightly larger horse in the corral across from the one we saw on our way heading out.  This horse I wish I knew the name of.  He let us rub him a little and we would have stayed and spent more time but there was a man with two small dogs who were following our dog.  So we walked away from the horse whose name i wish i knew and he started whinnying at us to come back.  He whinnied until we were out of sight over the hill and i kept saying “bye” loud enough so he could hopefully hear, but i did feel bad we left him so quickly.

We began to talk about all the animals we had seen today and it dawned on me that when i did my medicine cards with my cousin in Utah a few years back i had pulled both a Crow and a Horse.  Also a Mouse (which eats pie i leave on the counter) a Butterfly (which we hatch) an Armadillo (which Cole and i just drew together)  a Lizard (orange salamander things in NH) and a Dolphin (Minke whale Cole and I saw sailing the sunfish last fall) and I think the last one was a Fox (i can’t find the piece of paper i wrote all of it down on) (Cole has a stunning photograph of a dead coyote which i think is a comparable animal.) There are eight animals in a totem which makes up your medicine cards (one pulled for each direction i.e. north, south, east, west, northeast, soutwest etc.)  You can only pull the cards once in your life, from what i remember.  In other words, the animals I picked in Salt Lake would be part of my totem everywhere, i would carry them within me my whole life.

It was just a thought that struck me on the end of our walk, how all the animals that we encounter through living on this island are ones that might be related to me somehow.  Possibly related to Cole as well.  The coyote and the crows i think are.  We need to find some medicine cards and he can draw them and find out.  Staying on track though, we walked home, the chimes were still sounding the whole way.