Grounded
This walk is the pattern that I have deemed for myself. My designated route which gives me the feeling of being free. These roads that I trace are the same but different at the same time, every aspect of the environment tells you its story. The countless plastic bags in park bins crudely make you aware of those many dog walks long forgone. The bitterly cold air around you as your nose begins to run. Stories that are told by what is left behind.
Sometimes you come across a lifeless bird. This always seems to happen on the way back, which often gives the walk its melancholic tinge: the end of one of your many journeys, while overlooking the remnants of their last one. You would jokingly think to yourself ‘birds of a feather’, but even that feels in bad taste. The first time was a pigeon huddled next to some holly bushes, the irony in trying to find some last comforts in a prickly growth like that. It was still alive but clearly in its last days. So many birds fly above you on this walk, yet this flightless pigeon is the only one that seems to catch your attention for more than a second.
Poor thing could not even turn its head to look up at me. Frozen in time and place. Scruffy and weathered. No response given to this overhanging figure that would surely pose as a danger to their kind at a distance this close. Somehow, you weren’t sure if it was out of choice or whether their senses were dulled beyond return, but it was pitiful all the same. It was hard not to feel guilt at a time like this. Perhaps the pigeon lived a life of breezing through the sky and stealing many a sandwich in a town square. That was what you would have thought or liked to have thought. It might have been true, it might not have. Who would know? What could someone even do in a situation like this?
Is it depressing that a reality where I could have helped this bird wasn’t feasible? Fate decided that they would spend those last days in that spot. I could not change that. Imagine me holding this bird and bringing it back home. It would have been a sight to see for sure, someone cradling an old bird in their arms like some grandiose animal protector. Strangely enough, you do feel some guilt in leaving that pigeon to their own devices, even though you tell yourself that it is just nature taking its course.
The only thing I did was take a picture; a sight that odd could only ever encourage such a thing. That walk was strangely eventful as a result, my mind still hanging on that lowly bird. The bird’s sudden absence from that spot the next day only made me wonder more. Did a fox finish the job? Did they pass peacefully? Or did someone as mad as my imagination deemed, suddenly decide to rescue that pigeon? I could only wonder and wander.
Months later, I encountered another grounded bird while walking. This time it was a blackbird, dead on the side of the road. The only positive I could muster, was that there was no guilt to be had, over leaving a dead bird to itself. I even spent little time looking at it. Beak agape, eyes wide open, coddled not by a holly bush but the indent between pavement and road. A ghastly picture, and yet it was slightly numbed by the sight of countless roadkill before.
What were their journeys like? Journeys and freedoms to be jealous of, especially in states of lockdown and confinement. Like these walks, this blackbird must have traced their fair amount of movement leading to many different places. You wonder how far they have been in their lives, and yet it all led to this moment. A life of adventure cut short in the most boring way possible. Two journeys between human and bird in that moment intersecting, but only one of them could continue from that point onwards. That blackbird is gone, dead and tired as he continues to rest its head on a concrete pillow.
My meeting with the blackbird only drew me back to that pigeon from months ago. I even checked to see if I had that photo, while continuing to walk, and there it was. All the while the presence of that blackbird shrank behind me, further and further as I moved away.
Perhaps we are all just like birds? All on our own predestined journeys under the guise of escaping from the stagnant. If we were all to be released from our birdcages at this moment, then what casualties would result from these intersections of our own individual journeys? An image of frantic free-flying animals colliding into each other fills my consciousness: a celebration of freedom only to end in the destruction of one another.
If those two birds I came across were suddenly revived in a miracle, what would they do with their newfound lives? What would change, if anything at all? Surely they wouldn’t simply retrace those journeys, those same journeys they begrudgingly did so many times before; and yet, that is exactly what would happen. Is it sad that we can’t expect an anomaly in these bizarre times, some deviation from the norm?
To think this all comes from the birds that have been grounded, rather than the many that still fly ahead. Those moments where the temporality of everything starts to slow down, and you start to think about things like this.