Reading // Crow Talk

October 17th, 2024

Crows hold funerals. You probably know this. They’re hyper-smart animals that thrive in communal settings, creating nuclear families that live together for years at a time. They also use language in highly adaptable ways, and if that’s something you find curious — sidenote — you might join me in the delightful rabbithole of this blog post I just found by crime writer Sue Coletta. 

My cousin Kristin sent me the novel Crow Talk, which was written by a local author (to where she lives in White Salmon, Washington). 

Once, briefly, I lived in the Northwest, and I get nostalgic reading about the landscape of the wilderness there, which is world’s away from the Northeast, where I grew up and live again. The trees are colossal in the Northwest — much taller than here in Vermont, where there’s very little old growth left — and of a difference oeuvre.

While on a call this week, a colleague showed off some photos of her recent hike in the mountains outside Seattle, where there’s a deciduous conifer whose needles turn ochre yellow and shed in the fall: the larch. Who knew? People who hike up mountains outside of Seattle, I guess, but not me. We have brilliant foliage here in Vermont, but I’ve never seen a rocky outcrop of ochre-yellow larch trees like that. 

The birds are different in the Northwest, too. Even the crows are different, although it’s subtle. Along the northern Pacific coast you’ll find the not-so-imaginatively named Northwestern Crow (slightly smaller), while here in New England, we have American crows (most common) and fish crows (near water).

My favorite novels often tell stories about nature, and I loved the reverent descriptions of Northwest flora and fauna in Crow Talk, especially her accounts of wandering in the forest. But overlying that backdrop is a human story about being a daughter, and another about being a mother.

The latter, Anne, has a five-year-old son who, unlike all the talkative murders of crows that populate their remote lakeside forest, does not speak. Anne dotes on him, patiently protecting him from the outside world, but later, you realize that he wasn’t always the quiet little boy he is now. He once was an affectionate, talkative, engaged kid; then something happened.  He became mute and stopped interacting with the people who love him. But how did this happen — and whose fault? 

When you’re a parent, the idea of “fault” is such a troubling one.

The truth is that my genes, parenting, and the behavior I model have all contributed to my daughters and who they are becoming. It’s hard to deny that their fiery tempers, their heightened anxiety, their aversion to uncertainty, their need to have all the information about a new situation in advance, and their fine, easily tangled hair all came from me.

This week, there are three days off school, so, because I have to work, I booked my daughters into art camp. They have been to this art camp, at the amazing River Gallery School in downtown Brattleboro, many times over the years, and they always really enjoy it. In fact, they had recently been begging me to go.

Yet, they are incredibly shy about new people and things, and when we arrived on the first day, they were knocked off kilter because none of their close friends were there, the teacher was unfamiliar, and the camp itself was  held in the gallery, not the giant upstairs maker space with its myriad of tools and myriads.

I, for one, was envious of the morning that lay ahead for them. I would have loved to stay in the naturally lit art gallery making cardboard animal masks instead of retreating to my office to write about technology. But I had a full day of work ahead of me, and a carefully orchestrated childcare plan, and as the minutes ticked by, and one of my daughters in particular would not stop clinging to me, I found my own anxiety ramping up. After 45 minutes, I managed to extricate myself and head up the street to my office, where I felt the insidious working-mom guilt all day long. Not the best formula for concentrating on writing brilliant B2B marketing copy.

It was a nice relief to find, when I came home, that my daughters had made sweet masks to go with their Halloween costumes. Phoebe had previously told me she wanted to be “a phoebe bird” for Halloween. I said, I love this idea, since, as you know, that’s where your name comes from. But to be honest, phoebes are not all that visually stunning. 

After I showed her a photo, Phoebe thought about it for a moment, then decided, “I am going to be a phoebe bird who went to a disco and turned to rainbow.”

Needless to say, this is not a Halloween costume I’ve been able to find online, even on Etsy, which means we are making one. The other day, I spent hours cutting rainbow feathers out of felt for her Nana to sew into wings. This mask, made at art camp, will be perfect. 

Day two, dropoff was somewhat easier. I left my daughters drawing at a craft-paper covered table in the sunny front window of the art gallery, which sits at street level between the Latchis movie theater and Superfresh cafe. From there, my office is a block and a half away — almost shouting distance. Also, a distance where sirens heading from my direction to theirs catch my attention, as they did this morning.

Not that much later, I was sitting at my desk when my friend Antonia texted me from her office a little further down the street to warn me of a shooter on the loose. Gunshots fired somewhere nearby; the police were all over it. I immediately called the art school and asked them to lock the doors and move my daughters away from the giant gallery window. They swiftly relocated all the kids into a protected art space upstairs. I was relieved, but I felt myself suspended in a state of wondering: Am I overreacting? Or under reacting?

For the rest of the morning, as sirens flew back and forth, a SWAT team moved in, helicopters droned, and eventually, they caught the person, I reminded myself over and over, my daughters are safe. They’re tucked away safely on the second floor. 

But why? Why is this the way we live? Whose fault is it? 

And what happened to Anne’s child? In Crow Talk, the question is never answered. 

Likewise, we never get an answer to the question of gun violence. So many opinions; no answers. If you’re a parent today, worrying that your children will be murdered in a senseless act of violence in a public place holds more brain space than any other mortal possibility.

Crows hold funerals, and they also have murders, but it’s not like that. 

The term “murder of crows” may come from folk legend — allegedly they will gather en masse to determine the fate of a fellow crow who hath transgressed, relegating the perp to death. (Fun facts from PBS.) But crows are highly social creatures that act for the good of all. They nurture grudges for literal generations. They’re awful crop thieves. But they’re also incredibly smart communal learners, forming tight-knot family units and roosting in enormous numbers. They’re some of the smartest animals in the world, in fact. I’m not so sure about humans anymore. 

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