By Zach Irving
I took our original project idea to heart and decided to pair a series of observations made around my yard with some related reflections on various fairy tale themes. I am not a photographer, and thus there are no photos. But, for one of the more magical moments, I did find a related and very heartwarming and hilarious video: Sandhill Cranes Flight Training. You will know from reading the appropriate point to watch it.
It was winter last week and I felt like I was summering in the Hamptons. I’ve never been there, but the sun was that perfect strength where you want to take off your shirt not for relief but for warmth, and somehow, I imagine that’s what it’s like. We don’t really get winters in Florida so much as days here and there that make you forget you’re in Florida. The only observable change of season is a sort of general loss of saturation in the trees and the grass – few feel the need to give up their leaves. As a result, I’ve never experienced a true winter setting, with the cold and the snow as background to daily life rather than vacation destination.
In “The Little Match Girl”, Hans Christian Anderson takes winter to its extreme. The cold is bitter, and the darkness is cold. It numbs and it howls, and, in the end, it kills. And this is not an unfair view of winter. For those without a hearth and home, it is deadly. A winter which spares you at first might ruin your crops and starve you in the end. We now know that lack of sunlight can literally make you depressed. The Norse, familiar with winter, thought of hell as everlasting ice, not fire. Winter is, after all, the retreat of the sun – the life giver. I sympathize with this perspective, but sometimes, when each year is the same, unbroken by the seasons, I find myself wishing my winters were wintrier.
There’s something beautiful about the real cold, the kind with ice and snow. People routinely brave the cold for a chance to see glaciers and mountains, and the more inhospitable they are the more beautiful they seem. Acres of unbroken ice make Antarctica one of the most stunning places on Earth. Snow White, fairest in all the land, is so because her skin is white as snow. Her paleness should, by association with winter, frighten and repulse us (Neil Gaiman explores this connection in “Snow, Glass, Apples”). Instead, her skin makes her special. Pure white skin is rare, like diamonds or gold. And it is also delicate, ruined by exposure to sunlight. And I think this is how I feel about the winter. It comes once a year, and in many places never. It is melted away quickly by the sun. Like Snow White’s voyeurs, we want to view the strange and fragile creature while we can – and for only so long as it remains strange and fragile. Too long of a winter, or one that makes us fragile instead of it, is feared rather than desired.
But it was not winter today and I sat in the back patio looking over the yard. The birds arrived around 12:45, with something red darting across the scene and pre-empting the arrival of three cranes who stalk our yard. I have a somewhat tense relationship with the cranes which stems from several prior encounters I had while painting our side fences. Our right fence, in the front of the house, runs through a slight ditch which fills with water regularly during the summer season. Much of the cranes’ day is spent in this area, pecking in the puddles for whatever it is they eat. My project thus took me directly into what they perceived as their territory. Indeed, these cranes appeared to lack even the most rudimentary grasp of private property, and my attempts to explain that I needed only to access our fence and did not mean to evacuate them from the premises, fell flat. As I crept closer, the cranes performed a sort of pre-fight maneuver in which they make loud noises and attempt to appear as big as they can. I did my best to offer no response. Eventually they gave up their spot, but we repeated this encounter for several days.
The cranes were now in the back yard, however, and unaware of my watching them. The three of them form a family unit, two parents and a smaller child. The largest one is carrying out a bizarre exercise wherein he jumps about two feet off the ground and flaps his wings with great force but little speed. It is distinct from the aforementioned fighting maneuver. Periodically the young crane copies him. The other one continues to eat. I am just about ready to give up on interpreting the affair when it occurs to me that I am watching the young crane learn to fly. Unlike smaller birds, cranes launch themselves from the ground instead of from a tree, and so they apparently need to actually learn how to do so. The little crane gets a couple feet off the ground but cannot sustain it. They give up eventually. Progress, perhaps, but not success.
After watching this I felt strangely like I had intruded. The scene felt like private, family business. Like watching a father and son have their first drink, or someone else’s baby take its first steps. One of those moments that makes you see the human in the animal. Fairy tales do something similar: a wolf which talks and plots in “Little Red Riding Hood”, pigs and frogs and dogs which turn into people after a kiss. But these animals are really humans in disguise; often speaking, and always with the capacity for rational thought. By portraying them as animals we associate them with the natural world, which we separate them from ourselves. This allows us, especially as children, to comprehend those parts of ourselves most animal-like: our willingness to destroy and consume, our anger and our appetites. We can more readily see a wolf as evil, a pig as dirty, a frog as grubby. What fairy tales do is to make us see the animal in the human, not the other way around.
I remember as a child being irrationally afraid of animals, thinking that if I ever laid eyes upon a snake or spider or bear my death would soon follow. I was even afraid of the crane at first, with its sharp beak and loud noises, and took extra care to always cede the playground to them. But as I aged my fear of the natural world began to mellow. For the most part, if you don’t bother animals, they won’t bother you – an oft repeated sentiment which never sunk in for young me. This tendency, to fear animals more than man, is partially refuted by tales which tell us man can be evil too. But that animals are not something to be feared is always left out. Even the animal brides are always humans in disguise, or at the least, turn into them. It could be that I never read the animal bride tales as a child, and so never saw the animal’s redemption. I think this is an unhealthy fear, and I worry that fairy tales exacerbate it.
The most fearsome of all fairy tale villains is the man-eater. Commonly represented by ogres and giants, and almost never by humans (even Bluebeard does not eat his victims), the man-eater plays off two deep-seated fears. Most plainly, of death and dying. But why does being eaten afterwards bother us so much? It is because it demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect. Bluebeard has the decency to at least admire his collection of dead women, to recognize them as human, and thus, not as food. But a man-eater has no such qualms. It is no accident that they are generally giants. The giant is bigger and stronger than us, and he eats us because to him, we are food. We observe the same relationship with many animals, where the big (us) swallows the little (cows, pigs, etc.). And we are very afraid that we might not actually be the biggest ones around. This fear of being small and worthless is what makes the man-eater and the giant so much worse.
I decide to take a short walk out to the lake. As I dangle my legs over the edge of the dock, I see out of the corner of my eye some forest rustling. I turn and spot a racoon approaching the water’s edge. He does this curious thing with his hands in the water, as if he were trying to wash his hands but no one had ever shown him how. When he sees me he freezes. His racoon mother must have told him that predators can’t see without movement. Annoyed at the interruption, he leaves.
The raccoons are robbers. Specifically, they rob our cat. And they have developed a systematized approach to this robbery. At the time of approach (8 o clock, on the dot), we are either in the living or dining room. They check each room for us, leaving a lookout posted at the window in case we should check for them. Meanwhile, the other raccoons (there is always at least two, and up to four), approach the cat feeder and eat as fast as they possibly can. It’s easy enough to scare them off, with a clap or a stomp, and they scamper away like in a cartoon, looking back over their shoulder instead of at the road ahead.
It’s a hilarious routine, but I feel weirdly guilty about scaring them off. It isn’t like we don’t have food to spare, and their success rate is so low that they must be quite desperate to keep coming back. And our cat doesn’t seem to mind – she sits on the couch and watches them unbothered. But it just feels like we’re being robbed, and like the proper response to that is to chase off the robbers. Not to mention, making it easy for them to steal, or, worse, actively feeding them, will only encourage them to come back, unknown diseases and all. But running them off always makes me feel like a giant. And while I don’t ever want to meet a giant, I don’t want to be one either.
