A Bird in the Hand
The thing I like best about flying home to Alaska is how remarkably easy it is to spot Alaskans wandering the airports. There you are in some cavernous terminal in Chicago or Denver surrounded by young men decorating their tattooed bodies with skinny jeans and 80-dollar designer t-shirts patterned with dragons. Ladies brush by dragging leopard-print luggage, their heads cradled by flecked cashmere scarfs as if to ward off gravity. Then you round the corner to your gate and find a family of five in their pajamas, heading home to Alaska. Nearby is a heavily bearded man in full camouflage, as if the plane will land in Anchorage where he will hoist himself onto a four-wheeler and head directly into the mountains to return, as if he never left, to a tree stand in the wilderness.
Anchorage was once voted the worst-dressed city in the nation by a magazine claiming expertise in such things. It’s not surprising, really, in a place where function outranks form. Nor is it something Alaskans are particularly ashamed of. There’s comfort in knowing it’s appropriate to go to the finest restaurant in any Alaska city even if you’ve spent the entire day shoulder-deep in the belly of a moose carcass.
In Alaska, the contiguous United States are called Outside. It’s a convenient reference, like saying Iraq or Pakistan are just over there. Outside is a term synonymous with overcrowding, soul-crushing traffic, and deadly smog. It’s a place without life’s essentials, such as urban wildlife, northern lights, or abundant salmon fishing. It’s a place that takes an insufferably long time to get to. In other words, Outside should be avoided at all costs. Exceptions could be made of course for places with adequate sun and sand.
Or in the event of a family emergency.
So it was that I had just navigated a ghastly network of airports and returned home to Alaska from Ohio, weary and depleted, after my oldest sister Jennifer had sustained a traumatic brain injury in a motorcycle accident. I was describing our days standing over her bed, while she lay motionless in a coma, bumbling through an explanation of intracranial pressure when Victoria and I heard a loud thump in the boiler closet. We peeked up over the back of the couch in our cramped apartment and looked down the hallway as the noise grew louder and angrier. Alley, our longhaired tortoiseshell cat, was by now perched outside the closet door, twitching nervously with each bump.
We turned the knob expecting to find the boiler in full meltdown, but were instead surprised to see a grey and white chickadee no larger than an apple peering up at us, displeased, as if to ask what took so long.
The bird paused for a moment as we considered each other. And then it took flight.
“Oh my God!” Victoria and I shouted in unison, scurrying back for cover. The bird swooped up toward us and into the hallway. It turned right and fluttered against the walls as it disappeared into the darkness of our bedroom. Alley, flush with instinct, charged after it. We stood frozen, our mouths open in disbelief as we heard frantic little wings flapping against cheap plastic slat blinds inside the bedroom.
“Get the cat!” I shouted. We flipped on the lights and saw the caged bird nervously searching for a way back to the outside world. Alley was coiled low on the floor, poised to complete nature’s violence right there in our bedroom.
One had to admire the poor bird’s curiosity. Here, this little creature had stumbled upon a darkened opening in the exterior of our building, a hole really, and saw it as an invitation. A grand adventure! The other birds surely only issued frightened warnings, suggesting that a bird’s life should be lived among the trees, where it was intended. Alone, the intrepid bird snuck into the opening, navigated a network of cobweb-filled metal ducts with foreign twists and turns and then descended into a dank cavern, where it wisely signaled us for release.
And now this, a feline predator waiting to pounce.
Alley let out a mournful cry as Victoria scooped her up and closed her into a nearby bathroom. When there is chaos, Victoria’s focus is to restore order swiftly and methodically. She becomes an unstoppable force of action. Before I’ve even processed the scenario she has a ten-point plan of attack and written job descriptions for everyone involved. I become oddly serene in times of disorder, often pausing to let my disbelief linger.
With the cat out of the equation, we stepped into the hallway and closed the door, leaving the bird alone in our bedroom.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We have to get it out,” Victoria replied.
I raised my broom and stepped toward the tiny bird. It fluttered, appearing as if it would launch itself from the drapes as I quickly retreated.
We were both wearing big toothy smiles, and for a moment I’d forgotten the last few days spent in my sister’s hospital room nearly 4,000 miles away. What else can you do when life plunges you into one of these little unscripted moments?
“We need a net or a box and we can go in there and just catch it,” I suggested.
“But we can’t touch it. The other birds will reject it.” Victoria said.
“Not when they hear the story this bird has to tell,” I muttered.
Victoria assigned me to infiltrate the bird’s bedroom and simply open the window, hoping that the fresh air would draw it outside. This being better than my initial plan, which was to just surrender the bedroom and seal it off permanently. (“In there? Oh, we don’t talk about what’s in there”).
“What if it turns on me?” I asked Victoria.
“Please don’t tell me you’re afraid of that tiny little bird,” she said.
“No. Of course not. But just to be sure, I should get some eye protection.”
I retrieved a pair of safety glasses and then went into the coat closet and found a heavy winter jacket and an old Seattle Mariners baseball hat.
“And maybe I’ll just grab this broom too,” I said.
“What do you need that for?” Victoria asked.
“Because it has a larger surface area than a golf club,” I replied, thinking that was fairly obvious.
I placed an ear to the bedroom door and heard only silence. Perhaps the bird had seen itself out. Perhaps it had found an escape through a heating vent or maybe I would look inside to find a fist-sized hole pecked into the wall. I cracked open the door and peered into the bedroom to find the chickadee perched quaintly on top of the curtain rod above the window. It looked at me as if to say, “Well dammit, now this moron has a broom.”
I moved slowly, one step at a time as the bird observed me. Without taking my eyes off the small creature, I drew up the blinds and unlocked the window. I was close to the little bird now and I could see its dark eyes darting around the room, frightened. I opened the window as wide as I could and lunged back, expecting our visitor to swoop down and follow the fresh air to freedom. But instead it just sat there and stared at me.
Behind me, Victoria quietly stepped into the bedroom. The three of us stood like statues, waiting for someone to make a move. The chickadee began issuing tender chirps and it struck me that it really did sound like “tweet.” I wondered if it was trying to communicate with us or, worse, summon a flock of birds to storm in through the open window. I could hear Victoria working hard to suppress her laughter, likely because I was outfitted as a bounty hunter.
I raised my broom and stepped toward the tiny bird. It fluttered, appearing as if it would launch itself from the drapes as I quickly retreated. The chickadee then seemed to relax and pause for a moment before taking a long look around the bedroom to, I can only assume, reflect on our time together. And then it flapped its wings and flew through the open window, back to its life among the trees.
Victoria and I let out squeals of delight and rushed to close the window. We put away the broom and released the cat from the bathroom, sniffling and wiping tears of laughter from our eyes. We settled back on the couch and returned to our conversation.
“Oh, gosh, where were we?” I said. “Anyhow, we spent almost all of our time at the hospital staring at a little monitor showing my sister’s ICP levels, which stands for intracranial pressure. And the number was just bouncing up and down, up and down. And every time it spiked, I thought, oh God this is it.”
“And she was in a coma the entire time?”
“Yes, ever since the accident.”
I went back to describing what my mother, my sister Madeline and I had been able to learn after we rushed off to Dayton, Ohio following an emergency phone call a few days earlier. My oldest sister Jennifer, seven years my senior, had been involved in a motorcycle accident. There she was riding on the back of a bike, clinging helmetless to some guy she’d fallen for, when a distracted teenager pulled in front of them and my sister was catapulted over the top of the vehicle. Doctors told us the impact of her head on the cement was so hard that her little elastic hair tie became embedded into her skull. They discovered it several days into her stay at the hospital.
Standing there in her room in the ICU just days after the accident, all I could think about was that everything looked and sounded exactly as it did in the movies. There, buried among the tubes and monitors and breathing machines, amid an orchestra of beeps and hums, was the patient, as solemn and clueless as can be—the glittering star of the show, in the method-acting, career-defining performance of a lifetime.
My mother, Madeline and I stood for hours in silence, just staring at my sister. The ICU is not a place for small talk. Standing over your sister’s swollen and motionless body is the wrong time to review television shows, discuss dinner options, or debut your improved Robert DeNiro impression. Had Jennifer been awake, though, I was aware it would have taken only the slightest passing reference to flatulence or anything involving a toilet to send her into fits of laughter. A hand would instantly snap up towards her mouth as tears of laughter began streaming down her cheeks. “Oh, my, gosh! Braaaaaaad!” She might cackle with a youthful squeal.
Being much older than Madeline and me, Jennifer had always been something of an alien life form. While we were playing tag with neighbor kids, she was preening into a mirror. While we were giggling in the back of a movie theater, she was riding in cars with boys. When we were strolling the halls of high school, she was bumbling through college classes and toiling in retail. We simply didn’t get her and because of that she was rarely part of our inner circle.
Isn’t that always the case with families, the ebb and flow of relationships often dictated, it seems, by something as simple as timing.
But I always knew how to make her laugh. Standing there in the hospital, I wondered if I would ever get to do it again.
It had been years since the last time I’d talked at any great length with Jennifer, much less enjoyed fits of laughter with her. One of the tradeoffs you make when you leave behind your life in the lower 48 for a grand adventure in Alaska is that it is sometimes hard to get it back. The distance, the time zones, the isolated bubble of a place like Alaska, shrink-wrapped inside its own atmosphere so far away from everywhere. The lower 48 and the people who live there, however unintentionally, end up on the outside—just another part of Outside.
Still, no one would deny that Jennifer had been hard to keep up with. She was the family’s perpetual wildcard. The one who always seemed to go astray, never on purpose, but as if carried there by a weather system. Her primary talents included art, loving domesticated animals, and finding men with glorious character flaws. She once married an alcoholic who later faked his own death for tax reasons. She never used drugs or abused alcohol herself, but instead seemed only to be drawn to their consequences. Her only real crime was optimism, a belief that he could be it, despite the benders or the explosive temper. There were relationships with all types, and eventually a man who saw fit to invite her on to his motorcycle, but keep the helmet for himself.
“The doctors don’t know if she’ll make it,” I told Victoria. “And even if she does, they can’t promise us what she’ll be like. Brain injuries are too unpredictable.”
“What do we do?” She asked through her tears.
“We wait, and hope. That’s all anyone can do, I guess.”
After three days and with little change in Jennifer’s status, I had to return to Alaska. Before leaving I made one last stop in to her hospital room. I stood alone with her in the muted buzz of the ICU—she in her drug-induced oblivion, me wondering if this was it. When it came time to leave I thought for a moment about sneaking up to her, leaning in close to her ear, placing a forearm over my mouth and bellowing out a rich baritone fart noise. I imagined her springing out of her coma, breathless and red-faced with laughter, her big heart full and boiling over, just like always.
Instead, I kissed her cool, limp hand and turned to start the long journey home. I walked nervously back through the cavernous airports, breezed uncomfortably past cashmere-clad hipsters and gold-plated urbanites, navigated two migrane-inducing layovers and huffed the dry recycled air of three flights before rounding the corner toward my last gate to the welcome sight of oil-stained camouflage pants, mismatched shades of wrinkled turquoise, and practical footwear.
Hours later I was seated on the couch with Victoria, our eyes full of tears, when the little bird knocked on our closet door. “Awwwww,” Jennifer might’ve said. “It’s sooooo cute. Don’t hurt it.”
A smile came over me and I looked outside the front window to see a group of birds gathered in a nearby tree. Were they assembled, I imagined, to hear the hero’s tale? I glanced over at Victoria and she smiled back. “Just how did that damn bird get in here?” I asked. Laughter washed over us again and suddenly, there we were, back in the trees, where we belonged.
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