Sandhill Cranes Lay an Egg

 There is something to be said about taking an older dog out for a walk: you tend to go slow, you saunter. At the right place and time, this helps you think.

I felt a need for such a saunter recently, at a tourist attraction in southeastern AZ. It was a playa lake that draws hordes of tourists to look at sandhill cranes. The internet reviews kept using words like 'amazing' or 'awesome' to describe the visual spectacle and the sheer number of silly birds, as if it matters where you stick the decimal point on an outdoor experience. Long-suffering readers of this blog know that I was rolling my eyes at those reviews.

Walking through the crowded parking lot as sunset approached, I could hear generators running and beeping security alarms on cars. But that might be good news, because it could mean fewer people in my way.

We walked toward the main area of concentration at the edge of the shallow playa lake. People seemed to be walking away from it, perhaps because of the evening chill. Only the hard-core remained. On the spur of the moment I turned away from that area of concentration.  

It would have been confusing to be an air traffic controller here! Birds flew in opposite directions in small or medium sized groups. How do they decide? Their formations were somewhat V-shaped but not clean and disciplined lines, like geese. 

There were some pretty serious cameras getting lugged around. The photographers must have been disappointed. There wasn't much to look at. But the sounds were interesting, especially when it seemed to come from a large flock a mile away. Sometimes, at take-off, hundreds of wings seemed to beat in unison. Reverberation.

I liked watching the dangling landing gear of the sandhill cranes. The landings were fairly graceful. The horizontal sunlight caught the underside of their wings. The trail I chose aimed right into the setting sun, and that sun was brutal. 

Why not play with that brutality, that is, try to use it? The path (dyke) and its watery surroundings reminded me of Bernard Cornwell's description of the Viking ships paddling their way through the labryinth of the Frisian coast: so many possible watery routes, mixed with shallow dead ends; sedges and reeds; grass and sand; a cold wind off the North Sea.

But his characters had to deal with incoming or outgoing tides. There was none of that here but you could pretend there was. After the sun set, the birds evanesced into silhouettes. Sandhill cranes flew chaotically in opposite directions -- in noisy waves of trilling squawks.

A sea kayaker would imagine these waves as being reciprocal, like paddling or breathing. Each one knocks his little craft around, and with a bit of danger in cold water.

Finally we ran out of dry land and faced the sun, now on the backside of some serrated Arizona mountains. My old dog, my old sweetheart paused and looked to the west. I hope it made an interesting and beautiful impression on her.  

I would not recommend going far out of your way to see this tourist attraction. But it would have been a wonderful discovery before it was turned into a tourist industry cliche. I am pleased to have twisted the experience in my mind in order to make it seem like a fresh experience.