Jasper’s pop was something of a gourmand.
He’d flown down to a green city dumpster a couple of blocks from the Santa Monica shoreline and tucked right into that greasy, salty, crusty, just-spoiled-enough-to-make-a-crow’s-beak-water chunk of meat when something clonked him on the noggin and everything went black as his feathers. He came to bouncing in the back of what he surmised via olfaction was a garbage truck. He gave a quick, silent thanks to the garbage men for not pushing the red button on the side of the truck that caused the whole back end to collapse on itself and crush the trash—along with any errant scavengers—to make room for more trash. It was crow’s luck and Maynard Wolfskill knew better than to push it. He needed out, and now.
I tell you, he’d say, his deep blue eyes glinting with the playfulness Jasper loved in his old bird, I was in a tight spot and I didn’t have long before it got a lot tighter, know what I mean? At which point the other crows on the telephone line or in the palm tree would caw and twitter in the camaraderie to which Jasper had aspired even before his first moonday. Pop’s audience, who had heard the story at least a hundred times, would (if you’ll forgive the expression) egg him on. What’d you do, Maynard? How’d you get outta there, old crow?
His father would grow somber, almost philosophical. If he had a twig handy (oh, how Pop loved his twigs) he’d use it to scratch at a mite in his chest feathers or preen a wing as if he’d lost his train of thought. Pop was a master suspense builder when he told stories, a skill that earned him the nickname The Bard. The moniker actually was dispensed by an irate cormorant at Point Dume who’d had quite enough of Maynard’s crow stories, but Pop owned it right away and turned the tables as only a crow can.
After a few moments of scratching, preening, or just gazing toward the sage green Santa Monica Mountains, he’d say, Instinct. Crows have the best instincts of any bird species in the world except Northern Wheateaters. But those guys are just freaks of nature.
There’d be the requisite, Whaddya mean, Maynard? Tell us, Maynard! How’d you get outta there, Maynard? Come on, tell us!
His father would answer, A crow never panics. You can put us in any situation you can think of. The worse things seem, the calmer we become. Remember Old Bill?
Asking a crow if he’d heard of Old Bill was like asking a pigeon if she’d heard of a bird named Cher Ami or inquiring a human being about a fellow called Lindbergh. Old Bill saved the crows of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. As the storm gathered strength on that fateful August afternoon, instead of panicking like the other birds, the crows had flocked to their usual meeting spot in the willows near the Palace Café on Canal Street. They weren’t particularly frightened but they were at something of a loss as to what to do. No one had ever seen a storm like this one. Crows being crows, everyone had an idea and no one could agree. They cawed like mad, each bird straining to raise his or her voice over the others’ and the growing menace in the Gulf.
Old Bill, who at that point was a middle-aged nester named William Gadfly known mostly for his crossed beak, the result of an unfortunate encounter with a tourist fanboat on Bayou Chevee, had an idea. The storm was too big to fly around and everyone knew that trying to fly against a hurricane was suicide. Bill suggested they fly with it. The idea was too much even for crows, and they cawed something fierce.
Calm as could be, Bill (who was more than forty moons old) lifted off and corkscrewed high into the air. As they watched, the crows’ disbelief turned to amazement, and then euphoria. Riding the pressure at the edge of the hurricane Bill streaked through the sky like a black peregrine falcon. He tumbled and cartwheeled, sometimes seeming to lose control only to roll back to level flight. A few brave souls joined him, then a few more, and as the first raindrops fell on the doomed city 10,000 crows rode the pressure and flew to safety. Ever since, riding the ’cane was the highest form of crow praise for a well-executed aerial maneuver, and calling someone Old Bill was the greatest compliment in crowdom.
Pop would continue. I asked myself what Old Bill would do. I sure as shingles wasn’t going to peck my way through a steel-hulled garbage truck, and if I’d tried to fly I’d likely have broken a wing or cracked my head. It was black as a feather. Still, the longer I was in there the calmer I felt. You know how it is. Finally I realized the truck was built by human beings, and human beings are ground animals. The answer was probably as close to the ground as you could get. I pecked through the garbage (how it pained me to leave that magnificent chicken fried steak behind!) until I got to the bottom. I felt along the edge and sure enough I found a switch. A tap of my beak and the big machine went to work. The giant hatch started to open and as soon as I saw daylight I was out of there like a gerfalcon! The mess on Ocean Street fed the local crows for a week even after the humans cleaned up what they could.
Of course everyone knew that last part best of all. The Garbage Deluge was one of the great feasts in Southern California crow lore.
In his current predicament Jasper was beginning to worry that he was no Maynard Wolfskill, much less an Old Bill. He didn’t feel calm. In fact, it was taking a goodly amount of mental and emotional energy not to break into a full-blown, very un-crowlike panic.
He was learning to fly. More precisely, he was trying to figure out how to get off the ground. Instincts or no instincts, flying was about as far from his mind as chicken fried steak. He would have been content just to get airborne, thrilled with a little awkward gliding.
The moment had been coming for a moon. It started with Mama making a peculiar reference after dinner one night to Getting you kids out into the big colors. Then Pop started talking to Jasper and his brothers and sisters about the great wild mystery. Words like big and wild and mystery made the quills on the back of Jasper’s neck stand up. He was happy at home, and the more Mama and Pop talked the more he found himself half-burrowing his way to the very back of the nest, hiding under his brothers’ and sisters’ downy feathers.
As if they sensed his anxiety Mama and Pop let him go last. Their good intentions only made him feel worse. All week he’d watched in sick horror as one by one Mama nudged his sisters and brothers to the edge of the nest and heaved them over. Jasper nearly regurgitated his regurgitated breakfast every time he heard another sibling caaaaawwwwing his or her way toward the ground. The first one to go was his big sister, Grace. He was convinced she was dead.
Far from it. Grace, like all four of his siblings, miraculously reappeared under her own power a few minutes after her harrowing departure. All of them changed in that tiny window of time. Their eyes glinted more brightly than he’d ever seen, like a light switched on in a human window. They held themselves with their chests puffed out like Pop. Even his little sister Aubrey, who cracked her shell two whole days after Jasper, stood on the edge of the nest glowing like an angel. She’d said, You can do it, Jasp, I know you can! He was sure he’d seen doubt in her eyes.
This morning the inevitable had arrived. It wasn’t so much plummeting from the top of the palm tree toward the grass. He’d been too terrified to be terrified during the fall. Truthfully, even though it was less than five minutes ago he hadn’t the foggiest idea how he’d avoided certain death. He didn’t remember spreading his wings, and he knew for a fact he hadn’t flown anywhere because he was in a clump of shrubs and yucca not ten wingspans from the base of the palm tree. He was clinging to a dead yucca branch and trying not to look down at the waves crashing on the rocks a hundred feet below.
Finally persuaded that he was not, in fact, dead, he began to assess just how dire his situation was.
As it happened, dire didn’t begin to cover it. He forced himself to half-look over his shoulder at the cliff and the rocks and the waves and spray. His heart did a somersault and he felt breakfast coming up for what seemed like the tenth time that morning. Since he couldn’t fly off, his Plan B (a crow always has a Plan B, and C, and D) was to side-walk his way along the branch to the ground.
