I found a hummingbird on the ground during my walk yesterday. He was gorgeous, of course, as all hummingbirds are, with a translucent green under his wings and a bright fuchsia cravat and a tweed vest. Harley the Dog had stopped to put his nose in a clump of grass. My gaze wandered just a little behind him and that’s where I saw the bird.
A hummingbird had landed on the laundry line outside my window earlier in the morning. The hummingbird feeder was frozen solid — it has been very cold for Seattle — so he paused only for a moment and then, buzzed off, probably to find neighbors who remember to bring in the hummingbird feeder at night. It was about an hour later that I found the little hummie grounded.
I can’t know if it was the same bird. We have one particular variety of hummingbird that winters over here in Seattle, the Anna’s, and I have seen them line up in pairs and trios to get a turn at the feeder. (Hummingbirds are bad at sharing.) It was the same species I’d seen an hour or so earlier even if it wasn’t the exact same bird.
I scooped it up in a plastic bag — when you walk a dog you always have an extra plastic bag — and held it in the palm of my hand. The bird did not move. I could not decide if the heat I felt was coming from the bird. It could have been my hand, now protected from the biting cold by the plastic, was finally starting to warm up. I tried warming the little bird with my breath, too, but he did not respond.
Harley and I finished our walk and I brought the bird inside. I placed him in a plastic container on top of some paper towels. I put the lid on because I did not want to traumatize him yet again should he wake up and decide to fly around my house. Then, I went to breakfast.
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When I was a working painter, I never lived in any of my studio spaces. I used a lot of solvents and I didn’t want to breathe that stuff all day every day. And I was lucky — housing was still affordable enough that I could rent both a tiny apartment in the heart of the city — Capitol Hill — and a work studio.
But there were people living in at least one of the buildings I worked in, and certainly there were all kinds of weird unofficial squats all over Pioneer Square, places where artists joined the Y because that’s where they got their showers, places where artists made dinner on hotplates and in microwaves because they didn’t have real kitchens.
In Seattle, nearly all the spaces I remember spending time in have been gentrified and I try not to look back, not to regret that mostly, I work as a writer now, not as a visual artist. Not to regret that my paints are boxed up in the garage.
Reams have been written about the Oakland warehouse fire. 36 people died after a fire broke out during a party at this “alternative space” for artists. We had a lot of artists displaced by the 2001 Nisqually earthquake in Seattle; it’s not the same thing of course but I imagine there was an outcry about the need for artists spaces after that event too.
But with so many other issues confronting us, who cares about the real estate needs of art school weirdos? We are meant to grow out of it, I suppose, or achieve the kind of monetary success that allows us to move into work spaces that meet zoning laws and have fire exits and well built staircases.
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The hummingbird was in the parking strip; I couldn’t figure out where it had come from, why it had fallen just there. There were no good hummingbird hiding trees nearby, no windows for it to have bounced off of. It was as though it had fallen from the power lines over head. I carried it home and it had no weight in my hand. It had not moved by the time I got back from breakfast, nor by the time I’d eaten my lunch, and then the day was gone.
When I realized his fierce little heart would beat no more, I put the little plastic container outside on the bench by my back porch. It was another very cold night; his perfect little body would keep until I disposed of him properly. I thought about burying him in the garden, but he’s a bird so it seemed wrong to put such a light little object, one that is synonymous with quick motion and flight, into the ground. I think I will built him a pyre instead and let the wind take what ash is left.
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2016. David Bowie and Leonard Cohen and Prince left us, and a lot of other artists. America seems to have lost its sense of justice; recently a jury was unable to convict an officer of killing an unarmed black man — his name was Walter Scott — even though that man was running away from the police officer. David Duke, a Klu Klux Klan leader, recently said that Jews aren’t white, and whatever with that; we all know he was really saying was it’s okay to treat Jews the way the Klan treats black and brown people, which, for the record, is also not okay. The Standing Rock Sioux — and the people of Flint, Michigan — both had to convince the nation that clean water was important and worth protecting. Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of nearly three million votes, yet we are handing the control of our country to a man who seems to want to do nothing more than burn it down. And now I veer dangerously into rewriting “We Didn’t Start the Fire” or, a better song, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” and no one needs that.
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“Hummingbird Ashes” is a good name for a song about a woman who attempts to save something fragile and beautiful but it is just too late. Maybe the music has a cello line wandering back and forth in the background. “There was a hot fire,” the lyric could go, “and now I am waiting for the wind to take what’s left away.”
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Today, I am going to buy a new hummingbird feeder.