Carried By a Vulture's Wings

            The first turkey vulture sighting means spring is on its way, at least to me. Those silver-black wings bear a birth, a beginning. This isn’t a new idea. In ancient Egypt, the word “Mut” or “Mwt” was the name of the mother goddess—a protector, a nurturer—and also the word for vulture. Queens wore a headdress reminiscent of a vulture to symbolize their role as caring guides. The dead, souls freed at last from bodies, took the form of birds when leaving the world of the living. Often, this bird had a bald head, broad wings, and the ability to eat and digest almost anything. Often, this bird was a vulture.

            I wouldn’t mind that, I think, if my soul when I died could spread silver wings and fly. They’ve reached a state, those circling vultures, they’ve come to some understanding. Up there, they know there’s no reason to hurry. Up there, there’s peace in the sun. I would feel the wind in my feathers, if I could. Become part of the air, and fly.

            In the mountains of Tibet, the monks and villagers do not bury their dead. The earth is stone, and little wood grows with which to build a funeral pyre. The dead are carried up to someplace remote, between the earth and the sky, where vultures tip and soar on outspread wings. Vultures know these things. The sky fills. A blade is raised above the body. The ceremony is private, solemn, joyful. Someone opens the chest of the deceased. The vultures descend to take the offering. They leave no meat, only bone. In Tibet, too, vultures bear souls away, carry them into their next life. Sky burial, it is called. Because the ceremony is performed so high above the earth? Or because the physical flesh has literally been transformed, and given wings?

 A body is a gift from the earth, to the earth. A body must not be wasted.

            It is not true, what they say, that if you die in a dream, your living breath will stop. I dreamed death once. A river flowing upward, the water forgiving and warm. Death was beautiful, and death was the silver color of a vulture’s wings.

            I woke up smiling.

On Voluntary Earlobe Mutilation

At times when traveling via public transit, cringing becomes a necessity. The problem is not the vulgar language or the high-volume cell phone conversations. These are so ubiquitous as to have virtually no effect. Even the shrieks of children and the stench of perspiration rarely perturb me now. No, my issue rests with those people who step onto the train seemingly unaware that they have a gaping hole in their ear. It disturbs me.

            I can understand the desire to pierce, though it is an affliction I’ve never suffered from personally. I find earring appealing—I enjoy the idea of having some changeable, potentially symbolic jewelry that doesn’t necessarily announce itself, simply sits subtly in one’s earlobe tastefully hidden behind hair. I would never allow a sharp piece of metal to puncture my skin so that these delicate decorations would have a place to rest, but I can understand why an individual who places more import on physical beauty than I do might put themselves through such an ordeal. An earring, after all, is somewhat desirable. An ear hole has no such redeeming merits.

            On my first viewing of such a voluntary distortion, my initial thought was to wonder what form of surgery the unfortunate victim had been subject to, that they were now bereft of a portion of their anatomy. Realizing, however, that the individual, a young, physically fit male, had no apparent medical condition, I understood that the inch-wide plastic hoop surrounded by stretched skin was in fact an adornment of his own choosing. The object held a certain fascination for me, though at the same time I was somewhat repulsed by the sight of the unnaturally distended flesh of the young man’s lobe. A pencil, I meditated, could be passed through said opening without ever coming into contact with plastic or flesh. The ring would make an ideal handle were the youth ever subject to movement by coercion. Worse yet, the young man might travel through a heavily wooded area and find himself abruptly held up, some osier or twig having hooked his ear, suspending his progress. As my mind pursued ever more extreme paths, I forced myself to avert my gaze rather than open a pathway for similarly distressing scenarios to manifest themselves in my head. Those hideously stretched lobes, however, continued to draw my eyes until the inflicted individual disembarked the train.

            Inflicted, I say, because this man, like many others, was nothing more than a victim of cultural fad. Fortunately for the health and respectability of all our young men and women, the perceived attractiveness associated with this form of mutilation is going down, and fewer of our youth are deceived by popular culture into subjecting themselves to this form of physical punishment. I am confident that in the future our descendants will look back on this time as one riddled with misconceptions of beauty, false ideals that led the young of our nation down many disturbing and twisted paths.

On Vultures

This weekend, driving with my mom down highway 101, I knew it must be spring. I’d just seen my first turkey vulture of the season. Actually, vultures. They were “kettling”—the term used to describe a group of raptors, but especially of vultures, all circling together on the same thermal, wide wings sweeping round in every intersecting paths. It’s hard to see the bald red head through the windshield of a car. The chalky white feet—chalky from the birds’ own antibacterial urates—are invisible. Instead the sun catches on outspread feathers, turns black to silver as finger-like pinion feathers shape the wind.  

            I used to know a vulture personally. Her name was Clyde (vultures don’t come in pink or blue—gender’s a guessing game, till the bird lays an egg). Clyde lives at the Oregon Zoo. If you’ve ever watched the bird of prey show in the summer, you’ve seen her—she’s the one who went out of her way to brush your hat with her wingtip. Clyde likes to fly low. She likes to buzz people. She likes to get away with things. Mischievous: yes. Intelligent: vultures come third, after parrots and those pesky corvid crows. Clyde knows her handlers, knows the show commands, knows exactly what Tupperware containers hold (you don’t want to). She doesn’t know how to be a wild vulture. She was abandoned by her parents before she could learn to fend for herself or find food. Unlucky, but lucky to have been found and rescued.

            I think of Clyde, every spring when the vultures come back from California, from Mexico, from even farther south. Bald-headed, barefooted, they can’t winter here. Every fall Clyde gets restless as her wild relatives head south. Her handlers have to take a little more care to pull up their thick leather gloves. She gets a heat lamp in her “mew” but it isn’t quite enough. The keepers give her delicacies—raw herring, rat guts—to make up for the freedom she doesn’t have. In the wild those musty-smelling feathers of hers would be spread in the wind. She’d put her bald head to use. Have you ever tried, after all, to eat without hands? To eat, say, a plate of spaghetti? You wouldn’t want hair (or feathers) on your head either. Especially if that spaghetti was a carcass. Especially if the parts you most wanted to eat were right down inside. After eating, Clyde would spend the sunny California winter sitting with her wings spread wide, letting the sun bake bacteria from her feathers. The food she’d just consumed might have made another animal sick, might have begun the spread of an epidemic like anthrax. Vultures are cleaner than we think, and they clean things up for us.

             I said goodbye to Clyde a year ago. I couldn’t go to school full time and work both days of the weekend. She’s still there though. Soon her trainers will start prepping her for summer shows. Driving with my mom, I crane till at last I lose sight of the vultures. Clyde’s probably craning too, waiting for spring.