Dispatch #10
Saturday, August 31
Chetek, Wisconsin

The woolly worms--caterpillars black around their middles, burnt umber at either end--have begun to cross the roads. I swerve for woolly worms. I see the woolly worms, and therefore have the choice. It's one of the reasons for riding a bicycle and not a car.

And a word about the sand hill cranes: In these last weeks I've seen them in two's and three's, strutting mown fields and grazing, as it were. A dumpish kind of bird with extraordinarily long legs and a wing span wider than I am tall. As I have already reported, their call sounds like that of a turkey either desperate or else abysmally annoyed. Up close, in other words, they haven't much to commend them to the romantic eye.

On the other hand, Thanne and I have seen them on their autumnal ways south for the winter, and that sight is breathtaking.

Late in the afternoon we have driven down to the Jasper-Pulaski area (if I have my counties right), Indiana, and tried to arrive shortly before the sunset. A wooden walkway is built there some twenty feet above the ground, from which a person can see down a grassy glen several miles on the clear evening. Arrive. Find a place on that scaffolding. Look up. The sky is filled with the long necklace-like flocks of cranes descending. The whole sky is scored with the criss-crossing of a thousand birds. Follow them as they sink over your heads to the field, and watch how they seem to hang still upon their open wings, their legs dangling, their long necks thrust forward and drooping in order to find a spot for lighting on the ground.

String after string of cranes come in, land, and form a field of grey-brown carpeting. In the distance the birds take a bluish cast, and as far as you can see the cranes seem to press together for the night.

Listen. Far as they are, they make a universal gabbling in the evening wind. They are, on any given night during these migrations, ten thousand cranes in a few hours' communion. It is this way that the Lakota once gathered before winter, all the tribes, all the various peoples came together for council, the elders meeting together in a double tent in the center of the grounds, young men glancing toward the young women of other families, in the night-time playing sweet, secret melodies upon their flutes. It is in this manner that the peoples shared their year past, their plans for the year to come, their worship, their estimate of the future benevolence of Wakan Tanka. And they ate together, danced together, sweat together, told stories together, renewed relations together. "All my relations," they said (and still do say) when preparing to pray.

All my relations.

And I have seen the winged creatures meet and murmur the same way. But in Wisconsin these last two weeks, I have seen the families separated, surviving alone, if not the presence, then the potential of that marvelous gathering which owns the skies and all the land for a night: and we are granted the grace of watching.

Today is Saturday. Tonight a rally in Chetek, and tomorrow (God willing and the rain don't blow me off the road) I've a long ride to Hudson.

Peace, my friends.

Walt