Whales and Warblers and Human Hearts

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I turn away: Finish. Start. Shop. Prepare. Save. Make. Gotta eat an elephant? Take one bite at a time. Chew. Chew. Chew. Get the app for that?

I’m sorry. I know this isn’t what you’re here for. Or maybe you’ve only just joined (welcome!), and you’re not sure what to expect. Here, we meet caribou on alpine trails. We twirl through prickly pear patches painted moonlight-white in that stillness-after-chaos hum of the world resettling. We roam. We gaze into flames and tell each other what we see. 

This is what you’re here for, right? An alpine lake on an unmarked trail, Denali National Park, Alaska, USA, September 2021. HS.

In the neighborhood where Ruby the van and I are parked these days to have access to medical care, I need go no more than a handful of blocks to see a dozen “rolling getaways.” They hug curbs or yards, unattended sprouts. Their seeds were planted so long ago the images on the packets—a fish, slippery body glistening, jumping from a lake, an upside down trailer cozied into a grove of upside down aspens shimmering on its surface; a ram high on a plateau painted golden-buttercream-pink overlooking a tiny camper van; a couple exchanging grins, a ribbon of road stretching from their rearview mirror—and not just the images but the care instructions, too, have long faded. A layer of green mold, biding its time, covers the sides and roof of a class C motor home. The chassis of an eggplant-colored van rests on cinder blocks. Grass pokes through the center of the tire lying a ways off from its naked axle.

Stationary doesn’t suit me. Or that’s what I tell myself. That being still is why I’ve been reaching the end of too many days frustrated—I haven’t done enough so I can someday have enough, be enough.

And I think I know more than I probably really do about other people’s lives. So I’m guessing the reasons my neighbors want to escape and the reasons they don’t are one and the same. And those reasons are related to that feeling. And it’s more than a feeling. It’s a fact. It takes a lot to make enough.

Drifting through an Alaskan fjord, I watched a humpback whale slap her tail against the water’s surface. Her nearness made my bones feel stronger. Sister, I breathed when I learned that, in a matter of weeks, she’d start a 5,000-mile swim south. I wanted to show her the miles that had slid beneath Ruby’s tires since spring—sudden palm tree clusters in a sea of sand, yawning canyons, crimson and ivory tongues with swirls of green like plankton, craggy rocks and frothy spray, mountains so tall on either side we’d sigh, specks among wonder. I wanted her to show me the currents beneath her fins during the six weeks it would take her to reach Hawaii’s warm, clear waters.

Isn’t she beautiful? Humpback, Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, USA, August 2021. HS. Humpbacks migrate to Hawaii each fall, to explore and mate and return to the cool depths of Alaskan fjords come summer. The young go first. Then the adults. And finally the pregnant females, whose 11- to 12-month gestation period means they’ll calf back in the warm waters where the calves were conceived and no natural predators swim.

A smattering of doctors’ appointments, two new specialists added to the team, take me through a swankier neighborhood. And it shows you how little I know of other people’s lives that a faint surprise hits me when I realize I see just as many escape-plans-on-wheels here. A tall Sprinter van rests near a magnolia bush. I drool over a teardrop adventure trailer, tires with tread that doesn’t take no for an answer, extra fuel and a gear garage mounted to the side, and 600 watts of solar on top. 

Lack of choice is probably the real reason my heart feels like it’s peering through bars. Let me show you the spots I’m staying these days. My cousin’s home is an accordian of delicious—her garden with produce and then harvest, her kitchen table with hearty conversation and then the quiet understanding among beings who’ve known each other since before they could walk. And my sisters’ places a few hours north are bright with children and music and soft with the way calling the same place home makes each other home. So these are places I’d choose again and again.

But I can see, just out of my reach, neighborhoods of jackrabbits and antelope and roadrunners. And I can’t just fire Ruby up and point her nose south. And so I think, Well then, do. Produce. Become enough. 

I read about a tiny bird with a “buffy” throat and “wide, pale brows” and a triangle on her cheek who travels 5,000 miles every year from the boreal forests of northern North America to the Andes Mountains. Sister, I thought, learning how she’ll fly only at night, resting high in treetops during the day. I wanted to show her the miles between me and Joshua Tree, California, where I was to meet a trio of friends to celebrate our birthdays next week. How Ruby’s tires would fly over pavement while she rested, how I’d tuck into spots near tree trunks to sleep while she soared.

A Blackburnian warbler weighs 1/3 of an ounce. A humpback, 35 tons. A human heart, 8 ounces. And each of us turns to the sun. Our wings, our fins, our feet, our roots know intimately the 584 million miles our earth travels every year.

I want to show you my morning again—a do-over:

The sun has only just begun to untangle from ritual rendezvous with horizon when I unveil my eyes, toss lavender-scented mask onto beside table, blink. So, it’s into that blue-ish, pewter haze of stillness that I rise. You know the space. Like childhood, everything on the table.

This time, I turn—not away, to the list—but toward. I go to fig leaves stirring in pewter. I climb a ladder to their branches. A murmur of starlings picks up. In the hazy light up the street, a cat-shaped lump flicks a tail. The warbler and her flight came to me not by my spotting her out on the road but, rather, through the words of a writer/photographer I adore (My Gaia). Figs traveled here from Asia nearly 500 years back. I pluck a fruit. I bite. I hold its silky pulp against my silky tongue.

Figs from the very tree in this piece. BO.

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🔥 Would love to hear from your silky tongues. Do you know that feeling of not doing, having, being enough? What do you turn to that you wish you wouldn’t? What don’t you turn to that you wish you would? Do you long to let it all go? What’s your escape plan?

I’m glad you’re here. You’re my—we’re our—community on all of life’s many roads.

Thank you,

Diane Porter

, for introducing me to the Blackburnian warbler.

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Where we’re going next

Next week, plan to head out a few days early (post will drop Thursday). I’ll just say this: We’ll visit another stack. There’ll be two remote spots, one frigid, one balmy; at least two hats; and an absence of limits.

Tom Fish

, can’t wait.

In October, we’ll start my birthday month in South America looking for something lost. After that, expect heart-dancing vistas and an exciting announcement.

Be a part of all of it: