By Andrei Codrescu
When the cold front came through, the sunlight sat on the leaves of the trees like fall was just around the corner. One totally mistaken bird actually put out the news and some fool birds answered, spreading the misinformation. Last night the bats came out and modeled against the sky at sunset. We are bats, they said unequivocally, there are millions of us in your caves, Master, and now we’ll eat insects. They swooped over the roof and ate 60,000 times their body weight in insects. There was silent applause from small and big mammals in the valley. The stone-walled valley above which my perch sits is an excellent conductor of sound, and thus of news. The smallest bit of nonsense gets echoed from one bird to another in an instant. They are usually on the money otherwise. When the thunderstorm came through before the cold front, the whole valley fell as silent as a tomb. The insects quit at once, then the frogs, and you couldn’t hear a squirrel, snake, deer or wild cat move. The sun was still shining and I didn’t hear any thunder yet. But sure enough, about two minutes into the silence that kept deepening by the second as if even the snails in the caves quit their slithering, there was a long rumble of thunder. In the forest there is constant chatter, it’s like a bazaar full of coffee houses. Every crit yammers at its own kind and everybody else is listening even as they go on at the top of their voices with anything that comes to mind. Normally, they are discussing forest and valley politics, their greatest topic being who and what moved here recently and what’s to be done about it. The larger mammals are always the most radical. They lobby for either direct attack, which they don’t really want, or for invading other, not-so-crowded areas. The birds are of every opinion, pro and con, except for the owls and the whippoorwills. They ponder everything and hold their counsel. The latest rumor is that poets have moved in and nobody knows what these are, except human, and human, in their experience, uses boots and guns to crush eggs and kill. Then the word goes out, from a migratory hummingbird, just back from Mexico, that poets are a different kind of human, one that doesn’t kill, even though it sometimes makes awful noises because of alcohol consumption. This hummingbird had actually spoken to a poet who had drank the crazy vine and had established that, among his kind, he was the most helpless and swayable creature. The hummingbird had been sufficiently amused to teach this poet some bird language, which may have been a mistake, because he had taught it to other poets. Ever since the poets had come to the valley they’d been hollering the few bird words they knew, without any sense of their meaning. They went about shouting, “So what? What am I? Chopped worm?” It’s as if they’d picked up the end of a bird quarrel and imagined that it stood for the whole tamale. Only the bats took the poets seriously. The two last night told me that they were at my service insect-wise and that I should fear no ticks or squitos. And then the cold front came and everybody’s cool with everybody else for the moment.
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