Edge

Yesterday I rode my bike through the mostly blank world.   Our town hunkered down.  I took the bike path out past our Walmart, the afternoon light down on cars and people in the lot.  At least from the distance of the path things appeared as they might have a month ago. I did some grocery shopping earlier in the day at another store and Hoosiers who normally look you in the eye and smile, are socially distancing, as directed, but also a little fearful, distant in a different way.  Most people, myself included, are on edge.

The word edge—no surprise—had its first purpose in English describing the sharpened side of a blade.  It appears in the Middle English of Beowulf as the ecge of a sword.   As you peruse the Oxford English Dictionary the metaphorical implications of the word quickly show themselves. More famous figurative uses pop out:  Shakespeare’s Tempest: “to take away the edge of that dayes celebration”  And in a translation of Montaigne love is given an edge.

I became more curious about the word when the poet Stanley Plumly, many years ago, took me for a walk around the poet James Wright’s childhood town of Martin’s Ferry, Ohio.  I was a new professor, a fledgling poet, and I had one great poet showing me another’s territory. Martin’s Ferry is a mythical landscape in Wright’s poems.  And we were walking through it.  I remember much of what Stanley told me.  As we walked, he began naming the birds in the trees, some by their calls alone, and he explained that for birders a great place to observe birds is at an edge.  A biological or geographic edge as in edge of the forest, edge of a stream, any border between one landscape and the next as that’s where birds of prey have the best lines of sight, where birds and animals in a field can seek quick cover.

So here we are all on the edge of a pandemic’s potential disasters, a blade’s edge sure to cut, but I think we are also on that fecund, populated edge as well.  I thought of the word edge on my ride.

Our trail is called People Pathways, much of it converted old rail line.   With the sound of my tires on the gravel, I watched faintest green coming up on the floor of the scraggly swaths of forest, only ten to twenty yards wide, on either side of the path.  Through the trees are mostly corn fields, a few industrial lots.  Among the scrub, you can see old telegraph poles, some with blue green glass insulators perched on decomposing cross bars.   It is mostly weedy trees, redbuds, honeysuckle, silver maples, with occasional bursts of staghorn sumac, their dried and blackened red berries still hanging on.

At times the trees meet overhead so the path becomes a tunnel of empty branches.  There are other sections where the trees disappear and I’m passing cows in a muddy field, or the stubs of last year’s corn, where a few broken brown cobs still litter the path.  But mostly I watch the birds and squirrels and rabbits that live along the path.  All that life alive on those tiny edges of forest.

I pedal steadily to the next town, Filmore, past the closed little two room restaurant, Bert and Betty’s, where I love to take visitors for the home-baked pies, and made from scratch everything of a Midwest breakfast.  After Filmore, the path opens up even more into long flat fields with only the smallest strips of scrub.  That’s when the flock of redwing blackbirds appeared in the branches.   As I rode closer, they’d fly ahead, in a strange game of chase.  This went on for several minutes until one part of the flock peeled off and headed south, spreading out over the fields, the late afternoon sun catching their wings, and another smaller group stayed just ahead.  I finally stopped my bike to turn around and I marveled at the males’ wings–that orange patch with that thin yellow line below it.   A small fire edged in body’s teeming black.

I headed back to our sequester thinking of all the edges I have felt lately between myself and others – my wife, my kids, our friends, strangers and how I take the edge off with a run, a bike ride, or a beer at night.  Worry over the edges of capacity in hospitals, and so many of us on edge.  But I also wonder this edge of possibility, rich with life, where the blackbirds and I have had our little dance.

© Joseph Heithaus.  All Rights Reserved.

P.S. The photo above was taken from my porch looking over at my neighbors yard.  It was a foggy morning.  The sun was rising and burning off the fog.

Given where are lives are now with most of the world at home, I thought now is as good a time as any to start writing again about the Earth as I read it.  More to come.