On moving on

Grackles and academic nomadism

For as long as I can remember I have loved landscapes on the fault lines of here and there. Sometimes I have been lucky enough to live in one. The first thing I noticed about Santa Fe was that our yard was full of Great-tailed Grackles. It was January, and to my northern eyes it seemed like they shouldn’t be there. But there they were, calling like car alarms, slide whistles, ray guns. There were White-winged Doves in the elms and Canyon Towhees under the junipers, two other species near their distributional frontier. They were birds that signaled the start of some vast new country, and I was standing at its limit, at the beginning.

The beginning of one thing is often the end of another. Not far from that arid yard and its warm-weather birds are the flanks of the Sangre de Cristos, the southernmost tip of the Rockies. It was a rare week that I didn’t head up into this cooler, greener realm, home to a final finger of grouse and Pine Grosbeaks and bristlecones. Leave work a little early on a late winter afternoon and by 6PM you can sit at the edge of the tundra and watch the sun drag itself across the cholla plains 6000 feet below, dropping spot fires in each arroyo in its wake. You might wonder how the world could fit so much change so close together.

My time here is ending. I am moving to Bozeman, to start a permanent job at Montana State University, in a valley ringed by mountains where the birds are generally in the middle of something, not near its conclusion. It is the characteristically blind move of a career where nomadism is expected, driven by a mix of real economic forces and costly tradition. I am grateful and excited, and I am grieving a yard full of grackles. In the past ten years I have received mail at eight addresses in five states. It is a gift to get to know the contours of life in so many places. It is also exhausting, an endless state of transition that can seem as if it is all there will ever be.

When this feeling has threatened to become overwhelming I have tried to reorient myself; to turn in place. I have tried to think of the mountains on the skyline not as a beginning or an end, but as a connection, a bridge to a valley in the north. In the winter the valley is filled with snow and the yard is quiet. But climb high enough in the Bridgers and you can glimpse a great chain of peaks headed back the other way—here falling into there, now sliding into then. The doves and towhees are gone, but the woods are lousy with grouse and grosbeaks. And in the summer, in the green marsh by the railroad tracks, there are grackles, though of course they are not the same.