The Hunters in Our Midst
My mother saw a crow carry off a finch in its beak yesterday. Right there, in our driveway, where we should have seen and kept it from happening.
A few months ago, boxes arrived in the mail, holding bird feeders my mother ordered online. The late snows and freezing temperatures of an interminable winter seemed too harsh a burden to bear for the little creatures we’d grown to watch through our windows — watching as they scoured dormant grass for traces of anything to fill their little downy bellies.
She directed my father where to hang the three bird feeders — two in the backyard beyond our fence line where the birds could reasonably see it, but close enough to the woodline so the little finches and cardinals and woodpeckers could retreat if the hawk nesting in the back third of the property decided to look for easy prey.
After the birds realized the feeders existed, it wasn’t just the hawk we had to monitor, coming out of doors whenever we saw the shadow of a low flying raptor in the early morning sun. The foxes that den in the wooded properties around ours emerged at odd hours, foraging for peanuts that the woodpecker might have dropped beneath a still barren oak tree, or sitting in wait for a hungry songbird or squirrel to dip too low to the ground. One night I was kept awake by the sound of mammalian fighting distinct from the usual calls between foxes. The next morning my father discovered one of the feeders torn apart by raccoons.
Before the wildlife frenzy caused by the bird feeders, there was enough of the animal kingdom to police on our five acre property. Last spring, upon investigating a cacophony in the back meadow, I saw a pack of crows in pursuit of a small hawk. Whether the crows were defending their nest against a predator, or going after the hawk as prey, I couldn’t decipher with my unstudied observations. After repeated attempts to interfere in the primitive standoff with shouting and as much of an echo as my hands could muster, I realized I couldn’t stomach the aerial warfare and retreated to a room without a window onto the action. My day was soured by the knowledge that some life or death altercation would reach its end, quite literally in my back yard. It’s a feeling of unease that has grown too familiar in the past twenty years.
I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t remember the exact chronology of politics in the years directly following the fall of 2001. That sophomore year of high school I watched the second World Trade Tower crumble live on television at the beginning of AP European history, before the bell rang. Before we sat in distracted silence and listened as student after student was called out of class by their parents. We lived in the environs of the Pentagon.
That same year, a boy named *Paul persisted in courting me, in his own innocent and chivalrous way — asking a friend if I was interested. Giving me flowers that I was too embarrassed to properly acknowledge. I moved my senior year to a Marine base in North Carolina, but the newly minted .edu e-mail address I received on acceptance to college made Facebook accessible and made it easier to keep in touch with my friends who still returned to Northern Virginia on their school breaks. I saw that Paul — a constant in the group of students moving through advanced placement classes — eschewed college in favor of enlistment as a combat videographer. One year, I received a message from Paul, asking if my father was a Marine. By some small world coincidence, Paul had been assigned to a unit under my father. He had encountered my father during pre-deployment training and reached out to ask if I was related. In the NoVA suburban ecosystem, we were all vaguely aware of what each other’s parents did — teachers, military, government employees — mostly as a means of discerning whether our peers would be sympathetic to the new kid, and whether they would move before friendships could fully solidify. I guess Paul never knew my father was a Marine.
We never met in person after that exchange, but I kept tabs on him.
I watched from afar through the internet as his photos evolved from Paul in fatigues, to images of his ludicrously dangerous BASE jumping off rocky cliffs across the country, wearing parachutes like giant bat wings. The last time I remember seeing Paul’s profile on social media, he had gotten into a bad accident. There were photos of him recovering in a hospital bed — his face scarred and bruised. It seemed ironic — to come home from Iraq only to launch one’s self off of cliffs, tempting fate.
This was years after Paul and my father were in the same expeditionary force, after I made my journey to the West Coast and my father was sent to Afghanistan. This time I added my sister to the list of people I knew in the fight. Working as an intern at a production company, I sent her copies of scripts and films I knew she would like. It might have been against the rules, but I knew from my father’s earlier deployments that any reminder of a softer world outside the confines of an operating base was the best sort of care package to send. Around the same time, a college crush became a Marine pilot. When he deployed, I sent him a care package with Oreos and coffee.
Now I watch videos of demonstrators across college campuses — black and white Keffiyehs covering their faces. The headdresses remind me of a time when news channels showed protesters in foreign countries, draped in Keffiyehs and burning American flags, or pictures of special forces wearing Keffiyehs over their Kevlar vests. I have to remind myself that these young Americans on college campuses, draping themselves in the same Keffiyehs, did not watch the twin towers collapse in their high school classrooms. Did not see Paul’s combat videography or send their sister care packages. They did not pick their father up from the airport after his deployment ended, and watch him fall asleep in an armchair from exhaustion. I took a grainy image on my iPhone that I still remember, though I’ve gone through several iPhone models since then — his head droops onto his chest like an older man falling asleep in front of the television, though he is far from an old man. It was the first time I looked at my father and realized that he needed looking after. That he was human, and the whims of other men and politicians led to the worry that lined his face and depleted his body.
When I was in college, approximately one hundred and fifty miles from Columbia’s campus, I took a course entitled Russian Art. My professor told stories of her graduate years in the Soviet Union, smuggling art back to the United States in a suitcase. She helped curate the Guggenheim’s RUSSIA! exhibition and took us on a private tour where we saw first hand the progression from Western influence to Soviet Constructivism. From color bursting forth from Kandinsky’s forms — to stark black and grey and red figures marching in dynamic, uniform angles towards monolithic buildings meant to represent the common good. But anyone who has studied history knows that trajectory did not end with the victory of the common good.
This past winter, attempting to make my way through Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, I was struck by a scene. Unwilling to acknowledge the revolution happening around them for too long in the winter of 1905, Lara and her mother finally decide to abandon their Moscow apartment for shelter at a nearby hotel. They hear shooting in the streets, but cannot believe their ears or their janitor when he tells them about the violent struggle nearby where the boys from Lara’s childhood are fighting.
However Filat tried to convince them to the contrary, Lara and Amalia Karlovna insisted that the shots were blanks.
“Don’t be silly, Filat. Think it out for yourself. How could they be anything but blanks when you can’t see anyone shooting? Who d’you think is shooting, the Holy Ghost or what? Of course they’re blanks.”
They weren’t blanks.
These days, messages of hatred and violence, reposted from unknown sources, flood my social media feed — mostly on the accounts of younger friends. Like many others, I am of the mind that maybe our young people don’t fully understand what they’re supporting. I share a video of a German woman who speaks calmly and clearly about the Iranian regime that forced her to flee her home country. She says, straight into the camera, that Western protesters are supporting her oppressors. The next morning I wake up to a message from an old co-worker.
She tells me that she hopes I wake up from the bubble I’m in.
I think back to when she and I worked together through the first two years of Covid. Back when everyone used the term “bubble” to describe their social groups — but for us, it meant the small group of baristas who worked in-person serving customers while the city fell to pieces around us. It reminds me of how we were told it was unsafe to socialize with others outside of our work when we went home. I’m reminded of the special piece of paper our employer gave us, in case we got stopped by police when driving to work during lockdown. I spent my off hours listening to sirens race by on the streets and helicopters circling overhead.
I remember driving straight from a shift at our coffee shop to the laundromat to clean my work clothes alongside tripping druggies throwing their shoes and trash bags full of items into the machines next to me. I remember going home exhausted afterwards, straight into the shower to wash off the lingering virus particles I might have carried into the apartment I shared with my younger sister — crying because there was nowhere else to put the emotions that had accumulated over the course of the day. I remember sitting in two hour long lines for Covid testing at Dodger stadium every two weeks and watching another co-worker collapse on the floor from exhaustion when our company’s owner insisted we work overtime to handle the large volume generated by a paid promotion he decided to host for a lucrative media company. I remember the video call I had with a psychiatrist to discuss a prescription for antidepressants and being told to consider switching jobs if I was unable to lead a healthy lifestyle. I remember miraculously not needing those little pills anymore once I didn’t have to work seven days a week.
I remember deciding to come home after years alone in an apartment, and emerging to another state where housewives were still afraid of shopping in supermarkets — but I at least had my family to eat dinner with every night, rather than alone on the couch. I still remember the feeling of rediscovering a place where it seemed miraculous that I could experience love and affection from others who cared about my health and did things like put bird feeders out for nut hatches and bluebirds that might otherwise go hungry. Parents who listened to my Covid employment stories and told me that it’s hard to explain my perspective to people who’ve only known working-from-home and groceries delivered to their door for years on end. People who still live in that blissful bubble, even now. I know that my co-worker was not one of the lucky ones in the past four years; that she is angry to have been forgotten or brushed aside. To her, any call to right a wrong, to remember the disenfranchised, is a call to care for people like herself.
I think of how vulnerable to undue influence these collegiate young people might have been during these same Covid years — shut indoors or in dorm rooms with only a computer screen or a cell phone for company when previous generations like my own were amassing memories of slumber parties, of sports team tournaments and dances and emergence into a world where critical thought was encouraged. Where, even if you held differing political views from the norm, a college campus was a place where an opinion was invalid unless accompanied by the means to defend it with logic and reason. Where such intellectual rigor was expected of you, rather than obeisance to the ideology of faculty and administrators. A time when cell phones weren’t loaded with apps meant to corral thought with persuasive algorithms, or encourage the mindless trading of sexual partners. I am persuaded to think, that for the generations forming encampments on campus lawns, any modest glimmer of purpose beyond one’s self must feel like a lifeline in a winter that has lasted too long beyond its allotted season. That a strategically placed offering of understanding, of something resembling meaningful action must appear to them as something like long awaited sustenance after the isolation they’ve experienced. They do not think to look for crows and foxes lying in wait.
I haven’t seen many outspoken Palestinian sympathizers among my peers. While we are the generation of 9/11, we are also the generation of John Mayer’s Waiting on the World to Change. We are the ones who say “I don’t understand” when we see demonstrations unfolding, when college students use slogans coined by terrorists and take down the American flag hanging above storied institutions. I have looked around recently and thought that maybe we did get the last of our country’s golden age — the children of the 90’s and Millennium whose adolescent fashions and music and movies still fill the cultural vacuum of the past four years. But more than that, we are the ones who saw it crumbling, after our best and brightest offered themselves up for the fight to keep the terror of those tumbling towers at bay.
I’ve lost touch with Paul and my college crush. I don’t know what they’re doing or how they felt watching the now infamous image of a C-17 taking off from the tarmac in Afghanistan. I watched the news that day in stony silence with my mother. An unspoken grief between us, not only for the tragedy unfolding on that airfield, but for the loss of what so many — including my father — fought for. It’s the same grief I feel watching this younger generation liken their demonstrations to that of Vietnam War protesters as they drape college buildings in terrorist slogans and invite outside organizations to vandalize property with their faces covered in Keffiyehs once relegated to foreign news reels. College students who have never known a war. I think of Pasternak’s willfully blind characters: “Don’t be silly, Filat. Think it out for yourself. How could they be anything but blanks when you can’t see anyone shooting?”
Just the other day, before the finch was carried away, I was telling my father about the crows. How funny I thought they were, sauntering around the yard with their awkward gait, quick to dash across the road or into the woods for cover if the dog caught sight of them and warned them off. I did not think to watch for signs that they were hunting their own kind. It’s something I looked to the hawk for. But now I know better.
I think of how my father once told me that he was frightened by the film The Birds when it came out. Every poster I associate with that film shows Tippi Hedren attempting to fend off a swarm of shadowy birds that threaten to overwhelm her.
I think of the crows at home, increasing in number every time I went to the back meadow, swarming the hawk. Of the internet searches telling me that a pack of them are not above killing the bird of prey that makes its meal of vermin and slithering creatures from the underbrush, while the crow eats whatever it can get its beak around, even trash. Even smaller birds. It wasn’t until my mother saw the sight of the finch carried off that we understood the crows were more than a nuisance. I think of how the foxes patiently watch for an opening to the neighboring farm’s chickens. How they stand at a distance to ensure we’re not offering a meal when we emerge from our back patio to shoo them away. But they’ve never gone after the crows. Maybe they’ve known something we don’t all along.