WEBVTT

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Well, it turned out I
did not turn the pets in.

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And it turned out the
landlord was a lot more

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sympathetic than I thought.

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There was a reason why he hired
me to be a maintenance man.

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And one of them was he knew
that I was sympathetic to pets.

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It was his partner, the
lawyer, that didn't like them.

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So that was a surprise.

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But we got out of Iowa City.

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My wife got a teaching job
in a nearby small town.

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And when we moved
out there in 1993,

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one of the most bizarre and
transformative experiences

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of my life occurred.

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And this is the title piece,
"Man Killed by Pheasant."

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"So I'm driving
east on Highway 30

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from our new home in Belle
Plaine to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

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It's a four-lane.

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And because I'm an
eldest child, I'm

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driving the speed limit
around 55, 60 miles per hour.

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I'm listening to Jimi
Hendrix cry Mary,

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imagining, as usual,
that I am Jimi Hendrix.

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When in the far distance, I
see some brown blobs hovering

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across the Highway 1 then 2.

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But where they
move low and slow,

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I suspect they're
young pheasants.

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As I near the place
that they're crossing,

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I look over the
empty passenger seat

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and into the grassy ditch to see
if I can spot the whole clan.

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Suddenly, there is a
peripheral darkness.

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The fast shadow of an
eclipse and something

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explodes against
the side of my head

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in a fury of flapping and
scratching and squawking.

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In an act of
extraordinary timing,

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one of the straggling pheasants
has flown in my driver's side

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window.

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And being the steel-jawed
action hero I am, I scream--

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scream like a rabbit
and strike at it

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frantically with my left
arm, the car swerving,

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wings snapping, Hendrix wailing,
feathers beating at my face

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until at last, I knock the
damn thing back out the window

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and onto the road.

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I regain control of
the car, if not myself,

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and pull over to cry.

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That's the time I should have
been killed by a pheasant.

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For reasons peculiar to that
summer, I recall it often.

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It occurred for one
while I was on my way

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to teach a technical writing
course at a nearby community

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college--

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a summer job to help
me through grad school.

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This distance
learning experience

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took place exclusively
by radio wave with me

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in an empty room on campus.

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And my 15 students scattered
at sites within a hundred mile

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radius.

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The technology was such that
my students could see me

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but I couldn't see them.

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To converse, we
had to push buttons

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at the base of
our microphones so

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that each class felt like an
episode of Larry King Live.

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Judy from Monticello,
hello, you're on the air.

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The future of higher education,
my supervisor called it.

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And I never did get
the hang of the camera.

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I turn it on at the
beginning of class

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and there, on the
big screen monitor,

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would be a super
close up of my lips.

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I'd spend the next few
minutes jostling the joystick,

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zooming in and out like one
of those early music videos

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until I found a suitable frame.

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Sometimes, my students
would laugh at this.

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And I'd hear them laughing.

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But only if they
pushed their buttons.

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If there was an
electrical storm nearby,

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I wouldn't hear them at all.

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On the way to such a
displaced bodyless job,

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a near-death experience had
some additional currency

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as did the larger natural
disaster unfolding around me.

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It was the summer of the
Great Iowa Floods 1993.

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And although aware of widespread
human suffering in my state,

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I was privileged to watch
the whole thing unfold

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more gently from the roadways
of my rural commutes.

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And what I saw was a
wilderness of birds.

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Beanfields suddenly became
sheer inaccessible places

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where herons stood piercing
frogs in the shadows,

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where pelicans flew in
great cyclonic towers,

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where bald eagles swung low
to pick off stranded fish.

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Perched on soggy
neglected fence posts

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were birds I hadn't seen
since early childhood,

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babbling some
bluebirds and tanagers.

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Their color and song drew
my eye closer to the Earth,

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to the ragged ditches full
of forgotten wildflowers

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and grasses, primrose
and horsemint, big blue

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and switch--

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safe, at least for a while,
from the Moors blade.

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The domesticated landscape
of my home had gone wild.

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And I was mesmerized by it.

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Toward the end of
the summer flooding

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with the dramatic presence
of wild birds dwindled.

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I thought a lot about Noah--

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about those end days on
the ark between the release

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of the raven and the
return of the dove,

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between knowledge of a
decimated landscape and faith

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and one that through
decimation had become reborn.

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When it was all
over, I thought I

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understood Noah's first
impulse once on dry land--

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to get drunk and forget.

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I lived my entire life in Iowa,
the most ecologically-altered

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state in the Union with
less than one-tenth

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of 1% of its native
habitats remaining.

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Tragic is what the ecologist Wes
Jackson has called the plowing

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up of this prairie region.

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One of the two or
three worst atrocities

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committed by Americans.

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Not that I'd ever cared.

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It's hard to care about
a wild place you've never

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seen or known.

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It in those short
flooded months of 1993,

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I witnessed a blurry reflection
of what the land used to be--

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a rich ecology of wetlands
and savannas and prairies

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alive with movement in
migration, alive with power.

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Under its influence, I felt
closer to my home landscape

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than ever before.

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So when that power
slipped from view,

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I was surprised to find myself
longing to chase after it.

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Having spent most of my life
wanting to leave the Midwest,

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where might I find
the reasons to stay?

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To commit?

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Death by pheasant didn't
immediately come to mind.

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Although in the
wake of the floods,

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death was a part
of what I long for.

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Or rather, the possibility
of a certain kind of death.

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The kind in which you become
lost in a vast landscape

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and die as Edward Abbey
has described it--

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alone on rock, under the sun,
at the brink of the unknown,

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like a wolf, like a great bird.

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This possibility
helped define for me

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what a wilderness is a
place worthy of respect,

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a place of consequence, and
a kind of fearful freedom.

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My German friend Elmore
calls this freedom

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"vogelfrei," which loosely
translates into free as a bird.

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Far from the positive spin,
we've put on this phrase

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"Vogelfrei refers to the
state of being cast out

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from the tribe."

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So free.

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You'll die in the
open, unburied,

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to be picked apart by the birds.

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It's a state of fear and
vulnerability and movement.

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One that might, especially here
in the agricultural Midwest,

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a place seemingly without
fang or claw or talon

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make us more attentive
to the natural world,

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more humbled by its
power to transform us.

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At first flush, my
collision with a pheasant

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didn't seem to hold that
kind of possibility.

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But it could have.

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If, for example,
this had happened

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to me as a child or adolescent
or as a member of a new age

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men's group, I might have
made something more of it.

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When I was a boy, some of my
favorite comic book characters

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were mutations of
man and animal--

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Mole Man who plays a
significant role in an earlier

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chapter for all you, comic
book geeks, and Spider-Man

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and Captain America's
ally, The Falcon.

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Imagine the comic
book story that could

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have been developed this time.

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"A mild-mannered English
professor is struck in the head

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by a wayward pheasant, his
blood mingling with the birds

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while coincidentally,
a cosmic tsunami

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from a distant stellar explosion
soaks the whole scene in gamma

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radiation.

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Emerging from the smoldering
rubble, Pheasant Man.

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No, Super Pheasant Man.

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Super Pheasant Man or
mild-mannered professor

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finds he has acquired the
birds more powerful features.

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It's pride and daring.

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It's resilience.

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It's colorful head feathers.

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Learning to use them
for the good of humanity

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while at the same time,
fighting the darker

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side of his condition,
namely a propensity

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for polygamy and loose stools."

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But I was not a boy when I
met that unlucky pheasant

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on Highway 30, which is too bad.

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Because for a long
time afterward,

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I found nothing particularly
uplifting about the experience.

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Instead, I saw my life
and death made a joke.

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Imagine the regional headlines.

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"Iowa Man Killed by
Pheasant, Mother Files

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for Hunting License."

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Imagine the funeral where
in the middle of singing

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I'll Fly Away, one of my more
successful cousins whispers

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to his wife, "You know, it
wasn't even a cock pheasant

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that killed him."

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Imagine the members of that
hypothetical men's group, who

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in their willful
mourning of my death,

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botch up the spirit
animal ritual

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and condemn my
soul to be born not

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on the wings of an
eagle or a falcon

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but on those of a pheasant--

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stubby and
insufficient, struggling

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to get us both off
the ground, never

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getting more than maybe
15 feet toward heaven

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before dropping back down to
Earth with a thud and a cluck.

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No, thank you.

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I do not wish to become one
with the pheasant in this life

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or in the next.

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It's seen through the history
of the land, this bird

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and I have been
colliding for centuries.

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Having evolved together
on the grasslands

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of distant continents, we were
both brought to this country

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by the accidents of nature
and technology and desire.

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A native of China, the
pheasant was introduced to Iowa

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by accident during
a snowstorm in 1901

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in Cedar Falls that blew
down confinement fences

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and released 2000 of the
birds into the prairie night.

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They remained here ever
since, sharing with my people

00:09:51.440 --> 00:09:54.230 align:middle line:84%
an affinity for the northern
plains to which we've both

00:09:54.230 --> 00:09:57.140 align:middle line:84%
become anchored by the
peculiarities of the soil.

00:09:57.140 --> 00:10:01.310 align:middle line:84%
This soil loss in glacial
till is migrant and invasive

00:10:01.310 --> 00:10:04.250 align:middle line:84%
like us, having been carried
here from ancient Canada

00:10:04.250 --> 00:10:06.180 align:middle line:90%
by wind and by ice.

00:10:06.180 --> 00:10:08.630 align:middle line:84%
Its rich organic
loam black as oil

00:10:08.630 --> 00:10:11.140 align:middle line:84%
brought my farmer
ancestors to the region

00:10:11.140 --> 00:10:13.850 align:middle line:84%
and has, at the same
time, help close the range

00:10:13.850 --> 00:10:16.400 align:middle line:84%
of the ring-necked pheasant,
lacing the bird's grip

00:10:16.400 --> 00:10:18.230 align:middle line:90%
with calcium carbonate.

00:10:18.230 --> 00:10:21.080 align:middle line:84%
Because the ring-necked requires
an abundance of this mineral,

00:10:21.080 --> 00:10:24.980 align:middle line:84%
it doesn't stray very far, not
even a few hundred miles south

00:10:24.980 --> 00:10:28.370 align:middle line:84%
into the great prairies
of say, lower Illinois.

00:10:28.370 --> 00:10:31.910 align:middle line:84%
So the pheasant and I remain
settlers in this region,

00:10:31.910 --> 00:10:34.790 align:middle line:84%
watching as others
of our kind move on.

00:10:34.790 --> 00:10:36.410 align:middle line:84%
As such, we have
come to share some

00:10:36.410 --> 00:10:39.860 align:middle line:84%
of the same enemies like the
fence row to fence row get big

00:10:39.860 --> 00:10:44.300 align:middle line:84%
or get out agricultural
policies of the 1970s and 80s

00:10:44.300 --> 00:10:46.970 align:middle line:84%
that led to the farm
crisis of my youth

00:10:46.970 --> 00:10:51.170 align:middle line:84%
to the flight and impoverishment
of countless rural families.

00:10:51.170 --> 00:10:54.830 align:middle line:84%
For the pheasant as well, this
fence row to fence row world

00:10:54.830 --> 00:10:57.070 align:middle line:84%
has held its own kind
of impoverishment--

00:10:57.070 --> 00:10:59.408 align:middle line:84%
a destruction of
habitat so thorough

00:10:59.408 --> 00:11:01.200 align:middle line:84%
that 200 pheasants have
been known to crowd

00:11:01.200 --> 00:11:04.910 align:middle line:84%
a shelter built only
a 200 yards long.

00:11:04.910 --> 00:11:07.490 align:middle line:84%
In such a bare naked
world, a good blizzard

00:11:07.490 --> 00:11:10.970 align:middle line:84%
like the one in
1975 has the power

00:11:10.970 --> 00:11:13.130 align:middle line:84%
to wipe out 80% of
a local pheasant

00:11:13.130 --> 00:11:16.340 align:middle line:90%
population in a single evening.

00:11:16.340 --> 00:11:18.440 align:middle line:84%
Yet in sharing
enemies, we have also

00:11:18.440 --> 00:11:20.070 align:middle line:90%
been together the common enemy.

00:11:20.070 --> 00:11:22.230 align:middle line:84%
To the prairie
chicken for instance,

00:11:22.230 --> 00:11:25.610 align:middle line:84%
one of the many native citizens
that had the unfortunate luck

00:11:25.610 --> 00:11:28.000 align:middle line:84%
to proceed us here
in the heartland.

00:11:28.000 --> 00:11:29.710 align:middle line:84%
For almost a century,
European settlers

00:11:29.710 --> 00:11:33.010 align:middle line:84%
hunted and plowed down prairie
chicken populations in Iowa.

00:11:33.010 --> 00:11:35.530 align:middle line:84%
But the ring-necked pheasant
has also played a role--

00:11:35.530 --> 00:11:38.770 align:middle line:84%
destroying the prairie chickens
eggs, occupying its nests,

00:11:38.770 --> 00:11:41.440 align:middle line:84%
and interrupting,
seemingly out of spite,

00:11:41.440 --> 00:11:43.810 align:middle line:90%
its dancing ground rituals.

00:11:43.810 --> 00:11:46.240 align:middle line:84%
Some argue that restoring
prairie chicken populations

00:11:46.240 --> 00:11:49.150 align:middle line:84%
will have to coincide with
significant reductions

00:11:49.150 --> 00:11:51.130 align:middle line:90%
in pheasant populations.

00:11:51.130 --> 00:11:53.200 align:middle line:84%
But reducing pheasant
numbers around here

00:11:53.200 --> 00:11:56.770 align:middle line:84%
is about as easy and
popular as reducing our own.

00:11:56.770 --> 00:12:00.850 align:middle line:84%
We hunt this bird to the tune of
about a million a half a year.

00:12:00.850 --> 00:12:03.590 align:middle line:84%
It's one of our biggest
tourist attractions.

00:12:03.590 --> 00:12:06.850 align:middle line:84%
But I wonder, too, if we
don't see in this pheasant,

00:12:06.850 --> 00:12:09.700 align:middle line:84%
at some unconscious
level, a dark reflection

00:12:09.700 --> 00:12:12.880 align:middle line:84%
of our own troubling history
in American grasslands,

00:12:12.880 --> 00:12:15.520 align:middle line:84%
our role as ecological
party crashers,

00:12:15.520 --> 00:12:18.160 align:middle line:84%
as culture wreckers,
our role, ultimately,

00:12:18.160 --> 00:12:20.350 align:middle line:90%
as killers and thieves.

00:12:20.350 --> 00:12:23.470 align:middle line:84%
To question the pheasants' claim
on the land is in some, way,

00:12:23.470 --> 00:12:25.948 align:middle line:90%
to question our own.

00:12:25.948 --> 00:12:27.490 align:middle line:84%
It's unfair, of
course, and dangerous

00:12:27.490 --> 00:12:30.250 align:middle line:84%
to project our sins
onto another species.

00:12:30.250 --> 00:12:33.250 align:middle line:84%
But the pheasants need no
worry about sharing the blame.

00:12:33.250 --> 00:12:36.190 align:middle line:84%
Hardly anyone around here
gives them a second thought.

00:12:36.190 --> 00:12:37.960 align:middle line:84%
That indifference was
part of my problem

00:12:37.960 --> 00:12:40.120 align:middle line:84%
when I finally began
searching while living

00:12:40.120 --> 00:12:43.840 align:middle line:84%
in Belle Plaine for reasons to
care about my home landscape.

00:12:43.840 --> 00:12:46.060 align:middle line:84%
In relation to that
bird as to most

00:12:46.060 --> 00:12:49.610 align:middle line:84%
of the familiar transplanted
planet wildlife around me,

00:12:49.610 --> 00:12:51.250 align:middle line:90%
I felt nothing.

00:12:51.250 --> 00:12:52.680 align:middle line:90%
The pheasant was common.

00:12:52.680 --> 00:12:55.480 align:middle line:84%
And the last thing I wanted
to feel as a Midwesterner

00:12:55.480 --> 00:12:56.620 align:middle line:90%
was common.

00:12:56.620 --> 00:12:58.300 align:middle line:84%
Since early
adolescence, I'd been

00:12:58.300 --> 00:13:01.240 align:middle line:84%
fleeing a sense of inadequacy
shared by many in this region,

00:13:01.240 --> 00:13:04.210 align:middle line:84%
a sense of self marked, as
Minnesotan Patricia Hampl

00:13:04.210 --> 00:13:07.390 align:middle line:84%
has said, by an indelible
brand of innocence

00:13:07.390 --> 00:13:10.300 align:middle line:84%
which is to be marked
by an absence of vacancy

00:13:10.300 --> 00:13:11.910 align:middle line:90%
by nothing at all.

00:13:11.910 --> 00:13:15.790 align:middle line:84%
For Midwesterners like me,
the complex, the worthy

00:13:15.790 --> 00:13:18.280 align:middle line:84%
seemed always to
be found elsewhere.

00:13:18.280 --> 00:13:23.270 align:middle line:84%
Not here in this ordinary
place, this ordinary life.

00:13:23.270 --> 00:13:25.490 align:middle line:84%
Not surprisingly, in
the years immediately

00:13:25.490 --> 00:13:28.730 align:middle line:84%
following the flood, I didn't
seek that new relationship

00:13:28.730 --> 00:13:32.180 align:middle line:84%
to the Midwest in the familiar
land immediately around me

00:13:32.180 --> 00:13:35.090 align:middle line:84%
but by traveling instead to
distant and in my imagination,

00:13:35.090 --> 00:13:37.580 align:middle line:84%
more exotic landscapes
such as the Black

00:13:37.580 --> 00:13:40.670 align:middle line:84%
Hills and Badlands in
Western South Dakota.

00:13:40.670 --> 00:13:44.630 align:middle line:84%
What I discovered in those
places did indeed transform me.

00:13:44.630 --> 00:13:47.840 align:middle line:84%
Near one cave, I saw
for the first time elk

00:13:47.840 --> 00:13:51.530 align:middle line:84%
bugling and mating at home
on their native prairies.

00:13:51.530 --> 00:13:54.230 align:middle line:84%
While sitting in a
fly-plague prairie dog town,

00:13:54.230 --> 00:13:56.930 align:middle line:84%
I saw for the first
time a bison ball

00:13:56.930 --> 00:13:58.970 align:middle line:90%
wallowing in the brown dust.

00:13:58.970 --> 00:14:01.040 align:middle line:84%
On the grasslands
near Bear Butte,

00:14:01.040 --> 00:14:03.290 align:middle line:84%
where Crazy Horse
once saw vision,

00:14:03.290 --> 00:14:05.570 align:middle line:84%
I saw for the
first time a falcon

00:14:05.570 --> 00:14:08.690 align:middle line:84%
stooped to kill a duck, the
native cycles of predator

00:14:08.690 --> 00:14:12.290 align:middle line:84%
and prey of wild
death still lingering.

00:14:12.290 --> 00:14:15.178 align:middle line:84%
Even vogelfrei, that
fearful freedom--

00:14:15.178 --> 00:14:16.970 align:middle line:84%
I felt it for the first
time in this region

00:14:16.970 --> 00:14:20.540 align:middle line:84%
while walking lost in the
deep earth of the Badlands.

00:14:20.540 --> 00:14:22.760 align:middle line:84%
My journey through these
places toward commitment

00:14:22.760 --> 00:14:26.570 align:middle line:84%
has been awkward, fragmented,
and at times, pathetic,

00:14:26.570 --> 00:14:28.100 align:middle line:90%
even comic.

00:14:28.100 --> 00:14:30.500 align:middle line:84%
Yet the significance of
those experiences cannot be

00:14:30.500 --> 00:14:31.820 align:middle line:90%
underestimated.

00:14:31.820 --> 00:14:34.730 align:middle line:84%
How they have worked to
cure a lifetime of ignorance

00:14:34.730 --> 00:14:38.120 align:middle line:84%
and indifference, how
to use spiritual terms--

00:14:38.120 --> 00:14:41.270 align:middle line:84%
they have filled
what once was empty.

00:14:41.270 --> 00:14:44.210 align:middle line:84%
But if the spiritual journey to
a place begins, as some claim,

00:14:44.210 --> 00:14:48.230 align:middle line:84%
with mortal fear, then it was
not the bison or the falcon

00:14:48.230 --> 00:14:50.120 align:middle line:84%
or the Badlands
that first drew me

00:14:50.120 --> 00:14:52.940 align:middle line:84%
closer to the region in
which I'd been raised.

00:14:52.940 --> 00:14:54.960 align:middle line:90%
It was the pheasant.

00:14:54.960 --> 00:14:57.870 align:middle line:84%
That particular baby
pheasant there on a highway

00:14:57.870 --> 00:15:01.650 align:middle line:84%
in Eastern Iowa which almost,
as my sister Alison would say,

00:15:01.650 --> 00:15:04.050 align:middle line:90%
rocked my world.

00:15:04.050 --> 00:15:06.510 align:middle line:84%
In a sense, that's
exactly what it did.

00:15:06.510 --> 00:15:08.850 align:middle line:84%
It made me wake up, become
more observant of what's

00:15:08.850 --> 00:15:10.410 align:middle line:90%
lurking in the margins.

00:15:10.410 --> 00:15:12.810 align:middle line:84%
And what's lurking
there despite the rumors

00:15:12.810 --> 00:15:16.520 align:middle line:84%
is the possibility of surprise,
of accident, of death.

00:15:16.520 --> 00:15:19.590 align:middle line:84%
And if it's possible in this
overdetermined landscape

00:15:19.590 --> 00:15:22.020 align:middle line:84%
for a pheasant to
kill a man, then why

00:15:22.020 --> 00:15:24.660 align:middle line:84%
not also the possibility
of restoration,

00:15:24.660 --> 00:15:28.210 align:middle line:90%
renewal, and at last, hope?

00:15:28.210 --> 00:15:30.170 align:middle line:84%
That's a romantic
stretch, I know.

00:15:30.170 --> 00:15:32.230 align:middle line:84%
And at the time of
the incident itself,

00:15:32.230 --> 00:15:36.130 align:middle line:84%
I didn't feel particularly
worshipful of its surprise.

00:15:36.130 --> 00:15:38.470 align:middle line:84%
As I sat in the
car wiping my face,

00:15:38.470 --> 00:15:42.500 align:middle line:84%
I just felt lucky
and then ridiculous.

00:15:42.500 --> 00:15:46.100 align:middle line:84%
The whole thing was so absurd,
it might have been a dream.

00:15:46.100 --> 00:15:48.250 align:middle line:84%
I carefully leaned my
head out the window

00:15:48.250 --> 00:15:50.240 align:middle line:84%
to see if the pheasant
was still on the road.

00:15:50.240 --> 00:15:51.348 align:middle line:90%
It wasn't.

00:15:51.348 --> 00:15:53.140 align:middle line:84%
I thought about going
back to see if it was

00:15:53.140 --> 00:15:54.910 align:middle line:90%
injured but decided against it.

00:15:54.910 --> 00:15:57.003 align:middle line:84%
After all, it was
only a pheasant.

00:15:57.003 --> 00:15:59.170 align:middle line:84%
Besides, I was late for
work where in a few minutes,

00:15:59.170 --> 00:16:01.180 align:middle line:84%
I would be taking my
own precarious flight

00:16:01.180 --> 00:16:04.630 align:middle line:84%
to the airwaves across the
flooded land to students

00:16:04.630 --> 00:16:08.180 align:middle line:84%
I would never see,
never truly know.

00:16:08.180 --> 00:16:11.180 align:middle line:84%
I started the car and he's
back onto the highway.

00:16:11.180 --> 00:16:13.790 align:middle line:84%
As I approach cruising speed,
I saw something move out

00:16:13.790 --> 00:16:14.840 align:middle line:90%
of the corner of my eye.

00:16:14.840 --> 00:16:17.252 align:middle line:84%
I jerked, sort of,
in the car, a little.

00:16:17.252 --> 00:16:20.300 align:middle line:84%
A feather-- an ordinary
brown feather then

00:16:20.300 --> 00:16:21.698 align:middle line:90%
another and another.

00:16:21.698 --> 00:16:23.240 align:middle line:84%
There must have been
a dozen floating

00:16:23.240 --> 00:16:25.070 align:middle line:84%
in the breeze of
the open window.

00:16:25.070 --> 00:16:26.675 align:middle line:90%
They tickled and annoyed me.

00:16:26.675 --> 00:16:29.150 align:middle line:84%
Yet for reasons, I
still can't explain.

00:16:29.150 --> 00:16:31.520 align:middle line:84%
I kept a window
open just a crack,

00:16:31.520 --> 00:16:34.670 align:middle line:84%
enough to keep the wind feathers
dancing about the cabin.

00:16:34.670 --> 00:16:38.300 align:middle line:84%
And that's how I, the man
almost killed by a pheasant,

00:16:38.300 --> 00:16:41.450 align:middle line:84%
drove the rest of those
miles touched by its feathers

00:16:41.450 --> 00:16:42.560 align:middle line:90%
in flight.

00:16:42.560 --> 00:16:44.690 align:middle line:90%
Touched by an intimacy is rare.

00:16:44.690 --> 00:16:48.200 align:middle line:84%
And welcome in my tragic country
as laughter and a storm."

00:16:48.200 --> 00:17:02.010 align:middle line:90%


00:17:02.010 --> 00:17:04.500 align:middle line:84%
You know, I've read that
piece around the country.

00:17:04.500 --> 00:17:06.630 align:middle line:84%
And some people challenge
the truth of it.

00:17:06.630 --> 00:17:08.588 align:middle line:84%
I don't want to get in
that discussion tonight.

00:17:08.588 --> 00:17:12.160 align:middle line:90%
But the physics of that--

00:17:12.160 --> 00:17:15.900 align:middle line:84%
but the next year, a guy was
driving down that same highway

00:17:15.900 --> 00:17:17.040 align:middle line:90%
in his pickup truck.

00:17:17.040 --> 00:17:19.560 align:middle line:84%
And a wild turkey
flew in his window.

00:17:19.560 --> 00:17:21.329 align:middle line:90%
And he flipped the truck.

00:17:21.329 --> 00:17:23.702 align:middle line:90%
And lucky, no one was hurt.

00:17:23.702 --> 00:17:25.410 align:middle line:84%
But this got a lot of
national attention.

00:17:25.410 --> 00:17:27.329 align:middle line:84%
Dave Barry wrote
up a column about--

00:17:27.329 --> 00:17:30.075 align:middle line:84%
I felt kind of
ripped like some how

00:17:30.075 --> 00:17:33.156 align:middle line:84%
a pheasant isn't good
enough for Dave Barry it

00:17:33.156 --> 00:17:35.450 align:middle line:90%
has to be a freaking turkey.

00:17:35.450 --> 00:17:38.000 align:middle line:90%