Well, it turned out I did not turn the pets in.
And it turned out the landlord was a lot more
sympathetic than I thought.
There was a reason why he hired me to be a maintenance man.
And one of them was he knew that I was sympathetic to pets.
It was his partner, the lawyer, that didn't like them.
So that was a surprise.
But we got out of Iowa City.
My wife got a teaching job in a nearby small town.
And when we moved out there in 1993,
one of the most bizarre and transformative experiences
of my life occurred.
And this is the title piece, "Man Killed by Pheasant."
"So I'm driving east on Highway 30
from our new home in Belle Plaine to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
It's a four-lane.
And because I'm an eldest child, I'm
driving the speed limit around 55, 60 miles per hour.
I'm listening to Jimi Hendrix cry Mary,
imagining, as usual, that I am Jimi Hendrix.
When in the far distance, I see some brown blobs hovering
across the Highway 1 then 2.
But where they move low and slow,
I suspect they're young pheasants.
As I near the place that they're crossing,
I look over the empty passenger seat
and into the grassy ditch to see if I can spot the whole clan.
Suddenly, there is a peripheral darkness.
The fast shadow of an eclipse and something
explodes against the side of my head
in a fury of flapping and scratching and squawking.
In an act of extraordinary timing,
one of the straggling pheasants has flown in my driver's side
window.
And being the steel-jawed action hero I am, I scream--
scream like a rabbit and strike at it
frantically with my left arm, the car swerving,
wings snapping, Hendrix wailing, feathers beating at my face
until at last, I knock the damn thing back out the window
and onto the road.
I regain control of the car, if not myself,
and pull over to cry.
That's the time I should have been killed by a pheasant.
For reasons peculiar to that summer, I recall it often.
It occurred for one while I was on my way
to teach a technical writing course at a nearby community
college--
a summer job to help me through grad school.
This distance learning experience
took place exclusively by radio wave with me
in an empty room on campus.
And my 15 students scattered at sites within a hundred mile
radius.
The technology was such that my students could see me
but I couldn't see them.
To converse, we had to push buttons
at the base of our microphones so
that each class felt like an episode of Larry King Live.
Judy from Monticello, hello, you're on the air.
The future of higher education, my supervisor called it.
And I never did get the hang of the camera.
I turn it on at the beginning of class
and there, on the big screen monitor,
would be a super close up of my lips.
I'd spend the next few minutes jostling the joystick,
zooming in and out like one of those early music videos
until I found a suitable frame.
Sometimes, my students would laugh at this.
And I'd hear them laughing.
But only if they pushed their buttons.
If there was an electrical storm nearby,
I wouldn't hear them at all.
On the way to such a displaced bodyless job,
a near-death experience had some additional currency
as did the larger natural disaster unfolding around me.
It was the summer of the Great Iowa Floods 1993.
And although aware of widespread human suffering in my state,
I was privileged to watch the whole thing unfold
more gently from the roadways of my rural commutes.
And what I saw was a wilderness of birds.
Beanfields suddenly became sheer inaccessible places
where herons stood piercing frogs in the shadows,
where pelicans flew in great cyclonic towers,
where bald eagles swung low to pick off stranded fish.
Perched on soggy neglected fence posts
were birds I hadn't seen since early childhood,
babbling some bluebirds and tanagers.
Their color and song drew my eye closer to the Earth,
to the ragged ditches full of forgotten wildflowers
and grasses, primrose and horsemint, big blue
and switch--
safe, at least for a while, from the Moors blade.
The domesticated landscape of my home had gone wild.
And I was mesmerized by it.
Toward the end of the summer flooding
with the dramatic presence of wild birds dwindled.
I thought a lot about Noah--
about those end days on the ark between the release
of the raven and the return of the dove,
between knowledge of a decimated landscape and faith
and one that through decimation had become reborn.
When it was all over, I thought I
understood Noah's first impulse once on dry land--
to get drunk and forget.
I lived my entire life in Iowa, the most ecologically-altered
state in the Union with less than one-tenth
of 1% of its native habitats remaining.
Tragic is what the ecologist Wes Jackson has called the plowing
up of this prairie region.
One of the two or three worst atrocities
committed by Americans.
Not that I'd ever cared.
It's hard to care about a wild place you've never
seen or known.
It in those short flooded months of 1993,
I witnessed a blurry reflection of what the land used to be--
a rich ecology of wetlands and savannas and prairies
alive with movement in migration, alive with power.
Under its influence, I felt closer to my home landscape
than ever before.
So when that power slipped from view,
I was surprised to find myself longing to chase after it.
Having spent most of my life wanting to leave the Midwest,
where might I find the reasons to stay?
To commit?
Death by pheasant didn't immediately come to mind.
Although in the wake of the floods,
death was a part of what I long for.
Or rather, the possibility of a certain kind of death.
The kind in which you become lost in a vast landscape
and die as Edward Abbey has described it--
alone on rock, under the sun, at the brink of the unknown,
like a wolf, like a great bird.
This possibility helped define for me
what a wilderness is a place worthy of respect,
a place of consequence, and a kind of fearful freedom.
My German friend Elmore calls this freedom
"vogelfrei," which loosely translates into free as a bird.
Far from the positive spin, we've put on this phrase
"Vogelfrei refers to the state of being cast out
from the tribe."
So free.
You'll die in the open, unburied,
to be picked apart by the birds.
It's a state of fear and vulnerability and movement.
One that might, especially here in the agricultural Midwest,
a place seemingly without fang or claw or talon
make us more attentive to the natural world,
more humbled by its power to transform us.
At first flush, my collision with a pheasant
didn't seem to hold that kind of possibility.
But it could have.
If, for example, this had happened
to me as a child or adolescent or as a member of a new age
men's group, I might have made something more of it.
When I was a boy, some of my favorite comic book characters
were mutations of man and animal--
Mole Man who plays a significant role in an earlier
chapter for all you, comic book geeks, and Spider-Man
and Captain America's ally, The Falcon.
Imagine the comic book story that could
have been developed this time.
"A mild-mannered English professor is struck in the head
by a wayward pheasant, his blood mingling with the birds
while coincidentally, a cosmic tsunami
from a distant stellar explosion soaks the whole scene in gamma
radiation.
Emerging from the smoldering rubble, Pheasant Man.
No, Super Pheasant Man.
Super Pheasant Man or mild-mannered professor
finds he has acquired the birds more powerful features.
It's pride and daring.
It's resilience.
It's colorful head feathers.
Learning to use them for the good of humanity
while at the same time, fighting the darker
side of his condition, namely a propensity
for polygamy and loose stools."
But I was not a boy when I met that unlucky pheasant
on Highway 30, which is too bad.
Because for a long time afterward,
I found nothing particularly uplifting about the experience.
Instead, I saw my life and death made a joke.
Imagine the regional headlines.
"Iowa Man Killed by Pheasant, Mother Files
for Hunting License."
Imagine the funeral where in the middle of singing
I'll Fly Away, one of my more successful cousins whispers
to his wife, "You know, it wasn't even a cock pheasant
that killed him."
Imagine the members of that hypothetical men's group, who
in their willful mourning of my death,
botch up the spirit animal ritual
and condemn my soul to be born not
on the wings of an eagle or a falcon
but on those of a pheasant--
stubby and insufficient, struggling
to get us both off the ground, never
getting more than maybe 15 feet toward heaven
before dropping back down to Earth with a thud and a cluck.
No, thank you.
I do not wish to become one with the pheasant in this life
or in the next.
It's seen through the history of the land, this bird
and I have been colliding for centuries.
Having evolved together on the grasslands
of distant continents, we were both brought to this country
by the accidents of nature and technology and desire.
A native of China, the pheasant was introduced to Iowa
by accident during a snowstorm in 1901
in Cedar Falls that blew down confinement fences
and released 2000 of the birds into the prairie night.
They remained here ever since, sharing with my people
an affinity for the northern plains to which we've both
become anchored by the peculiarities of the soil.
This soil loss in glacial till is migrant and invasive
like us, having been carried here from ancient Canada
by wind and by ice.
Its rich organic loam black as oil
brought my farmer ancestors to the region
and has, at the same time, help close the range
of the ring-necked pheasant, lacing the bird's grip
with calcium carbonate.
Because the ring-necked requires an abundance of this mineral,
it doesn't stray very far, not even a few hundred miles south
into the great prairies of say, lower Illinois.
So the pheasant and I remain settlers in this region,
watching as others of our kind move on.
As such, we have come to share some
of the same enemies like the fence row to fence row get big
or get out agricultural policies of the 1970s and 80s
that led to the farm crisis of my youth
to the flight and impoverishment of countless rural families.
For the pheasant as well, this fence row to fence row world
has held its own kind of impoverishment--
a destruction of habitat so thorough
that 200 pheasants have been known to crowd
a shelter built only a 200 yards long.
In such a bare naked world, a good blizzard
like the one in 1975 has the power
to wipe out 80% of a local pheasant
population in a single evening.
Yet in sharing enemies, we have also
been together the common enemy.
To the prairie chicken for instance,
one of the many native citizens that had the unfortunate luck
to proceed us here in the heartland.
For almost a century, European settlers
hunted and plowed down prairie chicken populations in Iowa.
But the ring-necked pheasant has also played a role--
destroying the prairie chickens eggs, occupying its nests,
and interrupting, seemingly out of spite,
its dancing ground rituals.
Some argue that restoring prairie chicken populations
will have to coincide with significant reductions
in pheasant populations.
But reducing pheasant numbers around here
is about as easy and popular as reducing our own.
We hunt this bird to the tune of about a million a half a year.
It's one of our biggest tourist attractions.
But I wonder, too, if we don't see in this pheasant,
at some unconscious level, a dark reflection
of our own troubling history in American grasslands,
our role as ecological party crashers,
as culture wreckers, our role, ultimately,
as killers and thieves.
To question the pheasants' claim on the land is in some, way,
to question our own.
It's unfair, of course, and dangerous
to project our sins onto another species.
But the pheasants need no worry about sharing the blame.
Hardly anyone around here gives them a second thought.
That indifference was part of my problem
when I finally began searching while living
in Belle Plaine for reasons to care about my home landscape.
In relation to that bird as to most
of the familiar transplanted planet wildlife around me,
I felt nothing.
The pheasant was common.
And the last thing I wanted to feel as a Midwesterner
was common.
Since early adolescence, I'd been
fleeing a sense of inadequacy shared by many in this region,
a sense of self marked, as Minnesotan Patricia Hampl
has said, by an indelible brand of innocence
which is to be marked by an absence of vacancy
by nothing at all.
For Midwesterners like me, the complex, the worthy
seemed always to be found elsewhere.
Not here in this ordinary place, this ordinary life.
Not surprisingly, in the years immediately
following the flood, I didn't seek that new relationship
to the Midwest in the familiar land immediately around me
but by traveling instead to distant and in my imagination,
more exotic landscapes such as the Black
Hills and Badlands in Western South Dakota.
What I discovered in those places did indeed transform me.
Near one cave, I saw for the first time elk
bugling and mating at home on their native prairies.
While sitting in a fly-plague prairie dog town,
I saw for the first time a bison ball
wallowing in the brown dust.
On the grasslands near Bear Butte,
where Crazy Horse once saw vision,
I saw for the first time a falcon
stooped to kill a duck, the native cycles of predator
and prey of wild death still lingering.
Even vogelfrei, that fearful freedom--
I felt it for the first time in this region
while walking lost in the deep earth of the Badlands.
My journey through these places toward commitment
has been awkward, fragmented, and at times, pathetic,
even comic.
Yet the significance of those experiences cannot be
underestimated.
How they have worked to cure a lifetime of ignorance
and indifference, how to use spiritual terms--
they have filled what once was empty.
But if the spiritual journey to a place begins, as some claim,
with mortal fear, then it was not the bison or the falcon
or the Badlands that first drew me
closer to the region in which I'd been raised.
It was the pheasant.
That particular baby pheasant there on a highway
in Eastern Iowa which almost, as my sister Alison would say,
rocked my world.
In a sense, that's exactly what it did.
It made me wake up, become more observant of what's
lurking in the margins.
And what's lurking there despite the rumors
is the possibility of surprise, of accident, of death.
And if it's possible in this overdetermined landscape
for a pheasant to kill a man, then why
not also the possibility of restoration,
renewal, and at last, hope?
That's a romantic stretch, I know.
And at the time of the incident itself,
I didn't feel particularly worshipful of its surprise.
As I sat in the car wiping my face,
I just felt lucky and then ridiculous.
The whole thing was so absurd, it might have been a dream.
I carefully leaned my head out the window
to see if the pheasant was still on the road.
It wasn't.
I thought about going back to see if it was
injured but decided against it.
After all, it was only a pheasant.
Besides, I was late for work where in a few minutes,
I would be taking my own precarious flight
to the airwaves across the flooded land to students
I would never see, never truly know.
I started the car and he's back onto the highway.
As I approach cruising speed, I saw something move out
of the corner of my eye.
I jerked, sort of, in the car, a little.
A feather-- an ordinary brown feather then
another and another.
There must have been a dozen floating
in the breeze of the open window.
They tickled and annoyed me.
Yet for reasons, I still can't explain.
I kept a window open just a crack,
enough to keep the wind feathers dancing about the cabin.
And that's how I, the man almost killed by a pheasant,
drove the rest of those miles touched by its feathers
in flight.
Touched by an intimacy is rare.
And welcome in my tragic country as laughter and a storm."
You know, I've read that piece around the country.
And some people challenge the truth of it.
I don't want to get in that discussion tonight.
But the physics of that--
but the next year, a guy was driving down that same highway
in his pickup truck.
And a wild turkey flew in his window.
And he flipped the truck.
And lucky, no one was hurt.
But this got a lot of national attention.
Dave Barry wrote up a column about--
I felt kind of ripped like some how
a pheasant isn't good enough for Dave Barry it
has to be a freaking turkey.