Who Dat?

There is a woman, about Jill's age, that I see from time-to-time walking her small dog on the path to the Causeway. Today we spoke for the first time, right after I stopped to photograph the sculptured, but completely natural nexus of the gravel path, where it channels the runoff water egressing down both sides of the old railbed into the wetlands below, adjacent to the forest on both sides of the trail.

Two days ago, I saw the fully extended left wing of a Barred Owl emerge from the screen of hardwood trees on the right side of the path. Just as I raised my eyes from the gravel surface to look down the track, the fully articulated wing extended. Beginning at the owl's shoulder, his wing pointed down at an angle, about seven o'clock, towards the ground. That’s all I could see of the bird, but I knew instantly what it was, even though I could not see the owl's body, nor its other wing.

A Barred Owl's wingspan is about five feet. It is a very large predator. Suddenly, the wing folded up and the bird disappeared. When I reached the spot where I first spied the white and tan speckled wing jutting from the screen of branches, I saw the large owl in a hardwood tree about fifteen feet off the ground, sitting and staring at me, perched comfortably on a branch, not a care in the world.

I took a couple of photographs of the bird and moved down the path. That was a couple of days ago. Today, I decided to take some photos of the surrounding terrain, because I think this is the same bird that Jill and I saw last November, hanging out in the trees on the opposite side of the path. This spot has a certain context. I suspect this owl makes a living off the creatures traversing the path. Regularly, rabbits, otter and host of other small animals cross from one side of the wetlands to the other using the raised path that bisects the swamp, a virtual straight line for over a mile. It is prime real estate to hunker down and have a veritable critter buffet. The mice and other rodents, the snakes and baby turtles and God only knows what else scurrying across that path, both day and night, provide that owl and the coyotes, bobcats and fisher cats, all they can eat.

I asked the woman, her name is Deborah, if she had seen the owl. She told me that she saw it two days prior, the same day that I noticed the wing extended across the path. She told me a story about this same bird that gave me shivers. A friend of hers, from Denver, came home last week to bury her mother, here in Vermont. After the funeral, her friend rode her bicycle through this very spot. The Barred owl was perched in the trees off the path to the right, where Jill and I first saw the bird in late November last year.

As her friend passed the bird, it took wing and flew beside her, passing her and lighting on a tree’s branch in advance of her position in the small oak trees alongside the path. It did this a couple more times much to the dismay of this grieving woman.

I know, personally, the spiritual experience, the holy connection that this woman felt. The moment is real, regardless of prosaic coincidence or mere serendipity. The spirit of the Owl appears to humans in need, reported by cultures throughout humankind's history, far back into the ethereal mist. I know this truth because a Snowy Owl showed me its totemic power on my sixtieth birthday, in 2015.

I wrote the following narrative as an email to a relative the day after my experience, the morning after my birthday hike.

"Saturday morning, I went solo for a ten mile walk from my house through the woods onto a causeway, an old, raised railroad bed that snakes across the lake, built during the 1940's to transport war materials through Canada during World War II. In the 1970's it was converted into a walking and bicycle path. It juts out onto Lake Champlain for about 2.5 miles, separating the northern islands from the approach to Burlington.

The wind was really blowing, about 20-25 mph. Walking into it, literally, one had to lean into its force. For those brief unpredictable moments when the wind abated, one fell forward, lurching, until checking one's progress to keep from stumbling.

The Causeway is built from huge pieces of Vermont quarried marble and granite. The waves were driven by the wind onto the square cut pieces on the windward side, spraying water high into the air and then falling back onto the path. It was cold and wet the whole way.

Suddenly, just at my turn-around at the cut, where the Causeway is sliced through to allow the sailboats to transit their way to Burlington harbor, I was startled by a blur of white off to my left. About ten feet away from the path, perched on a smooth chunk of marble, veined in ivory and tan, a Snowy Owl leapt into the air, while geysers of water sprayed us both. He faced directly towards me with his wings fully extended into the driving wind.

Without flapping his wings, he slowly regulated his height off the ground by using the updraft to climb to about thirty feet above the water, hovering, our eyes locked the whole time. Then he abruptly dove toward the water and coasted along the crest of the waves, barely keeping above the lake's surface and flying along the leeward side of the railroad bed to keep out of the wind."

The moment was spiritual for me. It was magical. Renderings of Snowy Owls are found on cave walls throughout Europe and are revered by the First Peoples here on this continent, too. Something special happened to me that day on my sixtieth birthday and it happened to that mourning woman on her bicycle two days ago, too, as she grieves for her mother.

I don't know if it portends anything, or is an omen or an auspice, but all I do know is the atavistic awareness of the palpable connection between that Snowy Owl and me, and that Barred Owl and that woman. It is undeniable to us. And I have never met her. But I know she shares this with me. The Snowy owl became my Totem that day, for the rest of my life. He is tattooed on my right calf and his image hangs from a chain around my neck. I never take him off.

Does that make me a pagan? I don't think so. I had never thought much about animism before that day, that is, other than from an anthropological point of view, culturally speaking, in a forensic way. But I do know this: nature, with or without intention, provided me with the best birthday present possible on that raw and windy November day in 2015. I speculate it also provided a moment of wonder and respite for Deborah's friend. I hope it was as cathartic for her as the majestic and soaring presence of that Snowy Owl was for me.