BY BRENT JON BARBER
I am a pediatric cardiologist, and in one hour I will enter the contagious hospital for morning rounds. But on this morning, I am on my blue road bike, trying to momentarily forget the pandemic. I climb to the top of Gates Pass and then point the nose of the bike east and begin my descent. Speed gathers. The howl of the Sonoran desert crescendos and then stabilizes at my ears. The sun crests the Rincon Mountains. Long shadows appear. Then, from my left, a Gambel’s quail bolts. She appears suddenly, her topknot bobbing frantically as she hustles across the street. A harried churchgoer, late to mass, with a ridiculous hat. Two blurred fluff-balls follow in hot-linear pursuit. Surely too small and amorphous to have organized skeletons and the miracle of tiny glistening organs. More like dust motes or smudged fingerprints. Where are my reading glasses? Are they the last survivors of the covey? Where is the father? They look more like the soot sprites from a Miyazaki movie than baby birds. But they pulse with adrenaline and electrons. Foot-on-the-gas metabolism.
Does this mother know the length of her babies’ legs? Has she even considered cars and bikes and hawks? Soon, the heat of the summer will be upon us. Hair-dryer heat. Hair-dryer meets straight-jacket-wrapped-in-cellophane heat. Will the babies survive? Will either last long enough to feel the cleansing summer monsoon rains? To smell the heavy wet creosote? To hear the river toads calling from green pools? The toads’ groans are the sound of a forest of saguaro ribs expanding.
As long as I’m asking questions, how much am I bending the wild earthly truth through my tight and contorted prism? Three quail hung with William Gambel’s name that means nothing to the quail. As I filter quail through my helmeted gyri, it sticks on the image of a little soot, a small side creation by a movie studio in Japan, irrelevant to their current race across the dry desert road.
I want to learn how to free this quail paradigm from my procrustean bed. Release it to its full-blooded Nature. These are the inspirations that can be felt on a bike, before the pragmatic costs of the day dilute exhilaration.
We have some limited knowledge of this plump desert bird. It eats mostly seeds and leaves. We can distinguish its mating song from its call to assemble the covey. 7.8 billion sapiens, one species clogging the roads, rivers and even the trail up to Everest. Ten thousand unique bird species, about forty species of quail if you count the Himalayan quail, although that was last seen in 1876. There are no leisurely strolls left for the quail. Some glabrous biped or machine is lurking around every corner.
If we really understood, deeply, just one creature on this planet, where could it take us? If you completely released the potential energy of all the atoms on the tip of a house key, you would have enough energy to light a city for a year. At least that’s what my high school science teacher taught us. What does it take to tap into that kind of potential? The potential in truth. Is there an atomic understanding?
Have others succeeded? At least on this side of the firmament? What about you Mary Oliver? Cactus Ed? Paco de Assisi? Buson? Charles D? Ralph Waldo? Luis! Alberto! Urrea!?
If achieved, we would lightly raise off the tarmac together and soar to understand a quail, a mountain.
The blur of my spinning front wheel intersects the trailing perpendicular brushstroke of quail. The trio reach the edge and dive to safety under a blooming palo verde. The four of us breathe.
Brent Jon Barber is a pediatric cardiologist who practices and teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he also rides his bike and does some birding with his wife and three sons. His work has appeared in Harmony Magazine, where his non-fiction won the Mathiasen Award.
Process Note: The inspiration for this piece of flash non-fiction did indeed come in a feathery flash of quail running in front of my bike one morning. During the pandemic I had to give William Carlos Williams a pediatrician-to-pediatrician shout-out, as “contagious hospital” is a nod to his poem “Spring and All” (how did he write all of that clear, geometric, and memorable poetry between patient visits?). Luis! Alberto! Urrea! got the final shout-out, as at the time of writing, I was happily avoiding medical journals by reading his wonderful and exclamation mark worthy Wandering Time!