The other day, I saw something very striking and beautiful, somewhere you wouldn’t expect to find such a thing.
It was the early evening and I was headed out of the office, fumbling with my car keys in my pocket, thinking about the normal mundane end-of-day concerns: what were we making for dinner, did I need to pick up anything at the store on the way home?
But I paused in the parking lot.
It was one of those late October days that has seen every sort of weather. A downpour had just passed, and the sky was still half-full of big fat clouds, half-scattered by the wind. The sun was breaking through down in the southwest. Pick any handspan of sky, and you could see a dozen colours – from pewter to mother-of-pearl to molten bronze.
And flying northeast across the parking lot was a flock of crows. If you’ve lived around Langley for long, you know that in the colder months, the crows begin gathering every night in big, communal roosts. They stream out in the mornings and back at sunset, and this flock of a couple dozen was on their way home.
As the crows passed above the parking lot, dipping and playing in the gusty wind, they passed into one of the beams of sunlight that had pierced the clouds.
The crows’ wingtips lit up like sparks with each downbeat of their wings. The tips of the primary flight feathers glowed like silver.
I’ve never seen anything like it.
As far as I can tell, it was the natural iridescence of the crow feathers, reflecting the low and slanting sun, at just the right angle.
Pretty soon the crows flew out of that shaft of light and they stopped looking like they were shooting sparks with each wing beat.
That’s not something you expect to see in the parking lot next to the Costco.
Something I believe is that every place has its own kind of natural beauty. Vacant lots, reed-lined ditches, suburban cul-de-sacs where the streetlights catch the rain slanting down at night – there’s going to be something you can find there.
I miss most of it, of course. Because I’m busy, I’m working, I’m trying to get from A to B, I’m thinking about why that jerk up there hasn’t noticed that the traffic light has changed, all the usual distractions of life.
But I also think about what I’m missing.
The singer-songwriter Neko Case (who grew up in Tacoma, not too far from here) opened her song “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood” with the lyrics “Driving home I see those flooded fields, how can people not know what beauty this is? I’ve taken it for granted my whole life, since the day I was born.”
I remember the first time I heard that song, and thought about the flooded fields in autumn and winter, about the yellow-gold of the dead grass around their edges, about the way they reflect blinding blue sky or gunmetal thunderheads.
Sometimes I make the time to stop and get out of the car, and look the flooded fields, or the groves of cottonwoods, or the crows flying by at sunset.
