BY HARRY WEEKES
Lately, I’ve been thinking about time. Specifically, how other organisms experience it.
From my Western viewpoint and how people talk, discuss and complain about it, time is linear—inexorable, unrelenting and, it would seem, there is never enough of it.
In a recent discussion at school, we talked about time poverty, and time shortages, and whether our meetings should be more philosophical or more logistical. In an effort to arc toward the philosophical, I asked, “How do you think deer experience time?”
We changed topics.
Seriously, though, “How do you think deer experience time?”
If you work to answer this question, you will find it is almost impossible to get out of your own sense of time. “Well, of course deer know they are getting older.” “Even if they believe that time is cyclical, those cycles are mere eddies in the river of time, ultimately moving in one direction.” “Let’s say they do count winters. Well, then they know they are seven winters old—they never go backwards.”
What about species that don’t share our environment? What about humpback whales? They migrate over ocean basins and effectively keep their broad environmental conditions consistent. How do they mark the passage of the year? Of the seasons? And what kind of wrench does this throw into the mix: male humpbacks are the ones who sing. Over time, they add little pieces to their songs, which grow increasingly complex until, every so often, a totally new song emerges that is passed along and becomes the dominant song. How does that rewire time?
And what about the male red-winged blackbird that shows up in Indian Creek in the single digits of February? I am not talking about single-digit temperatures, but rather in the first days of February. So far, every year I have paid attention, a blackbird shows up sometime between February 1 and February 9. This year I saw him on February 8. He adds another confusing element in that I am certain this is not the same blackbird. Too many years have passed for it to be one bird. Is it the same family, though? Is it a member of the same population? Is it a totally novel bird each year? And why do they always show up in this first week of February, seemingly independent of conditions like snowpack?
What does this red-winged blackbird’s calendar look like? Is it entirely based on amount of light? And how does his calendar get set against other red-winged blackbirds that never migrate this far north? What is it like to be in a group where everyone’s calendars are just a little bit different? So even if we can convince ourselves that this bird’s years are built on a sense of time like our own, we then have to be open to hundreds of different versions of the calendar.
While I’d like to believe such mental rumination makes my linear sense of time dissolve, that’s not quite true. But something does happen when I go to the pond to confirm the blackbird has returned. While I left the house with a sense of urgency, at some point, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the willows for his dark form, the pace of the world changes.
The gurgling creek creeps in. The intermittent quacks of the mallards roll over me. The gentle and comical bobbing of gadwalls work a subtle, buoyant magic. The distinct light of early February warms my face.
Thinking about all that I do not know in a landscape simultaneously familiar and mysterious rearranges one’s sense of space, perspective, and time. Humility floats in, on the consistent calls of the chickadees, arriving like clockwork.
Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 53rd year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with Hilary and their two mini-Dachshunds. The baby members of their flock have now become adults; Georgia and Simon are fledging in North Carolina, and Penelope is fledging in Vermont.
