BY HARRY WEEKES
There are many ways to learn a secret — to overhear something, to have done something that turned out to have more significance than you imagined, to witness something you perhaps shouldn’t have, to have someone confide in you because they believe you are trustworthy.
I like to think it is this last bit that brought my secret to me.
I believe Loren Eisley once wrote about the magic of falling asleep in the woods. He said that, in awaking, it felt like all the things previously afraid of him had forgotten he existed. The world buzzed, as much because what hid now returned to its natural state before he trudged through.
I remember this story as a kind of “nature gets used to you” and think about it when ants or other insects eventually start crawling over me as I draw. (In my experience, ants get used to me the fastest.) Or, how mergansers, originally skittish and patrolling the distance, eventually move right off the dock if I sit still long enough.
I also worked very hard to have nature do this kind of forgetting with gray jays in Minnesota as a kid, where I sat as still as I possibly could, holding food in my cupped hands, hoping to have the birds land on me. I know now what I didn’t know then, that those birds were literally smarter than me. They were not fooled into thinking I napped.
I amble about Indian Creek. If I have Dachshunds with me, we scribble a route on the landscape more than we follow a coherent path.
During one of these walking sketches, I discovered something secret — where the whip-poor-will sleeps.
OK, it was not a whip-poor-will, but rather its local relative, the common poor-will.
I have written about these cryptic birds before. Nocturnal, highly camouflaged, able to go into a torpor where they reduce their metabolism by about 90%, they were known, wonderfully, by the Hopi as Hölchoko, “the sleeping one.” I, too, have gone by this name, but in English and by anyone who comes across my near daily naps.
The first time you learn a secret, you wonder, “Is it true?” Time passes and memory fades quickly. I am convinced this is why people end up sharing secrets — trying to keep them real for themselves.
So, after learning where the poor-wills sleep, which happened when they hopped up into the air, uncharacteristically, in the middle of the morning, I wondered, “Is that really where they sleep?”
A second pass through the area, days later, and again, the birds sprung into the air. Secret confirmed.
And the third time? Well, not only did I feel certain, but I felt something else, too.
I like to think that nature, in this case a small family of birds, got used to me. My shuffling approach. An appreciation of the whispered, “Sorry, sorry, sorry” at having bothered them, even as I hurried to get out of their way. How I didn’t come rummaging back through the rocks looking for them. It felt like I passed some unspoken test.
I don’t believe the birds thought any of this through. I do think something in their biology, something in the interactions, amounted to, “This periodic thing is not harmful. Be cool.”
These secretive birds let me know one of their most important secrets — where they sleep during the day. To be confided in by this small sliver of my backyard? Honestly, it just feels good. That part of the secret I will share.
Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 54th 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 has recently changed roosting sites to Connecticut.
