We live in Northern Monterey County, near California’s Central Coast region. Our back yard perches on the edge of a steep slope, chaparral mostly and dotted with coast live oaks, the slope dropping sharply to a seasonal streambed. Directly across, on the opposite slope rising just as steeply, a formable line of eucalyptus trees follows the opposite crest, their branches waving in the wind, creaking loudly, sometimes releasing a sharp crack, loud and ominous as a gunshot, as an overstressed limb suddenly breaks from a trunk or main branch to become deadfall in the decaying leaves thickly covering the ground. Whatever you think of these fire-prone Australian imports, all peeling brown bark and narrow gray-silver leaves, they’re striking, dominating the space about them.
Between the two sharply rising slopes, the atmosphere—in daytime often shrouded in marine fog but sometimes clear as crystal beneath the often cold sun of the Central Coast—is nearly always haunted with birds of prey, most often red-tailed hawks, red-shouldered hawks, turkey vultures, the occasional northern harrier. (At night, great horned owls hunt prey and perch in the trees, nearly invisible in the darkness as they offer their unmistakable plaintive moans). Our home is very near so-called Jeffers Country, named for the California poet who lived in a stone house set on the coast of Carmel Bay directly across from Point Lobos. Inspired by the incomparable Central Coast, Jeffers’ work offered a critique of humanity’s tendency toward solipsism, concern for self and security at the expense of an unhealthy isolation from what Jeffers saw as a divine natural universe.
Jeffers often prosecuted his arguments through symbolically deploying California raptors, the same ones flying around and over our home. One poem, “Rock and Hawk,” perfectly encapsulates Jeffers’ brand, one reason former poet laureate Robert Hass chose the name of this poem as title for his 1987 collection of Jeffers’ verse. But together as symbols of “Fierce consciousness joined with final / Disinterestedness. . .” the rock and the hawk, powerful as they are, stand embedded in a barely detailed Central Coast landscape. The same holds for another of Jeffers’ raptor poems, “Hurt Hawks,” which in two brief sections details the story of a wounded hawk, kept alive by the speaker of the poem, who finally dispatches the grounded raptor at the end: “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk,” he says. The story closes when he shoots the suffering bird:
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers, but what Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.
Though “Hurt Hawks” may be Jeffers most familiar lyric (it has been frequently included in literary collections), for me a more satisfying Jeffers poem is one that doesn’t feature a hawk, but an eagle. “Fire on the Hills” is actually a shorter work, but it offers a setting larger in scope, and one, unfortunately in these days of California’s worsening climate crisis, will be familiar to Californians, especially those who dwell outside of our metropolitan areas. In this poem, however, the brush fire, though personified as an intentional being, is clearly a part of a complex natural ecology, a “beater” that drives game, but not for any human hunter: The speaker of the poem observes:
The deer were bounding like blown leaves Under the smoke in front of the roaring wave of the brushfire; I thought of the smaller lives that were caught. Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror Of the deer was beautiful.
These lines express no sentimentality but offer instead the terrible beauty embedded in the wholly natural and ultimately beneficial destructive cycle of the natural world. The fire has driven out of hiding “smaller lives,” and in doing so, attracts an eagle, who “perched on the jag of a burnt pine” has come for the good hunting. The poem ends:
. . . the sky was merciless Blue, and the hills merciless black, The somber-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them. I thought, painfully, but the whole mind The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy.
This was the first Jeffers poem I ever read, and it struck me hard. Agency in this poem—like so many others of Jeffers verses—belonged most to the inhuman world, and that lesson is grounded in details of a central California coast landscape that in many places has hardly changed since Jeffers wrote of it in the early to mid 20th century. Hardly changed except, alas, that the fires are more severe.
Jeffers raptor poems, especially “Hurt Hawks,” echo in the works of other writers. Edward Abby famously wrote, “I’m a humanist. I’d rather kill a man than a snake” (20). But perhaps the clearest tribute to the poem was a short story that appeared in The Atlantic in 1940. Written by Nevada writer Walter Van Tilburg Clark, “Hook” tells essentially the same story as “Hurt Hawks,” but from the point of view of the raptor. Clark had a long-standing interest in Jeffers’ work and wrote his master’s thesis on Jeffers. And evidently Jeffers followed the career of the younger artist. In one of his letters, Jeffers writes,
Walter Clark’s work interests me. I didn’t know about his thesis at Vermont. I met somebody a few days ago who said Clark’s latest book was not good—“He can write stories about animals, not human beings.” I said, “The Ox-Bow Incident”? (347)
The book referred to was Clark’s story collection The Watchful Gods and Other Stories, released originally in 1950; “Hook” led off the collection. A 2004 reprint contains a foreword by Ann Ronald, who writes, “The germ of the story comes from Robinson Jeffers’s 1929 poem, ‘Hurt Hawks,’ though Jeffers’s bird’s final encounter with humanity is a noble one whereas Clark’s raptor meets mankind on less majestic and more enigmatic terms” (xiii-xiv).
The short story begins with the red-tailed hawk’s birth, “hatched in a dry spring among the oaks beside the seasonal river, and was struck from the nest early” (3). The story follows Hook’s experiences through several seasons, celebrating the exultances of his hungers, the satisfaction of the hunt and blood prey, the freedom of flight, the fight for a mate. In these descriptions Clark risks anthropomorphizing his raptor but he does so in service, as I read the story, in capturing in vivid detail the fierceness that Jeffers declared but sparsely described. And these descriptions are moving for the ways in which Clark embeds Hook’s hungers into a larger landscape. Here’s a portrait of Hook at the height of his power:
Throughout that summer and the cool, growthless weather of the winter, when the gales blew in the river canyon and ocean piled on the shore Hook was master of the sky and hills of his range. His flight became a lovely and certain thing, so that he played with the treacherous currents of the air with a delicate ease surpassing that of the gulls. He could sail for hours, searching the blanched grasses below him with telescopic eyes, gaining height against the wind, descending in mile-long, gently declining swoops when he curved and rod back, and never beating either wing. At the swift passage of his shadow within their vision, gophers, ground squirrels and rabbits froze, or plunged gibbering into their tunnels beneath matted turf. Now, when he struck, he killed easily in one hard-knuckled blow. Occasionally, in sport, he soared up over the river and drove the heavy and weaponless gulls downstream again, until they would no longer venture inland. (8-9)
Hook’s power, however, can’t last. A Japanese farmer thinks the soaring hawk is a menace to his chickens, blasts Hook with a shotgun, badly injuring a wing. What was a given in the Jeffers poem becomes the crisis in the short story. Hook is forced to take what prey he is able as a ground dweller, fierce and angry but still dangerous to the smaller lives around him:
When the heavy rains returned, he ate well during the period of the first escapes from the flooded burrows, and then well enough, in the vulture’s way, on the drowned creatures. But as the rains lingered, and the burrows hung full of water, and there were no insects in the grass and no small birds sleeping in the thickets, he was constantly hungry, and finally unbearably hungry. (21)
Thus, he ultimately wanders into the perimeter of the Japanese farmer’s property, looking for a meal. The farmer discovers the broken bird, and sets his dog upon Hook, who defends himself fiercely, but ultimately his injuries and fatigue cannot rise to the call of his will:
In this last conflict, however, there had been some minutes of the supreme fire of the hawk whose three hungers are perfectly fused in the one will; enough to burn off a year of shame. (29-30)
In the end, as in the Jeffers poem, the injured bird is vanquished. The farmer’s wife, witness to Hook’s end, offers a final benediction, “Oh, the brave bird” (30).
Comparing the crippled hawk to a vulture, a scavenger surely not driven by a fierce will to dominate prey and vanquish opponents, emphasizes Hook’s plight. But vultures, as Clark surely knew, play an important role in the natural world. Jeffers, in a late poem, gave the scavenger species due respect, perhaps not evident in Clark’s story. “Vulture” describes an encounter between the speaker of the poem and a turkey vulture soaring overhead:
I had walked since dawn and lay to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling up high in
heaven
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I understood
then
That I was under inspection.
The speaker understands that he is in no danger from the great raptor: “These old bones will still work; they are not for you.” Even so, he wonders about the possibilities: “To be eaten by that beak and / become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes—/ What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life after death.”
Contemplating the integration of the human and non-human not only acknowledges the vulture’s familiar role in the myriad processes of the natural world, but it ennobles its life force as equal, if not greater, than that of human beings. Bird and human both seek an “enskyment,” achieved within a profound spiritual space, wherein takes place a fusion of dissimilar consciousnesses. Jeffers’ poem thus opens room for reimagining scavengers like the vulture not just as necessary role players in nature’s drama, but as admired animals, with their own qualities of natural beauty that also serve as vehicles for the human imagination to celebrate the non-human world. I don’t know if Gerald Haslam had this poem in the back of his mind when writing “Condor Dreams”—as Clark certainly had “Hurt Hawks” in mind when writing “Hook.” But Haslam’s short story, to me at least, seems to evoke a similar theme as the Jeffers poem “Vulture.”
The story is set in the Central Valley, where the protagonist Dan is about to lose his family’s vineyard, thanks to unwise expansion encouraged by bankers and underwritten by mortgage debt. Surrounded by valley tule fog, a discouraged Dan recalls an experience shared with his father before his untimely death. A heifer had died, and the father had left the carcass for the vultures, but it had also attracted something else, “a dot high against the mountains”:
Neither man said anything and they stood waiting: Perhaps the great condor might strip this heifer’s bones. As though tantalizing them, it approached slowly, so slowly, its white-splotched wings tipping, never pumping, as it sailed far above, then began to swing lower, its great shadow sliding over the acres. Finally, the antique flyer swooped down from the wind, and smaller, squabbling birds quickly bounded away and scrambled into the sky. As the condor began to feed, father and son turned and smiled at one another; they were gazing at a California older than memory. (3)
Despairing that he will lose his land, Dan now wonders if there were condors left up there ready to “clean his bones” (4). He thinks they’re all gone.
The following day, an old man, Don Felipe Ramirez, comes by to inquire for work pruning grapevines. Dan admires Don Felipe, partly for his work ethic but also for his stories, though his “peculiar tales” would be unwelcome in Dan’s current state of mind: “Don Felipe, more than half Yokuts, held a belief in the supernatural—which he said was natural” (4). Don Felipe once worked with an “old Indian named Castro on the Tejon Ranch,” perhaps a medicine man who could do “many strange things.”
That guy, one time he told me that this life we think is real isn’t real at all. He said we live only in the dreams of condors. He said that us Indians were condors’ good dreams, and you pale people were their nightmares. (7-8)
In his distress, Dan doesn’t want to entertain such stories. A sudden pain blooms in his heart, spreads to his arms:
A startled moment later, he hovered above a great gray organism that sent misty tendrils into nearby canyons and arroyos, that moved within itself and stretched as far north into the great valley as his vision could reach. It was . . . all . . . so . . . beautiful, and his anxiety drained as he skimmed wind far above the fog, far beyond it, as he rode his own returning breath, and below the mist began clearing. His fields focused as the earth-cloud thinned. The land too was breathing, he suddenly realized, its colors as iridescent as sunlight on the wings of condors. It was all so alluring that he stretched a hand to touch . . . touch . . . it. (8)
Dan soon recovers—an anxiety attack rather than a cardiac episode?—and will visit a doctor, but “Dan now knew a secret condor still dreamed” (9).
To quote Jeffers once again, “What an enskyment”! Impossible to tell if Dan is experiencing himself as a condor’s dream or if his memories of a now nearly-extinct raptor species conjures the return of the great birds.
And, as we know, these magnificent creatures nearly did become extinct. Writing for All About Birds, Yurok tribal wildlife biologist Tiana Williams-Claussen says that Prey-go-neesh or California condors
. . . disappeared from most of western North America in the 20th century. Prehistorically they ranged from British Columbia to northern Mexico. By the 1950s, their range had contracted to a small wishbone-shaped area in central and southern California. California Condor was among the first animals listed under the federal Endangered Species Act. By the 1980s there were only 22 condors left in the entire world, and the last wild, free-flying condors were captured for their own protection.
She writes that several release sites for the protected birds exist in California, Arizona, and one in Baja California. This May, two juvenile condors from the Oregon Zoo and Boise Center for Birds of Prey were released to Yurok ancestral territory, another kind of condor dream, especially since for Yurok people “Prey-go-neesh was amongst the first spirits of the world, and helped teach us how to establish and maintain balance, and to live in a good way.”
Hiking near the Big Sur coast, I saw one once, soaring high over the coastal bluffs. Could have been a dream, except this vision turned out to take a pretty good picture.
Sources:
Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. Ballantine, 1968.
Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. “Hook.” The Watchful Gods and Other Stories. 1950. U of Nevada P, 2004, pp. 3-30.
Haslam, Gerald W. “Condor Dreams.” Condor Dreams and Other Fictions. U of Nevada P, 1994.
Jeffers, Robinson. “Fire on the Hills.” The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt, vol. 2, Stanford UP, 1989, p. 173.
—. “Hurt Hawks.” The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt, vol. 1, Stanford UP, 1988, p. 377.
—. “Rock and Hawk.” The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt, vol. 2, Stanford UP, 1989, p. 416.
—. The Selected Letter of Robinson Jeffers 1897-1962, edited by Ann N. Ridgeway, Johns Hopkins P, 1968.
—. “Vulture.” The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt, vol. 3, Stanford UP, 1991, p. 462.
Williams-Claussen, Tianna. “Bringing Back Prey-Go-Neesh, The California Condor, To My Tribe’s Homeland.” All About Birds. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology. 22 May 2022. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/bringing-back-prey-go-neesh-the-california-condor-to-my-tribes-homeland/. Accessed 19 June 2022.
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