Chimney Swifts and Quarantine (Written January 2021)

 

I was visiting a friend in Baltimore, a bird-lover who was taking me to the spot of a seasonal birdwatching attraction: the roosting of a great flock of Chimney Swifts in an old industrial chimney, still rising above its repurposed factory. Through some curious twist of evolution, Swifts roost on vertical surfaces, rather than upright, and are named because they roost communally in chimneys. Each fall, the Swifts returned to this industrial area for a few evenings on their migratory way South. Among the 15 or 20 people gathered to watch was a mother with her small boy, about five years old.

The boy and I struck up a conversation when he pointed to a picture of a lost cat on a flyer stapled to a telephone poll and asked me, “Have you seen that cat?”

“No, I haven’t seen that cat,” I said. “I don’t live in Baltimore.”

“I live in Baltimore,” he said.

“Oh, well I live in Washington, D.C. I’m here visiting a friend.”

“Washington?” he said. He looked at his mother as if for confirmation of something, then back at me. Then he exclaimed, “The news!”

Yeah, the news—way, way, way too much news.

Which was why I was grateful for this retreat to experience the natural world in the sky. More than seven months after the beginning of the pandemic, I’d had too many zoom meetings, too much time in front of a screen, too much social media, too much news, too much politics, too much panic and uncertainty and fear—and too much of all of it enacted in some virtual sphere outside of the real, natural world.

Mind you, this was October.

And I am one of the lucky ones. I work in the “information sector” in a job that can be done from my home with little disruption. My daughter, now 22, is launched into the world on her own, and I can wake every morning missing her but grateful I do not have to supervise remote learning while working. I am reminded of these blessings every day.

It turns out that at 60 I may have something else in my favor—my advancing age. Some recent research looking at people’s responses to the stresses of the pandemic in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found that adults aged 65 years or older had much lower rates of anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, or trauma- or a stress-related disorder than younger generations. The findings mirror those of other high-income countries, including Spain, Canada, and the Netherlands.

A couple of important caveats: these are older adults living in the community, not in nursing homes or retirement centers; and the data is from early in the first months of the pandemic. Still, the data suggest something interesting about the way people of different ages respond to a uniquely stressful event that has affected the entire human population. The authors surmise that older people may bring to the stresses and isolation of the pandemic features unique to their age group that have helped them to cope: the consolation of memories, the perspective that comes with having been through trials before and survived, a knack for savoring simple things in everyday life (a walk in the park, a conversation with a friend), and an appreciation for the quality of a few close relationships over having many superficial acquaintances.

These are a form of intelligence we know colloquially as “wisdom.” But wisdom, by definition, is a product of time and experience, only in the rarest of circumstances accessible to young people. While the rates of anxiety, depression and trauma-related stress were all under 10 percent for older people, the rates for people age 18-24 were staggering: 49%, 52% and 46%. Along with the revelation that 18 teenagers in Las Vegas had died by suicide between March and December last year, we can surmise that we have been witnessing an adolescent cataclysm in mental health.

The return to in-person schooling has been a fraught subject. I am well aware of the concerns that teachers and parents bring to the subject (and aware, too, that I speak from a position of privilege, not having to decide about sending a youngster into a school building).

But I fear that our young people--teenagers especially—are just missing out on too much. Even some partial return to school will not bring back, until the pandemic subsides, the ritual celebrations that are landmarks in a young person’s life: graduations, proms, sporting events that bring together students and the community in celebration. These are the real, true (as opposed to virtual) stuff of experience that leads to wisdom.

Which brings me back to the Swifts. As dusk fell, the birds began appearing from all points on the compass—as if called by some music pitched beyond the hearing of humans—and for the next 20 minutes or so would circle the chimney in an ever-growing gathering as the birds arrived, 500 or more, from every part of the sky.

Just before the sun dipped below the horizon, they began one by one, then in greater numbers, to dive into the chimney where they would roost for the night. As they dove, the circling flight grew tighter like the funnel of a hurricane, winding its way to a finish as the last of the birds disappeared for the night.

I have never seen anything like it. The memory of it—and my pictures and videos—will endure as a highlight of that terrible year. There is a music, a communal rhythm woven into the fabric of nature, and into our human nature as well. May this pandemic speedily end that we might return in person to celebrating birthdays and baptisms, brises and bar mitzvahs, first communions, graduation ceremonies and proms, weddings and funerals. These are own ritual gatherings, evolved over years to correspond to that music only you and I can hear, the real, true thing, the wisdom of our species and the only real news you need to know.

The Cesspool that is Political Facebook and The Need to be Heard (or The Only News You Really Need to Know)

 

Didn’t Paul Simon have a song long ago that went, “I get all the news that I need from the weather report….”?

I like that guy, the guy who knows what he needs to know (namely, should he wear a wool coat or a light spring jacket?) and what he doesn’t need to know. There used to be a lot of guys like that, I like to think, guys who picked up the newspaper (the print kind you hold in your hands) took a look at the weather and the sports page, then chucked the rest. As to his political opinions, he borrowed those—completely and justifiably without shame—from his family or peer group or other affiliations: his union, his church, his softball team. He didn’t live for politics, he didn’t spend hours arguing with people about it, he certainly didn’t go to “rallies.” He considered this (when he thought about it at all) to be one of the geniuses of the exceptional country he lived in—that you might vote every couple of years, might write to or yell at your congressman everyone once-in-a-while, might campaign for someone you especially liked, but otherwise you could go about tending your own private garden of happiness. In this he was a great and wise political thinker.  

What happened to that guy? Now he’s got a Facebook page and a Twitter account and is a fucking expert on everything—macroeconomics, epidemiology, foreign policy. The exceptional documentary flick, The Social Dilemma, as everyone already knows, is a forensic exploration, led by the young tech wizards who built these tools, of how the algorithms of social media—especially Facebook—are designed to both addict its users and manipulate them. And of how, when the medium is used for political “discussion,” the algorithm invariably divides people into self-reinforcing echo chambers.

Not discussed is what the user brings to this equation, and what he or she brings, I know from personal experience, is an enormous hunger to be heard, to have one’s voice amplified into the universe. I can still remember, long before Facebook, when it first became possible to engage in online “discussions,” when it first became possible to sit at your PC and send your opinions out to the world.

Magical! 

I think we have never gotten over it. I think I am no exception.

Growing up in Washington, a culture of over-educated know-it-alls, I started out early as a wannabe know-it-all. When I was maybe 15 or 16, I was watching a show called “Agronsky and Company,” in which some D.C.-based journalists would hash out the week’s news. It was so quaint. Martin Agronsky was an old school press guy who looked typecast to play the reporter who keeps a bottle of hootch in his desk. (In fact, I think he did smoke a cigarette on the set; this was the 1970s). He would host some other scribes and columnists—Peter Lisagor, George Will, Hugh Sidey, Carl Rowan, James Kilpatrick, Elizabeth Drew—and they would mix it up a bit. Sometimes, someone might get a wee bit heated, but really it was all very polite and friendly.

I liked it and I think I formed then a wish that I never quite articulated or said out loud—a wish to be one of those guys on the show. To be a Serious Guy With Opinions You Should Hear. In retrospect, this now feels to me like an appalling thing to aspire to but judging from social media today it seems like it is a desire not exclusive to over-serious teenagers marinated in D.C. head culture.

That social media has amplified and exacerbated our divisions is well known, an argument that has itself been swept up into the tsunami of argument and division: when Twitter shut down Donald Trump’s account, the over-weening power of tech companies to control speech became the new debate, leaving some of us to wonder—how in the world would Abe Lincoln have ever delivered the Gettysburg Address without his Twitter account?

I can remember when Facebook seemed to be a teenage kid thing; at some point the kids moved on to Instagram and Snapchat and (later) TikTok, and Facebook became a middle-age phenomenon. Some people think Zuckerberg is evil personified, but a wise friend I know thinks he’s just a “deer in the headlights” and that’s almost certainly true. Although the tech wizards in The Social Dilemma insist that the algorithm was designed from the beginning to monetize and manipulate our every online footprint, they may not have known when it started how it would be exploited politically, how it would be used by people (like me) as a megaphone, as a tool to quench the thirst for being heard (not to mention how it would be exploited by “actors” genuinely interested in sowing chaos). 

For political “discussion,” it was never going to be anything but a cesspool. Even in “real life,” and under the best conditions, debate about difficult public issues or controversies is plagued by the “Simple and Blunt” problem—which is that a simple and blunt answer, or slogan, is easier to communicate, more memorable, and often more attractive than an answer that is highly nuanced and strives to contain all the complexities of a complex problem. (And this problem is compounded by the fact that sometimes—rarely, but not never!—a simple, blunt answer is the right one.)

On Facebook and Twitter, simple and blunt is all there is.

The architecture of Facebook was built for sharing pictures of your kids and your vacations and your cat or your dog. It is a truly remarkable tool for sharing those aspects of your life, for keeping in touch with far-flung friends. Facebook has brought me together—sometimes in “real life”—with more than a few old friends from childhood. Consider me conflicted and addicted.

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It was more than seven months after the beginning of the pandemic. I’d had too much isolation, too many zoom meetings, too much time in front of a screen, too much social media, too much news, too much politics, too much panic and uncertainty and fear—and too much of all of it enacted in some virtual sphere outside of the real, natural world.

And mind you, this was only October.

So I will always be grateful to remember the night when a birdwatching friend in Baltimore took me to see where a great flock of Chimney Swifts, migrating south, came to roost for a period of nights at dusk in the old industrial chimney of a repurposed factory. Unable to roost upright on branches as most birds do, Chimney Swifts cling instead vertically to surfaces, and are so=named because they roost communally in the safety of brick chimneys.

We arrived about 6:45 and waited around scanning the sky for more than 30 minutes, wondering if they had migrated further south; the Swifts had been showing up for several nights already, attracting each night a small crowd of locals, birdwatchers and others in the know. Among the 15 or 20 people gathered to watch the night I was there was a mother with her small boy, about five years old.

The boy and I struck up a conversation when he pointed to a picture of a lost cat on a flyer stapled to a telephone poll and asked me, “Have you seen that cat?”

“No, I haven’t seen that cat,” I said. “I don’t live in Baltimore.”

“I live in Baltimore,” he said.

“Oh, well I live in Washington, D.C. I’m here visiting a friend of mine.”

“Washington?” he said. He looked at his mother as if for confirmation of something, then back at me. Then he exclaimed, “The news!”

Yeah, the news—way, way, way too much news.

Slowly as dusk fell, the birds began appearing from all points on the compass—as if called by some music pitched beyond the hearing of humans—and for the next 20 minutes or so would circle the chimney, the gathering ever growing as the birds kept arriving from every part of the sky, until there were likely more than 500 of them in a great communal flight around the chimney.

And then at some point—again determined by some innate clock or communal signaling—they began one by one, then in greater numbers, to dive into the chimney where they would roost for the night. (How is it decided who gets to go to sleep first?) As they dove, the circling flight grew tighter like the funnel of a hurricane winding and winding its way to a finish as the last of the birds disappeared for the night.

I have never seen anything like it. The memory of it—and my pictures and videos—will endure as a highlight of that terrible year. Communal rhythms, a music understood only or best, by the species for whom it is intended, are woven into the fabric of nature. Into our human nature as well; birthdays, baptisms and brises and bar mitzvahs, first communions, graduation ceremonies and proms, weddings and funerals—may this cursed pandemic speedily pass so that we might return to these . For they are the ritual gatherings we have evolved over years to correspond to that music that only you and I can hear, and the only news you really need to know.