Knowing What We Know

It's breezy and cool this morning, and there are changes in the trees lining spring creek. The rich greens of summer are fading to dull yellow. Scattered leaves of walnut, tulip, and river birch have begun to litter the ground.  Here and there are rogue blazes of red, on the sassafras and sumac, on the Virginia creeper climbing the bole of a sycamore.  There is a crunch and smell and feel of fall. The crickets are singing almost incessantly, and squirrels are cutting on hickory and bur oak. Summer is fizzling.

And 2020 is waning.  Its most tumultuous days might still lie in wait for election results or an earthquake or a declaration of war.  We don't know. Certainties are few compared to beliefs and opinions.  We don't know what caused the death of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of songbirds recently in the southwest.  It might have been a lack of food, a weather event, the influence of wildfires, or a combination of all.  But the birds are dead, and their demise will add to the 29 percent decline in the total number of songbirds over the past 50 years.  Twenty nine percent equates to three billion birds, or the loss of 1.5 per second over the past five decades.

Blue jays are fussing at the yard edge with an alarm call not easily ignored.  Perhaps a predator is lurking, a coyote or fox, and the jays have foiled its hopes of a surprise attack.  A cottontail a short distance away pauses mid-bite, its senses on high alert. 

I read a report yesterday describing the certainty of mass migrations of people in the very near future, within our own borders, as areas of the south and west become unlivable from the effects of climate change. Intolerable heat, a lack of water, crop failures and wildfires will gang up to force permanent evacuation.  Where the migrants land will wreak havoc on the infrastructure of municipalities. Ironically, in the years leading to this exodus there has been a great influx of residents to these same areas. Few are taking the news seriously. Yet.

We can be blindly and stubbornly unwilling to listen and accept facts. A cottontail whole heartedly considers the jay’s alarm, while a good portion of us choose to deny obvious warnings. We've seen droughts and floods, fires, heat waves, and each had their end.  “It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch.”

It's the first of October, and aside from an occasional day where a blue sky is painted white with smoke, all seems well in the Midwest.  Fall approaches, grain harvest is underway, early season hunters take to the field, leaf color maps light up.  We awake to crisp, invigorating mornings, feel a spring in our step, remember better years, and are spurred by an attitude of optimism.  We look to the future with expectations born decades ago. We are hell bent for normality, as if we don't know what we know.