Stopover – Terrain.org

On fatherhood, migration, and the beauty of the in-between.

 
In the muted flatlands of Nebraska’s Platte River valley, the horizon stretches in bands—pewter river, ochre cornfields, graphite tree line, tungsten sky. It is mid-March 2012 in the cool, wet center of the Central Flyway, the migratory bird route that stretches from Costa Rica to Canada’s Northwest Territories. Bound generally by the Rocky Mountains on the west and Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico on the east, the Central Flyway hosts more than 50 percent of North America’s migratory waterfowl. And where it narrows along an eighty-mile stretch of the Platte River—its wide, shallow channels like slow-poured mercury beneath an overcast sky—it serves as a key stopover site for the world’s largest gathering of Sandhill cranes.

My 11-year-old daughter Juliet and I have driven 1,200 miles to view these tall, talkative birds. It’s a distance that seems significant to Juliet and me, folded as we were into our silver sedan for two straight days. But for the cranes, whose migration may take them from central Mexico to eastern Siberia and back, that would represent but one leg of an annual journey that has taken place in one form or another, and in one geography or another, for at least nine million years.

“The Platte River is new to cranes in the longevity experienced as a species,” says Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, the poet who invited my daughter and me to Nebraska to view the cranes. “Existing fourteen thousand years, maybe less, the Platte allows the perfect stopover for the annual grand council of cranes on the narrows of the hourglass flyway that was once the pathway of the Inland Sea.”

The pathway Juliet and I took east out of our Sonoran Desert home this spring was much less sea and much more basin and range. We’d had a dry winter; wildflowers were sparse along the route that turned north onto Interstate 25 out of Hatch, New Mexico. Brown and yellow-brown mountains and mesas funneled us north, as did the wide ribbon of highway edging the Rio Grande. But rust turned to gold and then finally green as we passed the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge where, two years earlier, the Sandhill cranes changed my spirit, if not my life.

I’m not certain how I convinced my wife Billie to join our daughters and me to view cranes over New Year’s in 2010. Like me, she appreciates a good panorama, but she’s never been one to pull on a pair of hiking boots to explore places more deeply. So on my camping and hiking journeys with Juliet and Ann-Elise, she often stayed at home. Perhaps, then, it was the promise of the (admittedly low-budget) hotel room in Socorro instead of a tent, or the fact that we’d be gone over a holiday. More likely, she joined us simply because she could spend time with us—and I wouldn’t force her out onto a nature trail. Not a long one, anyway.

In the middle of winter, central New Mexico’s Bosque del Apache is a landscape of contrasts: placid blue ponds next to the brown braid of the Rio Grande; amber bulrush and cattails against ashen, leafless cottonwoods; the low, cinnamon-colored Chupadera and San Pascual Mountains against a pale turquoise sky. In a word: sublime. Yet what appears as a natural wetlands caused by seasonal flooding from the Rio Grande is in fact man-made. The 5,700-acre refuge was established not just in recognition of the outrageous diversity of waterfowl and other migrating birds that overwinter there, but also because of changes settlers made to subdue the river, beginning with the arrival of Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century.

“A river that overflowed and dug new routes every season was seen as a problem—especially if your house got flooded or your crops washed away,” says literature by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge. “So, people started building dams and irrigation ditches to manage the flow of the river and divert water for crops, livestock, and homes. Taming the Rio Grande was great for people—but not great for wildlife. The once-grand river shrank to a shallow stream.”

Flooding was not only constrained but ultimately eliminated, and with it native plants such as chufa and millet. Not long after, migratory birds along with year-round native species began to disappear. With its designation as a federal refuge in 1939, however, the area now just a short distance from I-25 could be managed for wildlife and native plants, beginning with work by the Civilian Conservation Corps to restore the floodplains. Today, water is moved seasonally from the river through the refuge’s fields, wetlands, and ponds via a series of gates and ditches before it is returned to the river.

We planned our visit to the Bosque del Apache to be quick: drive the backroads surrounding the wetlands looking for wildlife once we arrived, settle onto a viewing deck for the evening, find a late dinner twenty miles up the road in Socorro, and then return to the refuge before sunrise the next morning, before the cranes would head out for the day. And before we’d make the six-hour drive back to Tucson.

What we hadn’t expected when we arrived in the amber light of the afternoon was that there weren’t any cranes. “Where are they?” Juliet asked as we walked a path beside one of the refuge’s marshes. Stepping onto an observation deck, we saw coots, mallards, and other ducks, and in a cottonwood to our left, a bald eagle, but no Sandhill cranes. Ravens worked the branches below the eagle, their croaks carrying across the reed-edged water. But where we had expected to find a gathering of cranes, there were none.

And then, as the winter sun sank behind us, we heard them—the otherworldly chortled bugles of the Sandhill cranes, flying in from farmers’ fields up and down the Rio Grande. In twos and threes and then in groups of a dozen, three dozen, a hundred, the cranes arrived, their thin legs trailing from the vases of their bodies as their long necks led them forward. They landed almost acrobatically before concentrating along the far shore.

My daughters oohed and aahhed as we pulled coats and scarves tighter, as the temperature dropped. My wife tucked into me, whether for warmth or joy did not matter—she had not seen cranes in the wild before—and, joined by other families and a host of long-lensed photographers, we watched the scarlet-capped cranes ruffle their gray feathers and hold congress in the shallow water as the sky grew dark. In a nearby pond a thousand snow geese turned the blue surface white, and in this wetland and the next, the birds’ raucous calls were a crazy delight, the chilled air filled with the strange, flocked symphony that resonated as deeply in the human onlookers as in the water and land beyond.

The next morning, Billie and I nuzzled the girls awake in the darkness, ate a quick breakfast, and loaded into the minivan. The hotel parking lot was a frenzy of people doing the same, all with the singular goal of driving to the Bosque del Apache to view the cranes and geese before the birds flew off for the fields.

Our headlights lit the two-lane road as we made our way south, through the crossroads of the village of San Antonio, and into the refuge. We found a parking space not far from the observation deck of the previous evening and, as quietly as possible, shuffled onto the deck, squeezing between two photographers. The eastern horizon was a shifting watercolor—plum to red, orange to yellow above low, purple mountains. As the sky lightened, the silhouettes of the cranes became more pronounced: hundreds of birds, dark legs straight, thick bodies hunched, heads nestled into the down of their backs. A single black duck trailed across the water, and then another. Unlike the previous evening, the surface was not smooth but instead rippled by the breeze, cutting in its chill. Finally, the sun crested the eastern mountains and, as if on cue, we all sighed in anticipation of the warming day, our faces glowing in the new light.

Then, all at once, a thousand or—who could know in this cacophonous scene?—ten thousand snow geese erupted from the far edge of the pond, an enormous, luminous flock of white birds reflected in the water and rising. To call it breathtaking is to settle for cliché, and yet that multitudinous release took our breath away. It likewise triggered the cranes, who themselves became more vocal, more active.

Yet even in all this avian glory, the girls had had enough. Amazing, yes, but terribly cold for these desert dwellers. So we loaded into the minivan and headed north out of the refuge toward San Antonio, where we would turn west onto the freeway. Driving now in the morning light, however, we saw what we could not on the drive south—lining the west side of the road, only yards away, hundreds of Sandhill cranes had settled in ice-edged ditches and marshes, closer than we’d ever been or could have imagined we’d ever be.

I pulled over. My wife and daughters understood.

Leaving the girls in the warmth of the minivan, I stepped quietly into a scattering of photographers and, like many of them, kneeled. The closest cranes were some forty feet away. Though a few of the Sandhills remained hunched from their nighttime sleep, most now moved around, cracking the ice at the top of the water, stretching their dusky wings, raising their slender necks and pale heads, foreheads bright red in the golden light. Behind them, just on the other side of the interstate, the soft peaks of the Chupadera Mountains drank in the light, becoming vermillion-tinged, the sage a kind of green-gray fire against the copper hills.

 The cold breeze was constant but seemed to be rebuffed in the glow of the birds, who stood three or more feet higher than the surface of the water. Like those around me, I snapped photo after photo. But then I lowered the camera and rose, closing my eyes so that the gurgling calls and snicks of the birds flowed over and through me. When I opened my eyes, many of the cranes were queueing to take off—not an airstrip, exactly, but a loose line of Sandhills near the middle of the watery plain where the birds flapped and stretched. I watched them launch, one at a time or in twos and threes. Were the hills to the west responsible for this breeze, or was it brought on by the birds as they took flight, a short run and leap into the pearly sky, water streaming behind them like a whip of light?

“Non-being is the greatest joy,” says Lao Tzu. In this moment, finally, I knew such joy: I was not myself, not a being, but I was present—a presence, a movement, energy, a part of something so much larger and more basic than myself, than my body or soul had known before. I was not flying with the birds, was not the birds, and yet I was the air around the birds, the smallest particles of the air passing through them, the water beneath them and the ice crystals atop the water, the lift in their wings and the hollow bones of their wings, the weaving of gray and charcoal and cream feathers and also the single feather that floats down to the surface of the pond, sinks to the bottom, decomposes, renews. I was renewed. Reborn.

My expectations are high as Juliet and I drive into Kearney, where we are staying with Allison and three other writers. The gathering of Sandhills along the Platte River in March is legendary even though, from Interstate 80, the cranes remain hidden. Yet the Sandhills represent only part of my expectations on this trek. This is the first extended road trip Juliet and I have taken by ourselves, and she is a different kind of traveler than her older sister. Where Ann-Elise is an outgoing and inquisitive explorer, Juliet—with her long, sandy hair, light skin, and braces—is shy, preferring to spend her time drawing instead of hiking. And while Ann-Elise can be quick to show her temper, Juliet can just as quickly withdraw. One is never fully prepared for parenthood, of course, but before Juliet was born, what preconceptions I had that our daughters would be similar, wanting and liking the same things—let alone those pursuits I most enjoy—were dispelled early on in my journey of fatherhood.

Yet Juliet, at eleven, reminds me of myself at that age. Like her, I spent hours at a time drawing. I would sketch a map of an imagined country in a long-ago time and then draw a walled city and fantasize about its industry, the armory, the royalty and soldiers who protected their home, the monsters in the dark woods beyond. (Thanks, Dungeons & Dragons.) Not long after my mother, sister, and I moved to Tucson from Kentucky, however, I was drawn less to the landscapes I created and more to the strange desert landscape itself, trading my hours inside for long walks in the arroyo outside, trading imagined monsters for the very real scorpions, rattlesnakes, and raptors of our neighborhood. As we raised our daughters in Tucson, I continued to explore arroyos both near and far, my daughters joining me as often as I could convince them. But Juliet has not shown that same love for the desert, or bright skies and warm days, even though she has lived in Tucson her entire life. So here in central Nebraska, in our travels to a new landscape, is a chance for my younger daughter and me to form a stronger bond—and not too soon, I know, since she is nearly twelve, nearly a teenager, and I’ve learned by now what a seismic shift that can be. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s not yet consider the worries-to-be of any father whose daughter is becoming a young woman.

When we arrive at the house, down a long gravel driveway a mile or two north of the interstate, the sky is gray and the clouds low. Juliet perks up in this weather; I hope the grayness won’t last. Allison, whose hair flaps like a banner in the wind as soon as she steps outside, greets Juliet and me with a smile and a hug. It is the first time I’ve met the educator, activist, and writer whose work I’ve long admired, though I can’t help but feel we have known each other for much longer. She is that friendly, that passionate about culture and place. We step inside to meet the fellow writers: Lee Ann Roripaugh, a poet and editor of South Dakota Review whom I know from editorial correspondence but had not yet met in person; Kimberly Blaeser, a White Earth Nation, Anishinaabe poet, photographer, and scholar who a few years after our visit would become the Wisconsin poet laureate; and Renee Sans Souci, an Omaha Nation poet, educator, and activist. That is a lot of new adults all at once for Juliet. She holds her own, but it becomes clear she wants to escape to check out the room where we are staying and then investigate the large yard.

Although the land all around us is flat, it has two enduring qualities that our native desert does not: tall trees and abundant water. After unloading, Juliet and I head outside to find a few of those impressive trees plus a small pond edged in cattails and grass. Though there aren’t any cranes, a handful of ducks make small wakes across the choppy surface—mostly mallards that stick to the water and large Muscovies that hustle to the shore once they spy us. The mottled birds aren’t shy about expecting handouts, though they eventually waddle off, disappointed, when we ignore them. Their comical jockeying is anything but disappointing to Juliet, who laughs out loud, which makes me laugh out loud, which makes the birds reconsider and try their luck again. On their return, I coax my daughter into feeding one a handful of grass, which she agrees to reluctantly, snatching her hand back as soon as a drake approaches, the leaves floating to the ground. Realizing the jig is up, he scolds us before hustling off, trailed by the other Muscovies and our own laughter, rising to join the wind tittering among the trees.

We settle then onto the grass and watch the ducks tip their heads into the water, their stubby tails waggling for a few seconds before they surface again, pink beaks dripping. This evening, Juliet and I will attend a reading on campus with the poets and then chuckle as a couple of our housemates get high in their room after we settle in for the night, their laughter a wind chime resonating through the house. The next day, we’ll rise early to see the cranes we’d come for. But just then, there among the grass and the water, the wind and the waterfowl, we have found the connection I am seeking. I am in no rush to move on.

On the drive from Tucson to Nebraska, Juliet and I saw a bumper sticker that read, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey. – Gandalf.” Though Gandalf (or the quote’s actual author, Ralph Waldo Emerson) never had to battle a hydroplaning Honda Accord at seventy miles an hour as Juliet and I did on a particularly drenched stretch of eastern Colorado highway, I think he’s right—at least, considering my expectations for this particular journey. Yet sometimes it is the destination itself, as driving 1,200 miles to view Sandhill cranes in central Nebraska or even 400 miles to central New Mexico is no small endeavor. Fortunately, southern Arizona hosts its own overwintering grounds for Sandhill cranes: Whitewater Draw.

Located in Sulphur Springs Valley, a hundred miles southeast of Tucson and just north of the Mexico border, this high desert landscape of ranches, grain fields, and seasonal wetlands has long been a destination on the cranes’ annual migration. The number of cranes that overwinter at Whitewater Draw vary from a few thousand to thirty thousand or more. The Arizona Game and Fish Department reports that since the 1950s, the number of cranes has increased considerably, likely due to the rise in nearby corn farming. Though any negative impacts of a warming, drying habitat due to climate change may take years to gauge at Whitewater Draw and nearby Willcox, where the cranes can number up to twenty-five thousand in the winter, the birds’ increasing population in southern Arizona over the last several decades is a conservation success story. Accordingly, this state-designated wildlife area has become the mecca for my own annual crane pilgrimage. It’s a holy trek indeed when one of my daughters joins me.

One February, Juliet and I made the two-hour drive to Whitewater Draw to celebrate my birthday. I admit that my daughter may not have been riding along to see cranes or walk the wide paths but instead to gift her presence to me for my special day. In either case, I was happy to have the company of this shy, sweet, and sassy eight-year-old to inaugurate the last year of my thirties. Indeed, her only real complaint on the drive came when I mentioned the “Crane Cam” website, where we could watch the cranes in real time.

“Why didn’t we just look at the cranes from home?” she asked. Probably I started into a lecture about the ills of swapping technology for real life, about the need to get out into the real world—the natural world—because otherwise we substitute a pixelated version of a limited nature as presented to us by who knows who, for an actual, chaotic nature we are submersed in, or at least witness to, firsthand. Probably she then threw a handful of Chex cereal at me, or had by then fallen fast asleep. I’ve learned a bit about slipping into dad-lecture mode since then.

The entrance to Whitewater Draw is a slow and dusty two-mile drive down a dirt road, which is itself a turnoff from another slow and dusty, unevenly paved road. From there it’s a quarter-mile walk on a gravel path to the wide trail that runs adjacent to a couple small ponds before heading west across the caramel-colored water of the playa, which can dry up completely in the summer. Often I’ll see dozens of red-winged blackbirds around the permanent ponds. But one gray afternoon on a previous visit, the reeds and willows were thrumming with hundreds of boisterous yellow-headed blackbirds, the first time I’d seen these birds in the wild. The blackbirds—striking in their saffron hoods—flew two or three feet into the air, one by one or in groups of three or four, before diving back, over and over, into the seemingly cheering crowd. I was unprepared for this brilliance, let alone this behavior, and though I had come to visit the cranes, I stayed to converse with the blackbirds that reminded me, in coloration anyway, of the hooded orioles that sometimes visited our feeder back at home in Tucson. Unlike the blackbirds, which live in the valley year-round, the orioles migrate to central Mexico and farther south for the winter.

Before making it to the blackbirds and their ponds, Juliet led us on a detour to an old hay barn, sans sides, near the parking lot. There a sign suggested we look up for roosting great-horned owls. And so we did, finding a silhouette of the bird pair on a rafter beneath the metal roof. Though the urge to hoot like an owl is no doubt universal, Juliet and I both resisted, if just barely.

Once back on the path, it wasn’t long before we spotted hundreds of Sandhill cranes, their gray feathers soaking in the late afternoon sun, the cirrus clouds feathering the pale blue sky above them. The cranes socialized far from the path, which had been constructed several feet above the wetlands to account for varying water levels and provide the best vantage. On this visit the water was as high as I’d ever seen it so that—we later discovered—the farthest end of the trail was submerged. Rounding the first bend, I was disappointed to find neither red-winged nor yellow-headed blackbirds, though a number of small ducks swam the pond to our left, and a group of birders pointed out a red-tailed hawk perched in a nearby cottonwood.

Unfortunately, I forgot to bring binoculars, and Juliet wasn’t interested in looking through the telephoto lens on my camera. But soon she spotted the observation deck, which hosts a pair of silver scopes with steps that allow a child to enjoy the view. After walking the perimeter of the deck to admire (I hoped) the expanse of playa backed by low desert mountains, she stepped up to the scope and, with my assistance, focused on the closest Sandhills—her first time really seeing the majestic birds.

She looked, concentrated, looked harder, and said, somewhat plaintively, “They don’t move much, do they?” This particular group did not, except to swing a crimson-dabbed head or stretch the occasional wing. We’d need to stay for another hour, I reckoned, before the cranes grazing in nearby fields would fly in. I wasn’t sure I could eke that kind of patience out of Juliet, though the weather wasn’t particularly cold and the wind gusted only now and then.

“About the time the sun sets, we should see them fly in,” I said. “That will be awesome.” Whenever I use that word, awesome, I think of Scott Russell Sanders’s book A Private History of Awe, and how he laments the use of the word as a kind of default “cool” or “right on” or “neat” or other generational slang. Awesome, stemming from awe, should only be used when we are truly confronted by something that is awe-inspiring, he writes—meaning connected to spirit, the sacred, holiness. But awesome is absolutely the right word for Sandhills as they fly in to roost, the crosslike silhouette of each bird overhead multiplied by a hundred or a thousand to form a vast, thatched aerial quilt; the flying birds a flowing, living horizon in parallel with the fixed horizon of the high desert valley as they approach the water’s surface; the large feathers at the tips of their wings outstretched in a kind of angelic embrace as the birds finally touch down. And it’s not just a visual awe, for the cranes call out as they arrive, not a song exactly but still somehow lyrical—a chortling croak, a prehistoric yawp that harkens back to the age of flying reptiles and is as convincing an argument as any that the Sandhill crane is among the oldest surviving bird species.

“Okay,” Juliet said, taking my hand as she marched off the platform and back onto the path. From there we walked west, following the raised path beside a pond, past more ducks and now some red-winged blackbirds and, over there, a great blue heron—and finally to its slowly sinking end, where we found ourselves close to several small gatherings of cranes, perhaps only thirty yards away. We waited for a trio of humans to leave before settling near the waterline to watch the cranes as the water brightened in the reflection of the setting sun and those awesome, sweeping clouds.

More and more, then, the cranes flew in. But it was less the site of their circling and somewhat clunky landings than it was the sound of their calls that made us rise and look back to the east, where the birds now painted the dimming sky in broken skeins before arriving, finally, wonderfully, en masse. Juliet and I watched and listened and had no choice but to immerse ourselves in the cranes’ return, which, in the end, lasted longer than she could. We had been out for hours and though it was not much later than six o’clock, it would be another hour before dinner at a truck-stop diner along Interstate 10 and an hour from there back to Tucson. Too tired to trek back on her own, she asked if I would carry her to our car. I obliged, in love with this little person who might not become the naturalist I hoped she’d be, after all, but who still happily joined me on my birthday adventure. A few minutes later she was out, head on my shoulder, her slight, warm breath on my ear, wave upon wave of cranes serenading us from above.

When Billie and I moved from Denver to Tucson in 2000, we agreed that she and our daughters could spend each summer in Oregon, staying with her mother, Annie, in Eugene. It would be their own seasonal migration to avoid our Sonoran Desert summer heat. If we hadn’t already signed that pact by the time the moving truck delivered our furniture that first May—the afternoon soaring to 108 degrees—she just might have emblazoned the contract into my skin that very day. Unfortunately, Billie would have to wait until the following summer for the annual passage to begin, as Juliet wasn’t born until July. I’m not entirely convinced that my lovely bride, seven months pregnant when we arrived, has yet forgiven me for moving our family to the desert during summertime. Given our initiation by fire—or nearly so—I’m not so sure she should.

Though local media discusses immigration often, given our location just sixty miles north of the Mexico border, I hadn’t thought much about migration, outside of my wildlife biology classes in college, until Billie and the girls began their regular summer visits to Oregon. After marrying my American father in her homeland of Sweden, my mother immigrated to the United States. That was a few years after she had made her own journeys to England, Italy, and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). But her lifestyle in the United States once she divorced my father after only ten years of marriage—when I was two—was more like a slow nomadism than any kind of regular return home to Sweden. She moved my sister and me every four years, driven by a mix of wanderlust and bipolar depression. We lived in Tucson when I was young, and that introduction to and immersion in the desert in my formative years is ultimately what drew me back to southern Arizona as an adult, even though Billie and I debated moving to Portland, Oregon, instead (and have since dreamed of following the seasons annually from Tucson to Denver to Portland and back). Once we relocated our young family to Tucson, however, the urge to escape the desert heat—to migrate annually to the Pacific Northwest—was, admittedly, immediate.

The practice of migrating peoples is as old as human history, journalist and immigrant Sonia Shah tells us in her book The Next Great Migration. And it’s not just the movement of people caused by changing weather patterns, environmental catastrophe, or war, though certainly environmental and geopolitical factors play a role, particularly in modern history. Rather, writes Shah, “In the broad view of human history, we’re all migrants in every place we live, outside parts of Africa…. Scientific findings have made it clear that migration is not an exception to the rule. We’ve been moving all along. And there’s no singular factor that explains why.”

On our last day along the Platte River, I consider migration, both for our family—Billie, Juliet, and Ann-Elise will be making the round trip to Oregon again in just three months—and for the Sandhill cranes, who arrive in central Nebraska exhausted, their body weight down 15 to 20 percent. The cranes migrate south in the fall because of extreme winter weather conditions in their breeding grounds of Siberia, Alaska, and Canada, and then back north in the spring to reach their isolated breeding grounds that offer food and shelter in the wide, shallow waters and nearby plains. One could argue our impetus to migrate between Arizona and Oregon was similarly environmental—escaping the searing heat. But that, as with most human migration, tells only part of the story. Neither Billie nor I have parents near Tucson, and Billie is particularly close to her mother. Like my mother, Billie’s mother divorced when her youngest child was just two and then raised her children on her own. She likewise relocated every few years, until she finally settled in Eugene, where she lives now. It is important for Billie to spend time with her mother and for our daughters to know their grandmother. Even though Annie lives a thousand miles away, she is their closest grandparent. Indeed, while the annual visit to Eugene is a convenient way to escape the desert during much of the summer, I’m certain that Billie would have struck a similar deal if we had moved somewhere else—or not moved at all.

So, environment and family both play a role. But is something still deeper driving us, something revealed by my trip with Juliet along the migratory path of the cranes, by playing witness to their timeless gathering before the birds’ journey continues once again?

Juliet and I awake to a cool, dark morning, the songbirds outside just beginning their dawn confessionals as we dress. Although we won’t have to be quiet until we near the viewing blind along the Platte River, few words pass between us as we eat breakfast with Allison and the others before sunrise, though whether the silence is from sleepiness or anticipation or grace, I can’t tell. Allison is a Sandhill elder and our guide both ecological and cultural to the birds we are to view in our short time in central Nebraska. So we take her lead in our preparations accordingly—setting cameras and cell phones to silent mode, bundling up against the damp chill, accepting her request to keep a respectful distance from the cranes if we find ourselves among them. There are no special instructions or reiterations for Juliet, as the only child among us—yet another kindness Allison extends.

A light rain begins as we drive through the darkness from the house north of the river, then east on I-80, across a low bridge spanning the Platte River, and to the Iain Nicolson Audubon Center. Sited along a wide bend on the south side of the Platte, the center is located a few miles east of Kearney and just north of a stretch of cornfields at the 2,900-acre Lillian Annette Rowe Sanctuary. Purchased by the National Audubon Society in 1974 at roughly one-sixth of its current size, the sanctuary includes five miles of river channel, riverside wildlife habitat, agricultural fields, restored prairies, and facilities to support cranes and other wildlife. After parking, we follow Allison into the warmth of the straw-bale center and, with another dozen visitors, listen to the Rowe Sanctuary guide, who provides similar instructions: silence, distance. What need not be said: gratitude. He surveys us as he speaks and, eyeing Juliet, repeats his policy that we remain quiet once out on the trail and in the blind. Juliet nods, leaning into me. From there we walk as a group through the center’s back door to a trail that skirts fields on our right and leafless cottonwoods and perhaps eastern red cedars on our left. Beyond the trees lies the expanse of the Platte, its sandbars and sedge textured between shallow braids of river. Out on that sustaining river, though we can’t yet see them due to the waning darkness, thousands of Sandhill cranes ruffle and rustle and call. Still, we keep quiet as instructed, following the silhouette of our guide, the only human noise the low chant of our feet on the trail, the swish of a rain slicker, the distant rumble of an occasional truck on the interstate north of the river.

When I was about Juliet’s age, I went duck hunting with my older brother in the swamps of central Florida. Until this visit to the Rowe Sanctuary, that was my only experience with blinds, and along the edge of that southern cypress swamp, the blind’s camouflaged cover was no bigger than a two-person tent, and really more like a permeable tarp thrown over a clothesline. At the sanctuary, however, the tall, rectangular blind is the size of an RV and just as sturdy. It is easily large enough to fit two dozen people. We file in and take our places, the interior dark but dry, windows placed at intervals so that someone as tall as my six-and-a-half-foot frame or as short as Juliet, or shorter still, can look out without struggling.

In so looking out, however, another kind of struggle might ensue—one of containing a loud gasp or of forgetting to breathe entirely, for the scene before us is, as Scott Russell Sanders would no doubt agree, awesome. As far as we can see in any direction, Sandhill cranes fill the shallow river, thousands if not a hundred thousand of them. Though Juliet and I are not as close to these cranes as we had been at the Bosque del Apache or Whitewater Draw, the power and beauty here is less about proximity than about the sheer number of cranes spread across the river and its dark sandbars. And unlike the congregations we have seen in the Southwest, these stopover cranes are more social both in their closeness to each other and in their movements. In pairs that mate for life, the birds face each other, raising and holding back their wings that span up to seven feet before stretching their bodies into a jumping, not entirely fluid dance. They lift their necks and heads and beaks to the gray sky before swooping their heads down, beaks sometimes dipping into water or sand—or when among the fields, picking up a corn cob or twig—before pulling back up quickly, tossing any beaked prize above their head, and then hopping away only to bow once again. And again. These could be dances between mated pairs or dances between cranes seeking mates. In either case, the breeding itself will occur once they reach their summer grounds to the north. Still, crane dancing on the Platte in spring is commonplace and one reason the region has become known as “the greatest singles bar for cranes”—at least according to the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, which perhaps shouldn’t come up with marketing slogans for crane viewing, after all.

As the sky continues to lighten, the birds come into greater focus from our hidden view that looks northwest across the river. I admit I nearly forget my daughter in the uncounted time that follows, as I raise my camera and snap photo after photo of the multitudinous cranes, their dances, their flights in the morning’s blue light, the sheer abundance of it all.

The cranes, which number up to a million in the central Platte Valley from mid-February through mid-April, come from three distinct subspecies: greater, Canadian, and lesser. From our distance they are impossible to tell apart; the difference in the Canadian and greater birds relates to how far back the red patch on their head extends, while the lesser Sandhill crane is some two pounds lighter than the greater and has a shorter bill. But at least one white crane stands apart from all three subspecies, and when it is spotted, gleaming among its gray compatriots, there is no keeping the viewers quiet, for this is an endangered whooping crane, the tallest and among the rarest birds in North America. In the early 1940s the whooping crane population fell to as few as sixteen birds thanks to habitat loss and overhunting for meat and feathers. Their salvation as a species remains slow—the birds today number perhaps six hundred worldwide—and that the population growth is happening at all is thanks to captive breeding programs that in some cases place whooping crane eggs in active Sandhill crane nests. If we were in a boat, I would fear capsizing as everyone rushes to the windows on the north side of the blind to scope the majestic bird with its red cap, black cheeks, tan bill, and thin black legs among a body as white and elegant as porcelain.

I watch and take photographs and praise our luck and as quietly as possible swap my camera’s lens and refocus and watch some more and take more photographs and give silent thanks again until I realize Juliet is no longer standing next to me. I turn to find her sitting cross-legged, pink coat zipped and hood pulled tightly. She is facing away from the windows and nibbling Chex Mix pulled piece by piece from a bag in her pocket. Allison and I exchange glances, and with that we turn from the windows, gather ourselves, and step out of the blind before quietly walking back to the visitor center, the light rain blunting the morning light.

At the parking lot Juliet and I load into our car and drive west, cranking the heat and defogger before following the red Jeep carrying Allison. The road turns through several fields of corn stubble before we find its end just south of the river, where a bank of cottonwoods stands like ghostly sentinels, blocking our view of the Platte but creating a striated and strangely peaceful scene nearly black-and-white in its composition if not for the cornstalks, themselves muted to tarnished gold in the mist. And then they appear likes ghosts themselves—pairs or trios of Sandhill cranes stepping between the rows of cornstalk stubble, close enough to greet in a low voice if we so choose. We keep quiet, remaining in the car as I snap more photos and Juliet admires the birds between handfuls of Chex Mix and mouthfuls of questions: What do they eat? Where do they sleep? Which is the baby? What was the white crane? What’s for lunch? Can we maybe get Dairy Queen on the way home? I answer as best as I can, referring to both a field guide and local map I’d brought along. For their part, the cranes ignore us, searching among the stalks for corn and other delights like snails, earthworms, and insects, filling the stores they’ll need to continue their migration north.

And with that, Juliet and I are ready to fill our own stores for our two-day drive south, where we’ll cover only slightly more ground in a day than the cranes, who can fly up to five hundred miles between dawn and dusk on their migration. We wave our goodbyes and mouth our thanks to Allison, Lee, Kimberly, and Renee. We wave our goodbyes and whisper our thanks to the Sandhill cranes, too, which disappear in our rearview mirror much as they had appeared, the mist closing in around them.

As we drive toward the interstate, I once again consider the long and regular journeys humans and animals take—for environment, for family, for survival. Viewing the cranes from the Rowe Sanctuary blind, it is easy to think of the birds as a kind of single organism, moving in unison as they appear to do when flying or even wading en masse along the river’s edge. Upon closer view—foraging in the cornfields of central Nebraska or in a roadside ditch south of San Antonio, New Mexico, for example—we see the birds for what they are, of course: individuals, no one bird exactly like the other. So it is with migration, says Shah: “Movements that were once dismissed as robotically controlled by genes appear to be the result of dynamic interactions between individuals, each responding to subtle cues in the environment and from one another.” Yet the birds also get what scientists call “migratory restlessness,” she writes. “As the time to leave approaches, a restlessness sets in…. It’s hormonal.”

But hormones and physiology more broadly aren’t driving Billie and the girls in our own familial summer migrations, just as that impetus alone is not what keeps the cranes flying on. What, then, could it be? As we get up to speed on the interstate, leaving the rain behind, the Rockies not yet a scribble on the western horizon, I think of Ralph Waldo Emerson again and another of his widely known quotes: “Experience is the only teacher.”

And that’s it, isn’t it? Whether human or animal, migration is a journey—an educational process, an experience—that teaches us how to move through the world, the routes to take, how to find the right altitude, the stops to make, the places to avoid, the promise of coolness or warmth, food and shelter, family, love. More than the simple sum of environmental, family, and physiological factors, the experience of the journey—rich with the instruction of our parents and more broadly the community with which we move—determines our success not only on the current voyage but on all future journeys to come, until and even after we pass on our knowledge to our children in turn.

“Sure, Dad, whatever,” says Juliet, pulling me out of my soliloquy. “But what about Dairy Queen?” I’m not precisely sure what that cool treat will teach us, but it’s a stopover I am happy to make down the road a bit. And so we do.

Simmons Buntin is the author of Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far (Trinity University Press, 2025), as well as the poetry collections Bloom and Riverfall (Salmon Poetry, 2010 and 2005). He is also the co-author, with Ken Pirie, of Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places (Planetizen Press, 2013); and the co-editor, with Elizabeth Dodd and Derek Sheffield, of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (Trinity University Press, 2020). He is the founding editor-in-chief of Terrain.org and the director of marketing and communications at the University of Arizona’s College of Information Science. He lives in Tucson. Catch up with him at simmonsbuntin.com or on his Substack, urbanwild.substack.com.

Header photo, Sandhill cranes flying and roosting at the Platte River in central Nebraska, by Simmons Buntin. Photo of Simmons Buntin by Chris Richards.