Elegy for a chickadee

“chickadee{deedeedee}” by DJ Huber

After my wife coordinated two successful animal adoptions yesterday, I went to check out the Heritage Fair at the library. It hadn’t occurred to me people would be selling their local history books so I had no cash to buy them with. Instead, I went upstairs to see what I could get for free.

I grabbed two books from the on-display section. One was Surviving Canada: Indigenous People Celebrate 150 Years of Betrayal which based on the Goodreads reviews will be a bit of a dense go-through and the other is Zadie Smith’s new collection of essays, Feel Free. I’ve only read one Zadie Smith book, NW, but I liked it a lot so I figured I’d start here.

The first essay is about, fittingly, libraries, and the fight for their survival in England, and a larger meditation on the importance of public spaces, places that “don’t want your soul or your wallet.”

The second essay is titled “Elegy For a Country’s Seasons” and it was after reading the first few lines that I decided I’d be taking the book home. The piece gets at something I’ve been feeling for a while but haven’t been able to express– the small costs of climate change on the rhythm of our life.

“What ‘used to be’ is painful to remember,” Smith writes. “Focing the spike of an unlit firework into the cold, dry ground. Admiring the frost on the holly berries, en route to school… Whole football pitches crunching underfoot.”

“It was easy to assume, for example, that we would always be able to easily find a hegehog in some corner of a London garden, pick it up in cupped hands, and unfurl it for our children–or go on a picnic and watch fat bumblebees crawling over the mouth of an open jam jar. Every country has its own version of this local sadness.”

Here in north-central British Columbia, Canada, the belief that my yard will be covered in snow by Christmas becomes less and less definite every year, as rain creeps later into the season. This past month I’ve found myself experiencing what I can only describe as pre-nostalgia as I shovel snow off my back deck, anticipating a time where my shovels will have no practical application. It’s hard work, but I’m glad to have it and the idea of a world where someone living in this place doesn’t have to dig themselves out once in a while as kids slide down snowbanks makes me sad.

Then a big dump of snow does come, and moose retreat to the highway and get hit by cars and their ongoing presence in our world becomes even more tenuous.
Late last year, Kate Allen at the Toronto Star published an essential piece called “The Great Global Species Shakeup” that hit me more than any other climate change reporting. Her team illustrated what the predicted 2 to 5 C temperature change over the course of the next few decades will mean for Canada, particularly the boreal zone in which I reside. Shifting poles, an increase in Lyme and other parasitic diseases, but what really got to me was a map showing that the common chickadee is likely to stop living here in my lifetime.

The Toronto Star

It’s such a little thing, not seeing a chickadee in my backyard, but it’s precisely its littleness that makes it so shocking or, maybe, so easy to understand. The extinction of caribou and raging forest fires are apocalyptic, but the banality of chickadees taking off is more striking, because it is just more imaginable despite the plethora of evidence supporting the other scenarios.

As Smith writes, “It’s hard to keep apocalypse consistently in mind, especially if you want get to get out of bed in the morning” and it’s very true. And, I’d add, to carry a daily tinge of sadness about something relatively small in the face of a much larger disaster is very human condition. We cling to the little injustices, unable to fully grasp the full scope of what’s gone wrong.

Articles referenced:

“Elegy For A Country’s Seasons”
“The Great Global Species Shakeup“