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CALL IN THE DARK
May 25, 2003
Tom Cole

This story has not come to its end yet, if it ever will. To begin to tell it, I will say that I have kept a journal since 1989, the year I got my first Macintosh computer. It was also the year I got my dog, Noodles. The journal is very useful for nailing down events and keeping the chronology of my experiences in order. I find in my journal for June 6, 1995 the following entry:



I haven't been writing for some long time now. In 1995, I slept out on the patio a great deal. There was a monster out there that would snort at Noodles and me each night.



I remember that now. I wondered at the monster. Perhaps it was a big bull goose cotton rat. I never found out, and I haven't stopped camping out. I like it better than indoors.

At night if there is a stir of wind, the Soleri bell hanging over the patio rings. But the rest is all silence and cool desert air. I've had gravel put down in the back yard and I've killed all the grass so now there is nothing but desert there and a garden or two. Near the back wall are two little ponds surrounded by potted plants and boulders with stepping stones leading over and around and a park bench and a bush or two and a tall cactus. Between the boulders and the pond is a round empty area and there I sleep most nights.

My dog Noodles is close to fourteen now and incontinent at times, and so now I pretty much have to sleep out there. I have a foam mattress and a comforter with a southwestern color pattern that I drape over the sleeping area. I make the bed that way and the comforter stays out all day. It rains here so seldom that I don't bother taking it in. Besides it looks pretty as a part of the desert back yard.

 The dog has a down pillow and she curls up on it like a cashew. If she has an accident, the pillow is the only casualty -- not my Perfect Sleeper mattress inside -- and I put the pillow in the washer and afterwards set it on top of the pigeon coop where the Arizona sun has it dry in two hours flat.

It's kind of an adventure to camp out back; it seems that the adventure of the day continues that way. Once a helicopter came by and put its spotlight on me. It roared above for a moment and then sped away. Sometimes I will hear the yells of some soul in dismay far off in the distance or the sound of someone gone insane with a car. I woke up one night to the most awful din, got up, and looked through my gate to see a midnight black SUV dancing at the intersection of Villas Lane and El Monte. Dancing! It leaped around in circles, its tires screaming and its driver perhaps mad with alcohol or perhaps just plain mad. He raced away in a moment, leaving a stinking cloud of white, rubbery smoke floating up into the dark evening sky. Twice I have heard the sound of an auto dragging something. Once that something was unidentifiable -- and it was going down the alley across the gravel and around a dozen back yards, the sound of it loud enough to wake the neighborhood, though not even a light came on. Most recently it was a car that was being dragged, its brakes locked and the tires' squealing rubber burning down the street. Through the gate, I saw a truck come to a halt, a billowing wake of tire smoke racing to envelope it. Its frantic driver leaped from the cab to unhook the car he was pulling. He jumped back in the truck and drove to the front of the car, got out, and secured the car from that end. Then he jumped in the cab and raced away with only the smooth rolling mutter of the rubber across the road barely audible under the big echoing breath of the powerful pick-up truck. The next morning, there were tire marks from deep inside a neighbor's garage on Colt Road and all the way around the block to North Villas Lane.

The Repo man had made his nocturnal visit.

Sleeping out puts me first on the scene for these events, but as I said there is usually nothing but silence and cool desert breezes. It is otherwise an exceptionally quiet and peaceful neighborhood.

***

Some weeks ago in the darkness well before dawn something woke me. It was the call of a bird. It called once and I was instantly awake. I waited and it called again. Yes, it was clearly a bird. I waited again. It called a third time. I had never heard a call like that. I listened but the bird did not call again. Being a studied bird watcher I am well familiar with the local bird calls, but there was nothing familiar in the sound I heard in those hours before dawn.

The next night before the onset of daylight, the bird called again and woke me. It was like nothing I had ever heard. The call of a bird is made to communicate -- particularly to other birds, but to other animals as well -- among them humans. There was a tremendous boldness to that call. It seemed to be a characterization of a bird call, the call of a bird that wished to say: "This is a REAL bird call. THIS is how a REAL bird sings!"

In the mornings that followed, before daylight, the bird called promptly at four o'clock by the light of my indiglo wristwatch. The call was powerful and assertive. Indeed, once when it called, a fear pierced me in my drowsy and vulnerable moments between wakefulness and slumber, and I thought with a start, "That's no bird!" I was suddenly aghast at the possibility that some strange alien or demon had come to disembowel me then and there, the call just a distraction to make me let my guard down! My madness passed, but I still thought, "Is it really a bird? Why does it only sing at four in the morning -- and almost always only three calls?" I thought of the monster of 1995. Maybe this is that big bull goose cotton rat using his squeaky rodent voice to crow in the day. But no. It was a bird. A real bird.

I wrote to my friends Larry and Nancy and my brother Jeff, all bird watching fanatics. "You should hear this thing. Its call is like something out of a drug addict's nightmare!" My brother Jeff e-mailed me back, "It probably just a starling." I replied, "This is no starling!"

The bird's call had four notes and following the stress, pitch, and junction of the word "Epiphany!"

 One night I strung an electric cord out to the back yard. I plugged a tape recorder into it and waited. No bird called, but the next night I got him. Just once, but the voice clearly recorded. I played it for my brother, "Wow, that's a hard one!" he said. "Maybe some weird warbler."

The tale grows.

The following night the bird changed his call. He still had four notes, but no longer did he sing "Epiphany!" but "Beekeeper's Dream!" The accent was on the last syllable.

"He changed his call?" Jeff asked. "Why can't you get up and see what he looks like?"

"Oh, like I never thought of that. It's pitch black out there when he sings, bird brain."

This story has not come to its end yet, if it ever will. The bird continued to call at the same time every morning for a week or more and then stopped. As I said, I have his voice recorded and I have digitalized it with my Macintosh recording studio and I'm thinking of posting it on line for people to identify for me. But now it is quiet in the morning and I miss the call. The fact that the mystery has passed unsolved is not satisfying, but I will wait. Since I have dutifully recorded each call in my diary I will listen next year in the same season in the hopes that this bird of my dreams is migratory and that he will make his way back again to my yard and my desert and sing again. UPDATE: SOLVED! I decided to think of migratory birds that might show up and I thought of the western kingbird -- a big yellowish-bellied flycatcher. I looked him up in my database and noticed that he was absent from my neighborhood in the month before I started hearing the call. I noted too, however, that he was most frequently sighted in the month that I heard the call. I got out my Western American Bird Calls cd by Roger Tory Peterson and turned to the index on the western kingbird. There it read: DAWN CALL. It was him. And the dawn call was the special voice I had heard.




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