The bullheads lolling in the muddy shallows of Connecticut ponds aren’t big on concepts. They aren’t the thinking sort. These catfish don’t contemplate the arc of their lives, the way we do. They just spawn, eat, and die, never once leaving the sensate stream of right now.
So it was left up to me to wonder about the last few moments of a particular bullhead’s life last Friday morning. I had pulled over on my way to work to watch a great blue heron go about its early morning routine at a roadside pond. The heron claimed the pond as his own early this summer and seemed to favor the watery vegetated margins of the west side of the pond, which is where he was standing, stock still, that morning.
From the bullhead’s perspective, the long reedy heron legs rising from the muck looked rather ordinary against the cattail backdrop. They may have been the last ordinary sight he saw. The heron’s S-curved neck lunged like a lightening bolt, and its spear-of-a-bill lanced the unsuspecting catfish, jerked him up into the air, and after skillfully juggling the fish into position, swallowed him whole. If there were bullhead philosophers, I imagine they would fashion some fantastic end-of-life myths from this common scenario.
Great blue herons have the look of mythological birds, probably because we have seen them portrayed glyphically by the ancient Egyptians, who represented the mythological phoenix or benu, “the ascending one,” as a heron. In the floodplain of the Nile, the bird was associated with the sun as it would glide over the waters, or roost high up in the trees. Thus it became connected in spirit to the sun god Ra and was revered. It was created in the fire of a holy burning tree, according to the myth.
In the predawn darkness of October mornings there is nothing.
That is how it seems when Kate and I venture out for our early morning walk. Typically a passing cloud has come to rest for the night on our hill and will not rouse itself for another hour and a half, when the sun will rise and prod this foggy presence into evanescence with rude and ruddy fingers. But for us, earnest walkers, it does not stir. We are wrapped in its muffle and must make our way as rapidly as our fearlessness and familiarity with the road will allow.
From the nothing of such foggy mornings, the world reassembles itself — pebble by pebble, leaf by leaf, building by building — to reveal what another night has wrought. So by breakfast, at the kitchen table, it literally dawns on us that the world will continue pretty much the same as it was — though not exactly so: the leaf litter beneath the ancient maples has piled up a little higher; a nocturnal visitor (the opossum most likely) has buckled a sunflower stalk and scavenged the fallen seeds; and there’s a beer can in the road.
These are among the few new verses of the history of this hill left behind after the retreat of the dark and fog. None, however, are so elegantly written as the new web of the orb weaver spider in the top of the privet hedge. These circular intricate webs reach their biggest size at this time of year in the last few days and weeks before the hard frost, which irrevocably separates one spider generation from the next.
