Andrew White (American, 1981–2023) and Jack McAllister (American, b. 1938) Museum of the Shenandoah Valley.
About a month ago Lily and I were shoe shopping on a rainy weeknight. We were stopped at a light when a large raptor flew straight toward the van, a glistening fish writhing in its talons.
“Holy crap! Look Lily!” I yelled as the bird flew overhead.
“An osprey!” she exclaimed.
Just then, from the same direction, a bald eagle soared past us.
“MOM! Follow them!!” Lily commanded. The light was still red. I hesitated before swinging left across the two empty lanes next to us and making a U-turn.
How is it that bald eagles seem so special? It’s not even all that unusual to see one anymore. Every summer when we go to the grandparent’s house at their lake in Pennsylvania, we visit an ever-expanding nesting site and often see both adolescent and adult eagles. There was one that made regular fly overs during recess when I worked at the middle school. We spot them now and again when we’re near the Potomac. They’re not rare.
Maybe it’s their mythology. How since childhood I’ve been indoctrinated to associate their fierce but majestic visage with the United States. How eagles equaled patriotism and how that devotion to America was essential to being a good citizen.
This imagery is not by accident. Our original patriots selected the eagle as a symbol when designing the national seal eventually approved by the Second Continental Congress in 1782. Various committees tried their hand at designing the seal. In one iteration a Philadelphia lawyer named William Barton included a white eagle in his design for the seal because eagles traditionally symbolized strength. Congressional secretary Charles Thomson revised Barton’s design to include the bald eagle, a native of North America. Our eagle is grasping an olive branch and arrows showing the powers of both peace and war (the eagle gazes toward its olive branch, indicating its preference for peace, naturally). The story we’re told about bald eagles is one where the protagonist is courageous, bold, heroic. And because the bald eagle symbolizes our country and we’re of our country- well then we come to see ourselves as the same type of protagonist.
I’ve been thinking about how powerful stories can be. How a memorable story- the essence of it- sticks with us even when the details are hazy. I learned quickly as a first-year history teacher that facts can be very slippery. You might be able to hold them for a second or two, before it slides out of your memory. But the story is grippier. The concept of Manifest Destiny can be explained and re-explained and re-re-explained and still, when asked for the term the idea that America was destined by god to expand across the entire continent, and they’d still answer “Second Great Awakening”. But ask about the 15-year-old boy who was lynched for whistling at a white woman, and they’ll remember the name Emmet Till. The story we attach to a person, a place, an event – that becomes more lasting, more realistic to us than the details of what actually happened.
I’ve been thinking about this as it applies to our country and our world on a macro level, but then also to my own life.
Seven years ago during a showing, I remember sitting in the stairwell of the house that would eventually become our home. I was almost eight months pregnant with Annie and feeling every second of it. I was winded, ungainly and overwhelmed.
In my mind, the house was beautiful. Too beautiful for the horrors I knew my almost family of five plus a dog and two cats would undoubtedly inflict on it. The hardwood floors were glossy and smooth. The runner rug in the hallway was free of loose threads and stains. The walls were freshly painted and unscuffed. There were no dents or dings. The HVAC system was almost new. Same for the roof and the windows. The property was professionally landscaped. In that first year we learned that from spring through fall there was always something in bloom. There were no dandelions in the lawn. Ditto for clover and crabgrass. It felt a little like a garden for royalty. One that we were not equipped to maintain.
The girls felt otherwise. They quickly noted that the new house only had three bedrooms. That was one fewer bedroom than in the house we’d been renting. A house where the older girls had enjoyed the advantages of solo bedrooming for the first time in their lives. With their little sister on the way, they recognized their days of endless “alone time” and rooms free of their other sister’s leaning towers of books and mountain ranges of dirty clothes were numbered. The house as a whole was a bit … cozier than the rental as well. The downstairs rooms were average sized, save for the kitchen which was below-average sized, and maybe even below-below-average depending on how many dogs and children decide they need to congregate there when one is attempting to make dinner. Unlike our house in Pennsylvania, there was no basement.
I sat on the steps in the stairwell of the house, holding back tears, feeling it was both too good to be true and also not quiet enough. Feeling mentally and physically exhausted and fixated on finding a place to settle. In the two years prior we’d relocated to Virginia after I’d spent 12 years in Pennsylvania. Both the older girls started school. I started a new job as a substitute teacher and then I got pregnant. Life was changing so quickly and so massively I felt like I needed to anchor our family, anchor myself in something that felt safe and warm and cozy. That was our neighborhood. And a house that was a little too small for my family.
When I first arrived in Virginia all depressed and disoriented, my neighbors sort of swept me in. They invited me to holiday gift exchanges and to participate in Poemaday. They insisted my children join the cult that is the summer swim team. They told us about the most convenient place to watch fireworks on the July 4th and showed us the short cut where to duck under the barbed wire fence onto the golf course. If they thought I was as weird and awkward as I felt, they did not say anything. My girls made fast friends and between the neighborhood school and the neighborhood pool, we had plenty of opportunities to meet people.
I was insistent we stay. Even if it meant one less bedroom.
After I jerked the car around the median, I drove down the road feeling a little silly – why on earth was I chasing down two birds in a minivan? But seconds later, the eagle flew back overhead, except this time it was clutching a wriggling fish. The osprey was nowhere to be seen.
Lily and I sat in awe of what we’d just witnessed. A nature documentary fit for an Alaskan wilderness playing out behind a Target in the most suburbiest of suburbs.
Lily provided the David Attenborough narration:
“Oh yeah,” she said, “Eagles like to steal osprey’s food sometimes.”
To which I felt a twinge of irritation at the beloved eagle. What gave it the right to steal the osprey’s hard-earned meal?
There’s a story that Benjamin Franklin was lobbying for the turkey to be the national bird, rather than the eagle. But that wasn’t what he said.
What he wrote in a letter to an acquaintance was, “The bald eagle is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. He is too lazy to fish for himself.” Franklin went on to write that the turkey was a more respectable bird, even if a little vain and silly, the turkey had courage.
While I agree with Franklin’s assessment of the bald eagle’s character (even if it does feel … un-American to write that), I disagree about turkeys. Having lived and worked on a farm that often kept turkeys, I would not describe them as courageous. While the baby turkeys were adorable and charming, the adolescent turkeys were terrifying- chasing you around to peck and nip at whatever of your person they could reach. Gobbling in synchronized murderous cries. The adult male turkeys were preening, prancing, feathered bags of hormones. By my estimation, turkeys were symbolic of aggression and pride. Come to think of it, maybe a better symbol of the America we live in today.
I suppose no bird is perfect though.
Today, in our slightly too small house, two teenaged daughters still share a bedroom. As predicted, the shiny interiors have become dinged up and dusty. The walls scuffed and in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint, if only I could decide on the color. The beautiful cherry floors had to be replaced after a water leak went unnoticed for several days.
The lawn is more dandelion, clover, and crabgrass than actual grass. The shrubs are all overgrown, the flower beds in constant need of weeding. One of our dogs, Ruthie, loves digging. So the backyard is potholed worse than a Pennsylvania backroad. Brad doesn’t like going back there anymore. Our other dog, Ernie, is very gassy. Which means that at times the inside of our house can be … pungent.
One of my teens recently confessed that she doesn’t want to bring her new friends over to our house because she’s embarrassed by it: its size, its smells, the siblings underfoot, the often rowdy dogs running amok. Her friends have their own rooms. Their houses have basements to hide away in. Brad, who’s been working from our bedroom since the pandemic, is tired of the house, too.
I understand where they are coming from, I do. I remember being 13, 14, 15 and being leery of my friends’ judgment of my own crowded, kooky childhood home. What would they think of the random collections of loose screws, seed pods, and potatoes resting in bowls on the kitchen counter? How horrified would they be by the seating in our family room: Two nice leather chairs that only our parents were permitted to sit in and a grimy, sunken in love seat for the kids? I just didn’t have friends over. I can’t imagine being stuck by myself, day after day, working from a laptop in my bedroom.
As understanding as I am of my family, their comments also hurt. Surely our house wasn’t like the one I grew up in? Maybe it was slightly more put together? Slightly fewer people living there. I felt like I was always cleaning. Vacuuming up dog hair. Wiping down surfaces. Fighting various smells with candles, diffusers and open windows.
We’ve talked about moving to a bigger house. But the interest rates are so high, and anyway where would we go with the older girls almost in high school? We talked about an addition, but with college four years away, we thought that money should be stowed away for their futures. And yes, I should just pick some paint colors and refresh the whole house. We should just call a contractor about knocking down a wall or two in our kitchen to make some more space. While we’re at it, we should install that dishwasher. And yes, following up one energetic, destructive dog with a large, co-dependent second dog was a ridiculous choice.
But I love our ridiculous dogs. And though it’s a little too small and it’s crustier than before, I love our house. I still feel so lucky to have it. I love our shaggy, overgrown yard that is full of birds and bugs and milkweeds and flowers that blossom into lemony scents. I love the breezes shaking our wind chimes and the cherry tree out front that celebrates spring every year in a cotton candy pink cloud of petals.
I love that all of us- Annie, Jovie, Lily, Brad, and I – plus two large dogs can flop on the sectional in our family room. And that in the middle of the afternoon, because of Papa’s crystal suncatchers and stained glass in the window, my kitchen and hallways are speckled in rainbows.
Years ago, when Brad and I first started dreaming up the life we would build together, I envisioned a large family and a large front porch, situated on a small farm with goats, chickens, and a miniature pony. There would be several dogs, of course, and various cats lounging in sunny windows. The inside would be cozy and eclectic. It would always smell like fresh-baked goods.
What I did not manifest was a smaller version of the colonial I grew up in 20 minutes from where I grew up. And yet, life keeps barreling forward. This ungainly locomotive of people, dogs, cats, dreams, anger, sadness, messes, laughter, fur, crumbs and cobwebs.
Our lives don’t always match the stories we write about them.
What makes a good home? I’m wondering if it’s less about the physical space – the size, the amenities, the location- and more about the story I tell myself about it. I’m prone to mythologizing the mundane pieces of my life so that maybe I can find some meaning in it. Some lesson. A landscape. A portrait. Something that shows it is more than just a blip in time. An exercise in futility.
There has to be a reason we landed here. A reason we put down roots.
We’re not all wrong about eagles. They are majestic. And strong. Their talons have ten times the grip of a human hand. They can carry prey that weighs up to half their own body weight. When we visited grandparents this past week, we were all giddy about hearing eagles whistling in a nearby tree- we pulled grandpa’s boat closer to shore so we could spot their enormous nest where adolescents perched looking over the lakeshore. They are impressive birds.
Still, despite their fame, their symbolism, their belovedness, by the mid 1900s, bald eagles were almost extinct in the U.S. because of habitat loss, illegal shooting (farmers weren’t too keen on Eagles picking off their livestock), and insecticides like DDT that made their egg shells too thin and fragile. While there were an estimated 100,000 nesting pairs in the 1780s when the eagle became our national symbol, by 1963 there were just 417 known nesting pairs left (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service).
The Bald Eagle Protection act of 1940 outlawed the killing and distribution of eagle parts. DDT was banned in the U.S. in 1972 and in Canada in 1973. In 1978 the bald eagle was added to the newly created endangered species list in most of the contiguous 48 states, which allowed for breeding programs, greater protection of nesting sites, and law enforcement.
These protections helped. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, As of 2019, there were an estimated 316,700 bald eagles in the U.S. – 71,467 nesting pairs in the 48 contiguous states. They were officially taken off the endangered species list in 2007.
What moves me about the story of our nation’s most famous bird, is how we wrote and revised it. We the people recognized that we had to do better. That we were in danger of destroying a symbol that was foundational to our narrative. That we could rise to the challenge of preserving what mattered.
Even if what mattered wasn’t perfect.
The truth is, the bald eagle is both a bold, fierce representation of American strength and a thieving raptor of “bad moral character”. From the beginning the United States has been both a beacon of innovation and possibility and throughout its history a country of bad moral character. We are both a land of huddled masses and colonial invaders. I wonder if we can find our center by facing our both-ness. Reckoning with it. Integrating it.
Running from it does not seem so fruitful.
I just finished reading Karen Russell’s new novel “The Antidote” – part historical fiction, part magical realism, set in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. In it, one character grapples with his own family’s history- how his parents, Polish immigrants escaping German oppression and erasure, went on to commit their own oppression and erasure by displacing American Indians. When he recognizes the karmic implications of what his family had done– even despite the prejudice they’d faced in their own country- he challenges himself and his neighbors to do better. “Does it feel right to live as we do?” he asks. “Can we imagine another way?”
These questions stick with me today. In my own life, in my family, in my home, in my community, in my country.
The answer to the first question has to be no, right? Does it feel right in this country right now? Living through a time when we can’t agree on our history, our truths, our responsibilities. What we owe one another.
Can we imagine another way?
Certainly, there are people in power at this very moment who are not only imagining another way, but legislating it.
I love that word- imagine. How it conjures up childhood. Being little and dreaming. Trying to picture what my life would be like- where I would live, how many ponies I would have and which desserts I’d name them after. Whether I’d be an artist, a writer or a veterinarian. When I dreamed about what could be I never imagined a world that was worse than the one I lived in. It was only ever better. There would be world peace. Everybody would have a home and enough to eat. The hole in the ozone would be gone. The air would be clean. The orcas would be saved.
Humans would get along. Not just get along but be friends. Like, really love each other.
As a child, what could be imagined was often beautiful. Adolescence and adulthood changed that. Suddenly, it seemed that what I had dreamed up as a kid was silly, idealistic, impossible and absurd.
It was replaced with an imagination that was a bit less… generative.
For instance, I spend a lot of time imagining the day my children reach adulthood and realize I’ve failed to prepare them adequately for life in the real world. I imagine the disappointment they’ll feel about having me as a mother. I imagine the conversations my neighbors must be having about our critical thinking, sanity, and questionable housekeeping abilities after collecting my escaped dog for the 10th time, observing my children in the wild, or stepping through the front door only to be greeted by a smell that if it were a candle might be called “smoky vintage fart.” I imagine how my husband might respond to questions I haven’t asked and then I wallow in resentment because I disagree with whatever I’d imagined he’d said.
I think I just figured out that my imagination is still there, it’s just called anxiety now.
Is that what happened to our entire country?
In imagining another way, have we relied too heavily on fear and not enough on hope?
The root of the word imagine is to copy. “To form a mental picture,” “to picture oneself,” “sculpt, carve, paint; decorate, embellish” (Etymonline).
The mental picture we have formed of bald eagles is that they are inspiring and strong, even if from time to time they steal another bird’s food because it’s easier than taking a swim themselves.
The mental picture I have formed of my house is that it is charming, despite its faults.
What is the mental picture we have of our country? That it’s a crime-ridden, lawless, godless land full of parasitic outsiders in desperate need of a white knight?
Or that it’s a work in progress, flawed but capable of being repaired by citizens who care enough to do it?
Or is it something else entirely?
As I have found with my house, what you imagine of a thing can be what it becomes.
When I was 8 months pregnant, I toured a slightly-too small house and it became a home.
When we imagined that a cherished bird of questionable moral character was worthy of being saved, we saved it.
Can we imagine our country is beloved?
Can we see it as an image of families?
Our friends?
Our neighbors?
Ourselves?
Can we love all of those parts so that, equipped with the skills we have as adults to build worlds, we can love our country into being the way we imagined as children?
In Samantha Harvey’s gorgeous “Orbital,” six astronauts live aboard the international space station orbiting at 17,000 miles an hour, 250 miles above earth offering them an unmatched perspective on the planet they both study from afar and call home.
“Its beauty echoes- its beauty is echoing, its ringing singing lightness,” Harvey writes about Earth. “It’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre; it’s not everything and it’s not nothing, but it seems much more than something. It’s made of rock but appears from here as gleam and ether, a nimble planet that moves three ways – in rotation on its axis, at a tilt on its axis, and around the sun. This planet that’s been relegated out of the centre and into the sidelines- the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for by its knobble of moon. This thing that harbours we humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego a shattered edifice that lets light through.”
What light can we let through once we rewrite the stories of who we are, who we need to be?
Once we see the light in ourselves, in each other?
When we stop trying to dominate the mass of giddy waltzing things and instead join in the dance?
I will treasure waiting at that stoplight with Lily. For a moment, in our own universe. Spotting the osprey, spotting the eagle. Recklessly making an illegal U-turn to chase them down. Lily and I both flush with giddiness and adrenaline. The moment the eagle flew back toward us, a wiggling fish squeezed in its talons. And it wouldn’t have happened if Lily didn’t need a new pair of shoes. if we hadn’t put roots down here. If, as a country, we didn’t decide the bald eagle was a worthy investment.
We can build worlds with our minds. What version of our story will we write?
Can we imagine another way?