Dateline: somewhere north of the windy city. A “flyway” according to ornithologists, good for birdwatching. But birding will take a back seat to this story.
Although a bird waits offstage to “strut and fret…a tale told by an idiot.” Snippet from Shakespeare, sorry. But the bird IS a tale told by an idiot, you’ll see.
For now, let’s talk about wind. Hot wind. Chicago is famous for things other than pizza. One is its chilling winter wind, called “the hawk” in folklore. Icy blasts off the lake into the city are appropriately predatory.
But there’s an opposite side to that. Take today. A day in late May. A mean south wind is gusting across Chicago and into the forested outskirts with hot vengeance. A wind blowing out of hell.
Don’t turn the air on in your house, the system will break. It’s 90 out there, and the wind is coming in gales. Screens blow in. Curtains flop and slap. Every bending tree is getting stripped of twigs.
You go down to a small woodland lake and face the wind out of hell. Even sleeping naked tonight, you’ll be miserably hot.
But late in the day, as you let the blast furnace blow your hair, carrying all the pollutants of Chicago and points south into your face, courtesy of hell itself…you notice that bird mentioned earlier.
A Green Heron nosing along the shoreline. You’ve grouched about this bird’s name before, but cranky and sweaty in the gusts from hell you say again: damn, that Green Heron ain’t green.
It was a bird named by “an idiot.” You watch it strut and fret at the edge of that wind-tossed lake and think: sorry, kid—you’re hardly green at all. But birds make a decent distraction.
For a moment, you’re not pissed off about the wind straight out of hell. And you pity anybody looking for a Green Heron, expecting it to be green. Things don’t work that way in hell.
Not so green
Two-fisted birdwatcher’s prose poem version of “The Tempest.”