From a beach we watch a manta ray jumping out of the water by twice its body length. Ashore, as we struggle up bone-dry arroyos, naturalists point out some of the dozens of species of cactus, each with its own strategy for surviving in a place where it may not rain at all from one year to the next. Underwater, butterfly fish, blue-headed wrasses and huge angelfish swim around rocks that have tumbled down the steep hills. Blue-footed boobies dive with what seems a total disregard for their own well-being. (For anyone who has read Steinbeck, it will always be the Sea of Cortez.) Sea lions drape themselves over rocks as if they had no bones at all. Right now my flashback circuits are burning out with images from a New Year's voyage in the Gulf of California, between Baja California and mainland Mexico. Sometimes I'm at the rail of a ship cutting through the water, marveling at how effortlessly dolphins ride the bow wave. Or I'll be draped across a jungle gym of mangrove branches, watching the fish in the water below. One moment I'll be sitting at my desk as a good editor should, and the next I'm crawling on my belly over a sand dune to get a good look at the shorebirds lining a puddle at low tide.
Most calls of the wild, for me at least, come in the form of flashbacks. The world goes from two dimensions to three.
If I remember to look straight up, I will be rewarded most days with the sight of gulls soaring and wheeling so high that they are mere specks of white against the sky. The same thing happens coming out of work and onto the Mall in the evening. The scale changes so fast, it must be a little like the putative inflation that happened to the very early universe. Instantaneously one is taken out of whatever it was one was concentrating on and injected into a much larger world. It's almost shocking to look up from the computer at home just in time to see a hawk fly over the building, much less a great blue heron making its stately way over the neighboring apartment houses. These battery-driven, mechanical devices produce nothing less than the call of the wild. The cry of a blue jay, the buzz of a chickadee, the fog buoy call of a mourning dove, take me out of what I'm doing and tell me it's not too late, the real world is still out there somewhere. Within days, however, the clock birds became special. In the beginning, I was startled every time by the birdsong out of nowhere. At first, it seemed a clever gimmick, the kind of thing that is fun for a while but quickly becomes tiresome. When the big hand gets to 12, the clock plays the song of whatever bird is being pointed to by the little hand. Thanks to my offspring, I now have not one but two clocks on which the hours are represented by different species of songbird.
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