The Rivanna Rambler

This show originally aired on December 27, 2007 on “The Rivanna Rambler,” a weekly public affairs show airing every Thursday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU 91.1 FM or wtju.net.

It is that still time of the human winter: the lull between Christmas and New Years. In the early morning, I walk the hills of my neighborhood before the sun has fully risen past houses that are still buttoned up at 7 am. Behind closed doors, I imagine parents sleeping in, pancake breakfasts leisurely consumed in pajamas, kids getting to know their Christmas gifts. Housecats are perched at windows awaiting the return of their owners from holiday trips.

I live in Rugby Hills on the side that slopes down towards the 250 By-pass through the Greenleaf neighborhood. The high point is the ridge that Rugby Road traverses. The water from our hilly yards and streets gathers into backyard creeks that collect into a tributary that flows through a culvert under the Bypass towards Charlottesville High and McIntire Park and then into Meadow Creek. Walking the neighborhood at this time of year, I can easily scan through the bare trees across the small valleys between the streets that mark the original creases in the land.

At this hour, the streets are empty, but it is anything but quiet. From the first startled flutter of wings from the privet alongside our house as I open my front door, to the enveloping hue and cry coming from the hundreds of birds in the tall tuliptrees in our backyard, I am in the midst of a winter flock of American robins awakening from their scattered roosts in our neighborhood. They arrived, suddenly it seemed, a few weeks ago and now are part of our urban landscape, departing each morning for unkown foraging fields, in the rushing of wings that sounds like the air itself is breathing. At dusk, they return in waves for a half hour air show as they turn by the hundreds in an ever-changing Mobious strip flexing across the sky, contained and transformed by invisible elastic forces of instinct and safety in numbers.

As I walk down Cambridge Circle, the sun is rising over the Southwest Mountains and lighting the seedpods of the high branches of the tulip trees, salmon and pink like a muted outdoor Christmas display. I hear the kewing cry of our neighborhood sharp shinned hawk from its perch uphill and then, as bands of departing robins fly east towards open fields and pastures, the hawk crosses the street directly in front of me in a low swooping arc that rises towards its moving target. If there is an intersection of flight paths, I am not able to see it through the branches that layer in dense patterns against the warming sky.

I stand in the middle of the quiet street, watching the movement of life in unceasing waves of birds. Though this is my neighborhood, I am reminded of how little I really see until I stop like this – and also , with my neck tilted back for what seems like minutes of observation, how little I really know. Perhaps the resulting dizziness is an appropriate response to seeing birds numbering in the thousands headed out on a winter morning.

There is something just right about looking up at this time of the year – whether during the decent of darkness at dusk, or in the morning, like this, as the light silhouettes the shapes of the trees and houses before daylight colors them in. Looking towards the heavens, I have seen thousands of flocking birds, a vastness even by today’s standards – and one which helps remind me of my place in the neighborhood that I share with all kinds of neighborhoods. I think that this is, perhaps, a very good way to enter the New Year.