A Storytelling of Ravens

By Jan Hamer

According to Norse mythology, two ravens, Huginn (Thought) and Muninn (Memory), were Odin's most trusted companions. Every evening, they perched on Odin's shoulders to bring him news-and tell him stories.

 

In 1969, the world was unspooling against the backdrop of Vietnam war protests, the first moon landing, Woodstock

• Language: English
• Publisher: Binary Press Publications, LLC
• Release date: Jun 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781611710656

Book preview

978-1-61171-063-2cov.jpg

Acknowledgments

This is where I get to thank my village—all those who helped along the way to get these musings into print. First of all, Mark Biddle, for his beautiful design, his willingness to read and read again and give thoughtful notes, and for all the catsitting.

To the readers who persevered through many drafts and hand-wringings, who shared their insights and ideas over and over: JulieAnn Carter-Winward, Karin Hayes, Anna Lily Hodshire, Vicki Ramirez, and Abraham Smith.

And to all my other readers and inspirations—for all your encouragement and kindnesses over the years: Richard Bardwell, Don Beville, Mara Brown, Carol Biddle, Xenede Card, Julian Chan, Courtney Craggett, Patti Ehle, Judy Elsley, Roberta Glidden, Doug Hamer, Jesse DuBois Hodshire, Kyra Hudson, Jim Mariner, Donovan Penrose, Ryan Ridge, Brad Roghaar, Laura Stott, Sunni Wilkinson, and Kent Winward.

COVER IMAGE

The large bird in the upper righthand corner of the cover has been altered from the original shown here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crow_at_Duck_Pond_001a.jpg

The image has been flopped and converted to grayscale. Background elements were removed and changes were made to the bird’s anatomy. The file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Cover design and interior illustrations: Mark Biddle

Jan Hamer is an Instructor of English at Weber State University and the former faculty advisor for WSU’s literary journal, Metaphor. Born in Texas, raised in Kansas City, Hamer attended law school at the University of Kansas in the early ’70s, but decided to pursue her love of teaching, language, scaling mountain trails, cats, Argentine tango, and writing after moving to the mountains of Ogden, Utah, in 1985. A Storytelling of Ravens is her first published collection.

Copyright © 2022 by Jan Hamer

All Rights Reserved

Published by Binary Press Publications, LLC

ISBN: 978-1-61171-063-2

To Jesse and Anna Lily,

and to Jere, always

Foreword

In Norse mythology, the god Odin is attended by two ravens, Huginn (Thought) and Muninn (Memory), who fly off each morning to gather the news and return to perch on his shoulders each evening. Odin fears each day that they might not return, but fears most for Memory.

I went to Island Park, Idaho, in the summer of 2019 to work on what I’ve been writing for many years—stories, memories from my life—and this collection emerged. What follows are essays and poems written between 2006 and 2020, some with ravens, some without.

I searched animal group names for ravens: I had found unkindness of ravens in the past, but this time I also found storytelling of ravens. The ravens in my pantheon are not unkind, but sometimes unkindnesses emerge in the telling of our stories, the mining of our memories. Thought, memory, more thought and memory: then we see the past with new eyes, and the story may change.

And isn’t this true of all our stories? Each time we retell a story, whether ours or our version of another’s story, we bring to it everything we’ve learned since we told it last. If we are lucky, that is.

So. Storytelling it is.

And magpies too…

A Storytelling of Ravens

1. Four birds

I don’t know how long it took Jere to realize that I could really only identify four birds with any certainty: robins, cardinals, blue jays, and mourning doves. And mourning doves were rare in the suburbs of Kansas City, where I grew up, so that almost doesn’t count. (Plus, I could identify the doves only because my grandfather had pointed one out to me near his home in Moberly, Missouri, after I told him I always associated their calls with Moberly.) I never really heard or saw the doves at home, so maybe I should say I was only certain about three birds. Oh, yeah, and when I started to work downtown, I could spot pigeons, but if there were more than one kind, I wouldn’t know. Same with seagulls—generically, I knew what they were and had even spotted them near Lawrence, Kansas, a time or two (you’ll have to take my word, since I am self-identified as a non-expert, but others agreed that they were in fact gulls). And I had crayoned pictures of meadowlarks, the Kansas State Bird, in grade school, but had never actually seen one. All in all, a pretty pitiful life list.

Not that I knew before I met Jere, who later became my husband, that such a thing as a life list existed. So it should come as no surprise that I had never seen a bald eagle. I was quite mystified when, after we had dated for only a month or so, he announced that we were going to go see some bald eagles, and that I should dress warmly. I not only had never dated anyone who took me to see birds on purpose, I did not even know that bald eagles ever came near Kansas City or that anyone could possibly predict where and when humans might see them. We drove north from KC for an hour or two, past the airport (the last place I was certain I’d been before) until we arrived at Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge.

Now I got the ‘dress warmly’ part. I only had a city wardrobe, with no good warm boots or gloves. (This was years before we moved to the West and the local Patagonia outlet set me up with enough outdoor gear to outfit a small Himalayan expedition, provided the team members all wore a Women’s medium.) With cold, blue fingers and freezing toes, I studied the white, barren landscape and huddled against the wind entering my not-warm-enough jacket. Since I had never been there in warmer weather, I didn’t realize that we were looking at a vast wetland, or swamp, or marsh. Geography class in the ’50s and ’60s was mostly about memorizing countries and their capitals, so we probably never learned about flat, soggy places, let alone ever went out to visit one.

Look over there, Jere said, pointing at what looked to my novice eyes like small children bundled against the cold, all wearing identical white caps. They’re out there on the ice. Wait, those were eagles? Indeed, five or six of them were strutting self-importantly around a stretch of ice a few hundred feet from us. This man was amazing! How could he possibly have known they would be there? We didn’t have binoculars, but once I knew what I was seeing I could start to appreciate how magnificent and yet how ordinary these birds were. They weren’t flying majestically or posing for the cameras at the top of tall trees, and as I watched them, I realized that children would have been jostling each other, horse-playing around. These birds were just milling around on the ice, maybe shooting the breeze, looking more like a gang of short old men in dark suits, hanging around an ice hole hoping for a fish to tug on their waiting lines.

This was the first door that Jere opened for me, a peek into a new world—the first of many, as it turned out. Eagles were just a symbol of all I did not know about the natural world. Growing up in the suburbs with just robins, cardinals, and blue jays (oh, and squirrels—more on them later) is no excuse, since Jere had grown up in a similar environment. But he had the Boy Scouts, farms in the family, and a high school ‘science field club,’ plus a natural curiosity that I didn’t possess, to expand his vision. When I met him, I had never seen a deer, let alone a moose, a badger, or a porcupine—all of which I’ve had in my backyard in Utah, where we moved together in 1985. Moving to the West certainly expanded the possibilities, but Jere taught me to open my eyes. Without that, it wouldn’t have mattered much where I lived.

2. Trapping

After we married, Jere and I continued to live for a time in the same suburbs near where I grew up. (Jere is pronounced Jerry, by the way; it doesn’t really rhyme with chair). We traveled to Colorado to ski and to California to visit his dad a few times, and he continued to amaze me with the number of birds he could identify, flying over the highway or sitting on wires, even as he drove. He had bought me my first field guide, the Peterson Guide to Western Birds, and I had made a few stabs at identification. I soon learned to always look at the range maps before declaring myself: if something you think you saw only lives in the Arctic or in Mexico, and you aren’t in either place, you are probably wrong. Keep looking.

But back at home in the suburbs, it was pretty much the same big three, plus a lifer (another one of those bird-watcher terms, meaning one you hadn’t seen until then) for me: grackles. They were more slender than a robin, and their feathers were black, shiny, iridescent. And they loved our backyard so I got lots of practice identifying them. The other common backyard critter was the squirrel. Or rather lots of squirrels. According to local lore, as the suburbs were built, the developers planted lots and lots of pin oaks, fast-growing, spreading tree thought to resemble the elms that no one planted any longer because of Dutch elm disease. And what else are pin oaks good for? A squirrel smorgasbord of acorns. Fair enough if the critters had only eaten acorns, but they developed a taste for all the same things suburbanites grew in their gardens and put in their bird feeders. We had planted a modest vegetable garden, so squirrels became the enemy.

My own personal war on squirrels began (and pretty much ended) with a Havahart trap that I baited with peanut butter and set up in the yard. Over the whole summer, I actually trapped one-and-a-half squirrels. (The half is a squirrel that was in the trap until I picked it up. He escaped, scratching my leg in the process, leading me to worry about mad-squirrel disease or worse.) My one successfully trapped pest was duly transported to a nearby park and released. The main things I caught in my trusty Havahart were birds—specifically, many grackles and one hapless cardinal.

At least I assume I caught many grackles, rather than the same grackle over and over. But I know I trapped the same cardinal many times, because our yard hosted only a single pair. The male was the one who couldn’t resist that peanut butter. I would come home from work and hear his mate up in a tree, reading him the avian riot act for getting caught once again. Maybe he just went to the trap to get away from her, for she certainly was mouthy. When I’d let him out, he’d fly up to take his punishment, and then a day or two later he’d be back in the trap, unless a grackle beat him to it. Soon enough I gave up on the idea of trapping squirrels, much to the relief of Mrs. Cardinal, and just let the squirrels eat our tomatoes.

3. Western Birds

After a couple of years, we ceded our Kansas City home to the squirrels and grackles and moved to Ogden, Utah. One of the first things I noticed was that there were no blue jays or cardinals (or fireflies, either, but that’s another story). I’d seen grackles in California (I got chased by some while running in Palm Springs one time—probably relatives of the ones I