I zip into my tent and open up the sky window. It’s a big sky in Montana, everyone knows that, but the way it makes me feel lonely is all my own. I miss Marion and our two girls, all grown up now. In a day or so I won’t think much about them—everything will get focused down to the tunnel vision of migrating. I’m a man who lives dual lives with little overlap. But for the moment, I like to think about my family. I’d do just about anything for my wife and girls, like turn myself part way into a bird and migrate across the continent.
Three hundred and fifty miles later, give or take a dozen miles on my sore ass, we reach Yellowstone.
A huge banner stretches over the park’s north entrance reading, “See the Dance of the Sandhill Crane!” We sit back on our bikes as we coast into the park. Keith has been singing an old camp song to himself, over and over.
“I like bananas, coconuts, and grapes—that’s why they call me Tarzan of the apes! I like bananas…”
No one would blame me if I strangled him. Too bad I like Keith.
Theo is full of all kinds of talk again, playing the role of the good little stooge. He’s riding behind Hector, who treats him like a mosquito just out of slapping range.
“What can we do to make the dance more exciting and draw in more people? It’s great how the Sponsor is meeting us with more provisions, isn’t it? He really takes care of us.”
I bike steadily and let my leg muscles do the work. My left Achilles aches, but the rest of me feels strong. Yellowstone has crap roads that twist and turn on themselves like they were drunk when they laid the concrete. I pop and coast into hover a couple of times. Until the day I’m dead, I’ll always love hovering.
There are whiffs of sulfur and foul minerals on the air. Yellowstone is nature’s fartlands, but it’s the most popular American park. Go figure. Cars pull over and line the roads, waving and honking at us as we pass.
Hector increases our pace and we turn down a long stretch of road that’s less crowded. Even though it’s not the first stop in the park, we go to Old Faithful first. It puts an extra fifty miles on our ride, but that’s what the contract orders. We bike along the Madison River then down to the Upper Geyser Basin. The road loops back and around to where we start our performance, so we won’t be seen ahead of time. We dismount just out of sight of the Anemone, Beehive, and Plume geysers.
Our Sponsor is there with the costumes and body paint that Scotty radioed to him after talking us all to death about what we should wear. It’s not so different from last time. There’s cloth sewn along the arms and attached to our shoulder blades with a long skeletal frame to approximate the sandhill crane wingspan. The rest is sleek gray material so tight it shows off every line and muscle of our bodies, save for the modesty crotch-cups. This is a family event, after all.
“And now, what you’ve all been waiting for… .” A tinny sounding drum roll pounds through the park. “Once thought to be extinct, the sandhill cranes have been resurrected for one day only! The oldest birds known to man! Closest in kin to dinosaurs! The sandhill cranes’ mysterious movements might be how the dinosaurs danced! Please welcome the Western Migrators!”
The applause of five thousand people is a little unnerving. Theo takes a step backwards. We’ve painted our skin gray, except for our eyes, which are blackened, and our foreheads, which are a shocking red like the actual birds. Scotty leads the way forward, and we follow him, picking our legs along the ground carefully, straining our necks upward and moving them from side to side. Three of us move in unison for a couple steps then fall out of it, as though any uniformity were random. My legs are sore and my neck’s stiff, but never mind that, a crane doesn’t know about that. A thousand cameras click and follow our motions. As many people as they can fit into the bleachers lean forward and stare at us. A screen twenty feet above us projects our dance to everyone else. A kid starts crying.
We walk toward them slowly, until we are centered just right in front of the bleachers. Theo walks behind us, mimicking, not yet on the inside of what we are doing, not yet trusting the instincts within him. A force builds in my throat, and I raise my head to let out a loud, ugly “Augaroo-a-a-a‚ au!” The other birds… men sway away from me. Keith raises his arms and with it the long stretch of wings unfold behind him. He hops once, twice, up into the air. I cry out again.
Scotty echoes my cry, and Hector hops up into the air and moves his neck from side to side. He lands. A vent of steam hisses up from the ground, and we crouch down and spread our wings, except for Theo who’s a beat off. He crouches down as quick as he can.
Don’t think, be. Let it come, I’d tell him, but the bird within me takes hold. Grafted DNA and bird memory pulses through my muscles and limbs. My neck moves from side to side, tasting the air, feeling the wind against my cheek and the warm air blowing at us from beehive geyser. Anemone geyser starts gurgling and filling up with water, building pressure at the same time pressure builds in me. Everything is syncopated and my wings move with the rotation of the planet and sun.
Two birds start hopping up and down with their wings beating. Jumping toward each other, then popping back, testing their strength and virility. I crouch lower to the ground and sweep forward with my wings outstretched. Two hop over my wings. Another screams “Augaroo-a-a-a, garoo-a-a-a, au!"—a challenge and a promise. The cry passes to me, and I rise up tall and proud. I crouch down and jump up, my wings spread high above me as I twist upwards and fall back to the earth in a spiral. Beating my wings aggressively, I turn and face Theo—stare him in the eyes and lunge toward him twice, my body hinging at the waist. Still uncertain, he mimics my motions. I back away, feeling the heat of his movement, even if he can’t feel it yet.
“Garoo-a-a-a!” he yells at me, moving closer to the bird inside of him. I step away and bend toward him. Keith joins our circle and spreads his wings, his gray and red face blank as a bird’s. In unison, we run toward Plume geyser and, one by one, we jump across. The pit in the earth gurgles with boiling water below us. A dare, a challenge to the mother, and she lets us pass by, unburned. We turn and dance mirroring each other, facing the crowd of ragged Americans chewing on soya-dogs and deep-fried kelp bars.
Keith jumps up and does a somersault in the air. Theo does the same and I bend toward them, challenging, receding, moving. With a gurgle and suck, Plume geyser spews up and we run around it, our dance becoming more urgent as the hot mist hits us and stings.
People scream and clap their hands. Keith uses Theo’s shoulders to launch himself up higher. Theo watches him, then does the same with me, his weight pushing off me as he twists into the air. We are birds and we are magnificent. We get lost in the movement that goes on and on, ebbs and flows, reinvents itself and repeats. Garoo-a-a-a. We end by sweeping our wings along the ground.
People clap and kids jump up and down on the flimsy metal seating. I smile up at them. There’s few enough things the people of this country look forward to anymore, and I’m glad to be one of them. Young women with a hungry look to them check us out, as do a few men. Not that it will do them any good—none of us can be sexual on the migration. Just like birds, we have other fixations. Still, no one minds the appreciative stares.
We turn and walk away from them, back to the fake log cabins they put us up at.
Theo walks beside me, deciding, I guess, that I’m not so useless. You learn things about a man when you dance with him.
“That was… tell me about those birds.”
“Sandhill cranes danced for courtship, hierarchy, territories, and maybe, sometimes just because they wanted to. At least that’s what I think. They went extinct in May of 2012. Word went out that there was one surviving flock, and everyone shot at them, wanting to be the one to cause the extinction. We’ve got some of them in us. We’ve got every bird that we dance in us. They tell you that?”