Common Birds 54 - Golden-Crowned Kinglet
Monday, December 11
Walking in the rain is exactly my type of rebellion. By that I mean it isn’t rebellious at all, but I still get the thrill of feeling like I’m breaking rules. Because I, a fastidious lover of rules, would never break a real rule. However, there is a wide array of social expectation rules which aren’t “real” and I love to break. Social rules are real in the sense that people absolutely and instinctively know when you break them. Nobody goes for a walk in the rain. You might get caught in the rain. Sometimes you have to get from point A to point B while it’s raining. But you don’t just go outside and walk in the rain. So the rules are real, but for me they don’t count as real because the only cost is seeming strange. I have habitually felt like a stranger, so for me that cost is free. Even more, I often enjoy feeling strange. Now that I’m writing about it, I recognize that I care a lot about rules that require me to be good and don’t care about rules that require me not to be strange, and from this you can extrapolate my entire life. So I zip up my raincoat (I don’t actually want to get wet) and head into the rain, an outlaw.
At this point, it’s been raining for the last 18 hours straight. Puddles have claimed the parking lot, and the stream runs high and fast. I know that the normal entrance to the trail is going to be blocked off by a huge puddle, so I head for one of the secret entrances I’ve learned about over the last year of walking. It’s still a little swamped but I don’t have to attempt a leap which would probably be too ambitious. In the trees, the ground is mostly flooded. Over a large pool, chickadees flit and hang upside down from branches, drinking the droplets of water which hang from dormant buds. Then I catch a flash of gray and a blaze of yellow. I hear a call I don’t recognize. There they are - two golden-crowned kinglets! They’re so small they make the nearby chickadees look bulky. They also flash from branch to branch drinking droplets. Their gold crowns are luminous in the gray light. Water drips in slow trickles down my neck as I crane to keep them in sight. Mud squelches under the leaves as I shift my weight. I didn’t want to get wet but now there are kinglets and the day is glorious!
Back at my desk, I’m still glowing in the light of my renegade walk. Everyone else in the office is locked into their social programming. They have no idea I just went for a walk in the rain.
