Animals at social distance

When my son was tiny, we spent many nights in our big bed together, his father on one side, me on the other, him in the middle. It hadn’t been something we’d planned. In fact, in an antenatal class discussion group, talking about the limits we all wanted to set as new parents, it had been the thing his father had said would be going too far. He didn’t want the baby in our bed, he said. We called him the baby then, a theoretical concept.

I still remember one early cold morning, his two parents awake drinking strong coffee and betting caffeine could make up for the sleep we’d missed, this tiny human dressed in a white jumpsuit alone in the bed without us, sleeping soundly, the red hair he was born with trailing a mullet over the back of his collar in the first rays of sun through the clerestory windows above the bedroom.

I said to his father, ‘It was the thing you really didn’t want, the baby in the bed,’ noting the irony that the baby was the only one in the bed right then.

‘Oh no,’ his father said, tears close. ‘We can’t leave him. He’s too little to sleep alone. Look at him.’ 

I often think of that time in our lives as our most animal time, fluid leaking from us, tears and semen and blood and breastmilk and piss, those moments of sunlight all that mattered. An animal time, where there were clocks but we didn’t notice them in our little brick cave, overlooking a bushland park where butcherbirds lived and where once I saw a fox. 

In the days before the pandemic, I used to hug people to say hello and hug them to say goodbye. I don’t hug now, not hello, not goodbye. I don’t even remember which hug was the last hug with any of the people I love most in the world. When people cry in my presence now, my arms remain by my side. They don’t ache exactly but of all the things the pandemic has taken away, it’s hugging those I love I miss the most.

I used to stay in a cottage on a farm in northern New South Wales not far from the sea. If the cows were close enough to the cottage, you could hear the sound of the grass tearing as they pulled it up with their teeth. The sunlight at the farm was like a warm meditation. The cows gathered together mostly, under trees in the heat of the day, around the cabin late and early. You could listen to them chewing. You could watch them for a long time.

Once a year, the farm owners would sell the calves. I knew this because it happened twice when I was there. They’d take the calves away from their mothers and the next morning a truck would come and drive the calves away. They’d go to another farm, the calves, to grow big enough to be slaughtered for meat. The owner of the farm, third or fourth generation on the land, liked that the calves could go from the farm to more of life, not straight to their deaths. 

When they separated the calves from their mothers, the mothers bellowed all through the long night and then for days. The second time it happened when I was there, the farm owner came down beforehand with earplugs and a bottle of wine for me.

I have learned that when animals suffer, we all suffer. Sometimes you are called to bear witness to suffering. You might use earplugs. Drinking the wine might help. 

On my walks up a trail called Powerful Owl close to my home, we have yellow-tailed black cockatoos visiting. I’ve never seen them there before and I wonder if they are refugees from the terrible bushfires of last year, trying to find a new home.

Last year, I got to know a family of yellow-tailed black cockatoos in Lamington National Park, a rainforest fifty or so miles away from where I live. I got to know them to the extent you can, watching them over several visits. They are enormous and industrious birds, I decided. They had made their giant nest in the fork of a dead eucalypt not far from the trail. The parents were hammering deep lines into the side of the trunk with their beaks. You could hear the knock knock knock, on wood. It wasn’t anything like the song. They were drilling for bugs, I’d warrant, because the chicks above them in the nest were squawking loudly, as if they wanted more food, and I don’t imagine a parent of any creature could have been busy at any work other than responding to that call which was loud enough to make lyrebirds think they needed lessons. Over time and subsequent visits to Lamington, the tree trunk became more and more damaged, as if someone had taken to it with a router, pieces missing like Jenga blocks. It hadn’t fallen when I last visited, before the pandemic, but it might have by now. The chicks had fledged, and they were still squawking, their parents still chipping away at the trunk. 

The yellow-tailed black cockatoos that have arrived in my neighbourhood now are chased every morning by the sulphur-crested white cockatoos-in-residence that screech whenever they jolly well feel like screeching. I have always assumed cockatoos are dignified and kindly, despite their screeches, something to do with the smoothness of their feathers. It took me some days to realise that the white cockatoos are chasing the black cockatoos away. 

I suppose this is another part of our animal natures, the pushing of other away. I imagine the black cockatoos will leave soon. 

I have in the last few years been hiking out into the forest in Lamington National Park alone to camp. I think I am trying to understand myself as an animal among animals. I have reason to grieve, as many animals do, and I have found my tears are of no interest to the sentient beings I come across, or to the trees, Antarctic beeches, some of which are three thousand years old. You could not call them benevolent or maternal, those trees, not in any way. Sentinel, I like to think. I think of that Mary Oliver poem about the sea being busy, having work to do. That’s how those ancient trees respond in relation to my tears. They are busy. They have work to do. 

We are counting losses due to coronavirus. We count the money and jobs and of course, we count the human lives lost. Hugging is not considered a loss. We socially distance. It’s become a verb. Our animal selves must wonder. 

We are a lucky country in Australia. We have so far avoided much human death and mayhem. I have few people I can hug at present, my son, his father, and this week, my dear friend. A kind of hug, shoulder to shoulder, back to back. A kind of hug, enough, and oh, it was like a bird soaring in my chest.