Asa and the Woodpecker

It was late June, our second night camping with four-year-old grandson Asa at Kings Canyon National Park.

We’d spent the day clambering through the bodies of ancient trees, exploring a creek, setting up our tent. Now it was cool evening, with a campfire, green peas and mac & cheese for our supper. Still an hour or two before dark. Jeff and I would happily sit in our camp chairs by the fire with book or ukulele, but the right thing to do was to go out among the trees.

And so we went, Asa in rainbow socks and rainbow crocs, leading me up masses and moraines of sculpted granite rock, enormous earth bones, high and out of sight of the campground.

Clumped between a giant’s cairn of rocks we found a circle of trees that had escaped last year’s fires. Sugar pines, exceptionally tall. Ponderosa pines and giant sequoias. A perfect place to play.

We danced on stumps. Investigated rot.

Searched for bugs. Shook foot-long pinecones, rattling down the dark.

It was quiet in the sun–setting forest until there came a drum, a deep slow rolling beat from the tip top of a standing dead conifer.

“Asa. It’s a pileated woodpecker,” I whispered, drawing him into the curve of my arm.

“I see her, Grammy, up on that tallest dead tree!”

The last rays of the sun fired the bird’s triangular crest, a tomato red flag.

Her drumming didn’t stop.

“Let’s answer her, “said Asa. We picked up the bird’s rhythm on a dead log that straddled the rocky shoulder of the hill.

The woodpecker overlayed a wild whinnying call into her percussive rap.

Asa and I caught each other’s eye. There couldn’t be a better place or time to sing our current favorite song (All God’s Creatures Have a Place in the Choir)

Our tune escalated into a reciprocal shout, matching the shrill of the woodpecker’s voice.

A trio, in a communication of the wildest kind, we pounded and sang as the sun fell into the hot flatlands west of the park, until the woodpecker unfurled her white–patched wings and flew deeper into the forest.

How did we humans stop seeing ourselves as deeply embedded participants in the cycles of our planet? Here is the answer: some of us still do. All of us can.