The Lord God Bird
A lot of conversations with people I’ve recently met invariably include this question: “Where are you from?”
My accent is cited as evidence of being of some far-away drawling place, full of possibly porches, banjos, iced tea, and sunshine filtering through turning leaves. The questions that usually follow my answer, that I am from Arkansas, want an answer like this- but it’s so much harder to explain anything of value concerning a place that I both love and hate.
There’s the beautiful and sprawling expanse of nature that most people seem familiar with- the mountains, the delta, the quaintness that belongs even to our biggest cities, and even our lilting accents. These things are available in both pictures and sounds, and are fairly easy concepts to grasp, visualize, or relate to.
There’s also an intangible quality to a place like Arkansas that I can never quite grasp, and when asked to describe it this is the part that I struggle with the most. On NPR one day, as I sat in horrible Chicago traffic, I listened to a broadcast of “All Things Considered,” where the show’s hosts conducted interviews with the citizens of Brinkley, Arkansas, where the great Ivory-Billed Woodpecker was spotted after decades of a presumed extinction.
Aside from the subject, the interviews provided me a great insight as to that intangible quality of Arkansas that I struggle so much with to define. The people of Brinkley are located next to one of the poorest counties in the nation. In addition to suffering from the poor economy, they talk of tornadoes. They talk of struggling to retain the city’s youth, instead of losing them to larger cities. They, with their familiar accents that feel like home to me, talk of a down-south city where everyone knows everyone, where everyone knows the troubles that are being faced, and where this “Great God Bird” holds the key to revitalizing everything. They talk of tourism related to the woodpecker, they talk of jobs being created to support the influx of bird-watchers. They have great hope in something that, to an Arkansas transplant sitting in downtown Chicago traffic just seems so… insignificant. It’s a bird- albeit a special one- but just a fucking bird just the same.
And that’s the intangible quality that I could never quite put my finger on. It’s the hope, the kind of hope and outlook on life that I think is common all across the state. It’s the “I’ve lived my whole life here and times have always been hard and they’re getting worse, but things can’t go anywhere but up” attitude. It’s the “fuck it, I can go fishing and have a good day today.” It’s the “To hell with it, I can feed my family and that’s what matters.” It’s the “Shit, we’ve got this woodpecker, maybe we can turn this into something that matters.” It’s that, no matter how many bad things happen, no matter how many people lose their jobs, no matter how many people are leaving your city, no matter how many tornadoes rip the area apart- you’ve still got your life. You’ve still got your family and friends. You’ve still got all the things you’ve grown up with; all the things and people you know and love. And, by great god, you’ve got that damn bird, and maybe that’s the key to turning everything around.
I sat in Chicago traffic, where no one cares about birds or hope, listening to that little slice of home on my radio- and while I may have been reading too much into what those people from Brinkley, Arkansas were saying, because maybe it really is just a story about a bird, I got something from it. I realized why I want to go home, and why I don’t feel like I can ever return, all at once. I missed my home, I missed my people, and I missed all the things that Arkansas ever meant to me, and I cried.
*****
All Things Considered- “Brinkley, AR, Embraces ‘The Lord God Bird.’” Story from July 2005, featuring a Sufjan Stevens song written especially for the story, also called “The Lord God Bird.” Runs just under 13 minutes.
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