A September Return

Last night I want on a small adventure, a trip to Ingrid’s Scandinavian Food a restaurant which, not surprisingly, serves nothing else. Now start reading this as though Sir David Attenborough were talking. I ordered a salmon wrap, the bread used for the wrap is lefse, a potato based bread which was delicious and only 9 dollars. I ate as the sun began leaving the sky, sitting at a table in a parking space on a beautiful late summer night. But that wasn’t the only reason I was here. I was drawn by the promise of an annual celestial event I’d missed last year. The return of the swifts.

The chimney swifts or Vaux’s swifts, or both, have been coming to chimneys in Oregon in September for years. Before that, they nested in hollow trees, which were a lot more common 300 years ago. I read that groups of roosting swifts can range in size from just a few individuals to as many as 35,000 in some larger smokestacks. They returned to one particular elementary school for 30 years and then one year they shifted to another chimney and have returned to their “new” roost every year since. So those hollow trees must have lasted a while themselves to allow the birds to learn to memorize their particular tree. Or, more likely probably, all migratory birds can geo locate, I just never thought of it as being that specific, but it may feel just like the family who own camps or cottages. I wonder if it’s anything like opening the door for the first time in a year, smelling the smells of the place and sitting on familiar rocks and looking at the small familiar places, a crease in the rock, a returning daisy, the glint off water or the setting sun making an easterly, bosky hillside glow. The comfort in returning to familiar places, and, I suppose, dear chimneys.