June 3, 2010
The Peregrine Wall
The Peregrine Wall
When you first round the corner on the trail and see the wall before you, across the chasm, incandescent in the sun's full early light, it stills your feet and snaps your mind from details of your hike to dreams of primeval drama long smoldering deep within the human DNA.  The wall rises sheer, perhaps 1200 vertical feet, glowing red in sunrise splendor.  Halfway up, at eye level after your lung burning ascent, is a line of white, in sharp relief, at first glance looking like nothing so much as petroglyphs scrawled by some promethian god.

Then as your eyes struggle to comprehend the enormity of the wall and the meaning of its cryptic markings, your ears tune in to the screaming, soft at first, then rising, piercing and insistent, echoing down the quiet of the canyon, filling the solitude with shrill urgency.  Instantly it all comes together in primordial flashback, the red walls, the white wash, the raptors' calls.  You drop to your knees.  You could be the first human to set foot in this sacred place.  You could be the first human.

There is movement out along the cliff face leading to the glowing wall.  A Peregrine, presumably the female, slips from a crack, presumably the eyrie, plummets three hundred feet, arrests her dive into a fluid and perfect parabola and sweeps upward to a skylined ledge adjacent to the wall, leading your eye to a second bird, her smaller mate, just landing with prey in talon.  Your telephoto lens, too large to capture the vast expanse of the chasm, is too small to render the raptors in sharp detail, but the prey appears long tailed with blackish speckling on gray upperparts, a dove.

There are only two types of birds.  Predator and prey.  Peregrine.  "Wanderer."  Dove.  The universal icon for peace.  Peregrine and dove.  Predator and prey.  A dance of death and life older than the art and subsequently the language evolved by humans to sanctify and symbolize it.  But no older than the shrill vocals of the raptors which have reverberated down through the canyons of lost time and raised the hackles of their first human witness in some ancient wilderness.

The female grasps the gift in both talons, dives from the ledge, transfers it from feet to beak in midair, crying her benediction, and returns to the eyrie where nestlings await the male's morning bounty.  He flies to a long ledge, long used, above the line of white wash, the eyrie within his line of sight.

This mountain has three main trails used by 300,000 hikers a year.  You are on a side trail, a faint game trace, out of sight and out of mind of those hikers.  Down below, within an hour's radius, live five million people.  Down below the desert is heating up.  The red wall has paled to golden brown.  You watch the shadows fade along the crags.  The eyrie remains cool beneath its overhang of stone, the nestlings fed and sleeping.  It is time to leave.  You hesitate.  You are nearly overwhelmed by your reluctance to return to what your evolved language has designated "civilization."  It is alright.  A part of you will always remain.  And the peregrine, the wanderer, in your DNA will always bring you back.
Peregrine male delivering dove
Peregrine male delivering dove