Orion > From the Front - Shock and Awe



	American Symbol, 1998 Norm Magnusson, acrylic on canvas

WITH THE BOMBARDMENT OF BAGHDAD came the synchronous assault by the coalition of the media. The barrage from assorted radio and television reporters, manic in their excitement, seemed inescapable. Live-action reports were on the air wherever one went: the convenience store, the dry-cleaner's, the auto parts store.

After two days, which seemed to have gone on for weeks, I'd had enough. That Friday evening I left Chicago and drove with my grown son to my sanctuary in Galena, Illinois. The peace and quiet of the small cottage in the hills would only be interrupted, he promised, by the play-by-play of the NCAA basketball tournament, a welcome distraction.

My son, turning thirty, has become more of a friend in the past few years. Over the weekend, we spoke off and on about the war, without coming to full agreement. Looking at him, I remembered my father's lasting grief over my older brother who died in World War II, a boy years younger than my son was now.

TWO DAYS OF BALMY WEATHER (the false spring that sometimes misleads Midwesterners) had a soporific effect. By Sunday morning I proposed a hike in the hills before breakfast, and we set off at a relaxed gait. An hour or so later we broke out of deep woods onto the high paved road leading back to the cottage. Looking toward the cloudless, blue sky I pointed out a hawk flying in lazy circles only a quarter mile away. My son stopped, looked again, and said, "Wait, that hawk has a white tail---and a white head! It's an eagle!" We stopped, not believing. "Dad!" he shouted, "There's another one." Sure enough, a second bald eagle had appeared in the sky, circling just behind its mate.

My son turned to look behind us. "Dad, look -- more!" As I turned, coming out of the sun, were two, no, three pairs of eagles. "Quick," I shouted, "get the binoculars!" Before I had finished speaking, he was sprinting for the cottage, and I kept craning my neck to see two, then four more eagles coming toward us, circling in the warm, windless air.

We traded the binoculars back and forth in hurried bursts, shouting to each other, "There! No, wait, over there!" Through the field glasses, we could see their magnificent beaks, and how the tips of their long wings would curl up just enough to allow for an effortless turn in the thermal updrafts. They just kept coming, more and more. Spaced wide apart, each pair turned in wide, lazy arcs, all the time moving in a set direction. North.

"Probably heading to northern Minnesota, or Canada," my son said. "To the big lakes."

With stately mien this silent procession continued for only a few minutes longer, and then they were gone. The sky seemed empty. Later we reckoned there must have been almost fifty of them. They had come up the path of the Mississippi River, only a few miles away, and had crossed over our small valley. According to the bird guidebook, we had witnessed a "convocation of eagles," the term taken from a gathering of bishops.

WE WERE STILL EXCITED, but couldn't really say much, as we ate our breakfast. Occasionally we would look up and smile at one another. We felt we had been granted something extraordinary, something private. Yet by whom? To what purpose? It didn't really matter. I had experienced similar feelings on a few other occasions, alone in the Southwestern wilderness. The momentary shock of unexpected discovery in the wild, and the reverential awe that accompanies its impact, reveals Nature at its most magnificent, its most munificent.



	The Imposition of Order Upon Nature, 1997, Norm Magnusson, acrylic on canvas

That evening we returned to our separate homes, and to the panoply of destruction being dutifully beamed into every household. Having by now given themselves over completely to hysteria, the networks were engaged in a fierce graphics war of their own, competing to splash "Shock and Awe!" in ever bolder type across their screens. Those words had new meaning after what we had witnessed that Sunday morning in the quiet sky above the Mississippi -- a convocation of Nature's bishops, enacting an ancient liturgy. Calm and certain of their course, they glided above the earth, seeming entirely above our ill-fated attempts to rule it.

R.A. McKEE, book printer and freelance book editor, resides in Oak Park and Galena, Illinois. He is author of the chancel drama "Conscience of a Nation."