Off to the Witch

Safety, new beginnings, and hawks with metal names

Juvenile red-tailed hawk, pencil and watercolor on plant print, November 2024

On Thursday morning after the election, I woke up, realized my stomach was unhappy and promptly projectile vomited on the bedroom floor, on the bathroom floor, and eventually in the toilet. I didn’t have a fever. I wasn’t hung over. I just couldn’t process food anymore. I sobbed into porcelain, surrounded by worried dogs and wondered what had just happened to me. I’ve done this at a few brutal but ultimately pivotal times in my life, but I didn’t understand why I was doing it now.

I didn’t follow the election; I voted based on my own research while staying out of media unless it was to look at local media addressing the issue directly from ground zero. And it’s nobody’s business what my politics are unless you’re a close friend and ask. Even better if you are a close friend and we discuss fears, personal challenges, and hopes rather than straight up politics over beers. I’ll spill my guts to you and listen closely while you spill yours, but only then.  

My biggest fear was that no one would win decisively. I believe in women’s autonomy, the rights of all marginalized people, protecting the environment - and I also believe in fiscal responsibility, a strong stock market to ensure the endowments at my land conservancy can support the properties they are earmarked to steward in perpetuity, and in ensuring more than a livable wage for the team members who do that work. No matter what happened in the election, I already knew it wasn’t going to be my ideal scenario. So, I just wanted it to be decisive. I wanted to vote, know the decision, and decide what my next steps were then. In the meantime, I was focused on my own possibilities.

The Saturday before the election, after two weeks of searching and trying, I trapped a beautiful male juvenile red-tailed hawk to be my hunting partner for the next two or three years. As a licensed falconer, I am only allowed to trap a juvenile hawk of select species, the red-tailed hawk included. I have always loved trapping a new hawk in October/November because 80% of juvenile hawks don’t make it in the wild, especially during this time on their first migration. Juvenile hawks whether they understand it or not, aren’t safe. Yet, if I trap a hawk, I know it is, to the best of my ability, going to be safe.

I’ve always wondered what they must think, their wild genes driving them on their first great walk-about only to discover all they do not know and all that might kill them. Often their demise is as simple as not finding enough food. The hawks that are trapped on the bal-chatri traps I use are unharmed as are the mice used as bait and the hawk’s chances of surviving if I take it home increase exponentially. My hawk has health care, a steady and unwavering supply of food, and all the protection I give them beyond their own bad decisions when we hunt together. This year though, the young migrating hawks were doing very well.

I hadn’t seen this many juvenile red-tailed hawks in inland Southern California since 1995. It was a glorious year of rain and flourishing habitat. Most of the young hawks I tried to trap had no interest in the potential of free mice. There have been years when I drove for hundreds of miles just to see one juvenile red-tailed hawk to throw a trap beneath and it was always starving. This year they were on every other pole along the roadway interspersed between peregrine falcons and kestrels. The kestrel population is declining, but I saw so many. It filled my heart with the joy of possibility. I never thought I would see such a rich raptor migration again, but there they were, thriving. We can’t control the weather but have indeed left them spaces to refuel on their first great journey.

Freshly trapped juvenile red-tailed hawk, November 2, 2024.

I knew the journey of this election and what followed was going to be rough. Yet, I thought I would slide through it with grace and ready to go to battle for whichever of these important facets of my personal belief system went unfulfilled. I already knew I wasn’t going to win what I wanted. I will always think that what happens locally and in my purview to help is more important than my vote. (Although I always vote.)  Yet, I was so sick.

As someone who has family and friends they hold dear on both sides of the voting choices, I didn’t know who to talk to. I didn’t want to share my feelings with anyone who was relieved. I didn’t want to share my feelings with anyone who feared the worst. So, I didn’t. I just watched online as a doubling down on both these views unfolded and the attacks started. You were an idiot or evil depending on which way you voted. And when I dipped my toes in the water to suggest that there were people who had gone in knowing they would be sad and worried no matter who won, I got slammed as if I was far right or far left. And I am neither. Longtime personal friends “othered” me. I understand othering. It’s hard not to to put thought processes you don’t understand into the “other” bucket. It is easy to other or layer your beliefs on another being - even when it could potentially be an amazing friendship of entirely different minds.

I brought my new hawk home and was startled at his weight. Male hawks are much smaller than females and this one was small but somehow weighed as much as a female. As my doctor has loved to describe me, he was obese. This was going to be a challenge because the only thing I had to use for communicating friendship with a hawk was food.

I was going to have to rethink all of my tried and true training techniques to work out a relationship with nothing more than a few small snacks. This hawk had feasted so diligently that it was going to days maybe more than a couple of weeks for him to have any interest in more than a bite of food. In the wild they can go many days without a meal if they are well-fed. So, I tweaked and adjusted things to his comfort, finding he indeed had no interest in food. What he did have was something I’ve never seen before, a stalwart belief that life was easy and there was nothing to fear, including me and the dogs. Within 24 hours he was tame. He loved sitting on the glove, watching the dogs and bathing in his bath pan. Somehow over the last 7 months between hatching and migrating, he had grown up safe. His surety that the world was kind cushioned him like bubble wrap. I wish I had a cushion of bubble wrap.

I have never blocked anyone over politics, but I ended a few decades’ old friendships over the divisive finger-pointing conversations post-election privately offline. Worse, friends of friends piled on to add to vitriol and judgement on my tame comments asking for understanding on my seemingly wish-washy position. I know better than to argue with people online. I just so desperately needed someone to understand what it felt like not to be solidly on either side in this hullabaloo. Again, I should have known better. When I teach writing memoirs, I constantly preach that we should not explain ourselves to the world, but instead explain the world to ourselves. And here I was, explaining myself to the world as if I would somehow get what I wanted. And so, I woke up the next morning and spent two days trying to keep food in my stomach. Then I beat myself up for being a baby about the election. It took me almost a week to realize the true source of my bodily reaction. I was afraid. I was afraid for my emotional, and maybe physical, safety.

I went trapping hawks alone this year, because my apprentice who has deservedly graduated from his apprenticeship was sick and couldn’t come trapping with me. It’s easier with a second person because you have someone else to sling the bal-chatri trap beneath a hawk from the passenger side of the vehicle. This is harder to do from the driver’s side along a roadway. It’s also just more fun to have someone else with you to share the experience in both its highs and frustrations. At least that’s what I tell myself, but there’s a deeper truth. It’s also safer for me.

I went out at 6:30 AM and slow cruised stretches of road along open space on a Saturday morning. I didn’t see many people except for the one dude in a white Honda Civic who pulled alongside me to ask what I was doing while I peered at a hawk through binoculars. I told him I was bird watching in the most soothing “silly me” voice I could muster and hated myself a little for it. My Toyota Tacoma towered over his little passenger car, and I undoubtedly had two more cylinders in my engine, but my response was placating.

He said he was a security guard, but he didn’t look like a security guard. He probably was a security guard but what I did on a public road still was none of his business. I was nowhere near the construction site across the street he inferred he was patrolling. And I wished my apprentice, now friend, Lenzy was with me not for the shared experience but for his full six feet and ability to change the goofy smile he gives me into a glare that would instantly shift the dynamics. I continued smiling and signaling how unthreatening I was, then looked longingly at the hawk I wanted to try to trap and drove on.

There was a distinct danger to me in the rhetoric following the election and my inability to embrace either side. What I heard both in subtext and in upfront messaging was that if I was sad, I didn’t belong to one group. If I wasn’t sad enough I didn’t belong to other. Humans who do not belong are not safe. The science says this is why we desperately need to belong somewhere. It is why we “other” people.

What I saw was people shredding each other apart with their words as if there could ever be an absolute winner in politics. What I understood in this was that I had friends who I had loved and trusted for years would not support me, respect me, or believe in me if I couldn’t align. So, I felt alone, unprotected, and set up for a fight I would never win.

We are all entrenched in our personal experiences and mine have a long history of my fight for safety. When my parents were unavailable starting when I was five, when my grandmother who was raising me with my grandfather was committed for psychiatric care, when my stalker pulled a gun on my brother, when my boyfriend physically abused me, and when others spun intricate webs of lies that entrapped me and in all instances I looked around and saw no support and no escape.

It wasn’t the election. It wasn’t about who voted for whom. I was puking out my guts because I felt unsafe with no idea how to feel safe again.

Dio, 36 hours after trapping. Nov 3, 2024

I named my hawk “Dio” which will morph into barking “Ronnie James Dio” if I’m irritated. I named him this because the song “Last in Line” came on the radio when I spotted him. The morning was getting late. I was going to need to end my joyous morning of bird watching and tempting hawks soon. The radio cooed “We’re a laugh with a tear, the hope without the fear. We are coming… HOME” and then Ronnie James Dio belted, “We’re off the witch, we may never never never come home” and I flipped a u-turn and prepped my trap.

Dio the hawk wasn’t hungry and I’m not sure why he came down trap and even more so why he chose to take a risk when he didn’t need the food. I don’t take risks unless I feel safe, and I’ve never met a hawk that felt safer in the world. This tumult of a world with habitat disappearing by the minute and manmade structure proliferating wild spaces is a gauntlet that baby hawks fail more than succeed in surviving. I usually meet hawks because they are desperate.

I am learning how to work with a hawk who is fearless and can lean on his vision of a safe world. I may be flummoxed by his choices, but he wasn’t wrong to take the risk. In a few weeks I’ll be setting him off to fly free and to discover how much more success he can have working with a seemingly incompatible team of human, dog, and hawk. We will all have different ideas about how this should work but will ultimately have to compromise to not only succeed but to find greater success than we would have had relying on our own vision of the world.

So, I’m reminding myself that I extricated myself from every situation that has terrorized me, eventually. I am asking myself how to feel as safe as a juvenile hawk who has no business thinking the world is kind.

Nature is more brutal than politics. The hawk was never safe. Yet, nature is the greatest teacher and the most dependable source of comfort. It is where we find we belong, and where we belong we are safe.

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