The buzzards are back
In which I talk more about carrion and cemeteries than all the hotshot branding people would advise me to...
The buzzards are back for the summer.
I don’t know where they go during the winter — Missouri? to scavenge meth head corpses in the Ozarks1? — but they disappear sometime in November and come back as the weather warms. While they’re gone, bald eagles take their place in the food chain, seeking out carrion when it’s too cold to fish or hunt.
I never saw bald eagles as a kid. They’ve resurged exponentially in the last couple of decades, which is a rare bit of environmental good news. It’s common to see them nesting in Iowa, especially in winter, when the trees are bare and it’s easier to spot eagles on their high, lonesome perches.
Bald eagles are birds of prey, but they’re opportunistic when it comes to dead things. When the buzzards are gone, there’s plenty of carrion for them to clean up. You’ll see bald eagles feeding on roadside deer carcasses in the winter — and hopefully, the deer died from a car accident and not the neurological wasting disease that has inundated the local deer population.
Is a bald eagle devouring the carcass of an unfortunate mammal a metaphor for America in the throes of late-stage capitalism, or is it just a gruesome fact of rural life? You decide!
Anyway, the buzzards. I taught myself not to say “buzzard” after I moved to California. “Buzzard” sounds like something from the hollers of Appalachia, so I switched to “vulture” (when I needed to say it at all, which is pretty rare in places where landscaping crews have replaced carrion birds on cleanup duty). In the city, you don’t want to let on that you’re a country rube. In the city, it’s easy to remove yourself from the mess and decay of the animal world (rats and raccoons and pigeons excepted). In the city, you don’t see buzzards circling overhead; you don’t watch their wafting, floating movements and wonder what fresh death they’ve found somewhere below.
Death feels a little closer in my small town, and it’s not just the buzzards idly circling outside my window today. The local funeral home still puts cards out at the grocery store and gas stations to announce deaths — so every grocery run risks seeing a picture of someone you knew, reduced to a 4x6 card and an announcement of funeral timings.
There’s something sweet, and strange, and sad, about a place where funerals and visitations are a core part of the social experience. The calling of others to see if they saw the card, if they know what happened to the dead and why. The line-up to meet the bereaved family. The moment of viewing the body, tragic in some cases and a relief in others, trying to decipher in the lines of the face what was illness and what was age and what was the undertaker’s artistry with fillers and fluids. The recap after — who was there, who sent flowers, how nice the plants were, whether the turnout was good or whether the person had outlived all their friends. And after the funeral, often, dinner (aka lunch) in a church basement or community hall, with little sandwiches and jello salads and weak coffee, and emotion smothered over with social veneer.
And everywhere you drive here, a cemetery — the large ones on the outskirts of small towns, or the abandoned pioneer ones hidden down dirt roads and alongside farmers’ fields. San Francisco moved their dead outside the city a century ago2; in my 20s and 30s, I got used to living in places where I never went to funerals and never saw the dead.
But something in my body missed the rhythms here. And something in my heart is glad to see buzzards again, even if this is the most melancholy teen-goth nonsense I’ve written in awhile.
I just hope the buzzards are circling today because they’re enjoying being back, and not because my neighbor is dead.
Cheers,
Sara
Southern Iowans are prejudiced against Missourians for reasons that likely date back to the brief Honey War fought (without anyone actually dying) over the location of the Iowa / Missouri border and some critical honey trees back in 1839. It doesn’t help that Missouri also sucked big-time during the lead-up to and fighting of the Civil War (although their de facto war with Kansas was worse than their relations with Iowa), and continues to be problematic (although Iowa’s legislature and recent voting track record is undercutting my argument and breaking my heart, but that’s a different issue for a different newsletter).
If Missouri had won the Honey War, I would be writing this newsletter about Missouri and probably making some disparaging comment about Iowa’s meth heads instead, but the idea of being a Missourian is unfathomable to me.
Also, my grandfather was born in Missouri, but we don’t speak of that.
If you want to read about San Franciscans moving their dead to Colma, which became the “City of Souls” (with a current population of ~1500 living people and ~1.5 million dead), this KQED article is a good place to start.
I love this, Sara! As someone who recently relocated from my big-city condo to my rural childhood hometown, I'm being re-indoctrinated to viewings and funerals... and other small-town rituals, including potlucks and parades. I'm acclimating... and I can't wait to read more of your newsletter!
Love your writing! Dislike birds, though! Remind me to tell you the story one day about Grace C and I discussing our mutual distaste of birds moments before one flew into the beach house at a retreat....