Vultures, Ghosts, & Welcome to Spooky Season

OK, well, I feel like this is turning into a catalog of excuses for why I never visited the beautiful parks around DC before now, and to some extent, *guilty as charged*, but I’ve got a pretty good reason (even, possibly, slightly seasonally-approriately haunted reason?) for this one.

The park in question is Great Falls. Saying you’re interested in nature while living in DC but that you haven’t been to Great Falls is like saying you live in Moab, Utah, and love hiking but have never quite made it out to Arches National Park.

It’s also not quite true.

I did go, once. 

I was living in a group house at the time. It was a white house with a bright purple door, and I remember arriving from Austin, Texas with my mini-U-Haul attached to the back of my car and sitting on the wrought iron steps and thinking, “this’ll do.” 

Not, “this is fantastic,” as I’ve sensed before about some places, but just, “this’ll do.” The place had its ups and downs.

There was the roommate who insisted the sliding glass doors in the back had to be left open all day long for her dog. We were robbed blind, of course, several times. I didn’t have much to steal, but I drew the line after the thief went through all of our underwear drawers, picking out the silky ones. 

After developing and enforcing the a house rule of closing and locking the outside doors, the roommate with the dog moved out, and we brought in Lisa H.

She was older than us, and also wilder. She was the kind of woman who can keep her looks through any trial she cared to put herself through, and, pursued by ghosts, she put herself through many. She was always genial, though, always friendly, striking up conversations with strangers even as she was falling down, so full of life and also alcohol on quiet nights you could almost hear her inner rows from the next room over. She’s how I met the man I married. And she had an aunt in town, a professor, who lived in Great Falls, Virginia.

We only visited the aunt once, Lisa and I and another roommate nicknamed Hedger. Great Falls is now an extremely posh address, but the aunt and her husband had lived there for, I would guess, 30 years or more, in one of those houses of personality. Each room unfolded, less as a matter of function (here is the living room, here is the dining room), and more of a matter of collections. Here was their collection of glassware. Here was this odd piece of furniture. Here was this interesting bit of sculpture they had picked up in their travels. And here were their paintings.

One of them made me gasp with recognition. “It looks like me!” I said, although, upon reflection now, I am not entirely sure how much it actually looks like me.

It certainly looks like the young woman I wished I was once, showing up at M’s Fine and Mellow Jazz Cafe in Baton Rouge, smoking a cigarette, drinking a very full glass of whisky, smiling directly at the viewer and on the verge of dropping the blanket draped about her shoulders. I’m not sure I ever pulled her off.

Nonetheless, a few years later, after I had moved out of the group house, Lisa H. called me up. Her aunt had died. I was very sorry, I said. She willed you the painting, Lisa said.

No one has every willed me anything, before or since.

It sits on my desk in my tiny apartment, I look at it every day, thinking of the woman I wanted to be, thinking of the woman that Lisa’s aunt was.

After visiting Lisa’s aunt’s house, the aunt took us to Great Falls. 

Great Falls, though only slightly outside the Washington, D.C. boundaries, is a proper national park. It has an entrance, and a little booth, and if you’ve paid for a year-long entrance fee at any other national park, you can use it here too. It has parking and crowds and a visitor center.

Where the aunt took us had none of that. It was just a slip off the road, with a few parking spots. It was right next to the Falls. You could hike in either direction. I have no idea where I was, and I could never find it again. It was the kind of place you know if you’ve lived there 30 years, watched it develop. I didn’t want to spoil the memory of that day, so I never went back, until last week.

I don’t know why I went last week — to the proper park, the one with the booth.

I’ve been having some leg trouble — as many of you know, I have neurological problems that crop up every once in a while. Currently, my legs feel like they are heavy and made of lime jello. I knew I couldn’t walk far or explore as much as a wanted. Still, it’s fall migration, and I hoped to see some birds. Maybe some lovely little warblers on their way through to warmer climes.

What I saw is vultures. Enormous, great, vultures.

[Black vulture at Great Falls National Park, VA.]

Fortunately, I adore vultures.

[Hyenas and vultures on a kill in South Africa.]

They are, of course, important in the natural world. There’s been a lot written lately about the crashing vulture population numbers and how essential vultures are to just about every ecosystem. We’ll always need a safe, effective way to dispose of our dead, and vultures do a great deal of the dirty work.

But to me, they’re more than just the useful clean-up-crew of the bird world.

Just look at that enormous wingspan, the funny way they walk-waddle when they’re curious about something on the ground, their grace in flight, the way they catch the warm air and coast on it.

In particular, the Turkey Vultures at Great Falls are, according to Audubon, something special:

These birds fly using a type of soaring called “contorted soaring.” Through this technique, Turkey Vultures ride the upward wind generated when air currents collide with treetops. This allows them to stay closer to the ground compared to other carrion eaters, like Black Vultures in North America, giving them an advantage. They can also rock side-to-side while flying to counteract the wind forces in turbulent scenarios, which allows them to have a lot of control and stability in their flight. “They can fly with almost no wind and in very turbulent settings," Katzner says. "They are just one of the coolest species in North American to me." 

[Turkey Vulture at Great Falls National Park, VA]

Above all, they are a Bird of Personality.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be quite as bold as that woman in the painting — I know I’ll never be that young again. But as I meet her gaze, I feel I’m meeting the gaze of Lisa, and her aunt — their ghosts, and my ghosts, meeting my dead where they are, and carrying them along with me on my big, outstretched wings.