Quoth the Raven

“Nevermore!” --Edgar Allan Poe, 1845

We’re running along the path by Vancouver’s Kits Beach at the end of the day, and I try to match my stride to Lenora’s. Lenny is the rabbit of our running group, with her sleek, lycra-

clad limbs and her raven-black tresses. As the designated empath of our early evening

cityrunners’ cabal, she’s also Lenora the Listener. She’s the person you can imagine telling

about even your most apocalyptic fears. You can’t help but spill your guts with someone

like that, right?

Our conversation is punctuated by our footfalls on the gravel.

I tell her I’ve fallen apart: missing work, crying unaccountably at trifles, unable to sleep

more than four hours a night. I’m waiting for the next crisis, waiting for the next storm to

shake me up. Ah, life. I can’t seem to take it in stride, to get used to it. The aloneness is

what scares me most of all. Being alone in the fortress I’ve built is no picnic, believe me.

But who’s going to swim that murky moat; who’s going to come crashing through that iron-

wood portal? The best I can do is to conjure up the spirits of some long-departed

companions—and as they flit in ghostly form, white-sheeted figures among the stonework,

I can barely discern their features behind the veils of memory. I fumble through an

attempt to put this into words, for Lenny, who listens.

“Look!” Lenny shouts, as if to call our attention to a scenic view, as we pass a crow-laden grove. “Straight out of an Emily Carr painting, huh?!” She seems bemused as I suddenly veer off in the opposite direction, thrown off my stride.

“Huh!” I scoff.

Should I explain my sudden detour around the birds? It’s kind of embarrassing, really. I’m trying, god knows why, to make an impression here. Not as if a school-marmy me has a

chance with someone like her. Yet Lenora manages to look both sympathetic and enquiring

as she maintains her perfect pace.

“I--have--a sort of a bird-o-phobia!” I blurt.

“Tell Lenny the story!” a fellow runner entreats me. “Sort of a Margaret Laurence thing, right? You know--A Bird in the House--that one?”

Footfall, footfall. Breathe, breathe.

“Bird in the house--means--death in the house!” another runner recalls.

Footfall, footfall. Adjust the jacket tied around your waist; wipe the sweat off your forehead.

“It’s like--the end--of--everything!”

“This fear is based on an incident in your childhood?” Lenny asks.

“Bird came down the chimney--at Nana Hamm’s cottage--when I was seven! Freaked out!”

“You or the bird?”

“Well--both--really!”

“You saw the film?” Lenny wants to know. She doesn’t need to specify which one; it’s

obvious from context. Breathe, breathe. Laughter. Mine.

“Not till later! Yes! My girlfriend in high school threatened to kiss me with peanut butter

lips if I didn’t watch it!” My only love reduced to an anecdote.

“Charming!”

“But seriously! I should have picked the lips!” Breathe. Footfall.

“Birds inside are scarier than outside ones, is that right? Maybe the birds are your own

soul, trapped somewhere...”

“Right!” I affirm, trying to believe I’m not so afraid of those roosting in the trees, those

wheeling overhead. Some existential threat. This is the way the world ends.

“They migrate to Burnaby every night at sunset,” Lenny comments. “Should start up about now.”

The thought strikes terror into my heart. I want to stop talking about it, and I drop back a bit, but Lenny slackens her pace in lockstep with mine, and the rest of the group slows to

follow our conversation.

“Nana Hamm! You’re always quoting her, right?” Lenny asks.

“A poor workman blames his tools!” someone shouts. “You’re not sugar, you won’t melt!”

The words come back to haunt me as I recall I’ve uttered Nana Hamm’s wisdom whenever a fellow runner complains about an ill-fitting shoe or a run in the rain.

Yet my Nana Hamm was indisputably an inspiration and an icon of resilience. No wonder I trot out her aphorisms to my running group with what I’m sure is annoying frequency.

Even as my feet pound along the path, my mind runs along a well-worn track of memory. I drop back from the group again, and this time they all, even Lenny, run ahead and leave me alone with my thoughts.

My Nana. Her wisdom. Her mantra.

Instead of counting sheep, Nana Hamm amused herself as she drifted off by making smaller words from the letters in a longer one. Whatever thoughts kept her from slumber, how wisely she banished them; instead coming up with words within words, and worlds within worlds, patterns within patterns, lulling her gently to sleep at last. Amazingly, she always remembered the word and the number the next day.

“One hundred words from discombobulate!” she would announce, for instance.

Not surprising from a woman who could end a Scrabble game with the triumphant cry of “A seven-letter word! VAGINAS!”

It was Nana who gave me my unlikely Scrabble nickname, in one of our epic matches of

wits (she always won).

“That’s 16 points for RAVEN,” I said, alluding to the word I had just placed on the board.

“Oh, is that what you’re calling yourself these days?” she responded. I have been “Raven” at the top of the score sheet ever since.

I tell Lenny it’s my nickname.

“Ravin’,” Lenny ponders, “Is that like ravin’ mad?”

“No, the BIRD!” I laugh. A less likely label for a chunky blonde bird-o-phobe like me can hardly be imagined.

Yet perhaps I have drifted closer to that namesake, relinquishing some of my fear. Ever

since I got a dog—my first pet ever, in my thirties no less—my feelings towards all non-

human creatures (including birds) have warmed up a bit. I see a crow hopping along the

road—at a safe distance of course—and something about its spirit reminds me of my

beloved pet.

What’s a raven, after all? A stately bird of yore, or those who number among his lesser

cousins. Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie. Fifteen years ago, I sewed yellow

crepe-paper feathers to a yellow dress to dress up as my nickname then: “Super Chicken.”

Birds invite us to a dream world where anything is possible. Flights are ones of fancy, not of

fear and loathing.

Embrace your fears, you coward.

I run forward to catch up with the group.

“Lenny!” I breathe. “Will you go out with me?”

***

I guess the moral of the story, if there is one, has got to be “Never say nevermore”--even if it’s time for the end of the world.

No doubt, here in British Columbia, that apocalyptic moment will be heralded by giant

ravens straight out of an Emily Carr painting. And what would that look like? Only the artist

herself would know for sure.

Deborah Blenkhorn is a writer living on Bowen Island in British Columbia on Canada's beautiful west coast, where corvids have been imbued with mystical significance since the ancestral days of the tribes whose land was settled by uncouth interlopers like her.

Linkedin: Deborah Blenkhorn | Author website: Pebblepad