The vultures are back. I just noticed them the other day, driving on the causeway. How long have they been here? It’s a flock that winters in South Florida, I read somewhere. Some snowbirds!
They circle above reminding me of things I’d rather forget. Like stern preachers warning complacent congregations of inevitable fate. Take care of your souls, brothers and sisters, for your flesh belongs to the black, winged creatures of the sky.
As a kid in Cuba I would see vultures whenever we rode out to the country. They circled high above royal-palm groves and that always meant that deep in some ravine an animal lay dead. I used to see them later, when I lived in an Indiana farmhouse, and they meant the same thing. Something had died out there in the fields.
Then I stopped seeing them. My sojourns in semi-rural Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Vermont were vulture-free. So were the cities, of course – except for culture vultures. But they’re with me again, here in Florida, circling slowly, majestically, dramatically, malignantly. I wonder how winter-season tourists feel, lying on the beach and seeing a huge flock of carrion-eating birds hovering above their exposed pale flesh?
Vultures are the stuff of cartoons: a black-humor cliche about stranded desert wanderers. They are perfect caricature material, with their scrawny stooped necks and bad-humored faces. But all that is mere interpretation. Vultures don’t tell me anything by being vultures, other than it’s a good thing that someone likes to munch on roadkill for, otherwise, our highways would be, quite literally, a bloody mess. Vultures are not out to remind me of my mortality; they just eat dead meat, that’s all. Come to think of it, so do I.
Seeing them for the first time when he was four, my son fell in love with the vultures. They were big and powerful-looking and that’s what little boys love most. Lacking any cultural referents, like cartoon vultures eyeing stranded desert wanderers, he just saw grand old birds. Not unlike eagles, except that eagles are harder to spot. And, in a way, his interpretation was not wrong, not even culturally. For the biggest of vultures, the condor, is a subject of admiration: a mythical bird in South American countries, the object of ecological quests out in California.
My experience was different. I always knew that vultures were fearfully disgusting, that when they circled above the royal-palm groves in the distance there was always a death. The Cuban name for vultures is aura tinosa. Aura means the same in Spanish as in English, except that in the Americas it can also mean vulture. And tinosa means having parasites, being mean and being filthy. A mean, filthy, vermin-ridden aura. Go figure.
But I recall reading, in one of the Cuban-American newsletters that revels in my native country’s past, about a legendary white “aura” that, in the 19th century, was held in captivity in a provincial city because it was believed to possess magical curative powers. Such reverence this albino aura inspired that poems were written in its honor. Still, I figured I would have to be pretty sick to go fondle a vulture for a cure.
For no matter how ecologically correct I think our vulture flock is, they are a little unsettling. They circle above downtown Miami, a zone of urban decay. And they glide over the causeway that I take to get home. Some times they fly low and perch themselves close by, like cartoon vultures. Are they eyeing me the way I eye dead flesh in the meat department of a supermarket?
Driving home, I notice one of the roadkill-eaters has become roadkill itself, a tangled mass of red carrion and black feathers. The hit must have just happened for I notice the air is still thick with plumage. I drive through a cloud of feathers, all of them, miraculously, magically, white.
Enrique Fernandez’s essays appear the last Sunday of the month.
