A wild goose calling

The Dallas Morning News

The glitzy neon splash of Las Vegas and the just-plain-folks spirit of little Sutherland Springs represent opposite ends of America. Yet these towns are now forever bound by a heinous reality: Two of the deadliest mass shootings in recent U.S. history have shattered each in the space of five weeks.

Vegas’ nightmare began the first Sunday in October, when a madman with an arsenal of weaponry gunned down 58 people and injured scores more at a country music festival.

The nation had hardly regained its footing when, the first Sunday in November, yet another gunman bent on evil killed more than two dozen church-goers and injured 20 or so in the worst massacre in modern Texas history.

The Sutherland Springs assailant all but took out an entire congregation as he, spraying gunfire, burst into the modest First Baptist Church during morning worship. In just minutes, he turned the one-blinking-light, unincorporated town 30 miles southeast of San Antonio into a horror set.

Whether church worshippers in South Texas or music lovers in Vegas, all the dead and injured were innocent victims simply going about their lives. Not only are they lost to us, their lives cut cruelly short, but they leave families, friends and neighbors to the all-too-familiar dirge of heartbreak and healing.

Sutherland Springs is not the first church shooting in Texas to explode the myth of small-town safety. Some of you will recall the gunman, clad in battle fatigues and yelling “This is war,” who opened fire on a First Baptist congregation in the East Texas town of Daingerfield back in 1980, killing five and wounding 11.

But a massacre the size of Sunday’s church tragedy takes a small town and its residents to their knees. Hearing of victims who range from age 5 to 72, most shot as they sat in their familiar church pews — it’s enough to take us all to our knees.

And for a community with only a couple hundred residents, the victims’ names will be no abstract list. In small towns like Sutherland Springs, these will be relatives and classmates, neighbors and friends. And so often, it’s the churches that knit the community together.

As we hang our heads in this tragedy, we cannot forget that we’ve barely caught our breath from the last. We know in our heads that mass shootings account for only a tiny fraction of the killings in America. But we can see that the frequency of these large-scale homicides is increasing.

And with three of the deadliest having occurred in just the last 18 months — Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs and the killing of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. — a sense of helplessness is growing nationally.

We take pride in our Lone Star grit and resiliency. But the Sutherland Springs massacre hits hard — so many of us still carry small-town hearts, even if we have learned to wear bigcity armor. Thoughts and prayers — even the most sincere — are only a beginning.

The sound became too loud to ignore and finally brought my head up. They passed directly overhead.

Maybe it was the closeness that stimulated my imagination. Maybe it was the magical sound of wind through slotted wings that brought back some old-time feeling, or perhaps it was the sheer volume of their cry.

For whatever reason, I realized, suddenly, that the birds were beautiful and their passing haunting. I found this thought strange and disquietingly sad because like most people, I get to ignore Canada geese every day.

This wasn’t always true. Once even the rumor of distant honks would stop me in my tracks and draw my eyes to the sky. A wedged flock passing overhead would cause people on street corners to pause in their hurry and swap nods and smiles as if something special had been shared. And it was special. One of Aldo Leopold’s greatest passages was inspired by that beautiful sound.

“And in the night. When the cries of wild geese would slip through open windows and pry you from sleep. Don’t you remember how that sound beat a resonate tattoo on the place that lies just below the ribs — the place where human longing is stored? Don’t you feel your soul spread its wings and join the passage birds in spirit? Wasn’t that the way it was?”

Before game management engineers staged a spectacular goose population boom? Before agricultural practices produced a bounty of grain to fuel wintering flocks? Before a landscaping trend that turned forest into habitat equivalent to affordable housing for Canada geese came to dominate the land?

Before geese became the bane of golfers, a blight on corporate lawns, and so numerous that refuges can’t even give the birds away? Before one of the most magical sounds in the world, the sound of Canada geese, was diminished by repetition and volume?

I feel like I do when in an elevator and I hear some tune that I really liked the first eighty or ninety times I heard it but can’t stand now.

I feel like Midas, surrounded by gold, who wants only to savor, once again, the remembered taste of wine on his tongue.

I want to be pried from sleep by the cry — slipping through the window — of geese. I want to feel the dimly remembered hunger for things not yet been, experience the wings-wide reach for the far horizon and whatever fortune lies there for the taking.

But if I can’t have these things because there is not enough magic left in the world or because the having has dulled the longing, then I will settle for this: that every once in a while, a flock of geese will pass close enough to cut through the commonplace and turn my head so that I will see them and say, “They are beautiful.” STANLEY TATE