June 12, 2026: Requiem for a crayfish

I was just uphill from Big Rock Visitor Station Thursday morning, biking to work on the road leading into the Arboretum, when I saw a robin fly low over the pavement like a plane with engine trouble. It seemed to have bitten off more than it could chew. It was wrestling against the thing in its bill as it skittered to a halt. Had I not been biking towards it, the robin might have prevailed. Instead, with no time to wrestle its foe into submission, it flew off, leaving the thing on the pavement, and as I biked past I couldn’t tell at first what it had left. A very large moth? Perhaps, but why drop this one? A robin carries so many things so capably: snails and earthworms, bundles of sticks, terrible-tasting caterpillars. This thing looked like the silhouette of a boulder shrunken to the size of a silver dollar. I turned around and set my bike down to see what it was.

The robin’s burden turned out to be a young crayfish. It was still glistening with moisture. It propped back on its tail as I approached, planted its feet, aimed its long antennae and snout at the sky, and raised its open claws. It was frozen in fighting position. Years ago we had a smallish but scrappy cat named Fire. I once watched Fire leap up at a swooping hawk, claws out and back arched, to try to pull the bird out of the air. What was that cat thinking? The hawk would have torn him to pieces. Yet I would not have wanted to tangle with Fire if I were that hawk, and I would not have wanted to carry this crayfish if I were the robin. In fact, I was a little nervous about picking it up myself, but I had to get it off the road. I surveyed it from all sides. It watched me back, unmoving. It was implacable. What would this crayfish have done, had the robin gotten it back to the nest? Would it have eviscerated the chicks one by one? Or tormented them until the parent robin, exasperated, said, “Enough!” and returned it to the marsh? After a few moments I mustered my courage and grasped it firmly but gently by the sides, certain it would tear a hole in my finger. It did not. I set it beneath the trees and biked into work.

There were storms that afternoon. While I revised text and met with staff, raindrops hammered the leaves, banging against leaf rollers, leaf miners, larvae tucked tight into galls, aphids. They pummelled caterpillars and spiders holed up at the edges of their webs, ticks and craneflies. A friend poked her head into my office and said she didn’t want to be intrusive, but would I like a ride home? She had room for me and my bike. But I could see a break in the rain was coming, so I said no, thank you; and when it arrived, I took my opportunity. As I biked out through Crowley Marsh, a red-headed woodpecker swooped low over the road, wings flashing white. It landed on a bur oak in the middle of the low savanna and was joined by another. I watched them for awhile, then biked home past a corral of burbling cowbirds.

There was a tornado warning that night. The boys and Brooklyn and I retreated to the basement for 20 minutes. The cats wandered down to join us. It was a real party. We texted Rachel photos. We finished off a carton of ice cream from the deep freeze. The weather passed.

A singing chorus frog greeted me the next morning, Friday, as I biked in past the oxbow just north of the Ginko Collection. That evening, I took the train downtown for the Grant Park Music Festival. A pair of pigeons were pecking at each other on the sidewalk, either bickering or kissing. I suspect the latter. One flew up to an electrical junction box mounted on the side of an office building about 8 feet above the sidewalk and was quickly joined by the second. They kept pecking at each other even on that little box. They were still going at it as I walked away.

I expected every seat at Millennium Park concert shell to be filled and the lawn densely packed with blankets and picnic baskets. Apparently many in Chicago weren’t interested in this particular night of free music. It was a perfect evening, and I sat next to a gentleman a bit younger than my dad would be if he were still alive, hunched over a book with a canvas bag at his feet. I took out the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I had saved for this moment and made it last as long as I could, which was about 2 minutes, maybe less, tearing it into pieces as one does with a good PB&J and relishing them individually. Cardinals and cedar waxwings were singing in the armature overhead.

The conductor, Giancarlo Guerrero, emerged to enthuiastic applause and told us about the first piece the orchestra would be playing, Charles Ives’ “Variations on America,” which I believe Guerrero said Ives had written at the age of 17. It was fun, but my mind wandered. Then, without a word of introduction, they began the piece I had come for, Brahms Symphony No. 4 in E minor. It was beautiful. The sun was setting as the orchestra played. Starlings (I think, I wasn’t sure) copulated briskly–a bit too briskly, as songbirds do–on the strut that ran behind and to the right of the string section. The woman in the seat ahead of me pulled out her phone and turned Merlin on, set it to listen for birds. I watched her phone for a minute as it thought, distracted by the music. “Would you mind if I skipped the birds, just this time,” it might have asked, “and listened to the symphony? This 2nd movement is wonderful.” Instead, it silently returned no answer, and after a minute she turned it off. Her husband took videos at intervals throughout the symphony.

When the Symphony ended, the couple in front of me left, along with about a third of the audience. I had thought this would be the end of the evening, but it was just intermission! I read through the break and watched the sunset crawl up the Aon Center to the north of Millennium Park and up the side of Harbor Point, the condominium building on Lake Shore Drive to the east, wishing I had packed a second sandwich. I scrounged around in my bag and found an apple. I watched the cardinals and cedar waxwings coming and going. A gull flew overhead.

Only when Guerrero spoke again to announce the last piece did I see that a choir had walked in, silently, to fill the entire back of the stage. Guerrero described the piece, “Conquest Requiem” by Gabriela Lena Frank. The piece is based on the history of La Malinche, a Nahua woman from the gulf coast of what is now Mexico who was sold into slavery in the 16th Century. She served as a translator and interpreter, had a child with Hernán Cortés, helped enable the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Her history is complicated. I had never heard a thing about it until Guerrero’s story. The music is haunting, beautiful in places, vast for a piece that lasts only 40 minutes. I have a very limited vocabulary for this kind of thing. I drifted along with the music. In the fifth movement, “Rex tremendae,” the chorus abruptly stood up and, as one voice, sang from the Dies irae, Rex tremendae majestatis qui salvandos salva gratis, salva me, fons pietatis. “King of awful majesty, who freely savest the redeemed, save me, O fount of goodness.” The music filled the park and spilled out into the city.

I walked back to the train, talking with Rachel on the phone about the storms of the previous night, which had reached her by the next day, the afternoon of the concert. I stood outside the plate glass window of a bar as we talked, watching the U.S. playing Paraguay. I walked to Union Station and read on the platform, waiting for the train. We boarded, and I dozed intermittently, reading the same few paragraphs over and over, until we reached Fairview Avenue. I walked home, passing over St. Joseph Creek at about 10:30. It was bubbling quietly through the culvert that passes beneath Austin Street.