Emu

When I was very young, my world was made of concrete, tangible things. It was a definite place with familiar people and things and there was a way things were, and a way things were not. The spring I turned six I found out how reality could bend like a Slinky as imagination bore its fruit, making a worm hole in my tangible world. This revealed a permeable and wild borderland where the real and the imagined coexisted.

Growing up, my family owned a small cabin in the northern woods of Minnesota. The dwelling was nestled in thick forests of pine and poplar trees just off a rarely traveled and minimally maintained gravel road. A path led back further into the woods, made only by our feet traveling the same way so many times, and the occasional deer making use of our blazed trail. The trail led down a slope toward Silver Creek, then over a small log foot bridge and into the less familiar until it petered off entirely.

I was six that spring. It had rained all day but I ventured out anyway, clad in my rubber boots from Benjamin Franklin. I wanted to see the creek racing in all its intensity from the rain. The low banks of the creek weren't enough to hold it in after the storm; grasses and trees alike were covered to their ankles by the clay-colored water. When it was like that, the water reached the underside of the little foot bridge and I could stand on it with my Benjamin Franklin boots, crouch down, and touch the cold rush of the small stream.

Just beyond the creek was a small water pit that only appeared in soggy weather such as this and then often became a breeding nest for thousands of mosquito larvae. I stood on the ground by the water pit, the ground tacky from the rain, and it held firmly to my boots if I didn't take a step every few seconds. I bent down, looking into the shallow pool of water and watched the rain drops hit the surface and break the mirror with every splash. It was quiet except for the rush of the creek and the rain hitting the infant leaves of the tress far above my head.

I turned around away from the small pool of water and started walking back toward the creek. There it was. Standing just off the left side of the path up to its ankles in a muddy puddle, was a giant bird. I was standing face to face with it, a mere five feet away. The bird's eyes were at the same level as mine, as it stood just as tall as my six-year old body. The bird was absolutely drenched from the downpour. Its feathers looked like those of a week-long dead gull that had been washed up on the beach, not capable of flight or giving warmth, but simply limp and hanging downward. The spine of each plume was nearly bald from being so drenched and were a drably colored brownish-gray. Those pitiful remnants of plumage clung to the bird's long neck and off its small head, in the style of a balding man attempting a comb-over.

We stood there for a moment that seemed like an hour, this mystical alien creature and I, staring at each other in a mix of disbelief and wonder sprinkled with fear. The creature was dripping with the same rain that was dripping off of me. We stood there. We stared into each other's eyes. Its eyes looked ancient and beady like those of a Velociraptor in Jurassic Park, my eyes were wide and sleepy- the eyes of a child not yet shown many mysteries of the world.

I raced back up the path, slipping and sliding in the mud, back toward the cabin to tell someone about this amazing thing I had seen.

"Mom! Mom! There's an ostrich in the woods by the creek!" I exclaimed, out of breath from excitement and the jog back up the path.

"An ostrich?" she replied, obviously amused.

"Yep, a big one! It's got long wet feathers and it's as tall as I am. It's humungous!"

My mother smiled and replied in that placating voice that all parents possess that I probably imagined it, or saw a pheasant. I knew what I had seen, whether I knew the words for it at the time or not. There had been something magical standing in front of me that day. It stood awkwardly on two stick legs, battered and wet in a puddle of muddy water, but it was magical.

That was my first brush with the vast unknown of the tangible world. After a fitful night's rest, I went back into the woods the next day after the rain. I realize now that I was looking for some form of proof- prints in the mud, a long weathered feather that had been left, anything really. There was nothing- nothing at least that the rain had not already washed away.

It didn't matter in the long run. I knew what I had seen and held steadfastly to it as I grew up. Now, as an adult, I find that my world has again become tangible and definite. There is a predictability and rhythm that I've become too comfortable with. Inside me, though, I still firmly hold hands with that six year old who saw magic all those years ago in the rainy woods. I hold the knowledge that there are wild places in the world, and in the mind, where unknown or imagined things still quietly reside.