Planning a miracle

A summer dawn beneath a blank canvas of sky, and possibility glistens like the dew-fall. I separate from the concealment of the hedgerow and walk out brazen onto the billiard flat of a grass airstrip. Levelled and mown, these many wide acres are an unlikely wilderness. But nature is innovative. Here the daisy and the dandelion are royalty. An earthworm a dragon.

The wind is kind to me. A soft steady westerly finds the upwind edge of the airfield, hops over the fence and allows the tender grass to smooth its ruffled fur. It reaches me neat and laminar. Standing with my back to the breeze, the wake from my body spreads out in front of me as an arrowhead of eddies and riffles.

These vortices are the makings of a miracle.

There is forethought in this early morning pilgrimage. Many of the Second World War military airfields in south-east Scotland have been returned to agricultural use. But some, like the one on which I am standing, are still held by flying clubs and gliding associations. I have flown from a number of them over the years. They have their particular charms. The grassy runways may be managed and manicured but they are never fertilised and no pesticides are applied. Little plants keep their heads down and thrive. Their tight matrix is filled with life. Now, when the sun summons them, the insects rise from the meadow in a carnival procession, their outrageous costumes conceived in the crucible of continuance. They swirl and dance to the drumbeat of heaven.

The flies and gnats and midges too, are the makings of a miracle.

There is still a little time before I am observed. The early-bird pilots will be along soon to open the hangar doors. But they will have to squint up-sun to detect me. As long as I make no movement their busy senses will omit me from their reports. Stillness fools the eye.

I see the first hazing, way off at the eastern end of the strip. The air trembles as if its lover is knocking at the door. The faintest of high-pitched benedictions are whispering upwind towards me. Then, in a blink, I am overwhelmed. They are all around me. A blizzard of swifts. An agony of swifts. An ecstasy of swifts.

The birds believe that they know me. They think I am a bronze-age standing stone. Surely I must have been here for millennia, generating for them and their ancestors the swirl and churn in the wind which concentrates the aerial plankton on which they feed. The tiny birds gape like basking sharks and gorge on the table my wind-shadow has laid for them.

I must not flinch. I am only nature’s anonymous assistant as she performs her world-famous knife-throwing act. She surrounds me with flickering black-brown switch-blades. One after another they fling themselves through the turbulence towards me. I can hear the clack of their beaks snapping shut, just a few feet from my face. Their upwind trawl complete, they stick a wing-tip, like the point of a drafting compass, into the empty page of my memory and pivot around it. They draw their circle, up and away until it intersects with a final glimpse of a black crescent moon against the blue sky. Then around they come again, a deluge of hungry mouths. A lightning rod at the apex of this flat earth, I am aflame with swift.  

Giddy with the glory, I give in to temptation. I slowly raise both arms, out straight to the side as if about to embrace some long-missed friend. My open hands turn flat to the rising sun, fingertips yearning to be touched by the downdraught from their wings. I know they will not land. That is not in their nature. But I long for it so hard that my skin sings to them.

A young girl is helping her father open the heavy hangar doors, hungry for the day’s adventure. Inquisitive, yet to be bounded by familiarity and expectations, she alone glances out to the middle of the airfield and sees a man standing motionless, his feet together and his arms outstretched with palms facing forwards. But no, this isn’t an echo of crucifixion. I am not making a bargain with the other world. I am simply giving myself utterly to this one.  

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