Sleeping with the Lights On: The Urban Winter Crow Roost and What Happens When Nature Reaches for Us

Jeremy Hauck
February 21, 2019

In the sky over the rush-hour congestion on Manheim Pike, they take on the grandeur of a natural event, just beyond the range of dashboard and light pole, of golden arches and Coca Cola bottling plant. It was only after I began commuting to my present job that I took notice of this nightly gathering of murders (murder of murders? mass murder?) of American crows during the winter. Until then, I had always backgrounded the crows into the urban tapestry, with the squirrels and sparrows and gingko trees.

Crows over Manheim Pike, during my evening drive home

Each individual crow flies in an idiosyncratic manner, in its own space; some stop, either as individuals or in small groups, stubborn to leave certain tall trees. Others fly against the great current of wings, or obliquely to it. Some of the birds caw out while others fly in observant silence. Heads swiveling, they scan the landscape. But the shape of all of them together moves purposefully in one direction.

Last winter, I decided to check it out, to follow them. I got my family and we got in the car and we . . . we went to the mall?

Garden Fortress, Garden Chaos: Wild Lot Discusses Welty’s “A Curtain of Green”

Wild Lot
August 31, 2017

We emerge from our summer wanderings with a discussion of one of our favorite works of fiction and really one of the most perfect summer stories: Eudora Welty’s “A Curtain of Green.” Originally published in 1941, it is the title work of her first collection. “A Curtain of Green” takes place in the fictional town of Larkin, Mississippi.

Hear us, great Pan!: Valentine’s Day, Lupercalia, and Picnic at Hanging Rock

Jeremy Hauck
February 14, 2017

When I first saw Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), I must have been somewhere between 17 and 21 years old, living in rural Southwest Ohio, where I was born and raised and which was, like Weir’s 1900 south Australia, an ostensibly free yet inwardly straightjacketed province. I recall being excited by the subtext that Sara’s affection for Miranda, and then Mademoiselle de Poitier’s appreciation of Miranda’s beauty, suggested, not to mention the visuals of the key scenes that I get into here shortly. Above this impact, though, something haunting embedded in the film has made me ever since consider Hanging Rock part of my personal worldview, across multiple phases of my life, despite having seen it only once or twice until recently, when I brought it into the classroom as a case study of the Gothic.

The film is subversive, defiant, confounding, haunting, and impressionistic, which is probably why I liked it. What makes it even more appealing to me now, after reading the scholarship on the film, is seeing how the veinery circulating these impressions is the pagan god Pan—god of the Wild, and inspiration of the horror/sublime sensations brought on by finding oneself in the grip of the unthinkable mysteriousness of the universe, beyond the walls of normal experience.

wild lot

Category: The Sublime

Sleeping with the Lights On: The Urban Winter Crow Roost and What Happens When Nature Reaches for Us

Garden Fortress, Garden Chaos: Wild Lot Discusses Welty’s “A Curtain of Green”

Hear us, great Pan!: Valentine’s Day, Lupercalia, and Picnic at Hanging Rock