Going to bed early can be dangerous - wide awake, I dream through eagle eyes

In last night's post, I stated that I needed to go right to bed, as I had gotten somewhat less than two hours sleep the night before. The time stamped on the post reads 9:29 PM, but right after I posted it my friend the very talented fine art photographer Edite Haberman emailed me some pictures from San Francisco as part of Project 24 and was curious about my reaction to them, so we carried on online discussion for awhile. I broke away to go to bed about 10:00 PM. My goal was to be tucked in by 10:15, but I couldn't go to bed without calling Margie and we talked past that time.

I finally got to bed about 10:45 - very early for me. I was excited, for two reasons. I had not been to Abby's Home Cooking in awhile and had decided I would go. It's just better eating breakfast at Abby's than at any other restaurant I have ever visited - that's because it really is home cooking and Abby has created an exceptionally warm atmosphere.  I could hardly wait to chomp down on the ham, eggs over easy, the fresh-shredded hash browns and Abby's homemade multi-grain bread toasted and spread with homemade jam.

I was also excited about the prospect of sleep. As anybody who reads this blog regularly knows, a night of good sleep is a rare thing for me. I am an insomniac. It takes me a long time to go to sleep and then I wake up again and again and again and again throughout the night - whether there are cats walking back and forth across me or whether there aren't. There usually are. But this night, I was so tired, so exhausted, I was certain I would fall asleep fast and then get a good sleep.

I so looked forward to it!

I did fall asleep fast - even before 11:00. I slept sound... so, so, sound... and woke up feeling very pleased, certain that for once I had slept all through the night and would begin the day rested and refreshed instead of in my usual haze. I glanced at the glowing, red, numbers on the alarm clock, thinking the time might be something like 8:00 AM.

No! It was 12:20 AM! My good night's sleep had turned out to be only about one hour and 20 minutes!

These eyes are not mine, btw. They are Charlie's. My eyes are brown. They look tired.

I felt ready to get up, but I knew I needed more sleep, so I forced myself to stay in bed and close my eyes. In time, I dozed back off, but woke up a very short time later. This continued until 4:15 AM, when I got the feeling I was not going to be able to go back to sleep at all.

But I needed to sleep! I pulled the covers over my head. I felt comfortable, warm - I just could not go back to sleep. At 4:45 AM, I contemplated getting up, but Abby's would not be open for four more hours and 15 minutes. I did not want to eat before going to Abby's and I did not want to be up for four hours without eating anything. I decided to keep my eyes closed at least until 5:30. If I could do so, maybe I could fall back to sleep.

I closed my eyes. The bed felt so snug and comfy. I wanted to clear my head of all thought, the way Margie does. A man I know says the best thing to do is make your mind like that of an animal - an eagle or a fox - empty of thoughts and pondering, drive all thought out of it. Just be, like that animal. Then you will sleep.

I don't think anyone can know what goes on in an animal's head, but I decided to give it a try and so put my thoughts into the brain of an imaginary eagle. I kept my eyes closed, but looked down on the world through eagle eyes. Far below me, I saw a certain river in the Alaska Range on the west side of Cook Inlet, just north of Lake Clark, a river I had flown over a few times in the Running Dog in the 15 years before I crashed my plane.

I was a couple thousand feet above the river, yet I could see it sharply - even the details in the ripples and standing waves of its surface. This caused me to wonder why an eagle sees so much more sharply than does a human. Can its eyes somehow zoom in, like a big telephoto lens? Or do they somehow just have unfathomable powers of resolution?

Next I saw hundreds of tiny, short, red lines in the river, swimming upstream in bunches.

Salmon!

Thinking of nothing but my apetite and how incredibly beautiful the whole scene was, I picked out the fattest salmon, folded my wings, locked my eyes onto that fish and I dove. The salmon quickly began to grow bigger and bigger as the wind sizzled through my feathers.

The salmon did not even know I was coming, but in just moments it would be mine...

At just the right instant, I pulled back my wings to arrest the dive and flared out. I extended my talons...

I leveled out just inches above the river's surface and snatched the salmon right out of the water, then swooped upwards into a tree to eat it, sushi style.

The dexterity with which I pulled off this feat no machine could duplicate caused me to think about depth perception. Eagles have superior depth perception. But why? Wolves have good depth perception, officially because their eyes are far about. Animals with eyes close together are not supposed to have such great depth perception.

But eagle's eyes are close together - and they are on opposite sides of their head. The eye looking at me here, for example, sees something entirely different than does the eye on the opposite side of its head. And it must see me in two dimensions, not three. Where does the depth perception come from? 

And how does its brain resolve these opposing images as the eagle flies so swiftly between apartment buildings that I can hardly keep up as I pan with it here?

As I lay there not sleeping, a cat curled up at my ankles, wondering about the eagle eye, I remembered the times when I would come upon an eagle in the Running Dog.  Every time, whether it was one of two different golden eagles I met while passing through the Brooks Range or the different balds I encountered down here in South Central, it happened exactly the same.

I would lock both of my eyes upon the one eagle eye I could see, put the airplane into a steep bank and do a 360 degree turn around the the eagle. Except for the changing patterns of light, the eagle held its eye so firmly and steadily on mine that it did not even appear to move. I could detect no movment in the eagle at all. Yet, it did a 360 degree pivot, its eye locked unmoving into my eyes.

Then I started to think about all the eagles in Unalaska, across the bridge from Dutch Harbor, how they like to perch on telephone poles, houses, and the crosses of the Holy Ascension Russian Orthodox chapel. I thought how different the world must appear from a cross on a church house than from a tree over a river.

I thought of the late Unangan Vietnam veteranm Richard Chagin, who once told me how he had been standing on an Unalaska road, when he suddenly heard heard a loud "whoosh" and "whap" behind him.

Richard quickly turned around. He saw a dead cat lying in the road where no cat had been a moment before. He looked up. High above him, "and I mean high," he stressed, he saw two eagles fighting.

So it went, my eagle-mind journey, until finally I concluded that trying to put my mind into the brain of a wild animal was not a good way to get to sleep. It was 5:30 AM. I didn't want to get up. I had three-and-a-half hours to go yet before Abby's would open, but I couldn't stay in bed any longer.

So I went to Mat-Su Family Restaurant instead. I got there just moments after they opened at 6:00 AM. The room was almost empty. It was just Connie and me. She poured me a cup of coffee.

After about 15 minutes, another customer came in and took a seat. Connie waited on him, too. I decided that no matter how tired I got, I would not go to bed early tonight. I would keep myself busy all day long and retire at my usual time - somewhere between 1:00 and 2:00 AM, occasionally 3:00 or 4:00, sometimes five or six.

by 7:00 AM, I had Rosetta Stone Iñupiaq on my computer. I worked on my Iñupiaq for one hour, read a bit of news, built a fire, took a walk that started in the dark but ended in dawn. After Family Restaurant, I did not need lunch so I skipped it. At 4:00 PM, I took a half-hour coffee break. At 6:40, a 20 minute dinner break. Other than that, I have been going constantly since - and I have not goofed off. I have worked hard. I was exhausted all day, but my mind and body never quit on me. It is now 1:54 AM. I have been very productive today. I wish I could do this every day.

Now I will post this, brush my teeth, take my medicine, pee and go to bed. Then I will get up and go to Abby's Home Cooking when they open at 9:00. I shouldn't have breakfast out two days in a row, but Margie is gone, I am alone with the cats. I want to have an Abby's Home Cooking breakfast.

Comments

[AkMom]

I will buy a book of your eagle pictures.
So incredible!
(Hope you got some sleep)

[Logbook - Wasilla - Beyond]

thank you for this sentiment, AkMom. I am not a serious photographer and have never set out on a shoot to photograph eagles. I just photograph them when they appear where I am, so it would probably be hard for me to make a full-fledged eagle book.

[Logbook - Wasilla - Beyond]

I meant... I am not a serious EAGLE photographer... obviously, I am serious photographer.

[Rebecca]

Great post,. Great photos, Bill.

Rebecca