The Yellow Bittern

Anyone who hunts birds knows heartbreak, if only because most of us have been through dogs. The best of them last a quarter of our lives at the most. So we watch them come and go. And then there are the birds. And the land. Innocence. You know what that’s like.

I’ve been trying to learn a new instrument, the Irish pipes. They’re called “uilleann” pipes (pronounced “ILL-in”), which is Irish for “elbow.” You use your elbow to pump a bellows which fills a bag under your other elbow with the air you need to resonate up to 7 reeds. Then there are 13 keys you play harmonies with using your wrist and thumb while your fingers play the melody on a 14-inch tube with a finicky reed. It’s far more complex and insane than the Scottish pipes, which I’ve played since 2007 and had previously thought was the most ridiculous instrument ever invented. This instrument puts Ireland’s association with drink in a new light.

Irish music, like the people coming from that small island, is known for its ferocity, its speed. It’s lesser known for what, in my humble opinion, are its much better but heartbreaking slow airs, tunes we Westered mortals might call ballads. Most of those come from old poems or stories, and nearly all of them have Irish titles: Táimse mo Chodladh (I Am Asleep), Port na bPúcaí (Song of the Faeries), Éamonn a’ Chnuic (Ned of the Hills), An Raibh Tú ar an gCarraig? (Were you at the Rock?)…

An Bonnán Buí (The Yellow Bittern) asserted itself for some reason today. Maybe it was the weather, or the news, how can you know? It’s been a common song over there for a long time, and without getting all musicological on you, I’ll just say it oozed its way into me somehow today. I’d heard a bunch of versions by my favorite players (thanks, YouTube). Everyone does it quite differently, and I’d decided I needed to learn it. I have the printed sheet music, but it didn’t even closely match any of the far better versions by Chris McMullen or Cillian Vallely or Liam O’Flynn. So I picked one (McMullen’s), and started memorizing it. There are two phrases, and it took about an hour to get the first under my fingers. And then I realized there was something more I didn’t know.

I looked up the tune, and learned it’s after a poem from the early 18th century by an Irish poet called Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna. He was an admitted drunk, and this — his reputed greatest work — was about his struggle with alcoholism. He’d happened, in winter, upon a yellow bittern that had died of thirst at the edge of a frozen lake. Like most good poems, this says a lot with very few words. Seamus Heaney’s translation of one of the later stanzas:

I am saddened, bittern, and brokenhearted
To find you in scrags in the rushy tufts,
And the big rats scampering down the rat paths
To wake your carcass and have their fun.
If you could have got word to me in time, bird,
That you were in trouble and craved a sup,
I’d have struck the fetters of those lough waters
And wet your thrapple with the blow I struck.

In the end, the poet decides that — even though his wife desperately wishes he’d quit drinking — he can’t give up drink because he knows that when he dies he’ll get no more.

I was a music major in college, at first, anyway. One of the first things I learned and have never forgotten is that “programmatic” music is a hoax: any music purporting to paint a specific picture is not only bad but should be avoided and, if you’ve got the time, you should talk shit about it. The professor’s point, I recall, was that music was better than that. It was ineffable. It said more than a simple picture could. That’s why it was important to pick it apart, dissect it, musicologize it.

When Chris McMullen or Cillian Vallely start playing this tune I see the dead bittern and my heart breaks.

Today is my brother’s 60th birthday. He emailed me some of his thoughts about why he’s probably going to stop fishing for steelhead, something he’s loved and done for a long time. Much of what he said reminded me, in very different ways, of why I think more frequently these days about not chukar hunting anymore.

We’ve been hooked on the web cam showing Shadow and Jackie, the 11- and 13-year-old bald eagles trying to raise chicks in a nest high above a lake in the San Bernardino mountains. Two chicks hatched a few days before the third egg, and that littler chick survived long enough to develop a large fan club before it died. No fault of the parents. The weather there has been brutal. We could see them live anytime, and often marveled at one of the parents — only its white head and huge yellow beak visible in a snow-mounded nest — softly covering the babies during a howling snowstorm. We watched Shadow and Jackie bring dozens of dead fish and coots and ducks to the nest, tear them up, and gently feed them to the little fuzzballs. Leslie said today, “Look at all the animals that died to feed those chicks.”

It’s hard to stay away from the news, even though it’s obvious to anyone with a heart that there’s nothing good there. Very much the opposite.

I needed to learn about the yellow bittern, its story, today. For some reason. I didn’t expect it to, but it made me cry. That made me feel more human than I have in at least 50 days. So I guess that’s a good thing about heartbreak.

But then what?