Bicycling on Crow Planet

Today is the release of my wife Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s long-awaited book Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness.

So forgive my while I digress momentarily from bicycles, in order to tell you about this book (which you should rush out and buy!).

This won’t really be a review. Though I do love the book and think it’s her best yet (she published this and this previously), spouses probably shouldn’t post reviews of each other’s work.  But I will tell you that enthusiastic reviews are rolling in.

The Los Angeles Times said,

“With her sensitivity, careful eye and gift for language, Haupt tells her tale beautifully, using crow study to get at a range of ever-deepening concerns about nature and our place within it, immersing us in a heady hybrid of science, history, how-to and memoir.

Sadly the book does not address Lance's breakup with Cheryl Crow, or Russell Crowe's choice of bike.

In a starred review, Library Journal recommended the book saying,

Haupt delivers a delightful meditation on our role in the natural world. By focusing on the proliferation of the American crow, she provides a rich context for exploring the relationship between humans and nature.

But here comes the cycling part – one of the key themes of the book is that we must deepen our connection to our native place and the wild life dwelling within it, even if that place is the city or the suburbs. For Lyanda, that process is chronicled in the book, which is a kind of meditation on changing her habits and expectations as she traveled through the urban spaces where we spend the majority of our time. Early in the book she explains how, if she was to become an urban naturalist, she would need to start throwing her binoculars and notebook into her bag every time she left the house, even if she was just headed to Target. “I would wander everywhere as I wander in the forest, ” she writes, “prepared to see.” And see she does, as you’ll read in the book.

The parallel for me is about getting on a bicycle to do my urban traveling. Since more fully committing to cycling about two years ago, my eyes have been opened as well. Life is no longer racing past outside the window of a bus, my thoughts distracted by my iPod, or the fidgeting of my seatmate.

I’ve found a beaver pond on my route home, and I pause every evening as I cross the wooden bridge by its dam. By Seattle’s main container port I’ve watched this spring’s three fledgling Peregrine Falcons venture from their nest high above, under the freeway overpass. I’ve paused and taken a photograph every time I’ve crossed the Duwamish River for months. I dread the chill of pedaling through the microclimate of a particularly frosty lee when the temperature drops, and I know just where I’ll hit a cool marine breeze on hot weeks like this one. I’ve started seeing, and experiencing, the urban environment in a much deeper way from the seat of my bicycle, and it’s happened in parallel to Lyanda, really, without us talking about it too much. (Aaah, the modern marital condition: “Did you read my blog post, honey?” “Yes, did you see my Facebook status?”)

I’ll be honest: Crow Planet is not about bicycling. It’s about the idea that “we can learn another kind of attention that is deeper, wilder, more creative, more native, more difficult, and far more beautiful than that which has come to be accepted as adequate.” And that we do so by starting to see, really see,  the nature and wild life all around us, even in the city. Beginning, because it’s as good a place as any, with crows.

For me, that process is happening on a bike, as I roll through my neighborhood twice a day on my commute. Which makes Crow Planet incredibly relevant. (And also lovely, wonderful reading. Buy it!)

Lyanda reads from Crow Planet this Friday at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Books, August 10th at Powell’s on Hawthorne in Portland, August 13th at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, August 25th at Village Books in Bellingham, and more dates to come. Follow her schedule on her website.

Lyanda’s awesome blog on “cultivating an urban-earthen household” is The Tangled Nest.