In late summer the bar-tailed godwit begins eating. This is not unusual for a bird. What is unusual is what comes next: it does not stop. For weeks it gorges on invertebrates along the Alaskan mudflats, the dark sediment alive with amphipods and worms, and the bird becomes something else, incrementally. Fat accumulates under the skin and in the muscle. The body converts its own tissues in a hierarchy of emergency — digestive organs first, shrunken to stubs, useless now, shed without ceremony. The gut narrows and quiets. Even parts of the brain compact. The bird becomes a different configuration of itself, oriented entirely toward endurance.
By the time it lifts off over the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, roughly half its body weight is fuel.
What follows is eleven thousand kilometers of open Pacific. No land. No stopping. Eight or nine days in the air, winds permitting, navigating by the stars when the sky is clear and by the magnetic field of the earth when it isn’t. The Pacific below offers nothing but water and the occasional white cap, and none of that is for the godwit, which is above it, crossing it, until — after passing the date line, after passing below the equator — it descends into New Zealand.
What I want to look at is the crossing itself.
Not the departure, which is a decisive thing and has drama in it. Not the landing, which is also dramatic: the exhausted bird settling into estuarine mud, beginning immediately to eat and rest and, over weeks, become itself again. What I want is the middle. The night over the central Pacific, the bird beating its wings — roughly four beats per second — at an altitude of several thousand meters, surrounded by nothing but dark air.
At some point on the third day, it is equidistant between any land. The nearest coast is roughly three thousand kilometers in each direction. If a wing failed here, that would be the end of it. The ocean offers no second chances and no partial credit.
The godwit doesn’t know any of this. This is the thing: it isn’t overcoming anything. There’s no bravery operating, no will muscled against fear. The bird is not flying through doubt. It is following an instruction so old it predates doubt, following the magnetic north, the star patterns, some integration of solar angle and polarized light that we don’t fully understand yet. It doesn’t experience eleven thousand kilometers. It experiences the next wingbeat, and the next.
I find this clarifying rather than diminishing.
There’s a version of this story that goes: see how small we are, see how our suffering is nothing against geological and biological time. I don’t want that story. What I want is just the bird itself, its specific heft (about four hundred grams when it lands, having burned nearly everything), the way its bill curves slightly downward — adapted for probing mudflats, useful now for nothing, waiting. The way its wings are long and tapering, built for this exact thing, this one long use.
Somewhere over the South Pacific, on the sixth night, stars overhead and black water below, the godwit is alone in a way that nothing else is. Alone the way that objects in space are alone: surrounded by enormity, self-contained, moving with complete indifference to the enormity. It cannot be comforted and does not need comforting. It cannot be impressed by the crossing and is not impressive to itself.
It beats its wings four times per second.
In the mudflats at Farewell Spit, it will land among hundreds of others. The estuary receives them every year, these birds who have crossed what can’t be crossed, and puts them straight to work — beaks in the sediment, always feeding, the body slowly restoring its own architecture, all the organs growing back, the gut lengthening and filling with purpose again. In a few months the birds will be fat and ready and the whole arrangement will reverse, carrying them north again by a different route, across Australia and Asia, up through China and Korea, back to Alaska where the summer is just beginning.
The Pacific doesn’t care. This is also the thing I want to look at: the ocean under all those wings, this whole time, unmarked by the passage. The same swells moving through it that moved through it a thousand years ago and will move through it long after the last godwit crosses. The ocean is indifferent the way that nothing human is indifferent, not because it’s cruel but because indifference, for an ocean, is just what being an ocean is.
And still the birds cross it. Four beats per second. The stars correct for precession over generations, the magnetic field shifts by degrees over centuries, and the birds calibrate — how, exactly, we don’t know — and cross. They have been crossing it for longer than our species has been naming things. They will cross it after we stop naming things.
I am not drawing a lesson. There is no lesson. The godwit doesn’t know it’s beautiful and neither does the ocean and neither does the night. But something in the arrangement — the bird above the water, the stars above the bird, the wingbeats regular as a clock no one wound — something in all of that coheres, and I keep coming back to it.
The way a thing just does what it is. The way being built for something is itself a kind of grace.