On October 21, I would be visiting the Trinity Site where the first nuclear explosion test was conducted in 1945. I’d be lining up long before sunrise because the site is only open to the public two days a year, and the army warned that the because of the Oppenheimer movie, they expected larger than normal crowds. The sunrise the day before, I visited on of my favorite places—Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico.
Dawn—Blackbirds at Bosque del Apache
The White Stallion Army base is on the other side of this mountain range. In late November, thousands of Snow Geese, Sandhill Cranes and other birds fill the Rio Grande River wetlands in the Bosque. A few of the cranes were just arriving when I visited last month.
Sandhill Cranes
Well, I went today
Maybe I will go again tomorrow
Yeah yeah, well the music there
Well, it was hauntingly familiar
Well, I see you doing what I try to do for me
With the words from a poet and a voice from a choir
And a melody, and nothing else mattered
Stevie Nicks, Edge of Seventeen
Until I searched for lyrics from this song to add to this post, I had no idea who Stevie Nicks was referring to in that verse: John Lennon and her uncle John. They both died in the same week in December 1980. She was with her uncle when he died. She said later: “The part that says ‘I went today… maybe I will go again… tomorrow’ refers to seeing him the day before he died. He was home and my aunt had some music softly playing, and it was a perfect place for the spirit to go away.”
The reference to the poet and voice from a choir was to the murdered John Lennon who was a friend of her boyfriend at the time, who she was comforting while she was suffering from her uncle’s death.
Sunrise cottonwood and blackbirds
Just like the white winged dove
Sings a song, sounds like she's singing
Ooh, ooh, ooh
Just like the white winged dove
Sings a song, sounds like she's singing
Ooh, baby, ooh, said ooh
And the days go by, like a strand in the wind
In the web that is my own, I begin again
Said to my friend, baby (everything stopped)
Nothin' else mattered
Stevie Nicks, Edge of Seventeen
Lots of Mourning Doves where ever I’ve lived, and plenty of Turtle Doves where I grew up in Florida, but White-Winged Doves are birds of the desert southwest. When I first saw one only a few years ago and each time I do, Stevie Nicks’ voice sings in my ear of the the white winged dove.
“It became a song about violent death, which was very scary to me because at that point no one in my family had died,” said Nicks elaborating on the meaning of the line. “To me, the white-winged dove was for John Lennon the dove of peace, and for my uncle, it was the white-winged dove who lives in the saguaro cactus—that’s how I found out about the white-winged dove, and it does make a sound like ‘whooo, whooo, whooo.’ I read that somewhere in Phoenix and thought I would use that in this song.”
White-winged Dove - Bosque del Apache NWR, New Mexico