Post- Magazine

only the hills [feature]

on friendship and forevers

“All things come to an end.

No, they go on forever.” 

- “Train Ride” by Ruth Stone

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***

At 1 p.m. on September 1, 1914, the world went silent. At least, that’s what I imagine. Because it was at that moment when a centuries-old cacophony ceased, and the final breath in a history of trillions was exhaled. On that late summer afternoon, the last passenger pigeon in the world, a 29-year-old named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. The nation’s most common bird had gone extinct. 

When I first learned about Martha and the plight of the passenger pigeon, I was struck with sadness. How could an entire species disappear in mere decades? How could something once so alive, so abundant, vanish in the blink of an eye? 

***

When I was younger, it was hard to fathom that things could disappear. With so little experience, every moment felt infinite, every relationship permanent. That’s what I believed about my friendship with Megan. At the beginning of 8th grade, Megan became close with me and one of my best friends, and soon we became an inseparable trio. We shared overpriced chocolates and bus rows and stupid inside jokes. We had our chosen lunch table, one of the blue metal ones outside the math classroom, second from the left. When I found out that the two of us would be attending the same high school, I was overjoyed. We had only been good friends for a year, but now there would be four more. Four more years of laughter, four more years of lunchtime conversations, four more years of being known, truly, by someone. 

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The summer before we started high school, I visited her house. We swam and talked on her floor and ate cauliflower rice and fancy chicken nuggets with her family. We went to the nearby frozen yogurt shop, and after my mom picked me up in the warm August darkness, I remember thinking this was how things would be forever. We would always live in the summer and we would always exchange stories on bedroom floors and we would always be friends. We were going to high school together. That had to mean something. 

Then classes began and I rarely saw her. The times we did interact I was my annoying 14-year-old self, bringing up old jokes and taking random pictures. It was high school, a time for reinvention. But I clung to the past,refusing to change, so we drifted apart. When I finally noticed the distance a year later, it was too late. The damage was done, and we both had new friends. I grieved for months at the realization, lamenting the friendship I let slip away. Where had that year of closeness gone? What could I have done to save us?

I know growing apart is natural, but for the longest time I blamed myself. I could have been a better friend, less pestilent and clingy. And I could have noticed the decline before it was too late. 

***

One reason the extinction of the passenger pigeon came as such a surprise was due to the sheer volume of the species. It’s estimated that when Europeans first came to the Americas, there were three to five billion passenger pigeons in the United States. The birds gathered in the forests of the Midwest and East Coast, migrating to the southern states in the winter, and so many birds would roost in the trees that the weight could often snap branches clean off their trunks. Stories detail how flocks were so numerous and densely packed that when flying over towns and cities, the birds covered the sun for hours, as if the apocalypse had arrived. 

Yet by the end of the 19th century, no passenger pigeon remained in the wild. A combination of deforestation and the rise of the commercialized hunting industry began to wipe out the species by the thousands. The birds’ communal nesting habits and large numbers made them convenient targets for cheap meat. With the rise of telegraph systems and the national railroad in the 1800s, people could quickly learn of and travel to nesting sites and then sell the carcasses across the country. Settlers shot and hit and poisoned and suffocated bird after bird after bird; in Petoskey, Michigan, it’s estimated that for five months in 1878, 50,000 birds were slaughtered per day. Tables weighed heavy with the rich, golden meat, floors lay scattered with pale blue, orange, and gray feathers, and the pigeons began to disappear. 

Etta S. Wilson, writing on her childhood experiences with the passenger pigeon trade near Lake Michigan, describes how professional hunters scorned Native American advice on sustainably hunting passenger pigeons. When her grandfather recommended to white hunters that they practice an “offseason,” or a year where they abstained from hunting, they disregarded his advice. Scoffing, the men told Wilson’s grandfather that they knew as much, even more, than the Native populations. “There'll be pigeons as long as the world lasts,” they said. 

***

Even when I grew older and had witnessed how middle school friendships had drifted apart, I still held onto a hope of permanence. That’s what I believed with Luca. During our junior year of high school, we became intensely close by having multiple classes and a study block together. He could talk a mile a minute, and it filled me with outrageous amounts of giddiness and energy as we played card games with our friends at lunch and edited each other’s poems in English class. That winter was sunny, and the sky always seemed the brightest of blues. I remember sitting on the grassy hill overlooking campus with him and my best friend, doing our reading for class and laughing about who-knows-what as the flag waved in the February breeze. I remember baking him a cake for his birthday. I remember singing “Pocketful of Sunshine” in math class with him, and later that night texting the lyrics back and forth in all caps until I messed up. I remember the sun, and I remember the oak trees, and I remember feeling that everything was so perfect.  

But one day we got sent home from school for months on end, and the spell broke. I’ve never been great at texting, and I rarely messaged him over those seven months. When we finally came back to campus, the skies always seemed cloudy, and everything was so cold, and nothing was ever quite the same again. I had been thoughtless, and now another friendship had waned. 

***

33 years after Martha died, the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology dedicated a monument to the passenger pigeon among the forests surrounding the Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers. The bronze plaque was inlaid in a tower of sedimentary rocks, and on it was an image of a pigeon perched on a branch, one eye trained toward the viewer in an expression of unblinking judgment. Beneath the bird read the note that “This species became extinct through the avarice and thoughtlessness of man.”

To commemorate the building of the memorial, Aldo Leopold, a writer and conservationist, penned the essay “On a Monument to the Pigeon.” In it, he wrote:

“We meet here to commemorate the death of a species. This monument symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.”

“Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons; trees still live that, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a few decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.”

***

I remember the joy I felt when I settled into a college friend group after a particularly difficult freshman winter. We did all the things I had imagined stereotypical students doing: going to dances, holding impromptu movie nights, getting meals and developing jokes, sitting on each other’s floors talking about our lives. It was everything I had hoped for, and my sophomore year felt like a dream come true.

But junior year, interpersonal problems began cropping up, and as hard as I tried to ignore the pain, it wouldn’t go away. Despite being buried in classes and extracurriculars, the strife crept in through the cracks, and it only seemed to grow as the semester rolled on. Our foundations began eroding, or maybe they had never been as steady as I had believed. The cracks ran deeper than I could fathom, and by the end of winter break, when I realized the extent of the damage, it was too late. Everything had fallen apart. 

The day before returning to campus that frigid January, I was sitting in my friend’s house in upstate New York on a group trip. The conflict had hit its peak that evening, and as the snow fell in the midnight cold, I climbed the stairs from the ghostly silent kitchen to the bedroom where I was staying. I paced through the room as I packed, careful not to hit my head on the sloped ceiling, the silence only punctuated by the occasional shuffling of her cat across the wooden floor. I wished we could be together and cry and mourn and figure this out. I wished my heart wasn’t breaking quite so deeply. I wished I had someone to talk to. But my only company was the cat, and it was so quiet and so cold. So I lay on the bed and stroked his bronze fur and felt the tears drip down my cheeks, knowing deep down that things would never be the same again. Our group was gone. Soon enough, only the hills would know. 

Perhaps I was naive for thinking things could last forever. Perhaps I should have seen the warning signs. But I was blinded by the joys of our communal friendship, by bagel runs and impromptu dorm room chats and study sessions underneath the honey locusts. How could you ever believe something like that could go extinct?

***

Revive and Restore, an organization dedicated to using gene editing technologies to save extinct and endangered species, organized the “Great Passenger Pigeon Comeback” to revive a new generation of passenger pigeons before 2025. As of 2019, the organization was working on utilizing CRISPR technologies on pigeons to try and propel the gene-editing project. No updates have emerged since then. 

While I understand the desire behind projects such as these, I cannot say I agree with them. The woods and fields of the 21st century are vastly different from 150 years ago, and the ecology and food chain may have changed. We are not reviving a species so much as forcing them into a world to which they’re no longer accustomed. But, more importantly, bringing back an extinct species doesn’t change the fact that billions died at the hands of mankind. No amount of gene editing or cutting-edge research can truly restore what once was. The passenger pigeon is a lesson for us to look at our history and move forward, trying to treat those around us kinder than before. It is a reminder to acknowledge our thoughtlessness. It is a call to love better.

***

Over the summer, I visited my best friend at her school, which Luca also attended. The two of them had kept in touch, and one night we arranged to get dinner together and go paddle boarding. While Luca and I had never stopped being friendly since 2020, we seldom talked, and I hadn’t seen him for over two years. But when he hopped in the car, we immediately fell back into rhythm. We began to crack jokes and talk fast, and after we got onto the paddleboard and set off across the water, I felt like we were back in high school, the years and distance melting away. 

After my friend group broke down last winter, I was filled with deep anger and grief. Why did all of this happen? Why did something that once seemed perfect have to be filled with so much strife and pain? But as I’ve moved forward, my sadness has subsided. I’m still friends with everyone involved; our relationships just look different now. I’ve still found joy and connection with them all, despite the pain we endured. What happened was tragic, but I know that I’ve grown amidst it all. Sometimes that’s the only lesson we can glean from loss. 

A year ago, I posted on my Instagram story about how I had seen my favorite musician in a coffee shop. A few hours later, I saw a DM pop up. It was from Megan. She had known how much I loved the artist, and she messaged that it was a dream come true for me. The DM was short, less than ten words, but it made me smile all the same. At that moment, I wished I could have teleported back to my high school self, amid her sadness, and told her everything would be okay. Things change. We don’t always treat our relationships the way that we should. We grow apart. But not all is lost. We keep moving and living and loving some more.  

I do not want to suggest that the extinction of the passenger pigeon was a good thing. It was an awful, ugly massacre fueled by human greed and disregard for our fellow creatures. It should never have happened. Yet it did. So we can mourn those beautiful, lively birds, and all that they once were to us. Then we can move forward, knowing we must do better, and remembering that life, that hope, still remains. 

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