Editorial Content for We Should All Be Birds: A Memoir

A few months ago, I had just about decided to give up on memoirs about animals. After delving into books about hawks, otters, chickens and pigs, I was becoming convinced that my tolerance for reading about someone else's relationship with wild (or semi-domesticated) creatures had just about run its course. But I took one more chance with WE SHOULD ALL BE BIRDS, which Brian Buckbee wrote in collaboration with his editor, Carol Ann Fitzgerald. I suspect I'll be endlessly glad I did.

When readers first meet Buckbee, he's living in Missoula, Montana, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like almost everyone else, his life has shrunk down until it consists mostly of the four walls of his home. But unlike most of us, his retreat had started some years earlier, after a mysterious and debilitating illness began to take over his life and abruptly brought to an end his former life of sports and adventure travel.

"Buckbee's world may look drastically different now than it did a decade ago --- on some days he might not even recognize himself --- but thanks to Two-Step, he can still encounter those door-opening moments of wonder and awe."

Buckbee's condition had been alternately misdiagnosed and dismissed for two years. Characterized primarily by an unrelenting headache and overwhelming fatigue, the closest thing to a diagnosis that he has is a label of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). But there's no known cause and definitely no known treatment, so a label is not much more than easy shorthand.

Buckbee's days during the pandemic are long and lonely. He's also still suffering from a devastating heartbreak after the end of his relationship with a woman known to readers only as "L." The most vivid and pleasurable parts of his day are when he's able to take his nightly medication and dream. However, interrupting this cycle of incessant pain and exhaustion is the arrival of a most uncommon bird.

The pigeon whom Buckbee eventually dubs "Two-Step" comes to his attention during one of his neighborhood walks. The bird is behaving oddly, unable to move about in a typical pigeon fashion. He seems to know that Buckbee might help him, or at least that he might be safe with this gentle, slow-moving human. Buckbee invites Two-Step into his home and nurses him back to health. But that's only the beginning.

In some other animal memoirs, Buckbee's story might have focused almost entirely on his relationship with Two-Step and on the dozens of other birds he eventually invites into his yard and home. To be sure, there are lots of scenes of careful observation (and, brace yourself, more heartache) as Buckbee writes with respect and no small bit of tenderness about the bird companions who rescue him from loneliness: "Most days, I have more interaction with birds than I do with people. Except for the occasional hug or fist bump, I haven't been touched by another human being in a long, long time. But I am touched by the birds when they stand on my toes, or when I pick up the little babies to clean the cage, or when I give Two-Step a bath."

But as it progresses, WE SHOULD ALL BE BIRDS also weaves in so many other narrative threads: his mother's own tender-heartedness toward animals, his love for Bruce Springsteen and the movie Joe Versus the Volcano, the abiding love he still holds for L. and her young son. In almost all of these strands and others, Buckbee writes of glimpsing what he calls "open door" moments. These are transcendent experiences of awe when, for example, he sees fireflies, goes swimming in the rain, or runs through suburban streets at night. And, most heartachingly of all, he narrates a multi-week trip to Southeast Asia during which his chronic symptoms first began to assert themselves. This excursion gains almost palpable longing in retrospect, now that Buckbee has begun coming to terms with the knowledge that this epic trip is likely the last one he will ever take.

That sense of relating past experiences through one's present-day lens is one of the most remarkable aspects of this memoir. At one point, pausing in relating his travels in Bali, Buckbee imagines divers exploring his own wrecked body. One observes, "Wow, that was a lot of damage," to which another responds, "Yes, it was, and now there are all those other living creatures moving in and hiding inside him, living in a thing that no longer lives."

Buckbee's words are almost staggering in their resignation and the sadness behind them, but there's also no small measure of hope here. After all, he "needed to be rescued by…an injured, vulnerable animal who himself needed care, and through his need and nature could become a door-opener." Buckbee's world may look drastically different now than it did a decade ago --- on some days he might not even recognize himself --- but thanks to Two-Step, he can still encounter those door-opening moments of wonder and awe.