This is by Tom Haines of the Boston Globe. This is why we're going. This is writing just a tad over the top. I could write like this if I had listened in school. Maybe.
"Sandhill cranes in the hundreds of thousands fuel up, then fly off to the Arctic - all watched religiously.
GIBBON, Neb. - In the moments before daybreak, as braids of river, silty sandbars, and tufts of prairie emerge from darkness, thousands of gray-feathered sandhill cranes are chattering as softly as a snore.
A young eagle, a predator, flies upriver, and it is as though the earth has moved: Several hundred cranes rise in a swarm, their 6-foot-wide wings working mightily, their voices clamoring in alarm. A minute passes, then two, and the frightened cranes descend - long legs dangling, wings held open for a parachute landing - to the Platte River to regain a place among those that did not budge because it is not time.
Time, on this river in the middle of Nebraska and the Great Plains, comes in many dimensions, but none as epic as the spring ritual that has occurred for thousands of years, when migrating cranes stop at the Platte to fatten up before continuing on toward the Arctic." etc.
1 comment:
Gunnar, you write much better than that. The article is full of mixed metaphors and language that simply doesn't ring true for me.
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