Autumn is my season of cedar waxwings. Thoreau called them "cherry-birds" given their habit of flying en masse, landing· in a treetop or bush, and plucking a canopy clean of all its berries. Their distinctive flight-calls he described in his Journal as a "fine seringo note, like a vibrating spring" (June 21, 1852), though Cornell's Lab of Ornithology describes them as "a high-pitched, trilled bzeee."1 I think of their winged sounds as whispered piccolo notes raining from the sky.

The distinctive sounds of waxwings clued Thoreau to their "goings and comings," though he admitted "there is no keeping the run" of their travels. They move quickly, darting here and there, the movements of the flock simultaneously graceful and frenzied. Everyone follows the herd, a mass feeding frenzy conducted with such grace that most of the world doesn't even notice their presence. At least not on my campus, where I regularly hold class outside and point them out to unexpecting students who stand amazed at their flight-whispers overhead.

This autumn, I've been trying to heed cedar waxwings especially because a more disturbing sound frequently interrupts our outdoor classroom: the steady beating of helicopter wings.

It wasn't always this way. When the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, I remember thinking that my body would always associate COVID-19 with the smell of tea tree oil. Just prior to the shutdown, I made a rare stop at Trader Joe's here in my hometown of Boise, Idaho, and purchased a container of liquid soap. I was out of soap by the kitchen sink, and I had no idea how significant this quickly grabbed bottle would become. In those early days of the pandemic, when handwashing seemed our only hope, I relished its tea-tree aroma. This scent, I thought as I washed my hands for the sixth or tenth time in a given day, this scent will always be the smell by which I recall this COVID time. When I smelled the tea tree oil, I felt gratitude for each breath. Thankful for my backyard where I could sit, grateful for the nearby hills where I could walk freely, beholden to my body for staying healthy. Tea tree was my balm.

Soon, though, my senses were overwhelmed in another way: the helicopters began their grating.

Here in Idaho, the virus appeared first in Blaine County, brought by the wealthy who frequently travel in and out of the twin resort towns of Ketchum and Sun Valley. While the rest of the nation watched with fright as caseloads rose in New York City, Idahoans stood aghast as virus numbers escalated in remote Blaine County, where hospitals are equipped to deal with mountaineering accidents but not large numbers of critically ill patients. So the helicopters started flying, whisking the near-dying from the mountain getaway to the larger hospitals in Boise.

At first, I didn't think a thing of the rare helicopter that passed over my bedroom roof at dawn one morning in mid-March 2020. But then they started coming each morning. Within just a matter of days, they were starting at 4:30 AM. And then at 4:15, at any hint of light, or at no hint of any light at all--only the hope of it. I knew: the earlier the chopper, the more desperate the case, the longer the night before for those trying to preserve a life. I began waking in anticipation, anxiety rising before the sun.

They passed overhead many times a day and well into the night. Sometimes I woke to them at 11 PM or midnight, only to have them start again at 3:30 AM. In time, they abated, but this fall they are back, their mechanized wings beating my early morning alarm and my ghastly evening lullaby.

Here in Idaho, less than 50% of people are even partially vaccinated. The deaths continue, and everyone suffers. Weeks ago, the government enacted "Crisis Standards of Care," meaning even firemen have to call ahead to the emergency room before bringing in those in need of immediate care. Sometimes, even they are told they cannot come. Emergencies go unattended, and routine care waits--cancer treatments postponed, surgeries delayed, all medical hands on deck to care for patients with the virus, most of whom could have avoided hospitalization through vaccination. A friend's mother was sent home after a serious stroke. My forn1er students who now practice medicine in the valley tell me that they are barely holding on. No sleep, no breaks, no days off. The dire situation is maddening, because most serious cases could be avoided through vaccines, and it is utterly unfair to overworked medical personnel.

Helicopter. The word is from the French, helicoptere, derived from the Greek helix and pteron, spiral wing. At this point, those spiral wings trigger me. Those around me seem to carry on, but I know what those choppers are doing. They are ferrying the barely alive, the desperate. They carry the desperate individual from the desperate country to the desperate city, the whole desperate state in dire disorder over this devastating disease. Somewhat like a survivor of World War II air raids in London who halts to watch any plane flying low overhead, I hear a helicopter coming and stop whatever I am doing, even teaching. I watch it pass over, quietly say a word for the desperate onboard. Take a deep breath, count myself lucky, breathe again.

In some ways, Thoreau doesn't help much with this pandemic scene. He knew contagion in his time, to be sure-but not this tea-tree scented, helicopter-sky virus that ravages my state's population. Still, I search his writings for solace. I find him consoling himself, and me, about the natural presence of illness. "Disease," he wrote, "is not the accident of the individual, nor even of the generation, but of life itself. In some fonn, and to some degree or other, it is one of the permanent conditions of life" (Sept. 3, 1851). He reminds me of the greatest source of solace: "Nature, the earth herself, is the only panacea" (Sept. 24, 1859). I notice that he wrote these words in the early fall, which is where I now find myself-wishing for wax-wings and hoping against helicopters. I listen for the waxwings' notes, "fine and ringing, but peculiar and very noticeable," "as if made by their swift flight through the air" (June 16, 1854; March 20, 1858). I tell my students, who have learned to stand in respectful silence as choppers pass overhead, that we need to heed the birds, too. We will honor the birds and their calls. Notice their breathing, pay respect for their life flight. This autumn I await their spiral wings, letting theirs be the reverberation that halts me, the reason for my stillness as I watch life pass by.

Rochelle L. Johnson is the president of the Thoreau Society. Notes l. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Cedar _ Waxwing/sounds. Thoreau quotations from the first two paragraph are from the June 21, 1852 entry in Journal IV, volume 10 of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Toney (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1906), 126. Subsequent Journal quotations are also from the 1906 edition.