Synchronicity on the Graveyard Shift

When you have spent long hours shooting in a tree-shaded graveyard, a very old one with residents who passed away in the mid-1800’s, your thoughts tend to wander along some strange pathways.  We have been working hard, filming among and between all kinds of grave markers, some with inscriptions that quote bits of scripture or poems, others that mention angels. One, on a child’s headstone from 1889, said simply: “Ours to love for a short while.”

There are statues and obelisks, marble upright slabs, small, worn square markers on the ground, little fenced graves, flower-decked graves, bare ground graves, rolling hill after rolling hill of gravesites.

So you get to thinking about life, and about death, and about meaning.  Is there any kind of meaning to our lives?  Is there anything after our lives?  I am a believer in synchronicity as a sort of indirect proof of meaning in our own personal existence.  Synchronicity is a term coined by the psychologist Carl Jung when he noticed how outside events sometimes matched one’s internal thoughts, or personal events.

Jung’s famous example of synchronicity at work concerned one of his patients, a woman who was overly rational and so restricted in her thought patterns that in Jung’s opinion, she was not making progress in treatment.  One day during a therapy session, as she was describing her vivid dream from the night before about being given some jewelry shaped like an Egyptian scarab, Jung heard a scratching at his window.  He opened the drapes and saw a scarab beetle, a very unusual visitor to his country, apparently trying to get into his office.  He opened the window, took the beetle in his hand and presented it to her with the words, “Madam, here is your scarab!”

The strangeness of the concidence lay in its connection to the conversation between patient and therapist in their seesion at that moment and to the woman’s dream of the night before.  Although the dream did not cause the scarab to appear at the window, the external world seemed to somehow meet with and connect to the patient and psychologist at a deep, meaningful level. The woman was deeply affected by the event and Jung believed it helped her to evolve in her therapy. So, synchronicity is a coincidence that seems to bear with it a meaning to the person experiencing it.

There are certainly levels of synchronicity.  Some are mere “isn’t that odd—I was just thinking about gold-plated cuckoo clocks and here’s a picture of one in the magazine I picked up in the doctor’s office…”.  Others are very moving, heavily freighted with emotion.  At the graveyard last night I experienced both.

I had been thinking about Tennerin, my hawk, mulling over the realization that he had probably never killed a bird, since I had recently read that most red tail hawks do not pursue and catch avian prey, concentrating on small mammals, instead.  Just then I saw what I thought was a snowflake drifting down from above.  As it caught the light, it revealed itself as a tiny feather. I saw another feather slowly float past.

A few yards away, our camera operator called for me, his voice urgent, so I ran up to camera with my bag, thinking he needed something paint-related. Instead he pointed up at a large branch directly above the camera and some of the crew.  “Is that a hawk?” he asked. “It’s eating a bird!”

Sure enough, a small raptor was perched above us, plucking the feathers from a dead bird as it ate.  I told him it was some kind of falcon, probably.  We speculated.  A kestrel?  A merlin?  The little raptor was backlit and it was impossible to tell.  That was an odd coincidence.  I think about Tennerin often, of course, and everyone on the crew knows I have a hawk, so naturally they would call me to identify the mystery bird.

Still, in a graveyard entirely deserted except for one spot, and that one spot filled with fifty or so people talking and moving equipment about, the little bird of prey had chosen to perch on the one branch that ran directly above the camera.  We talked about it among ourselves for a bit, then forgot about the bird once work took our attention elsewhere.

Darkness fell and we began the long series of set-ups that would take half the night to complete.  The temperature hovered around freezing, and the rain fell off and on while the graveyard dust turned to mud.  I finally went inside one of the warming tents for coffee and overheard a man in uniform talking about the cemetery.  He said that it had recently become a county park. That fact surprised me.

The speaker was in dark green and wore a silver star, meaning he was a ranger.  He was stationed at the cemetery, and when I told him about the mystery bird of prey he knew exactly who it was: “That’s one of our merlins. We have a pair that lives here in the cemetery.”  Intrigued by the conversation and his knowledge of the graveyard, I joined in to learn (remember my last entry about how much we can learn from the people who populate our locations while filming?) that the county had made a deal to include the less popular parks (like the cemetery) along with more valuable parks in an all-inclusive package deal.  The ranger said that one of the more popular parks included as part of the deal was Oxbow Park, which lies some twenty miles southeast of our graveyard.

I told him that I had been impressed by Oxbow Park myself when I had filmed a show there.  The park was an amazing 1200 acres of natural features, including climbing rocks and a wild stretch of the Sandy River gorge flanked by a forest of huge, second-growth trees.  It was a lovely place.  What I didn’t mention was that I had seen something so disturbing there that it had haunted my memories of the park ever since.

The day we shot part of Twilight there, I heard the osprey first before I saw it.  The osprey cry is a high, unique call that actually seems to echo off the sky itself, as if the air has become a parabolic surface, bouncing the bird of prey’s voice from one horizon to the other.  The huge white raptor with its distinctive and stylish dark head crest flew over us repeatedly that day, checking us out, obviously curious about these busy humans.  It would perch on the top branches of cedar trees and watch us as we bustled around our our trucks far below.  In between studying us, the osprey would take off and fly back and forth across the river, looking for fish.

I saw it dive, once, and it split the waters surface, disappearing entirely, only to rise up like a phoenix and give that queer, osprey shivering of each and every one of its feathers to shake off the water so it could return to the sky.

As I watched the bird, I noticed a long, shiny filament hanging from one foot.  It was a fishing line, wrapped around the leg with a hook embedded in the osprey’s claw.  This was an awful discovery.  It meant that the raptor’s claw would become infected, and he would lose the use of it.  He would eventually starve, and it would be a long, slow death.  I told the park ranger there about the bird, and he agreed it was a fatal condition, but we both realized that nothing could be done, since the wild, free-roaming “fish eagle”, as it was sometimes called, couldn’t be caught and treated.

Ever since that show, almost two years ago, now, I have touched on the memory of that doomed osprey and felt the sadness all over again that we had caused such a proud and beautiful creature’s death through our human activities and thoughtless consequences of our presence.

The graveyard’s ranger was going on about the wildlife in Oxbow Park.  He had occasionally worked out there for a day or two at a time.  Bears came to the river to fish, sometimes, he said, and a bobcat had apparently established a den above the rock cliffs.  He himself had even helped rescue an osprey with an infected claw caused by a fishing hook—

“When was this?” I asked suddenly.

“About two years ago.”

“I know that osprey!” My voice was so excited that the producers looked up from whatever they were doing on their iphones.

The ranger told me that he had brought the bird to a rehabilitator and they had called to let him know when the bird was well again.  As the raptors’s savior he was on hand when they released the now-healthy osprey back into Oxbow Park.

So, I had met the only man on this planet who could have brought me the news of my often-remembered and mourned osprey’s eventual rescue and ultimate survival.  I no longer have the same feelings about Oxbow Park.  When ever I think of it now, I will be happy, not haunted.  Thanks to a welcome synchronicity in a dark and rainy graveyard and the camaraderie of filmmaking in a vast, but connected community.

Behind the Movie

First, a thank you to T. Emerson for your kind comment last week.  I fear that this entry will be short and not a telling of any story.  When I could have written this blog as planned, while waiting over an hour and half at the car repair shop and using my laptop there, I was instead held hostage by yet another endless succession of Windows Vista updates.  They took so long to install themselves that my battery ran down and the laptop shut off.

So here it is, late at night when I have to get up at 4:30 am to get to location early enough to carry my two set bags (40 pounds of dead weight in one, and an awkward 20 lbs in the other one) over two and half blocks down to the little corner store where we are shooting the first scene.  I had some good ideas for this blog, but they will have to wait until next week when I have more time and energy to bring them to light.

But before I sign off, I would like to remind those of us who work on location and on set that if we will just pay attention and be good listeners, we will learn incredible stores of knowledge, and broaden our cultural understanding, as well.  The next time you find yourself stuck on a strange street in a strange town during a long afternoon to night shoot, talk to the inevitable people who wander over and want to watch what’s going on.

In one long afternoon, I found out what a short line railroad is and met a couple of railroad engineers who drive the short line railroad engines.  I learned that the helicopters buzzing us all day out in the middle of nowhere were actually not carrying paparazzi, but were picking up bundles of Christmas trees from the farms and fields to carry them to waiting trucks.  I learned that one house on the street sold jars of honey made by their own bees, and that on the floor below where all the extras were getting dressed in their Halloween costumes, there was a church bazaar selling some very interesting crafty creations and art.

The people we come into contact with during a show—the “normal” people have amazing jobs and sometimes fascinating stories.  They have a community that you are lucky enough, through arriving in the gilded coach of filmmaking, to be accepted into their lives in an open, excited way.  Meeting people this way, all of you can be like kids again, happy with curiosity, asking questions and wanting to hear the answers.

I have met and talked seriously and deeply with frat boys and prison guards and sheriffs; with chicken farmers, biotech scientists working on cures for genetic diseases, architects, CEO’s, skateboarding artists and punks, a professor who teaches Russian and Math as well as manages the condominium complex where we are filming.  A woman who helped lend us some décor for a magician’s cottage set had traveled the world collecting native  artwork and jewelry hoping to bring them to buyers here and then return with the money to the natives so they could invest  their profits into making more pieces for the outside world, empowering themselves.

As exciting as making a movie is, the relationships that form and the wide range and colorful characters of the people who pass through are sometimes the real story, and the movie is only a shadow left behind.  And even if the movie is much more than a shadow—if it’s powerful and unforgettable—all of it will be colored by those other stories that you lived during that time with those people.  If you worked on that movie you will always see more in it than anyone else—anyone who didn’t come to know the people of the places you filmed in and lived in for those months of long days and hard work.