The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J Church Page A

suspended animation in which Alden and I lived our marriage.
    ONCE ON MY OWN again, I didn’t return to Tingley Beach; instead, I hiked the bosque along the Rio Grande. Beavers had carved some of the cottonwoods into wasp-waisted creatures, and at times the wind on the water would create spectacles of shimmering, dancing refractions of summer sunlight. I loved encountering one big male coyote in particular. Gold, brown, and gray, he would freeze and stare back at me, his hindquarters quivering with the energy he’d need to turn and run if I got too close. In the shadows of the canopy, I found beefy flickertails and the occasional bright, tropical-colored tanagers. I also saw my first greater roadrunner—the bird’s odd, warning rattle was what initially caught my attention. His beak was more ferocious than I’d imagined—long, sharp, and clearly made for spearing his prey of small songbirds, lizards. I found him disconcertingly threatening—more so than any coyote I encountered while walking alone in those woods.
    I discovered that when the limbs of cottonwoods die, they slough off their bark until all that remains is a smooth, supremely touchable gray-white wood. Only then is it possible to see that beneath the skin of bark, burrowing insects have engraved the wood with trails of hieroglyphic language. I loved to touch those symbols with my fingertips, closing my eyes as if reading Braille.
    Some evenings, I would sit on a downed tree carcass along the river to watch crows return from days of foraging to roost and repossess their home territories. Eventually, hundreds of crows would gather and send up a loud, raucous din that lasted until dark. I knew my master’s thesis would be on crow behavior, the social aspects of the bird, but I also knew I needed to hone in on a narrower aspect of their social lives. I longed to know how, when, and why they formed allegiances and if those bonds crossed familial boundaries. I wanted to understand loyalty—to know if it derived solely from evolutionary advantage, or if it might also be motivated by something else, something akin to caring, love, and devotion.
    On several occasions I observed crows acting in concert to attack another species, and my beautiful giant of a coyote was one of their humiliated victims. I saw the crows’ display first from a distance, heard them cawing and shrieking at something close to the ground. My magnificent boy was standing in an open area along the river, his tail tucked beneath him, his head lowered. The crows dive-bombed him repeatedly, but why? Was it a matter of territory? Or were they merely seeking to relieve their bright minds of boredom? They reminded me of cocky young men on a street corner, hassling passersby in a display of virility.
    Darwin talked about the struggle for survival being more intense between species of the same genus, when they come into competition with each other. He said it made sense that competition would be the most severe between allied forms, since they fill almost the same stratum in nature. I was thinking about crows this way—how much infighting was there? Social behaviors only survive if they increase the bird’s survival and ability to reproduce, but how social were they, really? Did the degree of participation in family life vary throughout the crow’s life, or did it follow a stable pattern? These were the questions I wanted to answer, and I tucked them away in my memory bank, eager to build upon them when I began my graduate studies.
    FOR OUR LAST EVENING together before I returned to Chicago and school, we found our way to a little hole-in-the-wall spot called La Cocinita, and there I had my first taste of enchiladas. They were delicious, smothered in jack and Colby cheeses, heavy with onions, accompanied by papitas— little fried potatoes. I tasted pinto beans for the first time, too. They’d been liberally doctored with a powder made from red chiles—so hot with spices that I drank two glasses