“I wasn’t searching for anything, and yet still I found it. I found a place to work and to live and to be at peace. A place to sever myself from the past and not to seek it out anymore. If I could exist only in the present, then my problems would be gone. Or would only ever be in front of me.

“I saw the naiad hummingbird at elevation, in the middle of the King Range, and I don’t think anyone was within one hundred miles. This was the off-season, cold and blustery, and I wasn’t really prepared, so I felt the chill too much and lost weight. But I was happy. The more my body reduced itself, the more my mind seemed to expand. The more I could experience what was around me. I did not bathe. I did not shower. I walked until I was tired and then tried to sleep inside my sleeping bag inside a tent. The food tasted like nothing to me.

“By the tenth day, animals did not appear to see me. I could walk by a deer and it wouldn’t run. The otters playing by the creek gave me a first and second look, then continued with their day. Or so it seemed to me.

“Yes, on the twelfth day, I saw the hummingbird. Coming across it with the overwhelming scent of cedar all around and the mountainside rich green with moss and lichen, and the trees, full of lichen, too, and ferns, so their leafless limbs burgeoned with life.

“I turned a bend to see a puddle or a pond, something caused by rainwater, in the middle of the trail, and bent down over the water, to drink … the naiad hummingbird. A female. The iridescent black wings. Her sharp, long, thin beak.

“She didn’t see me at first, her back to me, and I stood and watched as she stood there so defenseless, on the ground, drinking. Until with a little cry she sensed me and, alarmed, rose effortless and acrobatic straight up into the air and cursed me from above, hidden soon by the cedar.

“I hadn’t eaten all day. I had drunk very little water. I felt light as air, and in the moment of seeing the hummingbird, I began to weep with the beauty of it, which I cannot convey. I cannot get across to you or anyone the emotion of that moment. Because of the hummingbird on the ground, not in flight, and knowing that not one person in a million had experienced the miracle of such a small moment.

“So you can imagine how I felt when, later, I identified the bird and realized how rare the species was and headed toward extinction, and what I had borne witness to wasn’t just a minor miracle but, in fact, a moment that would replicate only another hundred or another thousand times.

“That in the history of the world, a naiad hummingbird would only come to the ground to drink a finite number of times before they no longer existed.