Past the strip malls and the power plants, out of the holler, past Gun Bottom Road and Brassfield and before Red Lick Creek, there’s a stream called Drowning Creek where I saw the prettiest bird I’d seen all year, the Belted Kingfisher, crested in its Aegean blue plumage perched not on a high nag but on a transmission wire, eyeing the creek for crayfish, tadpoles, and minnows. We were driving fast back home and already our minds were pulled taut like a high black wire latched to a utility pole. I wanted to stop, stop the car to take a closer look at the solitary stocky water bird with its blue crown and its blue chest and its uncommonness. But already we were a blur and miles beyond the flying fisher by the time I had realized what I’d witnessed. People were nothing to that bird, hovering over the creek. I was nothing to that bird that wasn’t concerned with history’s bloody battles or why this creek was called Drowning Creek, a name I love though it gives me shivers, because it sounds like an order, a place where one goes to drown. The bird doesn’t call the creek that name. The bird doesn’t call it anything. I’m almost certain, though I am certain of nothing. There is a solitude in this world I cannot pierce. I would die for it.