Fictional accounts of life in the Upper Delaware River Valley

Canadian geese

By TOM KANE

I looked out the window of my computer room one day last week and watched a flock of Canadian geese foraging over the green pasture next to my house. There were 40 or 50 of them.

As I watched, I heard in the distance the squawking of more geese. Soon the second flock appeared in full flight heading in a southerly direction almost directly overhead. Suddenly, two of them veered off the flight path and started to descend toward the flock on the ground in a wide sweeping about-face. Almost grudgingly, the others followed.

The descending flock, led by the two adventurers, came to a beautifully executed formation landing, like a wing of Air Force jet fighters. They all coasted with their flaps down and their heads up. They landed about 80 yards away from the other flock.

I watched curiously, wondering if the two flocks would intermingle. None of the geese in either flock moved for quite a while.

Then two from the descending group-I imagined it was the two adventurers-began to walk slowly in the direction of the other group. A group of several in the other flock began a similar cautious movement. The entire merging operation took nearly a half hour.

The union complete, the new flock took off in a spate of wing dust and squawks, circling and then heading in the inevitable southerly direction.

It was clear that the two flocks would never have merged if it had not been for the two adventurers. The spectacle made me think of us birds of the human kind. The majority of us are tradition-bound and don't take to change very easily. There are, however, a few among us, thank goodness, who are the adventurers-who damn the herd's way of doing things, go in their own direction and lead the rest of us.

I think of Einstein, Freud, Darwin, Thoreau, Rachel Carson and, in more recent times, Mother Theresa, Berrigan and Martin Luther King. At first, these thinkers and activists were roundly condemned and vilified but, very slowly, others began to move. Soon, nearly the entire flock accepts as the norm what these few innovators dared.

Today, a group of unconventional people is leading the way in the area of medicine, leading people away from dependence on conventional doctors. They're calling it complementary medicine and a lot of doctors ignore it and even ridicule it.

It isn't easy to reject what your doctor tells you and follow your own inner physician. Just a couple of weeks ago, my doctor wanted to put me in the hospital and perform an invasive procedure on me. I said no. Something in me knew that this wasn't the way that I'd heal myself. And that's it in the final analysis-you heal yourself, with the doctor's help where it is wanted and needed.

This may be unconventional thinking, but it is the trend of the future, and the way more and more people will go.