Malignant tumors have thrived in humans forever, but the one that insinuated itself into my soft tissue late last year was my first. With sharp claws and many legs, the crab-like carcinoma grew, colonizing my left breast with determination.
Three weeks after I’d learned my crab was cancerous, a long-bodied aquatic bird who’d flown well south of his Arctic home surfaced before me in Bodega Bay, California. Alone on an empty wharf between rainstorms, I’d been searching the chaotic waters since dawn for rare avian divers, my breast aching from the insult of a recent needle biopsy. As I was about to turn away, a loon emerged fifty or so yards from me, floating on the rolling surface. When I lifted my camera to shoot, he dove.
Mountains of charcoal-gray clouds loomed to the north, bringing to mind Zen master Dōgen Zenji’s thirteenth-century sutra: “All mountains walk with their toes on all waters and splash there.” Everything is interrelated, Dōgen taught—a key point of Buddhist thought—but the idea eluded me, a child of the 1950s raised to keep my private worlds separate: kindergarten cubbies, high school lockers, the universe inside my neoprene raft when I worked as a river guide. I couldn’t fathom that those partitioned entities were all one.
The loon emerged again, water streaming from his neck. Click. Got him. Maybe. Splash. He went down, trailing bubbles in his wake.
My husband, Paul, who’d been indoors buying take-out clam chowder, strolled up beside me. “What was that diving bird?” he asked.
Hard to tell from so far away, I said, but I thought I’d seen a yellow-billed loon, a near-threatened bird of the tundra. Atmospheric rivers unsettling the skies might have blown him down from his migration path. Still a juvenile, he hadn’t shown the ebony hood or herringboned back of an adult, but his thick ivory beak caught the light so much it glowed, with a tip the color of ripe lemons. The rarest of the world’s five loons, he’d been pursuing a meal.
“Ready to go?” Paul asked.
The needle wounds pinched and burned. Though I wanted to wait for the loon to reemerge, I felt a sudden and profound exhaustion. “Yes.” I capped my camera lens. “I’m ready.”
Like the loon, my crab had surfaced without warning: a hard lump, round and tapered at its circumference, found while I was soaping up in the shower. Within an hour I’d scheduled an appointment to see my ob-gyn. When we met, she agreed it bore little resemblance to the lipomas she’d found in me before.
She referred me to a special clinic, where the nurses and doctors treated the patients like cherished sisters who’d hit a rough patch: Gentle voices. No hint of judgment. When a mammogram and MRI showed abnormalities in my breast tissue, I opted for an on-the-spot biopsy. Delivered in three hard, staple-gun shots, the procedure ended with a gift: a titanium scrap inserted into the center of the crab.
“A marker,” the doctor said, “in case a surgeon needs to find it later.”
Back home my skin bloomed with bruises that hurt even when not touched. Paul assured me the lump was probably benign, like those I’d had before. When a nurse called a week later, she confirmed my fears: Mutated cells born in my milk ducts had pushed into tender surrounding tissues.
It was too soon to tell how advanced the cancer was, the nurse said, but initial testing suggested my tumor was slow growing. Surgery was recommended, followed by radiation, and possibly chemotherapy, depending on further analysis. Because breast tumors like mine thrive on estrogen and progesterone, I’d likely need to take a hormone-suppression pill for the next five years, putting me into a kind of second menopause. “You’re in good hands,” she added. “We treat thousands of cancers each year.”
Good news: They knew their way around cases like mine. Bad news: They’d gotten good at it while dealing with a cancer epidemic.
My crab’s mission was to replace healthy tissue and overcome its host—me. My mission was to stop its growth.
The crab-like nature of tumors was first documented around 400 BCE, when Hippocrates named the tenacious, clingy growths karkinos, after the resilient crustaceans of his home island, Kos. He also recognized invasive carcinomas in other animal classes—mollusks, fish, reptiles, and birds—though none have the milk-producing breasts humans do. Milk ducts especially are at risk of harboring outlaw cells.
My surgeon assured me I was an excellent candidate for beating cancer: “Young for your age, with extraordinary vitals and a low body mass index.” My lifestyle didn’t put me at risk for cancer—I was nonsmoking, nondrinking, and physically active. She foresaw a good outcome following the lumpectomy, during which she would cut out every discernible trace of malignancy. She’d also remove a few of the tiny, bean-shaped lymph nodes residing in my left armpit to analyze whether the cancer had spread. Thus there would be just one opening, one closing, one time under general anesthetic, but two procedures. Later a plastic surgeon would perform breast reconstruction with Botticellian artistry: I’d become Venus arriving on the half shell of herself.
In the weeks before my surgery I wandered parks and refuges where black-crowned night herons clung to cattails, pied-billed grebes fished ponds, and raucous crows cawed and flew upwind to find branches where they could shelter together. They would aim for a tree, fail to settle as a flock, then fall back and regroup to try again. Like the crows, I wouldn’t quit.
While birding, I yearned for my late parents. Dad would have been carrying vintage binoculars, a worn bird guide in the back pocket of his jeans. Mom would have been studying the avian habits with quiet curiosity, posing questions as much to herself as to anyone else: Where do these red-winged blackbirds live? How many chicks are following those quail parents? A naturalist raised by a wilderness-guide father and a historian mother, Mom was a good match for Dad, a former World War II Army officer and Boy Scout leader. They shared their love of forests, canyons, and deserts with my three siblings and me. A nation of six.
Without them now, I relied on the birds to guide me: the rasp of a spotted towhee or blare of Canada geese drawing me to fields or wetlands, the sound of wings pulling my gaze skyward. The songs and sightings were lifelines, invitations to stay alive.
After my diagnosis my siblings and I kept in touch, but I wanted to hear from Mom and Dad. Only once did I recognize their voices among an assemblage haunting my dreams: Come on over, they said from the other side as I slept. Just let go.
Let go? I asked in dream-speak.
They said it was easy. We’re all here.
Blurred faces wheeled above me—parents, grandparents, friends, pets. I drifted their way, longing to connect. Why not go? It did sound easy. Then, all at once, I put on the brakes. No, I told them. Not yet.
They vanished in an instant, and I slipped back toward my life.
Genetic testing of my tumor and review of my family’s cancer history showed little evidence of inherited mutations from blood relatives. Rather, the geneticists agreed that our lineage’s mutant cells probably had environmental origins. My maternal grandparents had used solvents and inks in their livelihoods and died of multiple cancers. They were also heavy smokers. My mother contracted nonsmokers’ lung cancer that metastasized before it was detected. Besides growing up among indoor smokers, she’d handled carcinogens without protective gear while working for Hooker Chemical Company during World War II. That company’s waste dump, called Love Canal, had leached toxins into the soil, water, and air. In 1979 the Environmental Protection Agency linked the disaster to numerous health problems, including cancer. Mom suspected hers was caused by the same deadly chemicals.
My father’s side hadn’t fared much better. My paternal grandfather, a resident of Fall River, Massachusetts, had worked as a Depression-era machinist. Unprotected, Grandpa used fluids tied to disorders like multiple myeloma, acute myelogenous leukemia, and myelodysplastic syndrome. One or more of these cancers shortened his life. I have no real memory of him, aside from an eight-millimeter home movie in which he’s walking with his four grandchildren among the birches and firs of a Fall River park. I’m no older than three, and Grandpa leans over to hold my hand while guiding us through the trees. With rapt attention, we little ones look up to a man I’m told was very kind.
Late in life my father put together our family tree. At Thanksgiving each year he’d share what he’d learned, toasting the courage of our ancestors, some of whom could be traced to the Mayflower. Hairy Atlantic crossings, fleeing to the unknown—they’d been braver than we’d ever be—but, starting with their arrival, we chewed up the scenery and contaminated our land and waters. The same type of “progress” has seeped into my family’s bones and cells. We and those we’ve denigrated are linked through the blood, mountains, and waters of Earth.
After coming home from Bodega Bay, I wrote a careful post about the yellow-billed loon on eBird, the citizen-science database managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. By the next morning eBird’s expert reviewers had marked my sighting confirmed.
Two days later a friend who watches local rare-bird alerts on eBird texted me: You precipitated a birders’ flash mob!
The latest alert showed twenty new sightings of the loon from the same wharf where I’d stood. Guided groups had detoured to view the rarity. Many who posted thanked their friends or group leaders for alerting them to the loon’s location. My favorite comment: “It’s real!”
My parents’ old copy of America’s 100 Most Wanted Birds says that finding a yellow-billed loon, even north of California, “requires considerable luck.” Luck was a word I’d heard a lot from friends since my diagnosis. It was lucky the cancer had been caught early. Lucky I’d kept my health insurance through recessions, job changes, and independent consulting. Lucky I’d come out of my first marriage with a daughter for whom I wanted to do my best, then and now. Lucky I’d found a partner who was all in, whatever happened.
On the day of my surgery Paul and I left our wooded driveway before daybreak and drove north as a tangerine-colored winter sun rose over the fire-scarred Mayacamas Range and shone on mystic Sonoma Mountain. The surreal glow fit the unreality of the moment: my last morning in the complete body I’d been given.
By cutting beyond “clear margins”—past the cancer-free tissue surrounding the crab—the surgeons told me they’d reduce the risk of recurrence by up to 30 percent. I’d shrink a few bra sizes, but I doubted I’d miss them. Still, I was losing part of me.
As the surgical team started an intravenous muscle relaxant and nerve block, Paul said goodbye. He’d be waiting when I woke up almost four hours later.
Once in surgery I lay awake under bright lights for all of thirty seconds before sleeping through the rest. Only my body would retain any memory of skin being peeled back, tissue exposed, blood vessels clamped, breathing slowed.
Later Paul drove us home, the same mountains on both sides now darkening in twilight. Arteries of creeks draining the valley’s upper watersheds fed a stream running between the ridges, pulled seaward beside us.
Last year, same as this one, hard rains swamped Bodega Bay during the height of shorebird migration, flooding shorelines, confining fishing boats to their berths, closing roads, and stranding seabirds. Half a million homes lost power.
As the storms raged, I telephoned an old friend from my river-guide days to tell him I’d be heading to the coast to see how a few rare birds had fared in the overflowing atmospheric rivers. He asked if I’d heard about the six thousand flights that had been canceled to keep people safe.
Feathered air travelers had also been grounded. Pictures on eBird showed seabirds hunched in sandy coves, waiting for clearer skies before continuing south. When I arrived at Bodega Bay, I met a young state park employee who monitored snowy plovers. As I helped her scan for the tiny shorebirds, I asked how they’d done in the storms.
Not well, she said. “Before this week of rain, we had thirty-four individuals nesting here. Now I see only five.”
I felt an ache in my heart, about where the crab would arise a year later. “It’s unfair. We keep piling on stressors and expect the little guys to take it.”
Frowning, she nodded. “That’s the thing. I couldn’t live out in these storms. How can they?”
When I was a girl, I saw some cedar waxwings break their necks on the sliding glass door of a neighbor’s home and fall lifeless to the ground, half-ingested toyon berries spilling from their beaks. I mourned the loss of the sleek, masked birds, and when my fourth-grade teacher gave us an essay assignment, I wrote a piece arguing that California’s rampant population growth and construction of wildlife-unfriendly homes showed a startling lack of concern for birds. I barely had the vocabulary for the concepts I described, but my outrage was real.
The teacher asked me to read my essay to the class. When I reached my conclusion—that “birds should all get together in big flocks to peck out people’s eyes”—a kid raised his hand and asked if I’d seen Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
I hadn’t. My folks didn’t take us to movies they considered violent.
“It was ugly,” he said. He’d seen it with his older brother at a matinee. The birds in the movie—some scenes of which were shot from the same wharf from which I’d one day see the loon—had done just as I’d suggested. He assured me I did not want that to happen. The teacher, her face pinched, sided with the kid and instructed me to hand in a rewrite.
But birds aren’t ganging up to attack humans. Instead, as anthropogenic causes lead to more extinctions of wild species, many of us humans are flocking to view them, as if time is running out. And it is.
After surgery, barely able to move, I let my eyes wander to the shrubs and trees outside my bedroom window. In a cluster of redwoods and elderberry beyond the glass, white-throated sparrows scratched the ground for seeds. One sang from his perch among the redwood needles, his head thrown back and throat full of music, vitality unmistakable even through the double glazing.
Cancer survivors often experience depression, anxiety, stress, and confusion, but engaging with wildlife has been found to be helpful. Strolling through a park, spending time in a forest, and even viewing nature through our windows all have proven benefits.
The same friend who texted about the birders’ flash mob once told me that the carbon we burn in the chase is the most shameful part of birding. One worldwide chaser I know has traveled two hundred thousand miles by plane and fifty thousand miles by car in a single year to see more than seven hundred species of birds. It’s exciting and stimulating—and potentially harmful to the very beings we love. Transportation accounts for 15 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. To go gentler on the planet, some birders have committed to engaging mostly in local observation, embracing and really knowing their own backyards.
Scientists have long understood that tumors form in laboratory animals only in the presence of excess heat. Recently researchers have observed that heat exacerbates carcinogens in the human body as well—another tie between climate change and cancer.
Dōgen Zenji named his mountains-and-waters verse a “sutra”—a term usually reserved for a verbatim teaching from the Buddha’s lips. Some call this a radical act, because if Dōgen believed direct transmissions can come from mountains and waters, perhaps he’s saying that nothing, not even a great spiritual teacher, need come between us and them.
Human and wild don’t stand apart. We’re all living with extinctions and cancers and rivers in the sky. All mountains walk with their toes on all waters and splash there. Given our inter-being, how do we humans navigate?
Speaking from a place of recovery, which my doctors tell me I’m in, I can say that everyone who helped me stay alive advised patience. Healing “takes maybe twice as long as you’d expect,” one breast-cancer survivor told me. “Now is a time to be gentle.” Gentle with ourselves and with our healing. Gentle with wild creatures. Gentle in how we relate; gentle in the chase. Gentle with loved ones, knowing no one is here for long.
Maybe some night when the voices and faces wheel above me again, I’ll quote Bashō, a Buddhist poet who lived four centuries after Dōgen and wandered Japan’s northern wilderness for inspiration:
An autumn night—
don’t think your life
didn’t matter.
