The rough red head of the buzzard swivels from hillside to horizon, its black beady eyes unblinking on this rare sunny day.

An ill omen, perhaps, it perches ridiculously on the rotten fence post; its claws swallow the top five inches of the redwood four-by-four, one stained talon delicately astride the rusted skein of barbed wire. Loose as an untuned violin string, it’s adorned incidentally by long threads of brown grass; a blood-colored coat of rust that in some stretches is all the fence that remains; and a white plastic bag flashing surrender from one fell tooth, frayed and decayed by months — years maybe — of rain.

A damp hand of low clouds off an arm of distended fog is all that remains of a recent storm. The sun, brittle and shy in the distance, seems reluctant to come close. As a result, night will almost certainly bring a shroud of white frost to deaden sound and push back any new growth tempted to thrive by the sun’s brief visit.

Cathartes aura shrugs off an insistent breeze and stubbornly clings to his splintering roost. He is a stranger here upon the low earth, brooding and hungry, naively blinded by shrubs and the sudden rotundity of trees. There is no carcass nearby that he can see, no violent death to stuff the aching hollow in his gullet. Healthy herds abound — their frantic movement a river flowing over and through the uneven, tattooed expanse of land. Laggard obstacles are swallowed in the flood of meat, sinew, fur dust-pale and matted. But these he avoids now as always, letting others deliver the death that nourishes him. Momentarily, he savors the risk of relocation, the rank proximity to earth.

Yet death is close.

A car, white and scarred with dents and flaking paint, approaches on Newburg Road. It sidles toward the center, slower than a mule can run. In the front seat — their white hair almost skeletal, silhouetted against the wide rear window of the Oldsmobile — an elderly couple stares vacantly ahead. In tandem, as if lashed together by bands of steel, they bounce and list with ruts in the asphalt.

Their grandson, meanwhile, rolls from door to door in the wide back seat like dice in a gambler’s hand, ecstatic in the clutches of gravity; his frantic hands run like spiders on the tinted glass, smearing the passing greenery with sweat, oil, crushed bits of candy, and saliva where he’d licked his fingers raw.

He is wild. They are Methodist. This is Sunday, and also the anniversary of their daughter’s death. She would’ve turned 41 this year, a spring baby that never flowered. An overdose.

Enveloping the four-door sedan is a nimbus of hot air laced through with the stench of fumes and gasoline.

The buzzard loathes an abomination. Precisely attenuated to sense even the subtlest change in the flavor of the wind, its sniffer is the engine of its diet, and a source of occasional suffering.

Death can be delicious. Yet clanking, inorganic machinery fueled by poison and hurtling unnaturally fast across the landscape — these beasts of the road are mere perversions. Mindlessly, they belch acrid particles to stain the world with carbon, choke the living into foul-tasting, chemical corpses.

It tilts its head dubiously, black spot eyes becoming the period to this sentence. Then, to this ground level episode.

Gangly and langorous, it falls forward off the roost, pounding with its wings huge sheaves of air at the ground then up and over the car, gaining the creature lift as it strives for its niche between shelves of wind high in the air. Outstretched, those wings are as wide as the car’s voluminous trunk, and move deceptively slow.

One beat. Two, three, and the bird floats above and just ahead of the white car, diving through the wrought-iron gate of Sunrise Cemetery, paralleling the ground as the driveway slopes sharply up onto the now hollow plateau where Fortunans bury their dead.

From the Greek, the name Cathartes aura is roughly translated as golden purifier, or — if you prefer — cleansing breeze. As a symbol and sign of what may come, the bird is a tapestry of meaning. Given its appetite for rotted flesh, or the cold, bland juice of distended eyeballs, it often inspires fear primarily through its connection with death, and the subsequent nightmare vision of you or someone close ripped into clotted slivers of meat that the long-necked scavenger convulses down its narrow throat.

Yet death, while ending the narrative of your life, is also the climax. With your exit, a work-in-progress is finally complete; the value of your years on this earth for the first time can be fairly judged.

You transform from living creature to ghostly ephemera haunting the corners of other people’s minds as a memory, but also potentially as an inspiration. No less real, an idea can often achieve much that a living American in 21st Century Humboldt County never could.

To an eye looking for signs and symbols, omens in the fall of leaves or the wake of a passing bird, the vulture is metaphor. Not just for an end, but a beginning. A rebirth. Biologically, this of course bears out — scavengers like the turkey vulture recycle the dead, transform mortal wreckage into fuel that paves this macabre avenue of nature’s food chain.

Interpreting these missives from the natural world is a poetic, spiritual exercise that helps me at least to feel connected to the planet, my family, all the wriggling bugs, people in their obscene multitudes across the continents.

Many say that such thinking is nonsense, the lingering superstition and paranoia of primitive man, a creature who struggled to make sense of an unpredictable, often deadly, world.

The meaning we draw is arbitrary, they point out.

We infuse this or that creature with anthropamorphic characteristics, symbolic depth, and poetic resonance not because these are inherent qualities of the thing described, but because of cultural and literary associations, religious teaching, political appropriation, mythological narratives, empathic inclinations, and, perhaps most importantly, the essentially human need to parse a larger, possibly moral meaning out of a transitory universe.

Bah humbug. These same people killed Santa Claus, cut wings off the Tooth Fairy, and make a mean Easter Bunny salad.

Much of what they say is true enough. But for me, given the choice between existing in a world rich with symbol, signifiers, spiritual epiphany, omens and augurs; or a purely rationalistic, wondrous though ultimately pointless, fact-based, romance-allergic alternative, I’ll dwell in the house of VooDoo forever.

Not because I really think the raven on the hood of my car, with its baleful stare and haughty headshake, spells certain disaster. I do, however, entertain the idea as a kind of mental exercise, and use those notions to experience the natural and spiritual worlds more deeply.

Such a unique and transcendant talent — likely unique to the human species — is a blessing whose evolutionary purpose remains a mystery.

On Newburg Road, the vulture keeps rising and the car eventually shrinks to nothing. Here, its wings rest, angled precisely to ride the rising currents of warm-air thermals, banking with the slanted push of an eastern wind.

Below, the cemetery sections unfold between fading clouds, the white marble and concrete of the grave markers almost invisible except as declarative accents in the shadows. One more time over the strange field the bird flies, confused by the scent of death and absence of visible corpses.

Finally, weak now and frustrated, the bird arcs slowly east and down to snare an errant breeze and sniff out a perfectly putrid meal elsewhere.

The boy, meanwhile, refuses to get out of the car. Grandmother clings to her walker, the slit tennis balls providing traction against the stiffening breeze. She smiles at him.

“She loved you, you know,” Grandmother says softly.

The boy turns to her, wide-eyed and trembling. Grandpa, wearing huge and black orthopedic shoes and a magnifying glass that dangles next to his LifeAlert, joins them after an arduous jaunt around the car’s massive front end.

He lifts a long, spindley arm and drapes it playfully over his lover’s frail shoulders.

“Ayup,” he says.

The boy turns his deep, earth-clolored eyes to the flower-speckled field of graves. He knows that somewhere out there his mother sleeps, maybe forever.

He thinks, I hope it’s cozy.

Sliding off the wide bench seat onto gravel, he threads his sticky fingers through those of his grandmother, bravely.

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James Faulk is writer, family man and cemetery worker. He can be reached at faulk.james@yahoo.com