JOHN PEPIN

Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about serendipity and happenstance and how often those things, intrinsically and forever linked within the construct of time, help us appreciate and cherish more dearly things we experience.

The idea of coincidence often resides at the heart of many of the events we subjectively consider to be great. It’s like seeing the artwork of the universe taking place in dazzling display right before our eyes.

I don’t understand how it works exactly and, if the notion is complicated by the introduction of quantum mechanics, then I really don’t understand it.

But I certainly want to.

As human beings, we seem to marvel at the gravity of chance and the idea that anything can happen.

Yes, at least theoretically.

However, do we really believe that on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis?

Some people do.

For me, I’m doubtful.

I say that understanding there’s a sadness and resignation in that realization.

Life and living have worn away a lot of that innocence and wishful thinking I had as a kid, when we were all told that anything and everything was indeed not only possible, but perhaps had a likelihood of happening.

Any kid could be president one day. Right?

True, but not really.

The odds of me beating Tiger Woods in a golf match, especially when I don’t golf, must be astronomical. But in the mysterious world of all of this, perhaps I may have already beaten him in some parallel universe and neither of us knows it yet.

Either way, I think the concept of real chance in the world is so big and encompassing it’s hard to have anything but a passing understanding of it.

I studied statistics in college, and I loved it.

But I think there are other factors in this world and the wider cosmos, for the purpose of our current understanding of science call them intangibles, have more to do in our lives than just predicting mere statistical likelihoods.

I tend to keep things on a small scale when grappling with these concepts of chance, coincidence, time, serendipity and happenstance.

I think that if I break things down into smaller pieces, the truth at the heart of the matter might reveal itself to me.

Now that is something that I think might have a real chance of occurring to me within the constricts of my lifetime.

For example, a couple days ago, I had the opportunity to push open my bedroom window to listen to the rain falling.

It was so calming and delightful to hear, I recorded a minute or so of it so that I can replay it another day and remember how wonderful it was and relive the experience.

If I was somewhere else at that time on that day, I wouldn’t have been able to be home to make my little recording keepsake or even enjoy the experience.

But what was I missing by not being someplace else at that time?

There’s no telling.

Last week, I wrote about two families of house wrens that were nesting in birdhouses in our yard. One nest failed and the chicks all died. The reasons are not clear and remain unknown.

The other nest, with parenting duties estimated to be a week or so behind those of the first wren family, was still inhabited.

I decided to try to attract house wrens to our yard after hearing a male singing his beautiful spring song while I was walking out to the mailbox one morning.

Fast forward to a year later and we have these two families of nesting wrens.

So, this past Saturday morning, I fell asleep during the afternoon while at my laptop.

In waking up, I decided to take another little walk out to the mailbox.

When I stepped out the back door, I heard a bunch of chittering and chattering coming from the shrubbery and raspberry brambles at the back of our yard.

I paid a little bit of attention to it as it caught my ear, but it didn’t deter me from getting to the mailbox. I was on a mission.

On the way back, hearing the sound again, I snapped out of my sleepy headedness.

This must be baby birds chirping – baby wrens?

I went into the house long enough to toss the mail on my desk and grab my camera.

I know that if this was the baby wrens now leaving the nest, they wouldn’t be back to the birdhouse ever again.

As I approached the greenery at the edge of the yard, I saw four or five little brown birds hopping up onto sticks and then quickly dipping back down into cover, chittering and chatting all the while.

This was indeed the wrens.

I surmised there were likely four young birds and at least one adult bringing the birds food, even though the chicks were now off the nest, and they had made it safely to the ground from the height of a purple martin nest box about 25 feet off the ground.

I followed them barefoot into the woods. I watched the fluffy and tawny Easter chicks running along the forest floor under the safety of bright green bracken ferns that stood about 3 feet tall.

I kept making chipping sounds to see if either the adults or any of the chicks would pop up into the open long enough for me to get a picture or two. The chipping sounds didn’t seem to do much.

However, I did see some great moments in quick glances, including at least one of the parents with a mouth full of insects feeding one of the chicks and the chicks popping up to the high limbs for a look-see and then popping back down.

The whole group of birds astonishingly flew past a “No Trespassing” sign as though they couldn’t read. Wow.

They continued to head up the gradient of the woodlands to a craggy cliff face, with green moss growing over the rocks. This is where they disappeared above me, leaving me with the sound of their young, few-days-old baby bird talk.

My dad would have made a joke about talk being “cheep” in this instance, but I’m not going to do that.

Now the point of updating my house wren story is to explain how these events that unfolded were made far more appreciable by the fact that had I not awakened from my nap and decided to go to the mailbox at the time I did, I would have missed entirely the house wrens leaving the nest box for good.

Here’s another incident that happened to me. Estimate the chances or odds of this occurrence.

When I lived in California, I worked as an assistant manager at one of the big west coast record store chains during the 1980s.

Just before noon on June 2, I decided to go home for lunch to enjoy some time with my then-wife. It was her birthday. I had never gone home from work for lunch before.

When I returned to work, about an hour later, I couldn’t get into the store because the entrance was guarded by police. One of my store clerks had been shot and killed inside the store.

What would I have done, or what might have happened, had I instead stayed at the store when the gunman came in and started shooting?

Again, there’s no telling.

Strange forces at work if you ask me.

Flash ahead maybe 20 years and I am sitting at my work desk in Michigan working my reporter beat in Munising. For whatever reason, as I typed out my story that morning, the Dion song “Abraham, Martin and John” was on my mind.

I love Dion. He is one of my rock-n-roll heroes. I also love that song.

What was on my mind about it specifically was that I hadn’t heard it in several years and I’d really love to listen to it. I did not have a copy of it in my record collection at home, a true sin I was to rectify later.

Anyway, as I finished deadline duties, I had to attend a meeting at the county offices.

I got into my car and when I turned the key, the radio came on.

Yes, it was Dion and “Abraham, Martin and John.”

It was shocking to me. It still is.

There are so many times in my fishing, birdwatching, hiking, stargazing and regular life events that if I had just been a couple of minutes late or early, I would have missed the entire experience completely, whatever it was.

That makes me wonder how many times do we hit it right and get to experience the event we end up thinking about or reliving for years after the fact?

Even more intriguing to me is how many times do we miss it entirely by being just a second or two later or early?

I would love to know the statistical probability of that.

Whatever the case, it’s all this smoke and magic and thunder and lightning occurring in the motion of time and space and chemistry in our daily lives.

I guess the bottom line for me is that I just want to experience more and when it comes to nature, the only way to do that is to get “out there” as often as I can.

Maybe we’ll me out there somewhere, you and me and Dion and Tiger Woods and the Easter egg chick wrens and those elusive lottery numbers.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.