It’s an expression used mostly by grandparents and politicians. If you fly with the crows, you die with the crows. The intended meaning, of course, is a warning. If you hang out with bad kids, you will become like them and suffer the same negative consequences. Makes sense, I guess, but only if you believe what you see in the movies about crows.
Ever since Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1963 horror film, The Birds, crows have gotten a bad rap. Crows are used by Hollywood to represent bad omens, evil and the supernatural.
Crows don’t seem all that bad, honestly. They’re mischievous, sure. But crows are social birds, more often seen in groups than alone. Crows are one of the smartest animals in the world, right up there with chimpanzees. And they live twice as long as chickadees. If you’re going to be a bird, being a crow might be fun.
An ode to the company we keep on the water
This spring, I paddled the upper section of the Madawaska River, a stretch of spring flow between the Ontario logging towns of Whitney and Madawaska, located just east of Algonquin Park. The first time I paddled it was with James Campbell. We were still in school, working the summers teaching paddling and guiding groups down whitewater rivers. We were on a day off. It was the perfect kind of day when dudes promise each other they will do this forever. Thirty years later, here we are again. Doing the same thing. As promised. This time with my 20-year-old son, Doug.
In the award-winning adventure film Noatak: Return to the Arctic, two guys in their 70s, Jim Slinger and Andrew “Tip” Taylor, return to the Noatak River in the Brooks Range, Alaska. It could be their last northern canoe trip after 40 summers spent on rivers together.
“If somebody had told us that we were going to be coming back down this river 35 years later, we wouldn’t have believed it,” says Tip.
“We’d have been very delighted to hear that,” laughs Jim.
They bumped into one another on the Yukon River in 1975. One thing led to another and they decided to do a trip together. Since then, they’ve made 30 trips to the north, each lasting at least three weeks long.
In his journal, Jim wrote an old Inuit saying he remembers them reading in a small museum on a previous trip to Baffin Island, “There is just one thing, and that one great thing is just to live. To open our eyes to the great light of dawn moving across the land and the beginning of the day.”
Tip and Jim are old crows. Thoughtful. Smart. Gregarious. Mischievous in their lifelong sense of adventure together. My friend James is a crow.
I think there is another way to look at the old idiom, if you fly with the crows, you die with the crows.
Crows are just misunderstood birds, misunderstood like the types of humans who spend 21 days sleeping on the ground and carrying canoes through barren, bug-infested wastelands.
I believe if you keep flying with the crows, you may be lucky enough to keep flying with them for a very long time.
“How many more times am I coming up here?” says Tip to the camera atop a mountain overlooking the Noatak River. “As we get older, we realize it’s coming toward an end.”
“Maybe this is the last trip,” says Jim. “But, I’m not saying it’s the last trip.”
As James, Doug and I drift up to the take-out bridge in the warm evening sun, Doug says, “It’s crazy you guys have been paddling rivers together since you were my age.”
I ask Doug who he thinks he’ll be paddling with in 30 years. What crows will he still be flying with?
Who are yours?
Scott MacGregor is the founder of Paddling Magazine.
This article was published in Issue 74 of Paddling Magazine. Take a bird’s eye view. | Feature photo: Rob Faubert
