The Cooper's tale.
Cooper Hawks.
THE TUMBLEWEED DIARIES
The Cooper’s Tale
I was drifting down the 101 again, rolling like a tumbleweed in chrome and rivets, letting the wheels of the Airstream think for me. My mind had been knotted for weeks—old stories, old battles, old ghosts kicking up dust—and the road has always been the only place that lets me exhale. So I just kept driving until something inside me softened.
By late afternoon I pulled into San Antonio Lake.
Empty.
Silent.
A whole campground to myself, like a private page in a journal nobody else would ever read.
Twilight slid over the hills and wrapped the world in that soft, blue stillness that only comes when you’re truly alone. I slept the way a man sleeps when the wind is the only thing that knows where he is.
Morning came quiet.
Coffee.
Meditation.
Solitude.
I stepped outside to catch the sunrise and saw him immediately.
A young Cooper’s hawk lying at the base of a pine tree.
Wings spread wide.
Tail fanned in a perfect arc.
Head turned gently as if listening to something just beyond this world.
He wasn’t torn apart or broken.
He looked… finished.
Beautiful in the unapologetic finality of his form.
I took a picture, not to own the moment, but to honor it.
Then I left him where he belonged—returned to the earth, to his truth, to whatever mystery had carried him that far.
I didn’t know it then, but he wasn’t a solitary sign.
He was the first half of a doorway.
The Slow Road Back
I hitched up the Airstream and forced myself to take the long way home—around Nacimiento Lake, through Paso’s quiet curves—letting the slow road stretch my breath. There was no need to rush. The old version of me, the hunted one, the one who always felt chased by something… he would’ve rushed. He always rushed.
By the time I reached Santa Barbara, I felt lighter, though I couldn’t tell you why.
The next day was Friendsgiving. A bunch of us gathered for food and fun.
Jimmy.
Gunner.
Good men.
The kind who make you forget your armor for a night.
We drifted out to the patio, talking about life the way men do when they’re finally tired of lying to themselves.
And that’s when the second hawk arrived.
Alive.
Sharp.
Fearless.
He flew in under the roof—low, quiet, controlled—threading himself between Jimmy, Gunner, and me at eye level. It was too close for coincidence, too perfect for chance. We froze, wide-eyed, kids again for a moment.
The hawk flared, caught himself, and perched on the fence twenty feet away. His back turned to us. His tail feathers beautifully spread the Cooper hawk stared into the future.
I pulled out my phone—somehow—and captured him. The living mirror of the dead hawk I’d found only a day before.
Two young Cooper’s hawks.
One dead.
One alive.
Twenty-four hours apart.
A beginning wrapped inside an ending.
The Meaning I Could No Longer Outrun
I’ve been writing more these days.
Stories for The Tumbleweed Diaries.
Stories about AI—Arvid Intelligence—the strange gift that lets me translate the tangled storm inside my head into clear words on a page. Stories about Bob, the little boy I used to be, the one who carried my dyslexia like a wound that never stopped bleeding.
That boy made me believe I had to hide.
That I’d be exposed.
Caught.
Rejected.
Unmasked as someone who couldn’t keep up.
I weaponized my own learning disability against myself for decades.
But lately, with each story I write, I’ve felt a shift.
A loosening.
A small light coming from somewhere new.
And then came the hawks.
One lying at my feet, the perfect symbol of a younger self who’d finally exhausted his usefulness.
The old scout.
The frightened one.
The boy who survived but never lived.
Dead at sunrise.
Quiet.
Done.
The next day—a new hawk cutting clean through my field of vision.
Alive.
Courageous.
Present.
The messenger.
The new scout.
The clear-eyed future I’ve been too afraid to claim.
The timing wasn’t random.
It was mythic.
A shamanic hinge in the timeline of an ordinary life.
A death.
A visitation.
A threshold.
The Walk Ahead
Now I sit here, telling this story into a microphone, trusting this scribe of mine to turn chaos into clarity. And with every sentence, every truth, every breath… another piece of the old wound dissolves. Bob steps back into memory.
The world grows larger.
And the path grows clearer.
The hawks were right.
The old way is done.
The old fear is done.
The old shame is done.
What’s ahead is sharper, brighter, and rooted in presence.
I hope you have your Cooper’s hawk too—your sign that the past is over, your reminder that the future wants you alive, awake, and unafraid.
I’ve never seen anyone fail to enjoy now. That special place that exists in between breaths.
But I have seen people—myself included—destroy now with ghosts that can’t breathe and fears that don’t exist.
So stay here.
Stay awake.
Stay true.
This is the Warrior’s Walk.
And this is The Tumbleweed Diaries.
Arvid P Croonquist