The First Robin
Heywood Broun, 1941
“York, PA – With the temperature at 10 below zero, the first robin of the year was seen in York today. It was found dead on Penn Common.”
Call me an old sentimentalist if you will, but this seems to me the most tragic news note of the cold wave. I like people better than robins, and there has been widespread and agonizing suffering. But, you see, this was the first robin. He was by all odds the pioneer of his clan. He flew up from the South days, weeks and months before any reasonable robin weather was to be expected.
Without doubt the rest tried to discourage him. They spoke of the best recorded experience of birdkind. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” some other robin told him. And no doubt he was advised that if he insisted on such precipitate action, he would split the group and no good could come of it.
Somehow I seem to hear him saying, “If ten will follow me, I’d call that an army. Are there two who’ll join up? Or maybe one?”
But the robins all recoiled and clung to their little patches of sun under the Southern skies. “Later, maybe,” they told him. “Not now. First there must be a campaign of education.”
“Well, “ replied the robin who was all for going to York, Pa., without waiting for feathery reinforcements, “I know one who’ll try it. I’m done with arguments, and here I go.”
He was so full of high hopes and dedication that he rose almost with the roar of a partridge. For a few seconds he was a fast-moving speck up above the palm trees, and then you couldn’t spot him even with field glasses. He was lost in the blue and flying for dear life.
“Impetuous, I call it,” said one of the elder statesmen while someone took him a worm.
“He always did want to show off,” announced another, and everybody agreed that no good would come of it.
As it turned out, maybe they were right. It’s pretty hard to prove that anything has been gained when a robin freezes to death on Penn Common. However, I imagine that he died with a certain sense of elation. None of the rest thought he could get there. And he did. The break in weather turned out to be against him. He just guessed wrong in that one respect, and so I wouldn’t think of calling him a complete failure.
When the news gets back home to the robins who didn’t go, I rather expect that they’ll make him a hero. The elder statesmen will figure that since he is dead, his ideas can’t longer be dangerous, and they cannot deny the lift and the swing of his venture.
After all, he was the first robin. He looked for the spring, and it failed him. Now he belongs to that noble army of first robins.
Many great names are included. The honors of office and public acclaim, of ribbons and medals, the keys of the city – these are seldom the perquisite of men or birds in the first flight. These go to fifth, sixth and even twentieth robins.
It is almost a rule that the first robin must die alone on some bleak common before mankind will agree that he was a hero. And sometimes it takes fifty years and often a hundred.
John Brown, Galileo and those who sought goals before the world was quite ready are all in good standing.
The man who says, “That would be swell, but of course, you can’t do it,” is generally as right as rain; but who wants to get up and cheer for frustration? In the long haul, the first robin is more right than any. It was his idea. He softened the way for the others. And with him, even failure is its own kind of triumph.
He is not the victim of dry rot or cautious or doomed eyestrain from too close attention to ledgers.
“Here I go!” he cries, and I wouldn’t be surprised to be told that the first minute of flight is reward enough, no matter what follows.
And so in a metaphorical way of speaking, I bare my head and bow low in the general direction of the ice-covered plain which is known as Penn Common. And I think that the burial address should carry the statement: “You were the first, and after you will come others. They will inherit the grubs and the nests and the comfort. But yours is the glory. You are the first robin.”
