For weeks I’ve been hearing mysterious references to “birds” being fabricated in Ballard and then shipped to Alaska. The birds are actually three dimensional sculptures of Northwest birds in migration; each one hand crafted in aluminum to become part of a public art installation in Juneau’s new airport terminal.

Last week I was on my way to see the birds and meet the designers at Denny Jensen’s studio in the Fenpro building on Market Street. Jay Craig, fellow “Bring the Ring Back to Ballard” committee member, was waiting by a side door to walk me back to the studio in the labyrinthine workplace. My hand was on the door knob. My cell phone rang. “Peg,” my sister said sobbing. “I think Gramp just had a stroke.”

How is that we can spend years wondering if we’ll receive a call like that and yet be knocked completely sideways when it comes? My sister was talking about our dad, rechristened “Gramp” by his four granddaughters. She was following the ambulance to the hospital, in another time zone.

When the call comes, when you live 3,000 miles away, and not a mile like my sister, all you can do is sit down rather than fall. Heart racing, fingers tingling there’s nothing to do at first but wait for the next call and pretend that the known world since birth hasn’t just opened up beneath your feet.

Just the day before I’d been working at my usual spot, the corner of the chaise lounge, wearing pajamas and looking out over the parade of dog walkers on 34th NW and vessel traffic beyond. I had been talking to David at InBallard.com about teaming up on the bell celebration while working on three separate writing assignments. I talked to Steve Henrickson about the birds that he and his wife had designed in a Northwest Native form line style. Then I heard a tornado was heading through Massachusetts toward the city where my daughter had that morning moved her belongings to an off-campus apartment.

The tornado that ripped through Springfield like a top was small compared to those in the South but it hit a densely populated Eastern city that thought tornados only happened elsewhere. My daughter and her friends emerged from the basement. Worcester was spared; Springfield was not. My daughter was airborne for Seattle when my sister called me; less than 24 hours after she landed she was on her way back to Boston with me.

One day you’re entrenched in your routines and special events; trash day on Tuesday, column deadline on Friday, an alley sale planned for the weekend, impulse items from Swanson’s waiting to be planted; the next day you’re learning to navigate a hospital wing with all its alarming equipment and unknown terms. But that’s a good thing because it means that your father is still alive.

When the call came there really didn’t seem anything else to do but continue, mind racing, to the Fenpro Building. To look at photos of the first aluminum birds installed the night before from the ceiling in Juneau airport, between arriving flights. To photograph the process of shaping a metal into an artist’s vision, but with accuracy to the tilt of the wings of a duck as it lifts into the sky. To wonder at the combined perfectionism of Steve Henrickson and his wife Janice Criswell with their designs for huge birds in flight, the aluminum cut by water jet and then shaped, pounded and pieced together by Denny Jensen, glass eyes made by Chris Dailey, Jay Craig painting each duck, goose, gull and tern to a certain patina. Giant birds that will be suspended from the terminal season, caught in the act of flight.

Between the phone call and the first report from the hospital I looked at photographs of the first installed ducks and marveled at the wingspan of the first goose prototype. Henrickson explained to me why it made sense to fabricate in Ballard because of the access to materials and proliferation of artists in the Fenpro building alone. “Ballard is the gateway to Alaska,” he told me. The birds will be crated to travel to Alaska by barge.

Unlike the birds we flew cross-country the day after the phone call. I don’t know yet when I’ll be back in Ballard, with chaise lounge serving as on office on the world. In the meantime my family is camped together, in a house by night, by a hospital room by day. This isn’t the bird column that I’d meant to write; it is mostly too hard to think of anything but the numbers that flash at us from the monitors, the effort to understand my father’s efforts at speech.

Generally we all take each day as though we know what to expect, can plan ahead; it’s our strength and weakness as human beings. If we are lucky, when the earth seems to move beneath our feet, when winds destroy buildings, when our fathers fall, we find that the human connections are stronger than ever, the better to rebuild a shelter, rewire a brain and fly away home.

Peggy Sturdivant is co-author of “Out of Nowhere” with Robin Abel.