The Seen and the Unseen

This has happened to me before. A journal begun confidently in January, meandering wryly through March, only to founder in April and get stuck in the too-muchness of spring.


It's the birds' fault.  Between April and late May, there's this amazing influx of birds, most foraging and sojourning on their way north, some staying. Each bird occupies a particular place of resonance, especially in those first re-encounters. The fashionable new, whistleable cadenza of a Baltimore oriole, accompanied by its brilliant tangerine in a treetop. The bell-flute of a wood thrush, slightly echoey, the way they like it, in the woods. The darting, precise energy of multiple warblers and kinglets, various flickers of color, here-I-ams of song. It's equal parts reunion, capture, and wish-fulfillment, to be repeated in various woods, meadows, and cemeteries every eligible early morning, alone, with a friend, or in a company of fellow obsessives.


So this blog entry, like its title, and the whole agony-reward syndrome that birding is, has been an elusive quarry. I'm not even sure if I've got a good purchase on it now, three paragraphs in. The thing to do is watch for movement and keep hopeful. This often works better with writing than it does with birds.


Birds want to be noticed by rivals or potential mates, but not necessarily by human stalkers holding up clunky eye-extenders. On the other hand, there is the curiosity factor. What are we up to? Sometimes a threat needs to be checked out. Or sometimes we occupy a zone of opportunity: food, roost, nest site. Or at least the neutral zone of familiarity. They must have assigned us a certain place in their own inner Field Guide to Non-Birds, maybe subdividing the friendlies (birders) from the bewares (quail hunters, homewreckers, etc.). Whatever the odds, to see or not to see is a game of chance that can produce cinematic memories that you replay for decades, like the two pileated woodpeckers I saw in a forest clearing in Nova Scotia, or bitter confirmation of your lousy juju.


How much is skill and how much is luck? They intertwine. You work the chance. Hear the call, recognize it, follow it to the right tree, catch the movement (knowing where to look) and it emerges! in full sunlight! Or you lose the damn landmark between the eye and the binoculars and it disappears behind a barrier of leaves and before you have it, it flies away, a brief fleeing silhouette that is a seeing of sorts, but offering no kiss of color, nothing for the memory or even the imagination.


Does it help to have another set of eyes? Probably. I think of the indigo bunting singing away in the copse of trees by the stump dump at the Brooks Estate. I peered. Nothing. The song moved. It's a very cheerful song, but brief, like a memorized aphorism.  I studied the array of trees, watching for a clue, like a golfer regarding the lie. Another birder approached. He resembled a young Irish schoolteacher, with Yeatsian round glasses. He guided me to another spot, a different angle on the copse. He confirmed it was still there and fed me a careful map of reference points: the main tree, the leaning branch, the treeline behind, halfway up, and then I had it. As deeply glowingly blue as indigo buntings ever get in a shaft of late-afternoon sunlight. I drank it in. "I couldn't have done it without you," I said, and there was gratitude in that, and also a little bitterness. The bird you find on your own has a certain intimacy: you were meant for each other. But there is the pleasure of sharing: the ensemble moan of a group seeing the sunset throat of a Blackburnian warbler... And do I prefer self-failing to assisted-succeeding? What are you, crazy?

It also helps to be in the right place at the right time. I was at Mt. Auburn Cemetery early in May with friends, pursuing some warbler or other. I'd fallen into conversation, and by the time I caught up with my friend Helen, I learned what I had just missed by minutes. Flying over the cemetery in graceful formation was a trio of sandhill cranes. My grail bird! I had once missed seeing it by a day in Pitt Meadows, British Columbia. I had long fantasized about making a pilgrimage to the Platte River in Nebraska or Bosque del Apache in New Mexico where sandhills gather by the thousands. And here in the sky--three sandhill cranes passing overhead in formation. A rendezvous I had failed to keep. A picture I had to create from other people's descriptions and, in consolation, a photograph.

Not that it was a bad spring. I had a splendid encounter with a chestnut-sided warbler, didn't see a Canada, did see a Magnolia, a Nashville, a Tennessee, a Black-throated Blue, didn't see the Wilson's, the Hooded, the Kentucky. Did see redstarts. Did and didn't see a prothonotary warbler.

The prothonotary warbler is a southern beauty of marsh and swamp that I mainly know from bird books and for the fact that they are named for a rank of Catholic prelates who wear brilliant yellow robes. A fortunate wind had brought one of these golden-yellow and blue-winged warblers to Brooks Pond on the Estate. It didn't show up where last reported, but I only found out in early evening: time to tuck its giolden head under blue wing. Tomorrow morning, for sure.


I went with friend Ed, whose juju is better than mine. He had seen a pair of prothonotaries a week earlier on the Ipswich River. We worked the peninsulas along the pond, both sides. No luck. And then we ran into an uber-birder who pointed us to a group right around the corner who had the prothonotary in sight, in hand, there for the taking. It was in a fallen but leafy tree projecting out into the water. We joined the eager group. They gave us careful location notes. Ed saw it. I kept looking. "Don't try to find it with your binoculars," one burly photographer instructed me, taking me for a complete neophyte. "Look for movement first." As a result I hesitated before re-training my glasses on a yellow-and-something bird perched on the main limb. And it flew. That was it. And that was all.


There are rationalizations. The brief glimpse is realer, more birdlike, you tell yourself. Or you return in memory to the barely seen and fill it out, make the whole experience an adventure on a par with Audubon's, Nuttall's, Townsend's, any of those roving ornithologsts of the nineteenth century. Or you measure the unseen against the seen, and who's to say the prothonotary is worth more than the chestnut-sided, or if you want to add the really close look at the male rose-breasted grosbeak you saw, its fat ivory bill quivering with song. Or, fine, add the indigo too. And go ahead and throw in the pileated woodpeckers. Is the scale balanced yet? And remember, you saw it. Kind of. 


Anyway, seen or unseen, it got you to finish this blog entry. 

conspiracy

There is nothing new under the sun. True or false?


This afternoon I tear myself away from revising old blog posts (as a book) to find the grist for a new one, because it's extraordinary out there. In the seventies! (Septaguinta!) Then Matt comes home. We should play tennis, I suggest (though my heart is telling me to ride my bike out to the Brooks Estate in Medford, listen for new birds). But he's tired, finally. Feeling a little disingenuous, I say, that's okay, and maybe we'll play when I get back.


I ride to Brooks, following a zigzag route to Mystic River, up Saltonstall Rd., through the cemetery to the woods. Try to lock my bike; no keys. Left them at home. Never mind. I wheel the bike down the path to Brooks Pond, lean it against a tree. Mallards are quacking lustily and nonstop. I go for a look and hey! There's the hooded merganser that thinks it's a mallard, hanging out with the male and female mallard "like a Ukrainian orphan," in the words of my friend Ed. And better yet! There's the wood duck pair Ed told me about. Wood duck drakes have an Asian look, a green samurai helmet, as well as a North American look, broad bosky swatches of maroon browns and whites and blacks and greens and a red eye. The hen is gray with white tear-shaped goggles. A classy couple. I watch the hoodie and the woodies for a while, then steer my bike over to the deck at the end of the boardwalk, with built-in benches. The water is high and the planks creak ominously, but I lean the bike against the railing and sit down gingerly. And write:


There's nothing new under the sun. T or F?


And think about the conspiracy of spring. Literally a breathing together of us and new scents, subtle and un-. Not sure where that sweet spicy smell comes from, but it's wonderful. There are no other birds. Well, a few common ones: redwings, grackles, distant goldfinch and ringing flicker. This mild breeze must be Zephyrus, the west wind Chaucer talks about in his April prologue to The Canterbury Tales (Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / the droght of March hath perced to the roote):


Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,


It's a conspiracy because it's the old oxygen/CO2 exchange and because we're not in on it the way the rest of nature is. They're all collaborating, or being collaborated upon by this urgent warm wind that is urging up green blades and buds and leaflets, and conjuring up flowers, daffodils and forsythia, that royal blue carpet of scylla at the foot of many an old tree. It's a sexy temperature, no doubt about it, reminding you of every other sexy day in April or May with a warm breeze stirring, so the answer is:

False. Everything is new under the sun to someone, and even if I've heard a goldfinch sing that way and felt a mild breeze like this one, why compare? It's not the same. It's always a brand new conspiracy.

Outs and Ins

March may have come in like a lion, but it wasn't a roaring one. More of a magisterial, businesslike one, walking the savannah, surveying its allotment of days, calculating the disbursal of spring, the reluctant retreat of winter, in small doses.

And it did not go out like a lamb, unless the few inches of wet, see-ya, snow that fell on eastern Mass. was supposed to be white as fleece.

After which April came in like that same shivering fox in lamb's clothing, with a weak April Fool grin.

Today is actually April 3, disguised as March 31, the day I wrote "Outs and Ins" up there. Months come in and go out in a variety of disguises, and in between they take on a costumery of other identities. This either says something about the futility of putting a face on a month, or the opportunity to put on as many faces as you like.

Which brings to mind, of course, the great John Belushi sketch from an early Saturday Night Live.

Chevy Chase:
Last week we made the comment that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Now here to reply is our chief meteorologist, John Belushi, with a seasonal report.

John Belushi:
Thank you Chevy. Well, another winter is almost over and March true to form has come in like a lion, and hopefully will go out like a lamb. At least that's how March works here in the United States.

But did you know that March behaves differently in other countries? In Norway, for example, March comes in like a polar bear and goes out like a walrus. Or, take the case of Honduras where March comes in like a lamb and goes out like a salt marsh harvest mouse.

Let's compare this to the Maldive Islands where March comes in like a wildebeest and goes out like an ant. A tiny, little ant about this big.

[holds thumb and index fingers a small distance apart]

Unlike the Malay Peninsula where March comes in like a worm-eating fernbird and goes out like a worm-eating fernbird. In fact, their whole year is like a worm-eating fernbird.

Or consider the Republic of South Africa where March comes in like a lion and goes out like a different lion. Like one has a mane, and one doesn't have a mane. Or in certain parts of South America where March swims in like a sea otter, and then it slithers out like a giant anaconda.

There you can buy land real cheap, you know. And there's a country where March hops in like a kangaroo, and stays a kangaroo for a while, and then it becomes a slightly smaller kangaroo. Then, then, then for a couple of days it's sort of a cross between a, a frilled lizard and a common house cat.

[Chevy Chase tries to interrupt him]

Wait wait wait wait. Then it changes back into a smaller kangaroo, and then it goes out like a, like a wild dingo. Now, now, and it's not Australia! Now, now, you'd think it would be Australia, but it's not!

[Chevy Chase tries to interrupt him]

Now look, pal! I know a country where March comes in like an emu and goes out like a tapir. And they don't even know what it means! All right? Now listen, there are nine different countries, where March comes in like a frog, and goes out like a golden retriever. But that- that's not the weird part! No, no, the weird part is, is the frog. The frog- The weird part is-

At this point John Belushi kind of loses it and falls off his chair. But I think I know what he was going to say. The weird part is the frog gets frog-Marched in . . . by a lion!

April fuel!

Good Old Days

I have this compost of jottings, some of them decades old. Some of them molder in the Word document where I left them, others in my scribble, usually a black ballpoint, on a small library of pads and notebooks. (In dreams I am always finding my writings in odd places: flea markets, antique stores, Dumpsters, strangers' waste baskets.) Do they serve a purpose, composting in a file cabinet? Are they in some way nourishing this writing in a secret evolution by osmosis? Or do I owe them a shot at the big-time, a "cup of coffee" in the majors, so to speak?

I have already rescued a couple of more-or-less finished pieces, giving them a shave, outfitting them in an Old Hatch's Almanac uniform, slapping them on the butt and sending them out there, like a 40-year-old rookie. "Hurry Up, Cows" was one. "Jimi Hendrix and the Jolly Jumper" was another. This one is called "Good Old Days" and hearkens back (some day I'd like to try hearkening foward) to a November day a few years ago.

*

Lately I’ve been writing brief entries in my “journal,” my book of days, that begin “Good old” whatever the day is. Today it’s good old November 30. I am looking out at it, through the tree, which was not possible a couple of weeks ago; but November has done its work of erasing and it leaves the world browner and colder and barer than it found it.

I started this “good old” business on my birthday, which is the one day I’m personally entitled to get chummy with—me and my fellow 10/27 passengers.

There are other days, holidays, semi-holidays (anniversaries, beginnings of seasons, big football games) that warrant an extra dose of respect, attention, or excitement: “Today’s the big day!” “TGIF!” But that’s not quite the same thing as “Good old…” It’s possible, I’ve found, just by writing an entry that begins with those words, to make a day more your own, especially a day that has no apparent distinguishing features for you. (My own good old October 27th may even be that day for many others, difficult as that is to believe.)

Take this day, which happens to coincide with this writing, an accident of time. I write “Good old November 30”—taking the “good old” purely on faith—and glance out at it to see what might justify that affectionate squeeze. Like a loyal dog the day looks back at me, eager to reward my friendly overture. Behold the wizened leaves, trembling in a light breeze. Behold the flat-bottomed fleet of scow clouds. It happens to be sunny. The light lies in musing planes on my black recliner like an old man recalling his youth. The day has a story, or at least a personality. Nor am I talking about the usual almanac stories each day contains (“On this day in 1888…”) I mean this day—which has a name, true, November 30, and a history, things happened on it on previous go-rounds, but I mean this good old brand-new day, especially when contemplated in the morning, before anything terrible has happened that might cause you to unfairly blame the temporal container of the event, which is as unfair as blaming the spatial one, but we kick the day like we kick the chair. Yet, conversely, when things are going well, do we praise the day? Do we say, “Way to go, November 30?” Not really. We congratulate ourselves, or the turn of events, which is fine, mazeltov, we should all have such days, but I repeat, I’m talking about the day, the boxcar, the one you befriended before anything wonderful or lousy happened in it.

Having befriended the day, it’s easier to go out into it or proceed through it with something of a companionable feel well into the afternoon before you forget that you forged a rleationship with it, which you probably will. Though even after you do, some good residue may remain. Consciously or unconsciously, you may find yourself looking up at the sky, the day’s face, with a collusive or collaborative appraisal. Or nothing in particular, just the invisible wind of minutes scrolling by—friendly minutes, seconds you were introduced to several hours ago when the day was good old November 30 or January 19 (cold and overcast and unlovable) or March 3. These are the good old days.

Dumb Old Ordinary Moon

I meant to be like a cool dad and pile the family into the station wagon (well, the Honda Accord) and drive to the top of Arlington, Robbins Farm, with the unimpeded view of Boston and the eastern horizon. There to see, no, behold, the rising of the supermoon, as big and astonishing as a giant yellow banana custard pie, 20% bigger than normal full moons because it's at the perigee of its orbit or something, a position it achieves once every 18 years.

But I forgot.

Until my father-in-law came up from downstairs to suggest we go outside to see the brightest moon there has ever been. (Doh!)

So we all trooped dutifully outside, but by then it was an hour or two above the housetops, floating free, with no horizon's trappings and trimmings to show off its hugeness. In the words of my friend Kitty Colton, who also arrived late, but expected more, it was just the dumb old ordinary moon.

Which is extraordinary enough!

Yeah, yeah, be quiet. Next time I have a chance to see the supermoon I'll be eighty. If I'm lucky. And watch, it'll turn out to be overcast that night. And I'll think back to the one I missed when I was sixty-two.

Did you see the Twenty Eleven Supermoon, old-timer? they'll ask. (Long whistle of appreciation) I heard it was "awesome"! (They'll say it in patronizing quotes, the way people say "groovy" now.) Was it as awesome as they say? "Awesomer," I'll mutter, and describe the rising pie I never actually saw, except in my imagination.

I'll tell a Baron Von Munchausen tale about how the moon was so close you could put up a ladder and climb onto it and go bounding around like a kangaroo. And people went skateboarding in the craters and you could breathe because it was sharing Earth's atmosphere. And people took tons of photos of themselves on the ladder or at the foot of the ladder looking up, like some old postcard with the caption "WOTTA MOON!" And then, of course, the moon would edge away, gradually at first, like a big ship leaving the harbor, and then little by little putting out to sea, or sky. And maybe a few misguided adventurers from Kansas or Honolulu or Papua-New Guinea decided to remain on board the moon for an 18-year hitch until it came back to port. Their families and loved ones had begged and pleaded for them to change their minds, but no, they were moonstruck, you could see it in their eyes.

"Look for me when the moon is full or in last quarter," they'd say in a hoarse dreamy voice like Henry Fonda as Tom Joad at the end of The Grapes of Wrath. "Wherever you see a lunar eclipse on a night where the wind is blowing the October leaves across the sky, I'll be there. And wherever two lovers are a-settin' silhouetted against the moon of June while they listen to a crooner croon a tune—but not Pat Boone; anyone but Boone, even Lorna Doone—I'll be there..."

At which point they will totally give me up as a crazy old geezer, even making the circular sign with their forefinger, the international signal for barmy, loony-tunes, batty as a ballpark. And all because I felt like I had to enlarge the dumb old ordinary moon.

But that's what it's there for!

Live Your Life

I just read that Garrison Keillor is planning to retire in a couple of years, after he finds a replacement host for A Prairie Home Companion (yeah, sure), and I suppose says one final “That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children…are above average.”

He is entitled to retire. Seventy years old in 2013. Had a minor stroke last year. Has other things he wants to do. And it’s not as if I plan my weekend around PHC anymore, the way I used to in my late twenties and thirties.

But the fact is the guy’s been a fixture in my life since the 1970s. What will I do without him?

I’ve had many a dream about Garrison Keillor. In most of the dreams we know each other slightly. Sometimes I’m just in the audience or listening on the radio. Once I appeared on a version of his show, a character in an elaborate radio play. And we’ve had a number of writer-to-writer conversations. I’m usually pretty awestruck, even in the dream.

I had one such conversation with him recently. In this dream, I attended a show of PHC held in some small-town auditorium or town hall. Then afterwards, either he sat down at the table where I was sitting, or I sat down at his. We chatted—good show; thanks—and then as I was about to leave, he gave me some parting advice. “Live your life,” he said, and something else that was a minor adjunct to it, like “and don’t sweat the details.”

Mainly I awoke with the “Live your life” part. It seemed both simple and profound. What else are you going to do with your life but live it? Unless it was a counsel not to commit suicide. Or did it mean “Live your life”: don’t squander it; don’t take a passive role. Live it, steer it, feel it, orchestrate it! Will do. I mean, I will if I damn well feel like it.

Or possibly, as a frequent mentor and ideel in my dreams, he meant to stress the middle word: Live your life. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Wait, I get it. Live your life; not a fantasy, not a fiction, not even a blog.

I don’t know. Maybe I was saying it to him what with his pending retirement. Be well, GK, do good work, and keep in touch.

A sneaky way to give advice to myself.

Japan

Didn’t that name mean something very different a few days ago? A faraway land with a lot of people and a lot of energy. Mt. Fuji and delicate cherry blossoms in Kyoto. An amazing story of a bitter enemy whose cities we atomized sixty years ago, and who soon after became a charming friend and cultural alter ego. If the land itself remained faraway and storylike, its products mated with us and our vocabulary: Toyota, Sony, Honda, kimono, manga, Miyazaki, Mitsubishi, Pokemon, geisha, hibachi, haiku, samurai, sushi….

And still it’s so, but under a terrible dark, scary, pall. An accident that stays in our periphery, the thought of it never far away, and now Japan means something else: a fragile place, some skinny vulnerable islands, with so many people who have died, and whose survivors must all be stunned, scared, if not in a state of post-traumatic stress disorder to match the trauma that has overtaken Japan.

We’ve had earthquakes, but long ago (San Francisco) or at a far remove from our perceived center (Anchorage). We’ve had other natural disasters—hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, forest fires, even a few volcanic eruptions—that felt like deep wounds. But for national trauma we’d probably have to compare this to 9/11. It’s inexact in its particulars, of course. Ours was inflicted by people and the death toll was small by comparison. But the insult to the national soul, if there was one, seems similar.

So what do we do? We do what we do. Memorize those images: the creepy, insidious video of the tsunami rolling over the farmland, overtaking the orderly patchwork of crops, like chaos devouring civilization. And on the news tonight, gigantic tuna-fishing boats, the size of factories, lying on their sides in the roads of a fishing port. They had been out in the bay. The tsunami dragged them in like a stupid god. And a few people standing here and there, stock-still, trying to comprehend it.

Go on about our business. Watch the TV shows we always watch, speculate on the college basketball tournament, listen to James Taylor, order a coffee and muffin, maybe feel a little grateful, even guiltily grateful, for things like meals and showers. Check out the Times online or NPR for the latest news of the new troubled-sounding Japan. Write about it or write about bluebirds, read about it and read the comics, think about it and lots of other things, fleetingly. Donate money or think about donating money. Go back to the coffee and the email.

Reflect on how it seems our planet could take us or leave us sometimes. Or how, if we’re so smart, isn’t there anything we can do to settle those restless underground tectonic plates? No. Furthermore, the fine print on the ticket says that the planet will not be responsible for…and there’s a whole long list of “acts of God,” including earthquakes and tsunamis.

So we will just have to eat the warranty along with our fellow planetoids.