The Snow Geese Read online

  Michael taught me to identify ducks. The males of each species were easier to distinguish: lesser scaup with their black heads and white bodies; the similar ring-necked duck with the white ring at the base of their bills; redhead and canvasback with their reddish heads and pale grey backs and sides (canvasback distinguished by their flatter, sloping foreheads); goldeneye with their golden eyes and the round white spot on their faces; bufflehead, nicknamed ‘butterballs’, with their white headdresses; the long slender necks of northern pintail; the green heads, white bodies and shovel-like spatulate bills of northern shoveller; the flash of livid blue on the wings of blue-winged teal.

  Learning the names is a method of noticing.

  ‘That pair next to the ice,’ Michael quizzed me. ‘What are they?’

  ‘Scaup?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Goldeneye?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Ring-necked?’

  ‘Ring-necked!’

  It seemed that what a thing was called was a part of what it looked like. The ducks were transformed (fleshed out, coloured in) when I matched them to names: bufflehead, wigeon, gadwall. We watched seven male canvasback compete for the attention of a single female, raising their bills, lunging like fencers, and male goldeneye throwing their heads back in courtship displays, as if swallowing aspirins. Michael could tell species from their styles of flight (the twisting, turning flight of compact teal flocks; the low, single-file processions of common merganser, diving ducks with white bodies and slim red bills) and knew in just what sequence to expect them back each spring.

  ‘First up are Canada geese,’ he said. ‘Then the mallard and snow geese, bald eagles with them, and then a lot of the diving ducks, goldeneyes and mergansers, which are fish-eaters, not much good as table birds, and now we get into redheads, canvasbacks, red-tailed hawks are here too, and sparrowhawks, and ruddy ducks and teal, blue-winged first and green-winged later, and now the water’s opening up you’ll get the white pelicans, double-crested cormorants, great blue herons, cattle egrets, black-crowned night herons, killdeer, Franklin’s gulls, Forster’s terns and black terns, sandpipers, western phalaropes, pied-billed grebes and eared grebes and western grebes and then the songbirds start . . .’

  He paused, removed his glasses with his left hand, rubbed both eyes with his right, and blinked three times with considerable purpose.

  *

  MICHAEL INTRODUCED ME to Rollin. He was eighty-two years old, with soft white hair and a long white beard: he had the white head of a bald eagle. Like Michael, he wore steelframed glasses, but Rollin’s glasses had thick lenses in which his eyes floated like puffer fish behind aquarium glass. The glasses sat with a look of stolid permanence on his robust, beaky nose. He was fit; he had the energy of a man twenty years his junior. He wore hiking boots and the kind of multi-pocketed sleeveless vest favoured by anglers and professional photographers. He had driven from Iowa to see the eagles at Sand Lake.

  ‘Mike says you like to walk,’ said Rollin.

  ‘He’s right.’

  ‘He thought you might be interested in taking a walk. There’s a good number of eagles in the cottonwoods out past Houghton Dam. I saw them on my way in.’

  We started off up the track alongside the lake. We both had binoculars hanging round our necks, the binoculars knocking rhythmically against our chests as we walked, beating on our hearts like pacemakers. We walked with a crop of maize to our left, cattail and phragmites to our right. Beyond the rushes, on the far side of the lake, we could see a flock of snow geese, at least 30,000 birds. The calls of the geese telegraphed through the ice as if people were banging on it with hammers.

  ‘What got you interested in birds?’ I asked Rollin.

  ‘I’ve been lucky, I guess,’ he said. ‘I grew up in north-west Iowa, east of Sioux City about sixty miles. I did my schooling in Cherokee County, and between my junior and senior year in high school I went up to North Dakota for a year to live with my uncle and aunt. They were farmers. Raised wheat, flax, rye, oats. They were losing money. Drought was killing all the crops and it was mighty tough times in the Depression. It was in North Dakota I found my love for the out-of-doors. My parents were interested in wildlife, but no more than anyone else. My uncle knew a lot of the names and such, and I looked up a lot in books. I don’t know. It was me, see? It was something in me. I just had to know. I always had an appetite for knowledge. I just kept asking questions. In North Dakota I just fell in love with marshes and sloughs. I saw my first eagle in North Dakota. Caught my first trout in North Dakota. Shot my first duck in North Dakota. It was a spoonbill, of all things, but I didn’t know the difference. I was using a double-barrelled 12-gauge and like a dummy I pulled both triggers at the same time and got sat on my ass real fast. I hit the duck and found it later, but I didn’t think I’d hit it because the first thing I know I’m getting up out of the water. Got kicked over by the recoil, see? I wasn’t very big at the time.

  ‘When I was in high school I lived right by the Little Sioux River, and the Little Sioux’s a beautiful north-west Iowa stream. I went up and down that river an awful lot, fishing and camping. In high school I didn’t play football or basketball or baseball. I was uncoordinated and nothing worked right for me. But I always liked to shoot, see? I got to shooting on a big-bore rifle team, an adult team when I was in high school, and I got to be pretty good at it. I was an expert rifleman in .30 calibre, and in .45, and .22. I could do that, see? A lot of sports I couldn’t do because I had to wear glasses, but I liked to shoot, and that’s part of how I got to be an outdoorsman.

  ‘After the war I moved back to Iowa and got out-of-doors every minute that I could. I liked books like Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. I liked Zane Grey westerns. Do you know The Vanishing American? Man of the Forest? Lost Pueblo? Do you know The Light of Western Stars? I had a job with the postal service. I was a real letter-carrier for twenty-seven years. Sorted and delivered mail to three hundred and eighty families on a hundred-mile route, most of them farmers. Soon as the route was done I’d get outside. I classify myself as a short grass prairie kind of guy. I love the prairie. I have a philosophy that every one of us is on this earth for a reason. I try to share my love of the beauties of wildlife, how wildlife is part of us, because they demand the same things we do, and if they can’t make it, we sure as hell can’t either. I’m partial to birds. Eagles, hawks. Songbirds I like real well, but eagles I like best of all.’

  ‘Why eagles?’ I asked. We were walking side by side along the track at a good, even pace, binoculars knocking on our chests. Rollin walked with the rolling, side-to-side motion of a galleon, and his voice had the cheery, tuneful fluency of a sea shanty sung on board.

  ‘Eagles,’ Rollin said, ‘well, eagles are top of the line. King of the hill. Their eyesight is fantastic. They reckon their eyesight is two and a half times better than yours and mine. There’s a tremendous pecking order among eagles. You’ve got an immature bald eagle sitting on a tree branch, and along comes a mature bird who wants that perch – it’ll just bump it right off. Or if an immature’s eating a fish and a mature bird wants it, it’ll come straight in and knock it off, and there won’t be an argument about it. A bald eagle will usually perch on the highest branch it can, and if they find a cottonwood tree all the better. They want to look around. They like to know what’s going on. A hawk will quite often take a lower branch. An eagle isn’t afraid of any other bird. A lot of birds have to perch according to what they think is their fear level of being attacked, but a bald eagle has no fear of other birds.

  ‘Whenever I get the chance to see bald eagles, I take it. One winter I saw bald eagles on the Mississippi River, near Davenport, below the locks and dams. The river was frozen right up to the spillway. There wasn’t much open water. The eagles picked off fish that went through the lock, through the rollers. Fish got kind of stunned by the rollers, and eagles grabbed them while their heads were swimming. I’ve seen eagles in Manitoba, Missouri, Louisiana, Yuko
n Territory, Alaska. There’s a two-mile stretch of the Chilkat River in Alaska where it’s not unusual to see two and a half to three thousand eagles, drawn by the late salmon run. I’ve sat underneath trees where bald eagles were so unconcerned that I was there, they were preening themselves, not paying any attention to me.’

  We stopped. We could hear ducks chortling on the far side of the rushes. We raised our binoculars.

  ‘Scaup,’ I said, fancying myself an expert. ‘A couple of pairs.’

  Rollin raised no objection. A Canada goose honked in the cattail.

  ‘Those Canadas,’ said Rollin. ‘Those are proud birds. I like them.’

  We started walking again, heading on towards Houghton Dam.

  ‘What happened when you finished high school?’ I asked.

  ‘Well this was the height of the Depression,’ said Rollin. ‘There were no jobs. You did what you could. You did whatever you could find. Maybe you worked on a farm a few days, and you worked on a threshing crew. You just did whatever came. I worked in a grocery store, but I knew that couldn’t last because I wanted outdoors work. I sold advertising for the local paper. Then the war started up, and I entered the Navy as an aviation gunnery instructor. I guess they saw my background in newspaper work, because I got to work for two different station newspapers. One of them was at Monterey, California, and one was at Santa Rosa.

  ‘While I was at Santa Rosa we had a guy come from the South Pacific, a commander, a public relations man. He got word out to all the station papers that he would grant a freewheeling interview to anyone who came up to San Francisco. So the chaplain, who was my boss, said, “Do you want to go, Rollin?” and I said, “Yeah, I’d like to go.” They flew me up to San Francisco in a torpedo bomber, and we landed at Alameda Naval Air Station. I went across the bay, and up to the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel, and I was in on the interview. Only thing is, this public relations man turned out to be an asshole if ever there was one. He was a full commander, a bigshot from Minnesota, and he kept us standing in this anteroom for an hour while he made small talk with his orderly. Finally he came in. He never told us, “At ease.” The orderly had passed out sheets of paper with questions on them. “These are the questions,” he said, “which you may ask the commander.” Jesus! Oh, I never said a word. I never asked a question. There wasn’t anything there but what you couldn’t have taken out of the San Francisco Examiner that morning.

  ‘Well, I went back across the bay. It came time to fly back to Santa Rosa. The pilot said, “Do you want a little fun?” and I said, “Sure. What have you got in mind?” So he said, “We’ll fly under the Golden Gate Bridge!” Now, that was unknown of. If we got caught at it we’d get court-martialled for sure. Anyway, we decided to do it. We got back in the torpedo. I was in the gunner’s seat, behind the pilot. The plane was camouflage-painted. They’d have had to catch us dead on, because we flew close to the shore, and Christ, a little ways away you couldn’t even see us, let alone hear us. Joe, the pilot was, Joe something. I guess he’d always wanted to do it, and this was an ideal time to do it. There were very few planes in the air and it just looked all at once like this was the time we were going to do it. We took off and flew over the water towards the bridge. There’s two hundred and fifty feet of clearance. As I recall, there was a boat coming at us under the bridge, but not a battleship, and I doubt like hell they saw us, because we just blended in with the background, see? The bridge isn’t golden, it’s a kind of rusty, orangey red. Over to the left there were hills and on the right there were beaches, dunes, big surf. Then you’ve got the Presidio, and there were houses there, but you don’t look at the houses, you look at the ocean, and the city. So we flew closer and closer. And this Joe liked to say “Son of a gun!” all the time, and when we got to flying under the bridge he was screaming out “Son of a gun! Son of a gun!” like there was no tomorrow. I was just laughing. The ocean was so close you could hang your hand out the cockpit and skim it just like a bird. So we flew under, and that was kind of fun, see?’

  We were almost at Houghton Dam.

  ‘Last summer,’ Rollin continued, ‘I was in California, visiting relatives. My sister-in-law has a friend who works in tourism in San Francisco. I called her up and said, “Is there any way we could get to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge?” She said, “You know, that’s almost impossible, but I’ll see what can be done.” Then I didn’t hear a thing. And then a few days later she calls and says, “Call this number.” So I did, and it was the Transit Authority himself. I told him why I wanted to go to the top of the bridge, on account of my having gone underneath it illegally fifty years ago, and also I’d been to the top of the Straits of Mackinac Bridge, where Lake Michigan goes into Lake Huron. He thought a good long time and then said, “Well, normally I’d say no, but you’ve got a good story. We’ll let you go.” I went with a friend of mine. He’d been in the navy too, and he’d lost his wife a few months before. We drove down to San Francisco in the pickup, and we got to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. What a view we had! God, that was fantastic. That was something. When I got to the top, the bridge was swaying. That’s the way they’re built, to do that in the wind. And this bridge just talks all the time. It moans in the wind, and the wind blows a gale at the top. You have to hang on. You can’t get blown off, because the railings are high. You can see through the rigging, seven hundred and fifty feet down to the water. That was something. I won’t forget that.’

  We reached the dam at the north end of Sand Lake, and turned east towards Houghton. We walked without saying much for a while, following the road to the floodplain. A narrow causeway carried the road over the ice, floodwater frozen to left and right. Dead cottonwoods stood knee-deep in the ice, calcium-white where the bark had fallen away.

  ‘Look,’ Rollin said, stopping me with his right arm.

  Three bald eagles were standing on the ice. They stood absolutely still. We watched them through binoculars. I saw, close up, the white head, blackish body, heavy yellow bill; the yellow feet and ankles; the severe eyes.

  ‘Not those,’ Rollin whispered. ‘Look behind them.’

  I looked. Between fifteen and twenty bald eagles were perching in a dead cottonwood at the edge of the floodwater lake. The tree resembled a candelabra, the eagles’ white heads like flames on thick black candles. One eagle took flight from a limb of the tree. The branch juddered. The eagle fanned its white tail as it banked away from the cottonwood, gaining height. Further away, beyond the cottonwood, more eagles were gliding in circles, lifted on a thermal column: a kettle of twenty or thirty birds soaring without effort or fluster, in carousels, turning and turning on the updraft.

  ‘Isn’t that something?’ Rollin said quietly. ‘Aren’t those the grandest birds?’

  *

  THE CONTENTS OF MY BAGS began to colonize the white motel room. Bird books and papers piled up on the desk, among them a copy of The Snow Goose, with my grandmother’s initials pencilled inside the front cover, alongside a date: October, 1942. My father had found it among his books and left it on my bed in the dressing-room towards the end of my long stay at home. The red-tailed hawk’s feather that Eleanor had handed to me beneath the radio mast lay flat like a bookmark between the covers of The Snow Goose. My possessions were beginning to breach the anonymity of the white room. Books and papers on the desk, my clothes on the floor, the room becoming familiar in spite of its blankness. Standing in the corridor, holding my room key, I knew what to expect when I opened the door: the black television, the La-Z-Boy, the two glasses standing rims-down on the red tray. I knew where to feel for a switch on the neck of the bedside lamp, as a nurse knows where to feel for a pulse. I could find my way around the room in the dark.

  Each morning I drove the Topaz north to Sand Lake. I walked and watched birds, sometimes with Michael or Rollin for company. But at night, in the motel, I became anxious. I’d been away for a month now, chasing geese. There were people I missed. I felt the allure of familiar scenes, the pendulum of my
impulses swinging back again, swinging back from what was new and undiscovered towards all that was known, named, remembered, understood. I was lonely in the white room. For the first time I felt frustrated by the journey to which I’d committed myself. On maps, the flight of snow geese from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson Bay and Baffin Island was a flawless, unbroken arc, the curve of time from one season to another. But the reality was different – not a smooth, continuous passage from here to there, but a stop-start, stage-by-stage edging towards the north, with geese flying from one resting area to the next, proceeding only as far as the weather would allow. I had attached myself to the birds. I couldn’t move on until the birds moved on, and the birds couldn’t move on without the spring.

  One night, I took the Gideon bible from the bedside table and leaned back in the La-Z-Boy. Browsing aimlessly, I found that time after time the bible fell open at the same place, in Psalms. I looked closely. Someone had torn out a page. Page 617–618 was missing. Psalm 23 was missing. I wondered who had torn the page from the Gideon bible. The most famous of the psalms: ‘The Lord is my shepherd: therefore can I lack nothing.’ What in those verses had been so important to a previous occupant of this square white room? Or had someone, when using the telephone, simply reached out for any piece of paper on which he or she could scrawl a message? The missing page struck me with particular force, because only a few months before, I had copied the last verse of the psalm into a notebook: ‘But thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.’ It had occurred to me how often the authors of scripture depict God as a house or shelter in which one might dwell, as if faith were itself a home, affording all the protection, comfort, steadiness and sense of belonging that home implies – as if the need for God were homesickness in paraphrase.