The Snow Geese Read online

  The discovery of the sun compass was a first step towards answering Kramer’s question: how do birds find their way? But many birds, including starlings, are able to migrate on cloudy days when the sun is hidden, and many birds migrate at night. The sun on its own was not enough. Birds must possess some other means of orientation.

  In the terminal at Oklahoma City the Greyhound slogan – Where Can We Take You? – was printed on banners hanging above the screwed-down seats, the sprinting greyhound trademark a cartoon of speed, efficiency and kinetic grace. Coaches pulled up outside, their front-ends sinking on hydraulic mechanisms to the kerb, like camels kneeling. It was cold now: in just a few hours we had outstripped the spring. The terminal was another limbo, an in-between place, a corral for itinerants, with nothing to mark it out as here, not there. Travellers attended luggage heaps or loitered by a snack bar where helical ribbons of yellow Victor flycatcher hung from the ceiling and an old fan on a white stand turned from side to side as if watching a very slow game of tennis, or they leaned over the lights and bubbling electronic music of Addams Family pinball, or gazed into video games, piloting Spitfire, Zero and Shinden fighter planes through the puffs of digital flak and pixellated gunfire streams of Strikers 1945, and working the wheel and pedals of Cruisin’ USA, accelerating through redwood forests, across piñon-dotted Nevada deserts, over the Golden Gate Bridge, along the Florida Keys, up scenic Rocky Mountain passes and down broad Manhattan avenues, skipping from state to state, a primer of America flashing in the corner by the vending machines.

  People milled about, waiting to board buses or greet other people. Two women in their sixties, sisters, wearing long pleated skirts and hand-knitted cardigans, with salt-and-pepper hair and spectacles hanging from their necks on colourful braided strings, celebrated their reunion in the temperature-controlled terminal by placing their hands on each other’s shoulders and delivering prim, delicate kisses to both cheeks like champagne glasses clinked together in a toast. A boy gazed up at a wall of gunmetal luggage lockers in three sizes, corresponding to handbags, overnight bags and suitcases, and then went right along the bottom row, trying the doors of the largest lockers. At last, one opened: a red-tagged key was still inserted above the coin slot. The boy looked around. He was planning something and didn’t want to be observed. He climbed into the empty locker and pulled the door shut behind him. A minute or two later, a man approached the wall of lockers. He was in his late thirties, with a pale face and black hair so neatly parted the division resembled a chalked line. He wore a blue suit, a red-striped shirt open at the neck, a white T-shirt underneath; he carried a brown leather suitcase. He put the case down and scanned the rows of lockers. He noticed the key with the red tag. He opened the locker. The boy was waiting inside, on all fours, and as soon as the door opened he stretched his head out, a creature emerging from its den, beaming up at the man in the blue suit, who took a step back, bewildered but not alarmed, as though this apparition were merely a trick of his fatigue, the kind of thing you should expect in the fooling of these distances.

  The bus for Kansas City was announced. The white-haired lady in the denim shirt decorated with the moon bagged the front seat. I sat behind her. The coach filled up: a man in torn jeans carrying a guitar, with the sections of a fishing-rod taped to its neck, the reel resting on the strings above the sound-hole; a girl hugging a lever-arch college file against her chest; two Amish elders dressed in black and white, with long grey beards and the stern countenances of patriarchs; a man in a dark grey overcoat holding a new cardboard box marked ‘Stetson’ on all sides: a promise of pure hat. Just before we were due to depart, a woman climbed the stairs and stood in the aisle, scanning the seats for vacancies. She was Eleanor’s age, with a thick, upswept crown of silver-grey hair, a black canvas tote bag hanging from one shoulder. She was ablaze with primary colours, dressed in a yellow polo-neck, faded blue jeans, white socks in blue leather sandals, large plastic-rimmed spectacles, and a bright red sleeveless fleece vest pinned with a badge that said, Women Are Not Born Republican, Democrat or Yesterday. She took two steps forwards, paused, looked the coach up and down, then plumped for the seat next to mine, setting the tote bag on the floor between her blue sandals.

  ‘My name is Jean,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  Our driver was short, with thin, mousy hair, and heavily built, his grey shirt bulging like a laundry bag. He spoke into a microphone as the coach drew out of Oklahoma City, warning all passengers that the consumption of tobacco, alcohol and other intoxicants would not be tolerated.

  ‘Anyone who wishes to make use of personal stereo machines,’ he continued, ‘I’d ask you to please first hold the headphones out at arm’s length, or as high as you can above your head, and if you can hear a noise then spare a thought that your neighbour will hear it also. And for anyone taking care of children on board, keep them in their seats now, because if I have to swerve or stop all of a sudden that little boy or girl is sure going to fly.’

  Late afternoon. The Greyhound continued on Interstate 35, crossing from Oklahoma into Kansas. Trees, signs and telegraph poles spun past; we pushed north on the humdrum basis of vibration and engine hum. I kept looking out for snow geese. I kept thinking of the birds from Eagle Lake, imagining that they were flying overhead, thinking that if only I could lean from the window and get a clear view upwards I would see them. Jean’s hands were resting on her thighs. She was tanned; the pink frames of her glasses had miniature rococo scrolls at their corners; now and again she looked anxiously behind her, down the length of the bus, as if expecting to see somebody she knew. She had a brightly-painted watch with Adam and Eve represented on the strap’s two sections, a large red love heart behind the hands, and smaller hearts at three, six, nine and twelve o’clock.

  ‘Have you come a long way?’ she asked.

  ‘From Austin.’

  The seats weren’t spacious. Strangers talking to each other for the first time do not normally hold their heads so close together, and I wasn’t sure if I should turn to my left in order to look at Jean, or look straight ahead, or continue gazing from the window as our conversation proceeded. We both spoke quietly, almost in whispers, as if to keep what we said confined to the immediate, enclosed space of the double seat. Although there was no screen between us, and no penance to be done when business was concluded, our conversation bore a trace of the hushed, boxed-in disclosures of confessionals.

  ‘How far are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘Minneapolis. You?’

  ‘Minneapolis, too. Then Fargo.’

  ‘Are you visiting relatives? My sister’s in the hospital in Minneapolis.’

  ‘I’m going to look for birds.’

  ‘Which birds?’

  ‘Snow geese.’

  ‘That’s interesting. I don’t know much about those. We live in the city.’

  She lived in Oklahoma City but had grown up in New Orleans. The sky was darkening, restoring powers of reflection to the window glass, the sun low on the far side of the Great Plains. The Greyhound was still heading due north, and sometimes, while Jean and I were talking, I savoured the clarity of this direction, as if Interstate 35 were a line to which migrating birds could cleave as they travelled from wintering to breeding grounds.

  A sun compass on its own was not enough: birds had to possess some other means of finding their way. The idea that organisms might use the Earth’s magnetic field for orientation was first proposed in the nineteenth century but not taken seriously by ornithologists until the 1960s. Magnetic field lines leave the Earth at the south magnetic pole and enter it again at the north magnetic pole. In between, these lines form varying angles of inclination with the horizontal: ninety degrees at the poles, zero degrees at the equator, changing systematically as they span the globe. The magnetic field provides a gradient map which could, in theory, be a source of reference for migratory birds.

  Wolfgang and Roswitha Wiltschko kept more than 200 European robins i
n octagonal wood and plastic test cages from which all visual clues were excluded. Each cage contained eight perches, one for each side of the cage, and each perch was connected to a microswitch that produced a signal when the bird hopped on it. Robins are partial migrants: some migrate to Mediterranean and North African winter grounds, while others are European residents all year long.

  The Wiltschkos screened off the Earth’s magnetic field with a steel vault and recreated it artificially by means of wire coils carrying electric currents, known as Helmholtz coils. In the spring, their robins began to display Zugunruhe: whirring their wings, hopping, flitting from floor to perch. The microswitches recorded the birds’ directional tendencies: the robins were trying to fly north. When the direction of the experimental magnetic field was shifted, the robins changed direction accordingly. Even when magnetic north was shifted to geographic south, the robins followed suit, flying directly away from their appropriate destinations.

  ‘The direction the birds take for “north”,’ the Wiltschkos concluded, ‘does not depend on the polarity of the magnetic field.’ Their robins seemed to be referring instead to the inclination angles of the field lines. In the spring, robins flew in whichever direction the inclinations became steeper, because this meant they were flying towards the pole. In the autumn, they flew in whichever direction the inclinations flattened out, because this meant they were flying towards the equator. The polarity of the Earth’s magnetic field has reversed thirty times over the past 5 million years: the Wiltschkos noted that a compass which depended on inclination angles rather than polarity would not be affected by such switches.

  ‘We lived on Music Street,’ Jean confided, her voice languid with southern twang, ‘in Gentilly, in New Orleans, me and my brother and sister, in a cramped little house with a backyard right up next to a railroad. The boxcars went clang-clang, and we rushed to the wall, and conductors smoking cigarettes waved at us from their cabooses. There was a washing-line in the yard and my mother hung everything on it – whites, delicates, you name it – and everything got covered in soot from the trains, all grimed up with coaldirt. My father left the house at two or three every morning to deliver milk for Mueller’s Dairy in Elysian Fields, up and down Franklin Avenue, and from one o’clock to nine o’clock at night he drove a public bus. The milk truck had a freezer box on the back, and once, when we played hide and seek, I locked myself in it.’

  ‘Did anyone find you?’

  ‘No. When I felt the engine starting I banged on that door for all I was worth. I nearly got delivered to Elysian Fields! We played hide and seek a lot, and there was a craze for hula hoop. I loved hula hoop. Every kid in the neighbourhood loved hula hoop. We had our own hula hoop club. Hoops were fifty cents each at McCoy’s dime store. We were quite boastful when we got a different colour – yellow, green, blue, you name it. Our dream was to acquire a hoop for every colour of the rainbow. We had small hoops to swirl on our arms at the same time as the big hoops. With a hula hoop, you don’t circle the hips. It’s a forward and back movement; it’s getting a rhythm, and once you’ve got a rhythm, you hit it forward and back.’ Jean was moving in her seat beside me, raising her arms, turning her shoulders from one side to the other, gyrating and shuffling, her own younger self roused inside her.

  ‘Not bad!’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I was good!’ Jean said, laughing. ‘And you know what I was good at too?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tennis.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, yes. My passion was tennis. We had a public tennis court on St Roch Avenue, in St James’s Park. There was a baseball field, six swings, a slide and a public tennis court. The New Orleans Recreation Department sent a tennis pro around the neighbourhoods. They held raffles, tennis raffles. Tickets cost a quarter. The prize was you could win a racquet. I pleaded with my mother in the kitchen: “Can I have a quarter for the tennis raffle? Can I have a quarter for the tennis raffle?” I went on and on and in the end she said, “All right. I’ll give you twenty-five cents. I’ll give you a quarter for the tennis raffle.” But there was a condition attached. Tickets were a letter of the alphabet and then a number from one to ten, and my mother said she’d only give me the quarter if I bought ticket J1, because that was my initial, J for Jean, and she thought that was going to be the lucky ticket. So I got it, I got J1, and they pulled J1 out of the hat, which is how I got my first ever tennis racquet.’

  ‘You were destined to play tennis.’

  ‘Exactly. I played tennis whenever I could. I loved it. But we were having a little trouble at home. After school my father locked me in my room. I heard him yelling at my mother and then he started to hit my mother and yell at her more and more. So I went to live with my sister in a boarding house. We had this funny old landlady with I don’t know how many cats. I lived there until I finished high school. We had very little money. My sister washed hair to keep our heads above water. At the grocery store cans of vegetables were seven for a dollar, so each week we saved a dollar and ate one can of vegetables every day of the week.’

  ‘What happened when you finished high school?’

  ‘I’m going to tell you. I went to the convent. Not in New Orleans, but in St Louis. I became a sister. Something in me was saying, “The thing for you to do is be a sister.” Recently, a woman who was a baton-twirler at the University of Texas asked me, “Aren’t you embarrassed that you were a nun?” and I said, “Aren’t you embarrassed that you spent all that time throwing a stick in the air?” I wasn’t embarrassed. I knew it was something I had to do. I was clothed, fed and educated; I had friends; I got to help people. We spent a significant part of each day in silence and I believe that silence healed me. I learned discipline. We were taught to feel ourselves unworthy. We prostrated ourselves on the ground. If you broke something, there was a punishment. We had to lie flat on the ground with our arms extended like this and say Hail Marys for close to ever. We had to sleep with whatever we broke, just so we never forgot it. People were sleeping with fans, bowls, pots, plates, cups, you name it. Once I broke a statue of St Joseph. This statue was Mother Superior’s favourite. It came from France. I had to sleep with the statue of St Joseph and a lot of people said I was lucky just to have a man in my bed.’

  We heard the indicator clicking; the driver manhandled the wide steering-wheel; the Greyhound turned off the Interstate. I’d got used to the bus making these stops, pausing at gas courts for short breaks between terminals. Passengers disembarked, lit cigarettes, sought restrooms, performed simple stretches, and made calls in hooded telephone booths, saying, ‘Did you feed the fish?’ or, ‘See you tomorrow, Mushroom,’ or, ‘Don’t ask me what I was doing, Marla! How should I know what I was doing?’ Exhausted, far from home, we roamed the store aisles, fluorescent lights glaring on washed white-tile floors, the outdoor smells of exhaust fumes and gasoline mingling with the aromas of stale coffee, hot dogs, microwave burritos and drooling yellow cheese sauce squelched on to card boats of Gehl’s tortilla chips. On the Greyhound you had only to gaze from the window and daydream, but now you had to reckon with the siren-song of brand names in brimming racks – Chex, Dots, Runts, Twizzlers, Munchos, Rain-Blos, Lorna Doones – and weigh the merits of Dakota Kid sunflower seeds, Chupa Chups lollipops, Jack Link’s Kippered Beefsteak Jerky, forty-four-ounce pails of Barq’s ‘Since 1898’ Root Beer, and powdered, chocolate-dipped and honey-dipped donuts, French Twirl Donuts, Mickey Egg Fluff Donuts, Mrs Freshly’s Creme Filled Gold Fingers, and Flaas Raspberry Bismarks. There were refrigerated cabinets stocked with sodas, iced teas, spring waters, juices and flavoured milks, and sometimes there were elaborate pipe displays featuring Irvin S. Cobb’s Corn Cobb pipes and ‘pre-smoked’ Dr Grabow filter pipes – the Riviera, Duke, Royal Duke, Omega and Savoy – made from imported briar, with standard bits and military bits; and Bryn Mawr Ream-N-Klean bristle pipe cleaners; and pouches of Black Cavendish, Gold Burley and Borkum Riff ‘without a bite’ tobaccos. We moved like sleepwalkers through this
trove of nouns, drifting one by one back to the Americruiser, the door sighing shut when a complement was counted.

  Jean and I settled down again in our seats towards the front of the coach on the right-hand side, the hands on her watch sweeping through the hearts. The Greyhound returned to the interstate, continuing north and north-east towards Kansas City. The driver spoke into his microphone.

  ‘Your attention please,’ he said. ‘Now, I know you’re going to think I’m going bald, but I found a hairpiece that belongs to one of you. I understand that you may be embarrassed to come up here and claim it, so I’m going to leave it at the front here and you can just wander up and claim it when we make the next stop and you get off the bus to smoke a cigarette or what have you. That’s the end of my announcement. Thank you for your attention.’

  We watched him lob the hairpiece at the windscreen. It slid down the glass and came to rest on the dashboard ledge, a curling, glamorous, brunette wig, tight-fitting, like a swimming-cap. It was dark now.

  ‘Did you wear a habit?’ I asked Jean.

  ‘Oh yes. I wore a full white habit, starched and crisp. White because I was a novice. Black shoes, stockings, garter belt, gabardine petticoat, a white linen wimple covering my hair and both sides of my face, and a loose white scapular on my shoulders, hanging right down to my black shoes. What a business that was!’

  ‘What about your tennis?’

  ‘Oh, we had a court. There was a convent court. I played all the time. The tennis court was about the only place I felt at home. I remember one Sunday afternoon four tennis pros came to play a doubles game on our court. Every Sunday afternoon we’d have some kind of entertainment – someone would visit the convent to give a talk, or there’d be an activity of some sort or another. When I heard that these four tennis pros were going to visit I asked Mother Superior if there was any way I could get to hit some balls with them. That was so exciting to me, just the idea of playing with actual professional tennis players – you didn’t get a chance like that every day of the week, and all I wanted to do was knock up for a few minutes, maybe have a game or two just for the experience of it. Anyway, Mother Superior looked at me for a while. She didn’t say anything. I could see the wrath of God in her face and I thought that she was about to explode. She didn’t say a word, she just stared at me, and I knew she was doing it to make me feel small. I started to apologize, but still she didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to do. I looked around the room. I looked at my shoes. And then here it comes, oh it was the wrath of God, this terrible long lecture on my lack of humility and modesty and my arrogance. I was mortified. I felt truly shamed.’