I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird

by Susan Cerulean

  So I began: watching birds at Bald Point, swimming in the Ochlockonee River, kayaking on Buckhorn Creek, taking notes, and listening for direction. On a day in November, I drove to the state park on St. George Island. The parking lots and picnic pavilions were empty, and the Gulf horizon spread vast. I walked and walked, losing my thoughts in the motion of the green bodies of the waves. They’d rush toward shore, iced with foam, and then drown again in the gem-clear Gulf. The reliable roar of the surf calmed my brain, and I lost myself in the largeness.

  The tide was low when I arrived. Ghost crabs constructed their kingdoms on the expansive shingle of the shore. Over the course of hours, the tide rose, corseting all of us species—shorebirds, crab, and human—against the grasses and oats growing on the dunes. The day’s tidal range reminded me of the larger geological rhythms of the planet and how the seas were rising and would continue to do so. I knew there was nothing more important to address. I didn’t know exactly what my next project would be, but I knew I would grow into it, walking alone in wild places.

  PART II

  I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird

  The dream I had was this:

  tide to dune, I walked beside the sea where

  crowds spread blankets and chairs

  played with their dogs and their children

  built sandcastles.

  Improbably, I saw

  ancient claimants of the shore

  dart among them

  seeking space

  a snowy plover and its toothpick-legged chick.

  no one saw.

  In the dream, I was instructed:

  Don’t take your eyes off that chick-child and parent!

  Care for them! Protect them!

  But how?

  How would I keep them safe?

  Far away on a deserted shore

  enormous flocks of snowy plovers thrived

  I wanted my job to be steward of that sturdy congregation.

  more worthy, I thought

  and more possible.

  but

  I have been assigned the single bird

  CHAPTER 8

  A Contract for Home

  Months passed, and then several years. Life held steady, or so it seemed.

  And then, on a Valentine’s Day, Mary Jane died of a massive stroke. Just like that, she was gone. Abruptly, unexpectedly, forever. Even as we grieved, we worried about caring for our dad. Someone needed to assume his wife’s role as advocate for our father. I knew I was the one. My sister Bobbie would help me, and it would be a chance for my brother, Doug, and me to spend more time together.

  “If you will just drive Dad down here to Florida, Jeff and I will care for him,” I had said to my brother at the funeral.

  “You’ve got a deal,” said Doug, knowing his was the easy end of the bargain.

  On a late-spring evening, I waited at the edge of St. Augustine Road, pacing circles around a sign that read “The Landing.” It was green-dark dusk, late spring in north Florida. Headlights of passing cars flicked over newborn leaves of oak and maple and the faces of me and my husband, Jeff. We waited. I hoped my brother and my dad would arrive before dark, and when they did, I wanted them to see us standing by the road, welcoming them home.

  Half a dozen slash pines held up the sky between the Landing and apartments next door. Perhaps they had been planted in a block once upon a time, because they didn’t have the widespread arms of a naturally forested space. Still, they hosted a few birds, and I would come to know their profiles well over the next four years. A great crested flycatcher shrieked, filling an empty space between those partial trees.

  A pair of cardinals whispered in the dusk, and a Carolina wren. I paced around the sign, around Jeff, understanding that I stood between my old life as a cared-for daughter and my new role as daughter-protector. Taking care of my father seemed like a constructive thing to do, a reasonable contribution to our family, a bow to the man who had raised me up. My desire to care for him came from some instinctual place in my body, not from reason or duty alone. It was the right thing to do. Bobbie had done her share and would continue to help me. My brother wasn’t interested. Our youngest sister had a big enough heart but even larger struggles of her own. And I felt that I could prove Dad was capable of more than he had been allowed under Mary Jane’s watch. Maybe I thought that with enough resources and kindness, I could raise him up from Alzheimer’s as I had raised my son from a baby to a man. But this was a dementia of my own, to think that I could change the course of this disease.

  And I had yet to answer the question: how does the tending of one dying old man—his protracted dying—stack up against the urgencies of the world? Perhaps I’d learn something by trying to fix or mend what is close at hand, those to whom I was most closely related and deeply loved. Maybe, I thought, through this impossible task, I would learn the language of tending the world.

  So here was the moment before the moment when my father became mine to care for. Like a gasp, a quick in breath, or the nearly invisible pause when the tide turns, like that. In the trajectory of a life lived together—parent and child—this was the moment when our lifelong roles would reverse. Everything I would think and do for him from now on would matter in a way it never had before. Before, I had been one of three daughters and a son, and something of a consultant for our dad and his wife. Now I’d be in charge of everything. Or so it felt. I was about to learn how to be with my father’s dementia, which would have only one possible outcome, and at the same time, continue to search for a path out of the cultural dementia afflicting the Earth.

  A month earlier I’d sat across a wide polished desk from Ashley, the manager of this assisted living facility. A sign on the wall of her office spelled out the facility’s credo: “The Landing is designed to give peace of mind. We offer a relaxed, non-institutional environment, and an independent lifestyle filled with dignity and respect.”

  “My dad is so dear, a really special guy.” I slid a list of medical disclosures across her desk; I had to be honest. The young woman tucked a strand of pale blond hair behind her ear while I composed myself. I desperately hoped the Landing would work out for my father. Ashley seemed unsurprised at the intensity of my pitch. “But he does have some physical limitations,” I added.

  I wanted the job of caring for him, I had asked for it, but suddenly, being responsible for everything in my father’s new life worried me. At the beginning of Dad’s illness, a good friend had recommended a caregiver’s guide that laid out the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in stages. Back then, in the beginning, I thought this was a disease with a timeline, that we could pace ourselves. But in New Jersey, for the past three years, Dad had been housed in a lockdown memory care unit. I felt he was capable of functioning at a higher level than he’d been allowed. If only I could find the right place, together we could prove it.

  Ashley’s perfect china doll features gave away nothing as she paged through the documents I’d brought. She looked up from the paper, locked eyes with me. “We would be happy to welcome your father into our Landing family.” The certainty in her voice was steel.

  “You mean, you will keep him . . . until the end?” I asked. “To the very end of his life? Before you’ve even met him?”

  “The only way we will break this contract with you, once signed, is if your dad turns out violent,” said Ashley. “Or if he wanders out of our facility.” I wanted to kiss her hands. Dad wasn’t physically capable of walking—he wouldn’t wander. I prayed that we could temper the impatience he sometimes directed at the help in his New Jersey facilities.

  A tear of relief dropped on the paper and blurred the ink as I inscribed my name and reserved the only unoccupied room at the Landing. Its availability meant someone else had just died and reminded me that anyone moving in would eventually pass as well. But it wasn’t the thought of my father’s mortality that summoned my emotions to the surface. It was Ashley’s assurance that she could contain the rest of my dad’s life
within a safe, nurturing structure. That’s all I wanted: a place close to my own home that could hold his stiffening body, soft heart, and diminished brain. Hopefully, Jeff and I could do the rest.

  Ashley led me forty footsteps down a broad carpeted hall to my father’s new quarters. A smooth wooden handrail ran the length of the corridor, paralleling a solid green line painted on the wall, all designed to lead aged eyes and bodies forward. Dad’s room was second to last, on the left.

  I peered into open doorways as we passed. Some of the residents had fashioned living spaces that reflected their lives and their tastes. Several had matched their decor to the facility’s public rooms. But others had been too exhausted and worn or simply had different priorities than to create one last true home in these single rooms. That is what I wanted to do for my dad.

  Through his window-to-be, I looked into a verdant patch of magnolia and pine and sweetgum. On account of all those trees, I thought we could sit in here as long as we had to, that the small forest would pull us out of the space of the room if we got to feeling trapped indoors. In April, when Dad arrived, and even into May, I knew I’d prop those windows wide. He’d have the voices of the cardinals and the nighttime frogs as companions in his living space.

  As I pulled away from the Landing, contract in hand, I thought about how a home holds you in more ways than simply by walls and rooms and roof and windows. I marveled at the brilliant marketing strategy of Dad’s new residence: Come home to family. Home is where you are welcome, always. Home is where your presence is integral. Not just your belongings, and your arrangement of dishes on shelves, more than that. Even the breath you exhale when you sleep matters. This facility seemed to promise all that, and more: A warm fireplace. Plenty of natural light from our many windows. Splendidly landscaped courtyard.

  Jeff and I had thought through the floor plan of our own tiny house over and over again, looking for ways it might absorb both Dad’s needs and ours. What worried us was that with the enforced helplessness of dementia, all the ways he once entertained his mind—reading, writing, travel, and frequent contact with many lifelong friends—those things were beyond his reach. That left only the present empty moment, and the next, and the next. That meant staring down a long, slow decline.

  If we took him into our home, the chaos taking over his brain and his increasing physical and emotional needs would overwhelm us, just as we were adjusting to the last of our children leaving for college. Finding a place for him at the Landing countered some of the shame I felt, that I could not—or would not—care for Dad in our little house.

  Was I signing a contract for family, as the literature claimed? I didn’t think so, not really. You cannot contract for love. There’s no amount of money you can pay to replace a lifetime of shared memory or history. You cannot purchase sisters or brothers or children. But if we were lucky, Dad might get some of that, anyway, and it wouldn’t be because of the papers I’d just signed. I hoped the Landing would provide him a good enough approximation of home and that frequent visits from me and Jeff would fill in the gaps. I was counting on blond, tough Ashley to make Dad’s life go right.

  My father’s parents lived their last years in a retirement home in Bradenton, in an unpretentious, three-story building built of brick. With roomy apartments and decent food, it was made purposefully gracious by its owners, the Presbyterian Church. It could have been apartment living except for the many dozens of antique wooden dressers, wardrobes, sideboards, grandfather clocks, and cedar chests that lined the halls and sitting areas, even the brief wall space between the elevators’ doors. The furniture pieces must have been too cumbersome for families to ship back to the North or Midwest after their old relatives died, or maybe there was no one left to claim them. They resembled the cast-off exoskeletons of very large beetles. Yet each piece was so heavy and so solid that the management couldn’t wrangle them out on the curb. Occasionally there’d be a yard sale and at one of those I bought a graceful gooseneck rocking chair for only twenty-five dollars. I was in graduate school then, and I couldn’t afford to have it reupholstered, but I knew someday I would. I sat every night in that chair with a small glass of wine and a journal, beginning finally in my late twenties to rock and soothe and investigate my own soul, to decipher who I was alone, undefined by a partner. That rocker was a precious gift from an elder, even though we had never met.

  I determined that Dad’s room at the Landing would be a microcosm of all the homes I’d ever known him to inhabit. We winnowed the most precious of his possessions to fit his new space. On his walls, my sister and my friends and I hung his blacksmith painting; a snapshot of a vacation cottage rental we had visited so often as a young family; a photo of his barbershop chorus; a replica of an American Indian peace pipe he’d bought somewhere on his travels out West. I placed framed photographs of Mary Jane and his mother on the dresser and fashioned a mosaic of other family photographs next to his bed, to remind him of who he was, and to make sure the staff knew we were watching.

  About this time, I began to watch over wild birds on coastal islands to the south, as a volunteer. Seabirds and shorebirds nest alone or in colonies, depending on their species, in shallow scrapes. Sandy open beaches, between the high tide line and dune grasses, are their homes, the only places they can nest and continue their kind. My first assignment was on a bit of sand only a few acres in size, a spoil island south of the Apalachicola bridge. There, I was to keep track of nesting activity by least terns, black skimmers, certain small plovers, or American oystercatchers.

  Megan Lamb, my contact at the Apalachicola National Estuarine Research Reserve, had told me that this little island, unnatural as it was, had historically hosted a large congregation of brown pelicans, seven hundred nesting pairs. But after a large quantity of spoil was dredged from the river channel and heaped onto the island one winter, the pelicans abandoned the site and never returned. Another year, she told me, more than two hundred least terns and a handful of gull-billed terns nested on the fresh spoil. Megan couldn’t say whether pelicans would return, or least terns—or neither. It could be a very exciting—or very boring—site to survey and protect, she said.

  On my first trip to the island, before my kayak nudged against the hip of the sand, I looked first to see if any boaters might be trespassing. None today; that was good. What about aerial predators—fish crows, laughing gulls, and ospreys, the last of the winter eagles? An osprey perched on a post drying its wings, and two fish crows stood on the wrack line of the tide. In my new role as steward, I thought of those birds as thugs. All three startled away as I approached.

  I soon learned why no other birders wanted to survey my new territory. Neither its shape, its smell, nor its vegetative composition appealed to the eye—or the nose. Along the shoreline, my feet sank into oozing mud where hard sand should be packed, were this a true beach. Still, the spoil island worked for some beach-nesting shorebirds because it was inaccessible to coyotes, cats, and raccoons and was unappealing to most humans.

  It was so very hot. I rolled up the legs of my pants and slowly circled the island, with my spotting scope over my shoulder and my binoculars around my neck, keeping count of all the birds I saw. At either end of the land, south and north, wind drove shallow water against the sand, fussing the wavelets into white-tipped fringe. Birds stood about in good numbers, bathing and cooling their bodies. I felt at home when I saw the single white pelican among the flocks, and the broken-winged laughing gull. I knew them among the crowds of terns and sandpipers, from earlier visits to the site. Caspian, royal, and sandwich terns stood belly deep at the island’s tips, flapping their wings and shunting water over their backs. It appeared as if the ends of the islands were trying to take flight or lift into the air, or were winged, with all those white and silver feathers in motion. But none of those species nested on the island; they only used it as a place for respite and feeding.

  Shy and boldly patterned, American oystercatchers live and nest only on beaches and sandbars. Pho
to by David Moynahan.

  How would I find the solitary nests of the oystercatchers? They don’t raise their young in colonies as least terns and brown pelicans do, so their scrapes in the sand are much harder to find.

  The first clue was a turkey vulture skimming the sand, tilting on the heat of the barest updraft. Right on its tail, three American oystercatchers piped loudly, physically pushing the vulture out of the island’s airspace. I’d never seen oystercatchers on the offense before, so I guessed there were chicks or eggs close by.

  I crouched low and crept up the mound in the center of the island, to the edge of the topmost plateau. Through the white sand’s shimmer, I spotted a pair of my birds, only seconds after they saw me. They scrambled to their feet, alert and worried. I knew that before I could settle my eye on the nest site, the birds would distract me away with quick wing beats. Before I even could guess where their treasure lay, the movement of their bodies would draw my eye to the left, tricking me from the nest. I withdrew, marking in my mind a post I might use to locate it with my optics. After I’d backed around the mound to a distance more acceptable to the parents, I set up my scope: Yes! Three eggs in the sand.

  On a berm at the southern edge of the island, I noted another pair of extremely wary adult oystercatchers, and my eye began to perceive the birds’ defensive ploys. They had slipped down across the broad spoil shoulder to watch me and wait out my intentions.

  Their nest cradled only a single mottled egg. I squatted on the sand to wonder over it, but I didn’t allow myself to touch the egg. No one was watching (no person, I mean), and I could have. Still, I curbed my reach, never even extended my arm. I think my desire to touch was connected to my human evolution, back to a time when eggs answered the need for protein, and when the practice of hunting birds’ nests was solely linked to food.