Then the second part of what Risa said finally managed to register in my brain. “Wait, what? Mess with people’s pictures? What the hell does that mean?” I said.
Risa raised her eyebrows. “You know what I’m talking about.” She didn’t sound convinced.
“Um, no I don’t. Of anybody, I would think you might know something about messing with people’s pictures.”
“Why would I…”
“Birdscouts are here for the first tour of the day. Laurel, you are up,” Jerry called from the Nature Center doorway.
Risa and I stared at each other for a second. I sighed and turned away toward my young birders. I didn’t know what Risa was talking about, but I decided it wasn’t my problem at the moment.
Karen, Fred, and their group stood poised at the edge of pond boardwalk. “What took you so long?” she said.
“Karen, I’m a full minute early,” I said.
“Early bird. Worms. You know the deal.”
The Birdscout moms chuckled.
“Follow me,” I said. At the first outlook, we stopped. “Okay, so here’s the deal,” I said. “The Western and Central PA bird count is in two weeks, starting on June 21, and I want Shunksville well represented, you understand?” I said.
Little heads nodded around me.
“What’s a bird count?” one kid asked.
“Shut up, Sidney,” said another little girl.
“Everyone knows what a bird count is,” said another.
“Now, Birdscouts! We do not shame people for asking perfectly respectable questions.”
“I’m new.” Sidney sniffed. “And I lived in Pittsburgh. All I ever saw was pigeons.”
I really wanted to let him know that there were probably at least fifteen species in the city that you could see on any given day if you really wanted to, but the poor kid didn’t know that.
“Don’t you worry, my friend. First, I would be remiss if I did not mention the Great Backyard Bird Count in February, created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society.” I bowed my head and placed my hand reverently over my heart. The GBBC had its own photo contest and was the next nut I intended to crack, after I achieved Fauna domination. “But this one is just for us here in this part of the state, for fun. So many birds come back here in the warm months. We want to emphasize the copiousness and dissemination of our avian associates.”
“What?” said Sidney.
“We count how many birds we see for at least fifteen minutes. You can do it one day, or you can do it on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday,” I said. “The Nature Center will be running bird counting groups in two weeks. You record how many of each type of bird that you see.”
“But why do we do it?” asked another kid.
“Because ornithologists, or bird scientists, can learn a lot if they get information about where birds are hanging out. Bird populations don’t stay the same; they are always changing.” My voice rose dramatically. It was hard not to lose my shit entirely when talking about sexy, sexy bird counts. “And since there are so many of them absolutely everywhere, no one ornithologist or even group of ornithologists can gather data in a couple of days to analyze it. So the science people and even regular people who love birds record what they see and share it on the same day!”
Bird counts have also led to my best Fauna pictures in past years, but I left that part out.
“Cool!” said Sidney.
“Yay!” said Karen.
“I want to win the bird count!” said another kid.
“Well, it’s not a competition,” I said. That was totally a lie. In my head, I always wanted Shunksville to have the most birds of anywhere. The Eastern PA summer bird count wasn’t until July, because Philly had to be a dick about its birds. It was a shame that that side of the state had basically ruined all eagles for me. And fucking Martinsville always seemed to outpace us. Maybe they shouldn’t get the new school. More elementary kids would mean more minions in the field counting birds.
Unless they ripped up the field to make the school in the first place. I shook the thought from my head.
“Okay, let’s see what we can find! As Brian Michael Warbley says, ‘We must count the birds we have now, so we always have our winged friends to count on.’ Now let’s go! Practice those observation and recording skills!”
I handed out little notebooks and mini pencils. My rallying speech had been a little too effective, because Sidney and Karen threw elbows to get to the front of the group.
“Roughhousing will scare the birds,” I hissed at them. “We need to be quiet observers in nature.” The group got the picture after a few minutes of ducks fleeing from us before we got close enough to really count them. By the end, my kids had counted robins, goldfinches, juncos, sparrows, jays, chickadees, bluebirds, catbirds, doves, grosbeaks, Baltimore orioles, and three black-backed orioles. Chicks had hatched and Mama squawked at the group as it went by.
“That’s one off the life list, friends,” I said.
“What’s a life list?” asked Sidney.
Oh, city kids. They made me feel the most useful in this job.
Back at the Nature Center, I recorded the walk’s data on our big whiteboard. “This will be erased on the morning of June 21, and we will update totals for the official bird count. But you will be able to see data from your practice counts until next week!”
“Where will all of this go after that?” Sidney asked.
“We’ll send it to the PA Audubon Society. It’s our state version of the awesome national organization. It’s like a club for people who love birds.”
“And what do they do with it?”
“They use it to think about answers to bird-related questions. Like do changing weather patterns change bird patterns? Are there bird sicknesses affecting birds in a certain area? Is migration changing? Stuff like that. And the number of different birds changes every year. So some years there might be a whole lot of one bird, like finches say, and some years there might not be. They look for patterns and analyze what those patterns can tell us.”
“We are totally going to win the most birds!” said Sidney.
“One hundred percent. In your face, Martinsville,” said Karen.
I smiled. I saw a bit of little Laurel Graham in her. I should tell her mothers to get her a starter camera for her birthday. “That’s the spirit. Kind of,” I said. “Okay, Birdscouts. Mr. Jerry is going to do story time now!” I heard Jerry groan inside the Center. Tuesdays were his day whether he liked it or not. I’d helpfully set up an Eric Carle display earlier so that Karen would have easy access to her favorites.
Risa and I alternated groups until the afternoon, when the individual birders came. They preferred their practice counts in solitude.
I scrubbed the toilets and sinks in the ladies’ room, put my signs outside of the men’s, and scrubbed those, too. Usually Risa and I had to resort to rock, paper, scissors to decide, but I didn’t want another encounter with her so soon. I emerged from the urinals, sparing her from having to smell like pine and bleach, and she didn’t even say thank you.
After my shift, I decided to try to get some shots in for Fauna. The bird count got me thinking of all the contests I should be focusing on. With Sophie leaving for camp, and Mom back in the dating pool, and Gran either sleeping or flying around, my camera was really the one true constant I had to rely on.
Oh, Gran. You should be counting birds, too.
Shove the pain down, Laurel.
All
The
Way
Down.
Outside, the air sunk heavier and heavier onto my hair and tank top. The perfume of freshly laid woodchips wafted over from the neat park just outside the gates of the nature reserve. The sky grew gray, then pink, then darker gray. The rain would start any minute. As I walked along one of the paths, I considered my o
ptions. I could go back to the Nature Center, but I was off the clock and there would surely be stuck children Jerry would expect me to help entertain. I could try to bike home, but Mom and Hipster Lumberjack or his replacement might be there. I decided the best bet was to stay with my trusty camera. Rain wasn’t great for electronics, but droplets on ferns? That shit was Fauna gold.
I sat on an ancient, wide root provided by Grandma Maple. Elder Oak may have guarded the entrance of Jenkins Wood, but Grandma Maple watched over everything that happened inside it. I always thought of her as the real authority over the place. By Jerry’s outside measurements, she seemed a century or two younger than Elder Oak, but Jerry was part of the Pennsylvania Recreation Department patriarchy, so I remained suspicious of his biases.
Plus I always inherently trusted grandmothers.
Dribs of water pattered onto leaves high above and slid through the canopy onto crevices in wood until it sunk into the soil beneath my feet. I covered my camera in my sweatshirt and closed my eyes. Sweet petrichor tingled my nose. I listened to the woods around me.
I could hear the short, brusque call of blue jays and the eponymous mating song of the chickadees. Sparrows sang to one another across branches. Birds didn’t mind the rain, so neither did I. It beaded on my skin, cool and fresh after the humidity of the day. When it slowed, I pulled out my camera again and waited. Nature photography was all about waiting.
Gran (and Brian Michael Warbley) had taught me that.
I managed to get a few great shots of a fox that crept out from behind a tree. I captured a nose, then a snout, then his muzzle, then bright eyes and perky ears. His rust-colored fur repelled moisture, but the rain had given him a sort of unearthly glow. He looked at me and I looked at him through the viewfinder. He considered my potential as an apex predator and skipped away after a few seconds. I smiled as he bounded off into the underbrush.
A skunk wandered by and I sat rock still. No picture in the world was worth scaring or pissing off that guy. A confused-looking beaver wandered past slightly after that. He grabbed a branch not far from my feet, glancing at me as if he’d been searching for that exact branch all along, and it was my fault he had to come this far from the pond to get it. Technically, he didn’t even live in the pond. There was a river that turned into a creek that marginally fed Sarig, and he lived with his family about a mile away by the deeper parts.
“I had nothing to do with this branch, bro,” I said.
He ignored me and started dragging it away. He stopped behind a tree and I heard him gnawing at it to cut it down to size. I considered trying to follow him to get a picture of whatever the hell he was doing, but a rustling from behind Grandma Maple distracted me.
“Oh,” said Risa.
“Sorry,” I said instinctively, like I’d interrupted her even though I’d been there first.
“Did you see the fox?” she asked.
“Yeah, then there was a beaver. I think they both left, though.”
“I probably scared them,” she said. She looked down at me.
“Hey, Risa,” I said. “Earlier, what did you mean when you said…”
“Nothing. Forget it. My bad.”
“No, listen. I want to…”
“It’s fine. I was just talking. Gotta go.” She turned and walked past me farther into the woods. I didn’t try to stop her. That’s how it was with Risa. One flight forward, two flights back.
I went back to see Gran before I went home. Her bed sat where it always sat, achingly out of range from the slants of waning dusk drizzle. I angled my digital over her face and scrolled through the photos, hoping maybe they’d register through her closed eyelids and neurons of questionable functionality. She twitched and her thumb moved in my direction.
“You wouldn’t be in a fox, would you? You never cared much for them. They ate your vegetables.”
Twitch. Twitch. Stillness.
I sat there and watched. Waited in case a miracle of nature would occur with open skies or petal bloom or anything. Instead, beeps and clicks and whizzes and whirs kept time with Gran’s mechanically enforced breaths.
I rode my bike home slowly. Mom wasn’t home and there was lasagna in the fridge. “Hope you had a great day at the Nature Center, honey!”
I microwaved dinner and uploaded the new pictures onto my laptop. I sent a couple of the best ones to Sophie. Sometimes she liked to paint them when she lacked inspiration.
Miss you! I typed.
I made out with a sculptor! she texted back almost immediately.
Good ol’ Soph.
Rain came again in the night. I wandered in and out of dreams where tall grass morphed into cranes whose long necks struck out into a violent wind that would then just beat them back to the ground. They’d raise their fierce wings toward the sky that longed to hold them, but their feet would sink into the earth and then they had no choice but to turn back into plants. Then came the men in suits who set them on fire.
I woke with a start as thunder shook our little house. No birds had died; no reeds longed to fly. It was just my brain making up stories.
But as I drifted back into sleep, I couldn’t help wondering if all the plants who felt the wind’s rustle didn’t long to waft freely, untethered, like the birds they saw do it daily.
FIELD JOURNAL ENTRY
JUNE 5
Mom hummed a little tune in the kitchen. I eyed her suspiciously.
“Good morning, baby!” she said.
“Summer vacation treating you well?” I asked. We hadn’t really seen a lot of each other since both of our schools had let out.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said, mostly to herself.
“When does your summer gig start?” Mom tutored in the summer and occasionally waited tables. She earned good tips but honestly I think she did it to find new dudes.
“Clients on vacation. Going to start up next week. Shift tonight. I’ll bring back smiley cookies.” She set a plate of eggs down in front of me. I always felt a little disloyal, eating eggs. But they weren’t fertilized birds, and I forced Mom to buy expensive ones from a free-range organic famer Gran knew. So these eggs came from relatively happy chickens who I liked to think didn’t want to have kids in the first place.
“To what do I owe this fancy meal?” I asked. Usually I was lucky if Mom remembered to buy cereal once a week.
“Just enjoying the time off. The weather. Brad,” she said, the last one almost a whisper.
“Ah,” I said. So the hipster lumberjack was still around. Maybe I’d still be able to score a picture for Sophie.
“What are you up to?”
I shrugged. “Nature Center. Pictures for Fauna. Visiting Gran.”
“Oh, that reminds me,” Mom said. She picked up a pen and wrote something on the pad on the fridge.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She looked right at me. “Are the eggs good?”
“Yes. Dippy eggs are always my favorite.”
Mom’s phone began to sing from the counter. She tended to pick the most mortifying sounds possible. I couldn’t tell who the artist was, but it sounded like the lyrics included the words “let’s get it on.”
“Speak of the devil. That’ll be Brad!” Mom said. She giggled and left the room.
Barfity barf barf to that one. I almost returned my perfectly good breakfast to my plate right there. I counted my lucky peacocks that Brad 2.0 wasn’t in the kitchen.
Still, I was unable to eat any more. I scraped my remaining eggs into the compost bin and rinsed my plate for the dishwasher. I’d vowed to myself to go to city hall today to find the remaining reports referenced in the one I already had. I got my backpack and nestled my camera in the front pouch. In the back I put my school-issued tablet that I got to keep for summer homework. It didn’t connect to my home cloud, but it’d be easier to just take pictures of the new reports with that so I could read and transport them. A thought occurred to me then.
Hey, Risa, I texted. I didn’t mean to sound like a jerk wi
th the tufted bird thing. I really didn’t. I believe in your identification skillz. Maybe that was why she was acting so weird. Or thought I might be against her in her Fauna pursuit.
It’s fine, she texted back.
Do you want to go to city hall with me today? I tapped. I waited a few minutes.
No response.
So maybe that was it? Sophie or I had offended her? What was she getting at when she said that thing about me messing with her pictures? Who could say. I gathered up my stuff to go and seize some reports. I caught sight of Mom’s note on the fridge as I passed.
“Realtor and city rep, June 7, 11 a.m.,” it read.
A Realtor? Chills rose up my spine and knotted in an icy ball at the base of my neck. That sounded way too much like Gran’s house was about to sell. It was empty and Mom hadn’t brought it up in a while. I thought she’d dropped it for the time being, since Gran seemed stable. I put a reminder in my phone to show up to fill the bird feeder at 11 a.m. on June 7 in the likely event that Mom was betraying me at that time and date.
I pedaled to city hall in record time, spurred on by my Mom rage. How could she still be seriously considering this? Gran had insurance, didn’t she? And some supplemental old people money. Surely that would keep her until she woke up. Goddamn it, I needed to find out who the strange bird was and I needed the fucking pond and woods to stay intact so the Gran bird wouldn’t leave before I could.
As I caught my breath, I tried to straighten myself out before I cajoled Brett (another Birdie Bro, dumber but nicer than Greg) to give me reports. I wiped off my sweaty face and brushed my hair so it didn’t look quite as smashed from my helmet. I even put on ChapStick for good measure.
Walking as casually as possible up to the counter, I pulled a few of the request sheets from their bin and began to fill them out. Brett noticed me from behind his glass window.
“Oh, hey,” he said.
“Hi, Brett,” I said. “We’ve met in the woods. I work there. At the Nature Center.”
The Confusion of Laurel Graham Page 11