by Kyo Maclear
I heard the clicking of the musician’s shutter and looked up to see the western grebe stretching and spreading its wings. Then the western grebe retracted its wings and went back to floating.
According to Webster’s dictionary, the word wait means to stay in a place of expectation, to not do something until something else happens. To wait means to remain stationary in readiness. The etymology of wait is to look upon, to be attentive, awake.
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To wait is to be close to nothing, to feel that closeness to nothing and to have confidence that it is more than that.
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The hardest adjustment for new birders is the waiting without itinerary or guaranteed outcome. Rachel Cusk captures this feeling of queasy idleness in her beautiful novel Outline when she describes the “great sense of futility” and the “feeling of some malady” that is “really only the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion.” Most of us don’t have time for the malady of stillness. Life is too short for longueurs. The idea of sitting for hours on end, on rocks or bits of log, in the cold, for a bird, is the definition of lunacy and silliness.
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And yet—“Time has a different meaning for birders.” So said the legendary New York City birder Starr Saphir. Known as the “birding doyenne of Central Park,” Saphir led walks four times a week for nearly forty years (once, memorably, including Conan O’Brien). Each eight-dollar tour lasted five to six hours—which meant long stretches of waiting. The tours continued even after Saphir was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2002, even when she needed to pop painkillers to keep going. (“At the end of every walk, I can barely get myself home, and I just kind of collapse into bed,” she admitted.) Aware of her finite days, the accelerated hourglass of time, she still walked and waited with infinite patience. Maybe the waiting helped slow time. She lived until 2013, surpassing her doctor’s prognosis.
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What makes waiting painful is the desire and goal to not be waiting. I had this epiphany one day at the dentist’s office. The dentist was delayed in surgery, and as time passed inexorably the dental hygienist said that I was the most patient patient she had ever met. She marveled at the way I lay there motionlessly, draped in the dentist’s chair like a boneless human. “I am a new mother,” I said. She nodded knowingly.
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Reclining in that chair—on pause from nursing, thinking, speaking, doing—I realized: it is sometimes painful to wait. But it is also painful to always be in a hurry on someone else’s behalf, to cram as much into a day as a day allows.
The musician and I went for another short walk to stretch our legs. It was getting colder and our breath came out in small white clouds. When we returned to our sitting spot, the western grebe was still floating off in the distance, oblivious to the attention it was generating, enjoying its own noonday rhythm, the bird equivalent of “moseying along.”
Keep awake and wait. And wait. I was learning. What I was learning was tacit and ordinary, but I sensed it was very important nonetheless. It was about how to be a birder and maybe more. It went something like this:
If you hope to see something, especially the notably elusive, you will learn to wait, like a devotee or a sanguine lover. You will choose your sitting spot and then you will just sit there. You will sit there, in the wind or drippy cold, waiting for the possibility of something beautiful to appear.
You will discover that the magic of a sitting spot is that it teaches you to go nowhere. If you are lucky, it will bring birds closer, or you closer to noticing them. You will sit so long that you eventually become part of the baseline conditions of a place.
If you grow restless, you will resist the childish temptation to run into a crowd of ducks or sparrows so you can watch the explosive liftoff. You will restrain yourself with the knowledge that any time you make an “abrupt, heedless, uncaring” gesture in a given habitat you risk creating what naturalist Jon Young calls a “bird plow.” This is not only annoying, it is potentially life threatening. Birds that have wasted needless energy lifting off and landing in a strange area are vulnerable to animal “wake hunters” who may seize on the opportunities caused by their fright and confusion to attack.
The goal in birding, you will discover, is to become as quiet and invisible as possible, and the easiest way to do this is to stay in one place, minimizing your wake of disturbance. When you stop with your fast movements, your sudden noises and unnecessary fidgeting, the birds (even the nervous perching varieties) may begin to respect you, by which I mean ignore you.
Even though you will inevitably discover that not everything within the spectrum of human desire is instantly available to you, your patience may be rewarded. You will encounter the reluctant and well-hidden things. These things may be fleeting and fading and without any obvious “payoff,” but you will discover that the realm of birding is also, sometimes, the realm of miracles.
Don McKay (Canadian poet and avid birder): “All you can do is make sure you’re in the right habitat.”
Neil Young (Canadian singer): “I don’t try to think of [songs]. I wait till they come. . . . If you’re trying to catch a rabbit, you don’t wait right by the hole.”
Annie Dillard (American author): “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
The musician and I packed up to leave. Two dozen people remained along the barren breakwater, serenely waiting for something that might never come. I admired their determination and the maverick force of their “project,” which ran so counter to what the rest of the world was doing. They were not furthering the economy of the city. They were going against its whole momentum.
Just before we said good-bye, the musician gave me my first bird book, a 1967 edition of Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds. It was a blue hardcover, wrapped in stiff cellophane. It was a beautiful edition, and I held it carefully and maybe a little warily, as though touching a book that stored all the many things I’d never known to wonder about before.
APRIL
KNOWLEDGE
(A Red-winged Blackbird, a House Finch, Robins, Wood Ducks, a Kingfisher, a Chimney Swift, a Black-crowned Night Heron, an Egret, Song Sparrows, White-throated Sparrows, House Sparrows, and a Gadwall)
On the utility of books in the real world and the allure of really knowing something.
My earliest bird memory is of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. I remember standing by Nelson’s Column with a fistful of bread surrounded by a sea of ravenous birds. I was four years old. I remember my pixie-haired nanny demonstrating how to scatter the crumbs. Like this, she said, a delicate toss.
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After we moved to Canada, I remember the small birds that used to fall to the ground outside my school. It was a quiet, leafy neighborhood known as Forest Hill. They zipped through the air and flew into the Gothic glass windows, mistaking the glass for a clear path. I quickly learned the specific sound a bird makes when it smashes into a window. I learned that when buildings and birds collide, the buildings always win. The birds dropped to the grass like little sacks of sand. We would come out to play and find a few cinder-colored bundles at our feet right under the oak trees. I remember their little matchstick legs poking up at the sky. Sometimes there would be a trickle of blood, but usually they would just look like they were napping. I left that school after two years, so I don’t know if they ever learned to curtain the windows, or if they ever placed a deterrent image on the glass as some buildings have done. But I remember thinking it seemed cruel that a bird should be punished for believing it could fly.
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I remember the crows in Yoyogi Park. I was eighteen and walking through Tokyo with my Canadian boyfriend. I remember how the crows suddenly darkened the skies. I remember the way they screamed as they dove down and with their beaks tore open a garbage bag a few feet away from us. I remember the whoosh of their wide wings an
d their claws, which looked like cartoon witch hands. I began to cry from terror. I knew they sometimes attacked unsuspecting pedestrians who moved too close to their nests. They were savage. They would peck out the eyes of creatures that were still alive. At least vultures would wait until you were dead.
Growing up, I spent every summer in Tokyo, and the crows had always frightened me. They are known as “jungle crows,” and to find them in the heart of an immaculately groomed city was both fantastical and terrifying. It hinted at a wild and unruly reality that might be hidden beyond tidy streets and gleaming façades.
There may have been other birds outside my grandmother’s house, but I don’t remember them. What I remember is spending a lot of time inside. I remember how the shoji screens would filter sounds from the outside world—the sound of trucks with their loudspeakers, those selling roasted sweet potatoes and the ones selling right-wing politics. I remember the soothing sound of rain cascading down the brass rain chain from the roof gutter. Rainy days were for writing letters to my friends who had migrated north to summer camps in Ontario. Rainy days were for reading.
When boredom and loneliness threatened to swallow me up during my long summers in Japan, I would retire to a small room in my grandmother’s house, unroll a futon, turn on the fan, and read, thus inaugurating a lifelong passion for books.
I escaped. I went to the English and Welsh countryside with the Famous Five and to New York with Claudia and Jamie Kincaid. I time-traveled and shape-shifted. I lived in the Jurassic past and the atomic future. I lived in Macondo and the Republic of San Lorenzo. I lived as a prairie girl and a French detective. I lived in dire Dickensian poverty and great dynastic wealth.
Books were my steadiest companions. When I ran out, I went downtown to Shinjuku and bought Japanese novels in translation. Soseki. Tanizaki. Oe. My books formed a nest around me on the tatami mat, right near my aunt’s Buddhist altar. A waft of sandalwood as the incense sticks burned.
They were my life and narcotic. They were “alive and they spoke to me,” as Henry Miller wrote. “With childhood reading there is a factor of significance which we are prone to forget—the physical ambiance of the occasion. How distinctly, in after years, one remembers the feel of a favorite book, the typography, the binding, the illustrations, and so on. How easily one can localize the time and place of a first reading. Some books are associated with illness, some with bad weather, some with punishment, some with reward. . . . These readings are distinctly ‘events’ in one’s life.”
I was a bookish child and grew to be a bookish adult. Books gave me pleasure, but they also gave me permission to isolate myself, to turn away from the world when it bothered or frightened me. Books allowed me to hide from demands, from the day, from family and the immediate world. They provided solace and amusement in the deep night and served as surrogates for friendship when I was far away from home.
Susan Sontag, remarking in one of her journals on her inability to stop reading, even in the face of her terminal illness, wrote: “I can’t stop reading. . . . I’m sucking on a thousand straws.” I know that feeling of bottomless hunger for words, even and especially during times of crisis. When I read Sontag’s words I thought of the famous photograph showing the ruins of a London bookshop following an air raid in 1940. It shows men browsing the shelves after the all clear sounded—a showcase of British perseverance or, perhaps, unstoppable biblio-addiction; a sign of folly or unvanquished hope.
Books have given me great stores of happiness, but if I am honest with myself I can see they have also taken something away. I glimpsed the real world between paragraphs of novels. I traced words when I might have touched the ground.
From those days in Japan, I still imagine a wheaty waft of tatami every time I open a book. I also have an inability to read upright. To fully immerse myself in a book, I must be reclining. I read best when mummified in blankets.
Sometimes books have housed me and sometimes they have encased me.
Although I have consumed vast numbers of books, I still feel entirely ill equipped in most practical situations—such is the vicarious nature of reading. Books have introduced me to world religions, ancient civilizations, political movements, the traumas of modern warfare, legal theory, the history of art, and theories of the unconscious. They have expanded my powers of empathy and insight. But I still do not know which berries are poisonous, or how to predict the weather, stanch a wound, or build a fire without matches.
It’s arguable I’ve just read too narrowly. There are many bookish people in my life who know how to do practical things, how to be in the physical world. Simon can bake bread. Jason can build a house. Hiromi knows how to forage in the woods. Jude knows how to make a poultice. Susan can make cordage out of tree bark. Sasha can deliver a baby. Some of this knowledge may have come from books, but I suspect much of it was acquired slowly and osmotically, through field observation and long conversations, through trial and error, contemplation and silence.
Some days when I feel alone in my unknowing, I wonder what others know. Walking around my neighborhood, I see bearded men who resemble woodsmen in their vintage lumber jackets and willowy women who resemble homesteaders in their prairie dresses. They look like they are heading off to swim logs down streams and pick flowers in vast grasslands. They look like they would know words like brook, buttercup, heron, ash, beetroot, bray, bridle, gooseberry, raven, and catkin.
In 2007, the Oxford University Press eliminated from its Junior Dictionary a number of words associated with nature. Among them were the names for thirty species of plants and animals—such as acorn, blackberry, and minnow. These words were replaced with up-to-date terms like analogue, broadband, and cut-and-paste. In January 2015, a group of international writers issued an open letter asking for those words to be reinstated.
We base this plea on two considerations. Firstly, the belief that nature and culture have been linked from the beginnings of our history. For the first time ever, that link is in danger of becoming unraveled, to the detriment of society, culture, and the natural environment. Secondly, childhood is undergoing profound change; some of this is negative; and the rapid decline in children’s connections to nature is a major problem. . . . We recognize the need to introduce new words and to make room for them and do not intend to comment in detail on the choice of words added. However, it is worrying that in contrast to those taken out, many are associated with the interior, solitary childhoods of today.
The musician knew things. This was clear to me very early on. Even when he behaved like a flighty artist, I still knew that as a part-time landlord he knew how to fix a fridge and do basic electrical work. It was also clear that as a birder, he was no dabbler. He always knew exactly where and when to go see birds. He knew what those birds would be and usually he knew why and how they got there.
Not that he advertised his knowledge. The musician was interesting and anecdotal, humorous and helpful, but as a guide, he wasn’t very guiding. The Roger Tory Peterson book he gave me for my birthday was the first gesture he ever made toward explicitly educating me.
This was fine with me. At least for the first few months with the musician I was happy to know very little. I did not look things up, turning away from my book-bound life. I liked the idea that I was having a pure, unfiltered experience. I was an empty slate. The skies and trees were my school.
It was all very romantic, but it was also untrue. Actually, I did know things. My bird knowledge came with me every time I went out for a walk. It was confected of pop songs, poetry, mythology, garish nature postcards, IMAX movies, Warner Bros. cartoons, Froot Loops commercials, European master paintings, and homemade crafts. I was steeped in pop ecology. I had learned about blackbirds from the Beatles and the mechanics of flight from Tweety Bird. My history of acquired bird information could not be canceled out simply because I wished it to be.
What happened in those first few months with the musician was a form of shedding. The more I encountered the reality of birds, t
he more my secondhand impressions of “birds” began to fall away. When we sat together in a swirl of mist and formless time, when I stopped seeing my idea of trees and started seeing infinite shades of green, when I looked at a swan’s back and saw that each feather was an intricate masterpiece of white, when distances collapsed and my own sense of scale diminished, it was a molting.
Then the musician injured his knee. It happened in early April, and it was serious enough to make bird walks impossible for a while. To fill the time, I decided to read. I came across a quote from Walker Evans on the musician’s website: “Die knowing something.” Suddenly not-reading seemed like a stupid and lazy thing to do.
I borrowed a stack of books from the library. There were books on the bone density of birds and the musculature of flight, books with sonograms, graphs, and accounts of various laboratory inspections and dissections. I consulted these books quickly, then returned them. These books had too much information and I had made myself a promise: I would not read out of duty, only pleasure. I wanted John Fowles’s woods knowledge: “a kind of wandering wood acquaintance, and no more; a dilettante’s, not a virtuoso’s; always the green chaos rather than the printed map.”
Manual of Ornithology: Avian Structure and Function by Noble S. Proctor. Ornithology by Frank B. Gill. The Unfeathered Bird by Katrina van Grouw. The Inner Bird: Anatomy and Evolution by Gary W. Kaiser.
I borrowed more books. There were older books by amateur ornithologists and weekend naturalists. I began to understand why many people remain wary of nature writing. It’s all that romantic wandering and dumbstruck waxing on; all those sublime mountains, delicate flowers, and shimmering sunsets. There is simply too much effusion, passion, and love for our ironic age. Even my environmentalist, nature-loving friends avoid it.