The power to proclaim this, to insist upon it, after his silent youth, after years of quietly absorbing the church’s denial of all that his senses made clear to him, always, always, left him nearly giddy.
Having made his point, he returned to the podium and his lecture notes, to tease out the subtler points of the theory of recapitulation. All eyes were on him, he knew, all pens and pencils poised. All except those of the blond girl, who had continued with her drawing all this time. He plunged ahead with his notes as the pencils began their frantic scribbling.
He resisted the urge to laugh at this desperate note-taking, as if there were some way in which he might test them on the kind of knowledge he was trying to impart. As if he planned to give them any sort of exam. As if their performance in this course would ever be evaluated on any grounds other than the quality of their attention in the field, and the seriousness and probity of their field notebooks.
Then, to shift from the drier, if crucial, background from Haeckel and Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace and to give them more to copy maniacally (and absurdly), he read them one of his favorite quotations, from the poet John Clare:
For my part I love to look on nature with a poetic feeling, which magnifies the pleasure. I love to see the Nightingale in its hazel retreat, and the Cuckoo hiding in its solitude of oaken foliage, and not to examine their carcasses in glass cases. Yet naturalists and botanists seem to have no taste for this poetic feeling.
“Now. Take a good long look at this ‘carcass,’” he went on, turning to the desk to lift the stuffed owl aloft, then setting it back down with a dramatic thud, “removed, for the moment, from its ‘glass case.’ This is a great horned owl, male, killed and stuffed right here in the valley of the Delaware River forty years ago, by none other than my predecessor at Burnham College.
“Take careful note, now. Record everything you see that might help you recognize this bird in the future.” As always, the majors began writing immediately, while the nonmajors stared helplessly for a full minute or more before beginning to write some tentative notes.
All except the blond girl, “the artist,” as he thought of her now, who sat quietly, her hands in her lap, staring at the stuffed owl, occasionally glancing at her drawing and making some small adjustment. Her bold friend, sitting next to her, pointed to her drawing and whispered something, to which the artist responded with a nod, then made some adjustment. The look on her face when she glanced up at the owl was completely unreadable to him. It was not, as far as he could tell, the absorption of someone who was studying a specimen carefully; it was something else, and though he couldn’t quite place it, he began to believe it might be something like contempt. Not for him, not for the poor bird, but more for this exercise he had assigned the class.
It astonished him that he recognized that look on her face. Contempt for the practice of closely observing something that had been killed and stuffed was precisely what he felt. But in all his years of teaching, no student had ever failed to register surprise at what he did next. To audible groans from those who had only begun to notice some feature of the great horned owl that they might record in their notes, he grasped the owl at its base and returned it to the black case in which he’d carried it into the room.
“And that,” he announced, “is the last time you will look at a stuffed carcass, in or out of a glass case, in my class.” He glanced at the artist again, searching for even the smallest smile of complicity, but her head was down, her hair once again shielding her eyes.
“Tomorrow we enter the woods from the path behind this building at five A.M. sharp,” he continued. “We’ll return by eight, you’ll have an hour to get breakfast, then back here for the day’s lecture at nine. Afternoons and evenings will be for additional excursions of your own and tending to your field notebooks. In the words of the renowned ornithologist Joseph Grinnell, ‘No notebook this day, no sleep this night.’
“Advice, by the way, that you’ll do well to attend to—more so than to anything I’ve said to you so far this morning, which, I assure you, will at no time nor at any place appear on an examination.” More groans then, along with a few gasps of disbelief. “I take it as a given that you are in this class because you wish to learn, deeply and meaningfully, about birds. If you have other reasons, you may wish to consider a visit to the registrar’s office to see what other courses remain open at this point.”
Here he found himself looking not at the usual lost-looking, gum-chewing sorority girl in the back row, nor at her boyfriend, the misguided young man who suddenly believed he should pick up some science classes and go the premed route, like his father, but instead at the frankly flirtatious girl in the front, between Cora and the artist. He was surprised by how much his feelings had changed over the course of an hour’s opening lecture, surprised and a bit amused to see how undaunted she was, staring back at him readily. He suppressed a laugh, thinking about how valuable his work was when it came to sustaining his faithfulness to his marriage, crumbling though that marriage might be. He did, however, find himself once again avoiding the eyes of the artist.
He glanced at the papers on the podium, reaching now for the class roster. Resting a pair of horn-rimmed glasses on his nose, he began to call the roll. Hers was the second-to-last name on the list. Just as he read it—“Adeline Sturmer”—and she responded with “Call me Addie,” a wood thrush trilled from the branches of the ancient oak outside the open window. All heads turned, and Tom Kavanagh laughed.
“That’s a wood thrush, Addie Sturmer. Is he a friend of yours?” he asked, and when she looked back at him and smiled, then turned back to the window, clearly hoping to hear the bird again, there was no denying it: Something in his chest hurt, and it was a blissful kind of pain, of a sort he remembered from his lonely days on the hills of Donegal.
He forgot to call the last name on the list, that of a timid young man in the back row, who waited until the end of that morning’s lecture to approach the professor and make sure his presence was noted.
four
WHEN HE OPENED HIS mouth to speak and she heard the first soft lilt of his Irish accent, she did not know what to do, or where to look; she could hardly contain her joy, the feeling of something bubbling up inside her. And so to keep herself from suddenly singing, or whooping, or hysterically laughing, she grabbed her pencil and began to draw.
That ridiculous, fusty old owl. She knew without thinking that he had brought it as some sort of joke; it bore absolutely no resemblance to a real bird.
So she drew it, realistically enough in outline and obvious detail, the large head with its tufted ears, the ringed eyes, the white bib with the bars below. But she gave it a recognizable, if caricatured, human face.
“Dr. Curtis?” Lou leaned over and asked in a whisper when Addie had nearly finished the bulging eyes below a receding hairline. She nodded, and then Lou wrote, on a page of her own notebook, “I’d rather draw him,” finishing with an arrow toward the front of the room.
Addie smiled and went back to the shadows under her owl’s eyes until Lou pinched her arm and pointed, again, to her own notebook, where she’d added one more word: “Nude.”
Addie rolled her eyes, her standard response to Lou’s excesses. She kept to herself the fact that while mindlessly sketching a moldering stuffed owl with human features, she was, in fact, memorizing the rich contours, the lines and shadows, of Tom Kavanagh’s remarkable face, the thin nose and strong jaw, the large, dark eyes, all shadowed by a head of unruly black hair that showed some streaks of gray. Later, in the privacy of her student studio, she would do her best to reproduce some image of that face from memory. She would work on it each day, she decided, immediately after leaving his lecture.
And she would, just as he’d urged, devote her afternoons and evenings to more outings in the woods, and to keeping a careful field notebook. Not because she cared at all about how she did in his course, but because from the moment she’d heard the wood thrush sing, just as Tom Kavanagh had
called her name, she had realized something powerful. What she wanted was not only to draw birds but to understand them, to come as close as she could to feeling what it was like to fly with hollow bones. To sit atop a warm and throbbing egg within a delicate bed that rests in the crook of a branch. To sing not from something like a human throat but from a place deep within the breast.
Tom Kavanagh’s passion for birds did not frighten her. And she found evolutionary theory less threatening than sleep-inducing. But what he had, and what she wanted, was clear to her from that first morning: a passion for birds—for truly hearing, seeing, knowing them—that made everything else in life seem trivial.
Somehow, she felt that if she had his face in front of her all the time she could hold on to that possibility. So she planned to throw herself into the course as wholeheartedly as she knew Cora would. (Lou was a different story; surely Lou would be one of the ones who went in search of another course.) But Addie knew that in the midst of her attention to birds she would also draw him, secretly, from the memory of watching him each day.
12 May 1965
Wednesday
Riegel’s Point, Plumville, Bucks Co., PA (Spit of wooded land between the Delaware Canal and the Delaware River, ½ mi. north of Plumville)
Time: 06:00–06:30—Mouth of Kleine Creek, near intersection of Old Philadelphia Road and the river road; 06:45–08:00—Riegel’s Point
Observers: Addie Sturmer. Alone.
Habitat: Pin oak, maple, and what, at home, we call an osage orange tree (with those odd, baseball-sized, brain-looking pods). Bluebells are blooming, and I saw more of Cora’s beloved windflowers.
Weather: Temp. 65 degrees F
Overcast and still, after a heavy rain. Would this be considered 100% cloud cover? Or did I see a small (1%?) patch of blue for just a moment at the turn in Kleine Creek at Haupt Bridge Road?
Remarks: I’ve taken your advice to cut class and listen, on my own.
SPECIES LIST
At mouth of Kleine Creek:
American Robin 3
Song Sparrow 1
Downy Woodpecker 1
Goldfinch 6
At Riegel’s Point:
Spotted Sandpiper (I think) 2
Number of Species: 5; Number of Individuals: 13; Time: 2 hrs.
Comments: I heard—and recognized—the Robin and the Downy Woodpecker. But the best moments were spent drawing a Sandpiper, pecking at the mud like an irritable old man who’s dropped all his change.
I just can’t keep writing all that Latin. I’m sorry.
12 May—I’m flattered that you’re willing to take me out in the field alone on Saturday; I look forward to this.
And I’m also flattered that you’re interested in seeing my drawings from England. Yes, I’ll bring along some of these. But not the paintings, no. They’re absolutely awful; I don’t think I’ll ever let anyone see those.
If I’m feeling brave maybe I’ll bring along a painting of a goldfinch I’ve been working on. I drew it for hours one day in New York City, in Central Park. Did you know the bird life there is incredible?
Well, that’s silly. Of course you would know that.
As to the great horned owl I drew on the first day of class—no, I don’t think so. That was more of a caricature really, to be honest. Nothing I’d want anyone to see.
And yes, it also has some of Louise’s commentary. But believe me, it’s not critical of you. Hardly.
Please don’t underestimate Louise (we call her Lou). It seems that nearly everyone does, and I suppose it’s her own fault. Honestly, though, she’s observing, and learning, more than you might realize—even though she probably seems to be interested only in luring Mr. “I’m Premed Like My Father” away from Princess “I Hate These Bugs!” (Lou can’t resist a challenge. The minute he takes the bait, she’ll turn her attention to other things and spit him out like cold coffee.)
Anyway, by now you’ve already seen what I mean about her in her field notebook. She’s a beautiful writer, isn’t she? And she’s getting really good at spotting birds—almost as good as Cora and Karl. When I go out on my own—which is better for the drawing, of course—I miss L and C’s good humor.
Even those predusk excursions are getting crowded, though. Karl always wants to come along, of course, which usually means his friend Robert as well. And I understand Mr. Premed is to join them on Friday. I imagine there will be a bottle of brandy too, and a tipsy walk back up Rising Valley or over from Gallows Hill.
But they’ll be watching and listening for birds too; they’re completely hooked. It’s all your doing, you know—you and your poems and that clever ruse of “calling out” the bobolink with your fiddle Monday morning. It’s all “the Survivors” (as we’ve taken to calling the eight of us who’ve yet to miss a morning in the field, and don’t intend to) talk about.
So, yes, it’s all your fault that the trails and fields and creek banks all around Burnham Ridge are crowded with insect spray–wearing, field glasses–wielding “birding loons” (our other name for ourselves) at the best hours for sightings, Monday through Friday.
So as I’ve said, I look forward to listening quietly, with only you, on Saturday morning—when all the Survivors will be sleeping off their birds and brandy.
five
PENNSYLVANIA, DEPENDING ON ONE’S outlook, is either all subtlety or a long lesson in contrasts, quiet and nuanced or screaming with too much history. It can feel—on, for instance, a drive from New York to Chicago—like an endless pelt of brown and gray, broken by a dramatic river and a bit of industry now and then, plus the requisite cheap and ugly overdevelopment of late-twentieth-century America. This was Scarlet Kavanagh’s view of Pennsylvania throughout her twenties.
But settling for that abstracted, through-a-car-window view, she eventually realized, was to miss some significant points of difference. The famous Amish farmland and the peculiar hex signs on the Pennsylvania Dutch barns. The gash of the mines to the north and west. Vestiges of colonial life (all those narrow stairways, for instance; had they really all been that small?) in the southeast.
Her mother, Addie, was a small woman—only a shade over five feet tall and just clearing one hundred pounds that spring when she and Tom Kavanagh fell in love. For Addie, Burnham College and its surroundings were a revelation. There was no other way to describe her discovery of that corner of Bucks County where the college sat neatly atop a ridge between two valleys. These valleys wound their way east until their creeks, the Nisky and the Kleine, emptied into the Delaware River, the dividing line between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. This beautiful spot was only a two-hour drive from Addie’s parents’ farm, but it could have been an ocean away. She had never set eyes on this part of the Delaware River until she’d learned of her acceptance, with the offer of a scholarship, and visited the campus during her last year of high school.
She loved all the colonial names—Hampstead and Plumville and Easthampton, Milford Crossing and Gallows Hill—with their echoes of England. There were German ones too, of course; the house she would eventually move into, with Tom, and where Scarlet would spend her carefree childhood and portions of her sullen teenaged years, had started out as a ramshackle fishing cottage perched between Haupt Bridge Road and Kleine Creek. Years later, after his first wife had moved to New York and Tom had purchased the cottage, Addie took stubbornly to calling the stream that slurred through the woods outside their windows “Little Creek.” People seldom knew what she meant when she called it that, but that never bothered Addie.
Her favorite name, though, was the local Indian one, Nisky, for the bigger, noisier creek, a small river by some standards, that traveled toward the cottage from the west, meeting up with Kleine Creek under the rickety old Haupt Bridge. It was here, along Nisky Creek, a quarter of a mile or so beyond their house, that Tom had built a wedding gift for his young bride, the bird artist, in the summer of 1966: a blind, constructed in the style of the English bird artists’ hides that she’d discovered d
uring her semester abroad. Addie’s hide was a wooden structure with a bench and a narrow opening at eye level, tucked inconspicuously into the woods, where she sat for hours, waiting for the birds she would draw—Eastern bluebirds, warblers of various stripes, her beloved wood thrush and scarlet tanager (for which her daughter was named). And she drew others too—cardinals, robins, nasty jays and grackles. In those days she wasn’t choosy; in fact she was disdainful of so-called birders (“featherheads,” she called them) who valued a species only if it was rare.
This Scarlet had always shared with her mother. Scarlet loved even the great blue herons, which became increasingly common in that protected area near the Delaware as she grew into her teens, their harsh, ugly screeches piercing their mornings and evenings on the screened porch where they ate their meals. She would never forget the sight of one rising from the creek each morning, the spring when she was twelve, as she let the screen door slam behind her on her way to catch the bus to school. That rush of wings and then the silent, massive span above her head, darkening the sky—every time, it made her catch her breath. And she tried to find a way to describe its rising each day on the bus, playing with words in her head: “giant, silent feathered airplane,” “blue-gray cloud with wings.” Tom, to her ongoing embarrassment, kept her spiral-bound notebooks from those years—notebooks full of phrases like these but rather lacking in homework assignments.
In Hovering Flight Page 3