“Herons make you reach for words,” she told her father at some point, back when she still spoke fondly about birds with her parents. She knew this because it was written, in Tom’s barely legible script, at the end of one of those spiral-bound notebooks, where he had given her credit for it and then included his own addendum: “They certainly don’t inspire you to sing.” He presented Scarlet with this and other notebooks of hers when they’d begun to speak of birds again, arguing happily over whether music or poetry might better capture their boisterous, rapturous, unclassifiable songs and calls.
This was, in a sense, Tom’s life’s work. His first and only book, A Prosody of Birds, was many things—a diatribe for one, as well as a plea for peace and for ecological responsibility. But also an attempt to create a system, akin to the metrical scanning of poems, for transcribing the songs of certain birds: dashes and breves and accent marks climbing and falling over the pages in rhythmic patterns, supplemented here and there by bars of musical notation. The Prosody was also illustrated with some of Addie’s earliest work, including plates reproducing five paintings—of a scarlet tanager, a purple finch, a Kentucky warbler, a bobolink, and a wood thrush: birds whose songs were some of Tom’s favorites.
Of course others have shared his passion for the music of these birds. Here, for instance, is a description of the voice of the bobolink from a later edition of the Peterson Field Guide to the Birds: “Song, in hovering flight and quivering descent, ecstatic and bubbling, starting with low, reedy notes and rollicking upward”—another line that appeared in one of Scarlet’s adolescent notebooks, and one she has continued to love. This description from Peterson’s Guide is a poem in itself, proof, she often said to Tom, that it may take language—bulky, uncooperative, but also perfectly tuned and incisive words—to get at just what it is about these creatures that haunts people so. “After reading language like this, do you even really need to hear the song itself ?” she asked her father. “And when you do, isn’t it bound to disappoint you just a bit?”
But Tom’s argument was that no one—no poet, no ornithologist, no field guide author or contributor—had managed to capture the majesty of birdsongs. F. Schuyler Matthews may have come close in his 1904 Field Guide of Wild Birds and Their Music, one of Tom’s most treasured books. But even Matthews, who wrote of the purple finch that “its persuasiveness is truly loverlike and irresistible,” didn’t quite pull it off. “Play those musical phrases he’s created all you like,” Tom once said. “You still won’t recognize the song when you step into the woods.”
Of course one could say the same about Tom’s complex, nearly impenetrable scansions. But it seemed they worked for Addie, who, even with her tin ear, eventually became as adept at hearing, and recognizing, birds in the field as Tom. But then Addie had a bit more invested in the process than the average weekend bird-watcher, as well as a bit more reverence for Tom and his method, at least in those early years.
Ultimately both Addie and Scarlet agreed with Tom that not even live recordings manage to re-create the magic of the singing of birds in the wild—or, for that matter, outside one’s bedroom window at the edge of dawn in the early spring. Scarlet once recounted for Tom and Addie a story she’d heard about the composer John Cage (master recorder and transcriber of, among other things, the music of urban cacophony) and his partner, Merce Cunningham, racing back to their New York City apartment after a disastrous weekend in the country, where they had been driven nearly mad by the noisy singing of the birds in the morning.
What’s remarkable is that so many people become skilled at tuning them out. Air conditioners help, of course. Scarlet has never been able to sleep with one whirring away in her room; she has Tom and Addie, mostly Addie, to thank for her discomfort with that kind of mechanical hush. Addie, who from time to time, at the dinner table perhaps, or while Tom and Scarlet cleared the dishes, liked to recite from memory the opening lines of Rachel Carson’s “Fable for Tomorrow,” her opening chapter of Silent Spring. “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves,” she intoned hauntingly, while Tom and Scarlet gathered the forks and knives and plates as noisily as they could, humming folk songs under their breath.
A Prosody of Birds was an idiosyncratic hodgepodge, wildly disorganized and provocative to just about every reader. Still, in the end, a pure joy to read, even with all the scansions and bars of music and impossible diagrams: Tom Kavanagh in a nutshell. It enjoyed some success when it was first published, soon after Scarlet’s birth, in 1969. Certainly its warning of impending environmental collapse and loss of habitat resonated with audiences of that time, prescient as it was. Out of print for twenty-five years, it was reissued in the late 1990s by a press in Berkeley, in a “millennial edition” that became, to Tom and Addie’s surprise, a kind of cult classic, popular with birders, environmentalists, alternative-health advocates, poets, and musicians. Scarlet, however, wasn’t surprised. By then she too had come to see it as a brilliant, beautiful book.
Of course Addie’s notoriety fueled much of the more recent interest in the book. But it wasn’t only her status among young artists and activists; that alone could not explain the book’s popularity. If Tom too failed, in the end, to re-create the experience of hearing the birds in the language of either poetry or music, what most admirers of A Prosody of Birds seemed to agree on was that Addie’s paintings and drawings did, in their airy, almost unfinished way, capture the experience of watching birds. Though the birds in the illustrations were still, it was as if the viewer had just witnessed them in vigorous flight, or pecking at grass or tree bark for insects, or feeding their young. They were, in effect, soulful illustrations of creatures with souls.
There was a strange, ethereal quality to Addie’s work in the Prosody, something in those early drawings and plates that made it abundantly clear that their creator was in love with these birds, with their surroundings, and, unmistakably, with the author of the book.
But perhaps Scarlet saw a love of the landscape in the book because she loved those woods and creeks and valleys of eastern Pennsylvania as much as her parents did. It was not a breathtaking landscape really. There was none of the salt- and taffy-tinged hominess of the Jersey shore, none of the sheltered feeling she always had in the valleys of Vermont and northern Massachusetts, certainly none of the expansiveness of the coasts of New England or Long Island.
The valleys that encircled the little hamlet of Burnham did not feel sheltering to Scarlet. No doubt there were psychological reasons for this. But maybe too it was the presence of the Delaware—a wide brown river with its own complex history, dividing one world from another somehow, obviously not a true barrier between East and West, not since colonial times at least—though at times it felt like one. And the river itself seemed strangely hemmed in, domesticated—skirted along its course through the northern end of Bucks County by the Delaware Canal. There was a kind of claustrophobia connected with that too; it was as if, following the course of a creek from the Burnham hills down to its end at the treacherous curves of the river road and then the footpath between river and canal, you found, instead of the freedom and openness you were hoping for, a kind of stage set.
Yet the whole area was beautiful, in a quiet way. There were remarkable stone farmhouses, peaceful farms nestled in the arms of valleys, curving roads that offered occasional glimpses of the river—brief, fleeting, breathtaking views. And then just as suddenly those roads would drop back down into a dark valley that was cloaked in shadow, no matter how brightly the sun was shining. No truly open vistas. And yet no shelter either.
When Scarlet returned to Burnham as an adult, she always felt a lump in her throat, a longing for the connection she’d felt as a child with the trees and the hills, the rushing creeks and the paths winding all around the woods between her house and the campus on one side, the river on the other. And also a powerful dissatisfaction that she’d never been able to write about this lit
tle corner of southeastern Pennsylvania. She was at home there, but also trapped. And she wondered: Did other people feel this way about their childhood homes?
Of course it was Addie who taught her to see it all this way. From the earliest days of her life Scarlet accompanied her mother on her excursions to the Nisky Creek blind. By the time Scarlet was four or five, Tom had built a second one, this time high in an old maple. For Scarlet this was a thrilling tree house, and she would spend the morning happily drawing and reading books while her mother drew. By then, with funds from the sale of the book and a few of her paintings, Addie had acquired a sophisticated scope, one that curved up and out of a small window in the blind, allowing her to train it on a distant bird and, at the same time, draw it comfortably.
Tom had cut a separate, larger window above a little bench at the back of the blind for Scarlet, and sometimes Addie would abandon her scope and come watch with her. Their favorite birds in those days were the black-capped chickadees, playful little performers who pecked at the dollops of peanut butter Addie and Scarlet left along the edge of Scarlet’s window when they arrived at the blind each morning. The chickadees would eat and frolic right in front of their noses, staring back at them, as curious as they were. So fearless and trusting.
“You have to admire them for that, don’t you think? Why in the world would they trust a human being?” Addie asked one day, and Scarlet never forgot that. She still sometimes dreamed about chickadees. The night before Addie died there was a beachball-sized one in Scarlet’s dream, hovering above her head and peering down at her; it seemed to be checking in, saying, “Are you doing okay?” And so she said, “I’m fine, now that you’re here,” and then she woke up.
Eventually the chickadees would finish their peanut butter and move on, and Addie would go back to drawing at her own window. Scarlet would entertain herself quietly for as long as she could. Then, when she could wait no longer, she would tap Addie on the shoulder and ask for lunch. They would spread their blanket—sometimes below, at the edge of the creek, or, on rainy days, on the floor of the blind itself—and start on their sandwiches. And Addie would tell her stories.
Sometimes, earlier on, they were stories about Addie herself—about her childhood on the farm, chasing their few cows through the pasture with her brother, John; about Scarlet’s grandparents, whom she saw only on holidays and for a week or so each summer; about Addie’s trip to England at the age of twenty. As Scarlet grew older and hungered for more of these kinds of personal reminiscences (Did you have friends? What were they like? Were there boyfriends? Did you go to parties? Tell me more about Cora and Lou), it seemed that Addie grew more and more bored with accounts of her own life.
What she wanted to tell Scarlet, instead, were stories about birds. About the land and its history. About famous figures in her world—Audubon, Peterson, Rosalie Edge and others connected with the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary to the west of them—people who were heroes to her. But Scarlet was disappointed when Addie’s stories took this turn; eventually she began declining her mother’s invitations to join her at the blind, opting instead to play with neighborhood friends, or stay at home reading on her own.
At the time, it felt to Scarlet as if Addie was constantly trying to teach her something; she got enough of that at school, she thought. Years later she could see that Addie was, in fact, trying to give a kind of shape to her own life in telling her daughter those stories—to place herself in the landscape, in the footsteps of these people she admired. And many of the stories were ones that Tom had told Addie first, when they’d met and fallen in love, there in that beautiful corner of upper Bucks County, in the woods above and below Burnham Ridge, during a spring spent observing birds, and, when they finally lowered their field glasses, one another.
II
k-selected species
six
MAY 2002
THIS MORNING’S SCENE IS a familiar one: Cora at the small table on the screened porch in back, glasses perched on her nose and paper spread in front of her, distractedly petting Lucy, her old collie, who’s flopped down at her feet. For as long as Scarlet can remember, Cora has been gray, her hair cut sensibly short. She’s also always been pretty. The sweetness and openness in her face and in her wide blue eyes have always somehow invited Scarlet to bare her soul, to share her deepest hurts and most ridiculous longings with Cora—though Cora will never, under any circumstances, do the same. If Cora has ridiculous longings, Scarlet hasn’t heard about them; she knows for certain about the depth of Cora’s particular pain—but she never hears about this from Cora either.
The two women are bundled in sweaters because it’s cool on the porch in the early morning. Sunlight streams in, the early fog burned off by now, and the long, grassy slope down to the beach is wet with dew. A rope clangs against a flagpole several houses down. Tom has been at his scope for an hour or more; Scarlet has been watching him. She knows he’d rather be elsewhere—in the marsh near the lighthouse, for instance—but everyplace screams with Addie’s presence now, and there is so much to be decided today. But for now no one can bear to begin that process, and Scarlet sits with Cora, as if it were a year or two ago and she’d just arrived, sleepless and distraught over her love life, whimpering over the mess she’d made of everything. Worlds away from everything she is feeling today.
At the sound of her oven timer, Cora disappears into the kitchen. Minutes later she returns with a tray and sits down across from Scarlet. “Coffee?” she asks, as always. When Scarlet declines, she cocks a surprised eyebrow, then pours juice into a smoothly glazed mug—one of her own—and waits for Scarlet to speak first.
“Lucy’s looking tired,” Scarlet finally says. She longs for a sip of Cora’s marvelously strong coffee but tries to act like she hasn’t noticed its intoxicating smell.
“She’s an old girl, like me,” Cora says as she pats the dog again. “Like all of us, your mother and Lou and I were saying, just a few nights ago. We had the strangest conversation, about all the pets we’ve had fixed over the years. Wondering if an animal feels something about that, what that means to these poor girls, never to bear young. If it means anything at all.”
As Cora bends over Lucy, Scarlet watches the play of morning light and shadows on her face, on the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She knows this face nearly as well as she knew her mother’s, before Addie grew so gaunt, if still achingly beautiful, over the past few months, and she knows this comfortable old house nearly as well as she knows the cottage on Haupt Bridge Road. No wonder Addie wanted to die here, she thinks now, with Cora’s soothing presence filling every room—the smells of her baking, the fresh salt air blowing through her windows, the dark glazed surfaces of her pots and vases and mugs, beckoning one to grasp and stroke.
And for a moment she is ashamed of her peevish reaction to Addie’s asking to be brought here, six weeks ago. “Why not at home?” she’d whined to Tom. At the time she’d felt strangely jealous, reluctant to share both her dying mother and Cora in this way.
“So somehow we got going on animal reproduction,” Cora says, “and suddenly we were back in Tom’s class, learning about k-selected and r-selected species. Do you remember when we used to talk about that? We would tease Addie when you were four or five, and she would say she couldn’t imagine sharing her love with any more children. ‘You’re the ultimate k-selected mom,’ Lou would say, missing the point about species of birds altogether, of course. But Addie loved that. ‘Yes!’ she’d say, ‘I’m a wood warbler! Sharing the planet, taking less space, only taking what my child and I need. No competitive exclusion principle, no intraspecific competition for me!’ ”
Cora seems lost in the memory. “Then Lou would say, ‘But watch out for that Tom, he’s a strutting blue jay, don’t you think? Don’t blue jays have babies everywhere and then leave them to fend for themselves? Or is that grackles? Cowbirds?’ ” Cora isn’t a particularly good mimic, yet Scarlet can hear Lou saying this, the edginess, the whiff of sarcasm a
lways there in her voice.
“Addie’d correct her,” Cora goes on. “ ‘No, no,’ she’d say. ‘Cowbirds are brood parasites. Which just means they don’t build their own nests. They leave them for someone else to raise.’
“And then one of us would make that silly joke about phoebes. ‘For phoebes! They leave them for the phoebes!’ ” Cora’s eyes are dancing now, glittering. “ ‘Phoebes are acceptors!’ And we’d all cackle then because of course at Burnham there was a girl named Phoebe we didn’t like, and so we all scribbled that down in our notes right away the day Tom said it in a lecture, and then after that, every time we saw that poor girl—well, I say ‘poor girl,’ but really she was a horrible snob, truly a nasty person, it was more her nastiness that bothered us than her reputation for sleeping with everyone on the football team—every time we saw her, we’d whisper, ‘Phoebes are acceptors—oh yes, phoebes are acceptors!’
“And then we’d howl. Just like a pack of twelve-year-olds or something. Good Lord.” She laughs a little sadly and wipes her eyes.
Scarlet smiles; she has heard this story many times, and she’s always loved it—this image of Addie and her friends being trivial and petty, human. A side of Addie she rarely saw. The whole idea of Tom as a strutting jay is mysterious to her, though. Scarlet has always been puzzled by this view of her father, the notion that he was the restless one, the one prone to wander. An Irish rover. That seems to have been his image, in lots of people’s eyes, but it’s always seemed to her that it was Addie who grew restless, not Tom.
Cora is staring at the table, still picturing the past. “Of course at this point Lou would be off and running, making some off-color joke of some kind, something about cowbirds and deadbeat dads. Something racist or something, you know, faking a Southern drawl. ‘Down where ah come from they like to say the cowbirds live over there, over on that side of the tracks.’ As if she lived in the heart of Alabama or something, instead of the suburbs of Washington.
In Hovering Flight Page 4