The Patch

by John McPhee

  Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara has announced that the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation is going to build by far the biggest airplane ever designed. The C-5A, as it is called, weighs three hundred and fifty tons. In 1948, when the B-36 was introduced, newspapers printed scale drawings that showed Orville Wright’s plane taking off from one wing of the B-36 and landing on the other, a hundred and twenty feet away—a hundred and twenty feet being the distance of the first controlled flight. A flight the length of Orville Wright’s could occur inside the C-5A. The great nose of the plane swings up and open, on hinges, like the visor of a knight’s helmet. It allows more cargo room within the fuselage, which is two hundred and thirty-six feet long, and the plane can be taxied with its visor open. Large buses could drive into the plane two at a time. Six of them could fit inside with space to spare. Its engines are so big that one of the pods they fit into could easily be converted into a cottage. The plane itself is so big that when the pilot pulls on the control stick, there will be no immediate perceptible response. Many seconds later, the nose will start to rise.

  THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, a notion was a thought. This meaning endures, but now the word also signifies all the miscellaneous objects on department-store notions counters. It is uncertain how this small fork in a minor etymological stream came to exist, but it is possible that John Locke created it all by himself when he wrote, in 1690, “Essences of the Species of mix’d Modes are by a more particular Name call’d Notions.” Locke was thus not only a father of modern democratic government but also a father of modern retailing, for Notions Departments are what make department stores go. The theory is that customers drawn in by the essences of the species of mixed modes on the main floor will proceed to higher floors and more ambitious purchases.

  Notions, in the world of American retailing, were once pins, needles, ribbons, buttons, bows, and related products. Pins, in the United States, were first made in Rhode Island, and out from there went Yankee peddlers, who became known as notions peddlers, and who sold needles, pots, pins, and pans in villages across New England and, eventually, on the frontier. A standard opening used by a peddler was “Can I suit ye today, ma’am? I’ve all sorts of notions.” After 1849, “notions vessels”—bazaars afloat—began appearing in San Francisco and elsewhere on the California coast. In the nineteenth century, the notion to end all notions was the bustle. An 1888 issue of Fabrics, Fancy Goods and Notions described one bustle as being made of muslin-covered wires that “cross each other to form an excellent spring, allowing the bustle to close easily as the wearer is seated, and promptly resuming its shape upon arising.” By the eighteen-nineties, notions counters had become standard features of stores everywhere in the country. Some pins and needles can still be found on notions counters, but notions today are anything at all that will sell—preferably items with some sort of real or pretended novelty. Notions buyers have become the biggest barracudas in the department-store world. When something really good comes along in, say, Housewares, a Housewares buyer who tries to get near it will probably be chewed up by the superfish from Notions.

  I WENT DOWN to Washington to observe the ritual distribution of fifty thousand dollars to six civil servants—tax-free, and with scarcely a string attached. The money was venerable, as money goes, not the sort that is tossed around in packets. It had once belonged to John D. Rockefeller III and had been further aged on the books of Princeton University. Rockefeller and Princeton have been doing this for twenty years. Rockefeller felt so sorry for civil servants during the era of the witch hunts that he sought a way to stimulate their morale, and since not even John D. Rockefeller can just hand cash to a public servant without setting off a sprinkler system somewhere, he gave Princeton stewardship of the money and asked the university to set up a program to select recipients. Virtually unknown outside the government, the awards carry more prestige (and far more money) than any other award given to members of the Civil Service. Departments nag for them, compete like football teams. Defense will call up Princeton, flash a little first-strike capability, and ask after the chances of this or that Defenseman. Commerce buzzes analogously. State skips diplomacy. Meanwhile, hundreds of letters have gone out from the university to people in and around the government, asking for detailed nominations. Anyone at all can write a nominating letter without being asked. The result is a list of about a hundred and twenty-five nominees a year—the best among the people Franklin Roosevelt described as having “a passion for anonymity.”

  Luna Leopold, as a recipient, seems particularly to epitomize what the Rockefeller awards are about: the singling out of a government worker of no nonsense and stunning competence, the strong suggestion that he is not unique but one of a kind, the concomitant revelation that someone is noticing, even cheering, what he is doing. Leopold, of the United States Geological Survey, is a hydrologist, a world authority on river mechanics—a name from an inner page of a newspaper, if ever there at all. With a single report, though, he may have saved the Everglades. Dark, tall, a falcon, he appears to have been stolen from a wall in the Prado. He knew just why he was being honored. “It is a good thing Rockefeller is doing,” he said, over drinks. “No one in the middle echelon actually thinks that he himself will get the award, but the fact that someone gets it makes everyone feel his job is more important. The public has lost confidence in government and in people who work for the government. Rockefeller is saying that somebody thinks federal service is a good thing. There’s a hell of a lot of good work done in the government.”

  A winner once went straight to the nearest dealer and bought a Cadillac. Rockefeller could not care less what happens to the money, as long as the winners keep working for the government. Before being confirmed by Princeton’s trustees, they are asked to declare that they have no immediate plans to retire. That is the one string attached.

  I GUARDED HIM once in a while in the noon basketball game in Dillon Gym. He didn’t go to his left, and he didn’t go to his right, but he easily managed to get off shots. The cigar may have helped him, the blown smoke. The cigar crazed me on the tennis court as well. We played regularly through the summers, and he was better than I was eight times out of ten. As I struggled against him and went down to defeat, in the middle of his face there was always that stump—contemptuous, glowing. If the cigar disappeared, I felt a shiver in the bones, knowing I was playing over my head.

  One very hot summer evening, near dusk, while Jadwin Gymnasium was under construction, I called his house, and asked for him, and his wife said, “He isn’t here. He’s down at the new gym.” The new gym was a large hole in the ground, girders rising. “The what?” I said. And she said, “The new gym. He goes there every night. He communes with the new gym. If he has to be away from town, he sends one of us.”

  I dropped whatever I’d been doing, bought two sixteen-ounce cans, drove to what is now the Jadwin parking lot, and walked in the half-light toward the skeleton of steel. He was sitting on the retaining wall between Caldwell Field House and the construction site. As I approached him and sat down beside him, he neither looked at me nor said a word. I handed him a can and he opened it. He continued to say nothing. He just gazed into the interior of the future gym. I was not about to speak, I can tell you. If anybody broke his silence, he was going to do it, not me. For a very long time, he said nothing and he never glanced my way. It could have been half an hour. The sky was all but dark. Finally, without turning his head, he said, “Can you imagine putting a bad basketball team in there?”

  I told that story to Dan White, who used it as the opening anecdote in his 1978 book, Play to Win: A Profile of Princeton Basketball Coach Pete Carril.

  One year, a basketball player submitted an adroitly written and charming essay in application for my spring-semester writing course, which would begin on February 1st. I picked up the telephone and called Pete.

  “One of your basketball players has applied to my course and I’d like to take him but it’s an all-afternoon seminar and I’m not going
to take him if he has to get up and leave and go to the gym.”

  In Pete’s only tone of voice—his gust-driven toad baritone—he broke in and said, “What’s his name? What’s his name?”

  “Matthew Henshon.”

  “He can do it. He can do it. What time does your class end?”

  “Four-twenty.”

  “He can do it. What’s more—let me tell you—if that fucking kid ever walks out early, if he ever misses so much as one minute of your class, he will never play another minute of basketball for Princeton.”

  Henshon was a starter on a championship team.

  Now that I no longer play tennis, I see Pete much less often, and therefore look forward all the more to talking with him and catching up with him on the long fast walks we sometimes do together from Jadwin. Evidently, he looks forward to these occasions, too. As we go down the towpath, he has earphones on his head and listens to bullfight music.

  My editor Bob Bingham called me at home and said that a friend of his at Vogue had asked him to see if I would write a very short piece on birds for a very long sum of money. I said I knew nothing at all about birds, they had the wrong man. Bingham said, “We mustn’t let the money out of the family.” I reemphasized my lack of qualifications. Bingham said, “Just interview me.” I said, “O.K.,” and added, graspingly, “if you’ll accept half.” We talked for a time and I recorded what he said. I figured if I was going to take half the money, I had to contribute something, however briefly. Plumbing my memory for a personal lead, I began, as follows, to write.

  SITTING IN A CANOE on a small, wild lake in the northernmost part of New Hampshire, I saw a bird leave the shore. I could not tell what it was, but from a distance it seemed to have the configuration of a gull. It was flying low over the water, and directly toward me, like a Grumman Avenger making a run. It had no more than two feet of altitude. Without swerving, it came steadily on, with an obvious sense of target. The distance closed to a hundred yards. Fifty. Twenty-five. God knows what the creature thought the boat was, or what I was, but a collision was now imminent, and I raised my arms in self-defense. Suddenly the bird lifted its head, spread its wings, and, with its body straight up, stopped dead in the air. A huge pair of eyes. In them, a look of miscalculation. An owl. We stared at each other, faces a foot apart. With a whip of wings, it was overhead and gone.

  As soon as I could, I got to a telephone and called my bird-watcher. He said it was too bad that the owl had chosen someone who might not sufficiently appreciate the encounter. That was true enough, for I suffer from a kind of congenital opacity to birds. My wife knows and loves birds. I have many friends who know birds. I have long felt somewhat guilty that I lack not only knowledge but also understanding of birds, and of what draws people to them. My bird-watcher is a business associate of mine whose name is Robert Bingham. I have never understood him, either. I began, some time ago, to try to draw out of him the essence of what makes him watch.

  Mr. Bingham is a tall, rufous man with unsuspicious eyes. He has the ample sort of mustache that all creation, even a bird, would trust; and he has thought deeply on the pleasures and advantages of bird-watching. “One might as well be blunt about it and concede that the entire enterprise is redolent of sexuality,” he said. “The voyeurism is embarrassingly obvious. I mean your stealth, your luck, and a couple of ground lenses can bring you into a secret intimacy with some of the most beautiful, graceful, and sensual beings in nature. The perspective is unreal—it’s as if you were up there on a branch among the leaves with them, and you cease to be your earthbound self entirely for a bright, timeless flight as you strain to catch one more glimpse of the golden-crowned kinglet darting through the conifers. Did I really see that crimson streak running through the yellow cap, or did I imagine it? The excitement can be compared only to that I experienced as a fourteen-year-old gulping my way through Lady Chatterley’s Lover, looking for the dirty parts. And yet the fantasy is of an exquisitely purer intensity—the eroticism of angels, not of thrashing animals on the ground. If I were to become a bird in some reincarnation, I would choose to be a cardinal. The cardinal is a rather common fellow, actually—a run-of-the-mill suburban-commuter type, despite the bright red suit. But have you ever looked closely at his wife? Damnably attractive, to my way of thinking. Just my type. A simple but superbly tailored dress in a kind of bronze color with a warmth that grows on you the more you look at it. A stylish long tail, with which she lets you know that, while she comes from an old family and went to the best schools, there’s plenty of spirit to her. And those lips! A luscious orange you can scarcely believe is natural. They have a nice pouting fullness to them, without the exaggerated clownishness of her cousins the grosbeaks. Cardinals are very uxorious, you know. Stay together all winter, not just in the breeding season. I can see why. A few weeks ago, I saw a couple giving each other pumpkin seeds at one of my feeders. Sexiest performance I’ve ever seen.”

  Mr. Bingham insists that he is “a more or less average bird-watcher” and that a review of his motivations might go far toward explaining what makes people in general stand around in the woods with field glasses, trying to add to their life lists. There are more than six hundred bird species known on the North American continent. With “accidentals” and subspecies, seven hundred and two are listed in Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds—a standard text that, for many, has been supplanted by the Golden Press’s Birds of North America. Fanatics, the sort who go out at the height of the migration to do a “century run” (one hundred birds in a day), have been able to do six hundred or more in one year.

  I once asked Mr. Bingham how long his life list was.

  He said, “I will not say. I deplore competitiveness.”

  “In what sense, then, are you an average bird-watcher?”

  “Well, for example, with a field guide in hand, I can probably differentiate half a dozen of the warblers when they are in full breeding plumage in the spring. To me, they are the most glorious objects of the hunt. The black-and-white has a natty salt-and-pepper topcoat, for instance; the magnolia has black spots down a splendid yellow vest. But I am completely lost among what even the guidebooks call ‘confusing fall warblers,’ who have suited up and shed their mating plumage and look all alike.”

  “How long have you been birding, Mr. Bingham?”

  “I find the word ‘birding’ affected. It is used by new-style ecologically minded counterculture participants who, being ashamed of the prissiness of all the little old ladies in tennis shoes who preceded them, feel they have to talk tough about what they are doing. They make me uncomfortable. I’m as determined as the next nature lover that our rivers shall be pure, our air uncontaminated, and our primeval forests preserved from brutish developers. But, somehow, the romantic escapism of bird-watching has been driven out by all the new ecological zeal. The last time I went on a bird walk, it was led by a perfectly wonderful young man who spent most of his time talking about solid-waste disposal.”

  “How long have you been bird-watching, Mr. Bingham?”

  “I came to it fairly late—that is, in my thirties—after a lifetime of ridiculing bird-watchers. It was during a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, where the Chilmark Community Center sponsored bird walks every Monday morning. I had heard that the leader of the walks, Edward Chalif, could lead his groups past no-trespassing signs to parts of the island a casual visitor would never see. That first Monday morning I was completely entranced. I mean, it was as if I had discovered that a whole other world—of beautiful, sentient beings—was superimposed on the familiar world I had been living in for thirty-some years. I could suddenly see it, almost get into it—into another dimension of experience that I might otherwise have missed entirely. I was shown three warblers that I hadn’t known existed. Chalif taught me the devices by which I attract birds to come to me, instead of footing it aimlessly through the woods after them. What I do is first make a noise like a hunting screech owl, then make a noise like a hurt baby robin. If
done well and in a promising neighborhood, the act brings them flocking in by the dozens to find out what the hell is going on. The owl noise is made by getting a fair amount of spit collected in the mouth on top of the tongue, tilting the head back, and whistling low several times. The hurt-baby-robin noise is made by kissing the back of your own hand vigorously.”

  “Have there been triumphs in your bird-watching career?”

  “There is a large tree outside my kitchen windows in Dobbs Ferry. Into the bark, I press suet and other meat fat during the winter. One morning, as I walked into the kitchen to put the kettle on for coffee, an immense woodpecker—unmistakably the pileated—flapped its way across the yard and landed on the tree for breakfast. I did not dare cry out the news to my family for fear of scaring the bird away; but when I had quietly summoned my wife, three children, and a Newfoundland dog, the pileated woodpecker was still there. I once positively identified a razor-billed auk sporting in the waves off the inlet to Lake Tashmoo on Martha’s Vineyard, the day before I was to leave the island. I called Eddie Chalif to tell him about it. A year later, I heard Chalif tell a group that he had once been able to take thirty people to see a razor-billed auk off Lake Tashmoo—on the basis of a tip he had received the summer before from a man whose name he couldn’t remember.”