by Cheryl Peck
Perhaps I feel perpetual guilt around my father because I did not become the daughter he wanted me to be. I don’t even know what he wanted me to be. Probably not a lesbian. I’m guessing not a writer who twists his life to her own point of view and displays it like a movie on a theater wall for all of her friends to see. I could have grown up, married a decent man, had a couple of kids and quit pushing him into experiences he never imagined would touch his life. Perhaps he doesn’t feel that way at all. When we were kids, our whole family went over to his parents’ farm almost every weekend. After his father died, our family— and his sisters’ families—had breakfast with Grandma nearly every Sunday morning. This outing to see the cranes is the first breakfast he and I have had together in over six months.
But first we took him shopping.
The Jasper Pulaski State Fish and Wildlife Area is about forty miles south of Michigan City, Indiana. Michigan City may be famous for any number of reasons, but the people I know go there to shop at the outlet mall or gamble on the floating casino. It used to be that the boat actually left the dock and floated out onto Lake Michigan, but it docked permanently a few years ago. As soon as Rae realized we were going anywhere near Michigan City she made plans to stop at the outlet mall and replenish her jeans. She needs four pairs of jeans to live comfortably: wear and tear had taken her favorites and wounded another pair.
My father does not shop. He’s a good sport—he would probably do anything we suggested, maintaining a pleasant demeanor as long as he possibly could—but I could tell by watching him that spending a day buying damaged or outdated goods was something of a mystery to him. The last I knew he bought his jeans at a truck stop because he stopped there to eat and the jeans were on the rack on the way out. He followed us around the mall and eventually bought a CD by Faith Hill, which is more than he buys on most shopping trips.
Then—since we were there and since we still had some time to kill before we needed to get to the park—we went to the gambling boat. My Beloved, suspecting he had never been gambling, thought it would be an adventure for him.
On our way to the boat, however, we took a wrong turn and wound up in the marina, which let us discover the pier and the beach. In November the only takers at the volleyball nets were teams of seagulls. Angry white-capped waves rolled up to take the shore. Still, part of my father will always be in the winds over Lake Michigan. I sensed him grow taller, stronger as he and I ambled down the beach. We both pulled out cameras and vied for shots of the lighthouse. Impossible shots from too far away, to match a hundred more old lighthouse shots buried in drawers at home, but we are water people. Displayed prominently on his wall at home, nestled in among posed shots of his children, is the photograph I took of his favorite fishing spot, buoy #2 in Tawas Bay, Lake Huron. It has never seemed odd to any of us to share our wall of honor with a buoy.
This love of water, however, does not necessarily extend to floating gambling.
I believe my father is the founder and true believer of the Too Good to Be True Club. I remember as a kid excitedly showing him that we had just won a $1,000,000 from Publishers Clearing House—all we had to do was send a card back and we would be rich. It became immediately clear to me that my father did not believe we even deserved to get something for nothing, much less that we were likely to soon. The con artists who prey on the elderly would have their work cut out for them, trying to part my father from his money. As we walked into the jangling cacophony of the riverboat he stayed close enough to my elbow to all but touch me. I could see his eyes traveling the room, a stranger on the wrong planet, surrounded by people who deliberately risked losing money for entertainment. I didn’t even try to get him to gamble his own money, but I thought if I put mine in, he might play for a while. We started with the dollar machines, but I realized almost immediately that I was never going to be able to keep my father actively throwing good money after bad for an hour, so we traded down to quarter machines and then to nickel machines. I gave him a wad of change and he gambled until he lost it. But then he wasn’t interested in losing any more of my money and he certainly wasn’t going to waste his own.
I hunted up my friends and advised them we had exhausted this entertainment adventure. I still had three one-dollar tokens in my hand, so instead of cashing them in I figured I might as well gamble them away. This turned out to be problematic because— when I made it down to the last one—that one won five more, and a few spins later I had fifteen one-dollar tokens.
I thought to myself, “You know—at this rate. …”
But I am my father’s daughter, and I don’t believe I’ll ever make my fortune gambling on a riverboat, however tempting the dream may be. I cashed out.
The Jasper Pulaski State Fish and Wildlife Area is in the center of what was once the Kankakee Marsh. Over a million acres of wetlands. Around the turn of the century, mankind, in our infinite wisdom, drained it and turned into farmland. I know almost nothing about the area except that it is the largest staging area for migrating sandhill cranes east of the Mississippi River. I was more familiar with the Phyllis Haehnle Sanctuary in Jackson County, Michigan, and the nearby Baker Sanctuary in Calhoun County. Haehnle is the largest staging area in Michigan. It is the first place where I watched cranes fly in from the fields in the evening. A large wetland all but inaccessible to human beings, it can be seen from the side of a hill about half a mile from the cranes themselves. When the weather is just right and there aren’t many people around, you can sit on the bench on the hill at Haehnle and four or five cranes will fly in about twelve feet over your head. You can hear the wind in their wings. This is as close as I have ever come to experiencing true spirituality.
Whenever I talked to veteran birders about Haehnle, they would say, “You have to go to Jasper Pulaski.”
Haehnle is a sanctuary owned by Audubon and it caters to preservationists: Jasper Pulaski feels more like a hunting camp. Visitors are reminded more than once that the fine viewing tower, as well as the land itself, was built and is maintained through revenue from sportsmen. One senses the controversy over killing for sport is never far from the surface at Jasper Pulaski.
The viewing area is a huge tower where visitors can stand to look over several hundred acres of green field. We arrived in the late afternoon. We had seen perhaps eleven cranes feeding in the fields on the way to the wildlife area and I was beginning to feel depressed. We had spent the whole day trying to get there, and there was not much to suggest that any cranes were anywhere near us. When we got there, there were perhaps a hundred cranes standing at the very back of the field, near what appeared to be a ditch or what my people would call a “crick.”
Not that far from the viewing tower there was one juvenile crane, all alone. The same conversation floated along the tower from one group of people to the next. He’s been there all day—he never went out to the field … He’s probably sick … I wonder where his parents are … I wonder what’s wrong with him? I wonder if his parents will come back for him … ?
Overhead a string of about eleven cranes flew in, dropped their feet, arched their wings, and floated to the ground like milkweed seeds.
As the sun began to set its residual warmth began to fade with the light. Ribbons of cranes appeared over the treetops and drifted in from the east, the north, the west and the south. Sometimes as many as two or three hundred cranes would be visible in the sky at once, strung along in groups of two to fifty, all headed for the field. Their call, prehistoric and resonating, cut through the air. The cranes on the ground would call back, as if they were schoolchildren calling to their friends, and more cranes appeared over the horizon …
As more and more cranes flew in, the juvenile would peep to them, as if looking for his parents. Occasionally a group would land not far away from him, stalking Egyptian-like over to check him out, but then they would eventually stalk away … He should have been feeding, storing up energy to trip. Within days his companions would leave for Florida, flying as much as five hu
ndred miles a day, and he would have to be able to keep up or he would perish. The green field stretched out ahead of me steadily filled in with sandhills until it became a sea of gray.
I have never been completely at ease with nature. I understand that if each infant survived the planet would be neck-deep in grasshoppers the first summer. I understand that the strong survive and the weak perish for the good of the species. I understand that the survival of the whole is infinitely more important than the fate of one individual. Still, the randomness of it all disturbs me. Like car-shattered deer on the side of the highway, there are reminders everywhere that this immensely complex and beautiful web of life that surrounds us is utterly indifferent to the fate of any single individual in it. Like the sick juvenile crane, they become absorbed in the flock around them. I lost him eventually, and when I worried about him to my Beloved she said, “Oh, I saw his parents fly in and beak him around the ears and he went off with them—he’s fine.” But will he be strong enough to fly?
Surrounded by birds gliding through the sky I turned to my dad. “Do you like it?” I checked.
And he grinned. Some things he doesn’t need words for.
Cranes have been staging in the fall in the Midwest far longer than my people have wandered down to watch them. Evidence suggests they have always held some mystical fascination for us: prehistoric man carried crane bones around in his medicine bags. Something about that apparently effortless flight, the aloof indifference to us—the steadfast determination to live as far away from human beings as possible—intrigues us. Standing on a tower next to a field and looking up at a sky filled with incoming cranes makes my heart swell. I feel I am touched by history.
As dark fell we walked back to the car and drove home. It was late by the time we got to my house: I checked with my father to see if he was okay to drive the additional hour home, but he assured me he was. I hugged him. He left.
He never mentioned the double vision. Three days later he went to his optometrist, who told him it was not a vision-related problem and he should consult his regular doctor. Within the next week and a half he would have as many as three more strokes, which ultimately blew out the vision in the right side of both eyes and damaged his short-term memory, and he developed some frustrating aphasia for a man who has never talked very much anyway.
As promised, the weather keeps getting colder.
tinker
MY FIRST CLEAR MEMORY of my father is specific, as crisp and immediate as a photograph. I am standing on the burned-out foundation of the garage where he parked his truck and I am looking eye-to-eye at his back tire. He is not there.
He drove a fuel oil delivery truck. Before that—during my lifetime—he tested milk, but apparently he managed this without my supervision. I remember his red-and-white bulk oil truck. I remember hurrying out to the foundation with him each morning and huffing along behind him as he completed his ritual inspection of his rig. His truck is the first solid object I remember appreciating for its size, its density, its irrefutable properties of depth and dimension. I was shorter than the tires. I banged my head walking under the corner of the back bumper. My father was six feet tall and he was in his early twenties when I was a toddler and he walked fast. I went everywhere we went at a dead run. And at each corner of his truck I would find myself scowling at his tire, which was taller than I was, alone, unprotected, utterly abandoned by the one person in the world I wished to be with.
I was annoyed with him. He was not paying adequate attention to my needs. I was my father’s firstborn, but I was not his oldest child. Before I came along to destroy the peaceful symmetry of their lives, my parents had lived quietly with their beloved dog, Tinker. I remember Tinker remarkably well for my age at the time. He had long, silky black-and-white hair that stuck to my fingers for no apparent reason. He had a row of tiny little teeth flanked on each side by great white fangs which spent an inordinate amount of time pushed right up in my face. His chest was three feet wide and rumbled continuously. I never saw my own fingers, when I was a child, because he was always nipping at them and I learned to walk by grabbing his coat and hanging on for dear life while he towed me down the road and tried to sell me to every passing stranger he could find. There was no love lost between Tinker and me. He hated me, and since my parents (apparently) wouldn’t let him eat me, he devoted his short life to standing staunchly, resolutely, I’ll-die-before-I’ll-lose-to-the-likes-of-you determinedly between me and anywhere I wanted to be. When my parents were watching, he guarded me as if I were crusted with the crown jewels.
My mother used to tell me Tinker rode around on the floor-board on the passenger side of our car and whenever she braked too quickly, I would tumble off the seat and land on him. For her, this story demonstrated his devotion to me. Once when she was downtown stopped at a traffic light, two men walked up to her car, one opened her door and one opened mine, and they started to slide in and take us away. Tinker (cowering as he was on the floorboards, trying to duck small, flying children) had apparently had a bad day and those men were the last straw and as he jumped up and expressed his aggravation with the whole situation, both men slid right back out of the car and ran on down the street. “Tinker was very protective of you,” my mother would tell me.
The thing he took the greatest delight in protecting me from was the company of my father.
I am standing at the corner of my father’s truck. I am looking straight into the back tire, which is taller than I am. I used to be walking with my father, but my father has turned the corner and now I am alone.
Almost.
I can hear the triumph in his little dog laugh. I can smell the gloat in his thick, hot dog breath as he flashes those little teeth at my fingers like a disembodied set of clicking jaws, fluttering, snapping everywhere my fingers go to get away from him as he backs me, one angry, frustrated step after another up against the garage wall where I am blocked, the wall behind me, the dog pressed up against me, growling, reminding me that our souls will meet and spar forever on the far side of the coals of Hell …
I have no recollection of ever being bitten.
He knocked me down. He stood on me. He dragged me out to the Suzy House and taught my father’s goat (Suzy) how to knock me over and stand on my shoulder straps so I couldn’t get up, but that is, perhaps, a different story … I have no memory of how my parents came to understand Tinker and I were not friends. I was terrified of dogs for years after my parents finally found him another home and perhaps I was honestly terrified of him. What I remember is being pissed. He tormented me. He was bigger, faster, meaner—a rogue shepherd. Some mutt combination of a border collie and the gatepost, he dedicated every herding instinct he had to making my life miserable.
And my guess would be that I never did a single thing to make that dog resent me. My motives were pure. My conscience is clear.
To this day I can still feel my little fists just buried in all that soft and silky hair.
making jam
LAST SEPTEMBER my father became gravely ill. In October his girlfriend retired early to take him home and care for him, in November he had two valves in his heart replaced, and in December she flew to Alabama to buy a house. My father lives in Michigan. My father has always lived in Michigan. In seventy-six years my father has drifted exactly eleven miles from the farm where he was born. I can only assume she decided that he wasn’t going to drift any farther and if she wanted to move back “home” it was time to go. That, or taking care of my father can be overrated. The summer she left she had her right knee rebuilt, and her sisters—all of whom live conveniently in Alabama—gathered together to make jam.
I know this because the following spring I went down to fetch my father who had drifted to Alabama, and she gave me two jars of jam and told me the story of how they were made. Her two sisters told her to rest her healing knee on a footstool and there she sat, doing what she could, while they fluttered around her and did everything else, and when they were all done, they gave every
third jar of jam to her. I can see this woman sitting quietly on a stool while other women worked around her—I’m suspicious they piled the jars in her lap and made her hold her share, just to keep her down.
I remember my mother canning tomatoes. She once did something to several quarts of concord grapes and every hot summer after that another jar would explode in the basement. We never ate them—they looked like jars of purple eyeballs to us. (We used to add grapes to our mud pies for exactly that reason.) She made strawberry and raspberry jam. In the beginning I think she put up corn and froze green beans and peas, but corn developed a reputation for killing people if it wasn’t done right and she lost confidence. We were not really a green beans and peas sort of family and I think she lost interest in working that hard to preserve food none of her children would eat. We lived on tomato products. We ate goulash and chili and tomato soup and homemade pizza and Spanish rice and meatloaf. We ate so many tomatoes in my family that I developed a passionate craving for white sauce that haunts me to this day. I remember being drafted as a tomato-picker or strawberry-huller or pea-shucker, but if my mother’s sister ever came over to help us I don’t remember it. And it’s possible that my grandmother came over to supervise us as well, but again, I don’t remember it. I remember my mother alone in the kitchen, where she directed little puffs of air at the bangs that fell in her eyes while she scalded an endless supply of large glass jars. In our family putting up food was a solitary sport.
Eventually I moved out of my mother’s house into an apartment of my own, where I immediately noticed a critical shortage of food. Not only was there no store food—there was no “free” food, like homemade jam or canned meat or frozen peas. In my mother’s house I could have survived that sort of deficit for months on end, relying on canned tomatoes alone for sustenance. My new independent apartment was a dismal disappointment. A disappointment nearly as crushing as the day I took my spanking new paycheck to a grocery store and compared it to the price of store-bought jam. It’s possible the first grocery item I ever bought was a jelling substance to distinguish my homemade jam from ice cream sauce.