The Snow Geese

by William Fiennes

  Homesickness. I’d never thought myself prone to homesickness. Even when I was eight years old and first going to boarding school, I hadn’t been especially homesick. There was too much of the new to keep you distracted, to keep the mind off the charms and comforts of home. But I can remember how excitement mounted in the last days of term, how the mood picked up, our senses whetted by the imminence of return, so that when Mr Faulkner read us The Snow Goose (his long legs crossed at the ankles, the school’s large white clock just visible through the high windows, like a full moon) you could feel a charged, febrile restlessness in the classroom, a quickening like static electricity. It was invigorating, the prospect of going home; it actually gave you energy. We whispered, fidgeted, passed notes, grated our chair legs on the wooden floor. But Mr Faulkner lost himself in the Great Marsh. He didn’t seem to notice when the electric bell rang the end of a period. He kept on reading, persisting to the end of one paragraph, then another. He went on reading about Rhayader, the abandoned lighthouse, the retreat from Dunkirk and the migrations of geese, until the hubbub and clatter forced him to concede, and he marked his place with a tasselled bookmark, stowed the book in his ragged leather briefcase, and told us, wearily, we could go.

  We could go. With this, Mr Faulkner acknowledged our restlessness and signalled release. But that restlessness was nothing compared to the longing I experienced when I fell ill. In hospital, after Christmas, the desire to go home was more powerful even than the desire to be well. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish one desire from the other. I waited for the doctors to tell me I could go home. Whenever doctors came into the ward, even doctors I’d never seen before (anyone in a white coat, with the pincer earpieces of a stethoscope protruding from a front pocket), my hopes lifted. I thought, You are going to tell me I can go home. And when, finally, my mother and father drove me back to the ironstone house, after dark, with a cushion tucked in under the seatbelt strap to guard the wound in my abdomen, I felt the grip of my anxieties loosen, I felt calm and lightened, as if I’d just been handed a reprieve.

  In 1688, observing that homesickness lacked a medical designation, a physician from Mühlhausen named Johannes Hofer proposed that it should be known by the term nostalgia, which he had derived from the Greek words nostos, meaning ‘return’, and algos, meaning ‘suffering’ – ‘so that thus far it is possible from the force of the sound Nostalgia to define the sad mood originating from the desire to return to one’s native land’. For Hofer, homesickness was a serious disease whose symptoms were ‘continued sadness, meditation only on the Fatherland, disturbed sleep either wakeful or continuous, decrease of strength, hunger, thirst, senses diminished, and cares or even palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, also stupidity of the mind – attending to nothing hardly, other than an idea of the Fatherland.’

  As an illustration, Hofer described the case of ‘a certain country girl’ who was taken to hospital after a fall. ‘She lay prostrate,’ he reported, ‘without consciousness or movement for several days.’ When the girl came to, finding herself ‘handled about among the wrangling and querulous old women’, she promptly fell victim to homesickness. She refused to eat, spitting out food and medicines. ‘Especially,’ wrote Hofer, ‘she wailed frequently, groaning nothing else than “Ich will heim; Ich will heim,” nor responding anything else to questions other than this same “Ich will heim.” Finally, therefore, her parents allowed that she be brought home, terribly weak, where within a few days she got wholly well, entirely without the aid of medicine.’

  Hofer saw that homesickness was an individual’s response to a double challenge, a reaction not just to the loss of things you loved or took for granted in your old environment, but also to the strangeness of things you encountered in the new – ‘the changed manners of living’, the foreign climate, the food, ‘and various other troublesome accidents’. As far as treatment was concerned, Hofer stressed the importance of keeping the mind occupied by something other than home – the need for companions ‘by whom the imagination of the patient is distracted from that persistent idea’. In addition, he recommended cephalicum, mercury, opium, oil of hyoscyamus, purging pills, diaphoretic and stomachic mixtures, external cephalic balsams, and internal hypnotic emulsions to ease the sufferer’s perpetual worries and spread a sense of warmth.

  Above all, hope of returning home should be given. And if these measures had no effect, Hofer said that ‘the patient should be taken away however weak and feeble, without delay, whether by a travelling carriage with four wheels, or by sedan chair, or by any other means. For certainly up to this time it has been proved by many examples that all those thus sent away had become convalescent either in the journey itself or immediately after the return to the native land; and on the contrary, many for whom means were lacking for a return to the native land, had gradually, with spirits exhausted, breathed out their life, and others had even fallen into delirium and finally mania itself.’

  When Hofer’s thesis was first published, it was widely believed that nostalgia only afflicted the Swiss. In German the condition was known as Schweizerkrankheit – the Swiss disease. In 1705, the Swiss physician J. J. Scheuchzer attributed nostalgia to the increase in atmospheric pressure experienced by these mountain-dwellers whenever they descended to the lowlands. Scheuchzer recommended that sufferers should be encouraged to return home immediately. If that were not possible, they should be sure to climb a nearby mountain or tower.

  As more reports emerged, the idea that only the Swiss were susceptible to nostalgia was gradually discredited. A footnote added to a 1779 edition of Hofer’s thesis observed: ‘The Scots, particularly the Highlanders, are also frequently assailed by homesickness, and the sound of the bagpipes which is very common among them can suddenly arouse this condition.’ In a 1975 paper, ‘Nostalgia: a “forgotten” psychological disorder’, George Rosen refers to a treatise on military medicine published in 1754 by De Meyserey, physician-in-ordinary to the king of France, formerly a doctor in the royal armies in Italy and Germany. De Meyserey, observing how often nostalgia was brought on by tedium or vexations, emphasized the importance of keeping any soldier who showed signs of homesickness busy, diverted, occupied by tasks or vigorous activity. He recommended medications that would allow the blood and humours to circulate more easily. And, like Hofer, he insisted that, if these measures were not successful, the nostalgic patient should be allowed to go home, or at least be given hope of returning home.

  It seems strange that nostalgia should have been so uniquely associated with the Swiss, when one of the founding works of European literature depicted so vividly the nostalgia of a Greek. When the reader of Homer’s Odyssey first encounters Odysseus on Calypso’s island, he is exhibiting symptoms which Hofer or De Meyserey would quickly recognize: sitting alone on a headland, gazing out over the sea, ‘wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish’, pining for Ithaca – his loved ones, his high-roofed house, his native land. He spends his nights with Calypso, his days alone, sitting on the shore, ‘weeping for his foiled journey home’. Later, he addresses those gathered in the hall of King Alcinous:

  ‘How much I have suffered . . . Oh just let me see my lands, my serving-men and the grand high-roofed house – then I can die in peace.’

  All burst into applause,

  urging passage home for their newfound friend, his pleading rang so true.

  The Odyssey is only one of a whole collection of ancient Greek stories (the Nostoi, or ‘Returns’) which describe the difficult journeys of a character or group of characters back to their homeland, especially the return of Greek heroes from Troy. These stories endure because the pleading rings true: the reader understands the strength of the longing for home, and appreciates the deep affront of anything that foils or obstructs the journey back. ‘Sunny Ithaca is my home,’ Odysseus tells King Alcinous.

  ‘Mine is a rugged land but good for raising sons – and I myself, I know no sweeter sight on earth than a man’s own native country.’ />
  *

  AT SAND LAKE, snow geese had gathered on the ice in a great assembly. Even Michael was bewildered: he’d never seen anything like it.

  ‘Two hundred thousand geese,’ he said. ‘More even. Two hundred and fifty thousand.’

  We stood at the edge of the lake. Small groups of Canada geese kept to the gold fringe of cattail and phrags. The ice was covered with snow geese: a thick-sown crop of white necks, right across the lake. Goose calls resounded in the ice, as if the hollow, metallic din were trapped inside it. Sorties of geese took flight from the assembly; squads returned from nearby fields, coasting down on bowed wings and settling in the midst of the gaggle. Suddenly, the flock took wing, an audience breaking into applause. It was as if the ice itself had exploded – almost a surprise to see the hard, blue-blotched plane intact beneath the birds. The flock seethed, rolling back and forth on itself, its shadow roiling like a turbulence on the ice below. The applause deepened to the sound of trains thundering through tunnels. Scarves of glitter furled through the flock when drifts of birds turned their backs and white wings to the sun, and sometimes the entire sky was lit with shimmer, as if a silver, sequinned dress were rippling beneath a mirrorball, the sounds of goose calls and beating wings pounding the ice below. With binoculars I tried to follow individual birds through the pandemonium. I witnessed collisions – caroms and buffetings of blue-phase and white-phase snows, one bird’s heft glancing off another’s, the O of my binoculars a frenzy of black-tipped wings. Then, as before, the first birds settled on the ice, followed by others, each goose taking its place, the gaggle reforming bird by bird, the roar diminishing, until the whole flock, more geese than there are words in this book, was spread before us on Sand Lake.

  ‘There’s a group of them in the open water at the south end of the lake,’ Michael said. ‘Maybe forty thousand geese. If you park at Columbia Dam and creep through the phrags you might be able to get right up close to them.’

  I drove to the dam and parked the Topaz behind a stand of elms. I walked through bromegrass towards the phrags. I could hear snow geese on the far side of the rushes, a low drone, ornamented by the grace notes of individual birds. The bright, straw-yellow phrags were seven or eight feet tall; each one had a feathery seedhead that brandished more than its fair share of sunlight. I stepped carefully through the rushes, trying not to make a sound, knowing that snow geese startle easily. The phrags thinned out, and I saw the geese, about twenty yards away. There were both blue-phase and white-phase snows, and a few of the smaller Ross’s geese, which have the same plumage as white-phase snows, but shorter necks, and stubby, triangular bills. A few ducks, mallard and scaup, floated among the geese.

  I crept forward through the phrags, as close as I dared. The seedheads glowed above me: it was a thicket of light. I didn’t want to disturb the snow geese. Some of them had their necks up; they were just drifting, looking around. Others were sleeping, their necks turned and tucked down between folded wings, resting in the cradle of the back, as if the goose were both the nest and the bird inside it. Pairs and threesomes took off from the water; others came down to join the flock. The seedheads of the phrags quavered and sighed when wind blew across them. I stood still, watching the birds. Then I retraced my steps through the rushes and bromegrass to the stand of elms, hearing the chatter of the geese going on behind me. I got into the Topaz and drove back to Aberdeen.

  *

  SOME AFTERNOONS I’d drive back to Aberdeen and sit reading or writing in Dally’s Dining Lounge on Logan Street. Dally’s was glass-fronted: the word Dally’s was engraved on the streetside glass in an ornate, slanting script. Customers took one step up from the street into a glass porch, then pushed open a glass door, surprisingly heavy, most people putting their shoulders to it. Inside were red leatherette booths, sprung like mattresses; a long counter with a row of stools; four slow-turning wooden ceiling fans; and, on the walls, black and white photographs of Aberdeen before the war: stanchioned streetlamps; men wearing cloth hats and coveralls; imposing, civic-minded clocks. Behind the counter was a cold cabinet of cheesecakes and deep-dish blueberry, pecan, cherry, lemon meringue and rhubarb pies, with tilted mirrors allowing patrons a bird’s-eye view of the pies. There was a stainless steel Bunn-O-Matic coffee urn; a Silver King Imperial milk dispenser with a sticker on the front saying, A Sign of Class . . . Milk in a Glass; and platters of muffins and cinnamon rolls under scuffed Perspex domes.

  The waitresses, Misti and Crystal, were in their twenties. They wore green-and-white-striped work frocks. Crystal had black hair furled in a bun at the crown; Misti’s bleached-blonde curls tumbled off the escarpments of her shoulder-pads. They passed orders through a hatch to an invisible chef, and drank the dregs of milkshakes straight from the blender, priests knocking back the last of the communion wine.

  Dally’s closed every day at six o’clock. Misti and Crystal began to clean up at about half past five. Instead of wiping the surfaces with cloths, they pulled on pairs of wide, padded cloth mitts. The mitts lent the cleaning an intimate character. Misti cleaned the red pommels of the stools as if she were walking down a line of boys, ruffling their hair. Crystal wiped the tables with long, smooth strokes, as if she were grooming ponies. They caressed the Bunn-O-Matic with such tenderness it seemed the prelude to an embrace, and rubbed the Silver King as if a genie lived inside it. The mitts transformed the work into a ritual of solicitude that bordered on the sensual.

  One afternoon, not long before mitt time, there was an almighty crash. Everyone in Dally’s looked up to see a tall man walking straight through the glass door, mistaking it for open air, falling to the floor in a debris of chips and shards. He lay motionless in the glass debris. He had grey hair, held in place by pomade. A baseball cap, dislodged by the fall, lay upturned next to his head. Misti and Crystal ran over to him. The man moved his hand. The first thing he did was reach out for the baseball cap. Then he raised his head. There was blood on his forehead. He put the cap back on: it said, Culprit – America’s Favorite Fishing Lures. Misti and Crystal protested when he began to heave himself to his feet. There was a chinking as bits of glass fell from his arms and shoulders.

  ‘Whew!’ he said. ‘That was quite an entrance!’

  Misti took his elbow and led him to a booth like a blind man.

  ‘I think we should call an ambulance,’ she said to Crystal.

  ‘You don’t need to do that,’ the man said. ‘I’m OK. I’m a little shaken, but nothing’s broken. If I could just bother you for a tissue or something for this cut here.’

  ‘Would you like some coffee, sir?’ Crystal asked.

  ‘Just a glass of water, thank you,’ he said.

  We all watched him closely, as though he were about to topple.

  ‘My apologies for this rude interruption,’ he said. ‘That was a stupid thing. A stupid thing to do. I’m sorry. Dumb as a sack of hammers. Straight through a door. Thought it was open. That was a stupid thing to do.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Misti asked. ‘We could get you an ambulance.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll just sit here a moment. My, those windows are clearer than air!’

  ‘We shouldn’t clean them so well, right?’ said Crystal.

  ‘Right!’ the man said. He held a tissue to his forehead. He brought it down and saw the blood on it. He shook his head.

  ‘Dumb as a sack of hammers,’ he said.

  Misti had fetched a broom and was sweeping up the glass around the door. Crystal had pulled the mitts back on; she was buffing the Bunn-O-Matic.

  ‘I ought to go home,’ the man said, standing up slowly. ‘I’m no use anywhere else! What do I owe you for the window?’

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Misti said.

  ‘All right then. I’m going home.’

  The tongue of his belt hung loose from the buckle, lolling like a dog’s tongue. He lifted the Culprit cap and smoothed his hair back with two brisk sweeps. He walked out through the
door, which now was open air, and took care on the step down to Logan Street. Misti and Crystal set to cleaning again. Lights sparkled in the metal and plastic surfaces, commending the work of the women’s hands.

  *

  WINDS BLEW HARD from the south in the first week of April. Snow geese began to leave the prairie sloughs of South Dakota, sailing north on the tailwind. I saw them from the window of Michael’s pickup as we drove west from Sand Lake on a dirt road across the Dakota Plain. The flocks were hurtling: earlier, driving north, Michael had seen geese flying above him, outracing the car.

  ‘That wind’s so strong,’ he said. ‘The geese hitch a ride on it. It’s a free gift. They just hold out a wing and raft right into Canada.’

  Globes of tumbleweed bowled across the track, northwards. On both sides, tracts of prairie were ploughed, cropped to stubble, or left as grassland. Wind blew the fine loessial topsoil from fall-tilled fields. The tilth rose in dark, north-drifting clouds like the smoke off stubble burns; dust-devils spun out of it like dervishes. Michael turned on the headlights when we entered a soil cloud.

  ‘He tilled that and tilled that last fall and left no cover on it,’ Michael said. ‘And that’s the most productive soil. That’s bad farming in just about every way you can think of. Sometimes you can’t believe the things people do. And that soil blowing off is probably filling the road ditch full of dirt also.’