Lambsquarters

by Barbara McLean

  I wasn’t able to observe as much in this location— which might have been their plan—of the nuance of the courtship, the gestation support, the offerings of bugs and tasty morsels, the recognition of cravings and ravings as they prepared for parenthood. I was vigilant in my concern though, for now they were once again in a perilous situation atop a cedar fence post, which was rough, climbable.

  I planned their protection from intruders. My children’s outgrown sled, a round plastic saucer in an unnameable neon hue, lay discarded in the drive shed. With my secateurs I cut to the saucer’s centre and snipped out a circle. I arranged the garish collar around the post under the box, where it became a plastic ceiling to climbers, slitherers, shinniers. I willed the bluebirds to overlook the aesthetic insult, recognize the thought and stay and raise a family. The collar screamed bad taste, outshone the bursting buds, competed with the lilacs for attention, dwarfed spring flowers, clashed with everything. But the birds stayed, accepted my gaudy assistance and got on with it.

  During my ramblings I marked their progress, checked the nest, noted the growth of the nestlings. I always knocked on the door, but the female never flew out the hole; either I timed my checks with her wanderings or she fled when I opened the box, narrowly missing me in her reluctant exit. There were at least four babies, possibly five; I never stayed long enough to be sure.

  Just when they were getting big enough to plan their futures, go for their first solo flights, a time when their nutritional needs were demanding, almost constant, the male bluebird discovered an enemy.

  Neither cat nor hawk, this foe was of his own image. Leaving his perch in the maple tree, he approached the glass of my loft window, veered away, and approached again. At times he landed on the window frame, sneaked peeks inside from the corner of his eye. Sidelong glances. He puffed out, made himself big and blue and mean. His double did the same. They played at this game, ruffling, sneering, threatening, for most of the morning. If I stood right against the window, he would fly off to the safety of the tree, but as soon as I settled even a short distance away, he was back at it, flopping himself against the glass, menacing his reflection, looking formidable.

  Obscure the glass, I thought. He will never see himself through glass darkly. So I taped up curtains made from scraps of fabric, a weaving apron, newspaper. I obliterated the whole window—my well-earned spring light gone—to save him from himself. But to no avail. This bird could see only the outer reflection, and no amount of screening or reasoning would persuade him to call a truce.

  Meanwhile his family was outgrowing its home. The baby birds were spilling over the nest, stepping on each other’s heads to get the next morsel from their mum. She was frantically catching bugs to feed them. A single mother, left alone to cope on the home front. She had no extended family here, no grandparents or older siblings; she had to feed herself and her babies, watch over them, worry and keep the nest clean all by herself. The fecal sacs came out as fast as the food went in. She was an ornithological taxi providing goods and services around the clock.

  The stupidity of the male bluebird’s personal war struck me. Pointless, consuming, it caused trauma to himself and others. His participation in the attacks served no purpose but to aggravate us all. I cut the grass under the window, hoping the lawn mower would deter him. But no, it emulated the sound of heavy artillery, of tanks and cannons. He loved it and fought all the harder to eradicate his rival. He played out his strategy until he was blue in the face.

  In desperation, I called the conservation authority for advice. I was told to tape black circles of paper to the inside of the glass. The science centre suggested taping a silhouette of a sparrow hawk flying. I tried. I bought black paper. I cut out circles. I cut out sparrow hawks. I taped them to the inside of the glass. He still bashed. He was single-minded. He was bloodthirsty. He wanted to rule the roost. Protect his family. A family that paradoxically was straining to survive without his help. A family that had no rival to fear, no enemy to fight, no bones to pick. They were just getting on with it while his testosterone rose on the wing.

  Inside barriers were not helping. Only cutting the reflection would convince him there was nothing to fight about, no territory at risk, no threat to his virility. He had to be stopped from the outside. And this was an upper floor window. And I don’t do heights.

  My children would have helped. If I had convinced my daughter to hold chickens, miserable creatures to her, surely she would have climbed the house for me. And my son was stretching skyward at an alarming rate, which made climbing less and less necessary to reach almost anything. And Thomas frequently follows my obsessions and fills in for my inadequacies. But no one was around. All were gone, all away. The problem was in my hands alone.

  The ladder lay nearby since screen-setting season was in swing. It’s not a bad ladder: aluminum extension, light, sturdy, with safe swivel feet to go to ground. I got it up to the roof of the lean-to—plenty of ladder extended above the roofline—and considered my task. There are wires from house to barn. The roofline slopes, though not too much, and the cedar shingles, still with fresh memories of the swamp, are slippery and smooth. I thought of roofers nailing fresh evergreen to ridges for luck. I thought of their jokes about long toenails for gripping. I thought of the carpenter in the halo brace, who had scrambled on my roof like a kid on a climber.

  I pondered my ruse. Black circles, a sparrow hawk and an owl silhouette? Or perhaps a scare-bird?

  Armed with duct tape, scissors, an old pair of coveralls and a bright blue baseball cap, I mounted the rungs with trepidation. I thought of coroner’s cases and broken limbs and the stupidity of taking risks to save a bird from himself. And I continued to mount the rungs.

  The window fills the gable end of the loft. Four panels of double glass angle to a peak, a modern Gothic attempt at salvation. But it was heaven I was trying to save the bird from. The first stretch was simple and I reached the roof. I threw the coveralls and hat ahead onto the shingles, tossed the tape on the mass of fabric and checked for the scissors in my pocket. A deep breath and I was over the top, perched. I repressed thoughts of the inevitable trip down.

  It was terrifying to tape my effigy to the window. I spread out the arms of the coveralls and duct-taped them to the window frame, fastened the shoulders and the collar and attached the legs in a manner I hoped the bluebird would think was a human form. I saw him watching me as I mounted the hat, and I wondered if he was just waiting for me to leave before resuming his brawl. But when at last I got myself over the edge and down, I could see that he was cautious. He backed off. Went back to the field.

  Perhaps bluebirds are like two-year-olds: intent on a project, unrelenting in its pursuit, but distractible. My coveralls succeeded. The bluebird gave up his bashing. He returned to the nest in glory. The battle over, the enemy conquered, the territory retained. He was a hero. There were no dead to carry or bury, no wounds to bind, no enemy to drag in the dust by the heels, just victory.

  TWO DAYS LATER he was back and swerving at the glass, menacing his doppelgänger, his nemesis. A storm had loosened the tape; the coveralls were in a heap on the roof, a pile of rags. Virginia Woolf told us that women have served as looking glasses for men, have reflected them back at twice their size. My bird’s anger toward an identical self-image was out of control. No wonder women are at such risk. He was violent, riled, ready to fight.

  Amused, I got out the staple gun, reassembled the artifice securely to the sash, watched the bird back off and forget. But bliss did not last. To the west, just outside a glass door on the ground, lay a flash of blue. The female. Lifeless, her neck was broken. Had the male warned her of the foe? Did she enlist to protect her young? Or had she merely sailed along in the early light, viewing only clear sky, an open passage, a freeway? The unanswerable. The sorrow of this event. A beautiful, needed creature, dead at my feet.

  I checked the box. Empty. Messy, dirty, well-worn and abandoned. I recalled the screech of a hawk at dawn. I feared th
e worst. The entire family, all but the marauding father, gone.

  He stuck around, feeding from perches in the apple trees on the lawn, swooping to catch insects, flying into the maples with mouthfuls of moth, beakfuls of beetle. I heard him chur wi and gurgle. Was he feeding heavily, perhaps sharing his catch? There was no evidence of offspring.

  Then suddenly they reappeared: four unsteady babies, blue around the edges, specked in front, tottering on the wire in a row. They were out, they were alive, they were being fed. Their father had transformed from pugilist to provider. He was raising his young alone.

  A NEW CLUTCH will usually vanish by August. The family stays and feeds for a few weeks after fledging, then retreats from the summer stage. Perhaps the parents go farther north where the bugs are bigger and more plentiful, or perhaps I just don’t see them because their feathers fade into camouflage after the breeding season ends.

  But this year I caught the odd glimpse of birds on wires at dusk, little colour in the fading light, but unmistakably the soft-shouldered bluebird shape.

  I checked the boxes. After its brood of tree swallows, the window box was taken over by the wrens who built right on top of the old nest. They woke me each morning with their chatter. A week ago I cleared the wren twig-fill from the fence rowhouse, a ruse they use to discourage other birds from nesting. Wrens spend hours moving twigs; they’ve filled my clothespin bag twice.

  Something caused me to check the boxes again yesterday. I had been weeding and working, and something compelled me to look. I knocked on the side of the box and waited. Nothing. I pulled the pin which holds it shut and slowly lifted the panel. A nest. Not twigs, but dried grass. Not messy, but well-woven, compact, neat. I lifted further and a small black eye peered at me from a crouched feathered body. Using the holding pin which fastens the door shut, I lowered the edge of the nest to glance at the buried bird. She fled in a flash of blue, revealing three perfect turquoise eggs. A new female. A new brood. Beginning again.

  CORDUROY ROAD

  IF YOU FOLLOW THE LANE beyond the summer chicken run, the drive shed and log house, the fancy-collared bluebird box and the rail gate into the bee yard and carry on down the hill, either turning to the south and walking between the tree line and page-wire fence to the top of the swamp, or straight west through the thicket of cedars and smattering of maples and cherries, you will reach the forest of Lambsquarters. The bush lies at the bottom of the hill. Thick, dense, overgrown and mysterious, it beckons, draws in the eye and begs for the body to follow. Full of riches and undiscovered treasures, it was impassable when we came, undisturbed for years by human footfall, unobserved home to hundreds of species.

  MAYBE IT WAS his sense of the pioneer that motivated Thomas to discover the methods of the homesteaders. Buying an old farm and being in touch with its ancestors through the remains of their log house, the bottle caches wherever we tried to dig a garden, the ancient ropes and pulleys in the barn. Perhaps that, and those early words of wisdom from our faraway friend—that only skills and knowledge are tangible—made Thomas decide to learn pioneer ways. To become a survivor, a maker. A carver of paths and a cutter of roads. Or maybe it was the frustration of hauling firewood out of a forest that was more marsh than highland, his boots sinking and suctioning, mud oozing and squelching. Or possibly he just wanted to open up the bog and let the sun in, the children through, the dogs along. Not that there were children when he began. Not that any of the dogs we’ve had here needed help. They followed their noses under the brush and through the cedar tangles and deadfalls that make this bush a continuous warren of wild things. Maybe it was the sheer work involved: the cutting and gathering, the navigation, the creation of order from chaos that makes us human.

  Most likely, Thomas picked up a branch, cut down a dead tree, made a pile of logs and wondered what to do with the narrow and short ones. He put two down on the ground parallel to each other. And then a third, and then a fourth, and one by one the logs became a road.

  MY NEIGHBOUR Harris told me that there are more trees in this farmland now, more forests and wooded bogs, than there have been since it was first cleared well over a hundred years ago. When the settlers arrived and staked their claims, they slashed and burned. They used large pine logs for houses, timber for barns, hemlock planks for siding, cedar for rail fences and posts, maple for floors and furniture, and all of the treetops for firewood. Elms, which survived for a time by adamantly resisting the axe, were brought to their knees by disease. They were skeletons when we arrived here. Great grey masses of broken bodies waiting for the wind to finish them off.

  Cleaning up those dead elms got Thomas to the bush. He brought back wheelbarrow-loads of elm to burn. He used the maul to split it, or the neighbour’s chainsaw, which left great square chunks of wood that burned all night in the stove if the fire got hot enough to ignite them.

  During severe winters, fires in the two woodstoves are essential. So the forest becomes a place of harvest. A place to scavenge and tidy. A place to protect and nurture. When the sheep flock grew bigger and needed the wild grasses of the open swamp for pasture, we had to build a fence to keep them from the wooded bog, from the maze of deadfall and rabbit tracks, the trillium and bloodroot.

  The season of the fence clinched the corduroy road. Fencing through the extensive ground tangle and excessive wood waste was arduous: post holes had to be hand-dug between grills of trees, braces had to be built and wire had to be stretched in cramped, muggy mornings drifting from spring to summer. The leaves unfolded with attending shade, but mosquitoes hatched hourly. That fence forced Thomas to look at the ground, be eye to eye with the elements. Develop an affinity.

  ORIGINAL SETTLERS, cutting, chopping, slicing with their crosscut saws, laid down the very first roads with felled trees. They followed native paths, portages and trapping lines, made way for horses, wagons, more immigrants. But soon the townships broke into patchwork quilts run through with Roman roads. Straight lines gave way only for deep lakes, stone-faced ridges, festering swamps. With stumps and rocks studding the land, only logs laid like matches in a box could form a base for concessions and sideroads.

  Excess trees from land clearing laid edge to edge make a road only visually similar to its cotton namesake: Corde du roi. The king’s cord is a fabric soft to the touch with a light-reflecting nap. Corduroy roads, although they do play with light through the lace of leaves, have no soft drape. One hard log lies against another and another, forming a continuous curdle of hills and valleys. Early immigrants were legally required to slog together to build these roads, whose ghosts can be seen each spring as the township graders unearth the splintered remains of former forest trees, forced up through the gravel by frost.

  I think of the first families when I see those torn logs. Families sitting on open wagons, fiercely holding their children, riding over waves of a road as choppy as the seas they sailed to get here. The pulse as constant as a racing heartbeat. A nursing mother cradling her newborn against full breasts assaulted by each jolt, and children bruising in their pretence of riding ponies, shooting rapids, rolling down terraced hillsides. Some pioneers carried only the clothes on their backs; others had the dubious burden of trunks full of silver and books to protect. In their bumpity journey they were levelled on a classless plane.

  The logs that appear during the spring breakup are all that are left of those roads now. Just memento mori to remind us of our connection with the past. And our impending outcome in the future. Occasionally, farmers still build a bit of corduroy in the bush—they fill in low spots for vehicles during logging. Their form is for function and is ragged and imprecise. Not trimmed, not measured, not calculated to please in itself.

  Thomas’s road is different. It is function and beauty both. Some say function is beauty, but it doesn’t always follow. Or lead. Perhaps beauty depends on the nature of the function. And in the case of Thomas’s road, the function is nature.

  I gather the road just began with the laying of four-foot lengths o
f log. All the deadfall from a bush idle for many years. Cedars dying or blown over, not knowing yet they were dead. Permanently on tilt or crashed to the forest floor. Dangerous widow-makers, threatening to fall suddenly on the unsuspecting. Balsams, which just seem to grow up to die (like us all), stand at attention until a great wind levels them or they are lovingly laid out. Their final rest as road.

  The bush itself has a high part, where maples and hemlock, beech and black cherry grow, even a nanny-berry tree, its trunk a straight link to the clouds. The high forest needs no corduroy, is rarely wet, is always accessible. But it leads off to lower ground directly. To the swamp cedar and the aspen, the poplar and the thick underbrush and bulrush. There are beauties in a bog, but access is the problem. How do you tramp through the terrain when you sink with each step? You don’t. Unless, of course, you have corduroy to step on.

  Thomas has taken years to thread his road through the acreage. It winds and meanders and connects with the two ends on high ground. It has absorbed every dead tree that has fallen. It’s a conservationist’s road. A road that makes life from death. A coroner’s road.

  Like some magic lens turned around corners, like fibre optics, the road opens up the inaccessible. The secrets of the marsh are revealed. Suddenly we can walk on water. We can walk the bog. Each season spreads itself across the landscape on either side of the narrow winding path.