by Lynn Thomson
When the ceremony was over, the old man opened the programme to the last page and asked for my autograph. It was a strangely intimate moment and I was filled with confusion. I wanted to say, “But I’m not famous.” Instead, I nodded and smiled at him and signed my name. He asked me to put down my son’s name, too.
I was brimming with pride and something like relief that Yeats had achieved this goal. He’d made the honour roll, he’d received an award for Writer’s Craft, and he’d been accepted to all three universities to which he applied. In my heart I’d known it would be this way, but I remembered, too, all that anxiety, all the time we’d spent together trying to sort out why school was a good idea.
We went to the reception in the cafeteria and I watched Yeats socialize with his classmates. He introduced me to some of them but mostly I kept a distance and just watched. He was expansive and open, hugging some of the girls and high-fiving the boys. He laughed and talked and appeared totally relaxed. I chatted with a couple of teachers, who had only good things to say about my boy. While I talked with one of his English teachers, Yeats came up to us.
The teacher said, “Congratulations, Yeats. You’ve done a great job in high school.”
“Thanks,” Yeats said.
“Are you going to work in the bookshop for the summer?”
“A bit. I’ll be doing some birdwatching, too, and spending some time at the cottage. What are you doing this summer?”
I looked at Yeats and marvelled once again at how unreserved he was in public. This boy who has no trouble showing me all his fears and frustrations brings a cheerful, open grace to face the world.
I wondered how surprised Yeats’s teachers would be to discover his depth of loathing for school, since his public persona was so agreeable. They were happy to hear he’d decided to go to the University of Toronto, and the teachers who remembered Rupert were equally happy to hear he was going to school in the fall, too. Both boys were enrolled at St. Michael’s College downtown. I was hoping they’d inspire one another.
Yeats didn’t want to stay very late, so we left the school and waited outside for the bus. It was a blustery Friday night at the end of October.
“I’m proud of you,” I said to him, at the risk of inducing annoyance.
But he smiled, looking shy for a moment. Then he said, “Thanks, Mom. Thanks for everything.”
THIRTEEN
BEN CAME BIRDWATCHING WITH Yeats and me the following May, down to Point Pelee for the 2012 spring migration. He hadn’t come with us to Pelee before because he was too busy but also because he thought it was our thing, not his, and he wasn’t sure about the entire endeavour. He came this time because I still couldn’t drive and because he knew we needed to spend some time together.
When I thought back to the fall and all the pain I was in, and how hard it was to sleep, and how much Ben was working, it was little wonder to me that our marriage had reached an edge. My journals from that time are page after page of the therapies I was having — physio, acupuncture, massage, homeopathy — as well as a good deal of moaning. Five months in the life of a long marriage may not seem like much, but two busy people often wind up taking one another for granted, or they don’t tend the marriage as they ought. I suddenly wasn’t busy at all, except for tending to myself. Everything was off-kilter.
Ben and I loved one another, but my injury highlighted the weak spots in our relationship. I suppose that was the silver lining, because we were both devoted to making it strong again.
Over breakfast one Sunday in January I’d said to Ben, “Yeats is disappointed that we won’t be going to Pelee this year.”
Ben said, “Why won’t you?”
“I’m not sure I’ll be able to drive by then.” I still couldn’t brush my hair using my right arm and the mere thought of putting the car in gear made the shoulder flare up.
“Well, then,” he said, “I’ll have to do it. I’ll be your driver.”
I looked hard at him to see if he thought I’d tried to manipulate him into being our chauffeur. I hadn’t even thought of Ben driving down, of him coming birdwatching with us on three of our most intensive days of the year.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Yeah, why?”
“It’s far. It’s a long drive. It’s a lot of walking and we get up at 5:30 in the morning and it might be pouring rain.”
“So?” He looked at me over the table. Thin winter sun was pouring in through the bow window, illuminating everything, making us a little bit warmer. He said, “This has been a hard time for you. I love you like crazy and I want to do something for you. I work all the time. The store has been great, but it’s a lot of work and I’m always gone.” I was nodding and trying not to cry. “It’s okay,” he said.
It was okay. I said, “Thanks, Ben. I’m sorry, too. This shoulder thing. I’ve felt a million miles away from you.”
We both nodded and looked one another in the eyes, and I saw that gentle sweetness that lies at the core of my husband. I thought, This is why I’m with this man.
“Thanks,” I said again. “We’d love to have you drive us.”
Yeats and I had our rhythm together when we bird-watched, though. We had certain music we liked to listen to in the car, we had our walking pace, and we hardly spoke on the path. I was happy to eat lentil roll-ups for lunch and dinner, three days straight if it came to that. When I told Yeats that we would go to Pelee because his father was coming along, he was a bit conflicted. Honestly, I was, too.
Ben said, “I’m just the driver. You guys do what you always do and I’ll do it with you. Just tell me.”
Yeats was most nervous about the music in the car, something that totally confounded Ben. He said he’d listen to anything, but Yeats and I had heard years and years of Ben groaning about particular bands. Yeats didn’t trust that Ben wouldn’t say something disparaging about a band he loved, which made him wary. I explained all this to Ben, who stared at me in disbelief. His outspoken ways had come back to haunt him, but we loved him for his outspokenness, too.
THE BIRD MIGRATION WEEKEND at Pelee coincided with Mother’s Day, but I’d never been big on breakfast in bed, and besides, I’d spent the past couple of Mother’s Days birding as well. It seemed somehow fitting, watching birds migrate in order to nest while contemplating motherhood myself.
On our way down to Pelee, we stopped again at Wheatley Provincial Park. It was such a quiet place and we wanted to share it with Ben. As before, we saw no one on our walk through the forest and around the pond. We saw a few birds — a house wren, a few chestnut-sided warblers, an ovenbird, some northern flickers — and on our way back to the car we saw some wood ducks and northern shovelers. All told, we saw thirteen species at Wheatley, which wasn’t great. Ben lived up to his promise to be “just the chauffeur.” He didn’t try to set the pace in the forest or tell us where he thought we should go. He let us do our usual thing and tagged along behind. We were happy to have him there and, as often as I thought seemly, I’d grab his arm and give him a quick kiss in appreciation.
It isn’t far from Wheatley to Leamington, maybe ten kilometres. We passed fields full of fruit trees and greenhouses, roadside stands selling asparagus and apple cider, and then the gas stations and car lots that announced modern civilization.
We checked into our motel in Leamington — a different one from last time — and drove straight out to the park. It was only about four in the afternoon, and we thought we might as well start birding right away.
Not far into the park, just past the first information area, we saw a small cluster of people on the road, looking through their binoculars. We found an illegal but safe place to park the car and walked back to join the group. It was the same spot where the great horned owls had been nesting last year, but this year we saw them clearly. Two of them were looking out at the dozen people looking into the forest at them. They were big and solid-looking, and all three of us stood in awe before them.
More often than not, when Yeat
s asked me what I’d most like to see before we set out birding, my answer was owls. I wanted to see all our owls, not so I could check them off my life-list (if I’d kept one), but so I could experience the charge I feel each time I see a new one. Owls are still and predatory. They are a little bit scary, even to a human many times their size. They sit and stare and seem to belong so profoundly to where they are, to the forest and the earth, that I feel like bowing down before them.
Every once in a while at the cottage, I’ll be wakened in the night by a barred owl. They’re the ones that call, Whoo-hoo! Whoo-hoo! or, Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? Sometimes, before making this iconic call, they’ll let go a bloodcurdling scream. I’ll sit bolt upright in bed, heart pounding, eyes trying desperately to see in the pitch dark. Who screamed? Who’s in trouble? Then I’ll hear the hooting and I’ll sigh, able to lie back down and relax. It’s that owl.
So we looked at these owls on Point Pelee for a while, then went back to the car and moved on down the track.
We parked at the Blue Heron area and walked onto the boardwalk, out into the marsh. Ben said he was surprised by how few people there were. He was expecting more, based on what we’d said. I looked around and saw a dozen or so groups of two or three people, everyone slowly making their way around the marsh. We had chosen to walk clockwise when everyone else was going counter-clockwise. It did feel like a lot of people to Yeats and me, who were used to birding practically alone, but we didn’t complain. This was Pelee on the busiest migration weekend of the year. Besides, I thought, it will be busier tomorrow morning.
On the boardwalk that afternoon, we saw common yellowthroats and black terns, as well as various turtles and dragonflies. Blue herons flew past in the distance and turkey vultures high above. In the woods by the parking lot, we saw a rose-breasted grosbeak, white-crowned and white-throated sparrows, a yellow warbler, and a grey catbird. Again, it was a short list, but we were hopeful for the morning.
Our motel was not as close to the park this time, but it was far nicer than last year’s. The three of us shared a room: two queen-sized beds, and a little fridge that we crammed full of food. The motel offered breakfast starting at 4:30 for avid birders, but that first morning Ben and I went down to eat at six. We weren’t as keen as in previous years, and Yeats was cool with that. He seemed to need more sleep these days and had become, I was happy to note, more practical than fanatical in his birding habits.
The serve-yourself breakfast was awful, not at all up to my obsessively health-conscious standards: white bread, white bagels, syrupy fruit-bottomed yogurt, sugar-based cereals. But the worst part was that everything was served on Styrofoam — plates, bowls, cups for juice and coffee. I didn’t fancy drinking toxic styrene chemicals with my breakfast, so I forewent coffee.
Yeats and I always stood out among other birders and so did Ben. I was wearing a pair of light-blue cotton pants with a T-shirt and a long-sleeved flowered shirt buttoned on top, along with my walking shoes. Yeats and Ben both wore shorts and T-shirts with their New Balance running shoes. Not that either of them ever went running.
Everyone else in the breakfast room was dressed in gear that came straight from an outdoors outfitter — khaki-coloured pants and shirts made from one of those high-tech breathable fabrics and with multiple pockets for storing things; sensible hiking shoes; brimmed hats with strings so if a gust of wind came along, the hat wouldn’t fly away. We had our baseball caps.
Every time Yeats and I were among other birders, they stared at us. We didn’t mind. Ben, the old hippie, didn’t even notice.
We drove straight to the information centre, where we parked among the three hundred or more cars already there. We ran into Donna, a friend from Toronto who was an avid birder and who was there with a friend. We made introductions in the parking lot and then went our separate ways. They were headed right for the tip and we were off into the forest behind the centre.
We joked that we saw someone we knew everywhere we went. Usually it was someone Ben knew through bookselling (which was the case with Donna); but out here in bird land, we might expect to see people from other parts of our life.
There were more people and fewer birds on the forest trail this year. We walked slowly, stopping frequently to look out into the woods, so several groups overtook us. Most people smiled or nodded hello. Most people were being very quiet.
The list of what we saw that morning looked something like this: red-eyed vireo, great crested flycatcher, scarlet tanager, Baltimore oriole, American redstart, cedar waxwing, chipping sparrow. We also saw four or five different warblers — including the elusive prothonotary.
I have to admit that it wasn’t as exciting to see this little yellow bird this year. Yeats was nearly blasé — it wasn’t a first sighting, after all. And there were more people around, big men with long-lens cameras setting up their tripods, taking up a lot of space on the trail. I didn’t find them irritating, exactly — they had as much right to be there as we did — but I wished they weren’t so big. The birds they were trying to photograph with their giant equipment were so small. The men were dressed all in black and khaki. These little birds were yellow and light grey. I looked from one to the other. I knew that one of these guys might take a photograph that would end up in a birding magazine and that a child somewhere might see it and be turned on to birding. Things like that happened. But they were taking up so much room!
We went into the information centre and bought Yeats a hat. I bought a giant granola cookie and outside we bought coffee and a snack for Ben. The coffee was in cups made from recycled paper. There was no Styrofoam or plastic in sight.
We decided to take the next shuttle bus to the tip of Pelee, not because we were hopeful of seeing many birds there, but because we couldn’t bear the thought of Ben coming all the way here and not seeing the southernmost tip of Canada.
The tip was very crowded, just like last year. It was a bit unpleasant, and I wondered if it would have been different if we’d come out here at 5:30 a.m. instead of 8:30 a.m. Possibly, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to find as many fanatical birders out here at that time of day. The largest flocks of birds flew over the lake at night, when no one was allowed in the park, but maybe some flocks flew early in the morning. Maybe it was worth it to get up at 4:30 and be here for that. It would be amazing to see huge flocks of birds.
We wandered around for half an hour. There were a lot of people also wandering around. There were groups with guides, all clustered together and looking up at, say, a red-headed woodpecker. A lot of people were talking.
We walked down the beach towards the very tip of Pelee but didn’t go out onto the sand. The beach was a different shape than it had been last year, and there were signs everywhere warning people not to swim, that the currents off the tip were swift and dangerous. It was a continually changing landscape.
We tired of the crowds and took the next bus back to our car. We saw two wild turkeys on the bus ride back. People pointed. Turkeys are like swans; they’re so big that on first sight, they’re startling. Can they really be birds? And why do people eat turkey and not swan? Someone who has eaten swan can let me know.
Our next stop along the point was the DeLaurier Homestead area. We circumnavigated the old farmhouse, looking for birds as we went. Some people were having a picnic. Others were standing around waiting for their tour to start. We headed off down one of the trails into the woods and finally started to see some birds.
We saw the gorgeous male indigo bunting. It’s as blue as the cardinal is red, a spectacular sight. Like other blue birds, this bunting’s feathers lack blue pigment. Instead, its colour comes from microscopic structures in the makeup of its feathers, which reflect and refract blue light. It seems like a trick, a bit of sorcery, since these birds do look so blue.
We saw several groups of various warblers: Wilson’s, magnolia, Blackburnian, yellow, bay-breasted. Warblers spend their time on the go, flitting from branch to branch eating bugs. No sooner did
I get one in my binocular-sight than it was gone. You had to know your warblers ahead of time in order to identify them in the field. You had to know, for example, that the Wilson’s warbler has no streaking on its breast, while the Canada warbler has a lovely necklace of jet stripes; otherwise, you might not be able to tell them apart. Among some of the warblers, the variations are small, especially among some of the females. Some of the female warblers even look like other species, such as the female house finch, except that the finch is smaller and has a different beak.
The point is, you had to be ready. You needed to be someone like Yeats, who spent hours and hours with the bird books, absorbing the minute differences, memorizing the similarities.
I remember one day asking him what he was doing as he lounged on his bed at home. “Memorizing the flycatchers.” Which, by the way, is impossible to do since two of them — the alder and the willow — are exactly alike except for their song. Until the 1970s, these two birds were considered one species and so, in order to decide which one you’re looking at in the field, you have to hear it sing.
I was not like Yeats, who memorized the birds, but I was with Yeats. Ben and I both had the benefit of our son’s encyclopaedic knowledge and ability to identify birds. Without him, we would not have been in the woods on Point Pelee on a beautiful spring morning. We would have been in the city selling books.
We came upon a group of about twenty-five people clustered together. All of them were looking up. We figured they must have spotted something good up in those trees so we joined them.
I asked the woman in front of me what they were looking at, and she said it was an eastern screech owl, red morph. Eastern screech owls come in two colours — red and grey — which scientists call “morphs.” Another owl! Two different owl species in one weekend! I asked her where it was and she pointed up at a tall tree not too far away.
“It’s impossible to see, it’s so well camouflaged,” she said. “But if you watch where those warblers are dive-bombing, then look through your binoculars, you’ll get it.”