David Hopes is the author of A Sense of the Morning, a collection of autobiographical essays on nature from which “Curlews” is excerpted.
“If I love nature,” he writes, “it is not because it’s beautiful — though it is — but because it bears witness. Even the witness it bears is terrible and uncompromising. For every discrete fact that you can make a wise saying about, it will announce a thousand times over that you can never know, never know.”
Hopes lives in the mountains of North Carolina, teaching literature and humanities at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, where he also coordinates the creative writing program.
In A Sense of the Morning, Hopes describes his interactions with nature in the sundry places he has lived and traveled. With elegant precision, he records all he has seen with attentive, wide-open eyes, eyes that wish to really see, that watch the small and the spectacular alike, that find the beautiful in everything — even in the ugly. His observations lead him to thoughtful speculation that is neither ponderous nor pedantic: he asks the questions that have no answers, releasing them like huge and tragic birds over a landscape of beauty and grace; the birds soar and recede. His observations lead also to his own memories, which he recounts vividly, with sadness and humor, revealing the boyhood origins of his love for nature and longing for understanding.
Hopes is looking for a publisher for his newest book, The Fourfold Vision.
— Dana Branscum
We are immortal until the hour death first seizes our imagination. This goes for species as well as individuals. To die you must once consider death and think of it as beautiful. All spiritual advances are advances in aesthetics.
The cockroach, the horseshoe crab have never quite come to grips.
Easter that year was as early as it could be. Wind blustered from the flat lands by Lake Erie, blowing the tan dust of winter’s end into nostrils and eyes. There were no flowers except for what the deacons brought from the florist shop on Pioneer Street. Dust scoured a flowerless flat land, all under dry gold light that rubbed even the dust and the bareness ringing clean. Emmanuel Church was not beautiful so much as lively and expectant, its walls stark behind the store-bought lilies. Deacons and elders wore black winter suits, their tight smiles expressing Dutch Reformed abashment before an indecorous feast, neither Protestant nor Northern. Only the boy’s mother wore anything like an Easter bonnet, because he begged her to, a pink dome surrounded by a corona of pale flowers and small, hard fruit. It didn’t matter that she removed it the moment she entered the building; the boy was satisfied.
The boy knew how things were meant to be even when he’d never seen them himself. He read everything. He listened to the conversations of adults with reptilian attention. He knew when they were wrong, and also that to be told they were wrong irritated them, and when therefore to keep silent. He knew that Easter Sunday required bright bonnets of the women. He knew that he himself should have a new suit, though he seldom did, and that it should be a gay color like green or cream. He knew that there should be flowers, not only from the florist but also covering the world in commemoration of the miracle.
Though he found no proof, he suspected that his church picked the wrong date for Easter. Deliberately. Out of an unaccountable impulse to ruin. He remembered three or four Easters, and there were never flowers, not real ones from the ground. Sleet. Cold. Nothing pertinent to resurrection except the blazing acid light.
Easter meant Jesus had been dead three days, then rose and was alive. The boy made sure of that point, asking again and again, “And it means that after three days Jesus rose from the dead, and that means after three days we rise from the dead?” And they told him, yes.
Much of the world was mysterious, and there was no way of telling what was really a mystery and what was obscured by the confusion of the people who had to be asked. When he could, the boy found out things on his own. When he didn’t know how, as a final recourse he asked adults, never quite trusting the answers but hoping at least for a clue to send him to the right place from which to continue on his own.
The three days seemed doubtful, or at least incomplete. It was too mathematical. Adults were always leaving things out of their explanations, sometimes because they didn’t know better, sometimes because they didn’t realize that he truly needed to know. So he asked again about the three days, and again they told him that’s how it was, that’s what Easter stood for.
“Does this have to begin on Good Friday and end on Easter, or can it be any Friday and any Sunday, or can it be any three days at all?”
They said it could be any three days at all. This news sat in his heart. His reason for asking was the body in the field on Good Friday.
The boy’s father had taken him kite flying on Good Friday. There was something wrong with this. He wanted to sit and think about death and Jesus — not out of morbidity, but because what he read and fragments he heard spoken in tones of awe or embarrassment by aged, odd people at church told him it was right to do so. In a book a saint had done this, and when he had done it very long, God put blood into his hands and feet. But he knew already what could and couldn’t be said to adults, what they would accept, what expressed desires would make them force on him their opposite.
Light came dry, golden, the wind behind it, a kite-upholder. He squirmed to think what they would say if he told them what he wanted.
His father seemed sure that March was kite time. This had the ring of ritual that the boy loved, so he said yes to kites, a white one, unfigured, a holy blankness in the Easter. His father got a red kite with prints of fighter planes with teeth at the front like tigers.
They drove to the open field across from the metropolitan park, thirty acres free of wires and trees. Others flew already, and the boy thrilled that his father had been right. There was still room in the sky. Blue kites, red, yellow, box kites like the stuffed, bright-colored garbage bags that blow wild on windy nights before pickup day. Not one was white. His father had been right again.
As soon as he got out of the car, the boy saw the puppy in the ditch at the roadside. His father told him to get away from it, and he handed him the kite.
“What killed it?”
The dog didn’t look smashed, but his father thought that it might have been a car. He said, “Get away from there.”
“How long has it been dead?”
“Not long. Now get away.” His father said he had to run to get the kite into the air.
His father wanted him to forget the puppy lying dead at the roadside. The boy knew he couldn’t push much further. If he wanted to know more, he would have to ask later, when his father wouldn’t suspect he was thinking of the corpse.
The body was gold. He wanted to scrape it once with the toe of his shoe to see if it was the puppy’s color, or the dust that settled everywhere, invisible until it came to the ground, swirling in tiny cyclones over the grass. The boy ran, paying string out behind until the kite leapt into the air.
His father had answered, “Not long.” How long was that? Two days? One? Just since that morning? While he stood at the end of the tugging kite string, he wondered if things must die on Friday to rise up on Sunday. He wanted to see the puppy rise. He couldn’t ask then, knowing he would be told to get such things out of his mind, but when at church the matter seemed appropriate, he asked, and they said rising comes three days after any day, and it didn’t matter anymore if the puppy died on Thursday or Friday.
The boy wanted to see the puppy rise from the dead. His faith was a torrent, a pale crown levitating over his head. He’d go back when the puppy had gone to heaven, on the third day. He had no doubt.
The next morning he went with his mother to the supermarket because he knew she would pass the kite field, and she would stop and let him look if he said he had lost something. She stopped, far from the puppy, so the boy ran at the field’s edge, pretending to search for something the location of which he knew exactly. It lay where it had lain before, its belly swollen, flies on its exposed eye. He didn’t slap at the flies, which might be part of the miracle.
“When Jesus rises on the third day, is it right at the beginning, right at dawn?”
She told him, yes. He’d come to the field Sunday, and the puppy would be gone.
Easter that year was as early as it could be. Dry and cold. The men stood with their cigarettes in front of the church, thin hair blowing backward from their heads. The boy sensed they didn’t altogether like a day to make its own rules, to complicate a matter otherwise as predictable and as steadfast as death, but they had to mention it was Easter, had to admit to the miraculous one day in the year. The boy felt a secret shared between himself and God. One day when they told him not to worry about such things at his age he would answer, I know. I already know.
The boy considered not going to the field to look. It was possible a sanitation truck had picked the body up, but then it would rise from the bed of the sanitation truck, or from the silvery detritus of the landfill. He was certain. He held faith in the center of his brain like a yellow jewel. Like the saint in the book, but better somehow, because bloodless and secret.
Only uncertainty as to what would manifest faith more fully made him ask to go kite flying in the afternoon. He didn’t need proof, but he had begun to believe he was meant to bear witness. Not to prophesy, but if asked, to answer, Yes, I know.
The wind had never stopped, and on the near horizon they could make out kites already soaring over the golden field. He would stand on the spot where the puppy had been, and people would see or not. But he would know.
His father was surprised by the request, perhaps delighted by its normality; and so with Easter ham and spiced apples in their bellies they went to the bright field to play.
They parked near enough to where they had parked before so that the boy, though he meant to delay and savor the discovery, caught the puppy in the corner of his eye almost immediately. By running very fast and very far from the spot, he was able to convince himself he had seen nothing, or if he had, it was a temptation to disbelief and not the untenanted roadside that must really be there. Closer and closer the boy circled with the kite line jerking through his hand, wanting to plunge in the updraft. The flatness of the meadow was such that far off he still couldn’t avoid seeing the puppy. Hoping it might be a test of faith, he ran to its side, not looking at it directly, because his father was watching and would know why he had wanted to come to the field. The swelling in its belly had deflated, and a few bones showed through the digesting pelt. The eyes were eaten away. It was dead. Plain dead. It had not risen Easter morning.
His father was looking, so he ran to the center of the field, trying to think at once about the dog and about not tangling the others’ strings. The boy ran with the kite string tight in his hand. Even when his father called him, he ran a little farther, to the fence that must be the field’s end. The wind never wavered. Gold, bright, cold. Always the fine dust ready to be tasted if he opened his mouth. The boy was crying. He had never felt sorry for the puppy until that moment, its being dead under the yellow dust. He ran back to his father, reeling in string so they could go home.
You are a twelve-year-old boy. You’re in love with creatures vanished from the world before the fathers of your fathers dropped from the trees. I don’t mean interested in them. I mean in love, so night and morning pass with their lumbering mysteries of bodies still processing, stately and hopeless, through your dreams. Why? Why would you walk out of this world without regret if the door opened on the endless garden of former time?
Genesis tells two creation stories. In the first, God says, “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
The second: “And the Lord God took man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and keep it.”
One a conqueror, one a gardener. Even the Gods are different, one speaking the ineffable Word of creation, the other kneeling on the riverbank, kneading man out of dust, breathing into his nostrils the breath of life. It’s a division that persists in the human heart. The day we took our destinies in our hands — by fire, medicine, technology, longing, will — we left the path of the animals. It is a grievous thing, but no sane person wants to go back. We are not part of nature. Genesis recognizes us our alternatives: lords of creation or shepherds of creation.
That “lord” should mean, inescapably now, “despoiler” is an aspect of the Fall.
You are Adam, the Lord God listens while you name the creatures, nodding His cloudy head in assent. It takes a long time, but you have a long time. When you finish, He says, “These may be your brothers or your servants. If your brothers, their destiny will be your destiny. If your servants, fear must grow between you. They will flee, and you will destroy them. Choose.”
Pigs, rats, goats, cats introduced into a previously isolated ecosystem can cause environmental disaster. Many indigenous Polynesian species are either extinct or threatened beyond reasonable hope of recovery.
In uninhabited areas, wildlife is often tame and unafraid. Guns are not necessary. They walk into your hands.
On one island an entire species of bird was wiped out in a few years by a lighthouse-keeper’s cat.
After recovering from near-extinction by the fur trade, the sea otter finds itself threatened again by fishermen who blame it for a dramatic decrease in the abalone harvest. Though proof exists that the abalone beds were decimated by silt from the construction of the Pacific Coast Highway, the sight of another mammal with a salable commodity in its paws drives us wild.
The American Army gave Plains Indians blankets taken from smallpox wards. Smallpox, an Old World disease, went through the native population like wildfire.
In pioneer Ohio, especially around Hinckley and in the Western Reserve, a series of stupendous hunts was organized to clear the area of “dangerous” animals. Hundreds of men formed a circle in the forest and drove the game to a cleared space in the center, where others stood with loaded rifles. One hunt in Freedom in 1818 bagged twenty bears, eleven wolves, 700 deer, and uncalculated measure of wild turkeys and assorted game. The bounty of the land was so great that it could support this sport for several years.
In the 1820s, British authorities detoured shipments of food away from the starving Irish on the grounds that charity would encourage dissolute ways.
In the cliffs of Moher on the west coast of Ireland nests the kittiwake, a gull with an especially piercing and disturbing cry. Legend has it that the kittiwake learned its cry from starving people who in desperation climbed the cliffs looking for birds’ eggs and fell screaming to the sea below.
As a generation, we preside . . . over the mass extermination of half the species of the earth, a holocaust unparalleled since the cancellation of the dinosaurs.
Half of all species of plants and animals on dry land live in the tropical rain forest. This stupefying diversity arises, probably, from the fact that the tropics have been the tropics for a very long time. While glaciers marched over the rest of the world and oceans invaded and retreated in response to their moods, the tropics sat relatively untouched, multiplying their grandeur and abundance. Every square inch is a garden. Every furlong teems with prey and predator, from the patient devouring fungal spore to the gliding jaguar.
Since World War II, half the tropical jungles of the world have disappeared. The few that remain dwindle hourly. Some are cleared for highways or farms. Most are ground down for pulpwood, a unique biota transformed into used-car ads in the morning paper. As a generation, we preside therefore over the mass extermination of half the species of the earth, a holocaust unparalleled since the cancellation of the dinosaurs.
We are already culpable for the extinction of the great herd mammals of the Pleistocene, which, surviving Ice Age well enough, could not cope with the growing efficiency of our ancestors’ hunting methods. Mammoth, mastodon, giant bison, aurochs, ground sloth, American camel, American horse, Irish elk — the list is long and dreary.
The speed of extinction of the North American biota is almost incredible until one realizes that they had never seen men, an invading Old World species.
The mammoth looked up, then went back to grazing. No fangs, no claws — what danger could it be?
The ground sloths sat with placid, curious eyes trained on the ape, until it plunged its spear into them.
In the Jewish ghettos during World War II — well, you see the point.
None of these incidents is especially shocking from the viewpoint of natural selection. Nor, of course, what is meant by it.
The voice said, “Cry.”
And he said, “What shall I cry?”
“All flesh is grass, and the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it. Surely the people is grass.”
“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever.”
It is a mistake to think that evolution is not suggested in Holy Writ. Selection as well, though one hesitates to say “natural” selection; the selection Isaiah has in mind is supernatural, but with the mystery and unintelligibility of any horrific natural event.
It is a further mistake to think of mankind as a special case. Behold, they are all vanity: their works are nothing: their molten images are wind and confusion.
Eve’s acceptance of the fruit is an allegory of self-consciousness, a far-off memory of the moment when a promising ape became Homo sapiens. The voice of God walking in the cool of the garden cries out plaintively, “Who told you you were naked?” Nobody told us. You woke us, Lord, animals. We bed down tonight, men.
Ancient man possessed an instinctive grasp of orderly natural succession. Pharaoh dies, but there is always pharaoh. Assyrians lay down their ravenings: Hittites or Parthians come to take their place. A dozen divinities preside over Delphi, but it remains the omphalos. The divinities themselves flower from ice-exhaling thunderers into Christs and Buddhas. Solomon says, “There is nothing new under the sun.” He does not say, “There is no one new.” The individual passes away; the set, the category persists. Dynasty trails dynasty, boasting empire after boasting empire, always a dynasty, always an empire, though the works of individuals become wind and confusion.
On the plain surrounding Ur, jackal and lion assume ecological niches once filled by gleam-eyed hunting packs of the Pleistocene. The graceful cheetah of the Persian kings prances out from the skin of monsters with the heft of bears. Abraham culls his flock from the unicorns of Eden.
Like kings from a Mesopotamian chronicle, these rulers of a former world leave behind a few relics and a pedigree of jaw-cracking names.
Meanwhile, in North America, camels herd with caribou, saber-toothed cats stalk elephants, killing less with a stab than with a terrible raking parallel to the victim’s body, destroying skin and muscle, staining the snow with blood. Ten tons of sea cow plow the waters of the north Pacific. Hammurabi, or even George Washington, could have seen these had he sailed to the Komandorskiye Islands. Steller’s sea cow will survive until 1768, when Russian sealers exterminate it twenty-seven years after discovering it. Whatever lumbering kelp-gobbler of the Cretaceous it replaced vanished unlamented by either ecologists or sentimentalists.
Backward through the epochs, other predators, other prey: nightmare rattites kicking the guts from proto-antelope; bi-pedal sprinting razors, part bird, part dinosaur, part bad dream, bring down their victims in a Götterdämmerung of reptile flesh.
The planet probably didn’t notice the difference. Until quite recently, to consider extinction was to consider the extinguishment of a particularity, never of a destiny. Except to the morbidly specialized, the distinction between a Sargon and a Babur is academic. Likewise, leopard and tyrannosaur are, in a planetary context, the same animal, performing the same labor. Nut-cracker, bone-gnawer, nectar-sipper are eternal classifications. The particular inhabitant of these niches is temporary and contingent. Because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it, one nectar-sipper vanishes, another creature rises to seize this honor formerly undreamt.
There is always the potentate, always the spoiler, always the messiah, though names change and grass grows over the capitals.
Those whom this horrifies have an ally in the shortness of human life, the longest of which takes in only a ripple of the long convulsion.
Many modern species are absolutely certain to become extinct in the wild within this century.
Cousin chimpanzee and his neighbors are threatened by an African population explosion. Until recently the human population of this continent — by best guess the race’s homeland — was controlled by disease and famine. Modern medicine and advanced agricultural technology enable it to support many more people than it ever has before. The undeniable improvement in human welfare is tempered, perhaps, by the recognition that banana plantations will grow where gorillas napped in the sun, that roads will cut the wildebeest from million-year-old migration routes.
Does this bother you? If so, do you feel ashamed, a traitor to your species?
I hit the remote-control channel button when television nature programs begin to whine about impending natural holocaust. Next to religion, Communism, and The Decline of the Family, it is the topic most likely to induce hysteria in the educated American adult. Hundreds of species are in peril of their lives. Unlike Pleistocene hunters, we do not stampede whole herds of aurochs and wild ass over cliffs into our larders, but we destroy habitat, which if less spectacular is incalculably more dangerous. This swamp is drained, that meadow asphalted over — true, but I don’t want to hear it always. Sometimes I need the illusion of Eden. When I hear the voice of God walking in the cool of the garden, I want to have an answer for Him. Either “I am innocent, Lord” or, “It was my destiny.” I’m at a loss as to what else can be done short of the most radical revision of man’s view of himself in the world.
Yahweh must be induced to rescind the terrible words, “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over fowl of the air. . . .”
How likely is that? The words are delicious. They deliver unto us the desire of our hearts.
The futility and confusion of alternatives makes discussion burdensome.
Some would have it this simple: either human babies eat, or the wild continues to exist. Of course it’s not that simple, but no matter. To quibble against the lives of the babies is unthinkable, or at least unsayable.
It’s a Pleistocene reaction: either us or them.
Nevertheless, my fantasies brim: transfigured trees of Brazilian rain forests magically resist ax and flame. Nothing harms them. They creep into the cities, over the farms, rattling flowers like sabers against the stars.
A mysterious genetic hiatus over a generation or so reduces the human population to a supportable billion. Lianas climb abandoned tenements. Bison scratch their backs on rusted tractor-trailers. We in our condensed but unspeakably beautiful cities cherish one another the more for our rarity. We daytrip among lions and giraffe. We stand at the sea’s edge, singing back to great whales. There needn’t be so many of us, as we are not lonely anymore.
The poacher’s gun backfires. Whalers sink at harbor’s mouth. The interstate sinks under cattails; swallows nest in the tollbooths. The basements of subdivisions hiss with rising water. Loons cry in the Hudson. Plutonium alchemizes to gold in the crucible of the warhead.
If I were God I would attempt these things. Being who I am, I shrug and say that there have always been deaths. Every twenty-six million years or so come extinctions so thorough and catastrophic as to appear complete. We recover. The remnant species radiate. Sea and forest fill. The beasts of the field stand motionless with plenty. I say these things with the wry smile you wear when you tell a child at her first heartbreak, “Everything will come out all right.” You know it won’t.
What you mean is that something will survive.
When I hear the voice of God walking in the cool of the garden, I want to have an answer for Him. Either “I am innocent, Lord” or, “It was my destiny.” I’m at a loss as to what else can be done short of the most radical revision of man’s view of himself in the world.
And there are surprises.
As a child I was fascinated by coelacanth, that blue-scaled lobe-fin fish finning back from the dead into the waters off Madagascar. I longed with great longing to see it fathoms deep in living water. I still do.
I lived to hear rumor of the ivory-billed woodpecker alive in Cuba.
Some sober scientists do not instantly discount tales of brontosaurs in African lakes, of unnamed pinnipeds in the murk of Loch Ness. We wear coelacanth on our foreheads like tefillin.
No, I do not believe in living dinosaurs, or secret mountain hominids, or sea serpents, or UFOs — yet were I to encounter one, my surprise would not be unbearable. And the emotion might not be surprise at all.
Once I saw a ghost.
Winter light fell on the Texas coast. I walked backward, not so you could see, but in time, counting the years with each step. I went out from motel lobby and beach flotsam, from among pale vacationers exercising their dogs on the sand — sand ground from the bodies of creatures dead before the empires of the world began. I hugged the breakwall that keeps the hurricane out sometimes. Meadowlarks gurgled on the wires, fresh and sun-colored, new mintage in an old world. I found the marsh road and took it as far back as it was going, into a land filled with tiny voices, with low metallic ponds darkened by waders. I retreated from the present into a past so past that I thought I might see something no eye had seen for a million years.
Believe me that these things are possible, if only one could desire enough, long enough, wisely enough, if one could find the right vibration of will to shatter the barriers.
The sand yielded under my feet. It wore the color of pale butter, of a cougar’s pelt. It took the shape of whatever last passed over it — a breeze, the highest tide ripple, the claws of birds. My own tracks followed me like the spoor of a dinosaur. I do not remember ever being so observant as then. Perhaps it was the air, neither warm nor cold, so perfectly adjusted to my body as to be impalpable. A meadowlark gurgling in a bush quickened my pulse. I whirled for the shadows of gulls, too huge and silent to be what they were. I believed it to be a day on which I would know something wonderful.
What came of it was the vision of two curlews on Galveston Island. They were quite distinct, one smaller and shorter-billed than the other at a season when size differential is not likely to be the result of age. I knew the larger immediately as Numenius americanus, the common long-billed American curlew; but because of the magic of the day, because of the strangeness of winter light, I hoped the other might be Numenius borealis, the Eskimo curlew, a bird rare to the point of the fabulous.
By the word of some, then, extinct.
I’d flown to Houston to attend the convention of the Modern Language Association, an experience not unlike a stroll among the nervous waders of the Gulf. In the whistling vacancy of the Houston Hyatt Regency dwelt the biota of a profession: unspecialized starling-like creatures darting into whatever controversy became available, propounding Bentham one moment and Dante the next, ears cocked for scavenge, advancement, or, sometimes, knowledge; hyperspecialized library fowl sipping nectar from a single flower only, evolved to precise and brilliant focus, able to say all that’s sayable concerning Dryden’s use of the tercet, liable to extinction at the burning of a single book; ambitious cuckoos and raucous jays letting the unformed children of their brain be fed into maturity by others, thieving merrily and holding their prizes up for inspection at the next California cash bar; high-flying hunters, swift to be mark, the hawks and storm-riding Canadas approaching at great height and great speed, taking in whole quarters of the world.
After a few days of that particular exhilaration I felt the need for contrast. I skipped the penultimate session of the convention and took a bus to Galveston for my first look at the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t remember anything but brown scrub of identical shape and dimension between Houston and Galveston, though I’ll grant that late December may not be that land’s best season.
I longed to see an armadillo — even a dead one smashed at the roadside — and kept my nose glued to the window, but I was not fulfilled.
The bus made stops at the fringes of Texas City. What I knew of the town was that once it had blown up. It’s the sort of thing I’d love to see for myself if I could work out the moral intricacies.
Egrets stab and stalk in the shadow of refineries, gas flares flickering over their crests. I suspect the refineries photograph them and call it an example of the compatibility of nature and technology. I feel it is a momentary grace.
Galveston I liked for its mixture of fine Victorian architecture and personable tumble-down informality. I bought a sandwich and was called “hon” three times by people who didn’t know me from Adam. I bought a map. On part of the map stood the streets and blocks and points of interest of Galveston. Beyond it lay a great blank dotted with the blue of tide pools. It was that blank I wanted.
A concrete sea-wall defends the city from the gulf, and the frontier-created windward of the wall brims with bird life and creeping things that the punctilious would, I suppose, call vermin. The beach had become a sort of highway for off-road vehicles and motorbikes, and for safety’s sake one walked close to the water, sidling into the wavelets when some horse-powered hot dog gunned too close.
On the public beach, sanderlings pattered in and out of the surf on their clown feet, at once hilarious and, against that immensity of water, brave and solemn. Once grass-green hermit crab had chosen a shell of deep sandy crimson to an effect of flawless elegance.
What from a distance looked like boulders turned out to be rubber tractor tires buried in the sand, gleaming black in the waves. Sacks of bright plastic components washed up beside sea-monstery lengths of rubber hose, boots, an unruffled copy of Sports Illustrated. A huge clear bag full of tiny seashells settled on the tiny seashells of the shore. The effect of all that trash was curiously beautiful, the flotsam of Atlantis tossed up, cleansed and mysterious.
I turned inland toward the U.S. Fish and Wildlife laboratory lagoon, startling a blue heron that deigned to flap a few yards before landing and going on with its hunt.
The theory that birds are dinosaurs shrunk, feathered, and shot into the sky is never more believable than in clear view of a heron, with its reptilian eye, its un-avian immensity and croak, its air of the primeval. I watched it long and close, a disturbing experience, one that made me a little afraid. I wouldn’t have wanted a closer look even had the bird granted it. My apprehension was not physical, but something sprung from the otherness of the creature stilting about in the lagoon twenty feet away. Only by accident did we dwell in the same world. I was watching time.
Death did not seize whatever passed for the dinosaurs’ imagination. Far from it. They pulled the greatest trick of creation to avoid it, a vanishing act so subtle and intricate we only now come to an appreciation. They transfigured, stoked their furnaces, sped up their hearts, climbed into their disguises, leapt into the air. The Aztecs with their feathered serpent had looked into the heron’s eye.
What did the heron see as she caught me in the yellow moon of her eye? Time, perhaps, but what time? The future? A fleeting, imperiled present moment, a figure small and vivid, an emperor looked at through the wrong end of a telescope?
My concentration on the heron was so great that I didn’t notice the Virginia rail hunting at my sneaker tips. I laughed aloud with the relief of seeing her merry in the sedges, poking and probing, wading boldly to the center of the lagoon, but never so far that the westering sun left her in too high a relief against the water. I don’t think I could have spooked her with anything less than a buck-and-wing. I moved freely, chattering to her. I contend that she paused and listened. Never quailing before the specter of anthropomorphism, I say that the rail’s expression was much closer and more readable than the heron’s, and what it expressed was satisfaction. One salt pond is world enough.
Across the dirt road shone a much larger pond, where visibility was reduced, paradoxically, by the superabundance of light, for it lay between me and the crisp winter sun. Glare from it flashed golden and tremendous. But I could see that it was strewn with the shadows of waders. I edged down to the shore. In the shining I seized on the unmistakable silhouette of a curlew. To the curlew’s left and nearer to me stood another shadow, like the curlew’s, but smaller, just over half its size, not a whimbrel, not a — what else was there? My heart leapt at the thought that I might be seeing the Eskimo curlew.
I took a chance that these birds would be infected with the casualness of the rail and the heron. I crept along to get a vantage point with the sun out of my eyes. The birds did not move: tame from protection in a federal lagoon, or perhaps for that hour charmed. I knew that the same light which blinded me must be lighting me up like a Christmas tree, inching in a ludicrous charade of inconspicuousness on their shore. I reached a shaded angle, whipped out my camera, swiveled the lens onto the bird. Too far. Though I could see well enough now, the curlews shrunk to sticks in the viewfinder. Had to get closer, wade into the pond if necessary.
That was a mistake. The instant the sneaker touched water, the birds flew, calling, the little curve-bill shearing off from the path of the big one, and I too busy fishing myself from the drink to watch where they had gone.
On top of everything I had read the schedules wrong and arrived as my bus belched toward the Houston road. I had to run ignominiously to catch it, had to sit sweaty and breathless and unable to share the tale of my travels back through time.
“I saw a bird,” I might say.
They would smile, turn half to the window, wanting to be left to their own thoughts.
“An Eskimo curlew!”
They’d smile, turn fully now to watch the toss of refinery lights on egret-y water.
Every twenty-six million years or so come extinctions so thorough and catastrophic as to appear complete. We recover. The remnant species radiate. Sea and forest fill. The beasts of the field stand motionless with plenty. I say these things with the wry smile you wear when you tell a child at her first heartbreak, “Everything will come out all right.” You know it won’t.
I returned home on New Year’s Eve, where, researching my bird books, I discovered that the last reliable sighting of the Eskimo curlew had indeed been on Galveston Island. I called the local Audubon hierarchy, whose opinion was that it was the wrong time of year for a sighting, and if the poor thing existed at all it would be padding the shores of Patagonia.
That news did not convince me I had not seen the bird. It convinced me I might have seen something more amazing still.
You’ve had the experience of talking with a friend in a bookstore or on a street corner, and late in the night the phone rings to tell you he is dead. Tidings of the curlew moved me in the same way. Had I seen the last one on Earth, who chose to pass his days in peace on that prow of sand rather than risking Patagonia a final, futile time? I cherished the possibility that I had seen the shade of a creature already fading from memory.
Extinct is an oddly clinical word. A mishap, it sounds, a slip of the evolutionary pen. The word does no justice to a calamity exceeding imagination. I thought I would be content even if I knew the curlew beyond doubt to be extinct, content to have seen the ghost of a bird where it flourished in life, passing as hesitantly from its home as human ghosts are said sometimes to pass from theirs.
I went to Houston to get a university teaching job. I did not get one. Usually I resent having to think of good things as compensation for greater things denied, but the curlew, this time, was enough.
To this tale there is a coda. I heard early in 1982 of an unmistakable sighting and identification of the Eskimo curlew. The news made the experience a little less mystical, if much happier. There remained the possibility that I had seen the real bird, a notch on my life list to be clucked over with a superior air and a lyrical memory of a sand island bathed in winter light.
And if a ghost, it had been no flickering shade, but a tough little spirit of determination guarding its clawhold of Texas sand, death no more in its mind than it is in mine, or even less.
I have, of course, wanted the ordinary things. But I have also desired with a full and Faustian heart to lay eyes on the creatures of vanished eras. I covet time machines wildly and irrationally, from Dr. Who’s TARDIS to a self-generated crystal bubble that turns that spot on which I stand backward in history. Any spot will do, for it’s not human history I mean. Napoleon and St. Paul interest me only marginally. But I ache from my marrow to see diplodocus shoulder among the tree-ferns. This is not curiosity. It is love unfulfilled, unrequited, an obsession as gaudy as a Tudor tragedy. I want to stand on Pangea’s shore and watch the swan-necks fishing, the great fins at their harvest in the deep.
Sometimes it seems impossible. How remote can something be on this little world? If I could wrinkle time. . . . If I could part the veil. . . .
That the animals do not participate in salvation is a particularly myopic prejudice. Who are the elder children of the world? Whom has God preserved longest?
Giant ground sloths became extinct so recently that in caves in Terra del Fuego their pelts have been mummified recognizably by the freeze-drying atmosphere, hair and fatty tissue intact.
Members of the Russian nobility once dined, in a memorable passage of human pride, on mammoth meat preserved in the high Arctic. People now living heard in childhood possibly genuine eyewitness reports of the New Zealand moa.
That one now living will — barring some millennial alteration of attitude — be the last person on earth to see a wild rhino or a free-living orangutan fills me with a rage more immediate, but substantially identical. Something belonging to me and my descendants has been stolen away, and there is no court from which to petition redress.
Clark Reservation in upstate New York is a tiny wilderness preserve surrounding a glacial plunge pool. A plunge pool forms when a waterfall, possibly a mile high, dives from the thawing face of a glacier. In the rock of the cliffs lie ghostly pale shells, fossils of a sea that tossed under the moon and vanished. Conceivably a billion years lie between them and me, yet I touch them, imagine them gleaning the bounty of that elder world. Such chronicles render ordinary aspiration vain. I want to die in a shallow, cool sea, near the mouth of a river, where my bones may be silted under, the decomposing bacteria smothered. I want the continent to drift until the ice grinds down to uncover me, that eyes might see and wonder fifty million generations hence. Now that’s an ambition.
There’s a series of alternate Paradises in which I would feel at home. They are all, I see now that I sit down to write of them, sprung from unfulfilled longing.
You are Adam, and this is the Garden of the World, the blue Ark plowing it ellipse among the stars. Cycads scrape the clouds. A clutch of dragon’s eggs gleams like ruby on the riverbank. You hear God walking in the cool of the morning. He brings beasts. He asks their names. You say, “Panther.” You say, “Bird of Paradise.” The panther scampers to the golden plain, where, pursuing impala, he crosses the paths of the stalking allosaurs. The smilodons roar, and God giveth them their meet in due season.
The bird of paradise flutters up between the calm chomping faces of giraffe and indricotherium. The father of crocodiles gleams agate and malachite on the riverbank. Mosasaur and dolphin sport in the breakers. Ramapithecus croons to her daughter in the araucaria shade.
The matrix of the world lies round about so rich you think nothing could harm it. Who can raise his hand against the thunderers, the sea-lords, the shakers-of-the-earth? Yet you have seen visions, heard voices whisper in the flowering groves. They have told you that one death, like a single pearl broken from a diadem, changes everything. The right death — that unsuspected bacterium, a lowly worm, an unconsidered grass — and the plains empty, the riverbank goes dark. So long as you dwell in paradise, this knowledge, like a fantastic tale, thrills without damaging your sleep.
But amid the garden grows a tree —
Nobody dies without death’s first having seemed beautiful to his imagination. You keep the word from them. You pretend to know nothing. You avoid mention of the shells in the plunge pool rock.
A vision is at once beautiful and cruel — cruel because whatever paradise it promises must be conceivable, must be plausible so as to twist the heart. The Eden of the Animals would have no power over me — except to restore that sweetness before sleep the adult heart loses some of at every waking — if it didn’t cry almost, if it didn’t lie closer with each hour of science, each second of the will’s endurance. The fossil in the glacial rock, tuatara in his sea-cave witness: everything that was, is; all that’s necessary is to get the right combination, the right sequence of genes, one more whirr of the engines of desire . . . one live cell of dimetrodon. . . .
What’s necessary? If I knew, I would do it. I would break any rule, defy any god. Come back! I’d scream into the dark cave, not caring what came out. I’d stand on the edge of time and with unanswerable longing and vehemence call, Come home! Come home!
To what ends will the blue goddess Terra go to survive us? Volcanos? Droughts? AIDS? Will she tear her ozone like a silken veil? Will she set the atom in our fists, cover her face, stand back?
The imagination of death is abroad. The rivers run red. The clouds are mushrooms. The pinup of the age is a starving child squatting over cracked clay. Something must be said to make it seem absurd, unnecessary.
I am not a joiner. My politics are, to put it generously, subtle. But I manage to do something now and then to earn the name of environmentalist. Why that, when the world’s suffering offers so many possibilities for concern? Because to hear my children calling heartsick to the gray whale and condor irretrievably departing is a deeper blow than I wish to weather now. Or ever.
An earlier version of “Curlews” originally appeared in Audubon magazine. A Sense of the Morning is published by Simon & Schuster (New York).
