to the great horned owl I drew on the first day of class—no, I don’t think so. That was more of a caricature really, to be honest. Nothing I’d want anyone to see.
And yes, it also has some of Louise’s commentary. But believe me, it’s not critical of you. Hardly.
Please don’t underestimate Louise (we call her Lou). It seems that nearly everyone does, and I suppose it’s her own fault. Honestly, though, she’s observing, and learning, more than you might realize—even though she probably seems to be interested only in luring Mr. “I’m Premed Like My Father” away from Princess “I Hate These Bugs!” (Lou can’t resist a challenge. The minute he takes the bait, she’ll turn her attention to other things and spit him out like cold coffee.)
Anyway, by now you’ve already seen what I mean about her in her field notebook. She’s a beautiful writer, isn’t she? And she’s getting really good at spotting birds—almost as good as Cora and Karl. When I go out on my own—which is better for the drawing, of course—I miss L and C’s good humor.
Even those predusk excursions are getting crowded, though. Karl always wants to come along, of course, which usually means his friend Robert as well. And I understand Mr. Premed is to join them on Friday. I imagine there will be a bottle of brandy too, and a tipsy walk back up Rising Valley or over from Gallows Hill.
But they’ll be watching and listening for birds too; they’re completely hooked. It’s all your doing, you know—you and your poems and that clever ruse of “calling out” the bobolink with your fiddle Monday morning. It’s all “the Survivors” (as we’ve taken to calling the eight of us who’ve yet to miss a morning in the field, and don’t intend to) talk about.
So, yes, it’s all your fault that the trails and fields and creek banks all around Burnham Ridge are crowded with insect spray–wearing, field glasses–wielding “birding loons” (our other name for ourselves) at the best hours for sightings, Monday through Friday.
So as I’ve said, I look forward to listening quietly, with only you, on Saturday morning—when all the Survivors will be sleeping off their birds and brandy.
five
PENNSYLVANIA, DEPENDING ON ONE’S outlook, is either all subtlety or a long lesson in contrasts, quiet and nuanced or screaming with too much history. It can feel—on, for instance, a drive from New York to Chicago—like an endless pelt of brown and gray, broken by a dramatic river and a bit of industry now and then, plus the requisite cheap and ugly overdevelopment of late-twentieth-century America. This was Scarlet Kavanagh’s view of Pennsylvania throughout her twenties.
But settling for that abstracted, through-a-car-window view, she eventually realized, was to miss some significant points of difference. The famous Amish farmland and the peculiar hex signs on the Pennsylvania Dutch barns. The gash of the mines to the north and west. Vestiges of colonial life (all those narrow stairways, for instance; had they really all been that small?) in the southeast.
Her mother, Addie, was a small woman—only a shade over five feet tall and just clearing one hundred pounds that spring when she and Tom Kavanagh fell in love. For Addie, Burnham College and its surroundings were a revelation. There was no other way to describe her discovery of that corner of Bucks County where the college sat neatly atop a ridge between two valleys. These valleys wound their way east until their creeks, the Nisky and the Kleine, emptied into the Delaware River, the dividing line between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. This beautiful spot was only a two-hour drive from Addie’s parents’ farm, but it could have been an ocean away. She had never set eyes on this part of the Delaware River until she’d learned of her acceptance, with the offer of a scholarship, and visited the campus during her last year of high school.
She loved all the colonial names—Hampstead and Plumville and Easthampton, Milford Crossing and Gallows Hill—with their echoes of England. There were German ones too, of course; the house she would eventually move into, with Tom, and where Scarlet would spend her carefree childhood and portions of her sullen teenaged years, had started out as a ramshackle fishing cottage perched between Haupt Bridge Road and Kleine Creek. Years later, after his first wife had moved to New York and Tom had purchased the cottage, Addie took stubbornly to calling the stream that slurred through the woods outside their windows “Little Creek.” People seldom knew what she meant when she called it that, but that never bothered Addie.
Her favorite name, though, was the local Indian one, Nisky, for the bigger, noisier creek, a small river by some standards, that traveled toward the cottage from the west, meeting up with Kleine Creek under the rickety old Haupt Bridge. It was here, along Nisky Creek, a quarter of a mile or so beyond their house, that Tom had built a wedding gift for his young bride, the bird artist, in the summer of 1966: a blind, constructed in the style of the English bird artists’ hides that she’d discovered during her semester abroad. Addie’s hide was a wooden structure with a bench and a narrow opening at eye level, tucked inconspicuously into the woods, where she sat for hours, waiting for the birds she would draw—Eastern bluebirds, warblers of various stripes, her beloved wood thrush and scarlet tanager (for which her daughter was named). And she drew others too—cardinals, robins, nasty jays and grackles. In those days she wasn’t choosy; in fact she was disdainful of so-called birders (“featherheads,” she called them) who valued a species only if it was rare.
This Scarlet had always shared with her mother. Scarlet loved even the great blue herons, which became increasingly common in that protected area near the Delaware as she grew into her teens, their harsh, ugly screeches piercing their mornings and evenings on the screened porch where they ate their meals. She would never forget the sight of one rising from the creek each morning, the spring when she was twelve, as she let the screen door slam behind her on her way to catch the bus to school. That rush of wings and then the silent, massive span above her head, darkening the sky—every time, it made her catch her breath. And she tried to find a way to describe its rising each day on the bus, playing with words in her head: “giant, silent feathered airplane,” “blue-gray cloud with wings.” Tom, to her ongoing embarrassment, kept her spiral-bound notebooks from those years—notebooks full of phrases like these but rather lacking in homework assignments.
“Herons make you reach for words,” she told her father at some point, back when she still spoke fondly about birds with her parents. She knew this because it was written, in Tom’s barely legible script, at the end of one of those spiral-bound notebooks, where he had given her credit for it and then included his own addendum: “They certainly don’t inspire you to sing.” He presented Scarlet with this and other notebooks of hers when they’d begun to speak of birds again, arguing happily over whether music or poetry might better capture their boisterous, rapturous, unclassifiable songs and calls.
This was, in a sense, Tom’s life’s work. His first and only book, A Prosody of Birds, was many things—a diatribe for one, as well as a plea for peace and for ecological responsibility. But also an attempt to create a system, akin to the metrical scanning of poems, for transcribing the songs of certain birds: dashes and breves and accent marks climbing and falling over the pages in rhythmic patterns, supplemented here and there by bars of musical notation. The Prosody was also illustrated with some of Addie’s earliest work, including plates reproducing five paintings—of a scarlet tanager, a purple finch, a Kentucky warbler, a bobolink, and a wood thrush: birds whose songs were some of Tom’s favorites.
Of course others have shared his passion for the music of these birds. Here, for instance, is a description of the voice of the bobolink from a later edition of the Peterson Field Guide to the Birds: “Song, in hovering flight and quivering descent, ecstatic and bubbling, starting with low, reedy notes and rollicking upward”—another line that appeared in one of Scarlet’s adolescent notebooks, and one she has continued to love. This description from Peterson’s Guide is a poem in itself, proof, she often said to Tom, that it may take language—bulky, uncooperative, but also perfectly tuned and incisive words—to get at just what it is about these creatures that haunts people so. “After reading language like this, do you even really need to hear the song itself ?” she asked her father.