Tom’s argument was that no one—no poet, no ornithologist, no field guide author or contributor—had managed to capture the majesty of birdsongs. F. Schuyler Matthews may have come close in his 1904 Field Guide of Wild Birds and Their Music, one of Tom’s most treasured books. But even Matthews, who wrote of the purple finch that “its persuasiveness is truly loverlike and irresistible,” didn’t quite pull it off. “Play those musical phrases he’s created all you like,” Tom once said. “You still won’t recognize the song when you step into the woods.”
Of course one could say the same about Tom’s complex, nearly impenetrable scansions. But it seemed they worked for Addie, who, even with her tin ear, eventually became as adept at hearing, and recognizing, birds in the field as Tom. But then Addie had a bit more invested in the process than the average weekend bird-watcher, as well as a bit more reverence for Tom and his method, at least in those early years.
Ultimately both Addie and Scarlet agreed with Tom that not even live recordings manage to re-create the magic of the singing of birds in the wild—or, for that matter, outside one’s bedroom window at the edge of dawn in the early spring. Scarlet once recounted for Tom and Addie a story she’d heard about the composer John Cage (master recorder and transcriber of, among other things, the music of urban cacophony) and his partner, Merce Cunningham, racing back to their New York City apartment after a disastrous weekend in the country, where they had been driven nearly mad by the noisy singing of the birds in the morning.
What’s remarkable is that so many people become skilled at tuning them out. Air conditioners help, of course. Scarlet has never been able to sleep with one whirring away in her room; she has Tom and Addie, mostly Addie, to thank for her discomfort with that kind of mechanical hush. Addie, who from time to time, at the dinner table perhaps, or while Tom and Scarlet cleared the dishes, liked to recite from memory the opening lines of Rachel Carson’s “Fable for Tomorrow,” her opening chapter of Silent Spring. “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves,” she intoned hauntingly, while Tom and Scarlet gathered the forks and knives and plates as noisily as they could, humming folk songs under their breath.
A Prosody of Birds was an idiosyncratic hodgepodge, wildly disorganized and provocative to just about every reader. Still, in the end, a pure joy to read, even with all the scansions and bars of music and impossible diagrams: Tom Kavanagh in a nutshell. It enjoyed some success when it was first published, soon after Scarlet’s birth, in 1969. Certainly its warning of impending environmental collapse and loss of habitat resonated with audiences of that time, prescient as it was. Out of print for twenty-five years, it was reissued in the late 1990s by a press in Berkeley, in a “millennial edition” that became, to Tom and Addie’s surprise, a kind of cult classic, popular with birders, environmentalists, alternative-health advocates, poets, and musicians. Scarlet, however, wasn’t surprised. By then she too had come to see it as a brilliant, beautiful book.
Of course Addie’s notoriety fueled much of the more recent interest in the book. But it wasn’t only her status among young artists and activists; that alone could not explain the book’s popularity. If Tom too failed, in the end, to re-create the experience of hearing the birds in the language of either poetry or music, what most admirers of A Prosody of Birds seemed to agree on was that Addie’s paintings and drawings did, in their airy, almost unfinished way, capture the experience of watching birds. Though the birds in the illustrations were still, it was as if the viewer had just witnessed them in vigorous flight, or pecking at grass or tree bark for insects, or feeding their young. They were, in effect, soulful illustrations of creatures with souls.
There was a strange, ethereal quality to Addie’s work in the Prosody, something in those early drawings and plates that made it abundantly clear that their creator was in love with these birds, with their surroundings, and, unmistakably, with the author of the book.
But perhaps Scarlet saw a love of the landscape in the book because she loved those woods and creeks and valleys of eastern Pennsylvania as much as her parents did. It was not a breathtaking landscape really. There was none of the salt- and taffy-tinged hominess of the Jersey shore, none of the sheltered feeling she always had in the valleys of Vermont and northern Massachusetts, certainly none of the expansiveness of the coasts of New England or Long Island.
The valleys that encircled the little hamlet of Burnham did not feel sheltering to Scarlet. No doubt there were psychological reasons for this. But maybe too it was the presence of the Delaware—a wide brown river with its own complex history, dividing one world from another somehow, obviously not a true barrier between East and West, not since colonial times at least—though at times it felt like one. And the river itself seemed strangely hemmed in, domesticated—skirted along its course through the northern end of Bucks County by the Delaware Canal. There was a kind of claustrophobia connected with that too; it was as if, following the course of a creek from the Burnham hills down to its end at the treacherous curves of the river road and then the footpath between river and canal, you found, instead of the freedom and openness you were hoping for, a kind of stage set.
Yet the whole area was beautiful, in a quiet way. There were remarkable stone farmhouses, peaceful farms nestled in the arms of valleys, curving roads that offered occasional glimpses of the river—brief, fleeting, breathtaking views. And then just as suddenly those roads would drop back down into a dark valley that was cloaked in shadow, no matter how brightly the sun was shining. No truly open vistas. And yet no shelter either.
When Scarlet returned to Burnham as an adult, she always felt a lump in her throat, a longing for the connection she’d felt as a child with the trees and the hills, the rushing creeks and the paths winding all around the woods between her house and the campus on one side, the river on the other. And also a powerful dissatisfaction that she’d never been able to write about this little corner of southeastern Pennsylvania. She was at home there, but also trapped. And she wondered: Did other people feel this way about their childhood homes?
Of course it was Addie who taught her to see it all this way. From the earliest days of her life Scarlet accompanied her mother on her excursions to the Nisky Creek blind. By the time Scarlet was four or five, Tom had built a second one, this time high in an old maple. For Scarlet this was a thrilling tree house, and she would spend the morning happily drawing and reading books while her mother drew. By then, with funds from the sale of the book and a few of her paintings, Addie had acquired a sophisticated scope, one that curved up and out of a small window in the blind, allowing her to train it on a distant bird and, at the same time, draw it comfortably.
Tom had cut a separate, larger window above a little bench at the back of the blind for Scarlet, and sometimes Addie would abandon her scope and come watch with her. Their favorite birds in those days were the black-capped chickadees, playful little performers who pecked at the dollops of peanut butter Addie and Scarlet left along the edge of Scarlet’s window when they arrived at the blind each morning. The chickadees would eat and frolic right in front of their noses, staring back at them, as curious as they were. So fearless and trusting.
“You have to admire them for that, don’t you think? Why in the world would they trust a human being?” Addie asked one day, and Scarlet never forgot that. She still sometimes dreamed about chickadees. The night before Addie died there was a beachball-sized one in Scarlet’s dream, hovering above her head and peering down at her; it seemed to be checking in, saying, “Are you doing okay?” And so she said, “I’m fine, now that you’re here,” and then she woke up.
Eventually the chickadees would finish their peanut butter and move on, and Addie would go back to drawing at her own window. Scarlet would entertain herself quietly for as long as she could. Then, when she could wait no longer, she would tap Addie on the shoulder and ask for lunch. They would spread their blanket—sometimes below, at the edge of the creek, or, on rainy days, on the floor of the blind itself—and start on their sandwiches. And Addie would tell her stories.
Sometimes, earlier on, they were stories about Addie herself—about her childhood on the farm, chasing their few cows through the pasture with her brother, John; about Scarlet’s grandparents, whom she saw only on holidays and for a week or so each summer; about Addie’s