“You can’t believe how awful it was,” said my sister, over the phone. She had driven Dad and Mary Jane to hear the neurologist’s diagnosis: Alzheimer’s disease.
“I think the worst of it for Dad was the threat to take away his car keys.” Bobbie called Dad’s church to rally support. The minister had already realized something wasn’t right.
“He says Dad comes in every couple days and stands in the office. Same thing at the doctor’s office. He just shows up at the receptionist’s desk. He doesn’t even go so far as to ask: Please, can you help me?” Bobbie reported the facts, but her voice choked. “Breaks my heart. Poor old guy.”
I imagined our father steering his gray SUV into those parking lots, screwing up his courage, probably guessing that neither minister nor doctor had a solution for the disease that was invading his brain. In the late 1990s, dementia bore a stigma that shuttered meaningful conversation. But he went there anyway, going where he had always gone, trusting the institutions he’d always trusted to put things right.
A few days after his diagnosis, I phoned my father and asked what it felt like to be in his body. “I feel like the world is spinning out of control,” he said. We both knew the short-term losses to come: his car, his independence. He’d always been a man on the move.
“Goofy,” he said. “I feel odd. It’s almost funny that I can’t say with my voice what I have in my head.”
“My brother sent me an article from Newsweek about the brain, about Alzheimer’s disease,” Dad said. He went on to tell me how plaque builds up in the arteries of the brain. It was more of a conversation—and an acknowledgment—than we’d had about Dad’s illness so far.
I said, “Actually, Dad, your voice does sound a little peculiar.” I was wondering if his tongue was thickening. I had been reading about Alzheimer’s symptoms too. A good friend had recommended a caregiver’s guide that laid out the progression of the illness in stages. Back then, in the beginning, I thought this was a disease with a timeline, that we could pace ourselves.
“Oh, that’s just because I am lying down on the couch while I am talking to you. I feel kind of sick to my stomach.”
Both he and Mary Jane suspected a doubled ration of his new Alzheimer’s pills was the cause, but Dad didn’t want to cut back the dosage. He was frightened he would lose whatever benefit against the dementia they might provide.
Despite growing up alongside my mother’s chronic illness—was it depression or alcoholism, or the latter an attempt to medicate the first—still I’d emerged into young adulthood with a remarkably optimistic belief in saving things. I thought we could save the world, or my adopted state of Florida, at least. I’d been hired as a wildlife biologist in 1984 as part of the state wildlife agency’s new Nongame Wildlife Program. It was a heady time for an energetic person who wanted to advocate for wildlife. There were many of us, and we were encouraged in our work, never attacked. We believed in good science and a stewardship ethic, and our chain of command did not hold us back or muzzle us. Governor Bob Graham listened intently to the great conservation leaders of the time, and in successive sessions, the Florida legislature (Democrats and Republicans working together!) not only funded the Nongame Wildlife Program but established water-quality standards, addressed wetlands protection, required local governments to start planning how to handle Florida’s explosive growth, and set in motion what for many years was the nation’s most successful land-acquisition program.
Diagnosis of Florida’s ills seemed simple. Identify the trends. Take them one at a time, figure out what’s causing the problem. Repair what’s wrong.
Take the Florida black bear. In the 1980s, black bears, though classified as a threatened species, were still hunted in Florida. It was rare back then to see one. You could ride along Highway 319 from the Ochlockonee River bridge to the FSU Marine Lab and maybe one year, maybe twenty years after you started hoping and watching, you’d spot something larger than a dog, with longer legs than you could believe. It would lope across the highway in front of your car and you would turn to your companions and try to find words to describe the thrilling quality of the animal, like no bear you’d ever seen sleeping at the Tallahassee Junior Museum or in a zoo. Most of all you’d notice the athletic stretch of its limbs, so clearly built for pacing the many square miles of its huge home range.
Once in a while, I would attend meetings of the agency’s appointed commissioners, and I felt both frightened and fascinated by the bear hunters who came to advocate for their sport. They didn’t suit up like the staff bureaucrats or the wealthy landowners and corporate businessmen on the commission. They wore camouflage pants, leather boots, and caps pulled low over their eyes. I saw more than one scratch his spine against a post, as if he were a bear and the post a tree. If you squinted your eyes, you could imagine the hunters as forest animals. They seemed of an earlier time in Florida, when this land was an open frontier and everything— land and wildlife alike—was up for trapping or shooting, skinning or eating. I simply couldn’t believe that anyone wanted to shoot a bear for sport. And yet, they did. And I also knew that those hunters and I shared the same love of wild woods.
Florida black bears bounced back after a ban on sport hunting in 1994. Photo by David Moynahan.
In 1994, bear hunting was closed statewide: science, and perhaps reason, or even morality, prevailed. The bear hunters were forced back into their forest camps and inholdings and to silence their guns. Bears began to bounce back.
So saving wild things seemed concretely doable, if not easy, at least if the problem was hunting a threatened species for sport. I’d yet to learn that there was so much more we’d have to address, beyond stopping the shooting. The deaths of birds and other wild animals I’d witnessed were usually single and after the fact. A cardinal killed after crashing against a window. Hawks and owls reduced to feathered mop heads on the side of the road. Once, a snowy egret shot then roasted over a bonfire by some children in Perry, Florida. I’d yet to face the underlying causes of my state’s diminishing wildlife: rampant overdevelopment and habitat loss.
CHAPTER 2
Hot Metal, and a Medal
From a lounge chair on her patio, my stepmother, Mary Jane, reached up her arms to greet me. She wore a sleeveless pink shell and plaid shorts, and her legs, freckled brown, were stretched in the sun. The bones in her shoulders felt like little bird wings—tiny wings, fragile wings—when we embraced.
“Your father is upstairs in his office,” my stepmother said. “He will be so glad you are here.” Before I turned to find my dad, I lingered a minute more with Mary Jane. In her elfin face, I could see my whole remembered past, though my mother had died decades before. She had been my mother’s best friend from the time our families moved into newly constructed homes, side by side, in a north Jersey subdivision. Her five children and our four—two boys, seven girls—played together every summer day.
Two years had passed since my dad’s diagnosis. Every six weeks, I flew to Philadelphia, where I’d rent a car and drive through the Jersey pine barrens to Dad and Mary Jane’s home in Manahawkin. My sister Bobbie did the same, traveling south from her home in Connecticut. Between us, we felt like our parents were reasonably attended.
I pushed through the glass storm door and bounded up the steep carpeted stairs to my father’s study. Dad half-rose from the couch to hug me, his face smiling and transparent with love. He wasn’t a large man. He’d kept his hair—untouched by gray—and would until he died.
He didn’t ask how my flight was or if I wanted a glass of tea.
“I’m sorting papers,” my father said. “Seems like all I ever do is try to get myself organized.” I settled close beside him on a small wicker chair.
Dad fidgeted through a binder of financial reports on his lap. “I’ve been wanting to show you this,” he said. “Because I can’t call you on the phone anymore.” He didn’t meet my eyes. “I guess the Alzheimer’s disease makes it too hard to figure out . . .”
“The numbers on the dial?” I filled in his words.
Yes, he nodded, that was it. His forefinger traveled to the last number in the final column on the last page.
“This is what I’ve got set aside to leave to you kids,” he said. “Do you think it’s enough?”
“I feel sure it is, Dad,” I said, studying the numbers at the bottom of the page. Anything he left us would be a gift. My own worry was different than his: what would be the course of this disease, and how would our family see to his care?
I was glad my father didn’t ask about my job, for I was restless. The Nongame Wildlife Program had blossomed and become absorbed into the larger agency, now employing more than thirty biologists and educators. For me it had been a place to be creative, to conjure new programs that might teach and motivate our state’s populace to protect wildlife. We wrote a guidebook to viewing wildlife in Florida and developed a Watchable Wildlife initiative to encourage counties to value their wildlands and creatures, if only for the economic benefits that might accrue. But I wanted to go deeper. I had cut my hours at the agency and traveled to Montana and Colorado to study with Terry Tempest Williams and Linda Hogan, exploring new ways to write and speak about the animals I knew were declining and about the ways of our colonizing culture. I intensely wanted to know how my people fit into this bigger, tougher picture. I thought if I understood, then I’d know my role. My book Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites was published, and I’d sent ahead a signed copy to my parents before this visit.
After dinner, Mary Jane shooed us off into the living room to visit while she cleaned up the dishes. Dad picked up my book from the coffee table. I perched on a hassock near his armchair, wondering what he would think about my book’s more personal aspects.
“I think your book is wonderful, the best writing you’ve ever done,” Dad said, creasing open the cover to the table of contents. He traced his fingers over the chapter titles, crossed his legs at the knee. Then he closed the book and folded his hands in his lap. He met my eyes, a long look for him, his eyes so unprotected, so vulnerable, liquid gray.
“What specifically did you like, Dad?”
My mother (right) would have approved: decades after her death, Dad married her close friend Mary Jane Grambor.
“All the adjectives,” he said. We couldn’t leave it at that.
And then the things I feared—knew—would sting him tumbled out between us.
“You hated the company I worked for, didn’t you?” Dad said. “And it was awful to make you move when Inco transferred me when you all were so young.”
“Oh, please don’t feel hurt, Dad,” I said, placing my hand over his cool fingers. “I was just trying to write my own version of how life has formed me. You have been the best father ever.” I knew the truth of his goodness. My father meant no harm, not ever. Moreover, it was he who had taught me to care about the world and gifted me with the books of Rachel Carson as one by one they were published. It was my dad who had taught me to caress the muscly trunk of the ironwood tree and the rough mittens of the sassafras shrub and commit to memory their places in the mountain forest near our home. And it was Dad who had brought home a new, mint-green clothbound Peterson Field Guide to Birds and held it at arm’s length against the window, so we could learn the real birds outside. Every summer we’d begin all over again with Peterson and the shorebirds when we visited the shore, the skittering willets and sanderlings prodding the wet sand beach.
But now I felt driven to ferret out how my family’s lifestyle was embedded in our country’s extractive economy and to understand how we might be complicit.
I knew exactly the pages of my book that had hurt my father’s heart. It was what I had pieced together about the company that had employed him—the International Nickel Company. Besides the need to support his family of six after World War II, Dad had a long enthusiasm for his chosen profession. “I loved working with hot metal,” my father had told me of his early years of observing furnaces and smelters of steel. Later in life, when his work restricted him to offices and conference rooms, he volunteered as a blacksmith at a local state park.
But in my own research, I learned that those hot-red furnaces burned with ore ripped from the inner fastness of the Canadian landscape. Rivers ran metallic and poisonous downstream of those factories, and the air was vastly contaminated.
Dad was a very small cog in his company’s resource-extraction machinery. His job was to market nickel ore to other industries, and so my family’s comfortable middle-class standard of living was built on the mining of nonrenewable ores, so-called resources, from the body of the planet.
Nevertheless, as I sat with my father in the small pool of light in his living room that night, I saw that my attempt to understand was clumsy, and my framing of my father’s life work was painful for him to read about in my book.
It wasn’t just my words that stung him; it was the disease he knew was taking his mind. He rose from his chair and walked to the window facing the driveway where his car waited in the dark. “Pretty much breaks my heart,” said Dad. Our father had just been banned by his doctor from driving this car, or any other, ever again. My brother was coming to retrieve it for his own son very soon.
“Sue, it’s in perfect condition,” said Dad, his voice choking to a whisper. “It’s got seventy-one thousand miles on it, but there’s not a thing wrong with it.”
I thought of a black night four decades earlier, driving with my dad on a winding road in southern Michigan. Seatbelts with big buckles held us in place. Only the green and red lights on the dashboard illuminated the car’s dim interior, and our headlamps revealed only the briefest stretch of the unrolling road. Trees leaned out of the pavement; we drove through a tunnel of branches and leaves. There were no other cars. I did not know where the road would take us. All I had to hang onto was my father, but I was too old to cling, physically or emotionally. I was thirteen, between sixth and seventh grades, and I’d be starting junior high school in this new town, leaving behind New Jersey and everything familiar. My dad had arranged that trip because he knew it would be hard for me to uproot. He was soft inside and he didn’t want me to hurt. He imagined that if he showed me my new school with its big indoor pool, and singing classes, and cooking and sewing instruction, and five foreign languages, that I would be able to bear our family’s relocation. He was defined by an instinct to care for us.
Most likely my dad didn’t know exactly where he was going either. The large corporation he worked for had mandated his relocation and he had a wife and four children to support. Dad wasn’t in a position to say no.
So there we were in the front seat of the car, driving through the dark unknown of our lives with all that space between us. Dad tried to cut it down to size by distracting me. He proposed a math puzzle.
“Okay, Susie, figure this one out. There are two trains leaving a city on parallel tracks, traveling the same direction. The passenger train is going twice as fast as the freight train. After forty-five minutes, the trains are thirty miles apart. What is the speed of each train?” He threw a quick glance at me in the passenger seat.
In my mind’s eye, I saw this: How scary it would be (kind of like right now, traveling toward an unknown life) if I were on a train going a certain speed. Maybe I’d walk from train car to train car through the little rattling open spaces between the cars, where you could really feel the swinging of the train and the cold wind, when another train hurtled past with all those flashing lighted windows and the squealing brakes on steel tracks.
I knew that was what it was all about, why we were sent to Michigan. It had to do with steel and stainless steel and alloys of steel and most especially nickel. It was my father’s employer, International Nickel, that severed our family from our roots and sent us to live in the Midwest. We knew nothing of what my dad had seen in the mines, nor the fiercely heated factories, nor for that matter, the war he’d fought. We knew he loved hot metal because he said so. Not because we�
�d ever seen any in our home or town. Although perhaps the train on the track was something like the foundries that generated that steel, forcing our culture into an ever-faster, more extractive future. My teacher Deena Metzger once said: “I want to tell you that a person can be wonderfully good, generous, kind, and still operate within the cultural machinery that destroys the Earth.”
The struggle that had made my dad into a purposeful man was World War II.
“Sue, go back into my bedroom and fetch the little gold box on my nightstand,” he said.
Inside the box, nestled in cotton, was a wafer-thin turquoise enamel medal engraved with an image of the Virgin Mary, also known as Our Lady of Lourdes. I held the exquisite icon close to the lamp between us. My throat ached with tears. I knew he’d gone to the jewelry store downtown to buy the fine silver chain holding the medal and used up one of his few chits for transport to do so. Mary Jane preferred to drive as little as possible, and Dad wasn’t allowed behind the wheel.
“What a precious gift, Dad,” I said, lifting my hair and fastening the silver clasp at the back of my neck. I knew the story of where this medal had come from, but I asked him to tell me again, to prolong the moment and the gift.
“Write it down so you remember,” he said. I pulled a notebook and a pen from my backpack on the floor. Dad’s eyes drifted out the window as he thought.
“It was a grand day, Sue,” he said. “I’ll never forget how the townspeople surrounded us as we entered Saint-Brieuc.”
I pictured him in my mind: the youngest in his regiment of engineers, the slightest built, underage, but probably the most enthusiastic, marching into that small village in northwestern France, liberating it from the German occupation on August 6, 1944.
I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird Page 2
