“Write that down,” he emphasized, watching my pen move across the page. “We liberated the town! And all the people surrounded us and cheered. They were so very glad to see us! I can still see the face of the Frenchwoman who pressed this little medal into my hands.”
That was the one constant point of pride in my dad’s life, the time he spent as a very young man in the army. Before dementia had a name and a power over him, a gathering power, like a war, an ominous war against his brain and his body, Dad had been piecing together a personal memoir. When my sister and I saw it for the very first time a year earlier, the fact that three-quarters of the laboriously typed manuscript focused on his three years in World War II astonished us. He’d never talked much about the war when we were children.
Bobbie was plain mad. “What about us?” she had said. “Why didn’t he write anything about his family?”
“It’s not because we didn’t count,” I had tried to reassure her.
In bed that night, I snuggled deep under a navy comforter. A small replica of the Barnegat Lighthouse lit the darkened room. I thought about Dad, trapped in his slowed-down body, with a life and a car and an office he could no longer fully occupy. I could almost imagine how he might have felt in 1944.
Our yard was green, so green, and our lives so predictable. The narrow pine staircase that I climbed to my upstairs bedroom had begun to feel like a ladder to a jail cell. I was done with cleaning the chicken coop, drying dishes, maneuvering my mother’s endless list of chores!
I had a longing I couldn’t quell; it kept dropping lower and lower in my belly. In high school, I had fed it well enough, skating on snowy nights holding Sally Arnold’s hand, or camping in a big khaki tent at Yaw Paw. The freedom of those things was enough.
But war was coming around again, and we knew it. We heard it on the radio; we read about it every day in the papers. And this called up inside me a purpose larger than I’d ever known in my life. It was like building a watchfire, something fine and bright, that’s how I came to think of fighting overseas for our country. The brass notes of military music drifting in from our little town square poured kerosene on that burning inside me. I knew I could help set the world right even though I’d never been chosen for first-string basketball or anything but far outfield on the spring baseball team.
At the age of seventeen, Dad had gone down to the recruiter’s office by himself to sign up for the army. The man had sent him home twice because his parents would not grant their approval. They did not want their son to go to war.
“You certainly may not sign up for the army, Robert,” my mother had said. “Charles, you take our son back down there and get him unenlisted. Robert, you are too young, you will do no such thing.” She drew her lips into a straight line. She would not grant me my life even though I wanted to be useful and I wanted to battle evil. Even though I was scared.
The third time my father tried to enlist in as many weeks, my grandmother and grandfather relented. The 1057th Engineers didn’t serve on the front lines—their job was to rebuild bridges blown up by the retreating German armies—nevertheless, his journal and his letters home were laced with taut fear and repeated references to the “goings-on of the enemy.”
The next day, Dad and I took over the kitchen to concoct his favorite German potato salad while Mary Jane went to the hairdresser. I laid strips of bacon in a frying pan. Potatoes bubbled on the stove. Our conversation was fragmentary, comfortable. But there was more I wanted to know about his past and mine, before he could no longer tell me.
“Dad, when you worked for Inco, did you ever visit the mines near Sudbury, in Ontario?” I asked.
My father raised his eyes from the fresh parsley he was chopping at the counter, startled. “How did you find out about that place?” he asked. Almost as if the mines were something he had pushed and hidden, way in the back of his mind. Or as if he felt I was prying, trying to understand how he made his living beyond what he was willing to tell (which in fact I was).
“Yes, I did,” he said. I didn’t tell him why I was inquiring, that I was intent on understanding my own family’s investment in resource extraction that was destroying so much land and water and wildlife.
I stuck a fork into the potatoes and then poured them through a colander in the sink. Steam veiled my face and neck. At the table, Dad peeled three hard-boiled eggs, chopped them fine.
One by one, I lifted the crisped lengths of bacon onto a nest of paper towels to drain off the fat. Dad measured olive oil, vinegar, and spices for his special dressing into a small red bowl.
What a strange time we were in. My dad, who had supported me all my life, his memory beginning a long fade. Me, writing in defense of the natural world, as he had encouraged me to do, finding a mirror in human abuses and taking from the planet. I hadn’t meant to make my father a scapegoat.
Unexpectedly, he began to talk about another long silence between us. He watched me slide the warm salad into the refrigerator. “You know, your mother tried to tell me several times what was going on with her.”
My turn to startle. I had never heard him address that part of our family’s past before. My mother’s alcoholism and early death and whatever fueled those things—those were their secrets, or maybe just her secret—and our family’s buried shame.
“What did she say, Dad?” It felt like my last chance to understand my mother, who had been dead more than twenty-seven years.
But he had no more words.
CHAPTER 3
Paths
Jeff and I set off at a half trot through a forest of Virginia pines, following a well-marked trail. The trees were wonderfully familiar in aspect to our southern pinewoods; the understory plants were not. No saw palmetto, no evergreens like gallberry or wax myrtle. But plenty of twiggy leafless shrubs with beautifully reddening new growth. Wild blueberries, I guessed.
“It’s 2:06,” said Jeff, looking at his watch. Our goal was to walk fast and make our hearts work. “How about we go for forty minutes?”
The day before, we’d flown up from Florida to be with Dad and Mary Jane. After all that hurtling through air and over asphalt, we had to will our bodies to slow down to match my parents’ pace. It wasn’t just my physical momentum that had to adjust. My mind was racing too. I wanted to fix their lives. And quickly.
“I have an idea about that thing we were talking about yesterday, about why it’s hard for you to resolve your dad and Mary Jane’s dilemma.” Jeff spoke slowly, looking into my face. He didn’t want to proceed without making sure I wouldn’t bristle at his observations.
“Go ahead and tell me what you’re thinking,” I said. But he was right, inside my head, I was already defending myself.
“You know, as if they’re children.”
I tried to want to hear what he was going to say. “Give me an example,” I said.
Jeff inspected my face again. A light sweat beaded his forehead. I knew he was tiptoeing around my pride, but I also knew he was a really good problem solver.
“Okay,” he said. “I think sometimes you talk down to them. It may feel to them like we are trying to take over their decisions.”
A little window opened in my mind. My response to my dad’s illness was to try to find structure for his life and hers, to contain what was to come.
I thought back to breakfast.
“I do not want to move to assisted living,” Mary Jane had said. You have to, I screamed silently. How else were they to get the help they needed?
But I couldn’t come up with a single way to move the conversation forward. So how did I respond? I switched the topic to toast. “Why is this pumpernickel bread dark? Where does it get its color from?” I had said, spreading soft butter over a crusty heel.
None of the other three had an answer. I picked up the cellophane package and read the list of ingredients aloud. “Must be the caramel coloring,” I said.
Why was I talking about pumpernickel bread? God, I wanted to go deep with them, but I could not for the life of m
e figure out how to get a meaningful conversation going—in the direction I thought it should go.
When Mary Jane wouldn’t talk about hiring help around the house, or moving into assisted living, or at least closer to one of their children, I would back down, let the conversation die—and complain to my siblings later on. I couldn’t say what I believed, which was that Dad had declined to a point where he would be lost without Mary Jane now. How could we help with his care from a thousand miles away? What would happen next?
Still, maybe Jeff was right. Maybe I was looking for a way to maneuver them to do what I thought was best. A part of me looked down at us jogging through the fragrant trees and saw the corners of my mouth curve up, just a little.
Later, in the car, Dad said: “I think I’ll be dead by Christmas.” Jeff and I exchanged glances, startled and curious. Mary Jane tightened her grip on the steering wheel, straightened her spine.
“Now, Bob,” she scolded. “Remember what the doctor told us. You’ve got to stay optimistic. Alzheimer’s doesn’t kill people.” Who was closing down the conversation now?
Alone with my father in his office, I asked him why he thought he’d soon be dead. “It’s this disease,” he said. He felt that dementia was—or would soon—kill his ability to be himself. I feared that too. Listlessness replaced the passion and curiosity that used to be the hallmark of my father. Dad seemed so tired. He slept long into the mornings, sometimes napped too, and was always the first to head for bed after dinner.
But he had things he wanted resolved, even if they weren’t what worried me. “When I am gone, will someone write a loving summary of my life, as I did for my two dead wives?” he asked me.
“Of course we will!” I said.
“And have I told you what I want done with my ashes?” He didn’t pause for my answer. “I want them flowing into the ocean halfway between Ocracoke and Hatteras Islands, just like we did with your mom’s.”
“I wonder how we will manage that,” he added. He couldn’t imagine not being there and taking care of things, even for his own funeral.
“Remember your eightieth birthday?” I asked. All four of us kids and many of his friends had prepared tributes and accolades, lengthy and heartfelt. He did, and he smiled, thinking back. Dad wasn’t worried about his safety as much as we were. He just wanted to know he’d done his job and that we knew it too.
“Dinnertime!” Mary Jane called us to the table.
I stood behind Dad, waiting for him to inch down the carpeted stairs. His right hand gripped the smooth wooden rail. I could feel the effort of his intended locomotion. I rested my hand on his shoulder and inhaled the familiar scent of his wool vest and his shaving cream.
Back at home, my friend Norine and I shared a practice of walking together along the boardwalks and red clay roads out in the country, near the small town of Miccosukee, many times a week. We did it for the exercise, we did it to watch the moon rise and the wildflowers turn with the seasons, and we did it to clear our minds and reinforce our paths in the world, not just through these particular woods.
One afternoon, our trail took us over a boardwalk through a green-canopied swamp. The afternoon was heavy-clouded, low-ceilinged, on the lip of a gray front moving in from the west. Soon, the rain would come.
“Say we wanted to organize action on behalf of the Earth in a brand-new way,” I proposed. “What would be our focus?”
“I think we’ve got to hold people more strictly accountable,” Norine mused. She was a therapist and a passionate advocate, and we’d covered a lot of territory over the years. I held back an overhanging limb of swamp bay, allowing her to pass. A frog plopped into the blackwater creek.
“I think we need to ask ourselves—and others—to meaningfully pledge to act.” She’d been studying the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, and she felt his tactics were a good way to organize.
“But act how?” I asked. “How can one person really help protect endangered species, when you’ve already got a full-time job and a family?” I had worked for the state wildlife agency and several conservation groups before that for nearly twenty years, and it was clear we were still losing ground.
Later that same evening, Jeff joined us for dinner on Norine’s airy screened porch, and our conversation continued. I handed around white enamel bowls of black beans and rice.
“Here’s the thing,” said Jeff, an oceanographer and biogeochemist by training. He settled into a rocker and set a sweating bottle of beer on the porch rail. Far off in the swamp, a pair of barred owls began to call. “There’s really only one issue that is driving all the rest and that’s climate change.”
I protested. “How could there be anything worse for wildlife than habitat loss?”
Jeff and his colleagues had understood that the climate was changing for some years, by now. But it wasn’t reported much in the news, and to me, it was a new and unthinkably enormous concept. Bulldozers and asphalt trucks had seemed like more than enough to contend with.
Sitting together with my friend and my husband in the lowering evening, I began to really digest what none of us wanted to be true. That beginning in the eighteenth century, during the Industrial Revolution, as humans began to burn coal and gas and oil to produce energy and goods, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere started to accumulate, at first slowly and then ever more quickly. The product of our industrial respiration, millions of years’ worth of carbon stored beneath the earth had been released, increasing in the atmosphere, and now it was spoiling our nest.
“What needs to be done is to teach people how our energy-happy culture is affecting all of life on Earth,” Jeff said.
“I think stories are the best way for people to learn,” said Norine.
Jeff thought for a while. “Okay, how about this? Imagine the deep ocean sea-floor, a cold, dark place, barren of life. But every now and then a large bounty will arrive, let’s say a dead whale drifts down from the surface. Then sea life explodes: all manner of worms and other invertebrates colonize the dead organic matter, and their populations increase dramatically—for a short time. Inevitably the resource dwindles and the population collapses.”
Early harbingers of rising sea levels along Florida’s Gulf Coast: dying cabbage palms. Photo by David Moynahan.
Through the screen, I watched lightning bugs hang their temporary lanterns in the darkening woods. A family of cardinals scudded into the trellised garden tomatoes.
“That’s where we’re headed,” he said. “Humans fuel their economic growth in the same way. We’ve found our dead whale below ground, in the form of oil, gas, and coal—the fossil remains of plants that lived long ago.”
I’d have to repurpose my path, my advocacy, if all this were really true, that wild birds and other animals weren’t in decline simply because we crowded and shot them. We humans were affecting the very climate they had adapted to. The warming atmosphere was—or would become—our problem too.
But it wasn’t an easy task, and it wasn’t in my job description. I was developing maps and interpretive signs to guide visitors through wildlife management areas all over Florida, and down river trails—the Aucilla, the Wacissa, Lake Lafayette, even the floodplain creeks of the massive Apalachicola. What a great job this is, I’d think, when the projects required ground truthing and carving trails in the field. But most days, I was locked at my desk behind a plate glass window. The maps and pictures I was drawing in people’s minds began to feel too small, especially when I tried to factor in the biggest possible stressor—climate change.
One day, my work took me to Hagen’s Cove on the Big Bend coastline south and east of Tallahassee. My assignment was to create several sign panels that would introduce visitors to that remote and beautiful landscape. Jeff had come along to keep me company.
What could I write to capture the essence of the Tide Swamp Wildlife Management Area? The area manager (my usual source for interpretive messaging) had been called off to manage a prescribed burn and couldn’t offer his
counsel. So it was just us and the cove, finding our way toward what stories offered themselves. A sloshing low tide and a single bald eagle perched on a silver skeleton of a cedar tree caught my eye when I slid the truck into the gravel lot.
We stepped from the vehicle and my boots sank into the pocked sand, even though the wrack line of the tide was hundreds of yards to the west. No better place in Florida to grasp the concept of flat, I thought, flipping open my notebook to an empty page.
We stood in silence, breathing in the salt wind, and the place begin to talk. Cabbage palm fronds rattled; blackbirds and grackle creaked like rusty gates. What was the real story here? What words could I employ to sharpen a visitor’s focus if she stood in my shoes? What brief bursts of text and simple images might open her mind to match the expanse of this horizon?
I faced west, toward the water, ignoring for the moment the pine flatwoods and wetland forests at my back. The old-growth cypress and virgin pines had been logged away and shredded long since, their green memory turned to dollars and smoke. Industrial pine plantations had been seeded into the swampy ground like crops of cotton or corn. Now my agency had undertaken a slow restoration of the landscape into a place where wild things might once again live.
It was an essential and lovely tale—land acquisition and restoration—but I’d written it for other protected management areas, at Three Lakes and Hickory Mound and Fisheating Creek. What else could we notice at just this edge, this cove, this coast? Nowhere is static on this Earth, even when purchased and finally protected. What was unique to this stretch of Gulf Coast borderlands? My eyes rested on the broad marshes. A tourist might stop at this empty place on the map with a certain expectation of the edge of Florida, particularly white beach. But instead of crashing waves and a crystal shingle of sand, she would find ribbons of tidal creeks coursing to the continental shelf. If it were low tide, as it was right now, she would see that shelf with her own eyes. She would find reddish egrets and white pelicans in January and an abundance of scallops in the seagrass come the summer months. Beautiful.
I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird Page 3
