I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird

by Susan Cerulean

  My pen began to play across the page.

  “How about this, Jeff?” I proposed. “Wide Open and Wild. Florida’s Big Bend Is a Different Kind of Coast.”

  “Sounds like a start,” he said.

  We listened to the talk between the wind and the place. There was more to tell. I hoped Hagens Cove would be a forever refuge, free from human intervention. It had already borne enough. Would that be true, though? Was it completely safe, even now?

  The tourist might see how the high returning tide would pile vertically and rush far, far ashore. I studied the forest fingering into the Gulf—cabbage palm, slash pine, red cedar, live oak, yaupon holly—and the welter of hammocks perched on lime rock, rising from the needles of salt marsh. I began to see a pattern of dead and dying trees intermixed with those still living.

  “What’s killing those trees, do you think?” I asked Jeff. He’d been studying the landscape too, through the lens of his work as a geoscientist.

  “I was just thinking about that,” he answered. He kicked his boot against the barren trunk of a dead cedar. “This coastline might actually be at the leading edge of climate change in Florida.” Because of the low elevation of Hagens Cove—sea level low—and its extremely gentle slope, Jeff postulated that a rising sea level forcing saltwater intrusion was behind the murder of the coastal forest.

  No doubt about it. For the interpretive materials at this site, I’d have to talk about climate change. I’d have to talk about sea level rising.

  Three years into his diagnosis, my father began to forge a new path, his own path, through a small stand of woods. Single-minded and slow, he’d set out from his house, wending around an artificial lake and then home again, nearly every day. Midway through that mile, he’d cut off on a short looping trail next to the road and walk through a tiny tract of remnant pine barren. The dirt path was uneven and rugged, Mary Jane told me, and she worried that Dad would trip and fall. She wanted him to keep to the pavement. But I loved thinking about my father moving through that patch of native turkey oak and sand pine. I felt that the tender sandy soil welcomed his quiet feet and that the trees appreciated his attentions.

  Dad picked up trash as he walked, discarded cans and condoms, bottles and food wrappers left by construction workers on lunch break, young lovers, or anglers, he didn’t know who. He just hauled it out. When I visited, I would help him hoist something out of the woods that he hadn’t been able to manage alone. One time he kept an eye on an old battery, counting the days until I would come and back my rental car up to the trailhead. When I did, we lifted that battery between us and drove it to a recycling center. Sometimes over the phone, he’d tell me he was giving it up, that he couldn’t keep pace with the refuse accumulating on his trail. But he never did stop. Not of his own accord.

  My father’s patch of trees was probably doomed. Construction in the retirement community inched ever closer, from west to east. I didn’t want to investigate when that land might be slated for the bulldozer. I couldn’t bear to contemplate a time when Dad’s tiny trail might go under blade and saw and he would lose the connection with that little bit of nature still accessible to him. But my father’s body fell before those trees ever did.

  CHAPTER 4

  Wildlife 2060

  I found my dad in room 301 of the intensive care unit of the Atlantic City Medical Center. He lay very still in the bed and didn’t respond to my greeting. Mary Jane sat in a chair beside him, no bigger than a crumpled pile of clothes. “They gave him morphine at six forty-five this morning,” she said. “He’s in quite a bit of pain. We can ask for it every three hours.” I squeezed in beside my stepmother on the hospital chair, wrapped my arms around her.

  Dad’s right forearm and wrist were wrapped in gauze, and flecks of brown blood clung to the hairs of his arm. A plastic bag hooked over the bed rail contained a small amount of extremely dark urine. Mary Jane listed the injuries he had sustained when the car hit him: broken wrist, fractured hip, multiple abrasions.

  A nurse slipped into the room and inflated the blood pressure cuff on my father’s left arm. “It’s 149/70,” she said. “That’s good. When he was here alone yesterday it was significantly higher. Family calms him down.” She smiled at us.

  Outside our room, clusters of people periodically emerged from the elevator. All of a sudden there they’d be, hovering in the doorways of the wounded people they loved. I’d learn over the next week just how many of Dad’s fellow intensive care patients had been injured by cars. So many that it felt like there was a war going on: cars against humans. The humans appeared to be losing.

  And not only people were going down. Between Atlantic City and Manahawkin, between Tallahassee and Crawfordville, anywhere I drove my car, devastating stretches of For Sale signs marked the trees, signaling an economic conversion of the land to human constructs that boggled my brain. I felt almost as crazy passing by the bulldozers pushing down live trees as I did witnessing the damage done to my father’s body. All of it beyond my control. A quarter acre of swamp traded for a dollar store. Forty acres of pine woods buried under a Walmart. A hip fractured on asphalt. What am I here for if I can’t save or protect a single place or thing? Or person?

  On the second morning of Dad’s stay in intensive care, the nurses moved him into a large, padded lounge chair. Good, I thought, that looks like progress. At least he was resting in a different position. We began to tend to him, my sister, Mary Jane, and I, and he looked more himself once we’d shaved his face and neck and hooked his glasses over his ears.

  “Who are all those little fellows?” he asked, sight restored. There was no one but us in the room.

  “Do you mean children?” I asked. I caught on to his confusion and didn’t correct him.

  “All about five years old,” he said. “They are probably yours, Sue.” After a pause he asked, “What does it say on that young fellow’s chest?”

  “You mean on his sweatshirt?” It was easy to enter his delusion, but that didn’t mean I could read the logo on the unseen boy’s garment.

  “Then there’s the dog,” Dad continued, picking at his bandaged wrist with his good left hand.

  “What breed?” What else could I say?

  “It’s tall,” my dad confided.

  “Is it a German shepherd?” I imagined my way into his confusion, remembering the dogs we’d had as children.

  “Probably,” said Dad. “That was one mistake our family made: all those lousy dogs.”

  He moved on to the subject of his nurses. “Is that Danish one immigrating?”

  The nurse answered for herself: “I’m not going anywhere, Mr. Isleib, but we will probably get you back in bed soon.”

  Dad replied: “And that will solve everything, won’t it?”

  “I’m so discouraged, Sue,” he said, after he’d been transferred back into the bed. I couldn’t tell him everything would be okay. His mind was returning, but his body had lost more ground.

  But as the shock of the accident and the surgeries receded, Dad began to eat again. After two rounds of cereal, seafood chowder, a third of a chicken breast, chunks of pineapple and cucumber, and a carton of coffee yogurt, he progressed to questions. Where was his cane, where was his wallet, and where were his damn glasses? My sister and I stayed on in Atlantic City, day after day, a week, caring for him physically as we could and supporting Mary Jane. My youngest sister, Martha, drove up from North Carolina to visit, and then our brother, Doug, from Maryland. Dad’s brother, Don, was constantly calling one of our cells for updates.

  Dad dreamed that he and I were attending Spanish classes. Not so surprising, because in the hospital bed by the window, a young Hispanic boy lay behind a cloth curtain. We had watched his parents pass in and out the door at the foot of Dad’s bed, but they spoke no English, and we had no Spanish. The best we could do was to exchange smiles.

  Dad caught the father’s eye. “Buenos días!” he called from his bed. “Me llamo Bob.” The other man smiled, pointed at his
own chest. “Candido,” he said, introducing himself. Magdalena, his wife was called. I had noticed how infrequently she left the room, how frail and worn she appeared. Candido pulled back the curtain and formally introduced their son, Ricardo, as if the young man could hear and respond. We learned that Ricardo was twenty-one and that his brain had been badly damaged when he was hit by a car, like Dad, while walking. Candido indicated his son’s broken leg, set in a cast. He pointed to the sky, folded his hands in prayer, and pantomimed while speaking in his own language that his son’s fate was now in the hands of Jesus. Our Spanish was too limited to further converse. We held our hands over our hearts, all five of us, knowing that each would pray for the other’s wounded loved one.

  The third morning in Atlantic City, we found Dad agitated, incoherent, and crying out in pain. I waved a nurse in from the hall and insisted that she check his chart. The night nurse had recorded that he hadn’t administered Dad his pain meds, since he couldn’t articulate that he hurt.

  “Percocet—right now!” ordered my brother, an ex-marine. We knew the chart called for pain medication every three hours. “Makes me feel like we can’t leave him alone night or day,” I said to my siblings as we huddled around the bed.

  Ricardo was in crisis too, even deeper than Dad.

  “What’s his white blood cell count? Blood pressure? Heart rate?” A crowd of nurses and resident doctors moved in and out of his cubicle. Machines beeped, and carts with life-saving equipment were pushed through the door. Candido and Magdalena were forced to our side of the room by the throng working around Ricardo’s bed. A Catholic nun in full regalia stood with the boy’s parents, translating and attempting to comfort.

  By nightfall, Ricardo had been transferred to a higher level of care: we couldn’t guess at his fate. The beige curtain divider was pushed open wide. For the first time, we could see out the window. In the dark night a giant red neon sign blinked BALLY, the name of a hotel I’d passed as I walked to the boardwalk to glimpse the ocean.

  Mary Jane clicked on the news. A weather forecaster reported that a big snowstorm was bearing down on South Jersey from the west. Dad’s floor of the hospital would very shortly be tending to the results of two car accidents on the icy roads, and I would hear the nurses talking in the hall: “two people dead, one here in intensive care, one walked away.”

  Five days later, I drove Mary Jane back home to Manahawkin to prepare for Dad’s hospital release. After we unpacked, I stepped out the front door of their house, drawing the cold December air deep into my lungs. What a relief from the warm stuffy climate of the hospital! I set out on a fast walk along my father’s path. The lake was clear of ice. Fifteen Canada geese and a pair of mallards floated in the chill winter sun. Much of the snow dumped earlier in the week had vanished, but still I kept to the road to avoid the wet grass.

  Unexpectedly, I came upon the scene of the accident. Orange spray paint marked the asphalt where the car had hit Dad. Another set of painted brackets indicated the terribly distant spot where his body came to rest on the road. I could feel the shock of the blow in my body. I made out tire marks in the frozen mud where emergency vehicles had parked as well.

  We all knew it wasn’t the car’s impact that brought on my father’s dementia. Nevertheless, the accident had caused him to endure enormous pain, would hasten his mental slide, and would soon cost him a life lived at home.

  “How about helping us put together a new report on predicted wildlife habitat loss in Florida?” The voice on the phone belonged to a respected wildlife biologist in my agency with special training in the management of black bears. “We need someone who can translate our data into simple language that anyone can understand.”

  “Right up my alley, I’d be glad to help,” I replied.

  “We’ll meet next Monday at 2:00 p.m. in the Bryant Building, second floor,” he said. “Appreciate it!”

  The agency’s headquarters had changed very little since I was hired to work there in the mid-1980s. In the meeting room, a group of biologists and commission staff had gathered around a long set of conference tables. Photographs of the five current commissioners hung on the wall; I didn’t know any of them now, but their framed images transported me for a moment to my beginnings here, half a life ago. Back then, it was rare for a woman to rise in these ranks. Most of the staff were white men with traditional training in wildlife biology from Auburn, Georgia, Oklahoma, or the University of Florida. The men and women in the room today were more diverse, and I knew several had degrees in marketing and advertising. They talked about audience. Who is the audience we hope to read this report? Who’s got the power to make the changes we need to see? And, how can we communicate to these folks what we think they need to know?

  As the biologists led us through the data they wanted to impart to Floridians, the potential landscape-level losses facing our state staggered me. I couldn’t imagine language or images powerful enough to help people understand and decisively act. The facts were not in dispute; the agency’s senior scientists were known to be cautious and measured with their numbers. I wondered: Didn’t those data make them crazy? I didn’t know how we could possess this information and still remain seated around the conference table without issuing a collective wail of mourning and despair. But not one person made a sound.

  I knew that each of us was looking for an end to the dichotomy, the dysfunction of our human minds, that allows our human population to believe that we can use up all the freshwater and natural lands, all the natural resources, and that life would proceed as usual. It was as if we were being swept down a very swift river, with thousands of new people moving to Florida, flooding and sprawling over the landscape that wild creatures need if they are also to live. Within the last one hundred years, we humans have shifted from a species with mostly local influence to one that dominates all life on our planet. And even as we have increased exponentially in numbers and technological reach, the drive to consume resources still runs us. It wasn’t the job of the state wildlife agency—conservative, ponderous, earnest—to stem that tide, but offering the facts, yes, that they could do. Even though I worked there only part time now and anticipated the day I’d finally resign and write exactly what and how I chose, I wanted to join those colleagues in presenting a longer view to the state’s residents and decision makers.

  Back in my office, I wrapped my hands around a mug of spiced tea and considered my task. I watched a family of gray squirrels rocket and spiral around the trunk of a laurel oak tree just outside the broad window over my desk. I couldn’t hear the squirrels chatter nor the tear of their claws on tree bark. But I knew those sounds, and I smiled, watching the family of small mammals at play. I propped my feet on the bottom drawer of my desk and leaned back in my chair and reflected on the burden of being conscious and the great inevitable sorrow of seeing and understanding the losses. I watched a tiny blue-gray gnatcatcher gleaning the oak leaves outside and I had a sudden desire to simply be an animal, to just live, to follow all the burning and blind urges of a simple existence, not to see the “big picture,” only to orient to the great sun and the green leaf. To be innocent. Not to know about, or in any way to have caused, the destruction we are imparting on our planet.

  I flipped through the data the biologists had asked me to interpret. The scale of predicted loss was unimaginable, even crazy. Maybe the right word was demented. How else to explain the devastation we faced over the next fifty years? With the predicted influx of eighteen million new residents to Florida, competition between wildlife and humans for land and water resources would be intensely heightened. Seven million additional acres of land—equivalent to the state of Vermont— could be converted from rural and natural to urban uses. Nearly 3 million acres of existing agricultural lands and 2.7 million acres of native habitat will be claimed by roads, shopping malls, and subdivisions.

  As I contemplated that loss, the squirrels in the oak tree continued to play. They seemed to live in a different universe from me in my off
ice, a world beyond fixed glass. Most of us humans are just as divided from the place we live. We no longer believe we even share the same air as the wild things that lived “outside.” We have been lulled into thinking that our destinies, our very survival, are independent of theirs and that we are safer in conditioned spaces behind panes of glass.

  I watched the squirrels chase across the centipede grass in the median of the parking lot. Gray squirrels can always make a life in such minimal habitat, so long as there is grass and acorns and a few branches where they might build a nest. I thought of another species of squirrel native to Florida much less likely to survive our incursions.

  The fox squirrel. I’d seen one a week or two earlier, trapped between a mile of tall chain-link fence and the four-lane highway near our airport. The squirrel’s home—a roomy stretch of pine forest—had just been clear-cut and carted to a mill. That rare squirrel with its glossy black face and tail and graceful gait, twice as big as its common gray cousins, was doomed to bound along the roadside until it was crushed by a car. The animal could not scale the fence and there was nothing behind the chain-link left to live in, were it able.

  This is the face of loss behind every For Sale sign, every new condominium complex, every new strip mall. Animals die. They cannot move elsewhere. I knew I couldn’t rescue that animal, and my car and my lifestyle and I were part of the machine driving it off its land. To that squirrel, I could offer no deliverance. There was nothing I could do except grieve.

  CHAPTER 5

  Simulation: The Answer Is Not

  My dad was pulled up to a small table in his wheelchair all by himself. He wore a tweedy blue turtleneck, sweatpants, and a deep frown like a preschooler, the one other kids don’t understand and don’t want to sit beside because he can’t hide how he feels. His shoulders were hunched, and his face was mapped with worry. He didn’t see us yet, my son David and I, standing just inside the doorway. On the wall beside us was a bulletin board peppered with announcements. One of the flyers, printed in a looping script on lavender paper stock, invited us to a workshop on the topic of “How to Have a Meaningful Visit.”