I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird

by Susan Cerulean

  Across the room, the residents of Oceanhaven Nursing Home were circled around a television in wheelchairs. A few sat on a sofa by the wall. Each patient was fitted with a silver metal clip that linked their clothing to a beeper on their chairs. As we watched, a resident tried to leave her chair. Her beeper startled.

  “Rosa, sit down. Sit down, Rosa,” an aide called from across the room. Rosa remained on her feet until the aide pressed her back into her seat and reset her alarm.

  Dad wasn’t trying to stand. His body was configured into a series of four right angles in the wheelchair: head and spine, hips to knees, knees to ankles, feet. I’d never seen him so frozen.

  “Sue!” he exclaimed as we approached, and his eyes embraced me and David too, my tall and beautiful son, now seventeen years old. The look on my father’s face reminded me of picking up David from kindergarten, how he would light up when he saw me coming across the room. If you stepped in between us, mother and son, and now, father and daughter, you’d feel the fire of our love and want to warm yourself beside it. Only back then, David didn’t look so worried, and now, my dad did.

  “Where have you been?” A mix of tamped-down panic and joy spread across his face. “I nearly had to resign from this place this morning. You’re not your own man here.”

  Resigning wasn’t an option, of course. He was still recovering from the multiple injuries he’d suffered in November.

  We chatted about the college tour David and I were just beginning.

  “Here’s our itinerary, Grandpa,” David said, describing our ambitious spring break travel. “First, we’ll visit Princeton, then spend the night at Aunt Bobbie’s. She’ll tour us around the campus of Yale, and then the next day we’ll drive out and see Brown University, then Amherst, and end up at Wesleyan, in Connecticut.”

  Dad nodded and began to relax. I watched his spine grow taller. He transformed into wise-Grandpa, Grandpa-who-has-seen-the-world. “You know, those are all very good schools,” he said to my son. “But you don’t want to get yourself into too much debt.”

  We wheeled Dad around the right angles of his unit: four sides of a square. A wide linoleum corridor divided the patients’ rooms from the dining area.

  In Dad’s room, David and I tried to follow the nursing home protocol posted above the bed: Take the foot rest off the wheelchair. Encourage patient to press hands into the chair arms, push up to standing, and edge back against bed frame. When knees contact bed, sit down, lie back, swing legs into bed, remove shoes and socks. But Dad couldn’t comply. All we could manage was to coax him up from the chair into a semicrouch over the bed.

  “How about if I just plummet into the sheets,” he said, and down he went, face forward, with me holding on to the waist band of his blue sweatpants. David and I flipped him onto his back like a pancake, shifted his legs toward the foot of the bed, and squared up his head and shoulders on the pillow.

  His eyes flew open. “But where will you two sleep tonight?”

  “Mary Jane has beds ready for us,” I told him, hoping that he wouldn’t protest our leaving to sleep at his own home, the place he wanted to return to more than anywhere in the world. But he was too exhausted to struggle. “Goodnight,” he murmured.

  When David and I walked out into the cold night, fresh air rushed over our skin, carrying the breath of salt marsh and sea. I inhaled deeply, letting the wind empty my lungs of nursing home odors. I linked arms with my son.

  “Mom, this is a terrible place for Grandpa to be!” said David, looking back over his shoulder at the bright lights of the facility. He was right. Dad was stashed at a high cost in a place he disliked, a place where he had no cherished friends. But months had passed since that careless driver had tossed him from his life, fracturing his ankle and pelvis on the asphalt road. He was still frail as a pinkie mouse. We could see that for ourselves. We hoped against hope that Oceanhaven, a rehab facility nothing like his home, was just a necessary stepping stone toward returning to his real life.

  From my bed in Dad and Mary Jane’s small guest room, I listened to my son rustling the sheets as he settled into a mattress upstairs in his grandfather’s loft office. Not so long from now, David would go off to college, returning to my house, not to live, but only to visit. I would make up his bed with soft flannel sheets, as Mary Jane had done for us today. As Dad once did, when he was able. I could not imagine and I did not want to dwell on that loss.

  The next morning, we drove through the sun-yellow spring day with Mary Jane to pick up Dad from Oceanhaven. First we unloaded a lightweight, wheeled walker we’d purchased. Dad was pleased. “I have this dream that I will strike out boldly with this new equipment.” He knew that going home depended on strengthening his body.

  “Let’s give it a test drive,” I said. “After you do a few circles around these halls with the new walker, we will go visit that forest you like out at Batsto State Park.”

  He said, “I can hardly wait!”

  And we did. It was so golden there: the just-unfolding leaves, the orioles and pine warblers and great-crested flycatchers, a dusting of oak pollen. We found a picnic table to spread out our snacks and sat among those birds, our family contained by all that beauty, breathing in the real air, the unmodulated temperature and humidity, the light. Dad said, “Isn’t this just grand? This is heaven on Earth!”

  And that night he dreamed about going back out to Batsto: the baby leaves of the trees, and all the birds we heard, and the four of us sitting together for a timeless span. He dreamed that David got into the college he most yearned to attend and that my sister Martha was happy in her job.

  What I didn’t want was for our brief visit to be the exception in my father’s last years alive on the planet. The facility manager had outlined the psychological protocol for caring for patients with dementia to me and Mary Jane. Stimulate the memory and the senses.

  “We use these flash cards,” she enthused, as she flipped through the images in her deck. A bus, a kitchen, a cradle. “On Tuesdays at 10:00 a.m. we offer chair stretches, sometimes a ball toss.” I shuddered, knowing how much my father would hate those activities. He’d know, just as I did, that this was only simulation: well-intentioned, research-solid, very expensive simulation. It made my heart hurt to think of my father stashed in an expensive facility where a cheery woman showing a flash card of an attic, asking, “Did you have an attic in your house?” was a quality of life activity. I felt sad for all of the elders whose waning days were spent in institutions where imposed routines cut them off from the things that mattered most to them in their lives.

  I got to thinking about simulation and how it is also a way of life, whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, when you visit or move to Florida’s southern and coastal counties. Gated communities, strip malls, and the Disney attractions have replaced much of the real and beautiful land, hoping to sell you something they’ve designed and built instead. When David was very young we’d occasionally visit a theme park in Orlando. SeaWorld was the least offensive. The first time we went, we were properly eager guests, ready for the suspension of reality that the Orlando attractions demand. But by the end of the day, pummeled by heat and hard sidewalks, overstimulated by fantastic animal shows and adrenaline-pumping rides, I felt profoundly disturbed by this corporate way of “making contact with another world.”

  “Let’s pretend we’re on a treasure hunt,” I said to my six-year-old son. I thought we might distance ourselves a bit, rather than simply collude with the cheerful presentation. “Let’s see how many bits of native Florida we can find in SeaWorld.”

  A white ibis was number one on our unusual checklist. I edged within three feet of her, studying her mild blue eyes mounted above a stunning red sickle of a beak. “Look how close she is, David!” I whispered to him. She stared back at us, unafraid.

  I could see how her silky white feathers were laid one on the next, just so. I admired the reptilian skin that clothed her yard-long legs. The nitrogenous odor of bird excr
ement stung our nostrils. This close, I could almost imagine away the black metal fence between us. This close, I could imagine I was with the ibis where she belonged, in a remote cypress swamp or a wide freshwater marsh.

  “Mom, people throw money at everything!” said David. He pointed out the shiny coins that speckled the floor of the shallow pool where the ibis stood. I gave him two quarters to purchase a handful of bird food from a glass gumball machine.

  Scarlet ibis from South America and pink flamingos marked with numbered leg bands competed with our white ibis for the brown niblets David scattered into their midst. A pink flamingo labeled number twenty-nine grazed the top of its head on the concrete pool bottom as it filtered pellets from the water.

  In a nearby pond, we picked out a hooded merganser (out of season, but native); roseate spoonbill (year-round Florida resident, but rarely found this far inland in the summer months); common moorhen with chicks (in place and on schedule); and a female shoveler (another winter resident of Florida—should be nesting in the northern United States this time of year). A cinereous vulture from Eurasia hunkered on a tiny spoil island under a graceful willow tree.

  The willow, we noted, was a Florida native. The vulture was not.

  We love and care for what we have come to know through immersion, moment by moment by moment, over long intimate years. Understanding the place we live in or visit, in this way, leads us to connect and tend and defend. What has been arranged for entertainment or convenience—simulated—doesn’t stick in our hearts. So we simply move through, uncommitted. If we are shown a Eurasian vulture tethered to a bit of lawn grass in central Florida, we may admire the bird’s majestic size and curious features. But we will not know the bird in context, the landscape that it was born to hover over, the creatures it eats to survive, where it roosts and takes water. Here the bird is a rare and expensive specimen and we are observers, passing by and moving on. SeaWorld doesn’t ask for our love, or even our loyalty. The natural world requires both.

  The Orlando attractions confuse those who want to understand Florida, because in their design and construction, no value is accorded to what has come before and rooted deeply and flourished, be it native people or native plants. The proliferation of Disney and SeaWorld and all their cousins erases the wisdom of this place, the unique and resilient plants and animals that once clothed the face of our peninsula.

  “Let’s go see the dolphins, Mom!” David tugged at my wrist, pulling me toward a shaded stadium down the path. The interpretive signage and the trainers informed us that we were about to witness something truly genuine in this dolphin show. But as we took a seat in the bleachers, facing forward with the host of other people, it was as if we watched television or the movies together. We were voyeurs, I thought, or consumers, at the least.

  Wild bottlenose dolphins belong in the wild. Photo by David Moynahan.

  David jumped to his feet as half a dozen sleek dolphins swirled into the main pool. Three young trainers, bouncy in their black-and-red wetsuits, rubbed the heads of the dolphins, fed them treats. Despite my decision to remove myself emotionally, despite the hype and the captive state of the animals, still I felt moved to tears by those awesome life forms so close to us.

  But it is precisely the real world that millions of visitors are encouraged to escape in the fantasy realms of these parks. Nonstop sensual engagement ensures that visitors will not for one minute be bored and that, at the same time, they will always be safe.

  On another day, in another kind of sea world, I was again moved by the presence of dolphins. We’d traveled to picnic at the western tip of St. George Island. A few hundred yards away lay a smaller island. The water passing between the two was full of power and the rising of the tide, surging as it did, from the Gulf of Mexico toward Apalachicola Bay. In its currents it carried the wild lives of uncountable sea creatures.

  Some of these animals we saw: three manta rays the size of bathtubs, skimming the water’s surface, powered by the flap of black wings. Pelicans and terns plunging in pursuit of small bait fish. And yes, bottle-nosed dolphins, arcing the width of the channel, a whole family group of them. No trainer choreographed that moment, no walls contained the animals, nor did—or could—proffered treats enlist their tricks. We felt no need to applaud. Every creature around us, and each of us humans, was engrossed in its own living, securely at home on Earth.

  My friends and I wrestled and played with our young children in the sand, joining our human exuberance with the life of the place. The sea moved on and around us, both oblivious and fully aware. The sun dropped into the water. Chill night air rushed over our skin. There was no question that we stood on authentic ground and participated in miraculous life.

  Another visit north. Mary Jane couldn’t care for our father herself anymore, and the idea of sharing their small home with hired caregivers made her anxious. Dad had been moved to Seacrest, a nursing facility close to the house Dad and Mary Jane had shared, and it appeared that was where he’d remain.

  On my first visit to Seacrest, the nursing home was mobilized with purpose. Every resident moved in the same direction, such as they were able. Mary Jane and I wheeled my father to the big sunny dining room on the third floor. The windows were wide open to the glorious spring day; light and air filled the room, and on stage was Gino Valente, an entertainer all the way from Atlantic City. This was a rare event for the residents of Seacrest, a mini–rock concert. The aides passed out hot chocolate chip cookies on Styrofoam plates. Mary Jane and I had been seduced by the aroma of those cookies baking as we’d made our way through the halls.

  Gino Valente was tethered to a long microphone cord, which allowed him to rove about the room in his black blazer and clean white Rockport sneakers. His eye contact was impressive.

  “Dean Martin sure was a class act, wasn’t he?” asked the singer. Several in the audience nodded and murmured in agreement. “But you know where he ended up, don’t you?”

  “Japan?” someone guessed.

  “No!” Gino laughed. “The nuthouse!” He moved right into Dean Martin’s trademark “That’s Amore.” Gino’s son-in-law supported the singer’s honey-lovely voice with a background orchestra on an iPod and an amp. I thought the quality of the music rising behind the old performer’s voice was really quite good.

  His second selection, a seductive “Strangers in the Night,” set the three ladies at the front table swaying and singing with open and outstretched palms, as if receiving a gift.

  But my dad ignored the music. I watched him scowl at a woman dressed in plastic pearls and bubblegum-pink nail polish. Her hair was cut severely short and she wore it tucked behind her ears.

  “That one thinks she’s a man,” he told me. “And she doesn’t try to hide it.” She did look a little butch, but I hadn’t known that to bother my father before.

  The lady on my right clutched her elbows against her beige sweater, rocked in her red faux leather wheelchair to a love song about a one-way trip to the sun. I watched her run her hands over the plastic tabletop, as if to smooth a cloth, or the length of a child’s dress. My heart hurt and my eyes filled, but it wasn’t until Gino laid into Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” that I thought I might break down. I had to turn away from my stepmother, Mary Jane, who wept openly as she sang out the words. Between us, Dad held himself back, impassive to the music he’d once so loved. I surveyed the dozens of people parked in that spring-brilliant space, people who had lost almost everything—home, independence, spouse, and children—and some of them, their minds. And I wondered if this were a case where gorgeous music evoked more pain than pleasure. At least for my dad, I thought, that might be true.

  A few days later, I reached him on the phone: “I finally have been able to come up with a word to describe how I feel,” said my father. I held my breath on the other end of the line, wondering what he’d reveal.

  “Homesick,” he said. “Just that.” Never going home again, living in a place and with people he didn’
t know or choose, that he didn’t want to face.

  “I am looking for ways not to despair,” he said.

  Wildlife festivals were one of the ways my colleagues and I were trying to help people experience the real Florida, not just the attractions. I traveled downstate to Glades County, finding my way to a public facility in the tiny town of Moore Haven, population 1,500. A pleasing wind blew through the planted palms lining a vast parking lot, and beyond the rustle of their fronds, enormous cargo trucks rolled past.

  “How many people have registered for the festival?” I asked Tracie. I’d located my hostess among the vendors offering local barbecue, cotton candy, and kettle corn. We’d met at a Watchable Wildlife conference in Fort Myers a year earlier, and she’d invited me to keynote tiny inland Glades County’s first birding festival.

  “Only twenty-six,” she replied, dragging deeply on her cigarette, her voice raspy and low. “I’m hoping we’ll have a lot of walk-ins.” Judging by the frequency of her smokes, Tracie was even more nervous than I was. She seemed to be waiting—or hoping to conjure—carloads of bird-watchers to her event. It was an unusual pairing for rural Glades County, the idea of selling bird-watching, the beginnings of ecotourism.

  A decade or more ago, I’d spent time here working up an entry for the Florida Wildlife Viewing Guide with my friend Ann Morrow. We’d come up with the concept of the Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail, which directed wildlife watchers to the seminatural dry prairies and palm savannas on the west side of the lake, where crested caracaras, sandhill cranes, and swallow-tailed kites still thrived. Particularly drawn by those kites, I’d returned to Glades County over and over, to track their journeys and write my second book. I knew I’d never make money doing it, but that’s what Glades County wanted, and what Tracie needed to make happen, if nature-based tourism was to succeed in this rural part of Florida.