The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession

by Mark Obmascik

  On one of Komito’s early sales calls, the manager of a small plant wouldn’t even answer the bell. But Komito kept ringing and ringing until the man finally poked his head out a second-story window.

  “What do you want?” he snapped.

  “You got a problem with your roof and you don’t even know it yet,” Komito shouted up at him. “Let me show you.”

  “I ain’t buying nothing.”

  “You know, I wish I had a hundred customers like you.”

  The manager’s glare melted. “Why do you wish you had a hundred customers like me?”

  “Because I have a thousand!”

  The manager let Komito inside—and eventually gave him the job.

  If Komito walked in a manager’s office and saw a golfing picture on the desk, Komito said, “Oh, you play tennis.” A man with a fish on the wall was asked about hunting. To a sailor: “How’s the golf?”

  Komito always wanted a reaction. A bad joke kept them off-balance. The greater the groan, the more he liked it. He was trying to make an impression. Maybe next time they would remember him.

  He was a type-A workaholic from the Bronx who scored big in business with the tough guys. And he still loved his birds. In the early 1980s, Komito set out to find them.

  From his weekend trips to the Jersey shore and Jamaica Bay and Cape May, Komito was an expert on the species of the Northeast. And he had lugged Bobbye and their three kids on enough “vacations” to Florida, Texas, and Arizona to become familiar with the local birds there. All that knowledge and experience gave him a life list that put him in the top 10 percent of birders.

  But Komito was Komito. He didn’t want to be the top 10 percent. He wanted to see all the birds, period. That wouldn’t be easy. All the best birders seemed to belong to their own little elite fraternity, and Komito wasn’t a member. It grated him that when a western reef-heron, an elusive Eurasian species, turned up in Massachusetts, he didn’t learn about the sighting until the New York Times published a story months after the bird had left.

  He had the money. He just needed the know-how.

  He got lucky. Just as birds eclipsed business on the Komito list of personal obsessions, an enterprising birder, Bob Odear, found a new use for Komito’s restless bank account. Odear launched the first North American Rare Bird Alert. For the first time, birders could pay a fee and get the inside dope on rarity sightings—identifications, locations, directions—as soon as they happened. The new service revolutionized birding. Before NARBA, elite birders spent decades cultivating networks of informants who would call whenever a weird species turned up. That took work. With NARBA, however, the information, the crucial inside dope on the whereabouts of the continent’s hottest birds, was sold just like any other commodity. For Komito, who had cash in pocket but not an ounce of schmooze in his bones, this was a godsend. To get his birds he wouldn’t have to suck up to anyone. For a long, long time in business, Komito had always done things his own way. NARBA meant he had no need to change just for birding.

  With hot-line information in hand, Komito birded the same way he did business: he was relentless. A bananaquit slipped into some gardens in Kendall, Florida, and Komito was there. A northern hawk owl roosted in Minneapolis and Komito traveled through the snow to get it. He even picked up a jackdaw, his old Name the Bird species, after a red-eye to Nantucket.

  The kids were grown. The business was established. The wife was happy.

  The contractor had become a chaser.

  Greg Miller grew up in the Land of No. In Holmes County, Ohio, home of the world’s largest population of Amish, people believed in a literal interpretation of John 2:15—Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world—and they lived their lives accordingly. For fifteen thousand of Miller’s neighbors, that meant no driving on roads, no electricity at home, and no doing anything else that might make anyone appear to be an individual. Amish girls in Miller’s school had no jewelry, no makeup, and no haircuts; their hair stayed wrapped in buns or braids, and their knees stayed hidden above the hem of their plain pastel dresses. Boys wore no sneakers, no jeans, and no T-shirts; they answered “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” and gave the teachers no lip. Because of the instruction in Exodus 20:4—Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image—there were no class pictures.

  Thanks to the prevailing religion, Holmes County had no movie theaters, no bowling alleys, and no businesses open on Sunday. The high school had no football team. The restaurants had no liquor. The teenagers had no hand-holding.

  Though half the population of Holmes County was Amish, the Miller family was not. They belonged to a sister religion, the Mennonites, who shared almost all the same religious convictions, but believed a family could accept modern technology without disobeying the Bible. Mennonites drove cars, not horses-and-buggies. They wore Levi’s. They used computers. But they also remained staunch social conservatives. Miller was in his junior year of high school before a classmate, non-Protestant, offered him his first cigarette. He declined it. He never saw drugs. Dancing was banned at Hiland High School, which posed challenges for the organizers of the senior prom. Students celebrated with progressive dinner parties—in the house of one classmate the mother would serve appetizers, the next made soups, another prepared the main course, and someone else, a very special someone else, was awarded the honor of dishing up dessert. The Land of No said an emphatic yes to pies. There were pecan pies and apple pies and pumpkin pies and rhubarb pies and cherry pies and pies made of anything else that could be sealed deliciously beneath two layers of butter-laden crust. Holmes County residents rarely boasted, but they did talk about the joys of living in the Pie Capital of the World. No one accused them of bragging; their pies made it a simple fact. If a family celebrated a new baby, neighbors gave them a pie. Tough night calving a Hereford? Give that family a pie. Mourning the sudden loss of a dog? A pie eased the pain. All these pies certainly helped build community, but they also gave local doctors considerable heartburn. The one vice that Holmes County embraced was eating. It was a fat community. Sunday dinner after church was a bountiful affair, with noodles and mashed potatoes and gravy and homemade breads and roast beef and the inevitable pies. Greg Miller was bred to eat.

  Waistlines were about the only thing that changed in Holmes County. In fact, residents prided themselves on being an oasis free from change. The biggest upheaval people still talked about came in World War I. When the kaiser made all things German unpatriotic, the town closest to Miller’s home, Berlin, Ohio, summarily switched pronunciation of its name from Berlin to Berlin. Even in the 1960s, Holmes County remained the eye in the nation’s cultural hurricane, the one place where nobody embraced sex or drugs or rock and roll. Sixty miles away, at Kent State University, the Ohio National Guard gunned down four Vietnam War protesters, but the major debate at Miller’s home church, Berlin Mennonite, was over the proper disposition of a donated organ. Church rules said no instruments were allowed during Sunday services. Church elders, however, didn’t want to offend the contributor. A compromise finally resulted: the organ was played while worshipers filed into the yellow-brick church, but was silenced during the service.

  Outsiders might think this was a restrictive life, but Miller never viewed it that way. Yes, as a boy, he lamented that his town had no McDonald’s. But it also had no crime, no violence, and no corruption. Children played outside whenever they wanted. Nobody thought twice about a boy trekking across town by himself to find the best sledding hill. He knew people made fun of the Amish because they all wore the same clothes. But when Miller drove somewhere outside the county, he saw teenagers all wearing bellbottoms, bare feet, and long hair. Who really was trapped in a uniform? he wondered.

  If there was one thing Miller had patience for, it was someone who was different. His younger brother Brent, born eleven months after him, was profoundly mentally retarded and autistic. He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t dress, feed, or bathe himself. His family never really knew how much he understood. S
ome experts recommended that Brent be institutionalized, but the Millers would never allow it. The family brought him everywhere. And everywhere they went, people stared. For many years, the Millers just ignored it. But when Greg and his younger brother Ned, and his younger sister, Ann, grew into teenagers, they turned more defiant. When a stranger started gawking at Brent in a restaurant, the Miller children would join together in a huddle. On the count of three, they would all turn around and gawk straight back at the stranger.

  A profoundly mentally retarded child would rip apart some families, but Brent helped bond the Millers. They lived in a three-bedroom house on County Road 201 with a station wagon in the garage and all the kids in one room with two bunk beds.

  The combination of their religious beliefs and Brent meant that the Millers were a family of few luxuries. But they did set aside time for one diversion.

  Greg Miller was a birder before he could remember being a birder.

  It was one of his family’s favorite stories: At age three, Miller was toted to a farm a few miles from home. His mother and father enjoyed the peaceful natural setting; Miller chased ducks around the farm pond. On the way back home, they stopped at a neighbor’s house. Miller ambled out of the family station wagon with 7×50 Binolux binoculars strapped around his neck. “See anything with those binoculars?” the neighbor asked. Miller beamed. “American goldeneye—female,” the preschooler replied. The startlingly specific answer took everyone aback except his mother. A career kindergarten teacher, she knew her son was different. He was the only little boy she had ever seen who never, ever splashed in a mud puddle.

  Miller’s father had caught the birding bug while growing up on a farm a few miles away. He worked during the week as an Ohio state large-animal veterinarian, inspecting the cattle, horses, and sheep of the Amish, but he saved his off-duty time for the birds. Miller’s father also had a remarkable ear. On one family trip, he had hoped to find the elusive Kirtland’s warbler, a federally protected endangered species that lived most of the year in the Bahamas but nested briefly in the jack pines of northern Michigan. In early summer, the forests of the Upper Midwest trilled with the songs of at least thirty-five species of wood-warblers. Some species, such as the ovenbird, had two-note calls so distinctive that even neophytes could pick it out. Most other calls were extremely subtle; telling one from the other was like identifying the model of a car solely by engine rumble. In the woods that day, however, Miller’s father somehow heard one warbler song he didn’t recognize. Sure enough, on a pine bough not far from the road was perched a nondescript yellow-and-gray songbird, the Kirtland’s warbler. What kind of birder could pick out a species only because it didn’t sound like thirty-five others? Miller was awed.

  Rare was the time when the father could go afield without his oldest son. By the time he reached high school, Miller, too, had learned to bird by ear. Some teenagers could identify every Beatles song by the first three chords; Miller could identify the songs of all thirty-five wood-warblers that frequented the Midwest. Occasionally Miller pushed further than his teacher. While his father tried to watch college football on television, Miller would pull out the Golden Guide Birds of North America and ask for an impromptu test. His father, after rolling his eyes, would pick a species at random and read aloud its text description. Without seeing any illustration, Miller had to guess the bird. When that became too easy, Miller told his father to read only a few words at a time. The challenge: naming the bird in the fewest number of words. When that became too easy, Miller upped the stakes even further. His father would name one bird, and Miller had to identify all the other species listed on the same page. Though his father hardly ever admitted it—he did, after all, really want to watch the game—the boy’s exploding knowledge of birds was a lot more surprising than Woody Hayes and his three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust Ohio State Buckeyes.

  As a state employee, Miller’s father got three weeks of vacation a year. In the 1970s, he started saving up all his time off in the odd years so he could take off six weeks in the even years. Then it was time for the big trip: The parents piled their four kids into a green ’69 Pontiac station wagon and pop-up tent trailer and drove West. The idea was to see the country—the Grand Canyon, Old Faithful, the kids’ first drive-in movie—but they saw a lot of birds, too. At one point, the car broke an axle at Milepost 101 of the Alaskan Highway and the family was stranded twelve days at a wide spot in the road waiting for a replacement. One morning a hungry adult bear popped its head into the family camper, but Miller’s father, the large-animal veterinarian, scared it away with a hard punch to the nose. Miller was astounded. He preferred to amuse himself with three-toed woodpeckers.

  Back home in Ohio, he brought his binoculars to school so he could hop off the bus at the end of the day and scan the woods across the street for chickadees and warblers. Other teens teased by calling him Bird Brain, Bird Nose, and worst of all, Miss Jane Hathaway, that eccentric birdwatching spinster from the Beverly Hillbillies. Miller didn’t like the ribbing, but he didn’t spend much time worrying about it. When your fifteen-year-old brother has a diaper that needs changing, you focus on what’s important.

  His family concentrated more and more on the Bible. On their camping trips out West the Millers met different kinds of Christians, charismatic Christians, who believed, unlike Mennonites, that they could be baptized in the Holy Spirit. The Miller family embraced the personal nature of charismatic Christianity and began hosting Bible study classes with fifteen or twenty worshipers in their living room every Thursday. Some charismatics prophesied; others professed wisdom. Miller himself spoke in tongues. The family started driving thirty miles past Berlin Mennonite every Sunday to attend an evangelical church in Canton.

  When it came time for college, Miller enrolled in Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma. It was far from home but devoutly Christian, and it scored well in the U.S. News and World Report annual rankings of universities. Though the Bible and preaching classes were terrific—Miller learned to read Greek—Oral Roberts wasn’t all that Miller expected. Many parents, it turned out, sent their teens to the religious school for the same reason that others used military schools—to tame their wild children. Living away from home for the first time, Miller had peers who dabbled in drugs and alcohol and premarital sex. Miller kept his eyes open, but stayed away. During Miller’s senior year, though, Roberts told the world about his vision of a nine-hundred-foot Jesus, which he said towered over Tulsa and told him to raise money for a hospital complex. In the Pentecostal world, Roberts had long been famous for his faith healing. But his nine-hundred-foot Jesus—bigger than Noah’s Ark, taller than the Washington Monument—made Roberts infamous to a larger world audience. In the dormitories of Oral Roberts University, many students gave thanks for the ninehundred foot Jesus and prayed for the donations to start rolling in. Miller, however, was embarrassed. Building a hospital was a worthy goal, Miller believed, but what did that have to do with a nine-hundred foot Jesus? Roberts got his money and built his hospital. Miller graduated from Oral Roberts University with a degree in biblical literature and a strong dose of skepticism.

  Even his hometown was changing. In Holmes County, tourists had discovered the Amish. Main Street filled with bakeries and oh-so-quaint crafts shops, and Berlin had to put up its first stoplight. Some locals resented being gaped at like animals in a zoo. After his years with Brent, though, Miller was used to that kind of attention. Besides, he had college loans to pay off. Miller worked two summers at a new tourist attraction, The Amish Farm, where he took families from Cleveland on $5 buggy rides around a green meadow. While the draft horse pulled, Miller reminded the big-city folks that their hamburgers came from Herefords; more than one child swore off Happy Meals.

  Miller started teaching math at an Ohio community college partly to pay his bills, but partly to take classes in computer programming. Software writing was a little like birding: it required both precise instructions and creative solutions. Miller liked the challenge, and
when he moved back to Oklahoma for his first computer job, he also liked the money. To stay grounded in faith, he took up with a regular Bible study class, where he met a hardbodied woman who was as passionate about exercise as Miller was about birds. She showed him how to get in shape; he found it daunting. He showed her how to chase birds; she found it boring. But they were in love, deeply so, and married, with a wedding reception that had no alcohol and no dancing. They moved to Washington, D.C., because computer jocks and aerobics instructors both were in high demand there. He was proud of his weekend work as an evangelical preacher, but later it reinforced the pain of his divorce. It was hard to deliver Sunday sermons about failed marriages. It was even worse to live through one.

  One night afterward, he was eating Buffalo hot wings at a restaurant with his younger brother Ned and talking about the bust-up of his marriage. His brother offered him a cigarette. Miller sucked in a drag—and convulsed in an uncontrollable coughing fit. His eyes bulged. His nose ran. He barely kept himself from throwing up. It was the first time he had ever smoked anything.

  He was thirty-nine years old. He was ready to try something new. First, though, he snuffed out that stinking cigarette.

  Al Levantin started out with little, which soon became even less. When he was two, his father, a traveling lamp salesman, walked out on the family. Levantin and his mother were left in a one-bedroom apartment. The father promised to pay child support, but never did. Nobody could find him. Al’s mother was alone in the Great Depression with a toddler and no money when the landlord came knocking. So she took a full-time bookkeeping job with a lingerie manufacturer in the Garment District of Manhattan and moved in with her parents in the Bronx. They cared for their grandchild during the workday. But when Levantin was four, his grandmother died. His grandfather died a few months later. Levantin’s mother had to keep her job. She had no choice. She had to catch the D train. She left her son each morning with a sack lunch in his hand and the apartment key in his pocket. The boy walked to school by himself. Before he learned how to read, Al Levantin learned to be by himself.