by Chris White
He’d simply never thought of it before. In a country swelling with strip malls and housing developments, spread with corn fields to feed the beef cows and supply corn syrup for nearly every product in the grocery stores, with highways and factories and airports and high-rises blotting out the habitats of the jackrabbits, the bobcats, the spotted owls, the wolves, and the buffalo—one of the main sources of land left undisturbed are the protected parcels owned and operated by the US military. Bases like Fort Campbell, Camp Pendleton, Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Eglin, and the naval stations in Norfolk, Jacksonville, and South Carolina. These are the sanctuaries for the endangered and the weary—in all, 24 million acres of land.
The irony of this fact is not lost on Adrian, and as it begins to form a hazy shape in his head, with the phone between his shoulder and his ear, he parts his hair with both hands and asks, “How do they survive in the midst of the blasting and the detonating?”
Here the woman hesitates, perhaps insulted, perhaps irritated, so he barrels on to the crux of the matter—civilian access to the base. How can he get in?
Eglin AFB Environmental Public Affairs is the place where Adrian finally finds an answer to his question. There, an energetic male voice virtually ringing with understated authority tells Adrian he’s welcome on the base, and that for ten dollars he can purchase an outdoor recreation permit to bike, hike, or canoe through a number of areas on the “reservation.” In order to receive the permit, he’ll have to get a bit of education at a place called Jackson Guard, where he’ll sit through a quick video. Since Eglin’s primary mission is the development and testing of munitions for the Air Force, they need to maintain a tremendous amount of buffer space for safety, the man explains. There are areas that are off-limits to civilians at all times, of course, and certain areas that are often open but that, on any given day, are off-limits for certain periods, due to testing or training ops. Today, for example, and for the next nine days, road 4D is closed, as are the southern Yellow River and East Bay access roads through the base. Jackson Guard will provide a map along with a complete list of off-limits areas at the training session.
Adrian snags his zippered bag of medication from his bedside table. He swallows his antibiotic, a Vicodin, and an Adderall. Maybe he didn’t fully take in the information about the closings. Maybe he’s feeling invincible, or maybe he’s just counting on his luck. But he’s already shoving his swamp clothes into his pack and jimmying his feet into Jeff’s boots. He’s packing up the Deep Woods Off and stuffing electrolyte Jelly Bellys into his pockets.
• • •
By the time Adrian buys food, rents the kayak, loads it onto his car, and gets to Jackson Guard, it’s 10:00 a.m. He attends the recreational-permit video session, where he learns that the Eglin Natural Resources Branch is locally referred to as Jackson Guard from the days when Andrew Jackson, not yet president, had kept prisoners there during the Seminole Indian Wars. Within the next few years, Jackson would become commander in chief and formally set into motion the Indian Removal Act, when a hundred thousand American Indians would traverse one thousand miles west on foot along the Trail of Tears, some in chains, and many dying on the journey.
Adrian doesn’t hear about that part at Jackson Guard, only that during the late thirties and early forties, as the United States prepared for World War II, the Pentagon began buying up enormous parcels of relatively unspoiled land—forests and swamps and deserts and coastline—for military reservations. Some 40 million of those acres were Native American lands. While the rest of the country spent decades getting clear-cut, plowed over, and developed to the gills, the relative tranquility of Department of Defense lands gradually became home to four hundred threatened or endangered species. Piping Plovers fluttered over warning signage into airfields; flatwoods salamanders scurried unfettered through barbed-wire fences into munitions training ops; black bears ambled over demarcations printed onto a map.
When environmentalists thought of those animals caught in military crossfire, blasted in a hail of gunpowder and experimental Agent Orange, they demanded their protection, and like anyone under the legislative gun, the armed forces were “happy to compromise.” Soldiers redirected their tanks from the turtles’ nests and drilled nesting cavities into ancient trees. They got out of their jeeps to lift rare snakes out of harm’s way. They moved only quietly and at night near the nests of bald eagles, planted only native trees and flowers. Eglin Air Force Base alone planted over two million longleaf pine trees on its reservation in one year, by hand. In a four-year period, the four branches of the military spent over $300 million to protect species designated endangered. Adrian listens to this part of the video with genuine interest. He doesn’t know what to make of it—this paradoxical tale of perpetrators and saviors.
Finally, he learns he has to watch for UXOs, unexploded ordnance, basically anything metal on the ground or in the brush or trees from the size of a bullet to the size of a barrel, that may, in fact, be “live.” No one has yet been killed on an innocent hike on Eglin, but the military has to spend a great deal of time picking up the lead from the ground, both live and spent—hundreds of tons a year, in fact—to keep things tidy.
Adrian tells the attendants at Jackson Guard he plans to hang out on the banks of the Yellow River, maybe do a bit of hiking, float around a little in the boat. He tells them he wants to watch the Gulf sturgeon jump, take some photos. All this to get a detailed map of the place. When he asks about the swamp, the woman at the desk says she has no knowledge of one and points out the same closed access roads the man mentioned on the phone.
• • •
Leaning against the hood of his car, holding the precious four-foot-wide map like a soldier’s letter from home, Adrian searches for but doesn’t find any swamp area specifically designated as such. In general, the map isn’t nearly as detailed as he’d hoped, though a hell of a lot bigger. His early morning research did, however, confirm an area off the Yellow River referred to as Boiling Creek Swamp—this from an Eglin environmental report on the endangered Okaloosa darter from 2005 and confirmed in other documents easily accessible on the Internet, mostly internal Eglin reports.
There were also several links to articles on the four Army Ranger students who died of hypothermia in the Boiling Creek Swamp on Eglin during a training exercise in 1995. It seems, over the years, twenty-two such students have died on their way to becoming the Army’s most “elite warriors,” trained to fight in all climates. But somewhere in this same Boiling Creek Swamp is where the man beside the water saw the bird near a cypress. Adrian suspects the swamp doesn’t show up on the map because it’s located in some hidden part of a wide swath marked through with red. Red, the woman told him, means “no public access.” When Adrian asked how the river could snake so near to the red spaces, the woman said that, of course, Eglin did not own the river, but that if a person “so much as touched the left bank” where Eglin’s restricted property began, he or she would have to be DoD (Department of Defense) or go against the law. “Not even all DoD have access over there.” She seemed suspicious of Adrian with his disconcerting combination of Boulder smugness and bags under his eyes, but he didn’t take it personally, and gave her a jaunty smile on his way out the door.
• • •
Past the town of Crestview, 87 South takes Adrian to a left turn at a dirt road marked clearly on the map. He motors down, idles—squints through the trees, the vines, the birds flitting from branch to branch, the hovering and zigzagging insects—and he can just make out the water up ahead, flat and brown.
He continues along the river for about five miles, as the woman at Jackson Guard told him to do, and pulls his sun-warmed Subaru Forester off to the right at the approach of a cleared, sandy river-access point, just as she suggested: “easy to find, easy to load in.” Once he’s got his (Jeff’s) sleeping bag and backpack down at the shore, he eases the aging red kayak from his roof. It’s the most effort he’s made since his illness, and he’s breathing hard when he
drags it along the sand.
The kayak sloshes, half in and half out of the water, Adrian’s boots submerging a few inches with a gurgle. Though alert to the potential presence of alligators and snakes, he fears them not, having encountered copperheads, cottonmouths, rattlesnakes, a seven-foot alligator, and numerous crocs over the years. (He’s no pussy, contrary to what his father always said.) The water is surprisingly clear, reflecting the weaker November sun, so he can see the foggy toes of his shoes on the river bottom. He balances his weight evenly on his hands, his arms shaking a little, either side of the kayak. Then he lowers his butt into the boat, followed by each of his dripping legs, and pushes himself away from the bank, paddling soft into deeper water.
Now he is quiet. The ragged sadness on Stella’s face, Zander’s thundering footfalls as he mounts the steps fade, June’s pathetic funeral fades, Adrian’s future, his past, his illness, and even the ivorybill fall away when the tea-colored water, the light cool wind, and the sounds of the natural world fill his head with safety and goodness.
He paddles and watches. For a while, that’s all. He is utterly focused on the task at hand. In the course of a few bends in the river, an old bridge rises before him—skeletal, wooden, and black—nothing left of it but vertical beams with an occasional support beam crossing on the diagonal. The river is wider here, maybe a hundred feet across, more ruffled by the breeze, and the trees give way farther from the shoreline to grasses, then sand.
He allows himself to simply float along the current, occasionally checking the bars on his cell: coverage is sketchy, in and out. He’s glad to be alone. If Jeff were here, he’d be talking. For Jeff, nature is a social backdrop, an excuse for conversation and companionship. The alligator Adrian spots now, for example, off the left bank, just up ahead under the exposed roots of a scrub pine, will not be commented on aloud. If Jeff were here, it would be a whole story. The alligator is utterly still . . . utterly still . . . then submerged.
Adrian rechecks for a text or call from the man: there is nothing. So he glides downriver eating trail mix, baby carrots, and dried trout from his pack. The banks pass steadily by—everything punctuated by saw palmetto—as he moves farther from civilization, where the ivorybill prefers it. The water, he finds, is moving at a faster pace than he anticipated, and he wonders at the prospect of eventually paddling against it.
As he is skimming through a patch of wide floating leaves, he’s able to log on to the Backyard Birder’s chat room, and shockingly, he finds a message, right there, posted and buried at three o’clock this morning:
4601 (11/28/09): Hey! Bud lite can hangng from a tree at boiling creek downstream past old brige
Adrian is shot through with promise, his heart speeding, his paddle slipping toward the water before he catches it.
He replies:
mandrake3: Then into the swamp, right? Will you meet me there??
Though the message was sent hours ago, Adrian immediately scans the trees near the water for a shiny metal can. Probably some fisherman’s trick, he thinks—marking the best spot for bass. Or maybe the man put it there himself to mark where he’d seen the bird. Or it just marks the mouth of the creek. Adrian desperately hopes he hasn’t already missed it, but he’s next to certain the bird will be deeper downriver than this.
Nevertheless, while his peripheral vision is alive to the potential glint of aluminum, he now sweeps the ever-changing canopy for the bold colors of the bird: if in flight, its open wings would exhibit a brilliant-white trailing edge, not black as in the smaller Pileated Woodpecker so commonly confused for the ivorybill. If the ivorybill were perching, an ample white patch would be present where the wings lie on top of its back. The pileated shows no such patch, with only the smallest sliver of visible white. There are other differences to do with the overall size, the bill, the face: the pileated has an all-red crest, but the ivorybill has a red crest with a black forehead, etc. He knows what he’s looking for.
What he does observe as he paddles along, watching, waiting: a Swallow-tailed Kite swooping high over the river, forked tail fluttering; a late-season Belted Kingfisher conspicuously eyeing Adrian without moving from its branch; a pair of egrets startling and flying away in unison; and a doe. All this in the course of an hour and a half as the river narrows, crumbling stumps and fallen logs multiplying along its banks.
Chapter Fourteen
* * *
Eight kilometers later, a Coors Light can winks in the sun. The man had said Bud, but close enough. Though he’s heard nothing back, Adrian sends another text saying he’s found the can and would love to meet him, if he could just text him back and let him know if he’s on his way, or at least that he’s getting his messages. Even if, in the worst-case scenario, the man hasn’t seen the bird again, Adrian will help him find it.
He feels fine about waiting here a while longer, though, since the river remains one of the best places to see the woodpecker, and he engages in a series of exhausting figure eights down river and back, rounding again and again past the hanging weathered can, hoping to hear back. Though his repetitive maneuvering only amounts to perhaps fifty feet, one way, paddling upstream is, just as he imagined it might be, nearly impossible. He distracts himself from the aching in his arms and back and the dizziness that’s begun to swoop like a swallow over his frontal lobe by thinking of his future, once he finds the bird—if he finds the bird.
In reports dated 2005 and 2006, an Auburn University and University of Windsor team claimed the ivorybill had surfaced in the Florida Panhandle. They boasted hundreds of recorded sounds and visual foraging and nesting evidence in the lower Choctawhatchee River, very close to where Adrian floats right now. Since there were no photographs or video recordings and no DNA (feathers, etc.), the Florida Ornithological Society refused to change the bird’s current designation: extinct. The Panhandle researchers continued posting web updates of reported sightings in the region up until only three or four months ago, when they finally stated that the sightings had diminished to such a degree that there was “no way to know whether the birds [were] in different areas in the Choctawhatchee Basin, different forests in the region, or dead,” and signed off.
What if Adrian were to find the bird? There would, of course, be a media bonanza. When it was believed the bird was sighted in Arkansas, it was like Michael Jackson dying. Movies and documentaries were made, books were written, songs were sung, television shows referred to the bird in their narratives, and newspapers and journals throughout the world splashed the bird’s image across their pages. The town nearest to where the bird had supposedly been sighted, Brinkley, became a thriving tourist attraction, where they’d cut people’s hair to resemble the head of an ivorybill, with a little red Mohawk up the center and black-and-white-dyed stripes along the sides. Stores all across the territory displayed ivorybill figurines, decals, drawings, key chains. The state of Arkansas even created a license plate engraved with the ivorybill’s image. If Adrian were to find the bird, his name would be known throughout the world, no question. He’d be asked to conduct lecture tours, to appear on talk shows. He’d write articles for ornithological journals. He’d be loved (and envied). If there happened to be a mate as well, the bird might live on to reproduce, and with very special care from the experts, the species might be reestablished. There would be hope again.
In spite of his fantasies about seeing his name in lights, Adrian can’t paddle any longer. So he drifts over to the left bank to hold on to a branch protruding from a fallen tree while the water flows past. The dizziness brings him back to the misery of his sickness, how he yearned for Stella, how the tiny colt had died before it was born, how he watched Zander toss the can through his binocular while he waited, idling, against the curb.
Just as his thoughts become almost unbearably maudlin, out of the corner of his eye, Adrian catches a glimpse of a large, mostly white-winged bird above the trees flying toward the swamp—in a microsecond of protracted time—its wings beating rhythmically, flying st
raight and true, then gone.
He bolts to standing like a man making an ovation, nearly losing his footing before he grabs at another branch, higher out of the water, to anchor himself. Scanning the canopy, his eyes try to part the trees from the vines, the leaves from the branches, but he can’t see anything else. There did appear to be some darkness on its wings, which is promising, he can’t be sure if on the leading edge or the trailing edge, it certainly could have been a pileated, or even perhaps a duck, but yes, this could have been the bird.
The phone dings, suddenly, and Adrian jerks it out of his pocket, still standing, still swaying:
4601 (11/28/09): I fell off the wagon Doc that night with Trammel.That’s what I did. Fourteen years. Easy as falling off a log.
Years ago I burned a bush I wanted to get rid of by sprinkling it with gundpower and shooting it with a flaming arrow. Which messed up the right side of my side of my face and chest and arm when I went to throw some lighter fluid on it to get it going again. Another time I drove my car into a creek and couldn’t get back out. Trashed the jeep which I still owed a bunch of money on it I had to pay off for a car I couldn’t even drive. Another time I rode all night with a paper bag between my legs on some batshit crazy revenge trip.
I don’t want to go back there man. You don’t wan tto see me.
Adrian takes in the message like a bitter tonic. Hopelessness builds in his mouth like saliva, then drips from the corners of his lips to his chin. He’s poking about on a “reservation” three-quarters the size of Rhode Island with no signposts and no guide.
He writes:
mandrake3: We all make mistakes.
I’m here. At Eglin. In the middle of the swamp. Can you give me a hand?
Gaping at the screen, Adrian hopes the man will write back on the spot. The air around him is a quiet buzz. The sweet bay trees have formed a thicket on the edge of the water alongside titi, tupelo, and gum trees—each with their sturdy, shiny leaves like rain jackets, unencumbered by the dampness all around them. The light bark skirts of the cypress trees fall stiff over the water—reflected there with the sturdy trunks of the spruce pines.
