Fowl Weather

by Bob Tarte

  • • •

  AS I HERDED the ducks and hens into the barn, it dawned on me that Victor hadn’t lunged at me for weeks. I could stroll from the water spigot to the outdoor wading pools without worrying that he would blindside me, and I no longer needed to arm myself with a push broom for self-defense. Victor seemed to remember my kindness to him with the watermelon, or perhaps he had come to think of me as a spindly food dispenser rather than a rival. I hated to admit it, but as much as I missed Hamilton, the absence of the aggressive Muscovy improved the emotional climate of the flock. Even shy Ramone had literally come out of the shadows to mingle with the other ducks.

  Returning from the barn, I noticed a rabbit that could have been Rudy’s twin on the hill behind the backyard fence. The unusually tame critter unhurriedly hopped away when I attempted to approach it. I imagined Linda laughing when I described how I mistook a wild rabbit for Rudy. But as I turned toward the house, I discovered that I had left the basement door open and remembered I’d last seen Rudy studying the sheet in his basement pen. Creeping dread overtook me, turning to full-scale panic as I hurried through the door and with a few strides reached Rudy’s empty enclosure. Safely stuck inside his loop, the less agile Walter lifted his head and fixed me with an indignant stare that said, “It serves you right.” I scoured the basement, checking Rudy’s favorite spots near the potter’s wheel and beneath the tables in the misnamed workroom, but I couldn’t find him. Back outside, I couldn’t locate the brown rabbit again, either.

  I hit the stairs with a clatter that Linda would have envied if she hadn’t been shocked by the lunatic who burst into the kitchen. “Quick, help me, I left the back door open. Rudy isn’t in his pen. We’ve got to catch him, hurry!” Bug-eyed and panting, with my hair all but standing on end, I was the embodiment of a cartoon depiction of hysteria.

  “He’s right here in his cage,” she informed me with a level of blandness that would have done Magda proud. “I was about to bring Walter upstairs when your mother called, asking if you had taken her keys. I think I’ll bring him up now.”

  It took me hours to get over the shock of thinking that Rudy had escaped outdoors. I slept poorly, while phantoms shaped like Stewart, Trevor, Bertie, Hamilton, the little grey bunny, and an accusatory Rudy slid underneath my eyelids and flitted about in the blackness. My dad made an unbilled cameo appearance with Benny Goodman. My mom and I wandered a maze of rabbit-pen loops, trying to find our way to my grandmother’s kitchen. The next morning, I asked Linda to make an appointment with the doctor for me.

  THE SIDE EFFECTS of the antidepressant sneaked up on me as I drove to work. I’d been taking the pills for three days without any noticeable results, which was a good thing, since instant relief from an existential dilemma would have made me suspicious. My osteopath had recommended this particular medication because of its effectiveness against anxiety plus the fact that none of his other patients had suffered an adverse reaction. None of his other patients had suffered visits from the hose demon, Henry the master gardener, or Bobo the Roller Clown either, so this didn’t exactly let me off the hook.

  I popped in an ancient Van Morrison CD as I turned onto the East Beltline. While I wasn’t what you’d call jaded to the charms of music even after reviewing hundreds of discs for publication, I had reason to doubt that “Moondance” alone could suddenly slow my cellular activity to that of a hunk of granite. Fortunately, my transformation into inanimate matter didn’t impair my ability to drive. I had become part of the car, sort of an extension of the driver’s seat with arms and legs. Once I reached my workplace, getting to the door presented unusual difficulty. Instead of locomoting my body, I dragged the building toward me with each step, and having to rotate the planet beneath my feet added to my sluggishness.

  I felt medicated, but without the pleasures that the word implied. My sensory apparatus had been dulled. Perceptions lagged behind stimuli like a movie with an out-of-sync soundtrack. When my friend Ron moved his mouth to greet me, I heard his hello a split second later. When I opened my jaws to return the salutation, a brief but noticeable pause elapsed before the drool flowed in reply. My thought processes seemed normal enough, so writing catalog copy for my client proceeded at the typical glacial pace. But avoiding ossification required me to lurch to a standing position and visit Randy at his workbench in the bowels of the shipping room for cup upon cup of seriously caffeinated coffee.

  Back home after lunch, I was grateful that the direst effects of the drug had dissipated, but to prevent myself from declining into total torpor I had to keep moving around. Only move around and do what? Physical exertion and I had never seen eye to eye. I happily encouraged Linda to hire college students for stress-inducing projects such as barn cleanup, duck-pen gravel maintenance, and lacing my shoes. Occasionally, though, an odd job would motivate me. The task I had in mind didn’t seem that debilitating if I did only a teeny-weeny bit of it each day. Given the nice fall weather, I surmised that the work could even be—gasp—not entirely unfun.

  Although we lived within five hundred feet of the Grand River, we rarely stood on its bank. Spring rains flooded the hollow beyond the back fence, blocking our path. By summer that same lowland turned into an impassable malarial swamp. In the fall, when the wet finally evaporated, neck-high weeds barricaded the way until heavy winter snows battered them down. While I was powerless against the elemental forces of rain, snow, and biting insects, I was merely weak when it came to combating vegetative growth. Armed with a grass whip and careful vigilance for poison ivy, which a string trimmer would readily atomize and spray onto my face, I could conceivably, slowly, lazily cut a path to the river.

  Wild birds were my motivation. They had fascinated me ever since my move to the country from downtown Grand Rapids more than a decade earlier. Dealing with the challenges presented by our Jekyll-and-Hyde Ollie, avian geniuses Stanley Sue and Dusty, and stubborn dove Howard convinced me to consider their outdoor cousins as more than flighty darts with colorful feathers. The months we’d spent with orphan European starling Weaver, who had learned to talk as well as a parrot, suggested that each and every bird that teetered on a tree limb or bobbled on the ground possessed a charismatic personality. So I started learning songs and field marks in my usual haphazard way. But Linda and I hadn’t investigated the “riparian habitat” of our river, where we might glimpse shorebirds, ducks, and other dabblers, plus the occasional migrating warbler. Fall was migration time, and time was wasting, so I started on the path by lopping down the first few weeds.

  I also started on a second antidepressant a week later. Despite the bouts of outdoor exercise, I still had enough pent-up anxiety under my skin to power a small city, with sufficient stores of uneasiness to light up the suburbs, too. A fellow music writer who also fought with fear and gloom had suggested a particular medication, though I felt sure that he consorted with a higher-quality inner demon than the clunk that slummed inside me. My osteopath agreed with the drug choice and presented me with a sleekly packaged introductory kit. Nestled inside four rows of plastic bubbles, twenty-one minimum-therapeutic-dosage pills lorded it over seven smaller half-dosage pills, as minimum-therapeutic-dosage pills all too often do.

  “Most of our patients skip the first row of pills altogether,” my doctor told me, but if anything I wanted to cut the half-dosage pills in half.

  Since side effects from the first antidepressant hadn’t kicked in until I’d taken it for three days, I downed my training-wheels dose of the second medication without a second thought. No neurological calamity struck during the drive to my workplace. After I’d worked for about an hour, though, I stopped to chat with Ron and caught myself wondering whether I was awake or dreaming—not the strongest indication of mental health. I couldn’t quite categorize the particular flavor of dissociation from reality. Then, while sitting at the computer, I experienced what could best be described as a lightning strike inside my skull. For a fraction of an instant, the external world fizzed in a hot flash o
f white noise and static. While the bulk of my nervous system was busy superheating, the lazier neurons that had been caught playing canasta in the back room contented themselves with shooting electrical jolts through my limbs. All of this happened so quickly, I imagined that I had imagined it. When it occurred twice more, I drove home during a lull between voltage peaks and climbed into bed, where I spent the remainder of the day.

  Oddly enough, the following morning I felt better than I’d remembered feeling for months, or even years. “It’s as if the medication burned off all my anxiety,” I told Linda.

  “You’re not taking that again, are you?”

  “Absolutely not. But it’s almost worth going through every few months or so.”

  THE PATH TO THE river evolved with inexplicable ease. If I had all the athletic prowess of a rusty gate, at least I could swing my arm like one and with the addition of a grass whip eventually hack down a weed. Waving my skinny appendage to and fro, I allowed the weight of the L-shaped sickle to inch my body toward the water in much the same fashion that a pendulum advances the hour. The activity was so mechanical, I turned into a perpetual-motion device. Even after my brain decided I should stop, my swinging arm exercised a mind of its own, repeating, “Cut more weeds.”

  Within a few days, I had chopped, sliced, diced, and, especially, minced a six-foot-wide avenue down the hill, across the spongy matter of the swamp, into the poison ivy – strewn margin of the woods, and ultimately all the way through the trees to the Grand River. I saw little logic in hiking the path with Linda only to stand single file at the end and remark, “Yup, that’s the water. Could you please move your head?” We needed space to spread out upon our arrival, so over the next several days I carved out an airy oasis seventy feet long and fifteen feet deep. But once at the river, we’d still need a way to get down the bank to the water’s edge without rubbing up against enough poison oak, poison sumac, poison ivy, stinging nettles, belladonna, and amanita mushrooms to wipe out Tbilisi. The grass whip kept whipping. Still, it was better than the nervous tic I’d been cultivating over the past month.

  My enjoyment of being in the woods was heightened by the fact that I had never benefited from more than fleeting exposure to nature as a child. Once a summer our family might drive to Cannonsburg Park for a picnic, but we would cling to the picnic table like ants, venturing into the woods only if they lay between us and a playground. I still wondered what I had missed compared to folks who had chased birds and butterflies for decades and knew a dragonfly from a damselfly. Houseflies were my milieu.

  My grass whipping finally paid off big. I normally wouldn’t have noticed a single, silent brown bird hiding in the leaves. But the hush at the river’s edge—the lush green that muffled the whoosh of traffic—allowed me to pay attention to tiny things. Tree bark, I marveled. Tree bark. The brown bird looped out over the river, then flew back again. As I moved to get a better look, it replayed its boomerang flight. Finally I caught the silhouette of its crest, the wedding band on its tail, and a high-pitched squeak that a locust wouldn’t have envied. Embarrassed not to have recognized a cedar waxwing, I glanced at the next tree down the line, where another waxwing performed a mirror-image routine. It was the same on the opposite bank. Up and down the river, four or five birds at a time went airborne as these berry eaters dined on flies on the fly. Not to be outdone, a belted kingfisher hit the water with a crack and, after settling on a snag, erupted in a long, rolling, mirthless, chattering laugh, lamenting his failure to catch a fish. He should have tried the bugs.

  When Linda joined me the following evening, the bell tones of a song sparrow serenaded us, along with the splash of turtles that hopped off their log when they spotted us. I wanted the cedar waxwings to surprise her, but we had barely planted our heels next to an oak when a pair of crow-size birds zipped by with folded necks, splayed orange legs, and grumpy kuk-kuk calls. “Green herons,” I gasped.

  “No!” said Linda.

  We’d once glimpsed a solitary green heron at a marsh on Lake Erie. A pair in full view in our own liquid backyard was as mind-numbing as being back on antidepressant number two. Honks replaced the receding squawks as a dozen Canada geese wheeled close, pulled up landing gear at the sound of Linda’s cries, then touched down in the water behind a grassy island one hundred yards upriver. Their clatter scattered a flock of killdeers, which squealed their name as they took flight.

  “Who knew all this went on down here,” I said.

  “You’d never know our house was just back there.”

  Except for the whine of a farmer’s tractor and a truck that blew its horn like the salute of a gargantuan swan, we might as well have been stranded in the wilds of Manitoba. For as far as we could see, the riverbank shielded our eyes from any man-made structures, though a quality doughnut shop wouldn’t have been entirely unappealing. The beauty drew us back evening after evening. We kept close tabs on the larger birds that clustered around the tiny island, watching for Linda’s flock of Canada geese, a trio of juvenile sandhill cranes with shaggy brown backs, a skittish great blue heron, and—if we had been very, very good and had eaten all our vegetables—a magnificent bald eagle bathing in the shallows.

  “What’s that on the rocks?” Linda asked. I swept the opposite bank with my binoculars. “There’s two of them!” she exclaimed. “Right there. Just a little bit down from us.”

  I had grown so used to goggling at big birds at a distance that I hadn’t noticed a couple of diminutive peepers right under my substantial nose. “Sandpipers,” I muttered. Bobbing and teetering as they walked and probed the mud for food, they resembled a toy maker’s whimsical creations. I was about to express my amazement that we’d find sandpipers on our river when an unearthly call grabbed my jaw and dropped it to the ground. Linda shared the same dumb expression of astonishment as we listened to a resonant piping that rose from a low, throaty croak to the suggestion of a woodwind at full tilt. If you crossed a clarinet with an exotic percussive instrument, you might create a similar call, but only if a master musician played the theme as a matter of life and death. The call repeated again and again, dazzling us with every replay.

  “Could that be a heron?” Linda wondered.

  A great blue heron perched upriver on a stump halfway to the island. Leaving our neat little clearing behind, I found myself racing through the brambles and poisonous plants trying to locate the soloist. As I drew opposite the heron, the volume of the sound diminished.

  “It’s not the heron,” I wheezed when I’d trudged back to Linda. “It must be some other bird on the other side of the trees across the river.”

  As soon as we got back to the house, I retreated upstairs, flipped past the Madagascar CD with its call of the indri lemur, and selected a disc of bird songs. A few minutes after I had gone downstairs to tell Linda that the cosmic bugler was a sandhill crane, the phone rang. Ignoring the warning of the caller ID, I lifted the receiver anyway.

  “Just checking in,” said Eileen brightly, as if we were old friends rather than old classmates. “I just wondered what was new.”

  “What’s new,” I harrumphed. I didn’t know what to say at first. Then, in an unexpected burst of goodwill, I suggested, “You really should come over some evening and walk down to the river with us.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Golden Orb Weaver

  Linda and I had started taking a palm-size two-way radio on our solo trips down to the river. That way, if I saw an interesting bird while Linda was scrubbing cages in the dining room, I could radio her, “There’s a pair of spotted sandpipers by the big tree, but no eagle,” and Linda would answer, “What? I can’t hear you. Your voice sounds funny.”

  I had hoped to get my daily peek at a tiny flock of migrating yellow-rumped warblers that moved along the riverbank in the late afternoon. This attractive brown fall bird with yellow patches had previously carried the dignified title of myrtle warbler. But pranksters in the American Birding Association had renamed it for a potentially embarra
ssing body part to keep the white-breasted nuthatch, red-bellied woodpecker, and bristle-thighed curlew company. I could usually spot the warblers in the trees only by homing in on their sharp pik call, but some idiot was polluting the aural environment by running a string trimmer. It didn’t take me long to realize that we were that idiot.

  I tried to radio Linda from the river to ask her what was going on, but she didn’t reply. Either she was right on top of the puttering two-stroke engine or she had dropped her walkie-talkie into a wading pool. Heading back toward the house, I stepped over the backyard fence and wiggled a finger at our student helper Mr. Bean, who flicked off the Ryobi and vigorously waved.

  “Oh, Mr. Tarte,” he shouted just before I had managed to scurry out of conversation range. I reconciled myself to waiting for him at the basement door. “I wonder if I might ask your advice,” he began. “There’s a girl at college that I want to take out on a picnic and ask her to go steady. Do you consider Fallasburg Park to be a romantic spot?”

  “Just keep away from the dumpsters,” I suggested. “If the aroma doesn’t chase her off, the yellow jackets will.” When he nodded as if seriously considering my remark, I asked him, “Is this someone you’ve known a long time?”

  “This will be the first time I’ve dated her.”

  “And you’re asking her to go steady?” I thought that going steady had fallen out of fashion when The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet had left the air, but social mores proceeded at their own pace at the local Bible college. I couldn’t resist the obvious. “Why would you ask someone to go steady on a first date?”