Fowl Weather

by Bob Tarte

  A few days later, I joined my mom as she ate lunch. Across the table, Francine asked the server, “What do you call this?” when a slice of pizza hit her plate. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” I found myself thinking that even Stanley Sue would have recognized one of her favorite foods. My mood began to sink, until a resident named Emily buoyed me by responding to my idle comment that the flowers on the serving cart looked nice.

  “Park Side Floral donates them,” she said. “The flowers are used in funeral homes. Then, if the families don’t want them, they go to hospitals and places like this.”

  I hadn’t expected such clarity from a person with Alzheimer’s disease. Before I left Testament Terrace, I watched two of my mom’s neighbors amble down the corridor and locate the doors to their rooms without a stick of difficulty. My mom couldn’t do that, and it pleased me that these women might help her along.

  I made my own way to the front door of my mother’s house. I had an appointment to meet an antiques dealer who wanted to buy the remaining contents of the house. I’d tagged my father’s decades-old hand tools as off-limits with a NOT FOR SALE sticky-note, along with two antique rocking chairs, four ceramic figurines, and, just to be amusing, the living room wall.

  “You didn’t leave me anything of value,” glowered a markedly unpleasant man who reminded me of a hectoring galoot you might meet behind the baseball-pitching booth at a carnival.

  “Three balls for a buck,” I wanted to tell him. Instead, I said, “You’ve got the china cabinet, two bedroom sets, the dining room table …” My voice trailed off as he abandoned me to race from room to room like a cartoon cop in search of a fizzy stick of dynamite.

  “Hardly worth what it will cost me to haul it all away,” he said. The pittance he offered was so low, I considered asking if I could exchange my prize for the stuffed dog. But the fact was, he had us over a barrel. My sister had sold the house a few weeks ago, and we had run out of time as far as clearing it out. I acted angry, because he was alive and Stanley Sue was not, so I told him we’d have to get back to him on his offer. He slammed the front door, slammed the door of his car, and almost slammed into Mr. Teany’s Oldsmobile when he jerked out into the road.

  I stomped upstairs in a stinky state of mind. I’m nothing, the voice told me. I’m just some idiot without his old bedroom.

  I lay down on the wooden floor and tried to mentally tune in to soft lapping waves of my boyhood days as my parents bustled about downstairs after I had gone to bed, perhaps watching I’ve Got a Secret on TV or I’ve Got a Secretly Depressed Son. I decided that if I had somehow been able to remain a mere lad and stay here over the years, Stanley Sue could have stayed with me, Stanley Sue could have stayed alive, and so what if none of this made sense. Certainly if my mom and dad’s old phone number were still in service, the space people could call me up, they would call this very instant, and when they asked to talk to Richard, I’d tell them, “Speaking.” Then, behind Linda’s pumpkin patch in that spooky spot beside the barn, they’d pick me up in their peanut-shaped craft, and things could be a whole lot worse.

  IF I HAD BEEN down in the dumps before, things got worse when the power died.

  Heralding the electrical disruption was a crow-size pileated woodpecker that grabbed my eye while we were eating Sunday breakfast. “Good grief,” I told Linda, “There’s a hatchet attacking a tree just down the hill.” At least that’s what it looked like until I picked up the binoculars. Occasionally we would hear the madcap laugh of a pileated in its early June mating fervor, but the extravagantly topknotted avian cousin of Eileen usually concealed itself from view.

  That night, a friend of the woodpecker pelted our house with handful after handful of hard peas. At least that’s what it sounded like until I picked up on the fact that an ice storm had decided to usher in the first week of April. Just before we turned off the lights for bed, they turned themselves off. Power failures in our wooded non-neighborhood were almost as infrequent as pileated woodpecker sightings and about the same duration, but this one ground on and on.

  Had it been a normal April, the lack of electricity would have been a minor irritant at most. But winter refused to pack its bags and leave, despite a kick in the slats from the calendar. The outdoor thermometer registered a measly eight degrees the following morning, so I decided to save the lives of our indoor birds by firing up the generator, which I’d never actually used before. Linda’s Pastor Larry had convinced me to buy it years earlier to prepare for the prophesied Y2K technological collapse. As it turned out, only my pocketbook suffered from the millennial turnover.

  A contractor had outfitted our outside power entry with a hefty power cord that allowed us to plug in the whole house as if it were an enormous toaster. But first I needed to fetch the generator from its home among the hay bales, which meant crossing the ice pack that lay between the back door and the barn via my Frankenstein’s-monster-as-an-infant walk. In the gloomy barn interior I tried thinking up an alternative to moving a mechanism that had seemingly doubled in size and weight since I had bought it, not unlike most of our pets. Then, for an audience of frightened chickadees, I performed the pratfall-filled comedy of pushing the monstrosity toward the house.

  Our lack of power was my lack of power. Starting a string trimmer with a pull-cord typically tore my arm out of its socket. The generator required a two-handed tug that pitched me backward into the pine tree, renewing my by now intimate acquaintance with the frozen ground. The engine expelled so much smoke when it finally turned over, that for one brief moment I thought I was back in San Francisco, attempting to find my dorm room in the fog.

  Getting the machine up and running was only half the battle. It lacked the juice and disposition to simultaneously power all the circuits in our electrically overloaded home. Having switched off every breaker before starting the generator, I gently coaxed them on again one by one until a sputter of complaint from the other side of the cinder-block wall informed me that I had insulted the engine with excessive demands. It took me the bulk of the morning to learn that we could use the stove as long as we didn’t run a faucet and start the water pump, and if we wanted to heat water in the microwave, we had better not plan on also refrigerating juice.

  Realizing that I ought to have a supply of gasoline to fuel a gasoline generator, I chopped the ice off the windshield, spun a few doughnuts in the driveway, and set out in search of gas cans to fill with gas. A quick jaunt down the unexpectedly salted and otherwise nicely seasoned road revealed that the power failure extended beyond our house and poultry pens. Most local businesses had shut down at the urging of cash registers that refused to register, not to mention the absence of lights. Fortunately, the local Meijer store not only blazed brightly on generator power, but the Meijer gas station was also only too happy to queue up the multitudes in the same predicament as me.

  “Power’s out as far as Lansing,” a stout fellow in an orange hunter’s jacket called across the lane to a woman at a pump as I dribbled gas into jugs.

  “My sister in Ionia has power,” she called back, her breath puffing out steam in the cold. “Everyone else in her neighborhood is out, but not her.”

  It always seemed to go that way. People who owned electricalutility stock got all the breaks, and I made a mental note to call my broker just as soon as I found a broker.

  Gassing up the generator required shutting it down, clicking off the circuit breakers, filling the tank, restarting the engine via the pull-cord, picking myself up from the pine tree, reattaching my arms, letting the motor idle a bit, then slowly switching on the breakers again, all the while alert for any change in pitch that indicated that the generator might decide to die. The thing would run for about six hours after fueling. Because the instruction manual advised against letting it run dry, I set my alarm for the wee hours of the morning to enjoy the entire gassing-up exercise shivering in the dark. Not that I slept well anyway. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I could hear nothing but the not-so
-distant chug and drone of the generator. Whenever it sputtered for a second or sang a couple of notes slightly flat, I jerked awake as surely as if someone had yanked a pull-cord attached to my brain.

  At least fixating on the generator gave me a subject to obsess upon other than Stanley Sue. Although smart enough to understand the folly of allowing my thoughts to drag me from one misguided worry to the other, I hadn’t mastered or even apprenticed at the knack of switching off the mental blather. I had read books about “not thinking,” practiced meditation and self-hypnosis, and hypnotized myself into practicing meditation on reading books about “not thinking”—but all to no avail. The incessant thoughts kept popping open valves that leeched noxious neurochemicals into my system. Where was the power failure that I needed for a jolt of mental health?

  THE ELECTRICAL OUTAGE lasted four days, just fifteen minutes short of the predicted Bob outage as sleep deprivation and gas-fume inhalation took their toll. Once I recovered from the shock of being able to flush the toilet while simultaneously toasting a waffle—and it took a long reach to accomplish that feat—I realized that our pileated woodpecker had been a bona fide harbinger. As the temperature suddenly shot up, an impressive array of songbirds popped into the open in search of food.

  Although we’d often heard a male indigo bunting singing ecstatic couplets from dawn until dusk in late spring through midsummer, we’d seldom succeeded in visually separating the shy bird from the treetops. But one Saturday afternoon while Bett spooned away at a generator-size slab of Linda’s strawberry shortcake, I gasped to note three brilliant blue males pecking at the ground beneath the bird feeder while two brown females perched in the very pine tree that still contained shards of my flesh.

  “Oh, my gosh, look at that,” I croaked, passing the binoculars to my sister and wildly gesticulating at the garden.

  “You go ahead,” she insisted, gamely passing them back to me. Another often heard but rarely seen tree-topper, the great crested flycatcher, sat nonchalantly on the wire fence flashing a yellow belly at me without the slightest trace of embarrassment. Two male scarlet tanagers lit up the carnivorous pine tree later, while a migrating eastern towhee—“Just passing through, folks”—serenaded us for a few days with its bell-like song.

  Good birding in our yard tantalized me with the prospect of adding new species to my sighting list at one of the best spots for viewing winged wildlife in western Michigan. I called my friend Bill Holm and scheduled a visit to drink in the unspoiled natural beauty of that teeming cup of naturalist’s ambrosia, the Muskegon County Wastewater Management System. Being around animals always helped my state of mind, and I knew this outing was exactly what I needed.

  Muskegon Wastewater was actually a far cry from the sludge-engorged ecological quagmire its name suggested. Thousands of acres of primarily pleasant woods, fields, and wetlands attracted otherwise finicky owls, waterfowl, shorebirds, songbirds, and the occasional golden eagle. The focal point for binoculars was a nearly four-square-mile wedge of treatment ponds frequented by countless ducks, geese, and gulls. The rubble-strewn shores concealed sandpipers, plovers, godwits, willets, knots, whimbrels, and their improbably named long-billed ilk.

  While the water seemed clean enough in the larger ponds, a copper-green stain on the surrounding rocks caused me to wonder if the birds couldn’t locate healthier quarters elsewhere. In fact, a year earlier one caustic-smelling mechanically agitated “bubbler” cell had given me my first ever sighting of a greater yellowlegs, a foraging wader that apparently enjoyed a more robust and irritation-resistant breathing apparatus than had Stanley Sue. A few minutes of peering into that pond one summer was about all my lungs could take.

  Bill and I rendezvoused in the parking lot of a Target store in northern Grand Rapids, and he targeted his new Volvo toward the waste facility. To waste my time during the ride while deepening my depression, he played the CD Buddy Ebsen Says “Howdy.” “Is the whole thing this bad?” I asked as a simpering female chorus shored up Ebsen’s atonality.

  “The whole thing is this good,” Bill declared. “It’s his finest album.”

  But I couldn’t really complain, since I had given him the disc for Christmas.

  A yard sign reading USED HUNTING PANTS FOR SALE indicated that we were approaching the entrance, providing me an opportunity to ponder what type of person would buy used hunting pants before Bill whipped through the front gate. I positioned our entry permit on the dash as Bill slowed to a tire-groaning crawl in response to the insect buzz of what we eventually identified as a grasshopper sparrow. Frantic thumbing through three field guides confirmed a second and more gifted striped singer as a savannah sparrow.

  “Those are both life birds for me,” I gloated. I had started keeping a list of any species that I spotted for the first time in my life. “Now if we could only see the bobolink.”

  “Bobo’s bird,” suggested Bill. “Perhaps it’s the link to the great unimaginable, the missing link in all theology and philosophy, the—“

  “Bobo’s gone,” I interrupted. “I haven’t had a single coincidence for months.”

  “He’s probably off planning some grand coincidence, but he’s never gone. And besides, what about Linda’s mother’s deed?”

  He had me there. After her recovery and discharge from the hospital, Linda’s mom had decided to arrange what she called her “final affairs” by prepaying for her funeral and updating her will. On our most recent visit to Battle Creek, she had shown us where she kept her important papers: in the garage freezer, underneath a carton of generic vanilla ice cream. It was a hiding place worthy of my mom. Glancing at the deed to the house, Linda noticed that the original property owner had been a man named Parrott.

  “Sometimes I think you are Bobo,” I said. “That would explain why you lack normal appealing human attributes.”

  “I don’t deny that I am Bobo’s chosen one. I told you what happened when I was born.”

  “You probably did, but I repressed it.”

  To my dismay, Bill unfolded a small birth-certificate packet that he carried in his wallet and produced a card made fifty-two years ago by his sister Barb. It was adorned with drawings of clowns. “Read it if you dare,” he said. “Out loud, so Bobo can hear you.”

  Reluctantly, I complied: “‘Boooo!!! Hi there. How are you today? says Mr. BoBo Clown. Hope you’re OK on this merry, merry day.’ “

  “How about that?” asked Bill.

  “No wonder I blocked it from my memory. Now I’m really depressed.”

  “You should be watching Judge Judy. She’s the funniest person on TV. No one can be depressed while watching Judge Judy.” Bill did much of the copywriting for his clients while parked in front of the television. “She revels in being mean, and she’s naturally mean, but at the same time, it’s an act.”

  “Watch where you’re going,” I interjected, hoping to derail a rant. In fact, the car was standing still.

  “She’s very complex,” he continued. “You should see her when she’s on Larry King trying to act human. It’s a disaster, because she tries to be pleasant, and—What’s that? Aren’t those bobolinks?” A half dozen birds with black wings and underparts, white rumps, and straw-colored napes rose up from the field with the tinkling song of a broken music box.

  “Another new one for the life list.” I made an entry in my notebook.

  “At this rate, Bobo will never let us get past the entrance road.”

  That statement broke the spell. The fields fell silent except for a crow that criticized the boxy silhouette of Bill’s vehicle from the stub of a steel post. Taking advantage of the lull, Bill eased us forward in the direction of the service drive, snaked past the administration building, waved innocuously at a wastewater-plant employee, overshot the service drive, then doubled back to climb the perimeter dike. In the back seat I noticed a six-pack of bottled water, an outdated field guide, plastic tubs of snacks that Bill’s innumerable and possibly psychosomatic food allergies could tolerate
, a teeny-weeny pair of binoculars, and a strap-on pouch for carrying these items in case he ventured outside the Volvo. I coveted a bottle of water, but I was too lazy to reach for it and Bill was too oblivious to offer it.

  “Northern shovelers,” Bill said as we eased along the center dike. “Nothing but damn northern shovelers.” A cloud of green-headed, white-breasted, chestnut-flanked, shovel-beaked, pencil-necked ducks lifted off from the largest pond. They often numbered in the thousands at the facility. “That’s right, you cowards, scatter,” Bill said. The sunlight glinted off a green van across the pond moving slowly in our direction. A moment before it would have been too late, Bill yanked the steering wheel and diverted us down the row of smelly bubbler treatment cells.

  “Pew,” I remarked.

  “I thought I saw something. Okay, I’m avoiding those shoveler lovers over there in the van.”

  The bubbler cells were frothing, cement-walled pools, and the acrid chemical smell competed with the roar of machinery to render the entire area unfit for man or beast. But three birds stood on a concrete abutment as if the setting were as natural as their favorite forked branch. “Stop!” I said. “Horned larks. No, right in front of us.”

  “I told you I saw something.”

  “That’s four new species today,” I said, ticking off the larks—and adding them to my list as they winged away in irritation.

  Slowly we started to circumnavigate the ponds. I searched for shorebirds among the rocks while Bill scanned the water for nonshoveler ducks and kept a suspicious eye on the green van. “I think it’s those nuts we saw last year with the SHOVELER WATCHER jackets,” he said. Bill didn’t care for birders—much less bikers, boaters, bowlers, beekeepers, other avid hobbyists, or, for that matter, anyone who had an interest in anything—though he enjoyed watching birds as much as I did.