The Off-Season
Though I’ve been fortunate enough to witness many miraculous sights, there always remains more unseen than seen. In Living on the Wind, Scott Weidensaul writes that on one fall night, some years ago, twenty million songbirds were recorded migrating over Cape Cod. Twenty million! And yet, for all I see on these nights, there might be ten birds, or two, or none. For proof of my denseness I need look no further than the fledglings, who have already slipped my field of vision. Though they are surely fishing by now, I still haven’t seen a single catch. The nest no longer serves as the magnet it once did, and their lives are scattered, while I, lacking spring’s energy, have given up the chase and turned to other work. Alan Poole writes, “Once they are independent and feeding themselves, no one knows exactly where young Ospreys go.” I certainly don’t. We are falling out of touch, me and the birds, my osprey season ending even before they leave. Much of what they do now, including the four-thousand-mile migration that will begin any day, will be invisible to me, accessible only through books and my imagination.
The trouble is that the books seem even more fanciful than my imaginings. I read all the theories about what prompts their coming journey—instinct, food, the tilt of the earth, fading daylight—and I read about what guides the birds—sun, stars, ancient pathways, earth’s magnetic field, and some mysterious inner compass—but the truth is, I can’t even begin to understand migration, not just the why of it but the how. I suspect that no one else, no human being, that is, really understands either. That’s because it just doesn’t make sense, not human sense, at least.
John Hay wrote of terns, “They seem to me like explorers from a great outer world from which we have been excluding ourselves.” It’s a world unknown to us, yes, but just how is it known to the fledglings? How will these birds, which I saw take their first balky flights not more than a month and a half ago, actually fly down to Brazil, on their own? How can they fly over a sea, the Caribbean, that they have never seen? It seems not only preposterous but wrong. Wrong to expect this of these still-beginning fliers, asking too much, like forcing a toddler to cross the Mojave.
Yet they will do it. Or some of them will. Though perhaps somewhat “arthritic,” and not always aesthetically pleasing, the steady wing beats of the ospreys will serve them well over the next months. They will seek out thermals, those columns of hot air that rise above our unevenly heated earth—above parking lots, for instance—and will lift faster than other raptors, then glide down these hills of air, riding the fall’s northwest winds, or they will head inland and soar on the updrafts of inland ridges and mountains. But unlike hawks, they will not be reliant on thermals and will even migrate directly over water, unafraid of offshore routes or long crossings. European ospreys routinely cross the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean. In these instances their strong steady flapping helps; while most hawks soar, ospreys, with their long, narrow wings, are built for plugging away. And while many birds build up stores of fat to live on during migration, ospreys hunt along the way, fishing as they go, sometimes even carrying a fish snack along with them. Though they tend to migrate alone, they will occasionally pass overhead in pairs and concentrated groups, sometimes dozens of them, not for any social reason as much as the fact that they happen to be riding the same rivers of wind.
The mature birds know the route not just instinctively but by eye; they are aware of landmarks, Alan Poole explained to me last spring, the same way that human beings get to know the routes we travel. The fledglings, on the other hand, will be dealing with winds and crossings and lands that they know only through some ancient internal map. For those of us who refuse to believe what we can’t see, here is irrefutable evidence of the invisible: the young birds, the ones who make it, will fly thousands of miles until they somehow recognize a place they have never been to, and something within them will say “home.” Then they will settle in this ancient wintering ground that they have never seen, a fact that’s surely a hundred times stranger than fiction.
There is no exact moment when I say good-bye, no long dramatic last wave as they flap into the sunset. The Quivett adults are long gone by late August, and the next to leave are the Simpkins adults. Since I now visit the Simpkins nest only about once a week, I can’t put an exact date on the departure of the young. All I know is that each time I return the evidence of their having been there at all grows fainter, except of course for the great shaggy flag that is their nest. The same holds true at Chapin. One day in September the fledglings are here, the next gone. Or that’s not it exactly: for many days the Chapin nest stands empty, though I suspect there are fledglings lurking, roosting, in the pines on the edge of the marsh. But then a day comes when the place feels even emptier, and I sense, I know, they are truly gone.
At my home nest, over the harbor, the birds hang on until mid-September. They were late fliers and will therefore be late migrators. I bike over from our new home, just down the street, visiting them every day, until one afternoon I find the nest empty. The platform looks strange and, though I know I’m projecting again, mournful, the dark green garbage bag billowing and one long piece of rope hanging down below the nest, swaying in the wind. The harbor nest actually appears more deserted than the other nests. These were the lazy, good-for-nothing ospreys, after all, the punk-rock ospreys, and the nest was never very deep or well built, more like a tossed pile of enormous pickup sticks. But if they didn’t pass muster as architects, the harbor pair, in the end, surprised me, proving fine parents, raising three fledged young despite my lack of faith.
Though I now try to follow the birds imaginatively, even looking at Internet projections of migratory routes and numbers, the truth is I prefer to avoid the statistics, particularly the ones that tell me that almost two-thirds of the young will never see Cape Cod again. Also, it’s best not to think too hard about weather reports. On September 15, a day or so after the harbor birds leave, Hurricane Floyd lands in the Carolinas. My sister and her family, who live in a house in Durham where trees threaten the windows, head to Charlotte to hunker down in my mother’s house as the storm lashes the coast. It will be harder for the ospreys to avoid Floyd, which cuts a path four hundred miles wide, unusual for a hurricane. As Alan Poole said to me in the spring, sometimes it’s just bad luck that does in the birds. I hate the precariousness of it. After the endless care and feeding and work of the summer, it could all end arbitrarily, thanks to the timing of a storm.
The next morning, September 16, with the hurricane due to hit us that night, I yank on my trusty marsh boots and head out to Chapin. Over the last two days Danny Schadt has been pulling boats round the clock down at the marina, and as I drive along the beach road landlords are nailing plywood over the windows of summer rentals. The leaves have begun to stir, though it isn’t just the wind that’s in the air but also that communal hurricane excitement, human beings scurrying and preparing. As I walk down the road to the marsh I remember a dream from last night: I was watching a storm from the roof of our house with my father, both of us laughing as huge frothing breakers welled up in a Technicolor green-blue sea.
I climb down into the marsh, goldenrod spraying yellow everywhere and beach plums falling off their branches, the few that hold on colored a deep juicy purple. I hike to the Chapin nest through what are now surreal fields of glasswort, red and orange, and even a pretend purple color like Play-Doh. By contrast the sea lavender, growing near the hump of sand where I parked my chair all summer, is a mature adult shade, subtler. Today I don’t stop at the sand but march right up to the nest, something I didn’t dare do once this summer.
Twenty feet from the nest I come upon the guard post where the male spent many of his aloof hours. It thrusts up five feet tall just above the tallest spartina. Beyond this outpost rises the platform and nest, sprouting out of another spongy field of blazing red glasswort. The nest looks smaller than I imagined, and again I wonder how the birds dipped and hid down in it. A week ago I took a ladder and tried to climb up inside the Quivett nest but found it surprisingly flimsy and unstable. It barely seemed to have any depression at all. The depth I’d hoped to get to the bottom of was shallower than I ever would have believed. No van Goghs in Snoopy’s doghouse, no billiard tables, no heated pool.
Now, staring at the ground below the Chapin platform, a thought comes unbidden: This is where the body of the runt must have fallen. Of all the wonderful sights I saw this past summer, it’s the one truly savage sight that I won’t ever forget. I assume that the corpse has long since been dragged off by a fox or raccoon. But, just in case, I get down on my knees and push aside the thick glasswort, searching, though mostly hoping I don’t find it. And I don’t, of course, though I do find sections of rope and some bones and enough sticks to build another nest with. Also several pieces of old fish skin looking reptilian and scraggly, hanging from a bush like the clothes of a scarecrow.
On the way home, around 11:00 a.m., I climb up to the hawk tower at Scargo. From up here the whole world is chopped off by fog, and Scargo itself, the fish-shaped lake, seems a big bowl of gray vapor. The oak leaves stir, whispering of the winds to come. Usually I’m a great fan of storms, secretly wishing they’ll blow as strong as they can: I like the group excitement, the way a storm simplifies our focus. But today the hurricane seems a great destroyer of purpose, bringing chaos to plans both avian and human.
I’m pleased when the hurricane proves a false alarm, at least for us. After all the anticipation, the winds that come off the sea blow less strong than those of a dozen winter storms. Nina and I actually sleep with the windows open that night, waking occasionally and staring out at a sea that never comes close to rivaling the one I saw with my father in last night’s dream. The next morning, the 17th, the house remains intact, as do my illusions about the safety of the fledglings. The winds that blew over Cape Cod were not much stronger than the winds we watched the jetty ospreys nest through the first spring we were back, and that is encouraging. Nina says, “Since I’ll never know what happened, I’ll choose to believe that they survived.” I nod, choosing to believe the same. Choosing, that is, to be hopeful.
I have a complicated relationship with hope. For one, I believe that hope itself is a more complex emotion than we give it credit for these days. When we speak of choosing hope we are in particularly dicey territory, allying ourselves with suspect forces. There is something artificial about the notion, something that reeks of Hallmark cards, positive thinking, and self-help gurus.
My father prided himself on being a realist, on not giving in to the fluffier sentiments, and my father is still very much a part of me. My sister and I sometimes fault my mother for the way she deals with my brother, for her insistence, despite the facts, that he seems to be doing better, and getting healthier. She sends him money and support, while I find myself wishing my father were here, being tough, imposing economic sanctions, cutting him off. But mine is just a fanciful solution to an unsolvable problem, a fantasy much more fanciful than my mother’s. The truth is that my mother is the better parent for the job, even if the job is one that drains her beyond exhaustion. When I, assuming my father’s voice, play the realist, she pleads with me to stop. “I need to have some hope,” she says. “I can’t keep doing this without it.”
I know what she means. While it’s easy, in the abstract, to deride the Disney-like quality of “hopefulness,” in reality when we lose hope we lose energy. Look at the Quivett nest for evidence: at the purposelessness and dawdling once hope was quashed. This even my father would have had to agree with, if not in theory then in life. “Without hope there is no endeavor,” said that great realist Samuel Johnson. But with hope our energy surges, infusing us with verve and the excitement of possibility. Hope is the juice we drink, a juice we need if we are to fight on, to struggle. And hope is a physical trait, found in the body. My mother’s great gift is her strength, an almost animal vitality, a force that works particularly well in the morning. No matter how difficult the circumstances, how crushing the news or mood of the night before, she usually rises the next day hopefully. She would agree with Thoreau that “morning is when I am awake and there is dawn in me,” and I would, too. For all that my father’s voice still rings in my head, when I wake I am my mother’s son. If you asked me to create a picture of hope I would take out my brush and paint a freshly wakened man or woman with their first cup of coffee or tea in hand.
Hope can’t be falsified. The things we look to for hope had better be as solid, or more solid, than the things that bring us despair. Scott Russell Sanders recently wrote a book called Hunting for Hope. His litany of reasons to be hopeful included wildness, craft, family, art, and beauty. To that list I would add “ospreys.” My season-long experiment in neighborliness has also been, almost inadvertently, a lesson in hope. I don’t mean just theoretical hopefulness, based on the fact that the birds have returned from near extinction, but something more basic. In the wild lives of these birds I have seen a daily reflection of the animal vitality, tenfold, that I describe in my mother. They wake each day eager to live, to grow, eventually to leap off the nest and fly. Hope is far too pretty and precious a word for the raw drive for life I witnessed at the nests, the pure vital surge to exist. Maybe with the word hope devalued, we need to find another, more savage term. Something that better describes the pure green surge of the thing, like weeds pushing up through concrete or a nestling gaping for fish.
On October 13 I take a long walk with John Hay. Since I stopped by his hand-painted sign on the day of my bike survey, I’ve spoken to him several times about getting together. In his eighties now, John warns me that he will be able to hike only a couple of miles. He wears baggy khakis, a green wool shirt, and a faded orange baseball cap. Before we walk we visit the natural history museum, where he asks me advice about moving the osprey platform away from the main path, in hopes of finally having a successful nest. I’m flattered by the question, and try to give my voice unfelt authority when I suggest moving it back to near the tree line, forgetting for a moment about the threat of the great horned owls. Our next stop is Paine’s Creek, the mouth of the herring run and the source of so much of John’s early writing. We sit down in the wrack line and listen to the waves lap, and he tells me how he would sometimes come here with Conrad Aiken at sunset and drink something they called orange blossoms, a mixture of gin and o.j.
“Aiken said it was like a sacrament,” he says. “There’s something to it. It’s like a ritual.”
I nod and tell him that I know what he means: I think of drinking beer and grilling meat with Hones, of our own rites and rituals.
He explains that it was Conrad Aiken who first drew him to Cape Cod. How not long after their first meetings, John bought the land on the hill where he still lives, a small house on eighteen acres of wood.
“When I first came here it was a worthless wood lot,” he says. “They measured it wrong and called it ten acres and we got it for twenty-five dollars an acre.”
As we watch the gulls, I picture his return after World War II. I find myself wondering, What was it like that first fall when he glimpsed the unimagined richness of the place he’d chosen to settle? It must have entirely caught him off guard, and when the marsh turned gold and the swallows swept overhead, he must have sometimes laughed out loud at his good fortune.
From the creek we drive over to my father’s grave. We walk down the path to the spot near the marsh elder bushes where I watched the Quivett nest all spring. Though we both curse the invasive phragmites, today they sough beautifully in the light wind, and the sun tints the canopies of oak silver. Inspired by the weather, we begin to hike down to Crowe’s pasture, just planning on going a little ways at first but then making the whole trip to the beach and back. For me, of course, this is much more than a mere walk. My favorite stories are of returning to an older home, of finding a home on earth, and that’s the story John Hay has told on this land that I know. While so much of modern literature is about alienation, Hay has stuck to an older theme: that of homecoming.
At the beach we sit on clumps of seaweed and stare out at the sea. He mentions how the eagles near his house in Maine will wait on a branch and watch an osprey fish and then, the fish caught, ambush the smaller bird until it drops its meal, which the eagle scoops up. Unlike ospreys, who eat only what they catch, bald eagles are no better than gulls in this regard, picking at carrion as well as stealing. It was because they often performed acts of piracy on fish hawks, Hay explains to me, that Benjamin Franklin objected to having the bald eagle as our national symbol. “They should have picked the osprey,” I suggest, more than half seriously. As I walk I happily picture an osprey flag, symbolizing rebirth and regeneration, as well as commitment to our nests.
We walk for over two hours, until I’ve broken a sweat and have begun to wonder if I will be held accountable for doing in my literary hero. But he seems strong and in good spirits, better spirits than when we began. Near the end of the walk, when we’re almost back to my car, he points up at a mockingbird on a branch.
“Strange to have come through the whole century and find that the most interesting thing is the birds,” he says. “Or maybe it’s just the human mind is more interesting when focusing on something other than itself.”
For all the pleasure it brought me, our walk was not pure nature rhapsody and profundity. One thing we both did a lot of was grumble. Grumble about the state of the planet, about the almost suicidal human insistence on ignoring other species. For at least part of our walk, aggressive pessimism was the order of the day. The Cape provides a handy microcosm for the crowding of the world, the bullying of the rest of us by the monied, and the destruction of nature. His own eyesight now dimming, John Hay seems frustrated by the lack of vision in most people, a blindness to both natural beauty and to consequences. As Thoreau said at the end of Walden: “The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.” We lack the penetrating vision of birds of prey.
Of course I know the usual reasons for pessimism; at times I’m overwhelmed by them. The list is familiar: thinning ozone, ballooning population, acid rain, species extinction, depleted resources, the death of the wild. Perhaps one of the reasons I’ve spent so much time focusing on the ospreys is that they give me hope, while so many other things I might focus on would bring despair. Maybe, to paraphrase John Hay, the human mind isn’t just more interesting but more hopeful when focusing on something other than itself. Whatever the case, these birds have made it easier to feel hopeful.
On October 15 I make my last pilgrimage of the season, heading down to Cape May, New Jersey, to watch migrating ospreys. This trip, like so many of my excursions, is inspired by Alan Poole. He e-mails me to say I shouldn’t miss the chance to see the rivers of hawks flowing overhead, funneled by the winds and the contours of the coast. “One golden day in October, I watched 800 Ospreys flying south along the coastal dunes of Cape May,” he wrote in his book.
My friend Brad Watson joins me on the trip. We pile into my station wagon at 5 a.m. and get to Cape May by 1:00. He drives the last hour while I read to him about hawks. The reason the skies are so crowded in certain places during migration, as best I can tell from the reading, is a little like the reason the Garden State Parkway is more crowded than the surrounding woods and marshes—it’s where the road is. Certain established routes, routes with a prevalence of updrafts and thermals, create virtual hawk highways through much of the fall. Cape May, jutting south from New Jersey into the ocean, is a turning point for many birds. When the land ends, they must decide whether to proceed directly south over open water or to cut west for a shorter water crossing, toward a more inland route. The ospreys are more likely than the other birds to cross stretches of ocean.
We check in at the hotel and then head directly to the Cape May Observatory hawk-watch platform. A chalkboard below the platform announces the season’s highs: one day 16,386 sharp-shinned hawks flew overhead; another, 5,038 kestrels. This year’s osprey record is 225 birds on October 2, but once we climb up on the platform we learn that this will not be one of those glorious days. Northwest winds (meaning northwest is the direction the wind comes out of) are best for hawk-watching, ushering the birds south, but yet another hurricane brewing off Florida has the winds blowing from the south. The mood on the platform is apathetic. Instead of rivers of birds, there is an occasional trickle. Still, I happily set up my scope with the other watchers, pleased by the dozens of people living on osprey—or at least hawk—time. The low level of activity actually helps me get acclimated. Laura Moeckly, a young guide with a pretty smile, points out the landmarks—the cedar top they call the poodle’s head, for instance—and assures me that I’ll see some ospreys. Armed with thousand-dollar Russian binoculars, she and the other interns identify birds before I can even see them. They’re able to make out small differences between the nearly identical sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks, for instance, from miles away. While the sky doesn’t blacken with birds as I’d hoped, I do learn a lot. Laura points out a great egret roosting in a nearby tree and a Eurasian wigeon with a reddish-pink head, as well as flocks of cormorants and scoters flying low out over the ocean.
Around three o’clock a report comes back that an osprey was seen landing near Lighthouse Pond, just a little ways down the trail into the marsh. Scope over my shoulder, I run out the boardwalk between the phragmites in hopes of spotting my first osprey in over a month. Sure enough, when I get to the little viewing area, the friendly couple who are already there point out the roosting bird. It perches in a dead tree, occasionally stabbing down at the mackerel that it pins between its claws, welcoming me with familiar savagery.
It feels good to be hanging with an osprey again, and just this one view assures me the trip was worth it. Birders have a reputation for being competitive, but Anne and Larry Craig, the couple with whom I watch the osprey, prove anything but. When Brad joins us they point out a merlin as it comes flapping by with its hard angry beats, slamming against the wind; the chunky little bird with the amazing flight abilities lands on a branch forty feet from us. Later the Craigs show us a falcon who slips through the air with easy fluid strokes. In turn, once I have my scope focused, I dispense some osprey wisdom. I point out that it’s an immature bird, with the telltale checkered wings, something they haven’t been able to see through their binoculars. They leave around dusk, and then Brad heads back to the main deck. I spend a half hour alone with the fledgling, as if reestablishing an old bond. Though it is only a one-way bond, I now realize how much I’ve missed the birds.
The next morning the wind is southerly again. It would have been nice to see streams of hawks, but that’s okay. Leaving Brad at the main platform, I walk back out to Lighthouse Pond early. Alone at the viewing deck I try my hand at telling accipiters apart, relying on yesterday’s knowledge. Then I watch another great egret stalk his way across the pond, revealing the water as actually no more than the depth of a puddle. I close my eyes in the sun and listen to the phragmites rustle in the wind. When I open them I scribble down these words in my journal: “My trip to Cape May is proving a bit of a dud.” It’s right then, of course, predictably, that I hear the noise and turn to my left. It is yesterday’s osprey, the immature, flying down above the phragmites, not twenty feet over my shoulder. He swoops over the shallow pond, then loops up into the sunlight, banks right, and begins flapping off toward the ocean.
Back at the platform, Brad and I listen as Glen Davis, another hawk-watcher, tells a story of how a merlin flew below a redstart, turned itself upside down while flying, and came up on the other side of the bird, in position to receive it like a baseball catcher. Glen suggests that the redstart died of fright before the merlin’s talons even touched it. Later in the morning we see a sharp-shinned hawk turn a quick pirouette below the platform, and later still we watch another “sharpie” (in birder lingo) being banded, its beautiful striped tail fanned and its yellow eyes shining fierce.
Before we leave that afternoon I’m treated to one final sight. Laura, calling out birds to a large group of Saturday watchers, points to an osprey flapping right toward the platform. Watching the bird, this one an adult, I’m struck by the laboring of its wing beats, in sharp contrast to the falcon’s fluidity, the merlin’s slamming, or the several flaps and then glide of an accipiter. It looks like work; there’s no easy gliding as he flies right over us. Once he crosses above, the other bird-watchers turn back to the north, and, following Laura’s directions, they see a turkey vulture, with its dihedral V-shaped wings and rocking flight. But I keep my telescope aimed south, trained on the osprey. The bird flies directly out over the ocean. It may not be flying into the sunset, but this will be as close as I get. Which is fine. For the experts here at Cape May, who have seen clouds of hawks, days when they get blisters on their thumbs from clicking their counters, this is a “bad day.” But mine is a more modest project, and deserves a more modest end. A bad day for these people is a good day for me. I had to wait a month, but I finally got to say a true good-bye. This will be my last osprey of the season.
I take a swim in the breakers before we head back in midafternoon. Our migration home is made easier by a couple of leftover Sierra Nevadas and the fact that the baseball game crackles through the static of the radio, coming in more clearly as we head north. I drive the whole way, almost straight through, listening as Pedro Martinez shines for the Sox and Clemens is booed out of Fenway. For the moment tomorrow doesn’t matter. The ospreys are flying home, and the Sox have finally beaten the Yankees. All is right in the world.
We return home to a Cape long empty of ospreys.
Though I’m always quick to sing paeans to wildness and wilderness, the truth is that I live in suburbia. It’s a strange sort of suburbia, however, a suburbia in which most of the population deserts their houses each fall. These fortunate humans, wealthy enough to migrate, leave their summer homes by the ocean to retreat inland for the winters. Cape Cod has always been a place for migration. Fred Dunford, the archaeologist at the natural history museum, explains that before Europeans came, the local native tribes would likely spend from late fall to spring in the wooded uplands of the Cape, then migrate to their summer camps right on the coast, where they could take advantage of the abundant seafood and cooler weather. Like the ospreys’, these human migrations were prompted by food and temperature. Whether they know it or not, the crowds that clog our bridges during summer are reenacting an ancient ritual of seasonal movement.
Thanks to the migratory habits of many of my neighbors, Sesuit Neck now takes on a feel that, if not exactly rural, certainly comes close. Houses stand empty, and starlings outnumber humans. Fall is the best time on Cape Cod. To be more exact: October, specifically these last two weeks, are the halcyon days, heralded in this morning by a slow-flying kingfisher that rattles up over the bluff. For weeks now cranberries have spotted the wrack line, left over from late September, when off-flow from the bog cut a small canyon through our beach, adding the roar and trickle of a mountain creek to the steady breaking of the waves. This is also the time of year when the sun begins to set behind the bluff. All through the warm months it drops into the bay, but, as the winter solstice approaches, it slides south, its final descent blocked by land.
On the first cold morning I take my tea to the beach, the liquid losing its heat before I’m halfway done. Last night’s full moon still shines crisp, its light easily burning through a blue-black cloud. Wind chimes the flagpoles and plays the music of distant harbor masts—and of sheets and tackle and anything else that moves, a clattering symphony. I walk around the house to where I will keep my friend Billy’s kayaks this winter. As with a lot of things on Cape Cod, these are seasonal possessions, now up for grabs. We reclaim them just like we reclaim Route 6A, our houses, and the privacy of our walks. The other day I saw J.C., my fellow scavenger, by the ocean. Cold reddened our cheeks and sand stung our eyes, and the lifeguard chair and beachballs were long gone, but he smiled a wide, wild smile. “It’s our beach again,” he yelled to me over the wind.
Which is exactly how I feel. Cape Codders call this the offseason, and while this label may just be a ruse to scare away the hordes, there is something perfectly askew about the name. It’s a time when whole trees squeak with starlings, when swallows mob the beaches, and when the annual miracle occurs: the people leave just as the weather gets most perfect. Days yawn before you as time widens and slows. No wonder I grow anxious each Memorial Day, the crowds signaling that the yawning days will end. For the time being, cold protects us. Nina and I ready ourselves for the adventure of settling. Of slowing down. It isn’t only the kayaks we have back but the neighborhood, the beach. We can rest easy, knowing houseguests won’t be reappearing for another eight months. Up at the post office, as the marsh decks itself out in the flamboyant colors of decomposition, we humans assume the grubby, drab clothes—the old jeans and sweatshirts—of fall. But we smile at each other more freely now that there are fewer cars in the parking lot, as if all of us were in on a giddy secret.
Of course, I don’t want to entirely glorify autumn. The bluff near my house isn’t just a great place to collect sentences. It’s also a good place to find death. The cliffside dirt slopes down to a point of shoreline that is one of the rockiest along the bay side of Cape Cod, the rocks reaching out into the sea and acting as a giant strainer, catching everything the tides drag in. In addition to the seal and porpoise cadavers last spring, I’ve found northern gannets with wingspans wider than I am tall, their web feet shriveled, and brants with necks like a skin diver’s gloves, and cormorants, and, of course, many gulls. Recently I’ve also seen my share of injured birds that will not be alive come Christmas, and the other day I found a monarch butterfly with a torn orange wing that won’t be making the trip south. I picked it up on my finger and felt a sharp pang, and then, my thoughts turning back to other things, I tried to flick it off. But couldn’t. It clung with a remarkable ferocity to my finger.
The few ospreys that remain in the north, most sick or injured, will likely die during the winter. The United States does have a few nonmigratory populations, in southern Florida and along the Gulf Coast, but none anywhere close to this far north. Sometime in November our neighborhood birds, with luck, will settle along rain-forest rivers, in Brazil perhaps. There those that have survived the long trip will spend the winter by the mouths of estuaries, where shallow waters provide an abundant source of food. Or they will settle farther inland, alongside the rivers that twist and turn through the forests. Either way, this will be for them, as for me, the most sedentary and least eventful time of the year. They will stick close to home, roosting, resting, and fishing until February.
Meanwhile I, four thousand miles to the north, prepare to greet winter. As the weather starts to hint at hibernation with more fervency, I think back to a sight I saw one day outside my window this past summer. It was a squirrel asleep in a round hole in the knotty post oak, curled all the way around itself, its head turned inward so that the whole of it formed a letter G. I envied the squirrel, how well it fit into the world around it. My dream would be to spend this coming winter settling into my place just as surely as the squirrel. But I’m not a squirrel, or even an osprey. I’m a human being, and a particularly self-conscious one to boot, a creature of too much thought and contradiction, who will never fit in place as snugly.
That said, I’ll keep trying. After my osprey season, I feel ready for the off-season, ready to settle. I am where I belong, and as I withdraw inside my place, memories of the spring and summer still warm me through winter. And not just memories, of course, but anticipation of spring. I know that gradually the sun will work its way back north, until it once again settles each night into the bay. Then the year’s turn, the sun’s slant, will spark something in the wintering ospreys, and, prodded by instinct, they will start the long journey to Cape Cod, the cycle of movement and mating beginning again. They will fly north seeking a match for the image that burns in their mind’s eye, and I will be here waiting for them, confident that they will be back. I believe in their return.