Living by Water

On Labor Day Nina and I go to the beach. Not for the day, or for a week even, but for the coming year. It is the time of migration, after all, and I, like the fledglings, am belatedly leaving my parent nest. It isn’t much of a move really: just down the street and still smack in the middle of Sesuit Neck. But it is a change. For the next eight months we will be house-sitting for a neighbor, settling less than a hundred feet from the water. In doing so we’ll be leaving my family house behind and actually wintering in a winterized house.

We lived close to the ocean for the last two years, able to see the harbor and part of the bay; now we will live on it. By doing so, we have traded sunrise for sunset. In our old house I could watch the red ball rise over the harbor each morning. While we’ve lost the morning’s rebirth, we gain a new ritual, witnessing the daily sinking of the sun behind the bluff, sizzling into the ocean.

For Nina living on the shore makes all the difference. No longer does she talk about longing for the mountains. Though not usually given to mystical assertions, she can’t help herself after several days and nights of falling asleep and waking to the lapping and crashing of waves. “There’s something religious about it,” she says. “I think I’d always like to live near the ocean.” With the buoys ringing like church bells and the staging swallows spiraling upward from the lawn, it’s hard to disagree.

Even our cat Sukie takes to the ocean, placing her forepaws up on the windowsill and staring out at the watery horizon for hours, like a sea captain’s widow. We stare, too. “You never get bored when you have the ocean as your backyard,” says Joe Buscone, the owner of Northside Marina. “It changes all the time, like staring at a fire.” From my study window, I watch the sea in all its moods—heaving and crashing, pond calm, lit up fiery at night, sacred yellow at dawn. I look forward to the violent, white breakers of winter.

When I look out the west windows I see a different sight. The new house on the bluff rises right above us now; we live in its shadow, like the quarters of a serf. The owners have begun building a second house, a five-thousand-square-foot “guest house,” the construction starting just in time to ruin autumn. Despite this, I like being next door to the new building, and not just because it means that a five-minute walk brings me to the base of the bluff. By moving here I have dramatically simplified my life. Everything I love and everything I hate is close at hand. It’s as if I’ve strolled inside of a myth, or a comic book, complete with a blessed land and an archenemy. I now reside within a vastly simplified cosmology.

It’s been a great summer for comebacks, and not just that of the ospreys filling our neighborhood as they never have in my lifetime. As I write this the Red Sox are nipping at the heels of the Yankees, and seem a lock for the wild card (though you never know with the Sox). Better yet, earlier this summer Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France, in doing so fulfilling the classic hero’s journey of returning from the underworld. Near death from cancer that began in one of his testicles and wracked by chemotherapy, he returned not just to health but to victory in one of the world’s great tests of endurance and power. He exemplifies the thrill of the comeback: hope renewed improbably after it has been seemingly, finally, extinguished. We rejoice when the near dead live again.

With the season over, I read about another osprey comeback, this one in the Scottish Highlands. Ospreys once built their nests atop ruined castles and towers throughout Scotland—where, according to George Waterson, they were known in Gaelic as “Iolair-uisig or ‘water eagle,’ or often just as Iasgair, meaning ‘the fisherman.’” But by the end of the nineteenth century the bird was in serious trouble. Philip Brown, who played Boswell to the osprey’s Johnson, writes, “The story of its extermination is particularly sordid, often characterized by an almost satanic malevolence.” The culprits were egg collectors, poachers, and gamekeepers (who saw the birds as competition for their master’s fishing interests and had free range to shoot a bird they considered “vermin”). The exploits of the egg collectors, in particular, were the stuff of vicious myth. They roamed the countryside like sadistic children, and there are great tales of poachers, like the Scot Lewis Dunbar (a kind of real-life Groundskeeper Willie), who swam across frozen lochs in winter and shimmied up trees to claim the eggs. Then there were the more highbrow murderers, like Dunbar’s companion and sometime employer Charles St. John, who fancied himself a “great lover of nature” and often expressed remorse after killing birds or stealing their eggs, as he does here after shooting a female bird: “As we came away, we still observed the male bird unceasingly calling and searching for his hen. I was really sorry I shot her.”

Despite their occasional pangs of conscience, the collectors managed to all but wipe out the bird by the beginning of the twentieth century. Ospreys still passed through Scotland, however, and there were even some attempts at reintroduction (notably by our old friend Captain C. W. R. Knight in Inverness-shire in the early 1930s). Then, in the early 1950s, unconfirmed reports began to trickle in that ospreys were nesting by the lochs in Spreyside. Of course the egg collectors caught wind of the reports and were soon up to their old tricks. But in an effort to thwart the poachers, and to ensure the reintroduction of the species, a small band of naturalists, bird-watchers, scientists, and enthusiastic amateurs, led by George Waterson and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, set out to protect a pair that had built a nest at Loch Garten. For three years in the mid-1950s these efforts failed; one of those years the clutch was destroyed by crows, another by poachers. Describing the crow-robbed nest, Philip Brown writes, “For a few days the birds went on building the new aerie in a more and more desultory way until they finally abandoned it.” Desultory, it occurs to me now, was the perfect word for the Quivett pair.

And desultory would describe the Loch Garten nest the next year, too. That year Waterson and company built blinds near the nest of the single pair that had returned, and they manned the blinds round the clock. Despite this, one night a poacher managed to sneak in, grab the osprey eggs, replace them with painted hen eggs, and make a run for it. After the chase, during which the poacher dropped one of the eggs, Brown writes, “I spotted a patch of white amongst the moss and stooping down, picked up the smashed egg of an osprey… . It contained a partially developed embryo.”

The next winter, according to Brown, “George Waterson never got ospreys out of his mind.” Obsessed with playing midwife to the birds’ return to Scotland, he prepared for the spring breeding season as never before. Citing the Protection of Birds Act, Waterson helped push a measure through St. Andrew’s House that made the area surrounding the failed nest into a bird sanctuary. But more had to be done; this was war. He sawed branches off the tree that held the aerie in hopes of defending it from both predators and collectors, and ran barbed wire around the tree’s base. Then he laid wood planks called “duckboards” over the boggy ground below the nest so he could better give chase to poachers, built a base camp, and, finally, drummed up volunteers who would stage the round-the-clock vigils necessary to protect the birds. “All these preparations took up much time and energy,” writes Brown, “but by early April all was readiness.” The ospreys, however, didn’t cooperate, deciding to rebuild at an earlier site. And so the whole operation was disassembled, moved, and rebuilt. Then Waterson, Brown, and others settled down to living on osprey time, watching and waiting.

That year, 1959, all their work finally paid off. Somewhere during the first or second week of June, three young osprey nestlings hatched in the Loch Garten nest. I have at least some inkling of the joy and pride the watchers must have felt. Soon these feelings were shared by hundreds, then thousands of others. Waterson, figuring that the ospreys would draw curious and potentially threatening sightseers, decided to make the whole affair public, setting up a special blind through which those interested could see the birds. Fourteen thousand people took him up on the offer during the remaining weeks of that first breeding season. Ospreys were suddenly stars, not just as tourist attractions but as the subject of magazine articles and newspaper editorials. One result of the Loch Garten story, according to Brown, was that “it exposed the egg-collectors in their true colors,” and, “Public opinion came out strongly in favour of the osprey and those who were striving to keep it on the Scottish map.” The next two summers saw successful nests, as well as forty-one thousand visitors, Art Cooley among them. By the early 1980s, there had been over a million visitors to Loch Garten, and close to a hundred osprey pairs now nest in the Scottish Highlands.

There is something doubly hopeful about the ospreys’ comeback. It assures us not only that we can change but that, even more importantly, we have changed before, giving us confidence in our future adaptation. For, if we’re honest, we must admit that it isn’t just their comeback that concerns us but our own. We are currently deep in a hole, a hole of our own making. If we are to climb out of this hole, a radical transformation will need to take place, a transformation that allows us to save other species as well as ourselves. Some scoff at the possibility of that transformation. But the proof is in the past. We need only look at the last hundred years for evidence of similar changes. While I hardly believe in the perfectibility of human nature, I do believe that its possibilities stretch a little further than we suspect at our most cynical. I believe, in other words, that we can aim our natures in different directions, that we can put our natural traits—our curiosity, our nosiness, our intelligence, our intrusiveness, our industriousness, our fidgety restlessness—to different, dare I say, better uses.

I need to believe this. Threats to the ospreys change with the times. It used to be nest robbing, then DDT, and now (while DDT still threatens) destruction of habitat. Though we have learned to frown on the practice of stealing eggs, we still smile at the prospect of building our dream house, regardless of how many other nonhuman dream homes we destroy in the process. While there aren’t as many egg poachers around, there remains a basic human type—acquisitive, meddlesome, destructive, greed-driven—a type we all at least partly recognize when we look in the mirror. As an antidote to high-mindedness, I remind myself that some of the culprits of years past were the naturalists. Guns, not binoculars, were once the tools of natural history. The old motto for those who studied birds was “A hit is history / a miss is mystery,” a “hit” meaning a shot bird. Audubon, after all, didn’t paint those beautiful birds while they sat posing for him. Had I written this book a century or two ago, I might have included a chapter on what it felt like to shoot an osprey. The trick, of course, is to anticipate what we will find barbaric two hundred years from now. It’s easy to frown on the past, easy to judge what is gone; it’s harder to look toward the future.

There is, in the end, something reassuring in the fact that the Scottish ospreys, once something to be shot and exterminated as vermin, are now looked upon with awe and reverence. And this change occurred in only a hundred or so years. This adaptability on the part of human beings suggests that future adaptability is possible, that we may be able to even more radically adjust our thinking. And this, to me, seems the single most hopeful thing about Homo sapiens. We can change our minds.

By early September the fledgling ospreys are rarely at the nest. In hopes of seeing the young birds dive, I’ve abandoned the nests, too, spending more time up at Scargo Tower, the stone castle that locals (falsely) claim is the Cape’s highest point. The landscape below takes on the clarity of a map: the fish-shaped lake, the trees, and, beyond, the shore and bay, our house, the bluff. Last spring I biked up here and witnessed a spectacular dive: tucked wings, a rocket plunge from a hundred feet up, though the splash was blocked by the shore trees. On that day the oak leaves were just beginning to fill, creating small islands of green, and the air sweetened with honeysuckle, lilacs, and autumn olive. Now full leaves sough in the fall wind, a green island around the tower, their sharp edges outlined in silver. I climb up to the top, armed with binoculars and scope, and I’m greeted immediately by two young red-tailed hawks involved in a serious game of tag. One dives straight down into a stoop at what looks like terminal velocity, then pulls up and easily glides back into a loop-the-loop, flashing breast and belly that shine as white as a gull’s. The other follows, just as bold, just as artful. I wonder if this is the same pair that my friend Billy, who lives nearby, saw not a month ago. Then they were just learning to fly, putting everything into flapping from one tree to the next, while their mother led them, coaching and cajoling. Now they can do anything they want in the air, being the only raptor in the East that manages to stay “still” in the wind, not hovering but, to the eye, motionless. When one weaves through the tree line, the other follows effortlessly, their colors rapidly alternating from the brown of their tails to the whites and marsh reds of their undersides. Later I see two young ospreys at the far end of the lake, but they seem no more interested in hunting than the red-tails do, perhaps for now content just getting to know their fishing grounds. Anyway, for one afternoon at least, the ospreys aren’t the main event. It’s strange, but after immersing myself in the natural world for the last six months, I’m just beginning to see how little I really understand about the lives of my neighbors. The work of immersing is endless: once you start you may never stop. My osprey year could lead to a red-tail year, which could lead to a great horned owl year, which could lead to a muskrat year. That’s the joy of it, too, that the wonders and work are inexhaustible, that there is no chance of ever getting complacent, of ever being done.

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do!” So said the sculptor Henry Moore in Donald Hall’s Life Work. If I start now with ospreys and work my way through a season each with my animal neighbors, I’ll still only begin to scratch the surface. But what a satisfying sort of scratching.

As I scribble down notes in my journal I sometimes refer to Scargo as the “hawk tower.” It’s a romantic, literary name, but Scargo Tower can stand a little of the sheen of romanticism. Local high school kids piss inside the tower, shatter bottles in the parking lot, and scribble graffiti on the inner walls. (My own name, buried under sedimentary layers of spray paint, links me forever with Jody Cushman.) Worse still, legions of tourists court heart attacks by huffing up the hundred or so steps each day. But right now I have the top of the tower to myself as the fall light polishes the edges of leaves and the summer season comes to an end. Clouds scumble the blue sky, and waves ripple across the pond, painting it a deep dark blue that you never see during midsummer, even on the stormiest days. The wind is from the northwest, perfect for early hawk-watching, and sure enough another large red-tail soon flies by. He, or she more likely, judging by her size, lifts straight up in front of the tower, less than a hundred feet in front of me, wings almost completely still, making only occasional adjustments. Her alignment into and with the wind is fascinating: the way she pulls in her wings, tilts slightly, then glides straight up—with fingertip control—riding the updraft. She stays perfectly still for a minute, then lifts up and down in yo-yo fashion. Finally she soars off, dropping from the height of the updraft toward the ocean, her wings held up in the slight V called a dihedral. I, watching from the top of the hawk tower, have to resist the urge to hold my arms out in flight. Then, what the hell, I don’t resist. No one is around, after all, so here, on the high point of the Cape, on the edge of the continent, I hold out my arms as the day blows south through me.

As I open my arms my jaw slackens and drops in that common, almost cartoony reaction we humans have in the face of the awe inspiring. A question: why is it that, at times like this, our bodies quite literally open us up to the world? Is it simply a case of wanting more of the world inside us or is it just the opposite—an emptying out of ourselves, our clutter, into something larger and greater? Both, I’m pretty sure. Whatever the answer, I feel freed, momentarily, from my own cluttered brain. For that I thank the hawks.

“Ecologists speak of an ‘edge effect,’ the concentration of animal life that often occurs where two different habitats abut,” writes Alan Poole. “Ospreys are part of this phenomenon, a shore and coastal bird, their life woven between land and water.” Fred Dunford, the museum archaeologist, visits the beach in front of our house and explains how so many rocks came to be deposited on the sand below the bluff, the point I now walk to every day. Likely the land out our back door was at the very edge of an Ice Age glacier when it began to withdraw north twenty thousand years ago. The rocks fell from glacier’s edge or were carried down in rushing snowmelt.

The season, too, is one of edges. As true fall arrives we enter a time in-between, a season that’s both the beginning and the end of something. The cranberry harvest approaches and the smaller birds train hard for their coming migrations, putting on fat and practicing formations. We’ve been blessed by the tree swallows, who stage right in our new front yard. Hundreds of them, sometimes thousands, swirl as if blown by a storm, white stomachs shining, as Nina and I run to the windows, transfixed by the whirlwind of birds. They blaze by the house like something thrown and scattered, readying for their enormous journey. They rise, dart, circle, their shadows spraying over the lawn.

Less dramatic, but perhaps more amazing, are the monarch butterflies we now find along the edge of yard and beach. They will travel, if they are lucky, in a fluttery but more or less straight line, from here to their winter roosts in the mountaintop forests of central Mexico, averaging over a hundred miles on a good day. If we stop to think about it, this is not something we easily believe, like being told a scrap of Kleenex will migrate to Veracruz by December.

In mid-September the migration of the ospreys begins. I’ve been readying myself for the young ospreys’ departure for some time, but it still catches me off guard. It occurs to me that moving away from the harbor may have been an unconscious preemptive strike, leaving the birds before they could leave me. I still go to the harbor nest daily, of course, but they are rarely there. Then one evening during the second week of September, just after sunset, two of the harbor fledglings visit me at the bluff.

Even before I see the ospreys the walk is memorable. For the last week the waters in front of our new house have been boiling with small silver slivers of fish, and dozens of terns, in response, wheel and dart down into the surf, immersed in a great orgy of feeding and death. As I walk past this tumult, I notice that several groups of human fishermen have tailed the birds: two boats are anchored not far from our front yard, and two young kids, brothers it looks like, run along the shore to throw their lines in the midst of the commotion. The water they dip their lines into, and into which the terns dive, is the furthest thing from the ordinary midday blue. It’s a blue-and-yellow striped ocean, illuminated eerily by the molten star that is now dropping toward the bay. These strange bands of light are not restricted to the water but also flash across the sky and clouds.

The boys seem to be having some luck, as are the terns, and soon I do, too. Just after I walk around the corner of the bluff and the fishermen vanish behind me; just after the sun disappears behind a cloud, then reappears as a thin blazing-red slice before descending into the sea; just then I see the little fawn with the white spots on its side. White also paints the insides of its ears, its throat, and the undersides of its legs and tail. It sees me and begins a surprisingly clumsy getaway, almost tripping as it staggers over the rocks, moving, improbably, not toward the bluff but toward the water. I sit down on a rock and try to keep quiet. It wades into the surf, then actually swims a little way, before continuing to wade another hundred feet west. After a while it stands quietly, still almost shoulder deep in the water, watching me as if waiting to see how I will respond. Living on osprey time has its advantages, and I employ my newfound patience, sitting still, not moving a muscle, until the fawn finally pulls itself out of the water, on the other side of the rocks, and hurries for the cover of the bluff.

Once the fawn is safe, I decide to emulate it. Protected from the fisherman by the turn of the bluff, I strip off my clothes and stumble across the wet rocks. Gradually, awkwardly, I make my way out into the ocean, past the black massed clumps of seaweed, and swim in the same water the sun sets into.

I don’t last as long as the fawn did. The cold autumn nights have begun to make the bay better suited to quick plunges than long immersion. I climb out and use my clothes to dry myself, then quickly dress. At that moment I receive the summer’s last gift. The sun has just slipped under the water, that final dip coming fast the way it always does, as if it were trying to sneak away, when I see the birds flapping strong and steady, traveling east along the coastline. They are large birds and they come right toward me. Their crooked wings beat out that stiff motion that the authors of Hawks in Flight call “arthritic,” a wing beat that now acts as a signature for me, a signature saying “osprey.” Even in the silhouette of dusk, they are unmistakable. Then, as they pass right overhead, I’m almost sure I make out the checkered markings of the immatures, though it’s true that I may be seeing things. Anyway, I choose to believe they are the fledglings returning to the harbor nest.

I watch the two birds fly off into the distance, sticking to the coastline, flapping by the little beach then over the jetties, back toward my family’s house. Several times they slip in and out of sight, the black lines of their wings slightly raised and kinked against the sky. Then they fade in and out again before disappearing completely.