Learning Our Place

The arrival of Heidi and her family signals true summer. The house is full and bloated, six of us now, reminding me of when Heidi and I spent our fortunate childhood summers roaming around Sesuit Neck. My sister plans on staying only ten days, but it’s a sure bet she’ll remain longer. It’s a game she plays every year, imagining she can just come up for a short trip, but then remembering that this is where she belongs during summer and getting pulled back in. We urge her to change her flight and stay, playing the game, knowing she’ll plop down the fifty dollars per ticket to make the changes. We even offer to pay, which seems well worth it. For Nina, my mother, and me, having the children here changes everything. They bring relief like rain, clearing out the dark feeling that has hung in the house since my brother’s difficult visit.

As the days enter deepest summer they are also becoming something else. It’s a transformation I could sense even as a kid, maybe especially as a kid, with school and September looming. Now, as perfect as late July is, I feel that the weather and light will soon change, seesawing on the fulcrum of August. As with any other time of year, we occasionally daydream of what we don’t have. I sometimes long for the cooler days of fall, an empty house, working obsessively on two or three projects at once. But more often I think of what we do have. Days of swimming, companionship, sun, evening drinks on the back deck—hot days where the weather tells you not to push it. My mother’s lilies are in full bloom, and we take turns cooking dinner. Though I look forward to fall, I know there will be winter days when I look back on my sister’s visit as if it were a dream.

And if I’m feeling more relaxed, it’s not just due to Heidi and the kids. The pressure is off at both the Chapin and Simpkins Neck nests. By Heidi’s second week, the last of July, the remaining Chapin birds are flying. Sadly, No. 3 is last again, still hopping around awkwardly while the other two flap out toward the beach and back. But finally he joins them, and the air fills with young ospreys. For months I’ve been coming to see them, but now they come to me. They fly right by my chair, wings beating heavily, underbellies a familiar flashing white. Though they fly uncertainly at first, wobbling slightly, soon enough they get the hang of it. Each day brings a new lesson, often a technical addition to their repertoires: banking, skimming over the spartina, hovering. They take turns lapping the marsh, staying within the basic boundaries formed by the telephone wires, creek, and beach.

If instinct gives them the final push over the nest edge and into the sky, now comes the time when learning hones instinct. Each adjustment of their primary feathers, each bank and each glide, is new, and must be mastered. And while they are surprisingly adept at moving through the air for the first time, there are also moments when they look very much like beginners. They practice landing, something that at first proves particularly difficult. One Chapin fledgling, No. 2, I think, glides low over the marsh, flaps hard to gain altitude, and hovers above the nest, the others letting loose a chorus of shrieks, like rehearsal for future territoriality (or maybe more like simple cheering brought on by excitement).

Much of the practice will serve the purpose of teaching the birds to hunt, but I fret that the fledglings will never be able to fish on their own. It’s a real worry, as starvation will be a constant possibility once their parents leave at the end of August. Despite the improvement in flying, it still seems highly unlikely that these awkward teenagers will really be able to catch anything anytime soon. I’ve seen no evidence to make me hopeful in this regard, and they still hurry back to the nest when either parent returns with a fish.

The fish deliveries are becoming less and less frequent, however, another parental prod toward independence. If the fledglings take the hint, if they’ve begun to feel the imperative to hunt, then No. 3 must feel it most acutely. Age hasn’t added manners, and the pecking order remains just as savagely civil as it’s always been. Once I watch as No. 3, by sheer good luck alone on the nest when Mother brings home a fish, starts jabbing excitedly at the meal only to be rudely interrupted by No. 1, who flies back, tears the fish away, and then blocks out her smaller sibling with wings and backside. Something in me, some impulse toward fair play and justice, still hopes that No. 3 will fight back, winning in the end. This might happen in a Hollywood movie, but not at the nest. Deference has been encoded in his genes through the generations, and that is not about to change now, suddenly, for my benefit. The pecking order works; therefore the pecking order continues.

Not that it would please me if the birds turned suddenly sweet or saccharine. There’s nothing dainty or precious about their lives; that’s one of the first things I liked about them, and that’s what I still like. Resting, hunting, mating, diving, plunging, building big sloppy nests, tearing into their prey—they live the way they live. For all their tolerance of humans, they are not tame. While people have often used falcons to hunt rabbits, and Japanese fishermen have used cormorants to dive for fish, it pleases me that ospreys were never trained to hunt and do the bidding of humans.

I still check in at the other nests. At Simpkins Neck the youngsters now spend the better part of their time roosting on trees by the marsh edge, and often when I emerge from the greenbriers I find the nest empty. One day, with no one home, I walk right up to the nest. It’s taller than I’d imagined, maybe three and a half to four feet high, though not quite as wide as I’d thought, and it’s still a wonder that four or five birds with five-foot wingspans can live inside. Dung and trash litter a circle below the platform. It feels strange to be here without the birds, as if I’d stumbled on an evacuated town, and it occurs to me that soon all the nests I watch will be as empty as this one. Suddenly one of the fledglings appears, on guard duty, though apparently not adept at it yet, giving me a few warning cries before flying off.

The last to fly, of course, are the harbor birds, the birds I now watch with Noah. Though he doesn’t accompany me to Chapin or Simpkins Neck, Noah is right by my side whenever I watch our “home” ospreys. In fact, he is right by my side most of the time I’m home, trailing me everywhere around the house. Though I’ve never been much of a beachgoer, his visit has changed that. Whether I’m trying to prepare my lesson plans, watch the birds, or scribble notes, he begs me to take him down to the water. In the evenings, after our beach trips, I hold him up to the telescope on the back deck, while he closes his right eye and squints with his left. He claims to see the nestlings, though I am skeptical.

“I can see your birds, David,” he insists.

It isn’t until the first week of August that we see the harbor birds take the big step. And it is a big step, bigger than the ones the young at the other nests have had to take. While the Chapin and Simpkins launching pads were twelve-foot platforms, the harbor platform is over twice as high. Noah and I happen to be watching when the last of the young birds takes the plunge. Talons near the platform’s edge, he flaps and flaps, as if buying time, peering down nervously, until suddenly, abruptly, he hops forward. At first it looks like this is a mistake. Unlike the birds at Chapin, he heads down, not out, falling directly toward the ground. But then, after the initial dip, he swoops back up in roller-coaster fashion, taking a quick loop around the harbor before awkwardly regaining the nest.

As well as learning to use their wings and bodies, during these midsummer weeks the young ospreys first begin to get to know their places. The local geography is imprinting itself on the developing osprey mind, and the fledglings spend these first weeks of flight learning the particulars of their home ground.

One way of looking at what is going on out on the marshes is that the young birds are committing their neighborhoods to memory, so much so that when they fly back from South America two springs from now they will know just where to build. Now is the time the attachment grows, an attachment that will lead to an unerring pull to return, an instinct for home that is almost beyond human comprehension.

As they explore, the nest becomes less and less the focal point. Though it is still the literal center of their worlds, they spend less time at that center. In fact, Alan Poole reports a strange phenomenon in birds that live in colonies such as Westport. Often the fledglings, while out exploring, will alight on nests not their own. Neighboring parents allow this, relaxing territorial boundaries during the curious teenage years of the young birds. Knowing this, I can’t help but wonder if No. 3 has considered nest-hopping over to a place where he is no longer the low man.

This learning process is not without its dangers, however.

One of these dangers is a relatively new one. As we humans have continued to crisscross our world with wires, as if absorbed in some giant game of cat’s cradle, the problem of birds roosting or nesting on power and phone lines has become very real. This is particularly true for the Chapin and harbor birds, who have begun to roost right on the wires. Many ospreys even nest on the poles, which, after all, resemble their ideal search image for a nest—a tall, dead, branchless tree. The problem is that, under the right conditions, these trees can send thousands of volts through bird and nest.

Not long ago I received an e-mail entitled “Osprey Electrocutions.” On first glance I took the title as a joke, some crank’s argument for an avian death penalty. But then I read the message and later spoke to the letter’s writer, Joey Mason, who has dedicated herself to the problem of ospreys and power lines. Working with cranberry growers (who’ve been extremely helpful) and with power-company workers (who’ve been a little less so), Joey has tried to set up various buffers and grounding devices to keep the ospreys from getting zapped. (Self-interest at least partly motivates both groups: an electrified bird can short out a neighborhood’s power, which, in the cranberry grower’s case, could stop their pumps from working and let their crop be destroyed by frost.) Joey hasn’t had much luck finding ways to keep ospreys away once they’ve determined where they want to settle, in this way the birds’ commitment to place working against them. Over the last three years, eleven ospreys have been electrocuted in her part of eastern Massachusetts, and Joey has assigned herself the unpleasant task of recovering their bodies. Once she found a bird so badly burned that its skin felt like the plastic bubble wrap used for shipping; another time she tried to help a young bird with burns and broken wings while the mother circled right above, calling in distress.

The problem is that the birds can often perch and even nest on the poles without harm, but if their wings make a connection between two wires the current will run through them, particularly if their wings are wet. Young birds, who are, in Joey’s words, “kind of doofy when they first learn to fly,” are particularly susceptible to crashing into wires. And there have been times when rain caused the nest itself to make a connection, setting whole nests on fire and burning nestlings alive.

Just as it does for ospreys, the modern world works against the human urge to learn about and commit to a place. But if it is more difficult to closely learn our places, it still isn’t impossible. Though his exploration lacks the birds’ urgency, I believe that over the last few years Noah has been imprinting the sea and sand during his summer visits. While the red clay of North Carolina will always be home, I hope he will remember his connection to the ocean, to the smells of hot sand, seaweed, and low tide.

Perhaps I’m a little dense, but it seems to have taken me almost forty years to just begin to learn the basics of this one place. We “more often need to be reminded than instructed,” said Samuel Johnson. How many times have I looked up the same bird or plant in my field guides, having already forgotten the name from the year before?

While my knowledge of bird life has gradually improved over the years, my plant knowledge remains minimal. In hopes of correcting this I invite Lee Baldwin, a guide for the natural history museum, out to the Chapin nest. Lee led me on a tour out to Monomoy Island last fall, during which I learned almost as much about the Cape’s plant life as I had in my previous thirty-seven years. This visit in late July is a little more reciprocal, as I get to show her the ospreys through my scope and catch her up on the plot thus far. But mainly she plays the mentor, I the pupil, which is fine with me. It’s always good to find teachers, especially those who can attach names to things you care about.

Some names she merely confirms or reminds me of, but others she teaches me. Not long ago I’d wondered what the grasses were with the tiny pinecone type clusters on top, and now she tells me they’re called three-square, a sedge with the Latin name Scirpus americanus. She points to the sea lavender and the low clumps of beach heather, or “poverty grass,” as Thoreau called it, and has me feel the rubbery salt-marsh spurry. We nibble at the edible landscape, too, the glasswort and beach peas and still unripe beach plums. This vegetable world contains medicine as well as food, including Saint-John’s-wort and the tiny pink-and-white yarrow, an astringent that Achilles supposedly brought into battle to stop the bleeding of the troops. As we walk she points—shadbush, Ammophila, black cherry, red oak—and it’s as if I’m with a mender whose job is to sew words to the world and the world to me. After two hours, Lee says good-bye, leaving me with a whole new vocabulary for my daily landscape.

As well as collecting the names of things, I’ve lately begun to collect hopeful examples of human commitment to place and old knowledge. In pursuit of these stories I recently interviewed Briar Cook, the husband of a woman I used to teach with. Briar and I spent an afternoon at his house bordering a salt marsh in Hyannis, while he regaled me with stories on his favorite topic: the heroic life of his father. The spartina and phragmites of the marsh grew not fifty feet from his back door; it was in those reeds and mud that Briar spent much of his childhood, and out of them that his father, Jonah, pulled much of what made up their life. When Briar was young his family owned most of the land surrounding the east side of the marsh and creek, and the stories he told paint a picture of a family living almost entirely off the marsh. Jonah Cook was the best fisherman, trapper, and amateur wrestler on all of the Cape. “He had the strongest hands of any man you knew,” Briar said, “from setting traps.” To illustrate he pantomimed the motion of pulling a trap apart, like a lion tamer opening a big cat’s mouth. He told me how his father worked as a postman but would get up at four to check his trapline for muskrats during the season. After that he paused suddenly and, as if I had objected to the violence (I hadn’t), came to his father’s defense. “He never trapped a place out, though. And he got out and checked the trapline every day, no matter how sick or tired he was feeling. He didn’t let those rats suffer.”

They got three dollars each for a pelt, and Briar and his brother would skin up to fifty a night. By the end of the season, the cellar floor was painted red with blood. Upstairs his parents were fleshing the animals, wearing silk stockings on their hands to remove fat from the skin. There wasn’t much to eat on the muskrats, of course, except for the legs, which they fried and gave to unsuspecting friends at Christmas.

“They were good, not gamy. The rats are vegetarians. One of the reasons you can catch them relatively easy is that they make a feed bed in the middle of the cattails. So you just find the feed bed and set the trap there.” There was plenty else to eat from the marsh and woods and ocean. For their annual feast the Cooks piled up everything they’d shot, dug, or caught: deer, duck, raccoon, pheasant, mushrooms, blueberries, scallops, razorfish, oysters, quahogs, mussels, sea clams, and stripers.

At one point during my visit Briar’s mother came out and sat with us. She told me how they collected and canned every plant and berry, how elderberry petals were gathered for wine, “though we didn’t drink a lot.” Then she showed me a picture of Briar as a sixteen-year-old holding a fifty-five-pound striper, as well as the one of her husband standing in front of a line between two trees, a line that held a few hundred muskrat pelts, pelts that looked as thin and splayed as bat wings. She confirmed the nearly superhuman tales of Jonah Cook: how he invented a special cone-headed wire trap, like a lobster trap, a trap that muskrats could swim into but not out of, and how that way he could catch up to eight rats at once. And she told countless more stories of his prowess and strength as a hunter, trapper, and fisherman.

I learned a lot about Briar, too. For instance, I learned that his name was born of a mistake. Jonah had always greatly admired the local high school principal, an upstanding old Yankee named Briah. Since this was how most Cape Codders pronounced “briar,” Jonah first assumed that that was the man’s name. By the time he named his son after the man, Jonah was aware of his original mistake, but he liked having that final r replace the h, it being more reflective of the land and the way of their lives.

On the drive back to Dennis I found myself wondering how many Jonah Cooks the modern land could handle, and realized the honest answer was “not many.” Just a half dozen could take care of the entire muskrat population of one marsh, though at the time there weren’t a half dozen and Briar’s father was careful not to trap out his place, since he depended on the muskrats. What is undeniable is that Jonah Cook and his family lived both on and in their place. Briar, after attempting to retire to Florida, found himself drawn back here, to the place he started from, the place he was still connected to by blood and stories.

Closer to home, I think of Norton Nickerson, whom I followed on a Chapin beach walk to explore plover nesting sites this past March. Since I probably won’t be gearing up to trap muskrats any time soon, Nickerson provides more of a realistic local role model for me than Jonah Cook. The plovers have recently been in direct competition with four-wheel-drive vehicles on the local beaches, and it isn’t hard to guess which of these two populations is thriving. Not long ago out on Sandy Neck two chicks were found squashed in the tire tracks of an SUV, but despite the bird’s endangered status, even this hasn’t convinced the town to ban four-wheelers from our beaches. The battle for the plovers was just one that Nickerson, a tenth-generation Cape Codder and Tufts environmental studies professor, undertook until he died, at seventy-three, this past June. Nickerson helped write the Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act, and, according to our town’s natural resources officer, George Macdonald, “If there was an obscure plant no one in the office could identify, there was just one answer: call Nickerson.”

What most interests me at the moment is the prospect of trying to follow, however timidly, in Norton Nickerson’s large footsteps. It was through leading the Dennis Conservation Commission that he managed to save hundreds of acres of land in our town, and his death has opened up a seat on that commission. I’ve been told that much of the work for the commission is dull, such as consideration of septic tanks and sewage, and my natural instincts are apolitical, if not anti. But when I recently attended one of the commission’s meetings, it rankled me how, without Nickerson, there seemed to be a wink-wink quality between the board and the developers, which prompted Nina to say, “They seem more like the anticonservation commission.” I know at this point it’s time to put up or shut up, but still I resist, not quite ready to throw my hat into the ring.

The other afternoon, a few days after Noah’s arrival, I watched as one of the ospreys’ downstairs neighbors, decked out in his usual chestnut cap and black bib, stole some twig and string from the osprey nest to use in repairing his own. The larger birds, mother and nestlings, just stared, impassive and curious, at this act of larceny. That same night I stumbled upon the fact that a house sparrow isn’t really a sparrow at all, but, according to our local authority Peter Trull, is “actually a European weaver finch introduced to the United States in the late nineteenth century.” Part of my new education has been to differentiate between the native and the introduced, and I confess that this prejudices me slightly against the generally likable sparrow. It may be the naturalist’s equivalent of xenophobia, but I find myself resenting the outside invasion of species, like the phragmites that threaten to take over our marshes and destroy their variety, as well as the phragmites’ ornithological equivalent, the mute swans, the great bullies of our creeks and lakes.

I take more than a little pride in my growing knowledge of the local bird life. The other night at the Barnstable Courthouse I gave my first public talk as an “osprey expert.” Since I didn’t have slides I demonstrated the birds’ behavior by pantomime, acting out the feeding of nestlings by tilting my head to the side and opening my mouth. One of the people in the audience that night asked me if it wasn’t boring sitting out there watching birds all day. I was flummoxed for a minute, but then replied passionately. It was hard to communicate how what I’ve been experiencing this summer has been the opposite of boring, and how the more I learn, the more absorbing it gets. I don’t know if I convinced my interrogator with my stories of birth, murder, love, and intrigue at the nest, but I’m beginning to believe in what I once thought impossible: that settling can be exciting.

The more I live steeped in all things osprey, and on osprey time, the more each day brings something different, often dramatically different, than the last. Not just differences in the young ospreys’ size—they now look like young eagles skimming above the marsh!—but differences in weather, light, and animal visitors near the nest. One day I might see a muskrat trundling across the Quivett path, on another the Chapin male might fly so close I can hear his feathers’ whisper, and yet another a platoon of ducks might riffle by, beating their wings in a motion that is the antithesis of gliding, as if expending their last possible ounce of energy. Just as important as sightings like these are the daily changes in the tides: the high-tide creek lapping against the spartina with a delicate music like rainfall, or the low tide sliding lower with the trickle of a mountain creek. I suspect I sounded like a lunatic preacher when I responded to the audience member’s sensible question, but I do feel something of the proselytizer’s zeal. My interrogator was actually lucky I didn’t jump down off from the podium and lay hands on him. What I really wanted to say was: You don’t understand! If I can do this, if I can learn these secrets, then anyone can! You can learn Osprey, too! Fortunately, I restrained myself.

Now the Chapin No. 1 is dipping down over the tidal creeks, flying out toward the bay, buzzing me at my chair, and spending more and more time off the nest. Some days she and No. 2 practice aerial maneuvers like fighter pilots, dipping and flying after each other, banking and turning over the marsh. Once they even engage in a World War I–style dogfight, screeching and interweaving. This is play with serious results.

The fledglings have begun to look even more like their parents, though they are still easy enough to distinguish by their pale tail bands and more dramatic checkering. But while they look more grown up, they still have a ways to go. Alan Poole writes that some birds catch fish two or three days after fledging, but most are still fed by the adults for ten to twenty days. Despite the fact that they are flying with more grace, I strongly suspect that the Chapin fledglings aren’t yet catching any fish.

Their relative independence has freed up the mother, however, and she now heads off to hunt on her own. The Chapin male has faded deeper into the background, spending a lot of time at his auxiliary guard post or entirely away from the nest, out of sight, apparently losing interest in the proceedings now that his offspring can fly. More and more often it is the female who returns to the nest with dinner.

When she does it’s like a cry of “Ollie-Ollie-in-come-free.” The fledglings return from their explorations like metal scraps to a magnet. Though they are now almost the size of their parents, the pecking order still holds. No. 1 or No. 2 will rip the fish from the mother and begin a vicious tug-of-war. Whichever bird wins no longer needs to be fed small scraps. Those days are gone. Now they tear into scales and skin with a savagery rivaling the adults’. Using their feet to pin the fish, they employ their bills as I did the pliers, pulling back with rips that should be accompanied by the sound effect of separating Velcro. Their now developed bills are one of the main ways the young birds encounter the world. I’m fascinated by the strength and versatility of the bill. Despite their hardness, the mandibles, like our fingernails, are made of keratin, a tougher sort of skin that constantly replaces itself.

Young humans also like to explore their world by putting things in their mouths. This I learn from watching Noah. Noah was born two years and a week after my father died, my mother’s first grandchild. Everyone said he looked just like my father during that first year, and it wasn’t just wishful thinking (though, honestly, he also looked a lot like Winston Churchill). Now Noah and Addie help fill up this house, turning it back into what it once was, a family place. These midsummer visits are important to me, in part because they confirm something I sometimes forget: we are still a family, if a reduced one, and we still have our place and our stories.

Over the last half dozen years my family has been shaken by tragedy. This is not melodrama, just facts. After sailing along for decades as a kind of over-the-top embodiment of the American dream, we have been rocked by cancer, bereavement, mental illness, deep depression. These are not particularly unique to my family, true; they’re the sorts of things we all run into once we’ve been alive for a while. But, unique or not, they have left me questioning, wondering just what I should do with my time left in this world. Heidi, too, has found herself asking questions in the wake of all that has happened. This coming year she will return to school, attending Duke University’s Divinity School for a graduate degree in religion.

My own response to our familial chaos has been to think long and hard about how to live, searching for clues in books, in nature, and in the lives of people I admire. I haven’t reached any earth-shaking conclusions, but I have made a choice. While my brother remains homeless, I will make a home. I have decided that, in the face of uprootedness, I will send forth roots; that, in the face of a radically unsettled life, I will attempt to do something radical—that is, I will attempt to settle.

One of my human role models in this attempt at placing myself has been Scott Russell Sanders, whom I met two years ago. In his writing Sanders offers an alternative to the two traditional psychological reactions of flight or fight, “a third instinct, that of staying put.” It is that muscle—the settling muscle—that I’ve tried to develop since returning to Cape Cod with Nina.

Some might suggest that by retiring to Cape Cod and dwelling on these things I’m digging myself an early grave. Maybe, but then maybe that isn’t such bad work for the second half of a person’s life. If death is the ultimate settling, then I’m getting a jump on it. My father, it seems to me, had the right idea, asking that his ashes be spread both below the ground and on the waters of Cape Cod Bay. I’d like to be dispersed in a similar fashion (though I hope one of my braver friends will sneak some of my dust up to my neighbor’s land above the bluff).

Finding a place is no laughing matter, but rather, as the ospreys know, a life-or-death proposition. I don’t want “sense of place” as some fancy concept, a kind of modern pastoralism. What I’m after is an embracing of place in all its details, gory or not. Not a pastoral commitment but a savage one.

It has meant everything to me that Nina is getting more and more attached to living by the ocean, that the salt air has seeped into her life, too. Like the ospreys, we will ideally nest in two places, spending some of our time in the mountains of Colorado. But while I once feared being a polygamist of place—charging from coast to coast like an adulterous husband in a madcap ’60s movie, passionately declaring my love for one place before hurriedly packing my suitcase to rush back and proclaim my love for the other—I now know that, to paraphrase Wendell Berry, I’m wed to both my wife and to this place by the sea. I remember what Alan Poole said about the ospreys, that their commitment to the nest might be what secures their monogamy, even more than their commitment to each other: “It seems most likely, therefore, that pairs continue together year after year because both members of the pair have a strong attachment to the same site.” While I suspect this isn’t true in my marriage, it doesn’t hurt to love your place as well as each other. Nina shares with me a kind of tenacious pastoralism, not a quaint love of “nature” but an aggressive need to dig into the places she cares about.

I’m convinced that, no less than the ospreys, we need to stake our lives on place, even if they have to shoot us to get us out of their chimneys. If there is a degree of mindlessness on the ospreys’ part, sometimes committing even though it gets them killed, we could stand to emulate some of that mindlessness. Whether we admit it or not, similar instincts operate within us: we have an instinct to build, of course, but we also have an instinct for the land, a drive to find a place and love it that is encoded in our genes. By neglecting this instinct, we banish ourselves. By living as if it doesn’t exist, we kill ourselves. That we don’t die immediately shouldn’t reassure us. It’s a gradual, long-term suicide.

Returning from his Florida exile, Briar Cook must have been relieved to be back in a landscape that had old stories attached to it. So am I. Familiar lands are storied lands. Each day when I drive to the Chapin nest, I pass the stone wall my brother and I built, bordering Willie Nick Road. I can’t look at that wall the way I might any other—one in Illinois, for instance, or even Colorado—for the simple reason that I built it with my own hands. Working for a local contractor, my brother and I lifted those stones into place, and if the wall isn’t particularly artful, it’s significant, at least to me. To look at it is to retrieve that sweaty August day when we hauled rocks for twelve hours, which, at ten dollars an hour, meant the most I’d ever earned in a day. If the money is long since spent, the memory is still there, available each time I drive or walk by the wall.

Here is a sad but common practice on Cape Cod: a parent dies and the children cash in, selling the family land to a developer who then tears down the house and builds another, often one that bulges to the edge of both borders and regulations. We blindly accept money as a true gauge of value, but if we stopped to think about it for even a minute, I doubt we’d be so quick to sell our heritages down the river. The ospreys have been living the way they live a while longer than we have and, I think, are a little wiser, or, at least, a little more in touch with the old ways, ways that have worked for millennia. They become part of a place as the place becomes part of them, an image resonating in their minds when they see their home again. Though their brains are much smaller than ours, they have held on to something that we, in our rush, have carelessly misplaced. On some level the birds understand that their first places are, practically speaking, places that served their parents well and will likely serve them well, too. While our images of place dim, theirs remain vivid. And following this burning picture, honed by instincts that have withered in us through neglect, they are able to find their way home.