from
the sea (5) - Baubo’s bird ludes by
freda karpf
Baubo went mutter jabbering through the dry
and cracking phragmites. Even the growth of the wetlands seemed against the
welfare of the waterfowl. But neither plant stopped their ability to cruise
past the little spit of land. The current there enjoyed the fjord like turns
detailing the hideaway. The waterfowl loved to cruise with it accenting the outline
around the spit of land. Most people fail to see that we have fjords in New
Jersey. You don’t have to go to Scandinavia to find land that has more ins and
outs, juts and teeth than an old saw.
Fjord like hideaways provides cover and protected coves for our
birds. The lack of routine and
predictable boundaries provide the same good that negative ions do for a sense of
well-being. It is true that nature loves
to reproduce itself but the changes, the iterations never follow an exacting
measure. There is life in the uneven boundaries and as the land can tell you
there is the ebb and flow of the river as well.
~
Baubo tried to figure birds out but never
spent much time learning what old Witmer or other ornithologists had to
say. She learned to recognize the
patterns and some of the details of their world. Baubo admired the whirlybird of blue jays as
they fly away. When they slowed to a landing she could see the Tiffany windows
on their wings. The robin’s chest looks
like the paint you see on a neglected barn, thinning, fading like an old blood
stain. Baubo wrestled with the age-old question about robins. ‘Do they hear the worms churning the soil or
spot the worms as they go about their butler duties marching across the
ground?’
She thought they ought to be listening,
particularly for hawks, after she saw a strike on a robin. She told them so as
well. Cannibals. The damn hawks. Loved
them anyway. How could you not? Fierce, swift, and when deadly, accurate and
quick. Merciful in their own way. She once saw a hawk fly past her holding a
bird in its talons directed like a figurehead on a ship. They both seemed to be
in agreement about which way to fly. But one wasn’t a bowsprit or a
figurehead. It was a poor bird that had
no idea what hit it.
~
Baubo was in the thick of bird thoughts as
she walked about Mrs. Scattergood’s property when she came upon some vacant
nests. As Baubo’s eyes travelled over the ins and outs of the turns she lost
track of her feet and thought she nearly stepped on a plover’s nest. She had
always loved plovers; though the black skimmer, if she had to pin her Valentine
on one bird over another, had her heart. How could you not love a skimmer? This was a plover’s nursery. They had all
fledged. All coming from this little hollow in the sand, no larger than a
deviled egg. Without that odd collection of twigs and remnants that birds usually
build into the cradle, this soft looking depression in the sand rocked her
awareness. Real plovers might be underfoot.
~
Witmer Stone’s description of the black
skimmer in his Bird Studies at Old Cape May was initially very disappointing. He wrote, “This grotesque bird forms one of
the prominent features of the wild life of any coast that it favors with its
presence.” ‘This grotesque bird’ chafed. But as he continues his field
observations the skimmer seems like a rival for Nureyev. Baubo noted that Doctor
Stone was forgiven.
~
“I’m dumber than mud,” Baubo said, still
watching her feet as she thought she nearly destroyed a nest. She really shouldn’t disparage mud. This is
not fair, she also realized, considering that it was some kind of mud that
created this whole wetland in the first place. If all life is sentient, even
mud, maybe especially mud, aka primordial ooze, created all this. Cooked sand,
rolled over by storm surges. Then small mud puddles turning a nascent beauty
into a marshland. Some high areas, soft
sanded and safe for plovers’ roll and wiggle which made it good enough for a
nest and egg. Feels like the start of
everything. Yeast for the world’s first rise.
‘Therefore’, lecturing herself, Baubo concluded that ‘mud must be fairly
well equipped with essential knowledge and know-how to create worlds. But being human’, she continued, ‘I’m hard
beset,’ as a poet once wrote, ‘and must gain what little nourishment I get from
the ground up, time masticated, wind pelted into backshore beaches and marshes’
The organic breakdown continued in her mind and thus and so Baubo, not really a
human, learned herself to love mud.
No comments:
Post a Comment