Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir (19 page)

The next summer we saw a female turkey calling from our island to its chicks over on Fairylands. One by one they flew over, low to the water. The mother
gobbled
and
gobbled
until all her chicks were safely with her.

One night at the dinner table Mom said, “I guess Lynn and Yeats were right all those years ago, when they said they saw a turkey running into the forest.”

Everyone nodded and looked at us. Yeats raised his eyebrows at me and shrugged, as if to say, “Too late now.” We knew what we’d seen. No one in the family has ever doubted our bird sightings since.

I thought of this episode every time I saw Yeats name a new bird in the field. If he wasn’t sure, he’d consult the books. He was methodical and thorough. He’d trained his eye.

So, even though George was the expert here on Kennedy River, I decided to believe Yeats where this flycatcher was concerned. As he said, it was exciting either way. And I’d had an amusing time watching these two passionate people discuss a little bird as it went about its innocuous business in the bushes.

GEORGE CALLED LATER THAT
day to see if we wanted to go on a pelagic tour the next morning. He’d be taking a small group of people way out onto the ocean to see seafaring birds, birds that don’t come in to shore. We’d see
Leach’s storm petrels
and tufted puffins, as well as pigeon guillemots,
marbled murrelets
,
Cassin’s auklets
, and maybe even
fork-tailed storm petrels
. It sounded exciting: four new birds for our list. I consulted with Yeats, my hand over the telephone’s receiver.

He shook his head, rolled his eyes, and said, “Two tours with George in one week is enough.”

I left it at that. Part of me loved the idea of being out on the ocean, those rolling waves, the smell of salt and all those unworldly birds. Another part of me never wanted to be at sea again.

By the time we left Tofino and crossed the island, Yeats was ready to spend some more time with people his age. He was a great travelling companion, but he needed some time away from his mom. Our last week in BC was spent with friends, but we were both conscious of a yearning to be home.

Yeats said, “This has been a long trip. I get why you love it here, even though it almost never rains.” (We’d had hot, dry weather for the past two weeks.) “But I can’t wait to get back to the cottage.”

On the flight to Toronto I asked Yeats about the universities.

He said, “I liked
UV
ic okay, and the tour of
UBC
made me think maybe university isn’t that scary after all, but I don’t want to go come all the way to BC. It’s too far from home. I don’t like the idea of being so far away.”

“Should we visit some Ontario universities, then?”

Even though he was talking quite willingly about applying for schools now that we’d seen a couple, I was still wary. I didn’t want to push and push only to be rebuffed at the last minute.

“We don’t need to. If I go to university, I’ll go to U of T.”

“U of T? Are you sure?”

“Yup. And I’ll live at home.”

That was what Ben had done. I sighed out loud and Yeats looked at me.

“What?” he said. “What’s wrong with that? Don’t you want me to go to university?”

“Yes, you know I do. And I’d be happy to have you living at home, too, but don’t you think it’d be fun to go away somewhere? Even to Trent? Peterborough isn’t very far, and there’s loads of great birding around there.” I thought it would be good for Yeats to be away from family expectations and obligations, to be freer to explore. Living in residence at university would be a great opportunity for meeting new people, and I didn’t want him to flat-out discount the idea. It never seemed to occur to him to ask if he
could
live at home. I guess he just knew we wouldn’t kick him out.

He didn’t reply and I decided to stop bugging him for the time being.

Ben was at the airport to pick us up and enveloped me in a long hug in the arrivals hall.

“Thanks for coming back, Lynn,” he whispered into my ear. “I missed you. When you go out West, I never know if you’ll come back again.”

I sighed. “You nut,” I said. “Of course I’ll always come back.”

Yeats was grinning at us, pleased to be home.

That summer we had West Coast weather —
real
West Coast weather — at the cottage: cold and wet. Yeats said, “This is more like it. This is proper weather.”

Every once in a while we’d have a sunny day. I went down to the dock early one clear morning and the sky nearly took my breath away. Its long streaks of pink clouds and tiny slice of new moon filled me with awe and lightened my heart. As much as the West Coast pulled at me, this lake and these rocks, this particular Muskoka sky in the morning, was my elixir.

TEN

IT WAS WINTER AND
my heart felt heavy. Each morning when I woke up I had a drop in spirits, wondering if anyone would notice if I stayed in bed all day, if I pulled another blanket up over me and tucked a book into the corner between my arm and all these heavy covers. But of course they’d notice and they would worry as well as protest, so in mid-winter I set aside the heavy-heartedness and hauled myself up.

This was the time of year when the store was most quiet. The fall, with all the launches, events, and readings, and Christmas, with its frenzy of shopping and visiting and family gatherings, had passed. Ben and I had more time to spend together. I helped him to pull returns at the store and he packed up boxes of books to send back to the publishers. This part of bookselling was like cleaning house: not very exciting, but it had to be done.

Then a day came when I woke to lightness instead. It happened every year, unpredictably, sneaking under the door at night, in through the windows. Was it the lengthening days? Was it the promise of spring? Was it something internal, a switch that flicked because something inside me was sick of the heaviness?

My urge to tuck in dissipated. This spring,
2011
, I was more conscious than usual of my renewed cheer. That persistent shadow which had dogged me since the Galapagos trip was fading away.

One morning Yeats said to me, “I need to get out of the city. What about you?”

“We could have a little getaway during March Break, go somewhere for a day.”

“Let’s go back to Amherst Island. Maybe we’ll see some more owls.”

THE ROAD THAT LEADS
to Owl Woods has never been paved. I wasn’t even sure if it was regularly graded, since it was full of potholes and ruts. It was a dirt country road, washboard in places, and in mid-March, parts of it were covered with drifts of thick, sodden snow. We were nearly stuck a couple of times. I had to back up the car, shift into lower gear, and take a run at a little rise in the slushy road, but not too fast for fear of digging deeper ruts into the soft snow.

Yeats said, “No matter what happens, Mom, it won’t be worse than last year.”

I thought,
We didn’t have any trouble on Amherst last year
, but I was concentrating on getting the car unstuck, so all I said was, “What?”

He said, “The shipwreck. It can’t get worse than that.”

I laughed and drove over the hump of snow onto a drier bit of road. I relaxed my hands and shoulders.
We did not get stuck on the dirt road in the middle of nowhere with no one around and no cell phone.
Next time I would remember to put a shovel in the trunk.

One other car was parked at the trailhead and we met its occupant coming back from the woods. The man was about my age, and he was wearing sensible winter attire and carrying a camera with a two-foot lens.

He said, “Good luck in those woods,” and pointed with his camera. “It’s dead today. Nothing but dead.”

I said, “Dead owls?”

Yeats snorted and the man said, “No. No owls. Nothing. Dead.” He gave me a weird look.

I said, “Right.”

“There was a barred owl this morning. Only one. I got him pretty good,” he said, briefly holding up the camera. “But there’s nothing now. Only these.” He waved his hand around his head.

“Chickadees,” I said, and he nodded.

“They’re stalking me. I need owls. I need the
boreal owl
. In Algonquin last winter I got the snowy and
great grey
. Also the long-eared. At home we get the
northern hawk owl
and the
barred
. I have lots of photos of them, feeding, flying, everything.”

He continued listing his lifetime owl sightings and after a while I thought I should participate so I said, “In Muskoka we get the
eastern screech
.”

“Hmph.” He practically rolled his eyes and Yeats laughed. I guess the eastern screech owl wasn’t very exciting to real birders. I wasn’t very good at this game but I tried again.

“We came here last year and saw three long-eared owls and a snowy.”

This time the man nodded in appreciation and Yeats started pawing the crusty snow, impatient to get moving. I didn’t understand the etiquette of the birder in the field. How long were we meant to chitchat with this guy?

After another minute we went our separate ways. Yeats and I stepped out of the bush into a meadow and immediately two white-tailed deer came bounding from nowhere, crossed the meadow, and disappeared into the trees on the other side. If we’d come two seconds later, we would have missed them. We stood for a moment and breathed. Yeats spied a hawk circling in the sky and took a look through his binoculars.

“
Northern harrier
.”

Just as we started across the field, the man tramped up behind us. He said, “Maybe three of us will have better luck than one.”

I said, “All right,” although I knew how much Yeats disliked birdwatching with other people.

The man talked the whole way to the forest, crunch-crunching in the snow. I thought,
Maybe he knows what he’s doing — maybe he’ll flush out an owl with all his noise.
But I saw how stiffly Yeats held himself and I imagined his upset, his disappointment in being joined by this chatterbox of a man.

Once we were in the woods, we split up to look around; the man was still talking, though with less enthusiasm. I responded to barely a thing he said and Yeats not at all.

Yeats took out a handful of birdseed and held it up for the chickadees. The man came closer to watch, smiling a little, but after a very short time, he turned around and left, heading back towards the cars.

I said to Yeats, “He didn’t even say goodbye.”

“We weren’t very friendly to him, Mom. I wouldn’t have said goodbye either.”

“Huh.” I felt bad then. Would it have been better to tell the guy right away that we didn’t want company, or should we have pretended to enjoy having him with us? I carried some guilt over this around with me for a while, staying even more quiet than usual.

We didn’t see any owls so we hiked back out of the forest. I thought about Peter Matthiessen’s long trek to see snow leopards in Nepal. It was time to re-read
The Snow Leopard
, my most-read book, my favourite work of non-fiction. Then I chuckled to myself — how could I possibly compare these two journeys, his lasting months under difficult and sometimes life-threatening conditions, and mine a simple walk in the woods?

For me, the climax of
The Snow Leopard
comes when Matthiessen, a Zen acolyte, finally talks with the abbot of Shey Monastery. The abbot is living in a mountain cave and the men meet on a ledge on a sunny afternoon. The abbot is only fifty-two years old, but walks painfully on twisted, arthritic legs, and it’s clear he’ll spend the rest of his life on this mountainside, a dubious refuge in Matthiessen’s mind. The abbot laughs out loud when Jang-bu, the translator, asks how he feels about this forced isolation. He says, “Of course I am happy here! It’s wonderful!
Especially
when I have no choice!”

Every time I read these words I’m deeply moved. They stop me. I sit still and question every bit of my own life and wonder at my small irritations as well as the bigger problems I feel beset by. The way I feel about everything, I realize, is my choice. I reconfirm that, at bottom, where it counts, I am happy, and vow to let that happiness come to the top, too, where it also counts. Making the vow is the easy part.

YEATS HAD A LOT
due at school. The university applications had gone in mid-January, two months ago, and this next set of marks would be sent in, too. His usual pattern when under this kind of pressure was to have a nervous breakdown, endure a lecture from me about how capable he was of doing the work, and then finish the assignments.

He spent Saturday writing an English essay without the usual fuss.

On Sunday, however, just after lunch, he called me into his room and started in on a breakdown.

“I have too much to do. I can’t do it all. I can’t do it, Mom.”

“What do you have?”

“A history essay due tomorrow. I’ve started it but it isn’t done. I have to have an outline for my Lit presentation done, too, and all the research for another history project. And I have to come up with a social problem to paint in art. And I have a history test at the end of the week.”

I could feel his rising panic and there was always a point in this process when I felt it, too — when I somehow forgot that it wasn’t my work, my classes, my expectant teachers, and I let the fearful emotions carry me away. Then I pulled back and breathed and started to talk calmly to him.

“Well,” I said, “when is the outline due? And the research? Didn’t we already talk about that art project? Aren’t you going to do kids not spending enough time in nature or something like that?”

This time, though, he didn’t want my help. He didn’t want me to comfort him and tell him what a good student he was or give him any of my usual lines. He didn’t need help organizing his time, either. I kept on, though, even though I saw I was making no headway.

He covered his face in his hands. I tried not to get frustrated. I felt the anger well up and I tamped it down. What did he need from me?

I felt like walking out of the room, but as soon as the thought crossed my mind, Yeats said, “Don’t leave yet, Mom.”

So now he’s reading my mind, or at least my body language,
I thought.

I sat down across from him and said, “You do want to get into university, don’t you?” and immediately kicked myself for being so leading, so full of expectation for him.

He said, “I guess so.” He dropped his head and mumbled, “But it won’t be the end of the world if I don’t.” Then he looked up at me and said, “I’m not going to fail any of these courses. You don’t have to worry. I’ll be going to university.” He was glaring at me.

“What’s the problem, then? I don’t understand.”

He said, “Mom, what I really need from you, right now, is to hear you say it’s okay if I don’t get all this work done
on time
.”

I stared at him. He repeated what he said, and I thought of my father and my grandparents and all the values we were raised with and how horrified any of them would be to be put into this situation. I heard them all shouting, “It isn’t okay!”

“That’s all I need,” he said to me, knowing full well how hard it was for me to say it.

I put my hand on his shoulder. I found myself laughing and crying at the same time. Then I took a deep breath and said, “It’s okay, Yeats.” I took another breath and he turned to look me in the eye. There was no escape. I said, “It’s okay, Yeats,
with me
, if you hand those projects in late.” I was not kidding.

I couldn’t believe how hard it was to say those words. We were both laughing and crying now and I was sweating like a pig. I felt like I’d unburdened myself of generations of heavy expectation.

Yeats stood up and said, “Okay, Mom. Now I can do my work.”

That night at dinner he said, “It’s amazing how much work I’m getting done.”

I just smiled. I didn’t trust myself to say the right thing and I was happy he could finally work on all these assignments with some peace of mind.

A couple of days later I was out with two girlfriends who have children Yeats’s age. I recounted what had happened and one of them said, “I could never have said what you did. Not in a million years. I couldn’t even have said that with my fingers crossed behind my back.”

I couldn’t tell if she was judging me poorly or wishing she could change her mindset, as I had done in that moment with Yeats. I decided I didn’t want to know.

WHILE YEATS AND RUPERT
— I’d been right about his wanting to go back to school — were working on their university applications, Titus decided he wanted to go back, too. He applied to Seneca College for their digital arts program, and was accepted at their York campus. All four children were going to be in university. Ben and I were happy for Titus. He’d been working in the bookstore for about a year, and was quite obviously miserable. He was a talented artist and needed to be using his creativity for more than making interesting book displays.

I was thinking that when Rupert and Titus both left the store, Ben would have only one full-time staff member other than himself — Simone.

I said to him, “You need to hire someone else. It won’t be fair to Simone. She can’t do everything. and what about when we go on holidays?”

He wasn’t really listening to me. I could hear him thinking,
What holidays?
He’d be saving a lot of money with the two boys off the payroll, but I was worried about the cost of this economy, that he’d be the one to pick up the slack. He’d wear himself to the bone to save some money — and was that really the point of having his own bookshop? Again, though, I had to remind myself that I wasn’t the boss, and I knew nagging him would have no effect. But I was worried about him, so when Yeats and I decided to go birding in Burlington, at the Arboretum, I said to Ben, “We’re mounting an expedition. Do you want to come?” It was Easter weekend, so the bookstore would be closed.