Fowl Weather (18 page)

To determine how a dog or cat had tricked me, I'd have to hide inside the wall and hope that Fido or Fluffy repeated the stunt as I pressed an eye against a peephole. Not with a rabbit, though. Rabbits lack the slightest shred of inhibition when it comes to repeating a naughty deed in full public view. While I watched, Rudy edged his nose under the bottom of the loop, lifted the fencing slightly, and wriggled his body beneath it. Then he plopped down next to Walter's enclosure and cleaned his ears with his front paws.

Emerging from the workroom with a bale of twine twice the size of Rudy, I secured the eight o'clock position of the loop to the leg of the potter's wheel. Next, I tacked the three o'clock and six o'clock positions to a two-foot-long section of two-by-four, which I laid on the floor inside the pen. The result was a vaguely egg-shaped enclosure, which I hoped would remain secure around the clock.

For the next three days, Rudy and Walter shared their after-dinner basement exercise together while apart in their separate loops. On the fateful fourth day, I tiptoed downstairs after dinner without disturbing or displacing a single molecule of staircase wood, only to find that Rudy had managed to vacate his pen. I bent down and tested the weight of the board and the vigor of the potter's-wheel mooring with my nose, then a finger. The loop refused to budge.

Hunkered down next to Walter's cage, the little brown rabbit scratched his head with indifference until I snatched him and returned him to his pen. With impressive nonchalance, he proceeded to demonstrate how he had made his escape. I saw it, but I could hardly believe it. Scurrying his little legs at hummingbird-wing speed, he clambered up the thirty-inch-tall fence as effortlessly as you or I might ascend an anthill in an auto. This time, though, instead of parking himself near Walter, he zoomed across the basement, steering toward the workroom and the door to the great outdoors, which, thankfully, was tightly shut, climbproof, and burrow-resistant.

After I returned him to his pen, I called Linda downstairs. Once the house stopped pitching like a dingy in a typhoon, Rudy obligingly repeated his Houdini routine. “I guess they can't be in the basement any longer,” I said with a wan smile. Surrendering to the tiniest difficulty always cheered me slightly.

“I'll get a sheet,” said Linda.

“What good's that going to do?” I asked, but she was already bouncing the giant bowstring of the stairway. To the rumbling tone of nearly subsonic B-flat, she galloped back with a sheet that could no longer do duty covering Dusty's cage because of the peppering of holes inflicted by his beak. But after she had wrapped it around a length of the loop, it worked fine converting the scalable surface into a comparatively smooth wall. Rudy sniffed and pawed the sheet for a few moments to determine if it could be tastily munched in the manner of our woodwork, carpet, or electrical cords. Then he made an attempt to climb his favorite spot and warmed my heart by immediately giving up rather than trying a different location. Linda's quick solution seemed to do the trick.

• • •

A
S
I
HERDED
the ducks and hens into the barn, it dawned on me that Victor hadn't lunged at me for weeks. I could stroll from the water spigot to the outdoor wading pools without worrying that he would blindside me, and I no longer needed to arm myself with a push broom for self-defense. Victor seemed to remember my kindness to him with the watermelon, or perhaps he had come to think of me as a spindly food dispenser rather than a rival. I hated to admit it, but as much as I missed Hamilton, the absence of the aggressive Muscovy improved the emotional climate of the flock. Even shy Ramone had literally come out of the shadows to mingle with the other ducks.

Returning from the barn, I noticed a rabbit that could have been Rudy's twin on the hill behind the backyard fence. The unusually tame critter unhurriedly hopped away when I attempted to approach it. I imagined Linda laughing when I described how I mistook a wild rabbit for Rudy. But as I turned toward the house, I discovered that I had left the basement door open and remembered I'd last seen Rudy studying the sheet in his basement pen. Creeping dread overtook me, turning to full-scale panic as I hurried through the door and with a few strides reached Rudy's empty enclosure. Safely stuck inside his loop, the less agile Walter lifted his head and fixed me with an indignant stare that said, “It serves you right.” I scoured the basement, checking Rudy's favorite spots near the potter's wheel and beneath the tables in the misnamed workroom, but I couldn't find him. Back outside, I couldn't locate the brown rabbit again, either.

I hit the stairs with a clatter that Linda would have envied if she hadn't been shocked by the lunatic who burst into the kitchen. “Quick, help me, I left the back door open. Rudy isn't in his pen. We've got to catch him, hurry!” Bug-eyed and panting, with my
hair all but standing on end, I was the embodiment of a cartoon depiction of hysteria.

“He's right here in his cage,” she informed me with a level of blandness that would have done Magda proud. “I was about to bring Walter upstairs when your mother called, asking if you had taken her keys. I think I'll bring him up now.”

It took me hours to get over the shock of thinking that Rudy had escaped outdoors. I slept poorly, while phantoms shaped like Stewart, Trevor, Bertie, Hamilton, the little grey bunny, and an accusatory Rudy slid underneath my eyelids and flitted about in the blackness. My dad made an unbilled cameo appearance with Benny Goodman. My mom and I wandered a maze of rabbit-pen loops, trying to find our way to my grandmother's kitchen. The next morning, I asked Linda to make an appointment with the doctor for me.

T
HE SIDE EFFECTS
of the antidepressant sneaked up on me as I drove to work. I'd been taking the pills for three days without any noticeable results, which was a good thing, since instant relief from an existential dilemma would have made me suspicious. My osteopath had recommended this particular medication because of its effectiveness against anxiety plus the fact that none of his other patients had suffered an adverse reaction. None of his other patients had suffered visits from the hose demon, Henry the master gardener, or Bobo the Roller Clown either, so this didn't exactly let me off the hook.

I popped in an ancient Van Morrison CD as I turned onto the East Beltline. While I wasn't what you'd call jaded to the charms of music even after reviewing hundreds of discs for publication, I had reason to doubt that “Moondance” alone could suddenly slow my cellular activity to that of a hunk of granite. Fortunately,
my transformation into inanimate matter didn't impair my ability to drive. I had become part of the car, sort of an extension of the driver's seat with arms and legs. Once I reached my workplace, getting to the door presented unusual difficulty. Instead of locomoting my body, I dragged the building toward me with each step, and having to rotate the planet beneath my feet added to my sluggishness.

I felt medicated, but without the pleasures that the word implied. My sensory apparatus had been dulled. Perceptions lagged behind stimuli like a movie with an out-of-sync soundtrack. When my friend Ron moved his mouth to greet me, I heard his hello a split second later. When I opened my jaws to return the salutation, a brief but noticeable pause elapsed before the drool flowed in reply. My thought processes seemed normal enough, so writing catalog copy for my client proceeded at the typical glacial pace. But avoiding ossification required me to lurch to a standing position and visit Randy at his workbench in the bowels of the shipping room for cup upon cup of seriously caffeinated coffee.

Back home after lunch, I was grateful that the direst effects of the drug had dissipated, but to prevent myself from declining into total torpor I had to keep moving around. Only move around and do what? Physical exertion and I had never seen eye to eye. I happily encouraged Linda to hire college students for stress-inducing projects such as barn cleanup, duck-pen gravel maintenance, and lacing my shoes. Occasionally, though, an odd job would motivate me. The task I had in mind didn't seem that debilitating if I did only a teeny-weeny bit of it each day. Given the nice fall weather, I surmised that the work could even be—gasp—not entirely unfun.

Although we lived within five hundred feet of the Grand River, we rarely stood on its bank. Spring rains flooded the hollow beyond the back fence, blocking our path. By summer that same
lowland turned into an impassable malarial swamp. In the fall, when the wet finally evaporated, neck-high weeds barricaded the way until heavy winter snows battered them down. While I was powerless against the elemental forces of rain, snow, and biting insects, I was merely weak when it came to combating vegetative growth. Armed with a grass whip and careful vigilance for poison ivy, which a string trimmer would readily atomize and spray onto my face, I could conceivably, slowly, lazily cut a path to the river.

Wild birds were my motivation. They had fascinated me ever since my move to the country from downtown Grand Rapids more than a decade earlier. Dealing with the challenges presented by our Jekyll-and-Hyde Ollie, avian geniuses Stanley Sue and Dusty, and stubborn dove Howard convinced me to consider their outdoor cousins as more than flighty darts with colorful feathers. The months we'd spent with orphan European starling Weaver, who had learned to talk as well as a parrot, suggested that each and every bird that teetered on a tree limb or bobbled on the ground possessed a charismatic personality. So I started learning songs and field marks in my usual haphazard way. But Linda and I hadn't investigated the “riparian habitat” of our river, where we might glimpse shorebirds, ducks, and other dabblers, plus the occasional migrating warbler. Fall was migration time, and time was wasting, so I started on the path by lopping down the first few weeds.

I also started on a second antidepressant a week later. Despite the bouts of outdoor exercise, I still had enough pent-up anxiety under my skin to power a small city, with sufficient stores of uneasiness to light up the suburbs, too. A fellow music writer who also fought with fear and gloom had suggested a particular medication, though I felt sure that he consorted with a higher-quality inner demon than the clunk that slummed inside me. My osteopath agreed with the drug choice and presented me with a sleekly packaged
introductory kit. Nestled inside four rows of plastic bubbles, twenty-one minimum-therapeutic-dosage pills lorded it over seven smaller half-dosage pills, as minimum-therapeutic-dosage pills all too often do.

“Most of our patients skip the first row of pills altogether,” my doctor told me, but if anything I wanted to cut the half-dosage pills in half.

Since side effects from the first antidepressant hadn't kicked in until I'd taken it for three days, I downed my training-wheels dose of the second medication without a second thought. No neurological calamity struck during the drive to my workplace. After I'd worked for about an hour, though, I stopped to chat with Ron and caught myself wondering whether I was awake or dreaming—not the strongest indication of mental health. I couldn't quite categorize the particular flavor of dissociation from reality. Then, while sitting at the computer, I experienced what could best be described as a lightning strike inside my skull. For a fraction of an instant, the external world fizzed in a hot flash of white noise and static. While the bulk of my nervous system was busy superheating, the lazier neurons that had been caught playing canasta in the back room contented themselves with shooting electrical jolts through my limbs. All of this happened so quickly, I imagined that I had imagined it. When it occurred twice more, I drove home during a lull between voltage peaks and climbed into bed, where I spent the remainder of the day.

Oddly enough, the following morning I felt better than I'd remembered feeling for months, or even years. “It's as if the medication burned off all my anxiety,” I told Linda.

“You're not taking that again, are you?”

“Absolutely not. But it's almost worth going through every few months or so.”

T
HE PATH TO THE
river evolved with inexplicable ease. If I had all the athletic prowess of a rusty gate, at least I could swing my arm like one and with the addition of a grass whip eventually hack down a weed. Waving my skinny appendage to and fro, I allowed the weight of the L-shaped sickle to inch my body toward the water in much the same fashion that a pendulum advances the hour. The activity was so mechanical, I turned into a perpetual-motion device. Even after my brain decided I should stop, my swinging arm exercised a mind of its own, repeating, “Cut more weeds.”

Within a few days, I had chopped, sliced, diced, and, especially, minced a six-foot-wide avenue down the hill, across the spongy matter of the swamp, into the poison ivy – strewn margin of the woods, and ultimately all the way through the trees to the Grand River. I saw little logic in hiking the path with Linda only to stand single file at the end and remark, “Yup, that's the water. Could you please move your head?” We needed space to spread out upon our arrival, so over the next several days I carved out an airy oasis seventy feet long and fifteen feet deep. But once at the river, we'd still need a way to get down the bank to the water's edge without rubbing up against enough poison oak, poison sumac, poison ivy, stinging nettles, belladonna, and amanita mushrooms to wipe out Tbilisi. The grass whip kept whipping. Still, it was better than the nervous tic I'd been cultivating over the past month.

My enjoyment of being in the woods was heightened by the fact that I had never benefited from more than fleeting exposure to nature as a child. Once a summer our family might drive to Cannonsburg Park for a picnic, but we would cling to the picnic table like ants, venturing into the woods only if they lay between us and a playground. I still wondered what I had missed compared to folks who had chased birds and butterflies for decades and knew a dragonfly from a damselfly. Houseflies were my milieu.