Study in Perfect (20 page)

Kingdom:
Animalia
; Phylum:
Chordata
; Subphylum:
Vertebrata
; Class:
Mammalia
; Order:
Primates
; Family:
Hominidae
; Genus:
Homo
; Species:
Homo sapiens
. Latin
homo
, meaning “man”; or
hem
—”the earthly one” (as in
humus
). Latin
sapiens
, meaning “wise” or “knowing.”

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists
Homo sapiens
as a species of least concern for extinction.

Lake Mattamuskeet Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina: A group of amateur birdwatchers arrive from Washington, D.C.–chubby,
middle-aged, suburbanite men and women who don't mind getting up at the crack of dawn. Necks hung with binoculars, eyes and faces lifted to the sky, they are escorted around the lake every day for a week. Their guide is an awkward, chapped-lipped young man who does this only because it earns a living and allows him to be outdoors with the birds. Obviously, he keeps a life list, glued to the back cover of his Peterson's. He passes it around, evidence of his obsession, a collection, he explains, that doesn't require ownership. It's migration season and he encourages the group to expand their own lists with open ears and acute attention to the smallest quiver under a leaf. The warblers alone, in alphabetical order: American redstart, black-and-white warbler, blackpoll warbler, black-throated green warbler, Canada warbler, common yellowthroat, hooded warbler, Nashville warbler, northern parula, northern waterthrush, orange-crowned warbler, oven-bird, palm warbler, pine warbler, prairie warbler, prothonotary warbler, yellow-breasted chat, yellow-rumped warbler, yellow-throated warbler. This kind of diversity can't be found everywhere. Still, about half of the group sees this tour around the lake as a social occasion, lagging back, chattering.

Was he irritated when a cough startled a black-throated blue lighting briefly on its way down the Atlantic Flyway to South America? When a twig snapped under a dull boot? When one of the women tossed her string-cheese wrapper into the grass? Humans are heavy, loud, dense, and preoccupied. Their bodies obvious, oblivious, obstructing. He loves the mystery of a 55,000-acre swamp next to the sea that reveals only a little of itself at a time. He prefers solitude, the dank canvas of a bird blind muting his own rude shape, its gross movements and sounds. He tries to breathe noiselessly.

Be there no human here              
be there here the flat marsh         
before man, be there here           

those bony wings.                     
(“Window Views,” Laura Jensen)

Every night I dream of flying. My arms pump laboriously; I rise six or seven feet above the pursuant tiger, bear, serpent. Something is always chasing me. There's no safe place on the compound, though I lurch from barn to garage to precarious rooster-cupola. Sometimes I make it as far as the upper canopy of sycamores, catching my breath till the predator appears, thumping on the ground below. The sky is an unreal indigo. My clothes weigh me down, as if I were swimming through Karo syrup. Of the many styles of dream flying, I always revert to the breaststroke, using my hands for guidance at the beginning of each backward pull. Fatigue is a serious limitation.

Oh, to be like my husband, waking each morning dazzled, his dream flight a green-glass liberation. He describes a pin, or Superman-style: horizontal, arms straight before him, hips tilting slightly to steer. The worst he can remember is flying too high, beyond the sound of human voice, siren, even explosion. Ice crystals formed on his fingertips and eyelashes. His lips cracked and burned. Finally, he executed a midair reverse flip, which got him going in the right direction.

Flying dreams are related to the vestibular system, which regulates body equilibrium. I read this somewhere. Also, that sleep clinics have actually induced these dreams by manipulating
the sleeper's sense of balance: applying a blood-pressure cuff, rocking in a hammock, raising and lowering the bed.

But why is it so hard to get off the ground? Maybe I'm just exhausted, still processing some unsettling news from my sister. Or perhaps my marrow-stuffed bones are just too heavy, even in my imagination. Real bird bones are filled with air. Birds have no teeth, another adaptation that makes them lighter.

I often dream my own teeth are crumbling and falling to my hands. But it doesn't make flying any easier for me.

A mist net is black, made of nylon, and resembles an extremely fine volleyball net. Ornithologists stretch them across thickets, deep in forests, and along shorelines in darkness or nearly moonless nights to capture birds in flight. They are almost invisible. Hitting a mist net, most birds tumble into a pocket of mesh, which quickly folds around them. They will suffer from wind, rain, and possibly predation if left for long periods of time, so it's vital that nets are checked often. Each bird tangled in mesh presents a unique challenge in extraction. We run the risk of strangling them—though there is no soft spot in the bird's trachea that can collapse (as in mammals), overconstriction of the entire body during restraint can cause oxygen deprivation. If we are worried the bird will escape, or frustrated at the snarl of fine threads around a wing, we might apply unnecessary force. If the bird struggles too much, the tangles inevitably worsen. Practice, extra care, patience, and common sense are needed to free a bird. In worst-case scenarios, we can always grab a pocketknife or pair of scissors.

Avoiding the risks of mist nets altogether, pull traps, drop
traps, and walk-in traps are also available to capture ground-feeding species.

Now a mourning dove waddles into a walk-in, lured by a heap of sunflower seeds and millet, and catches the wire mechanism. The trap snaps shut, and I approach cautiously so as not to further fluster the bird. It will hurl itself against the wire mesh relentlessly in the effort to escape, tearing tissue, feathers. I slide up the door, spread the left hand over the opening, then reach into the cage to embrace the dove with the right, grasping the body without squeezing, careful to envelop each wing, its head nestled gently between index and middle fingers. I pass the dove through the rubber flaps of a keeping cage and carry the cage inside, where an assistant removes and holds the bird firmly. I gently extend the leg, press a number-stamped metal ring around with a tool that prevents overlap; record in a looseleaf binder that number, date, species, gender, any unusual features; walk the bird outside myself, open my hand and …

To our surprise, the dove doesn't take flight immediately. It pauses, as though unbelieving. Shock at the sudden breeze when, before, death had a scent, sensation—salty, warm, and unyielding. Seconds pass.

No, I take back the “unbelieving,” “shock at the sudden breeze,” the impression that “death had a scent, sensation.” I think instead:
All the lives I could live, all the species I will never know, never will become—they are everywhere. That is what the world is
.

The bird flies, with an audible whistling sound.

Having all the required or desirable elements, qualities,
or characteristics; as good as it is possible to be.

Who named it perfect? Who made the declaration? Was it a swallow, nest mud-plastered to a piece of solid timber? Dried herbs sprouting a cottony mold? Rain that slides in sheets down the red tin roof? Wasps that appreciate ventilation but would never tell you so? Folding chairs in need of a stiff brush and paint? The straw, the long-dead horse, and its hocked saddle? The
what
that will take the place of rakes, dangerously rusting in a webby corner?

Soon I'll move my chair, or run inside for oranges, or fail to sleep very well, and then humidity will lay a green slime across the siding. The barn will not resist. In this the barn is no better than fence, or catalpa, or fields of medium-brown wheat.

But for now, the barn has perfect siding the color of coffee grounds flecked with salt and a long gray wind-stroking. The door doesn't fit and I love it so, love the shoulder lift I must perform in freeing it from its lock. I'm a little frightened of tetanus
but the bottom gap that brushes grass and hedgebrook sets forth a minty smell. The tractor on blocks, the barn's ambling house-shape with hexagonal door frames. Above, parabolas of bird-hunger chasing mosquitoes. There's an easy reason for the barn's abandonment. I love holding that reason back.

Woman Drawn Twice

 

Laura, elder daughter of two, driver of a Toyota as old as she is, occupant of the attic room, is going off to college. My friends are all sympathetic. I must be a bad parent because this imminent separation doesn't strike me as tragic.

What's made it easier is Laura herself. She holds the world at arm's length. Even as a baby, Laura would allow only her father and me to touch her. Uncles and aunts, forget it. Her very first sentence was, as I tried to pry loose the flap from her diaper, “Don't do that!”

Once we went camping and she brought her friend Rita along. For three days they were inseparable, sunbathing together on the rocks, hiking into town for sliders and French fries. Then suddenly Laura had enough social bonding. She began to sleep in, to disappear on mysterious after-dinner strolls. I took my tea to the edge of the creek one morning, and there was poor Rita, splashing about in a canoe, forlorn and abandoned.

Laura keeps a journal, leaves it on the coffee table or on the bathroom floor. Perhaps to lure us inside, perhaps not. But we don't look. She also has a web page and there with a click
of a button we are welcomed in, browsers like anyone else. It doesn't feel like trespassing, but the voice we hear is not meant for her parents:

Hello beautiful this is Laura the 16 year old illegal permit driving, Manual High School attending, singing, dancing, romancing Ramsi's employee. I read, write, and wish everyday that precalculus didn't exist. I'm out every weekend, sorry to you silly fools that get online 24/7 no I don't want to be your friend. Why do people love those bland, uninteresting talentless “artists” they see on television? That was cynical … and no im not a lesbian. Im going to NYU to be an English professor of creative writing with three novels, a wealthy, but interesting husband im in love with and a kid or two in my spare time. You have a problem with it you can call my super expensive top of the line lawyer, wherever she is.