The Curse of the Labrador Duck (33 page)

A sign on the building at 317 E. Church Street indicated that it houses Elmira’s police department, its city courts, and the city offices. When I asked for the mayor’s office, a police officer gave me a slightly disgusted look, and said, “Upstairs.” Odd sort of behavior for a civil servant. On the second floor, I found a uniformed guard and asked where I would find the mayor’s office.

“Well, it’s upstairs, but I don’t think he’s there.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “My appointment isn’t until two o’clock.”

“Yeah? Well, that may be, but I don’t think he’s coming back. He resigned this morning.” I responded with a slack jaw. “Yup,” he continued. “About three hours ago.”

Good God. How little did this guy want to speak to me that he was willing to quit his job? All right—I’ll bite. “Why?” It seems that the mayor had sought to top off his salary with a second job. Unfortunately, this new non-major job would put him into a potential conflict of interest situation over the dispensation of funds. The only sensible option, apparently, was to toss in his job as mayor. And to stand me up.

I walked up to the third floor anyway, if only because I suddenly found myself a bit shell-shocked and without anything else to do for an hour. Coming down the stairs was a friendly, if harried, looking gentleman with his arms full of paperwork. He was sporting a very worn yellow baseball cap and a turquoise sweater with the sleeves pushed up. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked. I explained about my appointment with the mayor and my long journey to keep it.

Terry McLaughlin deserves extra credit as a good and decent human being. As Deputy Mayor of the City of Elmira, he had probably been up to his armpits in messy meetings and interviews since sunrise. He could easily have said, “Look, we’re having a kind of rough day here, so if you don’t mind, I’m going home.” He didn’t. Instead, he invited me to join him in his office for a chat about Elmira and dead ducks. McLaughlin sat behind his desk and offered me the facing chair. He explained that he had served the people of Elmira for ten years as Councilman and eight years as Deputy Mayor. I got
down to asking him the questions that I had prepared for Mayor Hughes.

I got the expected answer when I asked if McLaughlin had heard of the Labrador Duck. “But I do have two Labrador retrievers!” He got half marks for that answer. Asked if hunting was popular in the area, he said that people hunted white-tail deer and black bear, and that fishing was very big, with special emphasis on trout, bass, walleye, and tiger muskies. Terry was particularly fond of hunting in the Adirondacks, where he “shoots black powder.” Probably a lot safer than trying to shoot bears.

I asked what the citizens of Elmira were most proud of. He thought for a minute, and offered up, “A small-city atmosphere, with a connection to the past.” The streets of Elmira are safe, and the people very neighborly. The winters are generally mild, the surrounding hills beautiful, and there are plenty of recreational opportunities. You can still buy a four-bedroom house in Elmira for under $80,000. Whatever might be said about Elmira, McLaughlin claimed that “no challenge is too large that we cannot overcome it,” which seems just about the right attitude for a politician.

McLaughlin gave me an impressively long list of famous Elmira alumni, which included, not surprisingly, Mark Twain, described as “a big tourist gig.” I heard about Ernie Davis, who in 1961 was the first black athlete to win the Heisman Trophy. Hal Roach, director of the Laurel and Hardy films, was an Elmiran, as were fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger, and John W. Jones, who was involved in the escape of 860 runaway slaves via the Underground Railroad. In 1999 Elmiran Lieutenant Eileen Collins became the first woman to command a space shuttle mission. Crystal Eastman, who helped establish the American Civil Liberties Union, was also from Elmira. What a place.

W
HEN
I
WAS
a lad, high school students in Canada were set the task of learning all of the American state capitals. More than anything, it was probably a mental exercise. After all, I have successfully navigated the last thirty years of my life without once being called on to shout out in a bar that the capital of Vermont is Montpelier, or that in North Dakota legislators flock to Bismarck. At the time, it seemed to me that a lot of American state capitals didn’t make a lot of sense.
They are often teeny places in states with a vast number of citizens. For instance, New York State has about 19 million citizens. Claiming just one-half of one percent of that population as residents, Albany somehow managed to become the state capital.

There must have been serious competition among candidates when it came time to choose each state capital. With the title comes glory. For instance, Albany can boast a major convention center, one of forty-seven campuses of the State University of New York, a new and exciting solid waste management landfill expansion project, and a truancy abatement project that has increased school attendance by 18 percent while reducing daytime juvenile crime by 13 percent. Even though it is a small community, the capital’s rich social calendar includes festivals of tulips, storytelling, dance, Iroquois art, songs, blues, food, lobster, apples, strawberry shortcake, wine, nations, Celtic, Latin, Italian, jazz, and Shaker crafts. And surely that would be enough festivity for anyone. But then you would find that Albany is also home to the New York State Museum, and the museum harbors two stuffed Labrador Ducks.

At the museum, Jane went for a stroll while I got on with my ducks. She found that downtown Albany is a pretty sleepy place. Sleepy? Oh, come on, Jane! Albany boasts no fewer than eight farmers markets and a science fiction and fantasy fan club whose members are all gay, lesbian, or bisexual. And yet Jane found that if she had wanted a sandwich, a wedding dress, meditation crystals, or a tattoo, none were available before noon. Her only option was a coffee shop in which she read a novel.

Late in 1958, Paul Hahn received a polite letter from the New York State Museum in response to his questionnaire about stuffed specimens of extinct birds. Written by E. M. Reilly Jr., the museum’s senior curator of zoology, the letter rambled on and on about the museum’s holdings of Carolina Parakeets, Eskimo Curlews, Passenger Pigeons, and Heath Hens. He explained that this bird had been collected at Cranberry Island in 1886, and that that one had been collected in north Saskatchewan in 1896. Reilly then stuck in a brief note about Labrador Ducks. He explained that the museum had a pair, but nothing was known about them. Pretty typical. Between them, they would increase my total by two.

The museum’s collection of birds isn’t huge, and the Labrador Ducks are among its very best items. But even the ducks are exceeded in wow value by the Cohoes Mastodont, an immature male whose bones were unearthed in 1866. Radiocarbon dating showed that he had died 11,079 years earlier. In April. It was a Saturday. Not a particularly good Saturday from the perspective of the mastodont.

Joe Bopp, collections manager of birds and mammals, had been with the museum for seventeen years. He was sporting short hair and a big black beard, which I suspect he used to cover up a big bubbly smile that he couldn’t have removed with a scouring pad. He sat me down in front of my next two Labrador Ducks, an adult male and a reportedly adult female, both taxidermic mounts. As mentioned, not much is known about their provenance. They were already in the State Museum when someone got around to writing reports in the late 1840s. They are thought to have been shot somewhere around Long Island, sometime around 1840. The hen, a uniform cinnamon brown with a slightly darker back than belly, was mounted very close to her base, as though trying not to be seen. Only two of her tail feathers remained. While other specimens had brown, yellow, or red glass eyes, hers were clear glass, relieved only by the black pupils. The drake was far jauntier, looking as though he were about to be fed. His eyes were gray. In both cases, a preparator had been a little too enthusiastic with the paint pot, coloring their bills with blobs and splotches of black, mustard yellow, and gray-green. Both birds stood on simple white wooden bases; the underside of his held the words “Labrador Duck male De Rhem Coll. Presented 1850,” and hers read “already in museum 1847 鞒 Labrador Duck see State Museum Report 1848.” With these specimens behind me, the end of my quest was in sight.

B
OSTON HAD BEEN
really messing me around when it came to figuring out just how many stuffed Labrador Ducks remained. Across the Charles River, in Cambridge, the holdings of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology seemed pretty straightforward. According to Hahn’s list, Harvard had three ducks. The first was a female shot in
Nova Scotia in 1857. The second was an adult male from the collection of someone named Thayer. The third was an adult male with no details about where he came from or when. Great. But was there another Labrador Duck lurking in Boston? No such duck was listed in Hahn’s book. I had been told by very reputable authorities that no such duck existed. Forget about it. Go for lunch. Drink a beer. Hmmm. But I had come to distrust very reputable authorities in the same way that I distrusted flamenco dancers, and I wasn’t going for a beer until I had nailed this duck down.

In 1891, William Dutcher wrote an article about Labrador Ducks in the scholarly journal
The Auk
. In it he quoted Charles B. Cory, who said that the collection of the Boston Society of Natural History included an immature male Labrador Duck. Theodore Lyman had donated it to the society years before. It was thought to have been shot on the coast of New England, but no specific date or locality was available. I have already indicated that the immature male in Frankfurt had made its way from Boston via the American Museum of Natural History in New York. But a careful reading of the literature showed that the Frankfurt duck and the duck donated by Lyman were different specimens.

I live in fear that my book will land on bookshop shelves and ten minutes later someone will discover a stuffed Labrador Duck that I hadn’t known about. In order to try to avoid the embarrassment that such a discovery would produce, in the days leading up to my American expedition, I scrambled after a fourth Labrador Duck at the Boston Society of Natural History. It didn’t help that there was no such thing as the Boston Society of Natural History.

Or at least there wasn’t anymore. One hundred seventy-five years earlier, six Bostonians had the foresight to establish just such a society. For more than three decades the group promoted the collection and study of all things related to natural history, working out of temporary quarters until a permanent facility could be constructed in the Back Bay region. After World War II, the city negotiated a ninety-nine-year lease for land in the area now known as Science Park. The nice thing about ninety-nine-year leases is that no matter how badly you screw up on the original deal, you are guaranteed to be dead by the time it has to be renegotiated. Sort of like Hong Kong, I suppose.
Along the way, Boston’s natural history group had metamorphosed into the Boston Museum of Science.

Did the Boston Museum of Science have a Labrador Duck? Time was running out. In the nick of time an email message came in from curator Shana Hawrylchak. The museum did indeed have a stuffed Labrador Duck, she wrote. It was on public display, but if I wanted to examine it, she would be pleased to pull it out of its cabinet. What a sweet human being. She had brought the global tally of Labrador Ducks to fifty-five. One for each playing card in a deck, plus the jokers, plus the card of instructions for counting points in bridge.

Amtrak dropped Jane and me at Boston’s Back Bay train station, and we took a cab to Cambridge, on the north side of the river. It was too late in the day to see much of the city but early enough for some power drinking. The hotel’s shuttle bus took us to Harvard Square, which looked a lot more like a triangle than any other geometric shape. Being St. Patrick’s Day, we expected all of the good bars to be crowded and all of the bad bars to be absolutely packed. We settled into a promising-sounding placed called the John Harvard Brewing Company, designed as an English-style pub. Clearly the architect had never been to England. Or sat in a pub. Few English pubs seat 300 patrons on high stools at long raised benches. Even fewer have stained-glass windows depicting saints. I didn’t recognize all of the saints, but I did make out the late President Richard Nixon, author Ken Kesey, hockey legend Bobby Orr, and feminist Germaine Greer.

This was clearly a student hangout, and the saints were probably Harvard University alumni, or Harvard wannabes. While getting in the first round, I met a Harvard MBA student who admitted that he was likely to become filthy stinking rich. He also admitted that the place was usually this crowded, except on Fridays, when it was much worse. Pity the poor serving staff; my ears were ringing from the background noise. Jane and I started to wade through the long list of specialty beers. We had Frostbite Lager and Irish Red Ale and Demon Double Pale Ale and Brimstone Red. Jane took swigs from my glass without asking. She sneaked French fries off the plate of a neighboring patron each time he turned his head.

We spied on a nervous couple at the next table who were carefully avoiding looking at each other, like a mated pair of kittiwakes nesting
on a narrow cliff ledge. When we lost interest in them, we watched a tangle of four young ladies. The lady in a mushroom-colored coat, checking out the action at other tables, slowly disentangled herself from her trio of companions. Short brown jacket tried coming on to white sweater. White sweater seemed oblivious to the advance, and so brown jacket moved a lot closer. Long black leather jacket would be dead ten years before realizing that some of her college friends were lesbians.

When we lost interest in that group, we chatted with Dustin Hoffman and Fred Flintstone, who were seated across the table from us. They were finishing off some sort of business diploma at Harvard. “When your boss tells you you’re going on an expenses-paid trip to Cambridge, you don’t say no,” Dustin explained. They correctly guessed Jane’s accent as “somewhere in Europe.” Dustin couldn’t place my accent, but his rather tipsier friend Fred got my accent as “north of the border.” When we lost interest in them, we drank more beer.