The Snow Geese (15 page)

‘There’s a group of them in the open water at the south end of the lake,’ Michael said. ‘Maybe forty thousand geese. If you park at Columbia Dam and creep through the phrags you might be able to get right up close to them.’

I drove to the dam and parked the Topaz behind a stand of elms. I walked through bromegrass towards the phrags. I could hear snow geese on the far side of the rushes, a low drone, ornamented by the grace notes of individual birds. The bright, straw-yellow phrags were seven or eight feet tall; each one had a feathery seedhead that brandished more than its fair share of sunlight. I stepped carefully through the rushes, trying not to make a sound, knowing that snow geese startle easily. The phrags thinned out, and I saw the geese, about twenty yards away. There were both blue-phase and white-phase snows, and a few of the smaller Ross’s geese, which have the same plumage as white-phase snows, but shorter necks, and stubby, triangular bills. A few ducks, mallard and scaup, floated among the geese.

I crept forward through the phrags, as close as I dared. The seedheads glowed above me: it was a thicket of light. I didn’t want to disturb the snow geese. Some of them had their necks up; they were just drifting, looking around. Others were sleeping, their necks turned and tucked down between folded wings, resting in the cradle of the back, as if the goose were both the nest and the bird inside it. Pairs and threesomes took off from the water; others came down to join the flock. The seedheads of the phrags quavered and sighed when wind blew across them. I stood still, watching the birds. Then I retraced my steps through the rushes and bromegrass to the stand of elms, hearing the chatter of the geese going on behind me. I got into the Topaz and drove back to Aberdeen.

*

S
OME AFTERNOONS
I’d drive back to Aberdeen and sit reading or writing in Dally’s Dining Lounge on Logan Street. Dally’s was glass-fronted: the word
Dally’s
was engraved on the streetside glass in an ornate, slanting script. Customers took one step up from the street into a glass porch, then pushed open a glass door, surprisingly heavy, most people putting their shoulders to it. Inside were red leatherette booths, sprung like mattresses; a long counter with a row of stools; four slow-turning wooden ceiling fans; and, on the walls, black and white photographs of Aberdeen before the war: stanchioned streetlamps; men wearing cloth hats and coveralls; imposing, civic-minded clocks. Behind the counter was a cold cabinet of cheesecakes and deep-dish blueberry, pecan, cherry, lemon meringue and rhubarb pies, with tilted mirrors allowing patrons a bird’s-eye view of the pies. There was a stainless steel Bunn-O-Matic coffee urn; a Silver King Imperial milk dispenser with a sticker on the front saying,
A Sign of Class . . . Milk in a Glass
; and platters of muffins and cinnamon rolls under scuffed Perspex domes.

The waitresses, Misti and Crystal, were in their twenties. They wore green-and-white-striped work frocks. Crystal had black hair furled in a bun at the crown; Misti’s bleached-blonde curls tumbled off the escarpments of her shoulder-pads. They passed orders through a hatch to an invisible chef, and drank the dregs of milkshakes straight from the blender, priests knocking back the last of the communion wine.

Dally’s closed every day at six o’clock. Misti and Crystal began to clean up at about half past five. Instead of wiping the surfaces with cloths, they pulled on pairs of wide, padded cloth mitts. The mitts lent the cleaning an intimate character. Misti cleaned the red pommels of the stools as if she were walking down a line of boys, ruffling their hair. Crystal wiped the tables with long, smooth strokes, as if she were grooming ponies. They caressed the Bunn-O-Matic with such tenderness it seemed the prelude to an embrace, and rubbed the Silver King as if a genie lived inside it. The mitts transformed the work into a ritual of solicitude that bordered on the sensual.

One afternoon, not long before mitt time, there was an almighty crash. Everyone in Dally’s looked up to see a tall man walking straight through the glass door, mistaking it for open air, falling to the floor in a debris of chips and shards. He lay motionless in the glass debris. He had grey hair, held in place by pomade. A baseball cap, dislodged by the fall, lay upturned next to his head. Misti and Crystal ran over to him. The man moved his hand. The first thing he did was reach out for the baseball cap. Then he raised his head. There was blood on his forehead. He put the cap back on: it said,
Culprit – America’s Favorite Fishing Lures
. Misti and Crystal protested when he began to heave himself to his feet. There was a chinking as bits of glass fell from his arms and shoulders.

‘Whew!’ he said. ‘That was quite an entrance!’

Misti took his elbow and led him to a booth like a blind man.

‘I think we should call an ambulance,’ she said to Crystal.

‘You don’t need to do that,’ the man said. ‘I’m OK. I’m a little shaken, but nothing’s broken. If I could just bother you for a tissue or something for this cut here.’

‘Would you like some coffee, sir?’ Crystal asked.

‘Just a glass of water, thank you,’ he said.

We all watched him closely, as though he were about to topple.

‘My apologies for this rude interruption,’ he said. ‘That was a stupid thing. A stupid thing to do. I’m sorry. Dumb as a sack of hammers. Straight through a door. Thought it was open. That was a stupid thing to do.’

‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Misti asked. ‘We could get you an ambulance.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll just sit here a moment. My, those windows are clearer than air!’

‘We shouldn’t clean them so well, right?’ said Crystal.

‘Right!’ the man said. He held a tissue to his forehead. He brought it down and saw the blood on it. He shook his head.

‘Dumb as a sack of hammers,’ he said.

Misti had fetched a broom and was sweeping up the glass around the door. Crystal had pulled the mitts back on; she was buffing the Bunn-O-Matic.

‘I ought to go home,’ the man said, standing up slowly. ‘I’m no use anywhere else! What do I owe you for the window?’

‘Don’t even think about it,’ Misti said.

‘All right then. I’m going home.’

The tongue of his belt hung loose from the buckle, lolling like a dog’s tongue. He lifted the
Culprit
cap and smoothed his hair back with two brisk sweeps. He walked out through the door, which now
was
open air, and took care on the step down to Logan Street. Misti and Crystal set to cleaning again. Lights sparkled in the metal and plastic surfaces, commending the work of the women’s hands.

*

W
INDS BLEW HARD
from the south in the first week of April. Snow geese began to leave the prairie sloughs of South Dakota, sailing north on the tailwind. I saw them from the window of Michael’s pickup as we drove west from Sand Lake on a dirt road across the Dakota Plain. The flocks were hurtling: earlier, driving north, Michael had seen geese flying above him, outracing the car.

‘That wind’s so strong,’ he said. ‘The geese hitch a ride on it. It’s a free gift. They just hold out a wing and raft right into Canada.’

Globes of tumbleweed bowled across the track, northwards. On both sides, tracts of prairie were ploughed, cropped to stubble, or left as grassland. Wind blew the fine loessial topsoil from fall-tilled fields. The tilth rose in dark, north-drifting clouds like the smoke off stubble burns; dust-devils spun out of it like dervishes. Michael turned on the headlights when we entered a soil cloud.

‘He tilled that and tilled that last fall and left no cover on it,’ Michael said. ‘And that’s the most productive soil. That’s bad farming in just about every way you can think of. Sometimes you can’t believe the things people do. And that soil blowing off is probably filling the road ditch full of dirt also.’

We emerged from the cloud. Gusts came at the pickup broadside: we were heading on a beam reach, a prairie schooner; we keeled a little in the strong winds. The dirt track, rising slightly, scored an impeccable line ahead of us to the horizon. Abandoned grain elevators stood by the track, tin panels hanging from cross-braced timber frames. Prairie rolled out on all sides. Clouds raced northwards with the geese, as if to cloud breeding grounds. Sometimes, through gaps in the cloud cover, sunlight flooded the open country. Winds were starting to break up the ice on pothole lakes, driving wreckage in thick crystal flotsams against the northern banks, raising whitecaps on the water. We caught whiffs of a pungent, rotten-egg smell: hydrogen sulphide produced by vegetation rotting under the ice, suddenly released by the thaw. It was the land’s exhalation, as if the prairies had held their breath all winter. Michael took deep breaths of it, filling his lungs.

‘I love this smell,’ he said. ‘It’s a sign of spring to me. That’s why I like this smell so much. I
love
this smell.’

We crossed the Elm River. We passed the Leola Country Club, where a few incongruous dark green cedars betrayed the landscaping of a golf course.

‘Leola’s the Rhubarb Capital of the World,’ Michael said. ‘They have a three-day rhubarb festival here each June. You can get rhubarb fixed in more ways than you can imagine. There are a lot of abandoned farmsteads out here, and the only sign anyone was ever living there are rhubarb plants which just keep on growing.’

Between Leola and Eureka we passed a hill: a prairie knob. On the side of the hill, white rocks had been arranged in the letters LHS, which stood for Leola High School.

‘Next week,’ Michael said, ‘it’ll be EHS, for Eureka High School. Kids drive out from one town or another and shift the rocks. Back and forth. They just rearrange the stones. I remember once the stones had been laid out to say BEER ME, and once they said 69 ME, which is when we thought enough’s enough, and rolled the rocks downhill. Came back a couple of days later and there they were again: LHS or EHS, the same old business.’

The prairie was less flat now, billowing like a sheet thrown out across a mattress: low, rolling grassland hills all the way to the Missouri River. Dirt plumed from the pickup’s back wheels.

‘This is the coteau,’ Michael said. ‘Beautiful country. Most of what you’re seeing are grassland easements. That’s land the government has purchased with Duck Stamp dollars and set aside from farming. Hunters have to buy Duck Stamps before they get to shoot waterfowl, and that money’s used to protect breeding and staging areas for ducks and geese. Isn’t this beautiful? This is how I imagine it used to be. No trees. Just grasslands and wetlands from the James River to the Missouri River. Prairie fires, bison and wind to stop the trees from getting a hold. If we were driving out here three hundred years ago, there’d be bison, elk, antelope, grizzlies and wolves, and no raccoons, no white-tailed deer, no red fox, no pheasants. We’ve changed it. Everything is so different. I’d love to have seen this country three hundred years ago. Used to be a lot of spotted skunk, but they’re pretty much gone. One per cent of the original tallgrass prairie’s left in the United States, but in South Dakota we’ve got six or seven per cent so we’re doing pretty well. You can’t recreate prairie. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s gone for ever once it’s ploughed.’

The coteau had stone colours in this heavy grey light: ash-white, dun, tan, fawn. In the grasslands were traces of Native American camps, spots where bands of Dakota Sioux had made temporary homes amongst the Indian grass, panic grass, switchgrass, wild rye, sprangletop, dropseed and needle-and-thread. Their tepees, like coffee mugs, had left rings.

‘The colours have bleached out over the winter,’ Michael said, ‘but in the fall I think the colours of the prairies, the golds, match any colour of woodland, even the fall shows of Vermont and the Appalachians. I’ve been over in New England when the maples are turning scarlet but I’ll take the prairies any day. Sunrise when light’s on the native grasses. The wind runs gold through the little bluestem. Isn’t this beautiful? All you can see is prairie. No trees. I love country like this.’

I looked at Michael. He was looking from the road to the open prairie on both sides, his eyes fervent behind steel-framed glasses – a man in his element, inhabiting just the life that life intended. Close to the track, on our right, one hill rose above the hillocks, a distinct prairie knob, a prominence in the low, undulating land.

‘We could stop for a moment,’ Michael said. ‘Might be nice to take a walk up there.’

He pulled over on to the shoulder of the track. He had to push hard to open his door into the wind. We put on coats and climbed barbed wire, one hand on the pommel of a fence-post. The wind ripped past our ears, gusting up to forty-five miles per hour. The grasses threshed and flailed. There was the roar of the wind in our ears, the flag-like snap and putter of our coats, the deep swishing of wind through stalks, leaves and seedheads across the coteau. We had to shout to make ourselves heard.

‘Bromegrass!’ Michael yelled, pointing at the grass around our feet. ‘Kentucky bluegrass! Little bluestem!’ I walked close to him, wanting to hear the names. He emphasised the names, pitching them against the wind. ‘Western wheatgrass! Echinacea! Leafy spurge!’

We reached the slope of the prairie knob and made for the summit, wind driving at our backs. The wind hit the slope and accelerated, racing across the summit at sixty miles per hour, its force gathered on the long sweep of the Great Plains. All around us the prairie receded, falling away on the curve of the hemisphere. The wind was part vandal, smashing the ice in marshes and sloughs, and part thief, vanishing northwards with birds in its pockets. We leaned back into it, trusting our weight to the windspeed. Michael had spread his arms out wide, for balance, like a skydiver. He was lying back at close to forty-five degrees, and he was laughing, but I couldn’t hear it: the wind filched his laughter along with the birds. Still reclining on the wind, Michael pointed skywards. I looked up. Snow geese were flying high overhead, not arranged in orderly Vs and echelons, but tumbling in loose clusters and pairs, careening on the gale, not entirely in control of their own passage.