Garth Robinson
Last year, when we were hiking in the Dolly Sods Wilderness in West Virginia, Marta started using an app called Merlin. The app is simple; it listens to bird songs and bird calls, and then it tells you which birds are likely to be making these noises. As it listens, the app charts the sounds on a spectrogram using dashes and arcs, and when it identifies a bird, the name of the bird appears in bright yellow. This is very satisfying. After dinner, Marta and I sat at the edge of a long, dry meadow. The app pinged and flashed magically in our hands, as if filled up with sparks. By the time we went to sleep, I could identify a cedar waxwing, a golden-crowned kinglet, and a red-eyed vireo.
I also had the sense that there was some dimension of the world that I had been ignoring. It was like I had stepped onto a stool and suddenly discovered a new, cleaner layer of air.
When I was a child, my parents did a good job instilling in me and my sisters a love of nature. We walked to the frog pond when we heard that a rare duck, blown in from some outer tropic, had ended up there. When we saw great blue herons or hawks, we pointed. My mother kept a birdfeeder in the front yard, although I thought of the birds that visited there as unspecial and basically anonymous.
Once, at the Baltimore airport, a shuttle driver told me that a goose had recently flown through the front windshield of his bus. When his supervisors heard about this, they asked if he needed to take some time off. “Time off?” he responded. “For hitting a goose?”
This was the kind of unusual situation that made me think about birds. After I started using Merlin, I began to think about birds all the time.
***
Marta and I had a small backyard that we shared with the other people in our apartment building. We thought the place too hopeless for a garden. Most of the other residents were college students, and they liked to smoke as many cigarettes as they could and leave the butts in flower pots and ceramic bowls, which would then fill up with rainwater. But I started to have the feeling, which I think is common in new birders, that even this fairly ugly place was full of remarkable dramas and eccentricities.
Each morning, sparrows crossed the fence from picket to picket and played their various flutes. Often, they were joined by Carolina wrens, who sang such vast repertoires that they began to seem worldly and sophisticated to me. I watched as nuthatches walked recklessly down trees, headfirst, and later I found out they have a special toe that points backwards and allows them to maneuver wherever they’d like. During the summer, I looked forward to seeing the chimney swifts each night, the way they tumbled and wrestled the air, like children let out to play after dinner. Months later, after the other birds had quieted, the robins kept on talking in long rivers of chitchat and gossip. They were so loud and insistent that I began to find them very unpleasant.
Because I had previously felt nothing at all about them, this made me feel like we suddenly had a relationship, which I suspect is only ever two or three steps removed from love.
It was a great thrill when other birds visited the yard. I had noticed in Merlin that brown-headed cowbirds were common in the area, but I had never seen one. When I heard a cowbird in the yard one morning, I felt a huge sense of relief, as if a very late guest had finally turned up at a party.
Another morning, just before dawn, Marta woke me up. She did this very gently, simply by leaning over me. I woke in the falls of her hair.
“There’s an owl outside,” she said. “If you’re quiet, you’ll hear it.”
We lay there together and listened. I felt a strange mixture of excitement and fear, of estrangement and proximity, and it was the same as if Marta had told me that the ghost of my great-great-grandfather was hanging over our bed.
The owl cooed, and the noise seemed to cling to the room.
***
As I used Merlin and began to recognize more of the birds around me, my presence in the world came to seem thicker and more substantial. The sound of a bird could reach out and grab my attention, regardless of what I was doing. One of the characters in Anne Carson’s book Red Doc says that reading Proust each morning was like having “an extra unconscious.” This is how I felt about birding. It gave me a new way of existing in the world, one that made me feel secure and cared-for, just as a boat must feel when its lines are tied safe to shore.
I was also filled up with wonder. Seeing a bird is an amazing, disorienting thing, because it seems so perfect and also so out of place. It is like looking at an enormous tapestry, some masterpiece of Renaissance art, and noticing a crazy, flyaway thread.
***
A few years ago, I started teaching high school English. Because I am relatively new at the job and can’t think of a more subtle way to do this, I like to loudly announce to my students when we arrive at my favorite passage in a book. I tend to most like the sections with animals. I read aloud the scene in Romeo and Juliet where Romeo expresses jealousy towards carrion-flies, because they get to stay behind in Verona and kiss Juliet’s hands. When we read The Odyssey, I told them the best part by far is when Argos, after twenty years, recognizes the disguised Odysseus. The old dog puts his ears back, wags his tail, and then dies from the weight of love returned.
Recently, we read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. My favorite part is when the Creation describes learning to love nature. “I began also to observe, with greater accuracy, the forms that surrounded me and to perceive the boundaries of the radiant roof of light which canopied me,” the Creation says. “Sometimes I tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds but was unable. Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.”
The Creation is an eight- or nine-foot child who, abandoned at birth, has now wandered away into the woods. Of course it is the birds that he first notices and seeks to imitate. Above him they turn the heavens into a complicated spectrogram. I imagine that, if I had woken to this life as the Creation does, then I would’ve believed that birds were perhaps little gods.
I wanted very badly for my students to feel the innocence and impossible goodness of this scene. When they pictured the Creation scaring himself with the sound of his own voice, I also wanted them to feel that the scene was pathetic and almost uncomfortably tender.
But my students knew me too well. On warm days, they often tried to get out of class by suggesting that we go birding. When we discussed the scene, one of them told me, “Mr. Robinson, you only like this part because it’s about birds.”
It is true that one of the many small joys of Frankenstein consists of watching the Creation become a sort of amateur birder. Throughout the book, only the Creation pays attention to birds. As his vision of the world becomes fuller, he observes more of their intricacies and particularities. He notices that birds sing more cheerfully in spring, and he learns to differentiate their songs from one another. He loves the voices of the blackbird and the thrush. Because the sparrows know “none but harsh notes,” he begins to dislike them.
Like me, and like all birders, the Creation develops favorites. In this way he creates his own self, his own opinions and preferences and loyalties. This is the thing that makes him a person in the world.
And isn’t Frankenstein’s Creation the perfect baby boy? He is sweet and intelligent, curious, appalled already by vice and by evil. He’s a vegetarian, subsisting on nothing but berries and acorns. Mostly, he is in love forever with the good, green earth. Later on, the Creation will be beaten, shot, abused, exposed to every humiliation and injustice, and he will respond with hatred and unforgivable violence. At the end of the novel, after enduring and inflicting all this pain, the Creation decides to burn himself on a funeral pyre. In his last few sentences, he thinks back to his first days of life and recalls the warmth of summer and the warbling of birds. Back then, the Creation says, “I should have wept to die.”
In other words, the Creation is saying goodbye to something he once found beautiful and suffused with meaning. He is cutting the lines that lashed him to this life, burning up the self who was once so new and naked that all he loved were birds.
***
A month ago, Marta and I visited her parents in Central Virginia. It was early April, and the redbuds had come out. All the other trees wanted to bloom so badly that you could feel them buzzing.
One evening, just before dark, we walked along the lake together. In the summers, we could see kingfishers and bald eagles here. But now it was very quiet and still, the light so gray that it seemed to be coming apart. I opened Merlin, hoping it might hear something I couldn’t, but the spectrogram rolled on and on without picking up anything besides our breath and the water lapping against itself.
At the end of the lake, in a kind of cove with overgrown bushes and braid-like tangles hanging from all the trees, we heard a very low, occasional blip. I started Merlin again, and we tried to become somehow more silent. A few seconds later, the app told us that we were hearing a Louisiana waterthrush. Later, when we arrive back in the kitchen, Marta’s mother will be excited to hear this. “Oh, they’re early this year,” she will say.
Marta and I stood on the other side of the thicket, bending our heads in various angles and directions to try to see the bird. Through the trees, the lake gave off its final glimmers. Another waterthrush called out from the other side of the cove, and the first said something soft in reply. The Creation passes a whole year inside the hovel of a peasant family, watching and listening through a space in the slats as they talk and sing and eat together, as they work, as they read to one another. The Creation decides that nothing could be more meaningful than to join this family. “The more I saw of them, the greater became my desire to claim their protection and kindness,” he says. “My heart yearned to be known and loved by these amiable creatures.”
Across the water the thrushes kept calling to one another, always and stubbornly out of sight. I had the sense that these creatures were hidden in the darkness—like stars, like pinheads of light and magnetism—and that they were watching us, that they were looking out and into me.
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Garth Robinson lives along the Chesapeake Bay and holds an MFA from Hollins University. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, Your Impossible Voice, Iron Horse Literary Review, Kestrel and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction.