Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir Read online

  When we arrived home from our trip to BC, Yeats started writing down the birds he saw on his walks around the city. He walked to and from home, across the Don Valley and through Riverdale Farm, stopping to look for birds. He kept the lists simple at first — just a notebook with the date on each page.

  March 30: house finch, dark-eyed junco, black-capped chickadee, American robin, blue jay.

  If it were me, I would have written finch, junco, chickadee, robin: the opening descriptor would have gone by the wayside in the name of convenience. But for Yeats, that wasn’t accurate enough. There were too many kinds of chickadees and juncos to take such a cavalier attitude towards the lists. Eventually, he developed shortcuts: A. robin, for example, or A. crow.

  After a while, too, he stopped writing down the five birds he saw every day no matter what: house sparrow, European starling, rock dove (pigeon to most of us), ring-billed gull, and American robin. They became the assumed birds.

  Yeats reminded me of my mom’s father, the geologist, who we called Bop. Bop made lists and charts and kept meticulous accounts of the world around him. He had an air of being grounded in time and space that Yeats carried, too. This quality is hard to define. I think it has something to do with being unhurried, and connected to the rhythms of the natural world.

  Every once in a while Yeats would say, “Okay, Mom. Let’s name all the birds we’ve ever seen.” And he’d take out a piece of pristine white paper, his pencil, and his incredibly expectant look. I’d try really hard not to sigh and roll my eyes. Still, I was happy to encourage the birding after that successful trip to Tofino. I never once thought to myself, Here is a good mother-son hobby; it just naturally evolved into something that we did together. We developed our birding habits, our way of walking slowly through the forest, Yeats going first to set the pace. We didn’t talk much — either in the car, where we listened to our favourite music, or in the field — and this companionable silence was part of what I loved about our trips.

  BEN DID MANAGE TO take more holidays later that summer, August of 2008, when the stock market crashed. Economics has never been my strong point, but even I could tell this stock market problem was worse than the usual August downturn. Laurie’s husband, Andy, gave us all a little lesson in bundled mortgages which I promptly forgot, and the daily paper was full of dire predictions for Canada and the world. People in the U.S. were losing their homes and giant brokerage houses were going under. It wouldn’t be long before people on Bay Street started losing their jobs, something that would slow our fledgling business right down.

  Ben lay on a lounger on the cottage deck and read books, a book a day for the most part. He was famous for this. Once, when Lauren was three years old, she came around the corner of the deck to find her uncle reclining on the chaise with a book.

  She spread her arms and said, “But why are you always lying there reading?”

  He looked at her and replied, “But why are you always dressed in pink?” Some things just can’t be questioned.

  While Ben read his books, Yeats and I went to Wye Marsh for the first time. An old friend of my mother’s had told us it was a great place to see birds. We ended up going there every summer, sometimes more than once.

  Of all the places we went regularly to bird-watch, it was my favourite. At least once every trip, I’d stand on a little bridge over a stream and say, “I love it here.” Yeats had the presence of mind not to say anything, and I’d follow as he stepped quietly off the bridge and back into the forest or out onto the marsh again.

  The Wye Marsh Wildlife Centre inhabits 3,000 acres of land just outside Midland, Ontario. It’s wetland, fen, and forest, operated as a non-profit society but in association with various environmental protection groups. They have an interpretive and education centre, boardwalks, an observation tower, canoe and kayak tours, bee-keeping, and a trumpeter swan restoration program.

  That first visit, we drove down from the cottage early in the morning, and we were out on the boardwalk before the place officially opened for the day. We were alone in the marsh. Alone — except for thousands of creatures and countless cattails and a wisp of a wind blowing sweet, marshy smells over everything.

  The marsh is a flat, grassy place. When the wind blew and we stopped to listen, we heard a soft whooshing as thousands of blades of grass rubbed gently against each other. And we smelled that incredible sweetness of fresh grass mixed with all the other things growing in the marsh — flowers, lily pads, the forest behind us.

  We saw a lot of birds at the marsh. We were certain to see most of our old familiars: red-winged blackbird, great blue heron, black-capped chickadee, common yellowthroat. Seeing these birds over and over cannot be considered a waste of birdwatching time. Watching an American robin hopping down a path ahead of us was always a pleasure, and I never tired of seeing the yellowthroat, with its black eye mask, perching sideways on a reed and singing witch-i-ty, witch-i-ty, witch-i-ty, witch. Every bird at the marsh filled us with a little light. I wondered if I was just so simple that this was all it took. But then I thought, I’m lucky that this is all it takes, and knew that I was especially lucky that this was all it took for my teenaged son, too.

  On one of the long, grassy pathways we saw a brown thrasher, a bird I remembered being described in one of our books as “a large, skulking bird of thickets and hedgerows.” We actually saw it in a hedgerow and it was skulking, making a positive identification difficult at first. We had to skulk along, too, bent over and sticking our necks out to see it from the path, trying not to scare it away. Brown thrashers are about the size of robins but have reddish-brown backs and white breasts heavily streaked with dark brown. They aggressively defend their nests and have been known to attack people and dogs forcefully enough to cause injury. It seems thrashers were well named, unlike those oystercatchers in BC.

  We continued to the end of the pathway to a lookout shelter where we found a nest of young barn swallows. The parents were taking turns feeding the babies, flying out onto the marsh and then swooping back under the eaves of the shelter to fill the four open mouths. We sat for ages, mesmerized by these beautiful birds and their young.

  I stood up and looked out from the shelter into the marsh, into acres of gently waving reeds and grasses. It was a scene that would never fail to fill me with tranquility, no matter how often I returned to it. Dragonflies, damselflies, butterflies: they all came to check me out. I especially liked the black-bodied damselfly, with its neon-green wings. I was looking through my binoculars, seeing nothing except the horizon, when a bird flew past.

  “Yeats! A tern!” My favourite seabird. This one was a Caspian tern, the biggest tern in the world. I wasn’t sure what it was doing there; maybe this one had decided to breed at the marsh. Maybe it had simply flown in for the day from Georgian Bay. It was a beauty, though, and we watched it fly away over the grasses.

  We walked back along the pathways and over the boardwalk that crosses the marsh, paying a visit to the little pond that houses the swans.

  Wye Marsh started their trumpeter swan breeding program in 1989. In 1990, the first cygnet was born in captivity, and in 1993, this youngster and her mate were the first nesting wild trumpeter swans in Ontario in two hundred years. Since then, they have successfully bred year in and year out. While they are free to fly away and breed elsewhere, they often return to the marsh, where they have an enclosed area safe from predators such as foxes and dogs.

  Trumpeter swans are the largest North American swan, with a wingspan that can exceed two metres. The adult has a black bill, which helps to distinguish it from the mute swan, whose bill is orange. The mute swan is an introduced species, from Europe, and is not mute at all. It is even rarer than the trumpeter swan, but is usually found in ponds and bays near people, so is more commonly seen by us.

  We studied the four swans in the enclosed pond, trying to see their numbered tags. We had a vague plan to visit the Scarborough Bluffs or the Toronto Islands in winter to see if the swans there were
the same ones at the marsh. It wasn’t often you could say, “Hey, that’s the exact same bird we saw last summer at the marsh!”

  While Yeats memorized their numbers I looked for other birds. There were plenty of them, a bounty of red-winged blackbirds and song sparrows, American goldfinches and robins. I saw something land at the top of the fence and then quickly disappear into the bushes. Something grey and nearly as large as a robin. I described it to Yeats, who said, “grey catbird” My first grey catbird, so named for its mewling call.

  We stood for a long time looking into the enclosed pond. We were on a covered dock, sheltered from wind and sun. It was a little like looking out at a diorama. We saw painted turtles on logs, frogs swimming between lily pads, catbirds flying from tree to tree, and these giant white swans swimming gracefully and nudging one another’s necks.

  All these common yellowthroats clinging sideways to the sky. All these swooping barn swallows. We sat on a bench along one of the walkways and waited some more. This was one of those scenes most of my friends couldn’t envision: a teenaged boy sitting on a bench in a marsh with his mother, waiting for birds to come, no coercion involved.

  We spoke very little. We raised our binoculars now and again, or drank from our water bottles. There were butterflies and frogs and crickets singing in the grass. We had nowhere to go and nothing to do. It was perfect.

  FIVE

  IN THE FALL OF 2008 we celebrated the bookstore’s one-year anniversary by taking the staff out to dinner, all ten of us including our four children. Ben delivered a speech thanking everyone and we raised a toast to a fine first year. But it was a difficult time to be a small-business owner, to say nothing of trying to sell books. The markets had crashed, companies were shedding staff, the Canadian dollar was riding high. The media was full of stories of people living beyond their means, living on credit and deeply in debt. It was a fearful time and we weren’t immune, as far as the business went. Everyone was looking for a deal, but we couldn’t discount our books the way the big-box retailers could. (They couldn’t, either, as it turned out. Actual books became a fraction, maybe as little as a quarter, of these giant shops’ stock.) Nor could we compete with online retailers who offered books at a huge discount and delivered them to your house the next day, though we were happy to deliver, for free, in the downtown core.

  As bleak as the outlook seemed for bookstores, with e-readers and other media joining the online shops in competing for people’s time and money, Ben was optimistic.

  “People have been predicting the demise of books since the advent of television, since before that,” he said. “It hasn’t happened yet and it won’t happen this time, either.”

  He figured if we could get through this — an economic recession just a year after we opened in the heart of the financial district — we’d survive anything.

  The first display I made in September was right in the entrance of the shop: a lovely selection of books about Zen and other forms of Buddhism. People were coming in for solace, looking for a sanctuary from the bad news out there, and I figured some of them needed to remember to breathe. We sold quite a few books from that display.

  The biggest change for the family, however, was that Danielle went off to university. She was living in residence at King’s College at the University of Western Ontario. This was in London, just down the 401, but it seemed like the other side of the country. Yeats missed her every single day. Danielle was Yeats’s closest confidante, the person he could trust above all others with whatever he was thinking and dreaming, and now she’d committed herself to life in London for four years.

  We missed her, too. She took the bus home for the occasional weekend, but everyone wanted a part of her — us, her mother, all her girlfriends — and we had to be content with a quick meal. She and Yeats spent dinner together comparing notes on Jarvis teachers. They talked about Yeats’s new English teacher, Mr. Dewees. Yeats said Mr. Dewees was the first teacher who’d inspired him to want to work hard and to do well.

  I asked him how this teacher differed from the others and he shrugged and said, “He just cares so much. He loves what he’s doing. He makes it fun, but he expects a lot from us.”

  Danielle nodded and said, “He was like that for me, too. I took that Classics course not because I wanted to read those books, but because people told me he was an amazing teacher. He was. I never really expected to be so turned on by The Odyssey. I tried really hard in that course.”

  Yeats also talked about his art teacher, Mr. Simpson, who ran a creative, fun classroom. Yeats spent extra hours in the art room, learning how to stack the firing kiln and helping Mr. Simpson with displays and clean-up.

  Yeats had never been into the party scene and that didn’t change in high school. He didn’t need to have something to do with friends on Friday and Saturday nights. The time spent in the art room, along with the poetry club, seemed to fill his social requirements, for the time being at least.

  Showing my maternal concern I’d say, “Yeats, why don’t you call one of your friends? Go to a movie or something. Have them over.”

  “Why would I do that? I get enough of them at school. Besides, all the movies my friends want to see are too violent or dumb.”

  “Maybe you could choose the movie. Maybe it would be fun to hang out with your friends. Go to a café in Kensington.”

  “I’m fine, Mom. You don’t have to worry.”

  I should have known how he felt, loving solitude as I did, but in my teenaged years I was very social. I worried about my boy.

  Titus and Rupert were living together in an apartment a bit east of us and since Rupert worked in the store, Ben and I saw him frequently. But Yeats was on a different schedule. Sometimes he came down to the store after school and read in the office or re-shelved the travel books, which always seemed to get out of order. He and Rupert would have a visit and sometimes they went off together to sell books at an event. Or maybe Yeats went off with Ben to sell books, or maybe he came home with me and we ate dinner and watched an old movie.

  I had taken to renting Cary Grant movies, which we watched on the desktop computer on our third floor. And nearly every Friday night that fall, Ben joined us to watch something old and, hopefully, amusing. One night I rented The Sound of Music, which neither of them had ever seen. It seemed incredible to me that Ben could be fifty-nine years old and never have watched this classic movie. He spent the entire time trying hard not to mock it. A couple of times he said, “This is so cheesy . . . .” then caught the expression on my face. He and Yeats exchanged about a thousand looks while I was happily reliving my childhood, when my family used to watch it every year on TV.

  Despite these Friday movie nights, it was a struggle for us to spend time together as a family. We had dinner with all the boys, and Danielle if she was around, whenever we could, usually once or twice a month on a Sunday night. Ben would make a big pot of vegetable soup or cauliflower curry and we’d have leftovers the next day, although usually it would be just me eating the leftovers. Ben would be out selling books somewhere around town.

  Grade 10 seemed to be suiting Yeats better. I felt that between Mr. Dewees and all the time Yeats spent in the art room, he was finding some kind of balance. His perennial dislike of the system was being tempered by a respect for individual teachers. But I knew that Yeats missed seeing Danielle and her friends every day at school. He consoled himself by walking home and listening to music in his bedroom.

  WINTER IN TORONTO WAS a good time to see ducks. We chose a sunny Saturday in January and took the ferry over to Ward’s Island, which is the easternmost part of Centre Island. This is the largest island in the chain that forms the Toronto Islands and helps to create the city’s harbour. The boat carved a path through the loose ice and when I stood on the rear deck, I watched the ice close up behind us. The farther away we were from the city, the more it looked like we wouldn’t be able to get back. The path was gone.

  On the north side of the island we saw buffleheads
and long-tailed ducks swimming in the harbour. We saw the ubiquitous black-capped chickadee on small trees near the ferry dock, but we didn’t linger long. We crossed over, past a few island homes, towards the south side. There was no one about. Yeats had never been to this part of the Toronto Islands and was immediately charmed.

  “People live here? In these little houses?” he said.

  The houses were small and rustic-looking. They had wind-chimes and bird feeders and looked like my idea of West Coast hippie life, an idyll from my youth when I hung out in Kitsilano and went to that music festival every summer. But I worried the comparison was simplistic and silly, and didn’t share it with Yeats.

  He said, “Are there kids living here? Where do they go to school?”

  “There’s that island school, at the west side. The one your class went to when you were in Grade 5.”

  Children living on the island go to the Island Public/Natural Science School, which was first established as a school in 1888. Children who live in the lakeside condos on the mainland join island dwellers every day for school, taking the ferry to and fro. And Yeats’s class had joined them, too, for three days when he was ten. “Remember?” I asked him.

  “Oh, yeah. It must be at the other end of the island. Maybe we’ll get there today.”

  Before we knew it we were on the south side of the island, walking down to a sandy beach. The beach was covered with shattered ice shifting around in small waves. The sound was like a million ice shards tinkling in a huge glass bowl. I could have listened to it all day, but Yeats spotted something through his binoculars and wanted to see what it was.

  A boardwalk runs along the south shore of Ward’s Island, and from there we ended up seeing many species of duck. Most of them were out on the water, not close to shore. They were in large flocks, riding the freezing waves of Lake Ontario. We saw white-winged scoters, buffleheads, long-tailed ducks, female common mergansers, female red-breasted mergansers, common goldeneyes, redheads. When we moved in closer to shore we saw mallards and gadwalls.