Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir Page 9

  We talked about that, about fragility and culpability. We talked about what it meant to be bullied by the press and bullied in the on-line community. This was a horrible, visceral lesson for all of us. I called the school and talked to David Reed, Yeats’s mentor, who was an English teacher, like Mr. Dewees, and a close friend of his.

  David said he’d keep an eye on Yeats. He said he saw Yeats every week at Art Beat and I knew this would be a comfort for Yeats. Mr. Reed had a calm and unhurried manner, and the kids knew he cared for them. Yeats said Mr. Reed seemed to understand what it was like to be at high school; he was filled with empathy. David told me that the English department was in shock and I could see that my boy was in shock too. He was always complaining of being tired and I explained how exhausting grief was and that even when he was over the worst of it, every once in a while it would come crashing back. He cried and I comforted him. He didn’t do his homework and I didn’t press. He said they had an English test and everyone failed, the entire class. The teacher threw the tests out.

  In November we went in for the parent-teacher interviews and nearly every teacher talked about Mr. Dewees and the impact his death had had on the school community and on Yeats in particular. I nodded and cried quietly.

  The science teacher, on the other hand, was all business. She showed Ben and me a graph of Yeats’s marks, and I pointed to a zero and asked what happened there. She said there was an assignment that he didn’t hand in. I looked at the date and saw that it was due in mid-October. I explained to her how devastated Yeats was by Mr. Dewees’s death and she looked crushed. She made a note in her book to take that zero off his record.

  YEATS WENT BIRDWATCHING ON his own. This was the start of his letting go of me, and as sad as I was to see him miserable and alone, I didn’t push. He went over to the Brickworks or down to Ashbridges Bay. The Brickworks is a park in the Don Valley that had been made from Toronto’s pre-eminent brickyard. It has ponds and grassy hillsides as well as heritage buildings and a gateway to the Beltline, an urban forested trail. Ashbridges Bay Park is on the Toronto waterfront and is comprised of beaches, trails, groves of trees. Yeats walked home from school and stopped in Riverdale Farm to look for birds. He took solace in being alone in nature, even in the middle of the city. I understood that he needed to make sense of his loss as well as all the attendant anger. For him, birdwatching was the place to do that.

  For birdwatching is a place, not just an activity. It’s a place I knew I could go to in my mind when day-to-day life seemed overwhelming. I could remember seeing ducks bobbing on the frozen waters of the outer harbour, for example, and feeling my blood pressure drop. I saw that place in my boy as I watched him go out to heal his spirit. He shoved his binoculars into his pocket and slipped into that place where he looked for birds, into that corner of his being. He was so unhappy and vulnerable, trying to understand a part of life that we, as parents, would rather shelter our children from as long as possible. But I knew he’d be okay because along with the vulnerability, Yeats possessed an emotional intelligence that would see him through. He threw himself into birdwatching, for example, rather than into risky behaviour that might end badly. This comforted me especially because I was busy with the store. It was October, which meant the ten-day international literary festival and then November, which was filled with book launches and events outside the store, and then the build-up to Christmas when I needed to work more shifts. I couldn’t be there, physically, for Yeats the way I’d been when he was small, even if he wanted me to be.

  But then, one day, he asked me if we could go to Amherst Island to look for owls during the Christmas break and I was delighted. I knew he needed me for my car but that was okay. I needed to go birdwatching, too. I’d been craving it. But my birdwatching place included Yeats.

  AMHERST ISLAND IS LOCATED at the east end of Lake Ontario, very close to Kingston. At seventy square kilometres, it’s one of the latgest islands in all of the Great Lakes, and lies directly in the path of one of the world’s biggest bird migration routes. The island is largely a farming community, but in recent years it has attracted mainlanders wanting either a second home on the island or a permanent residency. We’d heard about it from a bookstore customer who lived there. Browsing in the store one day, he mentioned something to Ben about seeing owls in his backyard in winter and about all the different hawks he saw when he went for a walk. I looked up Amherst and saw there was an area on the island called Owl Woods. This sounded promising.

  Yeats tucked that information away and pulled it out in late October.

  “When can we go?” he asked, during the IFOA when I was too tired to think.

  I said, “Christmas. We’ll go at Christmas.”

  “Will Ben come too?”

  “Probably not.”

  All four of Ben’s children called him Ben, not Dad. Every once in a while one of the three older ones would call him Dad and to my ears it sounded endearing, as though they were feeling particularly close to him in that moment. When I asked Ben why they didn’t call him Dad, he shrugged and said, “Titus just always called me Ben, maybe because that’s what his mom called me. Then the rest of the kids did, too.” When I pressed, asking if he never wanted to be called Dad, he shrugged and said, “Not really. I am Ben.”

  Ben liked to bird-watch but not in winter. He didn’t have boots or a winter jacket. He refused to wear gloves, a hat, or a scarf. He was famous in our neighbourhood for wearing his suit jacket and jeans, no matter the howl of the wind or the depth of the snow. So I couldn’t count on him for winter walking. Plus, he was too busy at the store. Even in the spring, when we were going somewhere close to home like Sunnybrook Park or the Leslie Street Spit, he seldom came with us. I understood the busy schedule, but I thought he might benefit from an occasional walk in the woods. Sometimes it made me sad that Ben didn’t come along, but to be honest, Yeats and I enjoyed being alone together on these outings.

  I had been praying for clear weather and we got it. We drove the three hours to Millhaven, just west of Kingston, and then took the fifteen-minute ferry ride across to Amherst. I loved putting my car on a ferry, no matter how short the ride, and leaving the mainland behind. I loved being on an island.

  We could see Wolfe Island with its armies of wind turbines on the crossing, as well as all kinds of wintering ducks: common goldeneyes, red-breasted mergansers, buffleheads, mallards, lots of Canada geese. We’d come to see the owls, but tundra swans were supposed to be hanging around in the freezing lake, just off the east coast of the island. We hoped to see them, too.

  Amherst Island was on the cusp of acquiring wind farms like those on Wolfe Island just across the water. We saw signs on people’s lawns proclaiming their stance against the turbines. Their concerns, we knew, centred around health (the noise, the vibration), and the disturbance of nature (the birds, the fragile limestone bedrock). Our friends had told us that the dispute was in danger of fracturing the community into two camps. It wasn’t exactly long-time farmers versus recent or seasonal residents, but close to it. Some of the turbines were to be placed next to Owl Woods, where snowy owls winter and several owl species spend summers. Our friends said they could talk to us all day about the dispute and we wouldn’t believe half of what they had to say. For example, farmers on Amherst who wanted turbines on their land had to sign an agreement, not only not to talk to anyone about their own contracts but also not to talk to anyone else who already had turbines. (In 2013, the power company has requested permission from the province to disregard any endangered species on the island when finalizing its proposals.) It all sounded crazy to me.

  Amherst was a very sleepy place in January. The hamlet of Stella was deserted. The few cars and pickup trucks that were on the ferry with us dispersed and disappeared. There were no shops or cafés. Even the store with the post office sign seemed to be closed. The school, too, was closed since it was still Christmas break, making the place feel even more like a ghost town.

  As we drove across
the island, though, we began seeing people here and there. We saw farmers around their barns and the occasional person out for a walk. We saw people walking their dogs and others filling their bird feeders. Everyone waved at us, something we were not used to in the big city. I waved back, gleefully.

  Amherst is mostly rolling fields with a few small areas of brush and forest. There are homes and cottages along the shoreline and the one little town of Stella. About four hundred people live year-round on the island and another four hundred or so join them in summer.

  For most of the day, ours was the only car in sight. It was lovely. It meant we could drive as slowly as we wanted, keeping a lookout for birds or a good place to stop. It meant I could pull over in an instant and park at the side of the road. We left the car unlocked as we ventured into fields and copses of trees. Despite being the middle of winter, there was only a light layer of snow on the ground and none on the roads.

  We turned onto the main road out of Stella. To the left were houses overlooking the lake and to the right were fields bordered by an occasional thicket. Just past the last house Yeats spotted movement in a clump of trees, so we stopped and got out. We saw a northern cardinal and a blue jay along with a whole flock of dark-eyed juncos. We saw these birds in our backyard every day, but it was still worth the stop.

  The whole time we’d been investigating these birds we’d been hearing the persistent honking of a lone goose on the lake side of the road. We crossed over to take a look.

  The lake was frozen from the shoreline to about 250 metres out. A flock of Canada geese was swimming around, but one poor goose was frozen in the ice. It was this bird that was making all the racket, and we saw instantly that it wasn’t just because it was stuck and uncomfortable. A red fox was slowly advancing on it. The goose struggled and honked, pulled and pulled, trying to get free. Its compatriots kept swimming around. I was thinking they could have flown at the fox, driving it off. I didn’t know why they wouldn’t do that. Maybe this stuck individual was a particularly annoying goose. Maybe they were waiting for the fox to get closer.

  The fox sat down and licked a paw. The goose squawked. The fox looked around, stood up, sat back down again. It advanced a bit and sat down again. Maybe it was waiting for the goose to get really tired before it went in for the kill. We decided we didn’t want to see the kill and went back to the warm car.

  We drove to the end of the island and turned south, the only way the road went. Someone had planted a huge purple martin house in their garden near the road. We fantasized about seeing purple martins swooping in and tucking themselves into this house. It was the wrong time of year, though. The martins were somewhere down in South America.

  We continued down the road until we noticed a little break in a fence and a footpath snaking along the shore. I parked the car again and we took the footpath, hoping it would lead us to the swans.

  We were walking in shallow snow and some slush, which didn’t bother me in my winter boots. It didn’t bother Yeats in his running shoes, either, but it bothered me that Yeats’s feet were probably getting wet. Like father, like son. This was an endless source of irritation between us. I cared about his feet way more than he did. If people could see Yeats’s father’s feet, they would understand. I wouldn’t wish Ben’s feet on anyone and neither would he — corns, bunions, in-grown toenails, horrible old sports bruises on his ankles that have never healed. They are a mess. So I feared that Yeats’s cavalier attitude towards his wet, cold feet in winter was the first step towards feet like Ben’s, even with the assurance of friends that this was normal teenaged behaviour. To be fair, Yeats did wear his orthotics religiously. He’d inherited his father’s flat feet (and his hard head).

  Waves were crashing on our right and the freezing wind was blowing into our faces, but we were happy to be outside looking for giant white birds. The field was to our left, looking empty and frozen, but Yeats spied something moving and we stopped to look. It was a snow bunting. Then it was a whole flock of snow buntings, rising from the snow-dusted field where they’d sat camouflaged. We watched as a couple dozen birds flew and swooped around the field together, their little white wings flashing in the sunlight. It was a magnificent sight and all the better for being unexpected. Over the years this would become an iconic birding moment for us, one we would pull out whenever we were talking about our best sightings or the times that most delighted us.

  Snow buntings resemble sparrows in size and shape, and in fact they were once classified as sparrows, but are no longer. Now they are classified with longspurs, another family of perching bird. Buntings in winter are white and sandy-coloured. As a flying flock, they appear all white, but they aren’t. The males will leave the relative warmth of these fields in April, about six weeks ahead of the females, and will begin building nests somewhere in the Arctic at temperatures as low as −30°C.

  Our next stop was inland: Owl Woods. There were no signs, but the map I’d downloaded indicated that the woods were off the first road that bisected the island, heading west. We bumped along that road until we arrived at a bend where two other cars were parked. On one side of the bend was a house and on the other was a trailhead with a signpost of rules. A bit farther on was a board with descriptions of flora and fauna, but nowhere was there a map of how to get to Owl Woods.

  We followed the footpath and trusted it would take us there eventually. It led to a scrubby forest full of black-capped chickadees looking for handouts (which we happily supplied in the form of oatcake crumbs), as well as some of our other winter woodland friends — downy woodpeckers, white-breasted nuthatches, a blue jay, juncos.

  We came to a clearing and across it was an evergreen forest with little bits of colour here and there — other birders in their down jackets and toques. This was our destination.

  We hiked until we found ourselves in a small clearing where the snow was trampled down. I saw a pine tree with wide, spreading limbs and little clusters of needles. In every cluster sat a perfect ball of snow about the size of a toddler’s fist. I couldn’t stop looking at this joyful sight, this tree flooded with sunlight, decorated by nature.

  We preferred being still in the woods. We looked up, moved slowly and quietly, searching for owls. We hoped that those other people didn’t come any closer with their loud whispers and crunching feet.

  Three owls swooped soundlessly out of the woods. One flew on while the other two doubled back and landed somewhere in the pines, hidden and silent. We stood still again, breath held, sun pouring into the clearing. We waited and I felt my limbs grow loose; I felt my breath relax and my feet planted.

  After a couple of minutes I beckoned to Yeats to stay put in the clearing. He nodded and I moved into the trees, quiet as a mouse, only little crunchings of snow and the slidy sound of my nylon jacket brushing a branch. Within fifteen seconds I saw them, high in a tree: two owls. I turned my head back towards the clearing and called, “Yeats, come.” He moved even more quietly than I had; he could be a tracker. He stood beside me and I signalled up with my eyes.

  There sat two long-eared owls, one facing us and the other sitting right beside the first but facing the opposite direction. We watched through binoculars as, very slowly, this second owl turned its head all the way around to face us too. Two owls staring at us staring at them. We watched each other for fifteen seconds before they flew away. We lowered our binoculars and looked at one another. My wonder was reflected in my son’s face and we both smiled.

  The long-eared is a medium-sized owl, about the size of a crow. It’s widespread throughout most of North America at least some of the year, but not commonly seen. It hunts at night — studies have shown that it has supreme hearing and can catch mice in the pitch dark — and stays hidden in the woods during the day. We were lucky to have seen these two. Later that day we saw a snowy owl perched on top of a hydro pole just outside Stella. Yeats saw it as I was driving.

  “Stop!” he shouted. “A snowy!”

  We climbed out of the car, leavi
ng the doors open, and stood gawping at the bird. We had no need of binoculars, we were so close. It stared at us for twenty seconds then swooped off.

  “Listen,” Yeats whispered behind me. The snowy was absolutely soundless; large white wings tipped with grey, flapping as though in a silent movie.

  The snowy owl is unmistakable, being the only white owl around. It nests in the Arctic and, though it winters in most of the Canadian provinces and the northern United States, seeing a snowy is not easy. It, too, usually hunts at night, and tends to live in secluded areas. Its preferred food is lemmings, and in years when the lemming population is low, it will migrate as far south as Alabama and Georgia. Seeing a snowy was a heady experience. It filled me with a kind of awe and I wanted it to happen again.

  Another favourite moment on Amherst was seeing the bald eagle. This time we only saw the bird in flight, but what a sight it was. We watched until we couldn’t see it any more as it flew out over the fields. Yeats made an audible sigh behind me as he lowered his binoculars. This was a sigh of deep satisfaction. He nodded at me and we got back in the car.

  As we drove back to the city, I thought of how priceless moments like these were. They became etched into our memories and didn’t cost us anything except transportation and time. To be standing together in a frosty field, looking up into the sky, marvelling at birds and revelling in the natural world around us, was a simple miracle. And I wondered why we were so rarely able to appreciate it.

  SEVEN

  YEATS DID A LOT of birding in a short period of time and I accompanied him when I could. We’d get up on a Saturday morning and Yeats would say, “Can we go to the Brickworks today?” An hour later we were zooming down the Bayview extension and minutes after that, we were slowly walking the pathways over the ponds. We were looking for hawks, hoping for goldfinches.