Essays

 

 

BRIGHT CONTAINERS: Escaping Classification, Chapter 4
by Quitman Marshall

                    "But when I breathe with the birds,
                    The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit
                     of blessing/And the dead begin from
                         their dark to sing in my sleep."
                              —Theodore Roethke

Though I knew well the strong excitement of seeing certain kinds of animals in the wild and recognizing them, care was not something I gave to birdwatching. I'd learned to spot game birds in flight from a great distance, but it was recognition defined where it began, in hunting, by which vivid life was seen, killed, and eaten. When I was younger, birdwatching seemed cold, abstract, without necessity. It was burdened by field guides. The bloodless term "identification" defined what you did. It never occurred to me back then that hunting, as I truly loved it, had become an anachronism.

I can't attribute my eventual disaffection with hunting to myself, or to any conscious decision. The violence of the late 1960's, the war in Vietnam, social upheaval in the larger world: my instincts and then my thoughts were turned from experiences I once considered essential. Shrinking and degraded habitat for game, high-powered rifles, military-style attire, ATVs replacing the walk into the woods: hunting has developed the clinical efficiency of a slaughterhouse. Identification of bird species, on the other hand, has become a tool very consciously and aggressively used to save habitat and animals from oblivion. Of course, it has been used so for decades, but I was too wild to know.

"Therefore I reject the world of the dog/Though he hear a note higher than C/And the thrush stopped in the middle of his song." Theodore Roethke's was the first modern American poetry I fell into. His gorgeous attention to the smallest creatures, their movements and music, is exhilarating and his work, like all great literature, expands available reality. I encountered the word "phoebe" there, the first bird we hear as we walk down the bluff to cross tea-colored Cedar Creek, a sharp "chip" on the cold morning air. Although I've joined the local Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count in the swamp, now Congaree National Park, a part of me swings from condescension to embarrassment. I should know better. It's 7 AM, just light, and well below freezing. This is no place for sissies.

Vermilion swallowed the tops of the pines off Caroline Sims Road. A small group of cars and about 12 people gathered at the gate to the swamp. It was too cold to linger, so we quickly split into three groups, each led by an experienced birder. I went with a man named Glenn to the swamp's southern entrance, where Cedar Creek curves against a high bluff and an iron bridge crosses onto the Kingsnake Trail. The frost on the fields along our short drive in Glenn's car looked thick as snow.

It had been strange to be aimed for the swamp and to find myself going upstream against a current of headlights on Bluff Road. Like a funeral procession, these were rural people going to work in the city on Saturday, not typical nine-to-fivers. Just yesterday they could stay put; they were working farmers supported by their land. Now with binoculars I'm following strangers into the swamp on the coldest day of the year.

Glenn said "phoebe" and I became all ears. Now he startles me with an image: a small bird's feet freezing to an icy branch, a quick death. We can't expect much movement, he says, until sunlight begins to melt the frost. Then what we'll see most are the great travelers, the little birds, and they must protect their feet. Mine are already stinging. We keep moving.

We are three and I'm the beginner. Linda is a high school physics and chemistry teacher from Georgia and she speaks in loud slurs, probably accentuated by her being very cold. Glenn's tall with a studious manner and a deep voice he keeps low. They are talking about religion or churches: Glenn has already told us he's a Lutheran minister. They know clergy-in-common. Glenn stops, nonetheless, with amazing suddenness and grace, in mid-phrase, for a song and names the bird making it. He says he's from southern New Jersey and has been "birding" for over 25 years. I know something about the raptor watch at Cape May, a crossing point before many miles of open water.

Glenn's at work on a book about Revelation. Life without God "at any place, any time" is a nightmare, he says, distinguishing his thesis from other apocalyptic interpretations of St. John's book. We've walked two miles now into the big, cold swamp. When Glenn asks me about publishers, I mention the local university press. Linda adds that it's "a hotbed of liberalism." Birds are beginning to fly in the bare gray branches as they warm. The good minister gently follows that he'd probably be considered more liberal than most clergy she knows. Much of the time I've been looking down, somewhat guiltily, for the tracks of deer and wild pigs. As the trail veers west, they are more and more, fresher and fresher.

When we spook a doe and two fawns off to the right, we need no prompting, but Glenn must lead us to listen, to watch, and to use our binoculars for the very small birds. Each of us has begun to count. There are 25 million active birdwatchers in the United States. Many say they are driven by a kind of wild sadness, to see certain species before extinction. Whose? The birds' or their own?

The roaring 1920's were the worst years in the history of the bird counts. Wholesale deforestation caused tremendous dives in avian numbers. Now it's suburbanization. Many migrant species must endure the 500-mile crossing of the Gulf of Mexico. Birds wait for a good wind and take off in the early evening by the millions from Central and South America. They use the stars to orient themselves. "How graceful the small before danger!" wrote Roethke.

These are the tiny flashing movements, balls of feathered life, the pulsing throats that spark the air with their music. I'm beginning to hear it, to note, with Glenn's explanation, one song's difference from another. Just beginning to hear and see the variations of form and shade that distinguish one brush quiver from another branch lightning, one high whistling from another low chuckle. I'd seen their quickness, jumped at their scrambling in loud dead leaves, but always with the thought of some large beast, some native wonder. Now I see and hear kinglets, vireos, wrens, and white-throated sparrows. Yellow-rumped warblers, titmice, and goldfinch. Hermit thrushes, cedar waxwings, brown thrashers, and chickadees. Also, the flickers, sapsuckers, hawks and vultures that stay year-round with the pileated woodpeckers, the downy, hairy, red-headed and -bellied, and always the hope for the ivory bill.

Forests have been cut to pieces. The year-rounders can adapt and are not generally declining, but the migrants have diminished by 45% in the past three decades. Some species, like the Bachman's warbler, have vanished. Those that return safely to North America collide in huge numbers with new city skyscrapers, towers, and power lines, or they find their former habitats carved into homesites and shopping centers. Fragmented forests increase predation tremendously: these bright creatures need at least 20,000-acre tracts to protect their nesting. Over 200 bird species have been identified in Congaree Swamp. It is just big enough.

I've forgotten much of what Glenn taught us that morning, but still recall his keen identifying fire. There was a certain brilliance in it: with all the kinds of sparrows, woodpeckers, and warblers, to be able in a moment to name that one. Aggression was surely in it too, but contained by the mind. Later that day I walked the high-ground Bluff Trail. As the sun climbed the sky, the sound of frost melting, falling in heavy drops to the dead leaves on the ground, was a kind of rain: the always-becoming-water that defines this place. I stood in sunlight where a great fallen tree had opened up the canopy and looked down into the swamp. While other towers of starch and water reached into the sky, this one lay bird-pecked, sodden, coming apart. It's our theology that insists on keeping us aloft forever.

 

Quitman Marshall grew up in South Carolina, moved to Barcelona, then DC, Amherst, New York City, and Paris. For most of the 1990s, he coordinated literary events at Charleston's Spoleto Festival. In 1996, he won P&W's Writers' Exchange Award. He was then already assembling notes and doing research for his long narrative work, Swampspirit, from which the essay in this issue of BigCityLit is taken. The book, while centered on a specific terrain around and within the Congaree National Park in central South Carolina, is a celebration of all swamps, undervalued, indeterminate, and often forbidding inland places, and the "swampness" that, despite all our efforts, pulls history and individuals into itself. His chapbooks include The Birth Gift, 14th Street, and The Slow Comet. Others of his manuscripts-in-process are What Made Us (poems) and The Bloody Point (novel). Since 2001, teaching in public schools and the local university, he has lived in Beaufort, SC, with his wife, Martine, and their children.