Vanishing Acts
This morning, two things vanished. The first disappeared while I was in the front yard watering a young crab-apple tree we planted this spring. Absent-mindedly, I let the hose wander to a nearby bush and startled a chipmunk, who dashed out in front of me and vanished into thin air. Or, more precisely, into the grass under my feet. I bent down, nonplussed, and realized he had retreated into a hole that was hidden in plain sight, disguised by our unkempt lawn, three inches from my right foot. Certain things suddenly became clear to me. The constant raids on our heirlooms, for example—our beautiful late-season tomatoes either vanishing or half-chewed. I’d assumed it was just one chipmunk doing that—the one I recently realized was responsible for all the chirping alarm calls that go on for minutes at a time outside our house. I was able to pinpoint the source of the noise a few days ago by training my binoculars on him as he perched on his hind legs on the back deck. I could see his small jaw move with every forceful, high-pitched chip! Now I have a vision of a whole tribe of chipmunks—parents, children, cousins, aunts and uncles—in burrows three yards long, living alongside us. No wonder they are always sounding the alarm: we must be constantly inconveniencing them.
Shortly after the revelation of the burrow, I was walking out to the car when I heard another piercing pik! pik! that I assumed was the chipmunk again. But it was coming from very high up in a nearby silver maple tree. Surprised that a chipmunk would climb so far, I craned my head upward just in time to see that it was, in fact, a downy woodpecker, which promptly vanished into a large hole in the trunk that I had never noticed before, although there was a series of sizeable perforations that must have been there for a long time.
*
These two lives momentarily intersecting with mine remind me to pay more attention; I have been blind to what is right in front of me, to lives that parallel my own, on my own ground. Slowly, over a quarter of a century living in America, I am starting to be able to name the other beings around our home in Madison, Wisconsin. And with naming comes noticing—an awareness of each specific creature doing its very particular thing. How can it have taken me twenty-five years to recognize and distinguish between such common calls, of chipmunks and downy woodpeckers? How much will be lost to me if I don’t learn it in time, if I don’t notice?
*
It took me twenty years to identify the downward, gurgling trill of the house wrens that come to nest in our backyard every year. They arrive sometime in May, and then the male’s call wakes me with the first morning light, day after day. It weaves in and out of my dreams like an obsession. Now I look forward to it, feel pleasure at knowing who is uttering it. So when I realize, one day in mid-August, that I haven’t heard it for a while, I am a little startled. And troubled. It is still very hot. Why have the wrens left? When did they leave? And how long did it take me to notice? They’ve become part of the extended household, and I feel remorse for failing to notice why or when they left. My disquiet also has an element of self-regard. I know that not paying attention to the natural world is actually dangerous for my mental and spiritual health. I am less prone to the crippling bouts of depression that have afflicted me all my adult life if I stay tuned in to what is happening out of doors day by day; it helps me see myself not as an isolated individual but as part of a great web of beings from the large to the microscopic, all of us, in Wordsworth’s words, “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees.”
*
The end of September, but there’s been no frost yet. Over my two and a half decades here, the first autumn freeze has been drifting later and later. Outside, the cicadas and tree crickets are still going strong. When you walk out the door, it’s like hearing a kettle singing on the hob and garden sprinklers hissing at the same time. There are still honeybees with furry waistcoats and laden panniers fumbling in the flame-colored, flamingo, and scarlet heads of the zinnias. I stand and watch a bee for several minutes as it combs the blossoms of the spirea bush. It clambers all over them with such frantic gusto that the magenta flowerets vibrate. It makes me smile. At night, when we drive past stands of trees, we hear the katydids’ staccato maracas. But now that I have noticed the absence of wrens, I really listen, as if I could hold onto these sounds. I know from long experience in this northern climate just how empty it is when all the voices of summer—birds and insects—fall silent. I want to hear every last day of the singing outdoors, and I want to be able to distinguish among the singers. What do they look like? sound like? What are their names?
*
Driving back from the swimming pool, I stop at a four-way intersection. I am singing. As I stare at the traffic lights, a monarch butterfly wavers across my field of vision, high up. I stare happily at it for a second, and then realize that the strong wind is blowing it right into the middle of the intersection of a four-lane highway. The light goes green, and all the metal boxes roar forward. I don’t see what happens to the butterfly. My friend says she used to drive through clouds of them while commuting to her job in southwest Wisconsin in the early 1990s. Now there are no monarch clouds.
*
The next day, walking in the arboretum in a blaze of September light, I see the corpse of a monarch on the ground. Its body is being eaten by yellowjackets. All of a sudden, monarchs are on my radar. A poster at the visitor center reminds me that they are, of course, on the move. It takes them four generations to do the trip north from the Sierra Madre in Mexico, although the return trip will be done by the last generation alone. I notice a call in the local paper for volunteers: the Audubon Society is tagging monarchs and needs help. As do monarchs. In their caterpillar stage, they eat only milkweed plants, which are being eradicated from midwestern cropland and roadsides by the herbicide glyphosate (Roundup). Monarchs have been following the same migration route since the last ice age, but their numbers have dropped by 90 percent in the last twenty-five years. The years I have lived in this house, in this country. The years I have been an adult, raised my offspring. Suddenly my own existence—the lumber cut and treated to build our home, the innumerable possessions in it, the food I eat, the cars I have driven, the garden I have planted every spring since I arrived—all of this seems implicated in the monarchs’ demise. I cannot see myself as separate.
*
I win a poetry prize, and travel to the award ceremony at a literary festival on “The Spirit of Place,” in northern Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Michigan. The festival theme tugs at my heart in some way I can’t quite identify. I am happy to find it attended by people I feel comfortable with, although we have never met—many of the authors write about the Great Lakes region, and the readers present are a down-to-earth crowd. My perennial sense of being an interloper, of not belonging because of my foreign origins and accent, vanishes for a while. The first morning, a photographer puts up a map on a PowerPoint slide. I puzzle over it for a few seconds: a strange configuration of continents, colored blue. Belatedly, I realize it’s not a map of land I’m looking at; it’s a map of the Great Lakes. But on this map, ordinary habits of seeing are reversed: the land is left blank, while the lakes are colored, detailed, labeled. The photographer, Kevin Miyazaki, has traveled all the way around Lake Michigan, compiling portraits of the people who live and work and play near or in it. I am elated and comforted to see how diverse they are, and how many first-generation immigrants are among them. My ending up here seems less far-fetched in that company. I see I have not merely wandered off course; that I am one of a tribe of contemporary migrants who have resettled far from their home countries.
The Great Lakes, Miyazaki reminds us, contain 20 percent of all the fresh water in the world. I am living close to an ocean of sweet water, of enormous practical and spiritual significance, which will become more and more vital as global warming ramps up. Now you see it, now you don’t. How long have I foolishly seen the Midwest as a backwater, “flyover country,” not anywhere important, not somewhere I would choose to be? I’ve lived here reluctantly, by default, often wishing I were somewhere else. I feel that unhappy wish morph into something like awe. Maybe I have been exactly where I needed to be, all along. I just didn’t know it. Until now. My resistance to Wisconsin, the disparaging lens through which I have often seen it in my years here as a “resident alien” and then a “naturalized citizen,” is gradually vanishing as I learn to know its landscapes, soundscapes, and waterscapes more intimately, as I start to engage in a deeper kind of seeing. Reading the essays of John Hildebrand, who is a presenter at the festival, I underline this phrase: “It’s a strange construct of emotions and allegiances—this story we tell ourselves about where we belong.”
*
Walking along the shore of Lake Michigan, which is heaving itself up into small waves and slapping them tiredly down on the shore like a washerwoman pummeling and rinsing heavy linens, I come across one dead and then one dying monarch. I see its wing flapping helplessly; the other is trapped in wet sand. I scoop up the injured creature carefully in my hands, free its wing, and realize that it is broken, irreparable. The wind is strong and cold off the lake; dusk is setting in. I turn to shelter the monarch from the wind, talking to it tenderly. It staggers upright on my warm palm, its little, soft, delicate feet pleasant. It is slightly shocking, this intimate contact with another being. I see its other wing is broken, too, like the torn silk of a damaged kite. It pulls itself onto my turquoise shirt sleeve and then onto my down jacket, but the fabric is slippery and it keeps falling down. I feel torn myself, with a new and intimate grief. This must be one of the monarchs migrating south to Mexico. Who knows how many miles of open water it may have just crossed to reach this peninsula. I know I can’t save it, and put it down gently in a hollow in the sand dunes that is slightly sheltered from the wind.
*
A monarch migrating south from Manitoba or Madison to overwinter in the oyamel firs of Michoacán will fly two to three thousand miles, a distance relative to its body length that is equivalent to a person traveling five times around the Earth. The distance I have to fly between my home in Madison, Wisconsin, and my family home near Manchester, England, is almost four thousand miles. Over twenty-five years of flying back and forth in an enormous metal contraption weighing several hundred tons and consuming obscene amounts of fossil fuel, I’ve racked up a travel distance equivalent to four times the circumference of the Earth. The monarchs win hands down. But they are losing.
*
When did the wrens leave? I have no expert to ask—my father, my lifelong source of bird lore, is in the process of vanishing bit by bit, being inexorably erased by Alzheimer’s, and in any case the species he was so intimately familiar with live in the British Isles, not here. I Google “house wren migration 2015” and find a report of a pair of house wrens departing southern Wisconsin around August 1, which is roughly when I last recall seeing ours. I am stunned to find a site called Birdcast, which ushers me into another world of parallel weather forecasts that are much more thrilling than the kind I’m used to, the pedestrian variety that tell you whether you need sunglasses, a down coat, or an umbrella:
Regional Migration Forecast, 18–25 September 2015
Upper Midwest and Northeast
Low pressure moving east across the region will spawn moderate to very heavy flights as it passes . . . through the Upper Midwest on Friday night.
[Nationwide], moderate and heavy flights [will be] the norm this week for many areas of the country, featuring Greater White-fronted Goose, Ring-necked Duck, Say’s Phoebe, Varied Thrush, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Fox Sparrow, and Golden-crowned Sparrow in the West and American Bittern, Northern Flicker, Eastern Phoebe, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Nashville Warbler, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Palm Warbler, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, and White-crowned Sparrow in the East.
In this weather world, a wind out of the north is a flying wind that will take you south to warmer places. Many of the great pulses of flights take place during the night. Thousands upon thousands of birds are traveling great distances, mostly unseen, and certainly unnoticed by me. It is a shock to realize the number of individuals and species that are on the move, each with their own date for initial, peak, and final departures. How complex, heroic, and miraculous the whole operation is: an Ironman of tiny creatures taking place every day. No wonder I have a sense of such loss in the winter—there really are far fewer bird species present near my home after November.
*
All the warblers and other migrants that I took such pains to learn in April and May, and whose songs I listened to endlessly on Audubon Society CDs, are moving out, or already gone now, halfway through September. My brain feels like a sieve; each year I manage to retain only one or two of the species that I try to cram into it. It is a cumulative business, this process whereby birds’ names take up permanent residence in my brain. This year, it was the tiny ruby-crowned kinglet, with its piercing, bubbly song. This spring, I followed a species with its own distinctive plumage—a group of ornithologists with khaki safari vests, loden jackets, and expensive binoculars on special chest-slings. One of them introduced me to the I-Bird app, which stores images, descriptions, and recordings of all the North American birds on your smartphone. The sun was slanting through the trees at the edge of the lake, suffusing the woods with grainy, golden light. Baltimore Orioles—at least 10! & a nest! I scribbled in my notebook on May 7. A week later, it crowed: 68 species today: Gray-cheeked thrush, Yellow-throated Vireo, Wood Thrush, & 8 warblers: female Blackburnian, Yellow-rumped, Chestnut-sided, Bay-breasted, Black & white, Magnolia, Blackpoll, & Canada. Next to Rosebreasted grosbeak I noted long sweet robiny warbles; next to Ovenbird I wrote teacher teacher teacher! Beside Willow flycatcher I jotted a mnemonic for the call: fitz bew. Remember the Palm Warbler, I told myself: sounds like a grasshopper or a frog. When I recognize a bird, visually or by ear, I feel not only satisfaction but a sense of belonging, of being better rooted in my new life; connected not just to the ecosystem I have entered in south-central Wisconsin, but to the unique and threatened ecosystem of my family of origin. Now that my father’s memory is gone, and he is dying, I am taking up, as best I can, the torch of my inheritance: his knowing and seeing the natural world, his passion for ecology.
*
Now, when I am out of doors, I am often frustrated, because I hear birdsong I don’t recognize and wish I had someone to identify it for me, or a pair of binoculars. The same goes for the trees. I realize I don’t know the names of most of the trees that surround me every day. I know maples, pines, and oaks—but not their different kinds. There are thirteen species of pine in the eastern and upper midwestern United States: jack pine, sand pine, shortleaf pine, slash pine, spruce pine, longleaf pine, Table Mountain pine, red pine, pitch pine, pond pine, Eastern white pine, loblolly pine, and Virginia pine. I write this on retreat on Lake Michigan, in northern Wisconsin, staring out the window at a pine tree. I am puzzling over whether it is a jack pine or a red pine, consulting tree books, poring over the cones and piece of bark that I’ve brought in with me. Suddenly, it has become important to know.
*
I become temporarily obsessed with migration and the progress and fate of the different migrants. Sometimes, the information I stumble across online is breathtaking. For example, this on October 15: Butterflies are crossing the border and streaming into northern Mexico after another peak week in Texas. Approximately 6,000 to 10,000 an hour.
*
A monarch weighs less than a gram. In their winter roosts, tens of thousands may cluster on a single oyamel fir, sharing their warmth. Sometimes their accumulated weight can break tree branches.
*
The autumn sun is warm at noon; I go outside to eat my lunch, and immediately three yellowjackets come to investigate the contents of my plate. They become a nuisance in late summer and remain until the first frosts, clustering around garbage bins and picnic tables. It bothers me that some Americans lump all yellow-and-black-striped insects together as “bees.” Maybe they do it because there are more types of winged insects here. In England, where I grew up, bees and wasps are clearly separated by language. The categories “yellowjacket” and “hornet” don’t exist there. But some crucial distinctions vanish when bees and wasps are conflated, as they would be if we referred to cats and dogs as simply “dogs.” Bees are workers, pollinators, pollen-gatherers; wasps are scavengers and garbage-pickers. Wasps are more aggressive, and can stab you once or multiple times before flying off unharmed; bees sting as a last line of defense. They have to disembowel themselves to stab you; they only get one chance. Many wasp species nest in the ground, often in rodent burrows, such as those of chipmunks. They are carnivores early in the season, eating mostly insects (such as the dead monarch I saw) in order to feed their larvae, but switch to sugars as the season progresses and the colony grows. Bees naturally nest in tree cavities, or hives, and feed on nectar and pollen.
I’ve been stung often by both. “Bicarbonate for bees, vinegar for wasps” was the phrase my mother used to determine which remedy to apply. If it was a honeybee sting, she would take out a pair of tweezers to extract the tiny thorn of the stinger. Mostly, I’ve been stung on the soles of my feet because I am congenitally nearsighted, and my vision is not good enough to make out what I am treading on. As a child, I liked to go barefoot but resisted wearing my glasses, so the territory beyond my knees vanished into a blur. I learned the hard way that not paying attention, not seeing, bore a cost. Each time I got stung, my foot would swell up like a melon and itch unbearably, requiring several days in bed.
*
The honey man at the local farmer’s market says he lost 80 percent of his bees last winter. Wisconsin winters increasingly lurch between Arctic cold and unpredictable thaws, which can be hard on them. This year, he’s driving his bees to Arkansas. He has researched it all—altitude, vegetation, which way the hives will face. But this habit of driving bees around the country—or the world—may be contributing to the bees’ demise. They can catch and spread viruses, fungi, and parasites when they are forced to travel long distances. This doesn’t entirely explain bee die-offs, though. More and more hives are succumbing to the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” that has been occurring since 2006. The cause is still unknown, although evidence seems to point at the class of pesticides known as nicotinoids. The vanishing of bees and other pollinators—including, of course, monarchs—threatens plant diversity, food production, the world as we know it. I shudder to imagine a world with fewer flowers and trees, where fruit, vegetables, and nuts are rare commodities, where the singing and buzzing of insects is largely absent, and not only in winter.
*
When you can name something—a bird, or a plant, or an animal, say—you look out for them. You not only notice them, you care more about what they are doing and what happens to them. As both a poet and a translator, I’m often struck by the symbiotic relationship between naming and seeing, at how language maps out the visible world for us in crucial ways, affecting both our perceptions and our emotions. Learning a new species name makes something happen in you. It parallels a phenomenon that is familiar to anyone who has studied a foreign language abroad: each time you learn a new word, no matter how improbable or esoteric it seems, you inevitably hear it that same day or the next day, and realize it was there around you all the time, invisible, inaudible to you.
*
The verb to disappear acquired another meaning in the twentieth century. It became not only intransitive but also transitive, meaning that sometimes disappearing doesn’t just happen; it can be deliberate, and can have an agent. Authoritarian regimes, such as the various military dictatorships of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, “disappeared” their opponents. The problem is, even with good intentions, one can inadvertently disappear things—wrens, for example, or ruby-crowned kinglets—by not being aware of them in the first place. And not seeing can, if not checked in time, and if practiced by enough people, lead to things actually vanishing. If we could really see honeybees and monarchs, we would do more to avert their catastrophic decline. Naming and seeing are political acts. So I’m trying to live out a home-and-garden variety of the 1960s slogan, The personal is political, by learning—painfully slowly—to name what is going on in the place where I live.
Of course, the chipmunk and the downy woodpecker didn’t really vanish the other day in my yard; they are not magicians, and were just going about their home lives. On the contrary, they were just becoming visible for me, manifesting, flesh made word. But many plants and creatures really are vanishing, more or less in my own backyard. Seeing and naming have become part of my project of rooting, of claiming my place of belonging. The eco- in ecology comes from the Greek oikos, “house, dwelling place, or habitation.” And poetry, from poesis, “making.” I am making a home in this new country I migrated to by learning its language, and by paying attention to the overlapping lives on my acquired home ground.
