Swamp Walks

Tom Gartner

 
Sara was from Iowa.  A lot of the Pacific Coast waterbirds were new to her— buffleheads, pelicans, curlews, Western grebes, surf scoters, snowy egrets…  They were new to me too, for the most part, because until I met her I'd only been interested in birds for a month or so when I was in fifth grade, around the same time I tried to build a laser and learn ancient Egyptian.
           
I lived a few hundred yards from San Francisco Bay now.  A trail ran along the top of the levee that separated the shore from the wetlands behind it.  Saturday mornings, hazy and winded from making love, we'd have tea and French toast in my kitchen, then walk the swamp.  We shared a copy of Peterson's Field Guide to Western Birds and a battered pair of binoculars.
           
A shallow lagoon stretched alongside the levee for half a mile, with an island dead center like the yolk of a fried egg.  On a mudbank that caught morning sun, wading birds congregated, bunched by species—curlews, dowitchers, willets, avocets, sandpipers.
           
"That one's not a curlew," she said one morning.  She pointed with a mittened finger.  "The one on the end.  He's different."
           
"Is he?"  I leaned into the fog of her breath.  She held the binoculars up for me to look through.         
 
"He's kind of butterscotch colored.  And his beak curves up.  Theirs curve down."
           
I could barely see it.  "Maybe he's just smiling."  I leafed through Peterson's.  "Could he be a yellowlegs?" 
 
"Too large."
 
"I don't know then.  There's not a lot with upturned beaks.  No, wait—this must be him.  He's a godwit."
 
"A what?"  She put her head against my shoulder to look at the picture, glanced back at the bird, then at the picture again.  "Oh yeah.  Wow.  Life bird."
 
"Me too," I said, though for me almost everything we saw was a life bird.  She stood on tiptoes to give me an off-balance kiss.  When I closed my eyes the sun on my face and arms was suddenly warm.
All that fall and winter, it seemed we'd see a new bird almost every week:  goldeneyes, Northern pintails, Northern shovelers, a lone oystercatcher, a pelagic cormorant winging past the ruined Rod & Gun Club pier.  The checklist at the back of our guidebook filled up with Sara's scrawled annotations.
           
Past the big lagoon was a chain of smaller ponds, with stretches of saltgrass and pickleweed in between.  Walking along the levee, we'd look down to that side and see dabbling ducks—mallards, gadwalls, mergansers, wigeons—and the occasional egret or heron.  On the other side, waves slapped at the tumbled rocks of the levee face.  Grebes,  cormorants, ruddy ducks, and pelicans bobbed and dove in the bay waters.  On the shoreline, killdeer hopped and fluttered seemingly at random.
 
It wasn't only waterbirds we'd see.  Besides the kite, there was a kestrel who perched on a tilted piling, a couple of red-tailed hawks, and one low-flying raptor we could never quite pin down, though we saw it over and over again—a Cooper's hawk, or a northern harrier, maybe just an immature red-shouldered hawk?  We couldn't find our way through the labyrinth of species, subspecies, morphs, and variations.  And there were legions of hopping, rustling, flitting shrubbery denizens—robins, towhees, sparrows, finches, and countless unidentifiable others.  "LBB," Sara would say dismissively, meaning Little Brown Bird, as I struggled to get a decent look at some evasive chirper.
 
As winter wore on into spring, the swallows came back to fly their looping dances over the water.  Hummingbirds whirred through the banks of fireweed along the levee.  But by late April the mudbank in the lagoon was empty except for a few gulls and an egret or two.  Species by species, the winter birds, the ducks and sandpipers and dowitchers and plovers, flew north.   
 
Where the swamp trail started, on the inland side of the lagoon, was a stand of aspens.  One afternoon in early May, a blue-skied Tuesday with the smell of damp grass in the air, I walked through alone.  Sara was at work in the City.
 
Ordinarily you'd only see a few commonplace birds in the trees—robins, jays, the inevitable LBBs—nothing worth raising your binoculars for.  But this day the branches were thick with strangers—a whole flock of crested brown birds with black bandit masks, yellow-tipped tails, and  bright red specks on their wings.  Their trills and whistles echoed through the grove.  The ground was splattered with half-digested berries.
 
It didn't take a lot of sleuthing to figure out that they were cedar waxwings.  Nothing else in Peterson's looked remotely similar. 
 
"Too weird," Sara said when I talked to her on the phone later.
 
"How so?"
 
 "I saw them here too.  At lunch.  They were in the park next to work"
 
"No.  Seriously?"
 
"Seriously.  Headed your way, I guess."
 
"Well, not the exact same birds."
 
"Yes the exact same birds.  I bet you."
 
"Eating their way north."  It seemed like a stretch, but if she wanted to think we'd seen the same flock, I wanted it too.
 
"Exactly.  If you don't believe me…"  Her laugh, a clear high sound, rippled beneath the near whisper of her speaking voice.  "Go ask them."
 
But when I went back to the grove that evening, the branches were empty.  A single mockingbird vaulted to the top of a fence post and trilled like a cedar waxwing.
                                                *
We weren't, it should be said (or maybe it doesn't have to be), very knowledgeable birders.  We absorbed some of what we read in our field guides, and we were attentive enough in the few hours we spent in the field.  But often enough we were surprised or confused by things we saw.  There were black-bellied plovers at the far end of the levee, but their bellies weren't black.  One of the small ponds was home to a family of mallards with weird white blotches on their chests; and once a robin flew into a tree ten feet from us and mugged a crow.  And of course there was the phantom hawk, always flying away from us, sometimes showing a striped tail, sometimes a buff flash of underwing, a russet shoulder.
 
One day toward the end of May, walking along the shore of the big lagoon, we saw two stilts—striking birds with their black and white plumage and long red legs, but a bit clownish on dry land—shrieking and flailing their wings as they stalked around a clump of dead reeds at the water's edge.  Half a dozen more stilts stood in the shallows watching.
 
"Are they fighting?"  Sara grabbed my arm.
 
"Pretty lame fight if they are."
 
"Yeah—oh—look!"  She pointed.  Something was moving on the ground  near the two birds.  They stepped back, forward, back.  "It's a nest."
 
We could just see a flattened place in the grass, a couple of pale lumps that could have been eggs.  A snake, patterned tan and dark brown, moved toward the nest fitfully, a few inches at a time.  The birds hopped and screamed and beat their wings, but they seemed scared to get close.
 
I wanted to do something—actually I wanted to take the snake by its tail and fling it into the pond—but I'd seen enough nature documentaries to know you don't interfere.  Then Sara looked at me, her eyes tearing up, and I started down off the levee.  But before I'd gone three steps, she grabbed my arm and pulled me away.
 
"No, don't."  But she went on staring at me.  Her forehead crinkled.
 
"You sure?"   
 
"No," she said.  "Yes."  She turned and walked on without me.
 
Which answer was I supposed to take?  I stood there until she was thirty feet further along the levee.  Then I walked after her.
                                                                        *
The last time we went to the swamp together was at the start of June—not summer yet, but it hadn't rained in over two months, and the green of spring was fading to gold and tan and grey.  The swamp seemed almost empty. We saw a few blackbirds in the aspen grove, a sprinkling of  mallards and coots in the lagoon, a turkey vulture gliding the length of the levee, and furtive LBBs in the thickets.  The sky was grey-blue, smeared with white haze.  We walked along, limply holding hands, until the heat chased us into the weak shade of a Monterey pine.   I looked at her but she didn't seem to register it.  After a few minutes we started back.  As we left the aspen grove she looked over her shoulder, then squeezed my hand so hard I felt the tendons rub across the bones.  All the way back to the house, I tried to find something to say, anything really, and I couldn't.
 
I still go there sometimes, but just for the exercise and the fresh air, the way I did before I met Sara.  I try not to think about her.  I leave my binoculars at home.  The names of the birds have begun to slip out of my memory.  I couldn't tell a canvasback from a scaup now.  I still see the hawk sometimes, gliding low over the reeds or the scrub, its feathers an unreadable frieze of chocolate and buff and dark orange.  I don't suppose I'll ever know what it is.
 








​

About the Author: 
Tom Gartner has had short fiction and poetry published in various journals, including Concho River Review, Whetstone, Aethlon, and California Quarterly. One story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He works as a buyer for a large independent bookstore in San Francisco.

---