As the
I listen again and look out at the prairie landscape. I have driven north as far as I want to go on this cool and sunny day. I stop the car, turn, and begin to travel south and west again, mainly west, where I’ll rejoin the main highway that leads to Alberta. For some time now, I have been passed by snow geese that are holding up the limitless sky, line after wavering line, as they migrate north. Now there are more and more, and they begin to land in farmers’ fields on both sides of the highway, the vees overlapping until they’ve become an assemblage of sinuous shapes.
While this is going on around me, Basil begins to pace. He starts dashing from one side of the car to the other, sniffing the air repeatedly. He keeps trying to force his nose into the gap where I’ve lowered the back window. If I stop again, there’s no telling what he will do. Run to the fields, ears flapping, bellowing for sure. I’d never get him back.
A new sound begins to break the silence of earth and sky. It is a chattering of thousands that can be heard from more than a mile away. The earth where the geese land becomes a moving mass of white. Then an entire field seems to rise suddenly into the air. The geese have been startled, perhaps by a fox. And though many separate flocks are on the ground, they surge upwards as if they are one, and swerve in a wide U-turn to regroup. It’s as if a lasso has rounded them up in the sky. There is a jostling of position while they assume the same direction, and then they land again. Their continuous noisy chatter can be heard inside the car, even over the Gloria of the Mass.
I wish Greg, with his love of the natural world, were able to witness this astonishing sight. But he is on the East Coast, witnessing his own astonishments. And here, above Basil and me, the migration goes on all day, thousands upon thousands of white geese, black wingtips flashing.
I slow, take my time and listen to the sustaining power of the final movement—described as the prayer for inner and outer peace.
DURING THE LAST EVENING of that first trip we made to Prince Edward Island in the early eighties, the three of us took a walk along the beach for a mile or so. “To say goodbye to the sea,” Greg told Lena as we stepped out of the mobile home and made our way over dunes and down the side of the cliff. “But only for now. Because I’m going to remember this place, and hold it inside of me until we come back next year. We
To which Lena replied, “I see it all now—and for the rest of time. I’m living with a man who is obsessed with rivers, a boy who loves the sea. We’ll be planning every holiday from now on around rivers. Or oceans. Or rivers that empty into oceans.”
The sky was dull when we set out, the vaguest of suns showing itself in a haze at the approach of sunset. Strips of horizontal cloud were stretched across the western sky like iron bars. The bottom half of the sun disappeared all at once, leaving the upper half stranded in an inverted silly smile. It was the only notable shape in that vast grey space. Cormorants flew low over the waves, their migration having begun. Greg was thrilled that he had recently learned to identify them. While tagging after Albert on the farm, he’d been taught to differentiate between cormorants and geese.
“They both fly in vee formations,” Albert had told him, pointing out past the shore. “From here, they look pretty much the same size, do you see? But the wild geese never coast. Their wings never stop flapping. A cormorant will pause now and then, and coast. That’s how you tell them apart.”
There was still a bit of light during our walk, and Lena said she was turning back because she wanted to start in on the packing. The sky was changing again, and clouds had begun to spin out from the setting sun. Greg and I continued for a while, sandpipers scurrying ahead comically, miniature busybodies with white rings around their necks. We were intent on reaching a promontory where the red cliffs jutted sharply into the sea. Mostly, we were silent, listening to the ebbing waves and paying attention to what had washed up on the sand since our last walk. Just before we reached the point, we came across a tidal pool that was shrinking rapidly but, at the same time, creating numerous shallow puddles some twenty or thirty feet back from shore. In the puddles, hundreds upon hundreds of small herring were trapped. The tide was going out quickly. The once wide rivulet through which the herring had swum in from the sea had left its outlines, but it was now clogged with sand and the exit was blocked. It was obvious that the herring were doomed, because the pools that contained them were too far back from shore. There was no hope of reopening the rivulet; it had closed long before we’d arrived. And now that the water was being absorbed, hundreds, maybe thousands, of small fish were abandoned on the surface of the sand.
Greg began to scoop them up, his bare hands turning to liquid silver as he ran to the edge of the sea to dump them in. Back and forth he raced, saving as many as his small hands could hold. When he saw how little progress he was making, he tried to scoop the flopping bodies into his sunhat, running to the sea and returning to the shrinking puddles. I helped him for a while, sickened by the hopelessness of the drama we’d become a part of. We could not keep up. There were too many tiny fish. Too big a school, too many stranded.
In exhaustion, and finally acknowledging what I already knew, Greg plunked himself down on the sand. His knees were bent up, his head down. His skin was almost nut brown from the sun and he looked like a sea creature himself.
I heard a curse. “Goddamn,” he said. That tiny, lean boy. He was struck down in defeat. It was a defeat for me, too, because I could not see any way to help him. He’d have been insulted if I had said, “It’s an accident of nature and we have stumbled upon it and we are witness to it and there is nothing more we can do.”
I thought of Okuma-san, who had always been there in the background when I was a young boy. Somewhere near. Instructing, caring. Hovering, the way Uncle Aki hovered over Auntie Aya. What would Okuma-san have done in this situation? He would have allowed Greg the dignity of silence.
It was dark when we turned and made our way back, the living-room light in the trailer acting as a beacon on the cliff to guide us forward. Greg’s narrow heels dug into hard, damp sand, leaving a trail of dogged footprints.
At bedtime, my son, who had been born old, looked up from his pillow and said, “I’m not so sure I want to live in an unjust world.”
To which I had no reply.
The death of the herring did not deter Greg. His love affair with the sea having begun, he became all the more determined to learn about the creatures that live within. Lena and I supplied books and recordings. He began to take tapes to school, sharing songs of the humpback whales. At home he sat in the reading chair, wearing oversized earphones while leafing through his new books and singing heartily along with the whales. In an exercise book he brought home from school, he printed:
When the teacher asked the class to make two lists, one of things they could do and one of things they couldn’t, Greg printed in his book:
THINGS I CAN DO: think, sing, giggle, subtract, swim, love the sea
THINGS I CAN’T DO: fly, juggle, drive, hate the sea
At dinner one evening, he crossed his hands over his chest and declared that in place of his heart were whales and dolphins. That was where he was holding his love.
CHAPTER 22
By the beginning of 1945, the windows at Okuma-san’s had frosted over and we would
