In which an uninvited creature arrives, refuses to leave, and raises questions I had not scheduled for this decade
I had not intended to skip three days of record. I should note this, and note also that the gap is not due to any crisis of health or spirit but rather to the arrival, on the morning following my last entry, of a young wood stork on my front landing.
A creature of perhaps two seasons, still carrying the dusty brown of immaturity about the crown, with a bald head that had not yet committed fully to its adult ugliness and so occupied that unfortunate middle territory between youth and character that I have observed in other scholars as well as birds. He was standing on one leg in the precise center of my doorstep when I opened the door, and he looked at me with the expression common to wood storks and to students I’ve taught who haven’t completed the assigned reading: blankly, without apology, and with the faint suggestion that the fault lay elsewhere.
I said, “You are not from this part of the marsh.”
He blinked one eye. Then the other. This isn’t, I should clarify, a sign of agreement in wood storks. It is simply what their eyes do.
I said, “I do not take boarders.”
He shifted his weight to the other leg.
I turned and went inside to pour my tea, when I returned he was still there, having relocated approximately four inches to the left in a manner that suggested deliberate accommodation rather than departure. By midmorning I had accepted that he was not leaving. By afternoon I had given him a name: Donat. It is the name of a Roman grammarian of whom I have always been moderately fond, which is to say I respect the work and would not have enjoyed his company.
***
I’ve not had a visitor, especially a persistent one, not one who stayed past the first awkward silence in a very long time. Seven years, if I am precise about it, which I try always to be. Seven years since the last creature elected to sit in the other chair, which I keep not from sentiment but from the mathematical probability that someday someone would need it.
The previous occupant of that chair was an old moorhen named Syllus who came each afternoon for a single autumn and disputed my field observations with the cheerful confidence of someone who’d never kept a field notebook and therefore felt no obligation to accuracy. He died before the cold season came, as moorhens of that age often do, and I wrote four lines about him in the notebook marked “Companions & Interruptions †, Vol. II” and did not dwell. I’m not by nature or by practice, a dweller.
Journal entry:
I’ve placed it, provisionally, under “Phenomena: Domestic.” It is the thinnest folder.I find, sitting here in the early evening with Donat folded into an improbable shape near the cold hearth, he sleeps like a collapsed umbrella, I note his breathing. The specific rhythm of it. The way his chest moves differently than mine, faster, shallower, as if he is always slightly surprised to find himself still alive. I have written half a page of observations on this breathing and I am not certain what category of the catalogue it belongs to.
***
What I know of wood storks, professionally: they are tactile feeders, sweeping open bills through murky water by feel rather than by sight, snapping shut on contact in thirty milliseconds, one of the fastest reflexes in the avian world. They do not need to see the thing to catch it.
I have spent forty-four years developing the opposite approach. I watch, I wait, I observe from a considered distance, I do not reach blindly into dark water. I have always believed this to be the superior method.
Donat caught four fish this morning before I had finished my first cup of tea.
I’m recording this without further comment.
He made a sound this evening that I can’t find in any of my references or notes. Not a call, wood storks are largely silent, one of their more agreeable qualities, but something lower, produced somewhere in the upper chest, a sound less like communication and more like a building settling after a long day. I heard it and felt, before I could apply any analytical framework to the sensation, a loosening in my own chest. As if something in me had been waiting for permission to set down a weight I had not known I was carrying.
I didn’t write this in the field notebook. I am writing it here, in this private record, where I allow myself one degree more of imprecision than the formal journals permit.
There is, I’m beginning to suspect, a category of data that the field notebook cannot hold. Evidence too soft to survive the pressure of categorization. Observations that lose their essential nature the moment you fix them with the pin of language. I’ve always known this theoretically, I have a monograph on the epistemology of felt experience that no one has read, companion piece to the one on proximity, but knowing a thing theoretically and having a young wood stork making sounds in ones study are not the same order of experience.
Journal entry:
Perhaps this is what visitors are for. Not for conversation, not for the exchange of information, not even for the comfort of another presence — though I will not entirely discount that possibility, not tonight — but for the disturbance they create in the settled sediment of one’s habits. A stone dropped in still water. The ripples are the data. The stone goes to the bottom and stays there and is not the point.
Donat has not told me where he came from. He may not know, in any communicable sense. He is young enough that the marsh still looks like a single continuous thing to him, undivided by the territories and histories that make it, to an older eye, into a map of losses.
I envy this. I note that I envy this. I note the noting.
***
Tomorrow I will resume the systematic observations that the past three days were interrupted. The water temperature readings are three days behind. There is an osprey nest on the eastern snag that I’ve been monitoring‡ and whose status I no longer know. The lily study is in a critical phase. I’ve responsibilities to the record.
Tonight, however, I find I’m content to sit here with the candle burning low and the rain beginning its second week and a wood stork making his settling in sounds in the corner of my room, and to write in this imprecise journal the imprecise truth: that something in this room is different than it was six days ago, and I do not yet have a drawer for it, and I’m cautiously, provisionally, and subject to revision not sorry that it came.
____________________
† “Companions & Interruptions, Vol. I” covers years one through twenty-nine of residency. It contains eleven entries. Vol. II, begun in year thirty, contains three. The disparity is not, as one might assume, a sign of increasing solitude. It is a sign of increasing standards.
‡ The osprey nest, checked the following morning: intact, two eggs present, the female giving me the look she reserves for my approach, which I have documented as “tolerant contempt.” We have an understanding.