Featured in the New Yorker, October 5, 1981
Letter from a woman in Pennsylvania:
On the first day that really felt like fall, Roger and I biked to a wildlife sanctuary in our community. Roger gets melancholy over autumn, and, besides, we had moved from a sixty-acre farm only a few months before, so the idea of going to a wildlife sanctuary in the middle of town at the beginning of fall had a promise of sadness in it. But we enjoyed our expedition.
At the entrance to the sanctuary, which covered seventy-five acres, a sign told us to leave pets at home and to “touch, not take.” We picked up a brochure that said, “The silent observer sees the most. Take only memories, leave only footprints. Stay on the trails.” It listed a woods-edge trail along the local river, an orchard trail, a tree-edge trail, and a woodland loop, offering varying “habitat experiences of stream, field, thicket, and forest.” Most of the trails were carpeted with wood chips. Along the orchard trail, the rotting apples on the ground smelled like vinegar. The trail led to the bird blind, a three-sided six-foot barrier of woven strips of wood, painted red, with openings to look through at several feeders. People had written on the bird blind “You saw somethin’ else didncha?” and “I’m Free.” On a clipboard you could record the birds you saw at the feeders. Billy Zaboroush had seen a pigeon three days before. I watched for pheasants and wild turkeys, but the only creatures I got a good look at were some chipmunks skittering about and a sparrow—whose markings resembled a chipmunk’s—nibbling leaves and cheeping like a day-old chick. Roger was sitting on a bench reading a book called “Two Acre Eden,” which he had brought along. He whispered to me that the book said you can try to keep rabbits out of your garden by putting spices on the vegetables but that in fact rabbits are crazy about cabbages sprinkled with chili powder. Around us, the invisible birds were an orchestra tuning up: there was crying and trilling and clucking, led by the teasing mew of a catbird. Now and then, we heard the huff and swish of horses in the shade of the apple trees. When I spotted a robin, Roger told me that his book said a robin gets so singleminded about wild cherries that once it spies one it will fly through a cat’s whiskers, if necessary, to get it. All at once, I caught sight of a bird that I thought was an extinct heath hen, but it flew away before I could even guess its real identity. Heath hens had been on my mind since I saw an ad in the “Antiques” classifieds in the Times for “extinct heath hens, male and female, mounted on extinct American cedar ($250,000. Call Tom).” I wrote down “Robin” under Billy Zaboroush’s pigeon.
We followed the thicket path through reddened poison ivy and raspberries. Everything had a dried-up look about it except a village of white mushrooms in the path. The brightest thing in the woods was the scattered butter-yellow leaves of the tulip poplar. On many trees, patches of leaves had turned brown. We found a large wire cage, its door swinging open. Inside were two hutches, a large feeding pan, and a climbing branch. Outside, on the doorstep, was a hard, yellow cucumber. Fifty feet away, we stumbled across these small gravestones: “Peckie, Loveable and Playful,” “Buster, A Cuddly Lovable Puppy,” “Fritz, Rebellious Puppy, Lovable Dog,” and “Bozo, A Lovable Rogue.” I suddenly thought how odd it was that we had to go to a special place, a sanctuary—a refuge, with a sort of religious connotation—for a ritual farewell to nature, because in becoming town dwellers we had already said goodbye.
And then, just down the wood-chip path, we made an unexpected find—bladdernut shrubs. These gracefully bending little trees, up to eight feet high, lined the path, arching to meet overhead. We seemed to be on an endless trail of bladdernut shrubs (Staphylea trifolia), all waving reluctant goodbyes. Their clusters of seed packets—some green, some crisp brown—were hidden beneath the highest leaves. The green pods made me think of limp, wrinkled party balloons that have hung too long, and the brown withered ones were almost as tough as cocoons. The seeds rattled inside like a baby’s rattle. The seeds were the size and color of lentils but more spherical, and some of them peeped out—surprised eyes.
The hanging “cocoons” made me think of butterflies and caterpillars, and I thought that perhaps this grove was the showcase of the sanctuary, a kind of special exhibit of nature’s metamorphosis, a hopeful but ironic insistence that, despite appearances, not everything was going to end up in graveyards, parks, or zoos.
As we biked home, a gust of wind pushed a dried leaf alongside me for half a block.