This happened last spring, after a day spent walking the power line right-of-way along the string of morainal hills from Barnstable to Orleans. I had set off that morning at Cumma quid, crossed Yarmouth and Dennis, and did not enter Brewster until late afternoon. I hiked the kettle holes of West Brewster, the high ridges along Setucket, forded the still-icy waters of the narrows where the power lines sweep out grandly over the Mill Ponds, skirted the wasteland of the trailer park along the north shore of Griffiths Pond, climbed the cedar dells of an old farm off Tubman Road and detoured around the fences of the Bassett Wild Animal Farm as a herd of pale, statuesque European deer followed me with their large, silent eyes.
The sun was already setting quickly as I began to descend the steep, circular kettle hole of No Bottom Pond. Its south slope was still snow-covered, the worn path a slick trail of ice. I began to push on consciously now; my goal was to reach the other side of the kettle hole and make a side excursion to the golf course, there to watch the woodcock’s courtship display before it got too dark. The extensive bog areas to the north of the power lines here, and the numerous nearby roughs along the fairways make excellent breeding habitat for these small upland shorebirds – and a perfect spot to watch for their remarkable evening flights.
Woodcocks are not an endangered species by any means, but their presence as a breeding bird on Cape Cod may be as more and more suitable habitat is destroyed. Already some of the roads for a new, mammoth, twelve-hundred-unit condominium project had been bulldozed in. This might be my last chance to listen to these birds here before they were replaced by other birds, the ones that one of the developers had cutely described as ‘empty nesters.’
But fatigue had caught up with me and began to sap my resolve. Even as I slogged and slipped up out of the hole onto the ridge, I found my thoughts turning to food and rest, a pizza at Laurino’s, perhaps even a movie in Orleans if I hurried and didn’t stop to play with birds.
It had begun to turn cold, dark and windy. I looked back, dog-tired now, over the undulating hills behind me. The serpentine course of the day, marked by a linked line of electrical crosses, stretched westward back across the broken moraine toward the horizon, where a red sun, floating on its rim, now began to swim and melt.
I turned and trudged on toward the east, toward the brightening promise of lights and food, the sound of human voices … and then there it was, off to my right, somewhere among a young stand of pines, that unpassionate, almost comical sound that is something between a grunt and an electrical buzzer: peent … peeent. A male woodcock was warming up.
Dropping down quickly, I crouched and waited beneath the lines, the wind beginning to blow harder now, the stars starting to poke through overhead. I waited and listened. Five, ten, twelve, fifteen times the bird peented with agonizing slowness. Soon it would be too dark to see. Come on, come on, I urged – I’m giving up pepperoni and Woody Allen for you.
And then the dark, squat form took off, not rising in its accustomed spiral flight, but staying low, planed down by the wind, giving the whistling flight only. It banked to the east and its breast caught a last glow of russet as it swerved, the squat and long-billed form clearly visible above the trees. I stayed down on my knees, my head bent low, as the bird described a wide, low halo around me, perhaps a hundred fifty yards in diameter, swinging out over the gulf of No Bottom Pond, around to the far edge of the cleared right-of-way, then back across the wires and out over the fairway, never rising more than thirty feet, a trial flight only, finally coming to rest again into the pines where it had begun.
In a few minutes it flew again, but this time, halfway along its arc, something startled it, perhaps an involuntary movement on my part, and it flew off straight into the woods. Now the sun was gone completely. I would not hear its flight song, the woodcock’s ‘true’ song, tonight.
But it was enough. It had provided a kind of needed benediction to the day. I stood up and walked on with all sense of haste removed, no less tired, but settled back into, and so carried on, by the rhythm of the day that I had tracked with so much effort and had nearly thrown away at the end.
Later, a full moon rose and rode along the dark tops of the pine trees, silver-washing the terrain and flooding in through swaths cut through the woods for new subdivision roads, as storm surges wash through cuts in the dunes on the Outer Beach. At intervals I heard the peents of other woodcocks along the right-of-way, responding to the moon as their ghostlike forms catapulted up into a transfigured night.
Along Millstone Road rows of new houses came right up to the power lines. Lights came on in kitchens and living rooms and I could see inside the chromatic flicker of televisions and the forms of people moving about: a woman chopping something at a counter, a family at dinner, a man petting his dog, children squatted on the floor in front of the tube.
And suddenly these familiar sights struck me as terribly strange and totally alien. These are my townspeople, I thought. Many of them I know; some are very dear to me. My ties with them are myriad and irrevocable, and without them my life would be unbearably empty. It was myself I saw through those lighted windows.
I knew that, acknowledged it, accepted it. And yet, for that moment, because of a woodcock seen briefly at sunset on a windy ridge, I stood apart and unconnected with their lives. I was a deer staring in, my head turned, slightly curious, slightly wary, but ultimately unattached and passing on.
I would go on, of course, and come at last to the lights, the food, the voices, even the movie. I would, in short, come inside where, for better or worse, human life is lived. But I kept for a long time that sense of detachment, when our lives seemed suddenly so locked in and humanly introverted, so presumptuous in our unawareness, so selective and partial even in our appreciation of that other life we call natural. I felt it would be easy and rewarding to become a perennial wanderer, a hider by day and a stalker by night, out where lives are more various and open-ended, like the spiralling, upward flight of the star-dancing woodcock.