Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs (23 page)

The whole incident just sort of dampened that whole together-in-nature feeling.

I
T WAS A
cold and blustery November day, colder than it had been, but not as cold as it was going to be. The sky was gray. The trees,
which had clung stubbornly to their leaves that fall, had suddenly thrown them all off—some still green—so that the trunks
wore ground skirts of wilted gray-green leaves, thick and in nearly perfect circles as if they all dropped straight down.
Everything was changing, making rushed and ill-prepared concessions to winter. In the ditches alongside the roads wildflowers
chilled on their stalks as if they had expected either more warning or more time.

There is something in that weather, which I can feel but I can’t describe, but it whispers to sandhill cranes, “go—
fly
.” Once purely by luck I stood on the edge of a stubbled cornfield and watched several hundred cranes dance to each other,
call back and forth to each other, jump into flight and rise up into the crisp November air as if they were being sucked into
the sky by invisible tornadoes, still calling down to their flock mates as they spiraled up into the thermals. I had no idea
what I was watching until I read about their migration rituals later in a book. But I saw it. And I remember the air. Crisp.
Sharp. Something changing.

We chose that particular day to drive to Jasper Pulaski State Fish and Wildlife Area in Indiana to watch the cranes stage.
None of us had been there, but when I was single I made the transition from fall to winter every year chasing cranes, and
now that I am with my Beloved I try to drag her to at least one crane watch every fall. Our friend Rae is addicted to loving
anything that won’t love her, so of course the cranes fascinate her, and to finish the foursome we invited my dad. I hadn’t
seen much of my dad that summer or fall. I’d even managed to miss the annual fishing trip on his boat on Lake Michigan, and
I was beginning to feel like the prodigal daughter.

I love my father. I sometimes miss the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful mangod of our childhood, the one we were all
destined to stand before as soon as he came home: but the woman who created him is gone, and the magic left with the magician.
The man she left naked and unprotected in her leaving is a kind man, a gentle, caring man who does not pry and tries not to
judge. There is something childlike about him that fascinates and amazes me. He has the power to see mystery in ants, art
in the stones in a river. He carries with him always a certain sadness or guilt that he was not the father we should have
had. Perhaps all parents carry that. I could have been a better daughter, myself. I could have paid some small attention to
the man who had always been there before I reached my mid-twenties and my mother got sick and fell, pulling down the elaborate
curtain she had built around him. Sometime during his life he could have learned to talk. But I am the daughter that I am
and he is the father he is. The silence will hold an infinite number of the things that we could have said.

I have taken him on crane watches before, but he never even asked why we were leaving for a dusk event at ten o’clock in the
morning. We left early because, first of all, we needed to eat breakfast. We stopped in Constantine at a little diner Rae
knew about. Somewhere in Rae’s past there is a restaurant, The Mother Restaurant, some seminal experience in dining. She has
eaten at least once in every restaurant in the three nearest counties, she’s the first to know when they rise up and the first
to know when they fall, she knows who owns them, who runs them, who works there, and—of course—if the food is any good. Myself,
I like to eat, but it goes beyond the food for Rae. She is also a truly good cook in her own right. I just follow her around,
eating where she tells me to eat. I’ve only had one bad meal eating with Rae and it took over a year to get the ban lifted
on that place. Don’t feed Rae a bad rib tip.

As we were walking back to the car my dad said, “I used to fish in that dam.” This apparently happened when he was a kid.

“What did you catch?” I asked, but he shrugged. “Do you want to go down and look at the water?” I pursued. We have a long
history of walking down to look at the water.

“Na,” he said, and got into the car.

Who took you fishing in Constantine? Did you have fun? Did you spend all day, or were you on the way somewhere, or … ?
Sometimes he seems so alone that I want to connect him with someone. If not me, then someone in his past. Someone. I never
know if he is lonely or if that is just how I see him. But somewhere I learned to stop asking my father an endless series
of questions—probably for the wrong reasons now, a lesson too well learned and habitually misapplied. I “talked too much”
as a child. Sometimes my heart tells me my father talked too much when he was a child. I learned to ignore that message, to
go away in my head and write stories for a more appreciative audience. My father learned to stop talking. And perhaps that’s
not true at all. I think it is. I think my father paid dearly to become the man his parents wanted him to be. But he did it.
My father has always done what was expected of him.

Perhaps I feel perpetual guilt around my father because I did not become the daughter he wanted me to be. I don’t even know
what he wanted me to be. Probably not a lesbian. I’m guessing not a writer who twists his life to her own point of view and
displays it like a movie on a theater wall for all of her friends to see. I could have grown up, married a decent man, had
a couple of kids and quit pushing him into experiences he never imagined would touch his life. Perhaps he doesn’t feel that
way at all. When we were kids, our whole family went over to his parents’ farm almost every weekend. After his father died,
our family— and his sisters’ families—had breakfast with Grandma nearly every Sunday morning. This outing to see the cranes
is the first breakfast he and I have had together in over six months.

But first we took him shopping.

The Jasper Pulaski State Fish and Wildlife Area is about forty miles south of Michigan City, Indiana. Michigan City may be
famous for any number of reasons, but the people I know go there to shop at the outlet mall or gamble on the floating casino.
It used to be that the boat actually left the dock and floated out onto Lake Michigan, but it docked permanently a few years
ago. As soon as Rae realized we were going anywhere near Michigan City she made plans to stop at the outlet mall and replenish
her jeans. She needs four pairs of jeans to live comfortably: wear and tear had taken her favorites and wounded another pair.

My father does not shop. He’s a good sport—he would probably do anything we suggested, maintaining a pleasant demeanor as
long as he possibly could—but I could tell by watching him that spending a day buying damaged or outdated goods was something
of a mystery to him. The last I knew he bought his jeans at a truck stop because he stopped there to eat and the jeans were
on the rack on the way out. He followed us around the mall and eventually bought a CD by Faith Hill, which is more than he
buys on most shopping trips.

Then—since we were there and since we still had some time to kill before we needed to get to the park—we went to the gambling
boat. My Beloved, suspecting he had never been gambling, thought it would be an adventure for him.

On our way to the boat, however, we took a wrong turn and wound up in the marina, which let us discover the pier and the beach.
In November the only takers at the volleyball nets were teams of seagulls. Angry white-capped waves rolled up to take the
shore. Still, part of my father will always be in the winds over Lake Michigan. I sensed him grow taller, stronger as he and
I ambled down the beach. We both pulled out cameras and vied for shots of the lighthouse. Impossible shots from too far away,
to match a hundred more old lighthouse shots buried in drawers at home, but we are water people. Displayed prominently on
his wall at home, nestled in among posed shots of his children, is the photograph I took of his favorite fishing spot, buoy
#2 in Tawas Bay, Lake Huron. It has never seemed odd to any of us to share our wall of honor with a buoy.

This love of water, however, does not necessarily extend to floating gambling.

I believe my father is the founder and true believer of the Too Good to Be True Club. I remember as a kid excitedly showing
him that we had just won a $1,000,000 from Publishers Clearing House—all we had to do was send a card back and we would be
rich. It became immediately clear to me that my father did not believe we even deserved to get something for nothing, much
less that we were likely to soon. The con artists who prey on the elderly would have their work cut out for them, trying to
part my father from his money. As we walked into the jangling cacophony of the riverboat he stayed close enough to my elbow
to all but touch me. I could see his eyes traveling the room, a stranger on the wrong planet, surrounded by people who deliberately
risked losing money for entertainment. I didn’t even try to get him to gamble his own money, but I thought if I put mine in,
he might play for a while. We started with the dollar machines, but I realized almost immediately that I was never going to
be able to keep my father actively throwing good money after bad for an hour, so we traded down to quarter machines and then
to nickel machines. I gave him a wad of change and he gambled until he lost it. But then he wasn’t interested in losing any
more of my money and he certainly wasn’t going to waste his own.

I hunted up my friends and advised them we had exhausted this entertainment adventure. I still had three one-dollar tokens
in my hand, so instead of cashing them in I figured I might as well gamble them away. This turned out to be problematic because—
when I made it down to the last one—that one won five more, and a few spins later I had fifteen one-dollar tokens.

I thought to myself, “You know—at this rate. …”

But I am my father’s daughter, and I don’t believe I’ll ever make my fortune gambling on a riverboat, however tempting the
dream may be. I cashed out.

The Jasper Pulaski State Fish and Wildlife Area is in the center of what was once the Kankakee Marsh. Over a million acres
of wetlands. Around the turn of the century, mankind, in our infinite wisdom, drained it and turned into farmland. I know
almost nothing about the area except that it is the largest staging area for migrating sandhill cranes east of the Mississippi
River. I was more familiar with the Phyllis Haehnle Sanctuary in Jackson County, Michigan, and the nearby Baker Sanctuary
in Calhoun County. Haehnle is the largest staging area in Michigan. It is the first place where I watched cranes fly in from
the fields in the evening. A large wetland all but inaccessible to human beings, it can be seen from the side of a hill about
half a mile from the cranes themselves. When the weather is just right and there aren’t many people around, you can sit on
the bench on the hill at Haehnle and four or five cranes will fly in about twelve feet over your head. You can hear the wind
in their wings. This is as close as I have ever come to experiencing true spirituality.

Whenever I talked to veteran birders about Haehnle, they would say, “You have to go to Jasper Pulaski.”

Haehnle is a sanctuary owned by Audubon and it caters to preservationists: Jasper Pulaski feels more like a hunting camp.
Visitors are reminded more than once that the fine viewing tower, as well as the land itself, was built and is maintained
through revenue from sportsmen. One senses the controversy over killing for sport is never far from the surface at Jasper
Pulaski.

The viewing area is a huge tower where visitors can stand to look over several hundred acres of green field. We arrived in
the late afternoon. We had seen perhaps eleven cranes feeding in the fields on the way to the wildlife area and I was beginning
to feel depressed. We had spent the whole day trying to get there, and there was not much to suggest that any cranes were
anywhere near us. When we got there, there were perhaps a hundred cranes standing at the very back of the field, near what
appeared to be a ditch or what my people would call a “crick.”

Not that far from the viewing tower there was one juvenile crane, all alone. The same conversation floated along the tower
from one group of people to the next.
He’s been there all day—he never went out to the field … He’s probably sick … I wonder where his parents are … I wonder what’s
wrong with him? I wonder if his parents will come back for him … ?

Overhead a string of about eleven cranes flew in, dropped their feet, arched their wings, and floated to the ground like milkweed
seeds.

As the sun began to set its residual warmth began to fade with the light. Ribbons of cranes appeared over the treetops and
drifted in from the east, the north, the west and the south. Sometimes as many as two or three hundred cranes would be visible
in the sky at once, strung along in groups of two to fifty, all headed for the field. Their call, prehistoric and resonating,
cut through the air. The cranes on the ground would call back, as if they were schoolchildren calling to their friends, and
more cranes appeared over the horizon …

As more and more cranes flew in, the juvenile would peep to them, as if looking for his parents. Occasionally a group would
land not far away from him, stalking Egyptian-like over to check him out, but then they would eventually stalk away … He should
have been feeding, storing up energy to trip. Within days his companions would leave for Florida, flying as much as five hundred
miles a day, and he would have to be able to keep up or he would perish. The green field stretched out ahead of me steadily
filled in with sandhills until it became a sea of gray.

I have never been completely at ease with nature. I understand that if each infant survived the planet would be neck-deep
in grasshoppers the first summer. I understand that the strong survive and the weak perish for the good of the species. I
understand that the survival of the whole is infinitely more important than the fate of one individual. Still, the randomness
of it all disturbs me. Like car-shattered deer on the side of the highway, there are reminders everywhere that this immensely
complex and beautiful web of life that surrounds us is utterly indifferent to the fate of any single individual in it. Like
the sick juvenile crane, they become absorbed in the flock around them. I lost him eventually, and when I worried about him
to my Beloved she said, “Oh, I saw his parents fly in and beak him around the ears and he went off with them—he’s fine.” But
will he be strong enough to fly?