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Authors: Howard Norman

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TO BECOME A BIRD OF THE SEA AND CLIFFS
Now here was an unusual sentence: “I've decided to become a bird of the sea and cliffs.”
Calendar-wise it is difficult to recall just when Helen first introduced the subject of reincarnation into our conversations. I think it may have been the first week of October, a little more than a month after our first meeting. However, once such a thing is mentioned, from that moment on it becomes a presence if not a preoccupation. It was for me, at least;
Helen is thinking about this.
We had walked out to Cape Merry, the rocky promontory at the mouth of the Churchill River. From this point you can scan the river, look out at old Fort Prince of Wales, or out over Hudson Bay itself. The tides are wild, the waters of sea and river commingle turbulently and, especially in summer, there's an impressive exhibit of wildlife. In June, for instance, after the ice-break-up flotillas of ducks and loons drift in and out of the tides. Also, pods of seals and beluga whales arrive to feed on schools of the small fish called capelin. Squalling flocks of terns, gulls, and jaegers wheel above the whales and ride on icebergs and ice floes. The river and bay, as early nineteenth-century naturalist Robert T. Capmore wrote, “constantly reconfigure their surface,”
breaking into jigsaw pieces of ice, one of the world's great floating sculpture gardens. In summer, when the sun sets around 10 or 10:30 p.m., it is an especially dramatic time to watch birds and whales at Cape Merry. (Since 1977 I have taken photographs at midnight or 1 a.m., though, at its darkest, the light is crepuscular.)
At 1 p.m. we had met, Helen and I, at the Churchill Hotel and set out walking with an Inuit man named George—I never learned his last name—driving a dilapidated dark green pickup behind us. Helen, it turned out, had arranged this, “in case I get too tired.” George had a rifle in the front seat with him; one had to be alert for polar bears. Helen had paid George twenty dollars Canadian. He kept about thirty yards or so behind us. “Today—at least right now,” Helen said, “I have an unusual amount of stamina and want to take the longest walk possible.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“If you get eaten by a bear, who should I telephone with the news?”
“Come to think of it, nobody.”
“That would simplify things.”
Cape Merry is about three kilometers from Churchill proper. We walked northwest on Kelsey Boulevard—the main street—then out toward the grain elevators. At the outskirts of town we turned left over the railroad tracks, the wind picked up and there was the slightest confetti of snow as we took the road to the area known as the Flats. The spare, makeshift houses, the poverty was striking, and could only be somewhat sentimentally dignified by a phrase such as explorer-bird-artist Mark Catesby used in the late
1700s to describe a seaboard shanty community, “perhaps a place where history hoards its cast-aways, houses its most terrible and beautiful secrets.” We looked out over the stretching mudflats. Scarce few birds remained past late August or early September, but, happily, we caught a glimpse of a snow bunting plus lots of common ravens and herring gulls. In another moment we saw two dunlins, which surprised us, because we had read that dunlins were a rare sighting this late in the year. “I know how they feel,” Helen said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, everybody else has gone off, haven't they? But you just can't quite get yourself to leave.”
“There's no reason you couldn't stretch your stay in Churchill another few weeks, is there?”
“That wasn't what I was talking about, really. But no matter.”
Then we saw a group of five or six common eiders, perhaps slightly more likely to be seen in early October, though most eiders had already left. With each bird sighted Helen checked her watch, marked the time, and noted the place in a small notebook.
Gazing at the mudflats empty, for the most part, of birds, Helen quoted Tabuboku Shinoda, a thirteenth-century artist she was particularly fond of, who had lived in a small house by the sea:
I have been drawing shorebirds. Each evening when they fly off to their secret haunts for the night, I am not merely a little forlorn. The cries of the birds I have drawn echo in my heart, as though my heart was the beach itself.
George accidentally honked the truck's horn, a raspy blurt, which startled us. When we looked back he shrugged apologetically, his wide red-brown face, unkempt hair, exaggerated smile like a mischievous child's. “Just wanted you to know where I was, eh?” he shouted out the driver's-side window. Then he tapped the horn a moment, rusty erratic beeps.
Then, an unexpected confession. “How George just honked the horn like that,” Helen said. “It sounded like Morse code, and my mind went back to the movie we saw the other night. The one we had our little disagreement about. You can't help how your mind connects things up, can you? So just now I was thinking how that one woman character—I can't remember her name—said that her heart felt like it was shouting ‘Mayday! Mayday!'”
“I went to a psychiatrist once, Helen, and she called that a panic attack.”
“That's not it exactly—what I'm feeling. But it has qualities of it, I suppose. I think I might have just about had enough of this bleak landscape, beautiful as it is. You know what a French phrase for melancholy is?”
“What?”
“Something like ‘black butterflies.' A dark—
fluttering
. Interesting phrase, I think.”
I did not know how to follow up on this so I said, “This is a nice little walking tour, isn't it?”
“I'm enjoying it,” she said.
Just past the railroad tracks we reached the first of the Granary Ponds, which had ice along its margins. The Granary Ponds comprised a sequence of shallow pools with muddy borders and erratic placement and configurations of
boulders, and are a fine place in season to see arctic terns, Bonaparte's gulls, and—in early June—Sabine's gulls. During migration season the ponds are absolutely a cacophony, a cornucopia of birds—ducks, for instance: northern pintail, green-winged teal, American wigeon, northern shoveler, greater scaup, old-squaw, mallard, black duck, gadwall, bluewinged teal, lesser scaup.
However, this was October and turning out to be a day of darkening clouds and temperature drop and on occasion gusting snow, when it had begun with sharp sunlight glinting off the water.
“I've done my homework,” Helen said, “and I bet you haven't.”
“How so?”
“Can you name the local shorebirds—even though we aren't going to see them for the most part?”
“I can name a few.”
Helen closed her eyes and recited, “semipalmated plover, Hudsonian godwit, yellowlegs—no, that would be lesser yellowlegs, ruddy turnstone, red-necked phalarope, snipe, short-billed dowitcher—”
“I get the hint, Helen.”
“—dunlin, semipalmated and least and stilt sandpipers. Those are the most common.”
“Is it your experience that bird-watchers can be the most competitive people on earth?”
“I'm not competitive,” Helen said. “With you, for instance, how challenging might that be? No, I'm just saying the names out loud for enjoyment's sake.”
“Guess what? You forgot the buff-breasted sandpiper.”
“That is really what you would call ‘uncommon' up here. I was naming
common
shorebirds.”
At the end of the first Granary pond, we turned left and followed a road back up to the railroad tracks leading out to the docks. The river was moving rapidly here, great, shifting eddies. “I've been here in summer, you know,” Helen said.
“You mentioned that. I'd like to come back some summer, too. Maybe next summer.”
Helen winced at my obtuse reference to the future, then, generously, somewhat made light of it. “Well, try to find me in the afterlife and give me a report.”
“What's French for ‘Sorry I said that'?”
“Anyway, as for birds, the summer here is quite remarkable.”
“I have a feeling you won't have to refer to your note-books.”
“Parasitic jaegers, arctic loons …”
We started to laugh, and Helen said, “And I once saw a Ross's gull out here.”
“Maybe a once-in-a-lifetime thing, for most bird-watchers, I bet.”
“Well, I have this
goddamn
disease! So it might have to be.”
“Have you been in a lot of pain lately?”
“I've just been thinking—”
Helen stared at the river through binoculars and now preferred to talk while studying the river.
“Thinking about what?” I said.
“Thinking about … you know, what comes next. Is there anything
next.
Which I do not believe in, exactly. Reincarnation. But I have begun to think about it quite a
bit. To see if I might find it useful to believe in. You know—what is the right word?
Engaging
. Could I locate myself in the whole concept of it.”
“Nothing to lose by thinking about it.”
“Don't worry, it's not all black butterflies. It's just—what's the phrase you Americans use all the time? Trying to ‘get my mind around it.'”
“You look tired. Let's go back. It's getting cold, let's go back.”
Helen kept looking through the binoculars.
“In a minute,” she said.
The wind whipped in from the river; I regretted that we hadn't worn scarves. “See anything out there?” I said.
“A duck of some sort, I think. Stayed late, stayed late.”
Five or so minutes of silence; I looked back to see George smoking a cigarette as he leaned against the truck. His rifle was racked against the rear window.
“Birds—
a
bird,” Helen said, “strikes me as an option. Becoming a bird seems a good choice, don't you think?”
“I don't have much understanding of it, Helen. But I'm not sure reincarnation is a matter of
choice.
”
 
“I've studied up on this. I'll study up a great deal more. But so far, I like Buddhist notions of predestination—I like that a lot. But, still, I can't accept traditional systems of belief. In reincarnation, I mean. You won't know anyway, will you, if you were right? Because if you become a cow or a tree, you won't have human memory. So—this is my point—why not choose? Choose what you'd most prefer to become.”
“Well, I have a lot of days as a human being I'd like to
forget,” I said. “And I mean, now, while I'm still here on earth!”
“That's quite funny, I think,” Helen said.
There was a sudden ferocious gusting of wind and in unison, like some kind of evolutionary survival tactic, ten or eleven ravens about twenty meters downriver each bent slightly forward, almost as if nailing their beaks into the hard ground, an impressive balletic display of synchronicity. They held that position for a good two minutes, then flapped and squawked off every which way.
“What a weird dream I had last night,” Helen said.
“Tell me walking back to the truck.”
“It was from a God's-eye view—or, maybe, a bird's-eye view. And all it consisted of was my damn typewriter on the ground. In the snow. And that was it. And then I woke up.”
“Maybe you'd already—”
“—become a bird. I know. I've thought of that. But I'm not good at interpreting dreams, you know. I can't somehow place trust in it. That's just me. But I'd allow for that interpretation, sure, why not?”
“No sense of which bird, though.”
“I think I've decided.”
“Decided which bird you were in the dream, or decided which bird you'd like to become?”
We got to the truck. George climbed into the truck and started the engine and waited. “I've decided to become a bird of … the sea … and cliffs.”
Helen slid in next to George. “You know,” I said, “I think I'm going to walk back.”
“Want the rifle?” George said.
“No thanks.”
“Well you'll be okay—no worry,” George said. “But go on, take the rifle. Leave it out front your door at the motel, eh?”
I took the rifle in hand. “See you at supper,” I said to Helen.
“At least take the binoculars,” Helen said, handing them to me. “See what you can see.”
No rhyme or reason to it, but along the railroad tracks I took a single potshot at a lone raven; it was a halfhearted shot, I missed widely, the raven scattered off as if riding on the echo. Out over the river.
 
 
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