The Snow Geese (14 page)

‘Look,’ Rollin said, stopping me with his right arm.

Three bald eagles were standing on the ice. They stood absolutely still. We watched them through binoculars. I saw, close up, the white head, blackish body, heavy yellow bill; the yellow feet and ankles; the severe eyes.

‘Not those,’ Rollin whispered. ‘Look behind them.’

I looked. Between fifteen and twenty bald eagles were perching in a dead cottonwood at the edge of the floodwater lake. The tree resembled a candelabra, the eagles’ white heads like flames on thick black candles. One eagle took flight from a limb of the tree. The branch juddered. The eagle fanned its white tail as it banked away from the cottonwood, gaining height. Further away, beyond the cottonwood, more eagles were gliding in circles, lifted on a thermal column: a kettle of twenty or thirty birds soaring without effort or fluster, in carousels, turning and turning on the updraft.

‘Isn’t that something?’ Rollin said quietly. ‘Aren’t those the grandest birds?’

*

T
HE CONTENTS OF MY BAGS
began to colonize the white motel room. Bird books and papers piled up on the desk, among them a copy of
The Snow Goose
, with my grandmother’s initials pencilled inside the front cover, alongside a date: October, 1942. My father had found it among his books and left it on my bed in the dressing-room towards the end of my long stay at home. The red-tailed hawk’s feather that Eleanor had handed to me beneath the radio mast lay flat like a bookmark between the covers of
The Snow Goose
. My possessions were beginning to breach the anonymity of the white room. Books and papers on the desk, my clothes on the floor, the room becoming familiar in spite of its blankness. Standing in the corridor, holding my room key, I knew what to expect when I opened the door: the black television, the La-Z-Boy, the two glasses standing rims-down on the red tray. I knew where to feel for a switch on the neck of the bedside lamp, as a nurse knows where to feel for a pulse. I could find my way around the room in the dark.

Each morning I drove the Topaz north to Sand Lake. I walked and watched birds, sometimes with Michael or Rollin for company. But at night, in the motel, I became anxious. I’d been away for a month now, chasing geese. There were people I missed. I felt the allure of familiar scenes, the pendulum of my impulses swinging back again, swinging back from what was new and undiscovered towards all that was known, named, remembered, understood. I was lonely in the white room. For the first time I felt frustrated by the journey to which I’d committed myself. On maps, the flight of snow geese from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson Bay and Baffin Island was a flawless, unbroken arc, the curve of time from one season to another. But the reality was different – not a smooth, continuous passage from here to there, but a stop-start, stage-by-stage edging towards the north, with geese flying from one resting area to the next, proceeding only as far as the weather would allow. I had attached myself to the birds. I couldn’t move on until the birds moved on, and the birds couldn’t move on without the spring.

One night, I took the Gideon bible from the bedside table and leaned back in the La-Z-Boy. Browsing aimlessly, I found that time after time the bible fell open at the same place, in
Psalms
. I looked closely. Someone had torn out a page. Page 617–618 was missing. Psalm 23 was missing. I wondered who had torn the page from the Gideon bible. The most famous of the psalms: ‘The Lord is my shepherd: therefore can I lack nothing.’ What in those verses had been so important to a previous occupant of this square white room? Or had someone, when using the telephone, simply reached out for any piece of paper on which he or she could scrawl a message? The missing page struck me with particular force, because only a few months before, I had copied the last verse of the psalm into a notebook: ‘But thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.’ It had occurred to me how often the authors of scripture depict God as a house or shelter in which one might dwell, as if faith were itself a home, affording all the protection, comfort, steadiness and sense of belonging that home implies – as if the need for God were homesickness in paraphrase.

Homesickness. I’d never thought myself prone to homesickness. Even when I was eight years old and first going to boarding school, I hadn’t been especially homesick. There was too much of the
new
to keep you distracted, to keep the mind off the charms and comforts of home. But I can remember how excitement mounted in the last days of term, how the mood picked up, our senses whetted by the imminence of return, so that when Mr Faulkner read us
The Snow Goose
(his long legs crossed at the ankles, the school’s large white clock just visible through the high windows, like a full moon) you could feel a charged, febrile restlessness in the classroom, a quickening like static electricity. It was invigorating, the prospect of going home; it actually gave you energy. We whispered, fidgeted, passed notes, grated our chair legs on the wooden floor. But Mr Faulkner lost himself in the Great Marsh. He didn’t seem to notice when the electric bell rang the end of a period. He kept on reading, persisting to the end of one paragraph, then another. He went on reading about Rhayader, the abandoned lighthouse, the retreat from Dunkirk and the migrations of geese, until the hubbub and clatter forced him to concede, and he marked his place with a tasselled bookmark, stowed the book in his ragged leather briefcase, and told us, wearily, we could go.

We could go. With this, Mr Faulkner acknowledged our restlessness and signalled release. But that restlessness was nothing compared to the longing I experienced when I fell ill. In hospital, after Christmas, the desire to go home was more powerful even than the desire to be well. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish one desire from the other. I waited for the doctors to tell me I could go home. Whenever doctors came into the ward, even doctors I’d never seen before (
anyone
in a white coat, with the pincer earpieces of a stethoscope protruding from a front pocket), my hopes lifted. I thought,
You are going to tell me I can go home
. And when, finally, my mother and father drove me back to the ironstone house, after dark, with a cushion tucked in under the seatbelt strap to guard the wound in my abdomen, I felt the grip of my anxieties loosen, I felt calm and lightened, as if I’d just been handed a reprieve.

In 1688, observing that homesickness lacked a medical designation, a physician from Mühlhausen named Johannes Hofer proposed that it should be known by the term
nostalgia
, which he had derived from the Greek words
nostos
, meaning ‘return’, and
algos
, meaning ‘suffering’ – ‘so that thus far it is possible from the force of the sound
Nostalgia
to define the sad mood originating from the desire to return to one’s native land’. For Hofer, homesickness was a serious disease whose symptoms were ‘continued sadness, meditation only on the Fatherland, disturbed sleep either wakeful or continuous, decrease of strength, hunger, thirst, senses diminished, and cares or even palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, also stupidity of the mind – attending to nothing hardly, other than an idea of the Fatherland.’

As an illustration, Hofer described the case of ‘a certain country girl’ who was taken to hospital after a fall. ‘She lay prostrate,’ he reported, ‘without consciousness or movement for several days.’ When the girl came to, finding herself ‘handled about among the wrangling and querulous old women’, she promptly fell victim to homesickness. She refused to eat, spitting out food and medicines. ‘Especially,’ wrote Hofer, ‘she wailed frequently, groaning nothing else than “
Ich will heim; Ich will heim
,” nor responding anything else to questions other than this same “
Ich will heim
.” Finally, therefore, her parents allowed that she be brought home, terribly weak, where within a few days she got wholly well, entirely without the aid of medicine.’

Hofer saw that homesickness was an individual’s response to a double challenge, a reaction not just to the loss of things you loved or took for granted in your old environment, but also to the strangeness of things you encountered in the new – ‘the changed manners of living’, the foreign climate, the food, ‘and various other troublesome accidents’. As far as treatment was concerned, Hofer stressed the importance of keeping the mind occupied by something other than home – the need for companions ‘by whom the imagination of the patient is distracted from that persistent idea’. In addition, he recommended cephalicum, mercury, opium, oil of hyoscyamus, purging pills, diaphoretic and stomachic mixtures, external cephalic balsams, and internal hypnotic emulsions to ease the sufferer’s perpetual worries and spread a sense of warmth.

Above all, hope of returning home should be given. And if these measures had no effect, Hofer said that ‘the patient should be taken away however weak and feeble, without delay, whether by a travelling carriage with four wheels, or by sedan chair, or by any other means. For certainly up to this time it has been proved by many examples that all those thus sent away had become convalescent either in the journey itself or immediately after the return to the native land; and on the contrary, many for whom means were lacking for a return to the native land, had gradually, with spirits exhausted, breathed out their life, and others had even fallen into delirium and finally mania itself.’

When Hofer’s thesis was first published, it was widely believed that nostalgia only afflicted the Swiss. In German the condition was known as
Schweizerkrankheit
– the Swiss disease. In 1705, the Swiss physician J. J. Scheuchzer attributed nostalgia to the increase in atmospheric pressure experienced by these mountain-dwellers whenever they descended to the lowlands. Scheuchzer recommended that sufferers should be encouraged to return home immediately. If that were not possible, they should be sure to climb a nearby mountain or tower.

As more reports emerged, the idea that only the Swiss were susceptible to nostalgia was gradually discredited. A footnote added to a 1779 edition of Hofer’s thesis observed: ‘The Scots, particularly the Highlanders, are also frequently assailed by homesickness, and the sound of the bagpipes which is very common among them can suddenly arouse this condition.’ In a 1975 paper, ‘Nostalgia: a “forgotten” psychological disorder’, George Rosen refers to a treatise on military medicine published in 1754 by De Meyserey, physician-in-ordinary to the king of France, formerly a doctor in the royal armies in Italy and Germany. De Meyserey, observing how often nostalgia was brought on by tedium or vexations, emphasized the importance of keeping any soldier who showed signs of homesickness busy, diverted, occupied by tasks or vigorous activity. He recommended medications that would allow the blood and humours to circulate more easily. And, like Hofer, he insisted that, if these measures were not successful, the nostalgic patient should be allowed to go home, or at least be given hope of returning home.

It seems strange that nostalgia should have been so uniquely associated with the Swiss, when one of the founding works of European literature depicted so vividly the nostalgia of a Greek. When the reader of Homer’s
Odyssey
first encounters Odysseus on Calypso’s island, he is exhibiting symptoms which Hofer or De Meyserey would quickly recognize: sitting alone on a headland, gazing out over the sea, ‘wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish’, pining for Ithaca – his loved ones, his high-roofed house, his native land. He spends his nights with Calypso, his days alone, sitting on the shore, ‘weeping for his foiled journey home’. Later, he addresses those gathered in the hall of King Alcinous:

The
Odyssey
is only one of a whole collection of ancient Greek stories (the
Nostoi
, or ‘Returns’) which describe the difficult journeys of a character or group of characters back to their homeland, especially the return of Greek heroes from Troy. These stories endure because the pleading rings true: the reader understands the strength of the longing for home, and appreciates the deep affront of anything that foils or obstructs the journey back. ‘Sunny Ithaca is my home,’ Odysseus tells King Alcinous.

*

A
T
S
AND
L
AKE
, snow geese had gathered on the ice in a great assembly. Even Michael was bewildered: he’d never seen anything like it.

‘Two hundred thousand geese,’ he said. ‘More even. Two hundred and fifty thousand.’

We stood at the edge of the lake. Small groups of Canada geese kept to the gold fringe of cattail and phrags. The ice was covered with snow geese: a thick-sown crop of white necks, right across the lake. Goose calls resounded in the ice, as if the hollow, metallic din were trapped inside it. Sorties of geese took flight from the assembly; squads returned from nearby fields, coasting down on bowed wings and settling in the midst of the gaggle. Suddenly, the flock took wing, an audience breaking into applause. It was as if the ice itself had exploded – almost a surprise to see the hard, blue-blotched plane intact beneath the birds. The flock seethed, rolling back and forth on itself, its shadow roiling like a turbulence on the ice below. The applause deepened to the sound of trains thundering through tunnels. Scarves of glitter furled through the flock when drifts of birds turned their backs and white wings to the sun, and sometimes the entire sky was lit with shimmer, as if a silver, sequinned dress were rippling beneath a mirrorball, the sounds of goose calls and beating wings pounding the ice below. With binoculars I tried to follow individual birds through the pandemonium. I witnessed collisions – caroms and buffetings of blue-phase and white-phase snows, one bird’s heft glancing off another’s, the O of my binoculars a frenzy of black-tipped wings. Then, as before, the first birds settled on the ice, followed by others, each goose taking its place, the gaggle reforming bird by bird, the roar diminishing, until the whole flock, more geese than there are words in this book, was spread before us on Sand Lake.