Reincarnations

BLUETHROATS

Have I ever gone birding around Nome with my daughter? Yes. Are the people in the story anything like her and me? No. And the lady I’m married to is just fine, for which I thank heaven every day. But Laura did see a golden-crowned sparrow in the back yard. She really did.

To get to where the bluethroats nest, you drive north out of Nome, up Bering Street. There’s not much traffic, but you drive slowly and cautiously anyway. The pavement ends a few miles out of town, near the Dexter cutoff, The cutoff is dirt and gravel. So is the Kougarok road, the one that takes you to where the bluethroats may be.

"Pothole." Your daughter rides shotgun in the rental’s passenger seat.

"I see it." And you drive around it. One jolt saved. "When the roads are good, they’re fine," your daughter says. But when they’re not…"

"They’re not," you agree. They have signs on them: NO MAINTENANCE OCTOBER 1-MAY 1. It’s June now. The sun shines twenty-two hours a day. It gets up into the fifties, the top few feet of the tundra thaw. Ponds and puddles and streams everywhere. Flowers blaze across the vastness. Millions if birds, which is why you’re here. Billions of bugs, which is why he birds are.

Your daughter points to a scattering of houses ahead. "Must be Dexter."

"Uh-huh." Before you got here, you wouldn’t have thought Nome, with not even 5,000 people, boasted suburbs. But you’re driving through one. Houses. A lodge. A little sell-everything hop. Gone.

Nome is half small-town America, half really weird. Satellite TV. Kids with backwards baseball caps and baggy jeans slouching around looking for something to do. An Italian-Japanese place run by Koreans- -pretty good, actually.

But… A reindeer in a red collar in the back of an Eskimo’s F-150. Musk oxen ambling around the slopes outside of town. More bars per capita than maybe anywhere. Loud, drunken arguments on the street outside your room at the Nugget Inn when the bars close at half past two.

It’s about sunset then. Night, such as it is, barely gets dark enough for you to need headlights. Then, a little past four, the sun comes up again and you start over-if you ever stopped. Midnight Softball-no lights-is a popular sport here. In the wintertime, so is ice golf on the frozen Bering Sea. And the Iditarod ends in Nome, across the street from the Nugget.

In the hotel lobby is a bigger-than-life photo of a bluethroat singing its head off. It’s an Asian bird, but in summer it spills over and nests in western Alaska. It’s sparrow-sized, but no other bird has that fancy blue-and-orange throat marking. If you want to see it in the States, you have to start from Nome.

A different photo of a bluethroat sits on the counter at the rental-car place, which operates out of the Aurora Inn, Nome’s other hotel. A lot of the summer visitors here are birders, and the locals know it. Next to the photograph is a journal of what’s been seen where. Nome is far, far away from the main highway system. But it sits at the center of its own network of 250 miles of these teeth-jarring roads. There’s a hand-drawn map in the journal. A little past milepost 71 on the Kougarok road…

Plenty of birding to do on the way. A few miles up the road from Dexter, your daughter points to a roadside pool. "Shall we stop?"

"Sure." You pull over to the side. You’re still half on the road, but so what? It’s straight as a Republican senator. Anyone coming can see the car from a long way off. Not that anyone is. After Los Angeles, having a road to yourself seems stranger than anything else here.

You and your daughter get out. You spray each other with insect repellent and rub it on your cheeks and forehead. A few mosquitoes buzz lazily. Only a few: it’s early yet, and cool, and you’re not very far out onto the tundra. But Alaska mosquitoes are like nothing you’ve ever seen. Even a few are too many. A postcard on a rack at the Nugget Inn shows the business end of one silhouetted against a sunset, with the legend ALASKA’S STATE BIRD. Kidding, but kidding on the square.

Strapped binoculars thumping against your chests, the two of you walk over to the pool. Except for your footfalls and the wind in the dwarf willows, everything is quiet. Your ears don’t know what to do with silence. Always something in L.A. An airplane overhead. Distant traffic. A neighbor’s TV. Not loud, but always there.

Two brown shapes swimming in the pool. "Ducks?" your daughter says doubtfully.

You raise your binoculars. "Beavers!"

They don’t give a damn about you. One swims to the edge of the pool, not twenty feet away. It’s a female; it has teats. It strips off some willows branches and drags them into the water, not very far, to eat. It crunches as it chews. Who would have thought beavers were noisy eaters? Who would have thought you’d find out?

"Wow." Not much more than a whisper from your daughter. She goes on, a little louder, "I wish Mom could have seen this."

"Yeah." These past few days, you’ve walked out on the tundra. Most of it is springy and yielding underfoot. If you come down wrong, though, you fill your shoe with freezing water. You feel that way now. Two years ago, your wife lost what everybody called a brave battle against breast cancer. You don’t argue. What point? You know how scared she was at the end, and in how much pain. Was that bravery? Perhaps it was. You go, "I-" and stop short.

One word too many. Your daughter sets her chin the way you do. "You were going to say something like, ‘I wish Dave could have come along,’ weren’t you?"

"Well…" You don’t deny it, but you don’t admit it, either. One word!

"Cheating prick." Your daughter is going through a divorce. They both teach at the state university, Dave in linguistics, your daughter in anthropology. Dave is dating someone younger, someone blonder, someone altogether more tractable. Someone less like you, in other words.

You always liked him before the mess started. You still do, till you catch yourself and remember you shouldn’t. Your daughter knows it. It pisses her off, bigtime. You can hardly blame her. Still… Dave was a pretty good guy. Is a pretty good guy, even if you won’t get to see him much anymore. Not perfect. You knew that all along, even if you aren’t sure your daughter did. But pretty good. With the world the way it is, that’s often more than enough.

Not this time. Too bad.

You raise your binoculars against these thoughts and this conversation. The Bushnells channel vision and attention away from dangerous places. Something-two somethings- swimming at the far end of the pool. Your right index finger slides to the center-focusing knob. "Ducks," you say, and then, nailing them, "Harlequin ducks."

"Where?" your daughter asks.

"Scan along the far bank till you see it poke out. They’re just in front of that, a little to the left."

"I’ve got ‘em," she says a moment later. "The male is nice."

"He is," you say. His head, blank and cinnamon with bold white spots, gives the ducks their name. "Everything’s in breeding plumage up here."

"One more for the list," your daughter says. Harlequin ducks are life birds for both of you. Even in their duller winter feathers, they don’t come down the Pacific coast as far as L.A. Your daughter’s list is longer than yours. Not a lot, but it is. You’ve been birding since before she was born, but she goes at it with a passionate dedication you never found.

"Anything else?" you say. "Shall we go on?"

She’s checking the south edge of the pool. When she spots something, she freezes. Then she laughs and lowers the binoculars. "Couple of white-crowns hopping around under the willows."

"Oh, boy." You’ve come 3,000 miles to see more of the cheeky little sparrows that mob your backyard feeders every winter.

Back into the car, then. You glance at the side-view mirror before pulling out. It’s a big-city habit, more useful here than a third leg or a fifth wheel, but not much. Nothing coming either way as far as the eye can see. You’re the only two people for miles.

"Pot-" your daughter starts. Too late. Thump. Your front teeth click together. "-hole."

Patches of snow-or is it ice?-lie on the hillsides. A little creek that runs down by the side of the road starts from one of them. Farther on, you come to a bridge over a real river. NO FISHING FROM BRIDGE, a sign in front of it says. You can barely make out the words. Plinkers have colandered the sign and chipped away a lot of enamel. What better place to plink than somewhere like this?

North and north again. You can’t go faster than forty, not if you want to have any kidneys left at the end of the day. No hurry any which way. You stop every few miles to bird. Your daughter says she sees a hawk on some lichen-spattered rocks. You stop the car. You both get out.

"I think it’s just another rock," you say. You raise the binoculars. It still looks like a rock. A dapper Lapland longspur hops near the bottom of the rockpile. He doesn’t notice anything dangerous, either.

"It’s a hawk," your daughter insists. The two of you walk towards it. It takes wing and flies off across the tundra. Your daughter grins. "Too small to be a peregrine or a gyrfalcon."

"Female merlin, I think," you say.

Her lips purse. She weighs size, color, shape. "Sounds right. That’s another lifer for you, isn’t it? I saw one up in Santa Barbara last year."

"One more checkmark in the Sibley," you say. A birder without a guide is like a minister without a Bible. "You’ve got mosquitoes on your hat."

"Damn!" She taps the brim. Some of them fly off. Some stay put. She looks your way. "So do you, Dad."

You go through the same routine. Chances are it does the same amount of good-some, but not enough. You both try it again before you get back into the rental. You still have buzzing company after you close the doors. Your daughter squashes one mosquito after another against the inside of the windshield with a kleenex.

"There you go," you say.

She nails another one-maybe the last. Then she says, "Mom wouldn’t have liked this part. She never could stand bugs."

"No." Your hands tighten on the wheel. Joints in palms and fingers twinge. Driving doesn’t bother you most of the time, but you have to hold on tight here. You could let your daughter drive, but she makes a better spotter and navigator than you would. And you’re used to driving when the two of you go somewhere together; you’ve been doing it since before she knew how.

Another river, wider than the last. You stop just beyond it. With running water, with trees and bushes on the banks, with mosquitoes and other insects buzzing above the stream and fish in it, rivers are great places for birds, and for birders. The scrubby willows here are trees, or almost; they’re twelve, sometimes even fifteen, feet tall.

Something perches in the top of a distant one. Dark back, rusty belly… You swing your binoculars towards it as if they were a nineteenth-century naturalist’s shotgun. "Varied thrush!"

"Where?" Your daughter’s voice rises. This is another bird you both want.

You point it out to her. "You can see the black band across its breast."

She scans till she finds it. "I don’t see that," she says slowly, and then, "Dad… it’s got a yellow beak."

"No way!" But you look again. It does-and it doesn’t have the black breastband you were sure it did. You saw what you wanted to see, not what was there. "Well, hell. I keep wanting varied thrushes, and I keep getting robins."

Till you got here, you hadn’t thought they came to the tundra. They do, though. If anything, they’re commoner here in the summertime than in Los Angeles. "Sorry, Dad," your daughter says.

"You were right. Don’t be sorry for being right."

"Why not? Fat lot of good it’s ever done me."

You can’t find anything to say to that, so you look out over the river instead. An American golden plover in fancy black-and-white breeding plumage tiptoeing across a drift of pebbles makes a poor consolation prize. Your heart was set on a varied thrush, the way your stomach sometimes gets set on lamb chops. If the only thing in the freezer is ground round, you’ll be disappointed no matter how good it turns out.

More mosquitoes get into the car with you. Your daughter commits insecticide as you drive north.

Off to the west rise the Kigluaik Mountains, purple streaked with white. More snow lingers on the northern slopes than the sunnier southern ones. The road winds by the north shore of Salmon Lake. You’re forty miles out of Nome. There’s a landing strip here, and a few cabins people use during the summer. You seem to have the place to yourselves now.

The rental car bumps across the dirt airstrip to the lakeshore. Two orange plastic cones mark the end of the strip. You stop just past them and get off. A breeze off the water keeps the mosquitoes down. Ducks swim in pairs: greater scaup, red-breasted mergansers.

Then something screeches furiously, about two feet above the crown of your hat. You can’t help flinching. Graceful as a jet fighter, a black-capped bird with a red bill and feet rises and makes another pass at the two of you. Screech! You flinch again.

"Arctic tern." Your daughter does her best to sound matter-of-fact.

You manage a nod. "Sure is. We must be close to its nest."

Another furious dive-bomb, another skrawk from the tern. It doesn’t hit either one of you, but it does its damnedest to drive you away. When you don’t leave, it tries again and again. Other terns also screech, but only the one strafes you.

Your daughter is crying. You didn’t see her start. "Hey," you say uselessly-tears always leave you helpless. "Hey. What is it?"

"Stupid bird." She tries to pretend this isn’t happening, a losing proposition with wet streaks shining on her face. Almost too low for you to hear, she adds, "Families."

She and Dave had talked about starting one. They ended up talking to lawyers instead. It’s a shame; you would have enjoyed grandchildren. But what can you do? Not much, not when she’s so fragile that a bird defending its nest can set her off.

"Let’s get out of here," she says roughly.

"Okay." You were married to her mother for almost forty years. Sometimes arguing only makes it worse.

The tern makes two more passes at the car as you drive away. You fear it will slam into the windshield, but it doesn’t. You jounce across the airstrip to the road, which isn’t much smoother. The Arctic tern has the lakeside to itself again.

"Sorry, Dad," your daughter says after a little while. "I didn’t mean to drop that on you."

"Hey," you say one more time. Each of you should have had someone else. But there are no payoffs at the should have had window.

"I really thought-" Now your daughter breaks off. What did she think? That when she grew up she wouldn’t need to go places with her father anymore? Something like that, or she would have kept going. She could have; it wouldn’t offend you. Of course people expect to do things on their own, or with a spouse, when they get into their thirties. ‘

But life isn’t what you expect. Life is what you get. And what your daughter’s got is a birding trip to Nome with her old man.

Rattling up the Kougarok road would make anybody feel old. More scattered rocks off to the left give you another excuse to stop. "Let’s see what we’ve got," you say. "Maybe we’ll spot a wheatear."

Like the bluethroat, the northern wheatear is a Eurasian bird that visits western Alaska. It’s supposed to display on rocks like those. With its dark mask, it looks a little like a shrike, but its black-and-white tail makes a terrific field mark. If you see one, you’ll recognize it.

A cloud slides across the sun as soon as you get out of the car.

The breeze blows harder, down from the north. It may be summer, but you’re only a hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. You zip up your anorak and tug on your hat to make sure it doesn’t blow away, through binoculars, the rocks scattered across the tundra seem close enough to touch. Motion on one makes you pause. But it’s not a wheatear, only another American golden plover. You sweep some more.

Your daughter is looking toward the dwarf willows edging a puddle. Her scan suddenly stops, too. "What have you got?" you ask.

"Redpoll," she answers. "Just behind that little plant with the yellow flowers. See him? He’s on one of the top branches."

"I’ve got him," you say. Redpolls are tiny birds, related to goldfinches. "Common or hoary, d’you think?"

"Common," she answers confidently. "Too dark to be a hoary." And when the bird flies off a few seconds later, it shows a striped rump. A hoary redpoll’s rump would be white.

Along with the redpolls, white-crowns chirp in the willows and scratch under them. So do a couple of golden-crowned sparrows, white-crowns’ less common cousins. You’ve seen them before, in the California hills. Your wife spotted one in the yard a few years ago, but you never have. She was so pleased, she was in remission then, too…

The sun comes out. The breeze fades. "That’s more like it," you say, and unzip the coat again.

A moment later, you wonder how smart that is. As soon as he air grows still, the mosquitoes rise up around your daughter and you. Their hateful buzzing, like so many miniaturized dentists’ drills, fills your ears. The repellent does its best. Not many land on your face or the back of your neck or your hands, the only flesh you’re showing. But they perch in battalions on your hat and your clothes.

Your daughter, who is still scanning the rocks in hope of a wheatear, makes a disgusted noise. She turns the binoculars around and blows on one of the objective lenses. "Goddamn things are everywhere," she mutters.

"Want to go back to the car?"

"Yes." She slaps at her calf. Maybe one got in under the bottom of her jeans and went up above her sock. Or maybe it bit her through the sock. You wouldn’t have thought a mosquito could, but you’ve never run into any like these before.

Your withdrawal across the tundra feels like Napoleon’s after Moscow. "Good God!" you say when you reach the rental. You open the doors and close them again as fast as you can, but you still need some time to get rid of the mosquitoes you let in. Even then, a couple hover against the rear windows. If they stay back there, you’ll let them live; going after them is more trouble than it’s worth.

You pull onto the road again. "Man," your daughter says. You nod. One of the mosquitoes from the back comes forward. She squashes it. You smile at each other.

Mileposts on the Kougarok road are white numerals, written vertically, on a traffic-sign-green background. They’re too small for plinkers to bother with. They’re also too small to be easy to spot. When you see one, though, you can read it.

Your daughter calls them out. Sometimes she misses one, but she always gets the next if she does. She’s reliable. If you say so, she’ll tell you it’s one more thing that doesn’t do anybody any good. You keep quiet, hoping she’ll know what you’re thinking.

"Mile seventy," she says at last. "Getting close."

"Uh-huh." Your hands are twinging worse now. You take the right one off the wheel and open and close it a couple of times. Then you do the same with the left. Maybe it helps a little.

"Mile seventy-one," your daughter says. Half a minute later, she points. "There!"

"I see it." A pole, taller than one of the milepost supports, stabs into the tundra. Stuck to the top of it is what looks like the outer rim of a bicycle wheel. You wonder how it got there, and why. Did birders put it up? There’s a marker like that at mile fifty-five on the Teller road, off to the west: a board in a roadside willow that points straight to the nest a pair of northern shrikes have built. This one is less precise, but it does the job.

You slow. A couple of hundred yards past the marker, a rutted track branches off the Kougarok road. It leads down into a little valley, with a creek chuckling over gravel at the bottom and with willow thickets all around.

"It’s the right habitat for bluethroats," your daughter says. "They like running water, and they like willows."

Once upon a time, people lived down here, but not lately. The planking on the house and outbuildings to the right of the stream is weathered and pale. Glassless windows stare blackly, like the eye sockets of a skull. Willows grow right up to the doorways.

You drive as far as you can-half a mile or so-till the track turns to mud as it nears the stream. If you bog down in that, you may never get out, four-wheel drive or no. You stop. The map on the counter at the rental place says the bluethroats live farther down the valley, past the buildings and past an abandoned truck you haven’t seen yet.

"Well." You open the door. "Let’s see what we’ve got."

Your daughter slides out, too. "Oh, my God!" she says.

This may be the right habitat for bluethroats. It’s the perfect habitat for mosquitoes. If a six-legged prophet preached of mosquito paradise, it would look like this. Plenty of little pools and puddles for eggs and larvae. All those willows to shelter the adults. No wind to speak of. And, now, sustenance.

The mosquitoes were bad on the open tundra. You don’t want to believe how much worse they can be. "Oh, my God!" your daughter says again. She yanks the door open and snatches out the repellent. You spray each other once more.

It helps… some. But they’re all over your clothes. And they buzz around the two of you in clouds as you walk down to the stream and then along it. You want to swat, but why bother? Would you swat a raindrop in a cloudburst?

You start to choke. Then you spit, and spit again. "Did you… inhale one?" your daughter asks.

"Not-quite." You spit one more time.

"Be careful here." She seems glad to change the subject. "Your shoes aren’t waterproof." Hers are, bought from some fancy hikers’ catalogue. You wear the old canvas-topped Adidases you always knock around in. They do let in water.

But you say, "My legs are longer than yours." The creek is only ten feet wide. Here and there, rocks and gravel stick up above the water. You cross behind her without getting wet.

The ground is a little better over there. But the willows- hardly any taller than you are-press close to the bank. The air around you is curtained with mosquitoes.

You walk on. A mosquito lands on your ear. You brush it away. A bird darts across the stream and into the willows. It’s here and gone before you can ID it. "Was it-?" you ask at the same time as your daughter says, "It could have been-"

It starts to sing. That lets you get a fix on it. Two pairs of binoculars swing its way.

"Redpoll," you say together, and lower the binoculars with identical sighs.

"Map said they were farther down." Is your daughter boosting her spirits or yours?

"We’ll see." You have to cross the stream again; the willows press right down to the waterline. You manage to stay dry once more. Here in this sheltered place, it’s almost warm. Your daughter takes off her outer sweater and ties it around her waist. You unzip your jacket again.

You go up to the abandoned house to see if a hawk or, more likely, an owl is nesting inside. You give your eyes a chance to get used to the darkness inside, but you don’t see anything. Reluctantly, you decide there’s nothing to see.

Your daughter points. "There’s the truck, Dad!"

"Where?" you say, not spotting it. Then you do. "Boy, that’s about as abandoned as it gets."

How many years has it squatted there? Long enough for rain and snow and ice to have had their way with its paint. Rust covers every inch of the chassis. The dark red-brown blends perfectly with the dirt and with the green and brown of the willows growing alongside. You and your daughter fight through the shrubby willows for a closer look. The side windows are either rolled down all the way or long gone. Cracks craze the windshield and smaller rear window.

Mosquitoes hum all around. You breathe in another one. By now, you have practice at this-you spit it out without your daughter’s even noticing.

"Past the dead truck. That’s what’s on the map." Excitement brightens her voice. The map might point toward buried treasure on the Spanish Main, not bluethroat nests in the middle of the Seward Peninsula.

A lot of maps that said they pointed toward treasure on the Spanish Main really pointed toward nothing. You have to hope this one won’t be like that. People have more incentive to lie about doubloons and pieces of eight than about little thrushes from Asia… don’t they?

You’ll find out. You follow the creek another couple of hundred yards. You stop in a small clearing. "If they’re anywhere, they’re here," you say.

"Sure." Your daughter still sounds more confident than you feel. If she can still believe things will work out for the best in this best of all possible worlds, more power to her.

She raises her binoculars and slowly scans the closer willows, then the more distant ones. You do the same. You’ve come all this way. Long odds you’ll ever get here again. You’d be an idiot not to give it your best shot.

Which doesn’t mean you’ll get what you’re after. Your wife gave it her best shot, God knows. So did your daughter. So did her ex, even if she so doesn’t want to hear that.

You lower the binoculars and look around. Something’s perched in a willow up near the edge of the valley. Your daughter’s already spotted it. You raise the field glasses again and aim them that way. "What do you think?" you ask her.

She sighs. "It’s an American tree sparrow. Right size, wrong bird."

You take a longer look. You sigh, too, because she’s right. She usually is. The cinnamon crown, the dark spot on the breast, the bill that’s dark above and yellowish below… American tree sparrow, all right. The first time you saw one here, it was a life bird for both of you, because it’s rare along the West Coast. But it’s common here in the summertime, and in the upper Midwest and East during the winter. Not a bluethroat. Not even close.

You scan some more. You spot a Wilson’s warbler: a little yellow bird with a black cap. The last one you saw was hopping around the magnolia in your own back yard.

After a while, you say, "We ought to head back to the car."

"I know." Your daughter doesn’t budge. "I hate to give up, though."

"So do I. Still, if we were going to find anything…"

"Pish! Pish! Pish!" Your daughter doesn’t say that to you. It’s a noise birders make to lure shy birds out of cover. Sometimes- not very often, in your experience-it works. Birders who do it too much are called pishers. For anyone with even a little Yiddish, that’s funny. "Pish! Pish! Pish!" Your daughter isn’t a pisher, but she’ll try whatever she can.

Nothing comes out of the willows. Only mosquitoes fly around you. You take a couple of steps in the direction of the car. Your daughter’s stiff back says she doesn’t want to see you.

"Come on," you say. "We’ll bird all the way there. Maybe we’ll find one."

"Maybe." She closes up with you. Then she leans toward the willows again. "Pish! Pish! Pish!"

"Pish! Pish! Pish!" You even try it yourself. Why not? What have you got to lose? "Pish! Pish! Pish!" A fighting retreat.

Stop and pish. Stop and scan. Back past the truck carcass. Past the buildings. Through the mosquitoes. Despite the repellent, they do land. How many bites will you end up with? You won’t feel them till later.

You see another redpoll, or maybe the same one again. A golden-crowned sparrow is bathing in the creek, fluttering its wings to flip water onto its back.

"Stupid thing." Your daughter is mad at it for not being a bluethroat.

"We tried our best," you say. You remember your wife. Sometimes it just isn’t good enough.

There’s the rental car. You look around one more time. The bluethroats aren’t supposed to be here, so close to the main road. But they aren’t where they’re supposed to be, so what the hell? A bird in the willows… is another American tree sparrow. You don’t need your daughter to identify this one for you.

She sees it, too, and what it is. She shakes her head and lowers her binoculars.

You open the door and quickly slide in. Your daughter does the same thing on the passenger side. You both kill some of the mosquitoes that got in with you. Then you start the car. You turn around carefully on the narrow track. Back toward the road. Back toward Nome.

Maybe, behind you now, the bluethroats flit through the willow branches. Maybe they snatch mosquitoes out of the air and carry them back to hungry hatchlings in their nests. Maybe they were never there at all.