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  • Clappers
  • David Gessner

I

In the evenings, when I read and take notes in my journal, I am showered by applause. As you can imagine, it’s a warm and rewarding feeling. I work outside, or as close to outside as you can get while in, my dwelling an 8’ by 8’ writing shack that I built a year ago in my backyard on the edge of the salt marsh. The applause, which begins just before dusk, comes straight off the marsh, though I rarely see a single member of my appreciative audience. Loud but shy, they call from hidden places. And though I know they are birds, I rarely see them. They are named, appropriately enough, clapper rails, and they call to each other with such vehemence that the noise fills the marsh. It’s a strange business for a creature that makes its living by hiding, as if after a full day of secretiveness they are ready to throw it all over, intent on revealing their own hiding places.

II

I built this shack in March of 2011 to celebrate my fiftieth birthday. It was a modest and inelegant project, slammed together in three days, my body remembering the few skills I had picked up working as a framing carpenter in my twenties. I bought a level for the work, but never got things quite level. The lopsided beams show and, when I finally put roof shingles on, the nails came right through the plywood ceiling so that they now point down at me like a thousand fangs. When the guy at Home Depot tried to sell me a long horizontal window for four hundred dollars, I understood, in a moment of inspiration, that I could instead spend forty bucks on a screen door and simply turn it on its side. This I did, effectively transforming the shack into a bird blind, an eye through which I see herons, egrets, woodpeckers, ospreys, and, every once in a great while, a glimpse of a clapper rail.

III

Most of us use language easily, even carelessly, slinging about sayings and metaphors. “Thin as a rail,” for instance. How many people know that this refers, not to a fence post of railroad tie, but to the same bird that showers me with nightly approbation? In his guide to bird behavior, David Sibley explains the saying’s origin: “The bodies of rails are laterally compressed (flattened) and the feathers can be held tightly against the body when necessary to allow the bird to slip through very narrow spaces.” In [End Page 7] other words, though rails are actually medium-sized birds with stubby wings and long bills, they can make themselves thin to the point of invisibility, which, combined with the fact that they are “cryptically colored,” allows them to all but disappear in the tall grasses of the marsh. Sibley goes on to say that their compressed bodies allow them to move through the marsh without rustling the reeds or grasses, which would give away their positions to predators, and that “Some observers believe that rails use the pathways of mice while foraging in dense vegetation.” The pathways of mice! Their nests, too, are secretive affairs, platforms of grass and reeds on the ground, hidden under other vegetation.

IV

“We need a backshop all our own,” wrote Montaigne. The shack has become my backshop. My treehouse. My fort. My hiding place. While you could throw a rock from my house and hit the roof, I am solitary enough here, despite occasional visits from my wife, daughter, and yellow Lab. At first I imagined the shack as a work place. I built a desk right below the screen-door window, and brought my computer out to write. But a crucial moment came when I decided to rip out the desk. I am something of a workaholic, with two offices already. The shack would not be an office. I would read there, scribble notes, and think; I would drink a beer or two and watch birds; and I would watch the sun slowly set over the trees. But I would not work. Anyone who builds a cabin, no matter how modest, is required...

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