Down on the Batture

Time

- 165 Time You can set your watch by them, they come so regularly each evening, 6:30 on the dot, wave after wave, as few as three or four and as many as fifty in a flight, the three or four seeming to make up for their numbers with even louder shrieks and cries, the whistling ducks coming home. For twenty frantic minutes the sky is full of them and then it goes silent again; they have safely passed. The other night I fixed a line of ten birds in my mind and began counting. By 6:50 they were at 1,290. In just my part of the sky. It seemed like a tremendous amount. The next day, however, while researching for a class, I came across a description of a flight of passenger pigeons by a nineteenth-century ornithologist who, upriver on the Mississippi, described being “struck with astonishment ” by a roaring sound and instant darkness. As he was rushing outside, a young boy told him,“It is only the pigeons.” The boy was already preparing his nets and clubs to kill them,“twenty or thirty dozen in a sweep.” The ornithologist, Alexander Wilson, did some quick math. Supposing the column to be one mile wide (and he believed it to be considerably more) and moving at the rate of one mile a minute, for four continuous hours, three birds per square yard, he came to 2,230,272,000 birds. In that one event. The nets and clubs proved to be quite effective. Cutting down their roosting trees turned out to be even more effective. I have an old sketch of the passenger pigeon, below which the caption tells us that “there is no zoo or ornithological garden in which this species is wanting.” The last one on earth died in the St. Louis zoo in 1914. - 166 Time So exactly what is a tremendous amount of birds? The 1,290 whistlers I’d counted barely merited a look skyward one hundredplus years ago. Our baselines shift. I remember visiting a friend in New York City last year. The haze from the traffic obscured the sun like a thin fog and the smell of exhaust was pervasive, but at the noon hour every square inch of available outdoor space was occupied by secretaries and executives in dresses and shirtsleeves, smiling, faces to the sky, exclaiming to each other,“What a beautiful day!” For them it was. They had forgotten what honest-to-God sunlight looked like and the smell of fresh air. Pollution was the new normal. I find myself wondering whether that is bad or good. Imagine the unhappiness of those New Yorkers if, magically, one were to replace their air and sky with the real deal, sharp and clean, and then, after they appreciated the difference, just as magically one made it disappear again, returning them to today. I wonder whether we are better off knowing these things or not knowing them. I am airing this thought with my friend Tim, a former student, down under the power lines. I had come early to sit on a bank of sand and a light a small fire of driftwood, carefully keeping my sneakers from the flame. I have several pairs of athletic shoes at home with their soles curled off from the heat; some things I know but I never learn. For a while I watched a fringe of cloud move slowly upriver, pretty as a petticoat and edged with neat ruffles that ran the entire width of the sky. From the other direction, against the clear and darkening blue, came the contrail of a jet airplane, its silver body ahead like a projectile, its path straight and inexorable as a pistol shot, directly at the petticoat cloud. It was going to be terrible. The plane streaked through the cloud, and at that very moment the petticoat began to fall apart, disaggregating into patches and then shreds and thin lines. The plane had won. How could it not. It is what humans do. As dark fell, Tim appeared, and soon behind him a line of four young men in jeans and sweatshirts who edged the beach towards the bank downstream where a large barge lay at anchor, and had - 167 Time lain at anchor for years. Tim had brought some beers, a brand I’d never heard of, but there were so many new...