FRIENDS & BIRDS

You know how it is with certain friends. You may not have seen them for years, but when you get back together, it feels so natural that you pick up right where you left off.

I just spent three days in Florida birding with such a friend. Rick and I are a bit like that old TV show, The Odd Couple. Let's just say that, like Felix and Oscar, our domestic habits differ.

On the other hand, we're about as in synch as possible in ways intellectual and political. We share a peculiar sense of humor. Our ages are nearly identical. We  know all about the Vietnam War, the Chicago Seven, greenie history. Abbie Hoffman was our friend.

We endlessly reminisced about shared history. Some of his stories of experiences long-forgotten by me, fired dormant neurons in my aging brain. From out of nowhere emerged images of people and places I'd forgotten.

Yet, all those experiences that seemed so profound at the time, now are lost to the mists. We agreed, however, that a tangible reality has outlived such ephemera -- what we did in our work lives actually made some things better, and of even greater significance, stopped some bad things from happening. Like the government doing an environmentally catastrophic, wholesale re-tooling of the Great Lakes in a delusional vision of boosting shipping on the lakes.

At one point, Rick started to tell me about another environmental controversy that he'd been instrumental in winning. Here's an example of why we get along so well.

Me: "I don't know much about that project."

Rick: "You don't know anything about that project." He gave only the slightest emphasis to the word, "anything."

Rick then proceeded with a loquacious history of his fight to (successfully, as it turned out) block deepening of the shipping channel in the Delaware river, along with attendant damages to the environment.

After he seemed mostly finished, I said: "You know, Rick, that was an insightful, nuanced, intelligent description of the project. But I kept thinking of your one sentence at the beginning." I repeated our earlier exchange.

Me: "A lesser person might have found that sentence a tad insulting."

Rick: "I would have phrased it differently for a lesser person." 

The last new bird Rick and I added to our birding list this morning was a common loon. It was way out on the water and we needed my scope to see it. We agreed it was the perfect bird to end our adventure. The last time we had seen a loon together had been close-up, decades ago, from his boat in a marsh along Grindstone Island in the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York. That's where he's lived for a long time in summers -- in a little house he built that you have to take a boat to get to. But that's another story.

The loon we watched scurrying through the reeds back then was a mother with her baby loons riding on her back. We'd seen that in nature films, but never in real life, before or, as it's turned out, after.

As we walked along the Atlantic beach, I realized I'd actually come coast-to-coast. It's close to the half-way point of my road trip: day 13, more than 4,000 miles so far.

Tonight, on Sanibel Island on the Gulf Coast, I listened to a different special bird with a different special friend. The bird was a Chuck-will's-widow. It's related to the whip-poor-will, and I've only heard it once before, back in 2006 in Virginia under circumstances I can't recall. Here's how the bird guide describes its haunting sound out of the darkness: "a loud, repeated, emphatic whistle CHIP wido WIDO."

The special friend is Larry. Before we heard the Chuck-will's-widow, Larry and his cousin, Connie, took me to dine on the best oysters and red snapper I could imagine. And now, the squawk of a great blue heron in the canal behind Larry's house…

Day-before-yesterday: BIRDS & PIGS