BY HARRY WEEKES
You may not believe this, but I actually try not to focus on birds all the time. I do my best to spread my attention around. I like snakes. Butterflies are cool. The ridiculous tree frog that looked like living moss that Hilary found clinging to the side of my in-laws’ house in Connecticut? Well, that was simply otherworldly.
But just like Michael Corleone, “Just when I thought I was out, they keep pulling me back in.”
OK, maybe it’s not just like Michael Corleone.
This time, we are standing in my in-laws’ living room, which looks out over Long Island Sound. This is looking out over wonderful pink granite, familiar to us as the stuff of the Sawtooths. The screen doors are pulled wide open, and the atmosphere is one of “coming storm.” Smooth, sky-blue water reflects clear and sunny skies immediately overhead, but this water gives way to an approaching wind line that is a thousand wrinkles in the surface, whose collective effect is to turn the ocean deep blue.
Penelope, the sailor, reads the wind and water in ways that are mysterious to me. As I work to figure out which way the tide is moving, what starts as her question rapidly becomes a statement: “Is that….A swan.”
I look up and experience her same confusion turned into certainty.
When a swan flies directly at you, and you are not used to seeing them, your neural networks combine a suite of information by stuffing what is happening into what you already do know. In this case, it goes something like this: “A gull is flying toward me.” “That bird’s wings are enormous.” “That is a really fat gull.” “Why is it flapping so weird?” “That bill is really orange.” “This could very well be the largest Herring Gull on the planet.”
As I wedged my observations onto a gull template, the bird’s trajectory changed, and the contradiction resolved as I felt my brain go, “Uuuuuuuurrrrggggg.”
I have never seen a swan in Connecticut. Obviously, they are here. This was a Mute Swan, and it was a doozy. To mix movie analogies, this bird came in like the Imperial Star Cruiser that cast a shadow of Leia’s consular ship at the start of Star Wars. Enormous. Somehow making its surroundings smaller. Almost foreboding, except that it was a Swan.
This bird gave us a majestic fly by that took it from the ocean, through the harbor, and banking to where it disappeared somewhere over the marsh. Against a stormy sky and deep green foliage, in the sunlight rapidly disappearing in the clouds, its great white body, deep orange bill, and tucked up black legs looked pasted on to the sky. There was, appropriately, nothing to say, except the obvious.
“That was a swan?” Said as a question, acknowledging that while this was unmistakable, it was also confirming that this was a first.
“That was definitely a swan.” And then some rapid follow up, “Where did it go? Where did it come from? That was crazy, right?” These amounted to rhetorical questions.
As is often the case, the members of my family drifted off to other pursuits as I stared into woods where the great bird disappeared. Internally, I whispered a final, “What are you up to?”
Appropriately, and expectantly, I got no reply.
Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 54th year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with Hilary and their two mini-Dachshunds. The baby members of their flock have now become adults; Georgia and Simon are fledging in North Carolina, and Penelope has recently changed roosting sites to Connecticut.
