Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 8, 1993 TAG: 9311090253
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: EDITORIAL EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
I'm so much of a novice bird-watcher that it took me a while to figure this out.
Before I realized what was really going on, for just a flicker of a second, I allowed myself to imagine that I'd sighted something no other bird-watcher had ever seen. Because no matter how frantically I flipped the pages of my Peterson's field guide, I found no illustration that precisely identified the slightly brown, slightly red, pudgy birds fluttering on my feeders.
Of course, what was needed was more attention to the birds themselves and less to the lovely field guide. For once I'd watched them long enough and closely enough, without flipping back and forth in my book, I was rewarded: I saw the father cardinal feeding his child, cracking a seed on his own bill and placing it into junior's gaping, demanding maw.
Then I knew what I'd been watching all along. Then that pudgy, unidentified bird made sense. Then, even closer watching revealed the two youngsters, each brought at a different time of day.
It's hard to see with clarity; to watch the scene before you and understand what's really going on. Every instant is intricately laced with invisible motives, complicated circumstances, history, interpretation. You watch and ask yourself, ``What do you make of that?'' Give any answer at all, and you run the terrible risk of being wrong.
I spent the last week of October in a rental house on North Carolina's Outer Banks. The house stood on stilts among a clutch of other houses, about 100 feet behind a dune that was crossed with a path to the beach.
In the middle of the week, a nor'easter blustered all through one night, pushing the surf up to the base of the dune and rocking the house on its stilts. Then the storm blew away.
I don't sleep well through storms, so the morning after, I rose early. I was just sitting down with my coffee when I saw a man rushing down the path from the dune. His black overcoat seemed wet from the surf and it flapped wildly around his thighs. He hurried on down the road and disappeared.
But then a woman appeared on the path he'd just left, and she was dragging a board. She struggled through the sand, dropped her board on the paved road between the houses, then started back over the dune.
Just as she reached the dune's crest, the man drove up in a station wagon, which he parked next to the woman's soggy board. Then he rushed up the dune again himself.
Over the next half hour, each made several trips back and forth from the beach carrying soggy boards and lengths of log. The woman, in particular, stopped often to impatiently brush sand from her clothes and toss her head in the wind. But the man seemed the more battered, sagging into this black coat with his hair dripping onto his glasses.
Presently, they stopped. And the woman stood by while the man loaded their wood into the station wagon. Then they got in and drove away.
What do you make of that?
Probably nothing more than a couple of thrifty vacationers who wanted a fire in their fireplace. Voila! Driftwood!
But other interpretations are possible, other histories, other motivations. My imagination runs wild.
That's what I saw. But what did I really see?
\ Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB