If this thrasher continues showing up in the same neighborhood I figure on making time again to try finding it with the help of others who will be trying, most having come a lot more miles than the 36 I've been traveling to get there.
Meanwhile I'm most of the way through the homespun travel memoir From Blueberries to Blue Seas by my friend and neighbor Curt Bush, published just last year by the Savage Press of Superior, Wisconsin. In 2013 Curt followed where his heart and fascinations were calling him, taking a 28-foot sailboat he had bought and outfitted for a long solo journey out of Duluth and down the other Great Lakes, out the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Coast of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, ominous with winds and seasick rollers, crags and sunken rocks and three-day fogs. Having trained himself on earlier, less suitable boats on the perilous near-shore waters of Lake Superior he had gained the skills it took for him to survive storms, mysterious tidewaters, shoals and other deceptions of nature besetting the long route from midcontinent to the sea. The story, in lighthearted tones that reflect the teller's everyday style among friends, nevertheless recounts his stresses and moments of rage interspersed with his delight in places, landmarks and companions met, cherished and left behind. In the part where I am today he is nudging his way along the coast of Nova Scotia in a fog and a headwind, with reefs and boulders to either side, making only 30 miles in a day, using charts, an instrument called a chart plotter and his anxiously squinting eyes in order to keep from wrecking against obstacles and ledges barely to be seen alongside. Once he puts up for the night in a bay on an island wrapped in fog, the only sheltered bit of water the maps reveal, demonstrating how, even in the technological age, a person can still painstakingly venture with something of the attitude of fear, daring and triumph known in the Age of the Explorers over lands they crossed, at a pace truer to that period before mechanized transit. No human may have been on that scrap of land before him, he'd have supposed for at least a moment. This reader would love to have had the know-how to make the same trip herself, or a different trip on a route even farther from popular consciousness.
The thought came to my mind as I was reading, and not for the first time: what if an ancient overland traveler, a North American of 200-300 years ago, could be reincarnated and sent walking over familiar terrain, with at least a vague idea of how much time had elapsed. What would the person see that still evoked the place in those bygone centuries; what rediscoveries, besides the stark changes, would the person proclaim to some modern-day fellow-traveler, like me? Could it be that as long as there is humankind there will still be be a few trekkers on foot or by sail or by hand-powered boat, seeing what is out there up close and intimate, growing spellbound at the hand of nature?
In our time when the urban hordes and the corporations supposed to serve us all threaten to scrape away soils, acidify waters and ruin the climate for anything out in the open, it seems to me a kind of learned adaptation to detach in happy-go-lucky style and move within the moment, eternalizing it inside the self. Whatever the weather we'll weather the weather (if the means persist) as some old song said. It's easiest if the present weather is a kind you savor--bright if you adore the sun, dim if that fits your temperament..
Remembering back to last fall when week after week of August-balmy sun prevailed and unusual people like me, not particularly a sun lover, fretted that we might have crossed into a new winterless era marked by long dark nights with the interspersion of a little frost, forget the snow, I've been drawing and painting a different, recent bird visitor. Day after day back then we had had southwesterly winds. Those must have been the impetus for the sudden, startling Eurasian tree sparrow seen on a weekday morning from within my car where I slouched in the driver's seat looking over a call list I was planning to use that day. This was in a sloping gravel parking lot above an alley in downtown Duluth where English sparrows whirl and forage, pigeons peck and gulls swoop after morsels flicked from cars. I had seen my first Eurasian tree sparrow in the January not quite two years previous, a visitor to feeders in Hastings in southern Minnesota. But now as I looked at the specimen just an arm's length above my windshield on top of a retaining wall, I was stirred with a memory of rushing from the car in weeks recently past and glimpsing what may have been an earlier Eurasian tree sparrow but dismissing it through inattention. Some days later a local authority on birds saw another Eurasian tree sparrow in the town of Two Harbors just up the Superior shore. I connect these strays with the southwesterly winds that must have swept them from Missouri or neighboring Illinois where their species, by some whim introduced from Germany in the 1870s, is more reliably sighted among the grubbier, more raucous and ubiquitous English sparrows.
Work-in-progress with English sparrows and sole Eurasian tree (or German) sparrow on top of a cracking, very American retaining wall
As the days lengthen and thaws allow me the chance, I will keep at this little 12 x 9" piece of work that shows both species (not true sparrows) side by side but mostly minding their own affairs, with a background that suggests crumbling, dispersion, residues and traceries of what once made up the area environment. The mood suggests the whimsical and fleeting, the weather-borne, restless and unstable, given over to wandering for maximal stimulation if no other gain.
