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| The Lake, in Summer |
I got out of my bed,
dressed in jeans, sweater, and boots, quietly opened the guest room door, and
walked down to the lake in the mid-November darkness. The early morning air was
clear and cold, with a hint of dampness rising from the night’s accumulation of
frost.
Years earlier, I had
taken my son and his best friend to my parents’ farm for an overnight camp-out
down by our lake. We had walked down to this meadow in the fall, and the night
sky was ablaze with fiery stars, bright planets, and sizzling meteors all set
against the endlessly deep river of the Milky Way. We spent the first part of the evening
tracing the constellations and pondering the ancient names of Sirius,
Aldebaran, Procyon, Deneb,Vega, Arcturus, and Rigel. By the time the heart of the galaxy wheeled
high overhead, the boys were fast asleep in their tent, and I was stretched out
on a blanket, bathed in the light of distant suns.
This morning, the stars
did not keep my attention, though their beauty spoke to me in the words of Antoine
St. Exupery’s The Little Prince when he said, “It is only with the heart that
one sees rightly.” St. Exupery had had an encounter with the universe on a
starry night many decades earlier, in the middle of the Sahara Desert, where he
had set his plane down for the night. The small boy of St. Ex’s conscience
reduced the search for truth to such a basic thought. “It is only with the
heart that one sees rightly.” As I made my way down to the lake, I searched in
my own heart for such a truth…and I could not find it. In the house behind me,
my mother lay dying, and that was the only truth I knew.
A waning moon hovered
low over the front range of the Appalachians, casting a blue-white spotlight on
our modest little lake. From where I stood on the hill overlooking the water, I
saw the forms of nine large male Canada geese gliding across the mirror smooth
surface. They were muttering and arguing among themselves in the mid-winter
stillness. The ganders had been up all night, maintaining their vigil over
their flock of almost eighty birds. Calling to one another in the pre-dawn
hours, the males' rich bass utterances carried easily across the ice-flecked
water. Occasionally their bickering banter was broken by sharp honks and the
smashing of wings and webbed feet against air and water in territorial
disputes, which ended as quickly as they began.
Generally silent throughout the
night, the rest of the goose population began to stir as the first light of
morning edged the surrounding hills. Many of the younger birds and older
females rose from their nests on a small island near one side of the creek-fed
lake; about two dozen more birds were station-keeping just offshore.
I quietly made my way
back to the house, padded softly to the front hall closet and borrowed my
father’s fleece-lined jacket and a blue knit cap someone left on the shelf. I
grabbed a binocular case from a hook in the closet, and, with the addition of a
pair of purloined gloves, made my way back to a natural blind of deadfall
branches I’d not yet cleared from the meadow. From my position, I could see
down the length of the lake, to the far end where most of the geese had
congregated in the pre-dawn hours.
As the night grudgingly
gave way to the day, the dominant geese – those birds who earned their
leadership over years of experience with this flock – took up an insistent and
raucous tone, calling to the geese on the island and on the shore, urging them
to shake off the morning chill and swim out on the lake in preparation for the
first flight of the day. One by one, then in twos and threes, and finally in
whole groups, the geese plunged into the water and shouted in the new morning.
On the far side of the
foothills lying several miles to the southeast, the sun worked its way up the
morning sky, its first tentative rays transforming a high layer of cirrus
clouds into a swirling abstract of purples, crimsons, and silver-lined pinks.
The injection of the sun's energy into the chilled air lofted tenuous streamers
of mist off the water and ascend several hundred feet above the lake.
Unimpressed with the
veils of fog surrounding them, the geese exercised their wings and jockeyed for
position as the flock collected near the island. The birds organized themselves
into gaggles of eight to ten, while a dominant gander in each group prodded his
charges toward mid-lake.
From the end of the
lake behind the geese, a flight of mallard ducks suddenly burst off the water
with frantically beating wings. They climbed quickly into the cold morning sky,
and peeled off sharply to the north. Below them, the geese honked an irritated
good riddance.
With each passing
moment, the valley filled with a clear yellow radiance. A wave of sunlight
spilled over the eastern hills, illuminating the ridges to the west before flowing
down the lower meadows and farm lands and sweeping across the lake. The cool
blue shadow that had surrounded me during my vigil yielded to the surging dawn
and was swept across the snow on the crest of the advancing light.
As if responding to a
new tension in the valley, a gaggle of twenty geese moved quickly away from the
others. Reaching the middle of the water, the geese wheeled about in one long
line abreast. Facing the luminescent brilliance of dawn, and softly visible
through the gauzy mist rising off the water, the birds let loose with a great
chorus of honking and shouting. As the noise reached a frenzied climax, the
geese shot forward and raced across the lake, their long and powerful wings
driving air down to the surface, pushing the birds away from the water's
viscous grip until the bond was completely broken. Holding their altitude to
just a few feet off the water, the gaggle accelerated toward the earthen dam at
the eastern end of the lake. Through the binoculars, I watched the powerful downbeat
of the leader’s wings flatten the water beneath him. His face was set in a
black and white mask of patient determination as his formation approached the
dam.
When all the birds were
up to speed and on track with the lead gander, the gaggle climbed as one bird,
up and over the earthworks and, turning in a graceful chandelle to the right,
soared away from the lake. Behind them, another gaggle had already begun its
takeoff surge, while the remaining geese were lining up to take to the air.
Flight after flight of geese lifted off the water and swung low over the rising
meadow, passing within yards of my blind, so close that I could hear their wing
beats and breathy exhalations.
Once up and formed on
their respective leaders, each gaggle circled the lake until all the geese were
airborne and loosely collected in one large formation. They spread out into
half a dozen "Vs" and headed south, crossing the lake again, this
time much higher, cruising over the frost-quilted Virginia hunt country in search
of corn fields scattered with kernels left behind from the fall harvest. After
the last formation passed above the meadow, a hush fell over the hills and
lake, and the calm of the winter morning settled in.
I walked across the field, trudging along the bluestone path that led around the
west side of the property and up to the garage and the main gate.
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