Today I am walking along the edge of the Cape Fear River searching for painted buntings, birds made up of patches of wild fauvist color—bluebird’s head, flaming belly, lime-green wings. But while this quest happily occupies my eyes, my mind is elsewhere. I am thinking, as hundreds of fiddler crabs scuttle off in front of me, about two men named John. In life the writers John Hay and John Haines were sometimes confused with each another. So, too, in death. Late this past winter, in a strange coincidence, the two nature-writing elders died within five days of each other. Hay was ninety-five, Haines eighty-six.

 

I knew John Haines only a little, both in person and on the page. I had read The Stars, the Snow, the Fire, a fierce memoir of his life of homesteading, trapping, and isolation on a hundred-plus acres in Alaska. Later I was lucky enough to meet him at a conference and tell him how I felt about the book. He was gracious and attentive, undermining his curmudgeonly reputation.

 

I knew John Hay quite a bit better. About a decade ago I began paying a series of visits to his house on Dry Hill, in the town of Brewster on Cape Cod. While Haines retreated to Alaska, John Hay withdrew from the world to that house on the hill after World War II. To some, Cape Cod might seem a rather tame and civilized retreat, but in the 1940s, Brewster, where John engaged in his own form of homesteading, had only eight hundred citizens, and he was able to buy his eighteen acres for just twenty-five dollars an acre. It might have paled next to John Haines’s retreat, but there was wildness and solitude aplenty during February by the shore.

 

John moved to Brewster after college to seek out the poet Conrad Aiken, who had recently settled there. He had vague literary ambitions, and approached Aiken to see if he “couldn’t get in a little apprentice writing with him.” He ended up staying with the Aikens for a while, doing both yard and literary work, hoping to absorb whatever it was that made Aiken a writer. “It was Aiken’s personality as much as his work, that seemed almost immediately liberating, even thrilling,” John told me. “My parents, my mother in particular, believed in being proper and restrained, and that was how I was raised. Conrad was entirely different. Wild and uninhibited.”

 

World War II interrupted his time with Aiken, but before he shipped out, John made an uncharacteristically impulsive decision, one that would affect the course of the rest of his life, and bought the land on Dry Hill. The land waited for him during the war.

 

When he returned, John made his furtive start as a writer, with Aiken serving the dual roles of any good mentor, someone for John to define himself both by and against. John loved the man’s wildness and his late-night monologues about “consciousness,” and the extravagant cocktail hours which grew so famous that even the napkins used for the Aiken’s pewter drinking goblets later found their way into an Updike novel. But despite Aiken’s company, Cape Cod struck him at first as a somewhat bleak place, particularly in the off-season. John later told me that it took a while to “start to see possibilities in the land.”

 

Meanwhile John struggled to write, living in the shadow of the famous poet and unclear of his own subject. But if the writing wasn’t going well, something else was happening. He began to feel more deeply the cycles of the natural world. “The mystery about the travels of birds, eels, monarch butterflies, or alewives, is not only a matter of routes or seasonal behavior,” he wrote in The Run, his book about the annual migration of the alewife. “It has to do with an internal response to the spinning globe and its unending creative energies. As a result of a respectful regard for other animals we may find that we are being led onto traveled ways that were once invisible to us, and in their deep alliance with natural forces we find a new depth in ourselves.”

 

For years John mulled over Aiken’s notion of “consciousness,” before finally taking it in a direction that never occurred to Aiken. One day, while watching herring as they swam and leaped back upstream, John began to understand that this notion of consciousness extended not just to human beings, but to all other creatures. “Do we belabor the special nature of consciousness too much as if it were some kind of A-1 badge that separated mankind from the rest of animate creation?” he would later write in The Great Beach. “Consciousness must be infinitely more mysterious, more connective, than any attributes we may assign it of personal distinction.” It isn’t that man isn’t unique, he discovered, but that all creatures are.

 

When he excitedly told Conrad of his revelation, the older man’s reply was blunt.

 

“Nonsense,” he said. “You’re barking up the wrong tree there. You’ve bought the Schweitzer stuff about ‘reverence for all life.’ We are superior!”

 

But by then John had begun to gain confidence, and embraced his biocentric view of the world in opposition to Conrad’s anthropocentric one. “I began, though slowly, to move toward a wider realm,” he wrote in his essay “Worlds without End.”

 

Over the next forty years, and eighteen books, John Hay tried to capture the spirit of that realm in words. He did this in sentences that were excitable, daring, and, to the modern ear, somewhat grand and sweeping. Living isolated up on his hill, he was entirely unfashionable, and beyond literary trends. At the same time that Raymond Carver was writing his plain sentences, John was saying things like this, in his essay “The Magnet of Spring”: “Over the years, I have come to look for the same events to be renewed: the singing of peepers in the bogs, the arrival of alewives in the brook. I want to feel raw life, raw as a codfish pulled out of the cold sea, quiet as an ant, clean running as a swallow, deep throated as a Great Black-backed Gull.”

 

The sand seethes with crabs. From the beach I cut up to the swamp, where the warblers have lit the murky darkness with song. Pine and yellow-throated warblers, and the fluting of a wood thrush. While I manage to identify a couple of the songs, with help from my books, I know in my heart I’m an inept birder. Most of the time I have no idea who is singing what. It’s true I speak near-fluent osprey, learned during a couple of seasons at their nests, but I understand few other bird dialects. I’ve always had a tin ear, and when the spring bird chorus starts up, I forget everything I learned the year before, except the most basic cardinal and chickadee.

 

I take some solace in the fact that John Hay, regarded by many as the twentieth century’s finest writer on birds, was not a natural birder, either. He once confided in me, nature writer to nature writer, that when he moved to Cape Cod from New York City he thought the cooing of a mourning dove was an owl.

 

I remember, when I first began to study ospreys, how I would stare up, transfixed, at what would turn out to be a seagull. But I persisted and, through time and effort, began to learn the birds and their language. Soon enough I could tell their begging calls from their warning calls, and could do a fair enough impression to get them at least to look over and wonder what I was up to.

 

My friends from my younger days laughed when they found out I had written a book about birds. Birds, of all things. Fancy, effete, pretty little birds. These friends were mostly athletes and they saw me as an athlete, too, not to mention as someone who was gruff and crude and drank too much. And now . . . birds! What I might have said to them, if I’d had the nerve, was that it was nothing fancy or pretentious that led me to birds. Quite the opposite in fact. Birds held the secret to something I’d been searching for. I slowly came to understand that it was contact I’d been after the whole time, and that I had sought out contact in drink and sport. What I might have said was that the contact I craved was right there in an osprey’s dive. Maybe it’s best that I kept quiet—they would have laughed back then, I’m sure. But they are getting older now and it will not surprise me if a few of them gradually find themselves turning to birds.

 

In the New York Times obituary of John’s near namesake, John Haines, there is a telling sentence: “Some critics dismissed him as a nature writer.” That was John Hay’s fate, too. Being a nature writer implies a focus on something small and restricted, and is easy to dismiss since “nature” has so little to do with most of our lives. But it wasn’t something small that John Hay was after up on his hill, and writing that addresses the natural world isn’t a small tradition in literature, particularly American literature. John was directly following a path first explored by Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. As his former neighbor the writer Robert Finch said to me after John’s death, “Part of his genius was showing that one could write about these topics in the modern idiom.” In other words, the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau are not historical relics to be placed in a museum, but living possibilities to be embraced, argued with, expanded upon, reinvented, and made relevant again.

 

But John had one key difference from Emerson: nature was not made up of emblems of the human, but, rather, as John had tried to explain to Conrad, of creatures that have lives and consciousnesses of their own. And if flight and transcendence were your ultimate concerns, why not focus on feathered creatures that fly?

 

It is morning and the woods are filled with birds. I take a little too much pride in identifying the “seedeater-seedeater” song of a Carolina wren. My daughter isn’t impressed. The little bird doesn’t rate high on her excitement scale. But the next bird does. A great horned owl flies from a higher branch of a dead oak to a lower one. We stare at the owl for a while, and at the swamp behind it, looking milky, bluish, fading back forever between the trees and their gnarled roots. Along with the owl, I am seeing something else: the possibilities of this place.

 

But still the question. Why birds? I mentioned contact but it goes beyond even that. I think the answer ultimately has something to do with both narcissism and narcissism’s opposite. We go to birds selfishly but we also go to them because they are one of the few things capable of prying us out of ourselves. They don’t do this always or even often, and when they do it it’s not for very long. But they do it. They give us transport along with contact. For that, and for the fact that they fly, I love them. I don’t like the geeky aspect of learning their names and calls as much as I like the sheer simplicity and transcendence of their lives. I am not talking about God here, and maybe God is not necessary. Maybe bird is enough.

 

“Strange to have come through the whole century and find that the most interesting thing is the birds,” John said to me during our very first walk together. “Or maybe it’s just the human mind is more interesting when focusing on something other than itself."

 

At my worst moments I live trapped in the prison cell of self. I try to remember, during the dark, depressed, inward-turned times, that there is something beyond the walls of self. This is the most reassuring thing I know. Not success or God or the Big Rock Candy Mountain. But the simple fact that there is still a world beyond us. It is something that John Hay tried to tell us over and over. We are not alone.