Ecotones are the edges of overlapping ecosystems, places that aren’t quite one thing or another. But as well as physical ecotones, there are also temporal ones, times of year when everything is becoming something else, when any sense of permanence, never much more than illusory to begin with, is even more fleeting, and when transience is the norm. The most obvious of these temporal ecotones, what the writer Scott Weidensaul calls “the great pivot points of the year,” are fall and spring, the times of the mass bird migrations. Then the world is in movement, almost every winged thing heading somewhere else. These are the times of great unsettling, biannual disruptions, and urgency fills the air. Though the fall migration is driven by a quest for food, not an escape from cold, the birds must race the weather south while simultaneously avoiding the great tropical storms. In the spring they are prodded by the pressure to breed, to get back to home nesting grounds so the work of procreation can begin and so the young can earn their wings in time to begin the fall migration all over again.
This past September I followed migrating birds, ospreys, from my former home on Cape Cod down the East Coast to my present home in North Carolina, then flew after them to Cuba to watch their dramatic and ancient migration through the mountains of that country. Ospreys are large, nearly eagle-sized raptors with six-foot wingspans, known for their swashbuckling dives for fish, and distinguished by their dark masks and vivid black-and-white wing patterns. In late winter, just as the spring solstice was approaching and the ospreys were beginning to stir, I flew down to their wintering grounds in Venezuela before accompanying them north through Florida, up the East Coast, and back to Cape Cod. The trip was, among other things, a different way to see the year. Not merely as days on the calendar, but as a journey along seasonal edges. Of course for the birds this eight-thousand-mile round trip is no “adventure”: eight out of ten young birds will not survive. But the ones who do will follow the same route again and again throughout their lives. Each will become an annual Ulysses, making these epic journeys with regularity, leaving every year in mid-September and returning in late March. They will cycle through their years.
I first got to know ospreys when I lived by their nests on Cape Cod. At the time they seemed the perfect embodiment of my own urge to root, to nest, to find a forever place on earth. Ospreys are fanatically committed to their large, sloppy nests, and though the birds are said to mate for life, most ornithologists believe that it is the commitment to the nest, not the mate, that keeps pairs together. It was this commitment to their homes that first attracted me to the birds as I got to know them during their summer nesting seasons. I believed that I, too, had imprinted my home place and would never leave. In fact, I had written a book about the place, about the ospreys, that ended in precisely that way, with my promising to “commit forever to Cape Cod.” What happened next was kind of funny, and consistent, in my experience, with what always happens when you make those types of grand pronouncements. Some professors at a university in the South read the book and liked it, especially the fancy lines about how I would never leave, and so they asked me to come teach at their school. All my high-flown yapping about loving and committing forever had been nice, but we were expecting a child and they were offering a salary and health insurance. In the end it was an easy decision. I moved for the same reason birds migrate South: to feed myself and my family.
After my first year in the South I briefly returned to Cape Cod during early July. This time I had no illusions about settling there “forever”—I was now a visitor, a tourist. My first morning I hiked out to one of the old nests, a sprawling unkempt nest that my then
one-year-old daughter could have fit quite comfortably in. But she wasn’t up in the nest; instead it was filled with other children, three dark brown and white juvenile birds whose insistent cries for food sounded like yearning distilled. These youngsters would imprint this place, the place they were born, and then, in less than three months, they would head out on a daunting journey of thousands of miles to South America. A year and a half later, they would return as adults to this same neighborhood to build their own nests. I still admired the way the birds were drawn to the magnet of home, but I now regarded them differently. After the nestlings had eaten their fish dinner, the oldest and largest of the chicks made his first weak attempts at flight, lifting up like an off-balance helicopter and landing almost instantly. Then, as the bird again lifted and fell, I felt my mind lifting, too, reordering, redefining. It occurred to me that the birds, for all their ferocity in defending their nests, were, like me, only visitors to Cape Cod. After all, wasn’t it somewhat presumptuous of me to call Cape Cod “home” to the birds, since they spent less than half the year there? Who knew what the birds considered home? Home might be the South American rainforest where they passed their winter months, or the migration itself, since they lived on the wing for so much of the year. Home might be a place in-between, and this was reassuring to my newly
unsettled self.
My old question had been how to nest. My new question was how to be at home in movement. And it was then and there that I made my decision to follow the birds when they left Cape Cod at summer’s end. While before I’d seen these birds as relatively sedentary, as nesters, I now wanted to get to know their other, more flamboyant selves. I wanted to see the year as a journey, a long precarious trip, a cycle of exodus and return. And as a larger experiment in living in-between.
As the editors began to put together the second issue of Ecotone, we noticed themes of movement, migration, unsettling. Look closely at Barbara Fisher’s beautiful cover and you will see animals, black and white, moving along the edges of a world of lighthouses, ladders and planets. This it is not a certain world, but a world where, as contributor Jennifer Sinor puts it, “change is the only stability I know.” Sinor’s piece, “Through the Particular We Come Home,” represents well the next generation of place writing. When Wendell Berry returned to Kentucky in the 1960s, he wrote of marrying his native place and proved you could go home again, a radical notion in a country where few have roots. But there are many who, like Sinor, remain wanderers, through circumstance or inclination, and they, too, need to write to place themselves.
But it’s hard to root in a shifting world. Ann Darby captures these shifts through multiple points of view in her story about the refusal to accept the certainty of death, while in David Rivard’s poems lives spill over into one another through transitions both fluid and abrupt. The themes of being lost resonate in Alison Lester’s story of cultural and marital confusion, in the poet Rebecca Aronson’s lines—“. . . find yourself/nowhere near knowing where you are”—and in the long nighttime ramble of Sebastian Matthews, a ramble over time as well as space (not to mention the rocky terrain of adolescence). Journeys and transformations fill these pages. Burns Ellison take us on an exhilirating trip north to Alaska in the sixties. In “Coachwhip,” John Lane sets out in search of stories and snakes, and re-traces his own past as both writer and amateur herpetologist, while in “Cutter,” Ben Jones’s short story, the protagonist transforms from suburban softie to rugged explorer of his own back yard, newly defined by his fresh scars. Poet Andrew Gottlieb describes a canoe trip that ends “adrift,” while Gretchen Steele travels through “a day on the edge/of not being a day” to witness the tragedy of famine.
An entirely different sort of journey is addressed by Margo Tamez in “Béti Leaves,” and it is worth noting that the police that guard against these border crossings are called “migras.” Brian Laird explores similar turf in a very different fashion, with a grisly and surrealistic tour of the Mexican-American border. Thousands of miles away, in the northeast corner of our country, Robert Root returns to E.B. White’s famous lake, and Sheila Kohler’s characters undergo a water journey, a trip “between land, in a neutral zone” where ambition bubbles below an amiable surface.
Perhaps nowhere is the thrill of migration so evident as in Derek Sheffield’s “Living on James Wright.” While ornithologists “open factual arms in dim rooms,” it is in the eyes of a thin migrant, a single yellow warbler, that we feel “the breath of fierce light.” Luminous imagery fills the poems in this issue: Charlotte Matthews sees “bright specks on the snow” that will soon fly away; Mike White wakes us to “bright hints of deer”; Richard Garcia sees clouds lit up below Taco Bell. Meanwhile, Sara Pennington concludes her “Epistemology of the Fern”: “This life is/larger than/anything I will ever know. And smaller.” Small, large lives are the focus of the migration trilogy that ends this issue: monarch butterflies annually bloom from trees in Jason Lee Brown’s story, while ornithologist Alan Poole lets us follow the miraculous journey of the sanderlings, the familiar toy birds that sprint along the shoreline. We couldn’t resist filling out this section with Thoreau’s own thoughts on migration and movement, compiled by Jeff Cramer, the Curator of Collections at The Thoreau Institute.
Finally, we would like to thank Rick Bass. Rick’s stories provide one of the great examples of nature writing spilling over into fiction.
