Because it has been so hot here, I’ve been taking my dog for his walk in the evening, at dusk, rather than in the afternoon has we had been wont to do over the winter and spring. And although having a bouncing, energetic retriever pulling you along isn’t really the quietest way to travel, I have noticed the silence of dusk, and I have noticed the birds—the herons flying inland from the sound, the bluebirds and swallows, winging their way to their nests. The dog has flushed out doves, brown thrashers and an endless number of cardinals.
Perhaps the birds were always here and I just wasn’t looking, but in the evenings they are more easily noticed, as the background noise of human activity dies away. Most of the houses are lit with the flickering, uncertain light of televisions as we walk by—the dog, with his nose to the ground seeing nothing, and I, with my eyes peering into the trees, feeling as though I were seeing everything for the first time.
Sometimes life seems oddly serendipitous. It wasn’t long after Ray (the dog) and I started our evening walks that I was given a copy of Joyce Hinnefeld’s debut novel, In Hovering Flight. It is the kind of book designed to appeal to me—about poetry and painting and birds and artists. But I long ago decided that subject was not as important to me as style—interesting tidbits of information no longer excuses uncertain and mediocre writing. So while I was interested in learning, for example, the proper way to write in a field notebook if you are a bird watcher, or that John James Audubon may have invented the Cuvier’s Kinglet he describes in one of his many journals, it would not have been enough to capture my attention—even with the mention of Audubon, a person I am interested in for many reasons, one of which is actually hanging on the wall behind my head. The style of the section called “field notebooks†however? Oh, that captured my attention immediately. It was quite as beautiful as the walks I took with my dog. Reading it makes me feel just like as if I’m standing on the small sandy rise down the street(soon to be a housing development but it was once a Civil War bunker, so it is a place that knows about battles) —looking down towards the sound, enjoying the wind and resisting the tugging of the dog and just watching the sky for flying creatures:
“Scarlet loved even the great blue herons, which became increasingly common in that protected area nea the Delaware as she grew into her teens, their harsh, ugly screeches piercing their mornings and evenings on the screened porch where they ate their meals. She would never forget the sight of one rising from the creek each morning, the spring when she was twelve, as she let the screen door slam behind her on her way to catch the bus to school. That rush of wins and then the silent, massive span above her head, darkening the sky—every time, it made her catch her breath. And she tried to find a way to describe its rising each day on the bus, playing with words in her head: “giant, silent feathered airplane,†blue-gray cloud with wings.†Tom, to her ongoing embarrassment, kept her spiral-bound notebooks from those years—notebooks full of phrases like these but rather lacking in homework assignments.
“Herons make you reach for words, she told her father…â€
In Hovering Flight is a novel about mothers and daughters, poets and painters, and passion—the kind of passion that in an earlier era would have been named a “calling.†Addie is an artist and poet who paints birds. Ted is her biologist husband who thinks teaches science using poetry. Scarlet is their daughter, named for the one bird her mother never managed to capture on canvas. (If she had been a boy, she would have been named Tanager).
This is a particularly beguiling “math for the masses” book, but it is really more about how ideas make life better. It is a little funny how the authors’ moral derived from the calculation of the circumference of a circle is that “your head CAN go farther than your feet!”
