Why I am doing this

Part 2 in a series covering my project of birding every county in Georgia

Prothonotary Warbler, George Pierce Park, Gwinnett County, Georgia. Gwinnett (population 1,002,584) is the first county I visited for this project. I love this picture because it looks like an Audubon painting.

OUTSIDE MY WINDOW everything is still. The birdfeeder hangs vertically, as it should, its long axis revealing the direction to the molten center of the planet, heaving and churning 4000 miles below me and below you too, wherever you are, defining the direction down for all humanity. And suddenly I remember this curious fact: the earth’s core is the same temperature as the surface of the sun, and shines with the same blinding white light, but is capped and hidden forever by thousands of miles of mantle and rock. Talk about a light under a bushel.

I look out. Nothing moves. There is no wind. The heavy late summer air presses on everything equally and from all directions, holding trees in place, keeping things from happening. A chickadee, determined to make something happen, flies from the peach tree to the feeder. This particular flight is for me nearly perfectly foreshortened; from my vantage point the peach tree stands some 50 feet behind the feeder. As the bird flies toward me I witness her motion as a quick series of bobs as she alternatively flaps her wings, then coasts briefly like a tiny feathered football, wings held to her body, then flaps, then coasts. This happens about three or four times, the bird rising and falling along her path, and I see it only because of where I sit. The bobs would be imperceptible to someone watching from the side.

She alights on the feeder, roiling the air in tiny swirls around her. She selects a seed and is gone. The feeder swings nearly imperceptibly before returning to equilibrium. Forces cancel, the air stills and presses, the world returns to rest.

The world at rest. What a fabulous, persistent illusion. The peach tree, the feeder, the chickadee and I, along with the rest of Atlanta, move along a long circlar arc at a quarter of a mile per second around the axis of the planet, which itself traces a loose spiral around the sun at 18 miles per second while the sun drags us and the entire tilting carousel of the solar system across the Milky Way, on a course set just east of Hercules, at about 150 miles per second. It goes on; the great glittering galaxy itself falls toward Andromeda, the two galaxies in turn toward great clusters of galaxies and then all these taken together toward greater and more remote clusters of clusters, and so on without end. Also all stars move. Over time the constellations will twist and stretch and snap and scatter, Polaris will drift south. There is nothing, cosmically speaking, to hold onto. Galileo might have said: everything moves, my friend.

The relativity of all motion. When I catch a glimpse, even for a moment, of this endless regress, I lose my moorings. I become frightened and disoriented. An abyss opens at my feet; I feel the flutter of vertigo; I wobble; I fall.

As it goes for astronomy, so it goes for grief. On some inaccessible level of the mind we believe, against spectacular evidence, that our people and our places will always anchor us to a world at rest. We believe this sometimes for very many years. I did. Then change comes like quicksilver, straight out of the hidden heart of the world, and I lose my parents and the house I have called home my whole life. Like that, or so it seems, and the howling gap opens and I sway and lean and reach for a handle but there are no handles. My hand snaps in the air and I topple, breathless, over the edge.

I don’t like it. I don’t have the fortitude for this free fall; I can’t endure it. I have a life to live. I have a family and a job. I need to fix the ice maker. I need to pray for my children, talk to Elizabeth, and vote. I can’t do these things while falling, weightless. Perhaps I could if I were a saint. Perhaps then I could live and grieve freely and without references, in the trackless wilderness of the world: just God and me in the eternal now, repairing appliances and filling in the ballot.

But I am not a saint. I am only a man who, at age 55, has lost his fixed points. So I look to maps, which have always comforted me to a degree, I suspect, that is not normal. My fourth grade teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up and I may have been the only student, in all her years of asking this question, who answered, clearly and without hesitation: cartographer. When newly married I spent months making a star map for Elizabeth. Looking at it now, hanging on the wall in my office, it strikes me as amazingly detailed; if you look closely you will find where I marked the solar apex, that point east of Hercules toward which the solar system has set sail. Whenever someone tells a story I feel a terrific need to ask, “Where did this happen?” because only when I know that can I picture the story, or even believe it. I am a man obsessed with place.

The map I keep in my journal. Completed counties are colored and dated. A peregrination is “a long, meandering journey.” So many counties to go, and so many birds!

Shortly before we sold the house I was looking at my map of Georgia on eBird, the online data repository where birders around the world log their records. The 20-odd counties in the state I had birded were colored in: the more species, the darker the color. Dekalb, my home county, was darkest, followed by a few others in metro Atlanta. Some in the mountains, two on the Alabama line, two on the coast.

Then, an idea: complete the map. Locate myself. Explore the neighborhood. Creeks and ditches and fields. Rivers and beaches and mountains. Forests and marshes and swamps. And so many birds! If I could see this through—all 159 counties—then maybe I could quell the terrible sense not only of falling but of vulnerability, of being naked and alone under a threatening sky, that has remained with me ever since Mom died, and that has only increased with time. Or, if that feeling could not be quelled, perhaps I could, by doing this thing, come to proper terms with it, and perhaps recognize it as freedom. It would, at the very least, give me something to do.

I am now 13 counties, or 8 per cent, in. Some notes. By “birding a county” I mean spending at least one hour birding on purpose, in a deliberate, and not incidental, way. Keeping a complete list each time. When I bird, an hour is the blink of the eye; the least time I have spent so far is 2.5 hours, at the Bacon County Recreation Complex, and that was painfully quick. Also, I started anew with a blank map. In counties I have birded in my previous life, like Dekalb, I am finding new places, places I have not yet seen.

It is no longer still outside the window. A thunderstorm has rolled in, one of those brilliant and brutal demonstrations of natural violence that plow through Atlanta two or three afternoons a week every July. God is playing darts with lightning bolts and land and the cat just shot under the bed. The peach tree is bent and twisting in the gale, the feeder is swinging like a pendulum, and the chickadee is surely waiting out the storm in some tree, dry under well-oiled feathers, unbothered. Perhaps she is dozing.