Mergansers in the fog
Dinn, James M.
WHO COULD HAVE GUESSED THE DAHGERS? Mergansers in the fog JAMES M. DINN JUST A surge of water, an enveloping velocity, thunder and silence. Probably not time enough for awareness or panic. It was...
...It is inhibition, more than callousness or cowardice, which keeps us from being Good Samaritans...
...But the roles never reversed...
...toward the nearer of two small lakes...
...Buoyed by irrepressible confidence, we hope for the future rather than plan for it: speculating rather than investing...
...Like the mergansers we too are betrayed by the elements we trusted...
...Besides, despite my fears I had never known a duck to actually get caught in ice...
...But a clownish game of tag would ensue, gulls hovering and swooping each time a merganser's head broke water...
...Pragmatists who have elevated expediency to the level of principle, we grope for fixed norms to test our bearings...
...But apparently they needed sightings, bearings on some fixed point, to notify them of their peril...
...Who could have guessed the extent of the risks of picking produce in our orchards and fields...
...These were sleek deep-water birds with serrated fish-holding beaks and the unkempt casual crests of seasoned professionals...
...No line of demarcation defines the danger zone...
...Adults reassured me about the efficacy of migration and instincts, and I believed them...
...You wonder if past successes in fast water had made them feel falsely secure...
...The sense of the ordinary and familiar so disarms us that clear evidence of distress or danger is misinterpreted...
...Struggling for equilibrium, overburdened with armaments, we lean heavily on our missiles and push against the current...
...Somehow they seemed impervious to the risk...
...Tragedies which belie that confidence have a special poignancy...
...It was over for most of them in an instant...
...We are ail-too-willing to gamble...
...We're over a hundred miles from the Falls here...
...The gulls were always "it...
...We are perfectly capable of heroism, but there is nothing heroic in being a smoke alarm which sounds off whenever the toaster is used...
...Presumably they, too, would be wary of any circumstance where the current was stronger than themselves...
...It had probably seemed the safest item they handled, the most humane weapon in their arsenal...
...Then they would take to the air, beam back to their starting point, and settle down for another drift...
...It continued typically until the gulls quit out of discouragement or embarrassment...
...When it was repeated I started walking (not running...
...We are, in a word, Americans...
...Birds are not alone in presuming on a certain sanctuary in their lives...
...But somewhere between here and the critical precipice there must be a point where the current begins to dramatically accelerate...
...We had always assumed that danger wore an alien face, that we would be forewarned by its un-familiarity...
...And we might seem foolish if we overreact...
...One might have thought some tactile cue, some kines-thetic sense, would have told them...
...Never in my worst fears had I thought they could be hurt by their own element...
...8 March 1985: 149...
...They were diving ducks, not your garden variety tip-ups who scavenge clumsily in the shallows to extract tidbits from the mud...
...It was a crowded, guarded little beach area at a small lake, familiar and safe...
...There was nothing but rough humjames M. dinn is afree-lance writer living in Pennsylvania...
...But it haunted me to realize that ducks could drown, that they could be blind to elemental forces, that they needed to be warned...
...Of course we would have ignored alarms anyway...
...mocked ice at the time on the stretch of Lake Erie outside my window, but I looked reflexively...
...No alarm is sounded...
...So with time I had grown less fearful and more confident of their well-being...
...Who could have thought that of all the unspeakable horrors and risks of the Vietnam War its veterans, a decade later, would feel most compromised by a chemical that removed foliage...
...Puzzled by weakness, inspired by need, hurt by rebuff, we are younger than our years...
...It was a couple of weeks since they had lingered here in frigid congealing water, diving between the ice floes...
...At the same time we are reluctant to sound an alarm, to declare an emergency, to attempt a rescue, to summon help...
...You wonder if anyone could have engaged their attention long enough to save them from their inertia and avert the disaster...
...They attracted the gulls sometimes, whether by their lordly airs or by surfacing with a trophy fish we couldn't tell...
...we tune out or turn off the seat belt buzzers in our cars...
...Truthfully, we are afraid of seeming absurd...
...The flocks would casually drift with the wind, floating comfortably as a loose-knit group for half a mile or more...
...We all have zones within which we feel confident, relaxed, and secure...
...I mean, one would scarcely feel impelled, at such a point where there isn't really a perceptible current, to play gamekeeper and to try to goad the birds into the air...
...Perhaps they needed visual cues to realize how far they had drifted and how fast the current moved...
...Everything was so casual, so normal...
...We see the limp figure on the ground beside the road, but it occurs to us that he may not be injured, is simply resting...
...I almost watched my younger brother drown when we were boys...
...I was envying his fun as I mistook for playing his desperate thrashing before losing consciousness...
...And they have the ultimate escape — they could fly...
...Yet I felt more foolish with every step, passing students who were lounging on the lawn or strolling unconcerned...
...Permeating the event is a haunting sense of treachery in the safe and familiar...
...I've often wondered about fish under those circumstances, but I Commonweal: 148 never thought about ducks...
...Thousands of wild ducks had been swept over Niagara Falls to their death, apparently blinded to the danger by a rare winter fog...
...You wonder if the leaders laughed at the timid...
...More dreamers than diplomats, visionaries without blueprints, we magnify significance, underestimate complexity, and trust in the efficacy of good intentions...
...Mergansers they were, American mergansers...
...It was preposterous to think anyone was in danger...
...the ducks were always the quarry, skillfully taunting, always eluding, seemingly totally secure in the water...
...Americans are the people who print warnings on the cigarettes which we continue to smoke...
...They could presumably dare the very brink of the waterfall and launch effortlessly into the air...
...Who anticipated the dangers of plastics and asbestos, the contaminants in our wells, the acid rain falling on our forests and lakes, the toxins in the air we breathe...
...Rather foolish on the face of it...
...Trying to join the game I happened into the same spring-hole, and my own floundering attracted a rescuer for both of us...
...I used to worry, like Holden Caulfield, about ducks in winter...
...How often we had watched whole flocks of them swimming in November...
...On Notre Dame campus some years ago I thought I heard a cry for help...
...The deus ex machina was part of their standard portfolio...
...But it seemed so implausible on that balmy June morning that I couldn't take it seriously...
...That's the amazing part...
...Only one other person reached the lake before I did, and fortunately he had already helped the exhausted swimmer to shore...
...Strange now to muse when their danger might have begun...
...The item in the paper was as brief as the bizarre event itself...
...It was an innocent concern about where they might go, what they could eat...
...I had never suspected he was in trouble...
...Even beyond the brink, for all I knew, they might brake their descent at will and be airborne...
...we are deluged with diet warnings but overdose on fried franchised foods...
...More than once they had amused my wife and me with their effortless ease in water...
...Evidently the fog betrayed them...
...You wonder if some had an inkling, if any tried alerting others...
...So were they also — American mergansers...
...Not surprisingly, with a sense of security in familiar elements and a reluctance to take alarm, we collectively smile at history and plunge casually into its swiftest currents, calmly braving its surges and eddies, frolicking in the turbulence of its power...
Vol. 112 • March 1986 • No. 5
