Thunder Sticks and Avocets
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union THUNDER STICKS AND AVOCETS BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Sunday. I wake up late, but not so late as I might have wished. Diane is in Boston at a conference and the boys are away at...
...Diane is in Boston at a conference and the boys are away at college...
...The moon rose...
...Go home...
...The camera pulls back to a close-up of the nest...
...an old beaver climbed out of the water and started dragging a fallen sapling toward the dam...
...His is a dismal choice: Either he stays where he is, and risks being mugged, or he moves out here, and risks being shot by some votary of the National Rifle Association who can't hit the broad side of a gravel pit...
...I decide to idle away an hour by watching television—not any show in particular, just "tv"—and I am soon rewarded with a screen-scene that seems uncannily to parody the view from my window...
...out on the pond, atop a beaver house, sat "two half-grown beavers idling and combing their shining brownish fur...
...There is much backing and filling, whirring and roaring, until it becomes clear that soon—perhaps within the hour—the bulldozer will overrun bird and nest...
...Loud squawks and snarls interrupt my research...
...We see her here surrounded by the tidal slime of San Francisco Bay...
...The bird has huge webbed feet, long spindly legs and a slender beak that curves upward like a bent toy sword...
...That's what two-acre zoning does to a community: It sanctifies selfishness and spreads illusions of noninterdependence...
...Very puzzling, until their leader solved the mystery...
...I pour myself a drink and silently toast the jittery city-dweller...
...So it seems reasonable to conclude that the safest place for outdoor target-shooting is none too safe...
...Among the speakers for the NRA was none other than the gravel-pit marksman who nearly killed our friends on their patio...
...Guns thus destroyed the balance of weakness between men and animals, turning the men into killer-merchants and the animals into victim-merchandise...
...if so, they will almost certainly be the last avo-cets born in this part of the bay...
...In the foreground a grotesque bird squats over her eggs...
...In the Garden of Eden there were no neighbors and no dogs...
...Then: "An exploding burst of light broke from the blackness there and knocked the beaver forward, the roar of the blast followed by loud plungings all along the ponds, the echo of the shot lost in the cries of alarm and warning at the village, and in the shouted orders, the running moccasins...
...The Japanese and the Russians prowl the waters in their killer-boats, equipped with powerful harpoon cannons and each year they massacre more than 40,000 whales...
...Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!—but this town is not a wilderness and it long ago reached the far side of paradise, the place where nature stops and community begins...
...It contains three eggs, all intact...
...I return to the house and find my copy of Mari Sandoz' Old Jules Country, that fine collection of essays about pioneer life on The Plains, which opens with an American retelling of the fall of man...
...The evening sun lay warm and brooding on the upper Missouri valley," she begins, while half-naked Indian children frolicked alongside a pond, playing with a wool-filled ball...
...Crack...
...It is also a good day for dawdlers...
...He said, "We came here to lick this proposal for good...
...it seems to be digging channels, letting in the sea...
...Paradise lost...
...Each carried "a long thin pole...
...Lots of people around here like to shoot at targets in their yards, and there appears to be no law to stop them, though both the noise and the danger are disturbing...
...For an instant the dog pauses at water's edge...
...At times, I've seen small boys carelessly firing large guns into the dark of the woods...
...They learned later that the bullet had been fired three-quarters of a mile away by a man who'd been target-shooting in a gravel pit...
...The frightened Indians found two white hunters standing over a dead beaver...
...it de-Christianizes the place...
...I drink a cup of coffee in the dining room...
...In time the Indians learned that they, too, could own a thunder stick: "that it could be obtained with the hide of their beavers—and that there were other dangerous things to be bought with their animal neighbors...
...We watch it work the ooze...
...It was a paltry proposal, designed less to solve the problem than simply to acknowledge it, yet it never stood a chance...
...We see cracks in the egg shells, and feathers pushing through the cracks...
...Cheers...
...As he pointed out, "If I can't practice readily [outdoors], my skill will diminish...
...One of their spokesmen argued that the U.S...
...In this case, however, the marksman not only missed the target, he missed the hill...
...They felt safe on their patio...
...But will the duck return to her nest now that she has acquired a knowledge of evil...
...No hiker is safe, yet people shy away from regulations...
...The gray sky presses against the window, and through the mist I see our pond asimmer in the rain...
...The dog seems mildly surprised...
...then he gazes ap-pealingly at me...
...The species is dying a hideous death...
...He gazes longingly at the quacking ducks...
...It is a country full of thunder sticks, Sunday alfternoon specials...
...Now, persons who claim to be experts in such matters say the safest place for outdoor target-shooting is in a gravel pit: If the bullet misses the target, it buries itself harmlessly in the side of the hill...
...First the beaver, then the buffalo, and now the whale...
...Do you not see," he asked, "that they are the thunder-stick men of whom we have all been told?—those with the hairy faces...
...From that moment on it was, ecologically speaking, downhill all the way...
...After all, he has only been doing his job...
...Not until the ball came soaring into the water did either of the young beavers look up...
...The local branch of the National Rifle Association mailed postcards bearing the imprimatur of the "nra institute for legislative action," urging members to come to the Town Meeting and vote "no...
...Avocet: "any of several small limicoline [mud-dwelling] birds of the genus Recurvirostra...
...I throw a pebble at the dog...
...Well, they came and they conquered...
...Another shot from another neighbor...
...then he, too, takes the icy plunge...
...A while back some of us in town tried to get an ordinance passed that would have limited the outdoor use of firearms...
...One evening last autumn a couple we know were watching the sunset from their patio when a bullet whizzed by them and gouged a hole in the trunk of a nearby maple...
...I run outside in time to see a neighbor's dog, a dappled English setter with an instinct for the chase, harrying our mothering mallard off her nest and into the pond...
...They are welcome, but we should take pains to see that the bulldozers preceding them do not, while we feather our nests, make avocets of us all...
...A disembodied voice explains that we are looking at an avocet, a shore bird found both in North America and in Europe...
...Let's get on with the vote...
...The American species is rapidly becoming scarce...
...In drawing up plans for the bay, the engineers did not consult the birds...
...What spoiled paradise for Adam and Eve was not banishment but subdivisions...
...Get out of here...
...I make my way around to the far side of the pond and find the hastily abandoned nest...
...one way to deal with solitude is to sleep through it...
...The voice says, "These fledglings may win their race with the bulldozer...
...He swims toward the two ducks, who are paddling in tight, panicky circles and quacking to the heavens...
...Now, says Time magazine, communities like this one are fast filling up with people eager to escape the cares and crimes of the city...
...Behind the avocet a bulldozer creeps into view...
...What woke me were the gunshots...
...Constitution, in giving him the right "to keep and bear arms," thereby conferred upon him "the privilege of practicing...
...If you live in a "rural" place, you don't have to love your neighbor as yourself because presumably your neighbor lives far away—out of earshot, gunshot and loveshot...
...The guns preserve the myth that our town is still rural, when in fact it is becoming mainly a bedroom for urban and suburban executives...
...A wild duck, looking green and primal in the odd light, drifts sleepily upon the waters, while his mate sits half-concealed on the opposite shore, coddling her eggs...
...Then, accelerating, he romps across our field and streaks up our neighbor's steep driveway, all in an instant...
...I pick up a larger stone and throw it in his general direction...
...I switch off the set and reach for my dictionary...
...The splash makes him sorrowful...
...It's a good day for ducks...
...With what I imagine to be a canine shrug he scrambles out of the water...
Vol. 59 • April 1976 • No. 9
