The Road Trip (Part 1)

Holding Things Close… and Letting Them Go

Migrating Broad-winged Hawks, Amherstburg, Ontario, September 13, 2023.

September 14, 2023

It’s near the end of the summer of 2023, and as I set out on this cross-continent road trip, I’m excited. 

But given the daily headlines of climate-related catastrophe, I’m also filled with an inescapable sense of loss. 

Something I once held as precious is changing. And by precious, I mean it’s something that I’m afraid to let go. But the first few days of the trip – from NY through Ontario and into Michigan – have reminded me that letting go of something old can be a way of making room for something new.

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For all of us, “precious” means our partner, our children, our siblings and parents, friends, and our pets. We treasure fond memories of loved ones. Certain photographs and books are special. For me, precious also is my view of nature. It’s developed over a lifetime of meaningful experience of places and people in the natural world. But there are challenges to and pressures on my old way of thinking. And, it’s easy to fear the loss.

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One day many years ago at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in south Florida where I worked, the author Peter Matthiessen appeared unannounced at my office door, pointing a skinny finger to the bronze plaque over the entrance that acknowledged his parents as the benefactors who had paid for the little building in which I sat. We ended up taking a walk through the swamp in a late afternoon summer rainstorm, just the two of us. He shared loving stories of a Florida long since gone.

Another time years earlier, I found myself sitting on a curb at 4 am, drinking coffee from styrofoam cups with Annie Dillard, of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek fame. She talked of life, and the magical colors and sounds of a still midsummer night, as the changing street lights were the only movement in the empty street.

If it sounds like I’m being nostalgic, I am. You see, I have some deep connections to several writers and thinkers who shaped our views of the natural world in the mid-20th century. I once worked in the same building where Rachel Carson herself had written. Her personal library of notes, letters, books, and documents were still stored in the basement where I had to go from time to time. Once in an office at World Wildlife Fund in DC, Sir David Attenborough patted me on the back telling me, “Keep up the good work.”

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Writing about nature – “natural history” as they called it in the 19th and 20th centuries – has a rich legacy. It is steeped in romanticism, beauty, empiricism, and emotion.“Swedenborgian” if you will. It is popular science and art, and full of tradition. Through it, nature seems knowable, manageable, and eternal. In the minds of many authors, nature is the product of a loving God. 

A Massachusetts woodlot bestowed benevolent lessons on Henry David Thoreau. Aldo Leopold taught us to see things from a wider perspective. Edward Abbey told us to use our heads – and our hearts – in the outdoors. Rachel Carson bravely shared some painful truths to those who would listen. Wallace Stegner always chose the perfect words.

In 2023, however, the natural history writing of those earlier generations seems almost too quaint and naive for today. In many ways, it’s irrelevant in a world raging daily with floods, fires, heat, and storms. That romantic view of nature as our loving teacher is gone. And, I can’t help but feel a sense of nostalgia, and a sense of loss for that way of thinking and viewing the world.

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WEDNESDAY MORNING 9/13/23: 

This first week of the trip I’m driving between the Great Lakes looking for migrating hawks. There’s never any guarantees with wildlife, but on the third day of driving I happened upon the perfect combination of weather, location, and date. I was at the Holiday Beach Migration Observatory in Amherstburg, Ontario. It’s one of the oldest continuously monitored hawk watch sites in North America.

Counting migrating hawks of various species is an exacting science, and there are dedicated volunteers at various locations every day of the fall. The Hawk Migration Association of North America has over 200 registered sites from Alaska to Labrador, to Mexico and Jamaica. Like most every other natural phenomenon in the summer of 2023, scientists are monitoring the migration closely now looking for signs of change.

In most places, a good day for the hawk watchers may be just a couple of dozen birds. But with the species known as the Broad-winged Hawk, things can be dramatically different. They migrate from Canada to South America in large flocks at extremely high altitudes. The flocks can number in the hundreds, or even thousands. In my opinion, it is one of nature’s greatest wildlife spectacles, and I’ve never witnessed a full-on Broad-winged flight until now. It’s one of those things for which you have to be in the right place at the right time.

This day at Holiday Beach, observers counted 13,751 Broad-winged Hawks.

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WEDNESDAY NIGHT 9/13/23: 

As you know, my ultimate destination is coastal British Columbia where I hope to find the “Spirit Bears” of the Great Bear Rainforest.

Most nights, I’m sleeping in a tent attached to the back of my car. 

Wednesday, the third night of the trip, I spent alone in a remote state forest in northern Michigan, nestled on the shore of a quiet little lake. No one was around for miles. Coyotes woke me up about 5 am and then I realized I had to get up to pee. When I unzipped the tent opening, this was what I saw. 

Unknowingly, I had parked the car with the rear toward the north, and I had slept all night facing Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the Big Bear and the Little Bear. It’s only a photo made with an iPhone, but I took it as a sign. 

I settled back into another hour of sleep with thoughts of bears in my head.

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THURSDAY MORNING 9/14/23:

I’ve brought a stack of books in the car for company. Most of them are new things that I’ve been meaning to read. There’s a couple of old friends, however, that I thought should make the drive as well.

“…we had watched in other years a parade of soaring migrants. On set wings the hawks had drifted or scudded by. They rode as on an invisible tide that swept them down the long ridge in a great curve toward the south. The trail they followed was the same autumn pathway their ancestors had used long before the ‘Santa Maria’ crossed from the Old World to the New. It was a trail that, all down the Endless Mountain, providing supporting updrafts that enabled southbound hawks to cover hundreds of miles with scarcely a wingbeat.” - Edwin Way Teale.

Autumn Across America (Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1956) is Edwin Way Teale’s narrative of a drive from Cape Cod to Point Reyes in 1952 with his wife. It’s likely to be the perfect example of writing that captures that old-fashioned feeling of benevolent love for nature.

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After I had read a while, I took a walk around the lake. All morning an adult bald eagle had been circling and calling, stopping to perch occasionally in a tall tree over the beach. On the beach, I found an eagle feather – remarkably the second one I’ve seen at my feet this summer. I placed it near the water’s edge pointing north where the Big Bear and Little Bear had been when the stars were out. I said a prayer of gratitude in four directions, north for the bears I hope to see, west for where the eagle had sat and the direction I’m heading, south where my car and tent sat on the hill reminding me of the journey at hand, and then east toward the rising sun and home. 

I left the feather there and continued on my way.