We all should discover somewhere else.
We have home, which comes with it certain responsibilities and routines. We have work with its predictable patterns of give and take. But we need a location that is neither, that is ours to claim how we want and gather with friends, or be alone, and let our stresses and expectations dilute in the deluge of “somewhere else.” For many it is a bar, or a coffee shop, or a park or a gym. For me, it’s outside, often on the sand looking out toward Portugal, toward Spain, and Africa. Looking up the coast and wondering if anyone I used to know is looking south.
I get home late and I settle onto the porch, but it’s a two hour drive from my office to my driveway in the woods on the Rappahannock River, so by the time I am home I need to stretch my legs; I need to keep moving, energized by the commute during which I watched the city fade to suburb fade to country. It wakes me up just when everyone else is winding down. So just after dark and sometimes until midnight I walk the far reaches of the marshes along the Chesapeake Bay and the Rappahannock River. Here, nearly every evening in winter just before dusk bends to night, in those moments after twilight when I let my eyes adjust to the lack of light, a few hundred geese land in the pond, some on the river, and a few in the field nearby.
I can hear them for quite some time before they actually fly into sight from beyond the trees to the west. The air is so clear this time of year I can hear them honking in groups, joining in like a chorus which starts with just a few voices and adds another rafter until they reach some crescendo. At first it might be only a flight of a dozen or so based upon the muted sound from the distance. But over the course of five or ten minutes I always hear another group, then another, and more. They fly in a “V” to be able to see each other clearly for protection and create just a little draft, but the closer they come to landing, the faster the formation falls apart.
I’ve not come upon many places in my travels that simply don’t change. Old neighborhoods seem smaller, the trees suffocate the once wide-open fields, and old hangouts usually have new crowds, or shut down, weeds pushing through parking lot pavement, some windows broken and boarded near a rusted dumpster. Such is civilization in neglect.
Even most of nature can show signs of change. Forests give way to fires, or new growth simply pushes out old oaks, changing the landscape. Rivers erode at the banks, and while the mountains can retain their majesty, trails and roads can rip small scars across the land, or some new cabin is built whose windows catch the sun and the glare flickers across the valley.
But out here on the reach, the wildlife follows the same patterns they’ve followed for thousands of years, longer. I find something grounding in this movement.
Eventually the first group is already in the pond when the last group crests the bare branches of the oaks, and hundreds settle into the field or onto the river. Once, thousands landed on the plowed cornfield just down river. Their honking continued for an hour that night, and just as the sounds of these geese tonight slowly softens and, finally, quiets, so did those of the thousand that night so that from my porch I could tell they had all landed safely.
But every single time long after the groups have all seemingly arrived, two or three geese come in late, alone, as if they stopped at another farm over near the bay and had to regroup and find their flock.
I don’t want to disturb them with my walk along the water, ankle deep in the cool river, but I always want to watch. So when I walk along the river at this hour and the skin on my face is tight from the cold and my nose runs a little, and the muscles in my back are also tight from the cold, I keep my hands thrust into the pockets of my coat and walk along the soft shoulder of the tiny dead end road so that my feet make no noise. I can usually get to the narrow strip of grass between the river and the pond, sit, appearing much like a bush, and let them settle soft around me. Still, their call increases in a burst of warnings to the rest that I’m around. It quiets quickly though as I remain still and blend into the rocks and am no longer a threat.
On winter nights the water is almost always calm, a slow methodic lap at the rocks and sand. The sky is all stars, and sometimes just after dark in January you can still find the center of the Milky Way in the southwest. With no unnatural lights for more than twenty miles in any direction except from the scattered farmhouses or buoys, the sky is a carpet of constellations.
It isn’t by chance my Canada friends find respite here. They need grass for food, they need water, and they need to be able to see great distances to anticipate danger. That’s why they’re here on the edge of the bay with open fields and ponds. It also explains why they love airports and golf courses. The abundance of geese isn’t an accident either; they travel in “gangs”; often the younger geese are forced into the gang so that traveling is safe, and then the group can better dominate these areas.
But their coolest trait is their honk. They keep that up as a form of encouragement so the lead geese will maintain their speed and not give out so easily. Basically, the ones in the back are telling the ones up front to “Go! Go! Go! Go!” and move their collective asses. And when the lead gets tired, she moves to the back and gets to badger the others for a while. And they do this their whole lives—about twenty-seven years.
And just after twilight when dusk is making its brief appearance, and the water is like a mirror, the call of the geese from well across the treetops is musical, somehow eternal. When this land was unbroken, Canada geese called to each other, rushing for the open fields and waterways, settling down here. Powhatan heard geese here, and John Smith, and Washington just to the north at his birthplace on the Potomac, and Jefferson not far from there. Through the centuries the flyway from the St. Lawrence down across the Adirondacks and Catskills to the Susquehanna south into Virginia to the mouths of these five fair rivers spilling into the Chesapeake has been their home.
And they love dusk, just before dark, as it is the best time of day for them to recalibrate their internal magnetic compass to cross continents; to come here year after year and settle by my side. Then they move on. It is something they need to do. And I need them to come as they do; they remind me that some things are absolute, some things will remain true. So I suppose I also need them to leave.
We have that in common: we’re both migratory; yet we both end up here. I guess that’s what also attracts me to the passing flocks of geese. The peace in such sounds late on a winter’s evening touches my soul, settles me somehow beyond my ability to explain. But also, I sit on the rip rap and blend into the rocks and watch them in the water and contemplate their distance from the central regions of Ontario and Quebec, across Hudson Bay. My entire life I’ve been drawn to migration, to some sense of movement from one place to another, particularly the seeming randomness of such order. They know where they are going every time, and yet they move south without boundaries, schedules, or maps. I envy them that, to be always in this retreat, this third place, which for them is little more than a rest stop. But we all need a third place. For me, it is the wilderness, which, as Edward Abbey points out, is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
We all need somewhere that gets in our blood.
When I was young my father bought me Robin Lee Graham’s Dove. It was the first book I remember inciting in me a sense of adventure, travel, and exploration. The sea seemed to have no borders or barriers. Graham’s goal was circumnavigation, but his schedule was wide open. Peter Jenkins, too, in his A Walk Across America, knew where he would end up, he just didn’t know when or how; and along the way the adventure was in the places he paused for food and water, with an open view of life around him. Ironically, I like the consistency of this migration; the predictable return, surrounded by friends, a quiet night. Those were my dreams growing up. They still are.
I suppose all dreams are migratory, both in hopeful destinations and their transience with the changes in our responsibilities and circumstances. At times I take flight, abandon my flock and push off for a while. But I look forward to coming home to settle into some sense of domesticity, which I can accommodate briefly at best, because eventually I think about the dreams of my youth as I fly toward my twilight years. They call to me to “Go Go Go Go” as my life moves further along, pushing at the edges of dusk.