truck. She’s very independent.”
“And you resent that.”
“
Resent
is the wrong word,” I said.
“You should resent it,” she said. “I was too independent once, and now I’m too needy.”
“Is that your assessment or someone else’s?”
“Whatever their faults,” she said, “at least eagles mate for life.”
As we continued, I learned that she had been engaged until her fiancé developed an interest in healthier specimens; that she had studied woodpeckers on the Mississippi (which she called “a vast national sow prone to rolling over her young”), even claimed to have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker, often called Elvis in feathers less for his gaudy plumage than for the regular sightings of him since he was declared extinct in 1944. Her job was “doing all the things Travis is supposed to,” making calls through a speakerphone and answering e-mails with voice recognition software. She was lucky to have the job, would never declare herself disabled provided she could still find a way to work, had been in Jefferson only three months, and had begun chipping away at a paralegal qualification in the evenings.
At Nest 3, both of us drenched in perspiration and covered in mud, I held a water bottle for her to drink from, and she announced that she would like to continue; see whatever else there was to see. I led her downriver to a lock and dam the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers laid across the Ohio fifty years before, and we stood on top watching blue catfish four and five feet long batter the concrete below with their armored heads. It’s unsettling to watch, and nobody knows why they do it.
“Simple,” said Dana. “The dams age. The fish breed. Check back in two hundred years.”
We found a molting copperhead on a flat rock, and keepingwell away, admired the hourglass pattern on his shining back while he glared at us, half-dressed.
Downstream from that lay the wreck of a steamer that ran aground in 1934. Later the U.S. Navy attempted to salvage it, resulting in a U.S. Navy salvage boat wrecked alongside. Both wrecks teem with frogs, thousands of frogs gorging on the millions of bugs clouding the air. In chorus they sounded like the rumbling of a great riverine intestine. I felt like a demented tour guide; everything I showed her was vaguely revolting. She loved it, she said, and thought me foolish and fortunate in equal measure, and said she hoped I wouldn’t fall out of a tree.
We neared the confluence of the two rivers, where green and blue churn and roil to create the reeking brown sludge that eventually becomes the Mississippi—or where, Dana said, the sultan Ohio impatiently awaits his Wabash concubine. On a small sandy strip of desolate shoreline Dana said she would like to swim. Would I turn around while she undressed? I did.
“I don’t wear things with buttons or laces,” she explained, but several minutes passed before she called out okay.
She was twenty feet out, shoulder deep in a wavering brocade of sunlight and water, laughing, blighted hands invisible.
“You could join me,” she said, and turned to face the river. At first I hesitated, and then I didn’t; she was too demure and too damaged for it to be anything other than a friendly invitation, and there was no one around but the bright blue Ohio and us.
Bowfishing, at least as practiced in Southern Indiana, combines hunting and angling while eliminating the need for theskills of either. You sit in a rowboat firing arrows at large targets three and four feet away in three feet of water. It’s considered a good date in Jefferson: a lady can work on her suntan while her gentleman kills things, and the only expense is beer. Nest 2, the cypress nest and archaeological site, was subject to infrequent human contact in the form of bowfishing expeditions.
The eagles at Nest 2 observed these hunters closely.
seems skeptical of human techniques
,
I wrote.
The dominant species in that lake are paddlefish, a large silver animal
“And you resent that.”
“
Resent
is the wrong word,” I said.
“You should resent it,” she said. “I was too independent once, and now I’m too needy.”
“Is that your assessment or someone else’s?”
“Whatever their faults,” she said, “at least eagles mate for life.”
As we continued, I learned that she had been engaged until her fiancé developed an interest in healthier specimens; that she had studied woodpeckers on the Mississippi (which she called “a vast national sow prone to rolling over her young”), even claimed to have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker, often called Elvis in feathers less for his gaudy plumage than for the regular sightings of him since he was declared extinct in 1944. Her job was “doing all the things Travis is supposed to,” making calls through a speakerphone and answering e-mails with voice recognition software. She was lucky to have the job, would never declare herself disabled provided she could still find a way to work, had been in Jefferson only three months, and had begun chipping away at a paralegal qualification in the evenings.
At Nest 3, both of us drenched in perspiration and covered in mud, I held a water bottle for her to drink from, and she announced that she would like to continue; see whatever else there was to see. I led her downriver to a lock and dam the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers laid across the Ohio fifty years before, and we stood on top watching blue catfish four and five feet long batter the concrete below with their armored heads. It’s unsettling to watch, and nobody knows why they do it.
“Simple,” said Dana. “The dams age. The fish breed. Check back in two hundred years.”
We found a molting copperhead on a flat rock, and keepingwell away, admired the hourglass pattern on his shining back while he glared at us, half-dressed.
Downstream from that lay the wreck of a steamer that ran aground in 1934. Later the U.S. Navy attempted to salvage it, resulting in a U.S. Navy salvage boat wrecked alongside. Both wrecks teem with frogs, thousands of frogs gorging on the millions of bugs clouding the air. In chorus they sounded like the rumbling of a great riverine intestine. I felt like a demented tour guide; everything I showed her was vaguely revolting. She loved it, she said, and thought me foolish and fortunate in equal measure, and said she hoped I wouldn’t fall out of a tree.
We neared the confluence of the two rivers, where green and blue churn and roil to create the reeking brown sludge that eventually becomes the Mississippi—or where, Dana said, the sultan Ohio impatiently awaits his Wabash concubine. On a small sandy strip of desolate shoreline Dana said she would like to swim. Would I turn around while she undressed? I did.
“I don’t wear things with buttons or laces,” she explained, but several minutes passed before she called out okay.
She was twenty feet out, shoulder deep in a wavering brocade of sunlight and water, laughing, blighted hands invisible.
“You could join me,” she said, and turned to face the river. At first I hesitated, and then I didn’t; she was too demure and too damaged for it to be anything other than a friendly invitation, and there was no one around but the bright blue Ohio and us.
Bowfishing, at least as practiced in Southern Indiana, combines hunting and angling while eliminating the need for theskills of either. You sit in a rowboat firing arrows at large targets three and four feet away in three feet of water. It’s considered a good date in Jefferson: a lady can work on her suntan while her gentleman kills things, and the only expense is beer. Nest 2, the cypress nest and archaeological site, was subject to infrequent human contact in the form of bowfishing expeditions.
The eagles at Nest 2 observed these hunters closely.
seems skeptical of human techniques
,
I wrote.
The dominant species in that lake are paddlefish, a large silver animal
Similar Books
