Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir (14 page)

It turned out that Andy’s passport was waterlogged and the embassy staff told him he wouldn’t be able to use it, so he needed new documents too. And his wasn’t the only one — practically everyone else in our group ended up in Quito by the next morning, trading their waterlogged documents for papers saying they could go home. Only Ben, Yeats, Stephen, and Jane had useable passports.

The first batch of us received our letters and we flew back to Guayaquil the next day. Ben and the others were waiting for us in the airport, and I cried all over again. It felt like weeks, instead of one long night, since I’d last seen them.

EIGHT

WE ARRIVED HOME IN
Toronto on Sunday morning. Thankfully there was no snow on the ground or in the air, because we were in flip-flops and I was the only one wearing pants, linen though they were. Ben and Yeats, in shorts and T-shirts, thought the whole thing was pretty funny and I was so worn out I didn’t care. It was awfully nice not to have any baggage to wait for, but I was disappointed that I had to turn in my letter of transit with its terrible photo of me. It would have made a good souvenir.

That afternoon Ben took Yeats shopping to buy shoes for school, which started the next day. Yeats only ever had one pair of shoes at a time; consumerism was low on his list of priorities. According to him, the less stuff he had, the better, with the possible exception of books.

The next day I called the school and spoke to David Reed, Yeats’ mentor. I told him about the shipwreck and asked if he’d keep an eye on Yeats. I was worried that this incident might have stirred up the emotions that Yeats felt when Mr. Dewees killed himself only five months before. I knew it had stirred up all kinds of things in me: fears, mostly.

I said, “I have no idea if he’ll crash the way he did when David Dewees died, but I want to know someone is watching out for him.”

“Coffee House is coming up,” David said. Coffee House was the evening event created by the poetry club for students and teachers to entertain one another with poetry and song. “I’ll be working closely with Yeats over the next couple of weeks anyway. How is he at home?”

“Mostly the same as usual. Won’t talk to me, then does. Hates school, but does his work. Happy one moment, surly the next.”

“In other words, a pretty typical teen.”

“I guess.”

“You need to remember, you’re the mother. Kids feel safe with the mother and will drop all their fears and anxieties at your feet. If he’s feeling vulnerable, he’ll show it at home, not at school with us. Did you say, by the way, that you lost your own passport but not the others’?”

“Yes. I grabbed Ben and Yeats’s passports and missed my own. I had to go to Quito without them.”

“You’re the mother, always taking care of everyone else first.” He’d nailed it; an English teacher catching the symbolism.

David called me the next day and said he’d spoken with most of Yeats’s teachers and told them that I was concerned and that they should please call me if they noticed anything amiss. I thanked him and felt a twinge of guilt, knowing that Yeats would probably be mad at me for going behind his back like this. But he was still a child, just sixteen, and if he really was fine (as he said he was), then he didn’t need to feel self-conscious knowing adults were looking out for him. None of the teachers called me. He really
was
fine.

The next day, Yeats came home from school with two great projects. Mr. Reed had asked him to put together a CD of his favourite songs to play while people were arriving for Coffee House. And his English teacher had asked him to make a list of his ten favourite poems for the class to study in the upcoming weeks. I didn’t know if these men would have asked Yeats to do these things if I hadn’t made that call to the school. Maybe they would have. But I appreciated it anyway, because I saw the joy on Yeats’s face when he was telling me about these projects.

We talked about which poems to include. I said, “How about ‘The Cinnamon Peeler’ by Michael Ondaatje?” and went to the shelf to find the book.

He said, “You don’t need to read it out. It’s a good one, though, really beautiful.” He put it on the list.

“And what about that one about the cloths of heaven?” I asked expectantly. Yeats knew it was my favourite W. B. Yeats poem.

He laughed at me and said, “Okay, that one, too. It’s nice and short.”

I scanned the shelves for Ben’s old
Representative Poetry
, and got down the dusty and slightly mouldy-smelling volume. Twelve-page poems by Pope, twenty-page poems by Keats. I thought not. Far more interesting in this book were the little pieces of paper Ben had stuck into it over the years. There were old ticket stubs from concerts — the Kinks, the Eagles — small bookmarks from novels published in the
1970
s, and even a flyer promoting the Lotos Eaters, the band Ben sang in when he was younger.

So we went on with life, work, school. In a typical week, Ben worked at least three nights, as well as five or six days in the shop. We had book launches in the store in the evenings or we sold books at off-site events, and sometimes I worked at those functions too. We were back to the pace of the previous fall. Some weeks, Ben had an event every night. He was really tired. We were all uncharacteristically tired after the trip, trying to recalibrate.

Some days I found myself pussy-footing around Ben. He was so crabby. I was afraid to interrupt him to ask for help or to fix a problem. It was not that I was afraid he’d explode at me, but that he’d give me the silent treatment or glare at me like I should already know everything.

Simone said, “What’s eating him?”

I sighed and said, “He’s sore somewhere. Probably his feet, that broken toe, or his knees, or just his legs in general. He doesn’t get enough sleep and he doesn’t eat properly. All the same old things.”

“Huh. Maybe he needs a real holiday.”

“Maybe he needs not to work five double-shifts every week.”

Plus
, I thought to myself,
maybe we need more time alone together
. He gave me tight little kisses goodbye, which made me feel like crap. Simone saw the look on my face and said, “It’ll be okay. He’ll work this out like he always does, you’ll see.” She came over and rubbed my back.

But it wasn’t just Ben. I was crabby, too. I called my friend Chris in Halifax and I cried a bit.

“Take care of yourself, Lynnie,” she said. “Can you do something nice? Go out for dinner with a girlfriend or maybe go away for a weekend? Don’t take care of everyone else and leave yourself for last.” She would know, with three children of her own. “Besides,” she joked, “we’re about to turn fifty. It’s time to have a little bit of fun.”

ONLY A MONTH AFTER
we returned from the Galapagos, I was already planning two trips: a birding expedition to Pelee Island for the May bird migration and another in the summer to visit BC, ostensibly to scout out universities for Yeats but also to bird-watch and see friends. My flashbacks to the shipwreck were becoming less frequent; Ben and Yeats claimed to have no flashbacks at all, ever.

We were all back to our regular routines, school and work, but something was out of kilter for me. My teeth were sore. Did I need a root canal? Then I noticed I was clenching my jaw. Whenever I stopped to think about it, I found that my jaw was firmly clenched.

I was at a café downtown, sitting with a cappuccino and watching people go by, something I used to do all the time but never did anymore. It felt good to relax, but my jaw was still clenched. I unclenched it. I sipped my coffee and had to unclench my jaw again.

I thought it was time for a little self-examination. I sat there and said out loud (in my head),
What on earth has happened to make me so persistently anxious?
I thought back over the last days and weeks, and bumped up against the shipwreck and its stressful aftermath. Of course! Maybe it should have been obvious, this residual anxiety, but to me, it wasn’t. I’d been going to my Wednesday-morning writing group and I’d written about what happened on the trip, but not about my feelings or anxieties. Nor had I written about them in my daily journal. It was like they were stuck: in my body, in my jaw. Now I recognized the experience of the shipwreck for the power it still had over me, and I have to say I was relieved I didn’t need a root canal.

I called a girlfriend who was a yoga instructor and she said, “We hold everything in our bodies.” I remembered that from my yoga days, too. Our bodies hold the keys to our emotions, if we only know how to find the door. So now that I’d found the door, how did I open it?

Someone suggested therapy. Someone else suggested homeopathy. Another friend said lots of wine might be good (she wasn’t joking) and my doctor recommended exercise (which was her advice for everything psychological). I appreciated the advice, but had to find something that would fit into my daily life. I opted for massage with cranial-sacral therapy, once a month, as well as long walks with my friend Anne, and wine with friends on a regular basis. And birdwatching, which turned out to be a perfect choice.

The clenching abated and the flashbacks stopped, but something was left behind. A shadow of disquiet followed me around and when I thought about travelling, it enveloped me.

BEFORE GOING TO PELEE
Island, people asked if I was afraid of the ferry ride, the one-and-a-half-hour crossing of Lake Erie. I knew they were asking because of the Galapagos affair, and most people were asking partly in jest. No one had died, and so the shipwreck had become a great joke.

I looked at the possibility of fearing this crossing, and the one coming up in the summer from Vancouver to Victoria, and all the boat rides all summer long in Muskoka. I thought about the possibility of fearing the boats, the water, another shipwreck. I knew now, in a different kind of way than I had before, that freak accidents could happen to ordinary people, and that knowledge was in my body. My awareness had shifted. When we boarded the ferry, I looked for the exits; I looked for the life jacket stations, the muster stations. I prepared myself in a way I’d never thought to before. Yet this shift in awareness felt, to me, more practical than fearful.

Where I was sensing the shadow, though, was in a lack of joy. I was not having those fleeting joyful moments I usually had when contemplating a trip. Usually I loved setting out for somewhere I’d never been and felt an expansiveness in my chest just thinking about it for weeks in advance. This time, that shadow filled the space instead.

Once I’d driven the car onto the ferry to Pelee Island, Yeats and I walked out on deck but a cold, fierce wind was blowing, so we went back inside.

I said, “Let’s sit in the canteen and play cards.”

Yeats said, “Okay, let’s play Rummy.”

The boat tipped and rocked in the waves and every once in a while we looked up from our game.

I said, “Remember those waves?”

“Don’t think about it, Mom. We don’t need to worry.”

“You’re right.” We laughed a bit and I said, “But remember that really big wave, the one that tipped the boat right over? We were all in the
panga
and this giant wall of a wave came along and then that was it.”

“Yeah, that was the last wave.”

“It’s kind of amazing that no one was sick.”

“There was no time to be sick. Think about it. It all happened so fast — the crash, getting into the
pangas
. It was chaos.”

“But not really chaos. No one panicked.”

“Right.”

“You were especially calm. Like now. Here you are, calming down your momma before she even gets jumpy.”

While I felt comforted by Yeats, I still didn’t have that old carefree feeling I was used to having when my son and I were on the road. I was waiting for something to uncloud my heart.

Most of my friends had either never heard of Pelee Island or had some vague idea that it was a bird migration route. When I pushed them, though, it became clear they were thinking of Point Pelee, on the mainland, rather than the island itself. When I told them what I’d learned about it — that it was closer to the U.S. than to Canada, that since
1860
its farmers had been growing grapes for wine, that it had great beaches and gorgeous sunrises — they said, “Really? Why have I never heard of it?” I told them I had no idea.

The island is the permanent residence of about three hundred people, and another
1
,
200
or more cottage there every summer. It is the southernmost populated part of Canada and tends to have milder weather than the rest of the country. It is also part of the Carolinian forest, and the landscape is as flat as a pancake.

We arrived mid-morning, settled into our inn, then drove to a place marked “Fish Point” on the map. A couple of cars were parked at the trailhead, and on our walk through the woods we saw very few people. The whole place felt under-populated.

It was sunny but still windy and cool, so I wore nylon rain pants over my trousers. We weren’t even twenty metres into the forest before Yeats (who was wearing shorts) turned around and said, “Mom, your pants are driving me crazy. They’re too loud.”

“What? Too loud? I need them to keep me warm.”

“Well, they’re too loud. Listen to them.”

We walked a bit farther. I was thinking that I needed these rain pants to keep me warm and I was irritated by Yeats’s comment since he rarely felt cold. He didn’t understand. But then I stopped this internal chatter and listened for a bit and finally heard what he was hearing. They were really annoying.

“Okay, you’re right. I’m going to take them off.” I took off the offending pants and stuffed them in my backpack.

In the forest on the way to the beach we saw all kinds of warblers, including our first sighting of the
Cape May warbler
. This beautiful yellow bird has black stripes on its chest, an olive back, and red patches on its face. It is named for Cape May, New Jersey, where it was first described. But after that first sighting, it wasn’t seen in Cape May for another hundred years. It has an unusual tongue — curled and semi-tubular — which it uses to collect nectar during its winter sojourns in the West Indies.