Sand Hill Cranes

Decatur, GA, 10-FEB-2019 – Jennifer thinks the call of Sandhill Crane sounds like the clattering of crockery dishes, a distinctive sound that carries for miles. I had always, somehow, thought that Sandhill Cranes were endangered and rare – they are neither. Though they do mate for life.

There is a very small anchorage in Cecilia Island, BC, just north of Shearwater, where a mated pair return each year. The first time we heard that pair, we stood stock still on the deck of Caro Babbo. The sound is loud, really loud. After a while we spied the pair on shore.

Last week for ten minutes before they flew overhead, we heard the cacophony of a migratory flock above the Willivee house. Jennifer tells me Candler Park, where lived for a while in the early 2000s, is on their migration path. She’d see them each year.

The flock that flew overhead was large, dozens of birds, but dwarfed by the half a million that stage together in Nebraska’s Platte River before starting the migration south.

Across the Alaska trips, we became better at spotting the bustled birds walking along the shore feeding – they’re omnivores. In the afternoons, when we’d see them, they were quiet, walking along, fattening up during the long summer days.

In Florida, two weeks ago, we saw Sandhills again, but these aren’t our migratory Alaska friends. There are resident birds in Florida, Cuba and Mississippi. https://abcbirds.org/bird/sandhill-crane/

I’m not a birder. Birds, to me, have always been part of the background, white noise of outdoor life. Not so, for Jennifer, who drinks the natural world, spotting wild life and decoding geology.

I’m second source: I learn what Jennifer teaches me, but little more. I see what Jennifer points out to me through her binoculars or in a rock lifted from the beach.

I revel in the archaeology of ruins and standing buildings, abandoned roads, settlements and choices in modern architecture, the choices people make now and the choices they made then.*

We both read the weather, the water, the charts and electronics that we use when we travel from one place to another.

In June, Jennifer and I will know each other fourteen years. Six weeks after we met, we were in Amsterdam motoring around the canals, a week later sailing on LI sound. Within a few years we were in Moscow, Seoul, Cape Town and Kuala Lampur. It is a life of travel, where for me, home is the bubble of space that surrounds me. For Jennifer, it is a life of travel and the quest to return home to the peace that isn’t somewhere else tomorrow.

I hadn’t thought of this in terms of the Sandhill Cranes, but I suppose there is some metaphor there.

The Edgemont house should finish up this week. Erwin arrives in Seattle in the middle of April. In between, I need to study celestial navigation, weather prediction and get a 100-ton license. A busy bunch of months.

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There is a lot to write about when we are not traveling: pieces that take time and reflection. Many of the settlements have full histories, left behind in machinery, foundations, and grave yards.

*Last night, I found a ‘‘delft’’ pottery shard that Jennifer and I discovered on the beach at Cachalot, a whale processing site on Vancouver Island’s west shore. While many of the settlements are impenetrably overgrown, a few, infrequently visited sites were not. We made it a point to leave all the artifacts as we found them, but a piece mixed with sand on the beach came home in a jacket pocket.

A friend is clearing a piece of breach front property he has purchased, finding the ruins of those who came before, but it has taken him almost two years. Nature reclaims with a tight fist.