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Journal of a Sabbatical |
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February 15, 2001 |
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fried things |
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Today's Bird
Sightings: Today's Reading: In Audubon's Labrador by Charles Wendell Townsend Today's Starting Pitcher: Pitchers and catchers report on Saturday! Plum Island Bird List
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I have a thousand and one things to do before I go to Budapest, but winter is the season for ducks here and ducks are probably my favorite bird family. Warblers don't do anything for me particularly so I don't go all gaga in the spring, but wintering ducks just float my boat. So, early in the week Ned and I planned a Cape Ann duck sighting expedition for today. The ostensible goal was harlequin ducks but any wintering ducks will do. We'll see what we can see. Starting at Gloucester Harbor and ending at Salisbury Beach we found not one single harlequin. One spot in Gloucester that always has harlequins, and is reported to have had harlequins yesterday, was overrun with mallards. Hundreds of them. I can't remember the last time I saw so many mallards. It was spooky. Is some alien force out there changing harlequins into mallards? They swarmed enmasse toward the car like a giant creature bent on engulfing us and changing us into mallards too. We hightailed it out of there pronto. I whined to Ned: "There were harlequins here yesterday." Ned: "Yeah, and there was a winning lottery ticket here yesterday too." Between stops to check out the bird life, Ned read to me from his novel and went over the plot outline. I critiqued heavily. We worked it thoroughly. I should mention that he often writes his songs in the car so it didn't sound totally insane to me when he said he wanted to work on the novel in the car. I normally prefer to edit on paper, not by ear, but I surprised myself. Every place we stopped, except that weird mallard place, we saw red-breasted mergansers. The males were starting to display. The goldeneyes and buffleheads were displaying too. One male goldeneye was displaying for all he was worth to five females who were completely ignoring him and going about their diving and foraging. At one of the stops we met some other birders who mentioned looking for oldsquaws. Turns out Ned has never seen an oldsquaw, so I added that to the agenda. I figured if all else failed we'd get one where I saw some yesterday in Salisbury. We stopped in Essex for lunch at Woodman's. For non-Massachusetts folks that's where the fried clam was invented. I am not big on fried clams. For one thing, I'm vegetarian. For another thing, they are filter feeders. You can bet every pollutant ever visited upon the Atlantic coast is on Ned's clam plate. Except for the coleslaw and tarter sauce, Woodman's only serves fried things. I made a meal out of French fries, onion rings, and coleslaw. I felt positively greasy. One good thing there though - they serve iced tea all year round, not a normal New England restaurant behavior. After our meal of fried things we looked for oldsquaws and found none. We did find many many more red-breasted mergansers, some common eiders close enough for us to hear them moan, and some harbor seals sunning themselves on the rocks in the Merrimack. Since we had to pass the cat shelter on the way back to Rt. 133 anyway, I suggested a stop there. Ned had never seen it and was much impressed. I don't know exactly what he pictured (a tiny drab prison with feline inmates?) but he was pleasantly surprised. I petted Miss Newburyport for awhile and tried to get her to let Ned pet her too but as soon as he came close she put her ears back. Oh well. With no more stops for ducks on the way home we concentrated on the novel. It's kind of an unorthodox way to write a novel but it seemed to be working. |
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Copyright © 2001, Janet I. Egan |
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