Extinction and the Brink: Notes from February

by

Katherine Hauswirth

Maybe it’s the winter doldrums extending their tendrils into cyberspace, but it’s hard to take in any news of late without hitting on a “feeling of impending doom” brought about by tales of extinction or species teetering on the brink. “Impending doom” is a phrase I learned in nursing school that encapsulates a just pre-panic state that can be either premonitory, as with a heart attack, or completely unjustified from a logical point of view, as in a sudden, anxiety-driven shortness of breath, say while driving across a bridge that’s been part of your daily commute for a decade.

It’s not completely clear exactly how much panic may be justified, but it’s at least worth a severely knitted brow when Science Daily headlines this week screamed of twenty-five endangered turtle species, among these a subset of five species each numbering less than five individual turtles. My mind immediately flashes to Dr. Seuss’ Yertle the Turtle, and it’s not hard to hear him chant, in a sad, singsongy voice: “Please . . . I don’t like to complain / But down here below we are feeling great pain.”

On my bedside stand sit two books that turned out to be microcosms of these hovering thoughts of doom, loss, and the inkling of hope for renewal. In other words, perfect books to read while huddled in the drafty rooms of late winter.

Christopher Cokinos’ Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds reveals itself within the first few pages as belonging to the “labor of love” category, albeit love for the no longer existent. Cokinos, an English professor and recipient of an American Antiquarian Society grant that funded his avian research, clearly has the chops to turn out good literature with a major imprint, as this and his more recent book with Tarcher, The Fallen Sky, attest. But in the case of Hope is the Thing, it’s more telling that he is also past president of the Kansas Audubon Council and on the board of HawkWatch International. His passion for birds is palpable and contagious, so deeply entrenched that for nearly ten years he researched the six vanished species that are featured in his chronicle.

I discovered that Hope is the Thing is not a book to read if you’re feeling glum about the state of the world—unless you are looking to deepen the groove of the emotional abyss into which you are already sliding. A pandemic of human stupidity and selfishness was repeatedly underscored as the chapters unfolded, seemingly an Animal Planet-sponsored Darwin Awards right through the demise of the Great Auk at volume’s end. The shooting, the stuffing, the wearing of entire birds atop hats, subpar naturalists failing to be proactive as they watched the defenseless birds get picked off one by one, all contributed to my vain longing for avian resurrection while simultaneously questioning the general usefulness of the human race. But I found some thin threads that showed humanity’s finer side, just enough to cling to as despair started to settle into my marrow.

The tone of the main title, borrowed from Emily Dickinson’s hopeful poem, is not complete sarcasm, because the tale left me more aware, perhaps inclined to even do something about disappearing birds, and therein lies the ultimate hope at which the author aimed. Indeed Cokinos cautioned that sadness should not be my only response to the loss of the Heath Hen, the Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, it should only be my first response before figuring out how to repay the gifts that guileless and exquisite creatures have bestowed unconditionally. In its best moments the book had me watching the skies for life that may have been, or perhaps is about to be, forgotten. It got me to lift my head up, which was a good start.

Quite a different creature at first glance, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson’s debut novel, brought me to the door of a retired English gentleman who, despite the suggestion of adventure hinted at by his title, seems to have lived a largely unremarkable sixty-eight years.

As I read my way into the Major’s inner life, I got the sense that, reminiscent of Cokinos’ examples of dwindling (okay, dwindled) avian stock, he is a bit of a dying breed himself. Major Pettigrew is at the stage where it’s no longer a complete shock when loved ones die; he has just lost his brother and had been a widower for six years before that. He enjoys things that we Americans probably view through the lens of Masterpiece Theater trailers, things like formal discussions of Kipling over tea, the hunt, and an excruciating sense that propriety must at all costs prevail. The Major spends a lot of time at the golf club, a seemingly benign if somewhat stuffy place. His son Roger seems to support the view that the Major’s leanings, and perhaps the Major himself, are wholly irrelevant. Roger supports commercial development in a heretofore genuine, English-cottage–charming town and advocates for the sale of family heirlooms, damned be the wishes made explicit by his ancestors. At the same time, he’s managed to carry on the very worst of ancient family traits, bowing and scraping before an antiquated hierarchy and losing out to his inflated sense of pride. Yet another ugly case of human history repeating itself. But I found some hope in this tale, too.

The Major’s very English life seemed so predictable on one level, but all along the way were small hints that, although I thought I had him pegged, there was more to this man than his tweed and teabags. I got to know and like the Major, at first just a general affection for a grandfatherly type but then a recognition that his humanity was still very much alive and kicking despite his stodgy exterior and dusty props. It’s in the small moments that Simonson shows the true spirit of the man, like a walk alone early in the book: “He had been many decades . . . in the village of Edgecombe St. Mary, and yet the walk down the hill to the village never ceased to give him pleasure . . . He liked to pause at the stile, one foot up on the step, and drink in the landscape. Something—perhaps it was the quality of the light, or the infinite variety of greens in the trees and the hedges—never failed to fill his heart with a love of country that he would have been embarrassed to express out loud.”  

What seemed endangered about the Major at first was his stereotypical English reluctance to express his true feelings on many occasions, AKA his perpetually stiff and surely aching upper lip. Many, in this age of well-advertised emotion, might consider that endangerment a long overdue conclusion. But it turned out that the Major was a fine specimen of near extinction in that, when push came to shove he became a man of finely principled action, whether he was ready to talk about it or not.

I needed a dose of hope and it came in the form of this fictional old man made real by the author’s descriptive skill. I rooted for the Major as he took on a sometimes subtle, sometimes not undercurrent of prejudice and misplaced ethnocentricity, pursued a passionate romance in the midst of bleak circumstances, and ultimately saved at least two lives. And, especially if I pictured him looking off into the green trees and hedges of his hometown landscape, it wasn’t hard to view the Major as near kin to the last Heath Hen that Cokenos wrote about in Hope Is the Thing. The brave and lonely Hen shocked everyone by alighting on the highest tree branch and, despite the lack of a suitable mate, shouted the loud, vital noise (called booming) that the species had used to signal procreation.

Extinction? Yes, a real and present danger but not necessarily inevitable. Both books that revealed this danger also lent a much-needed insight in this land of grey snow and tired boots: it’s not over until it’s over. But as the Major’s creator Helen Simonson said in an interview for Major Pettigrew’s end pages, “In real life, change is hard, inertia is easy.” In other words, we need to lift our heads and pay attention to that which seems to be fleeting; we need humanity’s best to keep hope in its feathery and ebullient state. Especially in February.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Fallen Sky by Christopher Cokinos (Tarcher, 2010)
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds by Christopher Cokinos (Tarcher/Putnam, 2000)
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson (Random House, 2011)

Katherine Hauswirth is a medical writer by day and a creative writer by stolen moments. She writes creative nonfiction and poetry. She is the author of Harriet’s Voice: A Writing Mother’s Journey and contributed to the anthology Get Satisfied: How Twenty People Like You Found the Satisfaction of Enough. Her current blog is The Year I Said No, an adventure in making room for a richer life by learning to say no to things that get in the way. Katherine has been published in many venues including The Writer, Byline, The Christian Science Monitor, Pregnancy, The Writer's Handbook, The Writer's Guide to Fiction, Women of Spirit, Wilderness House Literary Review, Poetry Kit, Eat a Peach, Lutheran Digest, and Pilgrimage. A Long Island native, Katherine lives with her husband and son in Deep River, Connecticut. She can be reached through her website, Harriet’s Voice: Home Base for Writing Mothers, or at khauswirth [at] sbcglobal.net.