How many birds must fly into your window before you don your cap of feathers? How many times does the winter wren have to sing before the turn to spring?
Such were my thoughts when I rolled my bicycled up the path of the Bog Turtle Ecostery to where Gronigen stood, welcome, always welcoming, broom in hand. A fortnight had passed since I’d seen him last and with little snowfall where I live but here in the hills—not the rooftop of the world but maybe its attic—everything was still white, and as such full of possibility. As he watched me approach Gronigen held his broom at half mast, poised for adventure.
“What’s new in the world of tracks?” I asked by way of greeting.
“Everything, everything.” He surveyed the horizon. “Well, the coyotes in particular have been making their presence felt hereabouts.”
“So I’ve heard.”
He smiled and leaned his head a little to one side, unsurprised by my appearance. He asked me about my ride and then explained, while scrutinizing the cloudy sky, how he himself was leaving soon for a journey along the old Catskill Turnpike. It would take over a month and he would get to stay at a dozen stations like this old farmhouse that were located along the old road (sometimes following current highways, sometimes reverting to smaller byways) every twenty-five miles or so.
This year was the first where they had enough stations—call them hostels, lodgings, ecosteries, what you will—off the carbuncular grid to enable a bicycle journey from Vermont to the Finger Lakes. In the winter, even. He’d been working toward this for a decade, bringing people together and inspiring them to see beyond the end of their fenders, to give up the tailpipe dream that claimed a god-given right of 2.5 cars per family. To simply share. To be hospitable. “But you know about that already, what we’re up against.” He all but called me comrade.
I was quiet. I didn’t wish to disappoint him by honoring the truth—that my devout bicycling was more accident than design, more poverty-induced pragmatics than a Gandhian gesture to change the world. Of course I preferred bicycles to cars, aesthetically and I might even say ethically, and as such I lived at a certain oblique angle to the rest of America, but I held no romance that therein lay salvation.
“Have you been training for your journey?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. Every morning the roads are clear Bronwen and I take our bikes out and retrace the roads around us. She’s so disappointed she’s not coming. Poor child. But next time, next time.”
I explained that I had a gift for Bronwen—or, at least, a gesture of customer servitude. Perhaps it had been forward of me, but I took her letter as a kind of summons—or, at least, a hint by the universe, whose stars and constellations only speak in hints. After her letter I got right to work and bicycled to the bookstore in town where by luck they had a copy of Mumford’s tome that had so offended the girl. I paid for it with some of my store credit and then back home wrote to Bronwen explaining I would deliver a replacement copy in a week. This copy I bought was clean of any markings, so I turned to page one and with pencil in hand embarked on my own marginal commentary. It took me a week to fill it from endpaper to endpaper.
Gronigen seemed to understand perfectly. “I’m sure she will be aglow with gratitude for your conscientiousness. I’m surprised by how she’s taken to Mumford—that old stalwart can inspire still!”
He gestured toward the farmhouse and we headed that way—and how I was looking forward to another cup of tea around their blazing fire! Just before we arrived at the door, though, Gronigen leaned down toward a shallow stone bowl sitting next to the path. It was filled with sunflower seeds. With a mischievous grin—as though testing my faith—he scooped up a handful and tossed them over his head. The seeds fell like a dash of black sparks against the snowy stone path and instantly hailed a flock of squawking starlings, all iridescent, a full convergence of them, like something shattered suddenly reassembled. Dozens of birds, like stars falling, suddenly there, milling along the path and picking at seeds. Where had they come from? How do you train two score starlings so? I shivered with incredulity. A seed landed on my shoe and a bird followed it there. I had to resist the urge to kick it away, an urge stirred not by the bird itself but what it represented, a wild confusion and perversion of things, a sort of black magic even.
“Mustn’t dawdle!” Gronigen cried out, taking the three steps to the door in a single bound. He chortled quietly, and I suddenly feared for my sanity.
As he entered the cottage he glanced back at me and I could see the hull of a sunflower seed lodged in his teeth.
