The Last Word On Nothing

They were dark forms scattered up and down the beach. One here, three there, a pair just beyond them. Their larger size distinguished them from the other shorebirds, drawing our attention.

“What are they?” my dad asked.

“Whimbrels,” I said.

We were at Fort Stevens, a few miles outside of Astoria, Oregon, my hometown. My two younger sisters walked ahead of us, bundled against the cold of the mid-May evening. The wind was strong and unrelenting, and a heavy mantle of cloud compressed the sky against the rolling breakers of the Pacific. We were the only people on the beach so far as I could tell.

My mother had died two days ago, taken by a sudden and unexpected illness. I had last seen her a couple of days before that, on Mother’s Day. When I told her I would see her next week—now, as it turned out—she smiled wanly. In retrospect I wondered if I should have taken that as a sign. She had been old, but not that old, or so I thought; in the same way I am old, but not that old, at least when it comes to losing a parent.

“What makes a whimbrel a whimbrel?” my dad asked.

“Gosh,” I said. “So many things.” An overall grayish-brown aspect, but feathers that on close inspection reveal their own vivid patterns. A wingspan of 30 to 32 inches, with a bright white shaft on the outer primary. Long legs. A gracefully decurved bill. All these things, while technically correct, seemed insufficient, of course. What makes anything anything? A body, breath, a beating heart.

We had spent much of the day going through my mother’s things—clothes, books, all the bric-a-brac she had amassed over the course of her life. My sisters were tender but unsentimental as they sorted. Full bags we piled in the room where Mom died. Those on the right went to the dump, those on the left to Goodwill. I made several trips to both places, and once they closed, picked up dinner and drove us all out to the beach. Mom liked to walk on the beach, but so do a lot of people.

Joining the whimbrels were western sandpipers, dunlin, dowitchers, black-bellied plovers. All of them were on their way north for the summer. These were the stragglers, though, the main migratory pulse of birds having already moved through. Rather than thousands or even tens of thousands of birds clustered thick on the sands and frantically stuffing themselves, we were treated only to this loose smattering. On the empty beach I could feel the absence of those throngs, here just a week earlier.

To live on the Oregon coast as my parents do is to see most shorebirds only in passing, but a few summers before I had visited whimbrels on their breeding grounds on the Seward Peninsula, in Alaska. Each pair claimed a vast territory of tundra, and on that dazzling acreage the female would lay her perfectly camouflaged eggs. I desperately wanted to find one of their nests, but whimbrels are so skittish that the moment a bird or her mate saw me—whimbrels are very alert—they both took to the air and called out in alarm: quiquiquiquiqui! They flew in circles over my head, calling and calling, refusing to land until I left. In two weeks, I didn’t find a single nest.

Sometimes as I wrestled with my grief after my sister called with the news, I would find myself thinking, Okay, I have learned all I want to learn from this, Mom can come back now. But other times, like at Fort Stevens with my family, I felt a dull and almost eerie calm. My dad and I paused to watch a whimbrel suck a worm from the sand like a strand of spaghetti. So this is what it will be like, I thought. Day after day after motherless day until I get used to it.

Whimbrels breed throughout the most northerly parts of the northern hemisphere. Their name in English is a rough approximation of their voice. A type of curlew, they were like other curlews thought to be harbingers of death, their call recalling the cries of the departed. But there are other readings. In The Wind Birds, Peter Matthiessen writes, “Yet it is not the death sign that the curlews bring, but only the memory of life, of high beauty passing swiftly, as the curlew passes, leaving us in solitude on an empty beach…”

I don’t think my mom ever read that book, but I know she would have liked it if she had.

We had gone on another mile or so when I saw a whimbrel off by itself at the sea’s edge. A film of water on the sand made a mirror for the clouds in the sky, and the blue-gray monochrome gave the scene a sense of infinite recursion, of sea sky sea sky sea sky, and at the center of that eternity stood the dark pinpoint of the one bird. I broke away from my dad and walked towards it, trying to turn it into my mother, into her spirit, into a message from her, dimly aware of the keenness of my desire pressing against its thresholds of individual well-being. I tried to reach it with all my heart, but then I got too close and the spell broke, the whimbrel leaping up, crying out, and winging low over the water until it could alight some distance away, nearer to its own kind.

Photo by the author.