I had not chased a life-bird for North America since before New Years in 2018, the blackhawk up in Maine. It had been over 10 months. I had seen over 450 life world birds as a consolation, so I'm not complaining. There had been many quality and cool birds out there, but I had either been in the Southern Hemisphere or Europe, driving my RV, or been on the brink of some mandatory obligatory activity where I could not get away. Most of these birds had been nowhere even near to me or been unchasable in Alaska.
I had contemplated chasing a green-breasted mango in South Texas that had been reported when we were in El Paso but it was only a one day wonder and by the time I got Big Bird my RV, to San Antonio no one was still reporting the hummingbird. We continued heading east. It was a bird I’d photographed in Roatan in February anyway and seen many many times.
Another bird I had seen in February,
this one in Jamaica, was the Antillean palm swift and one of these had been
reported in South Florida. It is hard to chase swifts, they don’t usually stick
but this bird had arrived in the summer and been seen for a couple of weeks and
then disappeared but in October, it had returned to Marathon about six miles
away from its original location. It was a code 5, and prior to this
bird, only a pair that had shown up after a hurricane in the early Seventies had ever been
reported. It was a great bird but one I
never planned on seeing but as we got closer to Florida I began to think…maybe?
We came to Florida and immediately I chased a Florida Scrub-jay for my year list, it turned out Don and Nancy Harrington, of our Antarctica and Europe trips were camped a half mile away from us and he needed it as a life bird. I had a guaranteed go to spot. finding it took a few minutes.
I talked to Don after we chased the scrub-jay and he was
game for a real chase, and since I had nothing to do on Monday the day before we had
to depart Florida albiet temporary, we took off on Sunday. The
plan was simple. Stay in Florida City
and meet Larry Manfredi the next morning, a local expert and a fun guy to bird
with. I could have probably found the
bird easily myself, but I had been lazy to do any homework and I hadn’t seen
Larry since 2016 and well, it is good to catch up with people. Life is too short and one can lose track of people.
We arrived at the golf course in
Marathon about 9:30 on Veterans Day. Standing
out in the ruins of the front nine was a familiar face, Chris Feeney, a man who
had spent a month getting great birds up in Alaska and seemed to have been
everywhere in the last year, knocking his list up to over twenty more than
me. He was sitting on ABA 823 with two in the bank. That was not including Hawaii. Chris had never even birded the 50th state. Larry called him and he hadn’t seen
the bird yet that day. He had bagged it
the day before.
So, we started looking. It was basically finding a place with a good
view and look for a quick bird that was not a swallow. I saw my lifer mangrove skipper first.
Mangrove skipper
We
switched locations and then there it was, lifer #802. We saw the Cuban bird at distance for brief
times and then met up with Chris Feeney and took a break for lunch. It was after a really nice lunch. Later, I had decided that I would rather hunt
for butterflies when the swift made some passes that were almost too close.
Antillean Palm Swift
It
was a great bird, and this was much closer than I’d seen the bird in Jamaica,
but I was 300 miles from my RV in Lutz and we had a 2000 mile trip to leave on in the
morning. It was also worth the trip to
see some of the aftermath of Hurricane Irma.
This golf course had been severely hurt by the winds and the surge. Palm trees were still topped and they had
only opened half of the course. The
camping areas of nearby Long Key State Park had been destroyed and it looked
nothing like the last time I had been there chasing a grassquit and a dove back in
2016. It brought me back to St Martin
and where I had started this writing project I was currently on.
We
got to Lutz at 8 PM and after a night of sleep, I awoke, packed the
car with a dog, closed the RV, rounded up two cats, and a wife, and we headed out.
Then thirty minutes later after we had realized we had forgotten cat food and circled back, we left again. It was a
beautiful 78 degrees, later ten miles north of the Georgia border, it was 58, by
Atlanta it was 42, and in Nashville, it was now 26 degrees. 10 hours and a loss of 56 degrees. They even had snow on the ground. I began to wonder why we were leaving the south.
The
next morning, the hills of Tennessee gave way to the fields of Kentucky, but it
was still a cold ride home, and there was even freezing rain by the time we got
to Iowa. I had only packed my sandals
and well, my feet would have to toughen up before I could get home and find
some shoes. We stayed about a mile where
my wife and I had lived in Evansdale, Iowa near Waterloo. That was 22 years ago. It had been an eventful two decades of
life. Lauren, out daughter, wasn’t even
a thought when we lived in Iowa. We were
too busy with the twins. I have always
liked Iowa and driving US 20 that next morning was quite enjoyable. I dropped Silja off in Sioux Falls to go to a
concert with her book club.
I
got home at four, let the pets out of the car, and then made a 45 miles sprint
to our cabin to turn on the heat and hope the place hadn’t frozen up. It had already been below zero and Enemy Swim
Lake was frozen over. I arrived at dusk
and the temp inside was just 39 degrees, but luckily nothing had frozen inside
as the warmer ground under the house had kept it above freezing. The furnace fired up without problems.
I
came back home for the first time in 7000 miles and two months. I was tired.
The TV and the internet were down.
I had no food in the house and all it seemed I had was a bottle of
Ardbeg scotch. I made do. I drank a toast to a long journey and by 9 PM,
I was asleep, exhausted. It had been a
long trek—a very long trek, but like the others this year, it was now over and
soon another new one would begin.
AFTER WE ARRIVED
home for the first time in two months, we turned around after less than twenty
four hours and drove the northwestern Wisconsin for my sister’s and my father’s
birthday party. As has been the trend
lately, a family gathering includes cleaning out my beloved grandmother’s
house. Being a creature of the
depression, she saved everything and also collected fine antiques. One never knows what one might find or how it
would move you.
On a previous trip we found left
over alcohol from the Seventies. Cheap
Phillips vodka from 1972 still tasted like old cheap vodka in 2019. A case of Bruenig’s Beer from Rice Lake,
Wisconsin (it closed in 1974) made us all laugh as I threw it out in the
dumpster. All of this was found hidden
in grandma’s favorite hiding place for important artifacts. Under thirty years of taxes, her prized
pickles, was a box of deeds and all of this old booze. I was afraid to even taste the sloe gin. Does anyone even drink that these days?
My family was always very well read
for periodicals and newspapers. For
thirty years, two daily papers and at least six weekly newspapers were received
at my grandparents house. I believe every
gardening magazine ever created was delivered monthly in care of my grandmother
Lucille. My grandfather read Fur,
Fish, and Game religiously every month which was also the first magazine
that ever published something I had written, a letter to the editor on sucker
fishing. If I desired a subscription to
about any magazine, I would never have the request rejected. I got everything from Outdoor Life to Time, the Sporting News to Sports Illustrated. My friends in school also looked forward to
me receiving my copy of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue which was banned
at my high school for being too provocative.
I think I even sold one year’s copy to a fellow lusty teenager. The results of all of this current events
reading was my near mastery of current event competitions in school. The other
result were stacks of old magazines and newspapers with stories that interested
my grandmother stashed around. Throwing
away a magazine was something my grandmother didn’t like to do, especially a
gardening magazine.
We
were throwing out a pile of old Life and Look magazines from
the Sixties when I came across a classic that got me to thinking a little. Dated June 1962 was this issue with Marilyn
Monroe on the cover. I’m not sure, but
this is probably her last cover ever while she was alive, as just a few weeks later, she would die from too many pills. This story involves some
outtakes from the movie Some like it hot.
A skinny-dip you’ll never see on the screen
celebrates her nudity. The
article is suggestive as hell, but remember, Life was a family magazine
and the pictures are pulled so that they don’t really show anything. Probably like my old SI Swimsuit issue, I bet
I could have sold this issue two decades later for a tidy sum, that is if I had
found it. I felt a little like I had missed an opportunity at commerce.
One thing that is proven by this magazine
that even in 1962, nude recreation and nude activities fascinate readers. Maybe it is just the thought of seeing a
cheeky pose of Hollywood’s biggest starlet of the time, but in reality, it
shouldn’t matter. Marilyn Monroe was not
the first person to swim naked, in fact, many years before this, swimming naked
was the rule and not the exception. Theodore
Roosevelt would take a walk from the White House and jump in the Potomac for a
dip. I guess it was just that no one
talked about it and it was especially true that no one brought with a camera. Who would have been interested in a naked
picture of our portly President? Even
today, typically, no one brings a camera or at least they shouldn’t.
My son wanted this magazine. His interest was not for the movie icon or her shapely buttocks. He is a Millennial. “Marilyn who?” He asked me.
Being the graduate student he was attracted by the article, Cancer
may be infectious. I don’t think
that article is why this magazine is for sale on Ebay for prices that are above
$50.00.
Olaf
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