The Big Yard: Birdwatching in a Time of Quarantine

Or: The Evolution of a Lister

The road not taken—except by me—among coastal red cedar and fir. Banana slug and Bigfoot country. This is not southern Arizona.

Day 155 of the Quarantine (August 15, 2020)

            The day after I check off the new warbler with the blushing face, I depart Bisbee and drive toward Yachats, Oregon, with poet and writer Richard Shelton in the passenger seat.  My friend, my mentor, my traveling companion—from the Alaska Range and the Inside Passage to the far reaches of the Baja Peninsula, we’ve set boot tracks on most of the west coast of North America.

            Two 12-hour days of driving with masks and spray sanitizer and as few stops as we can manage.  Eating in the car.  “Resting” at the side of the road.  One night in a sanitized hotel room at Santa Nella, California, with thick, hot, luscious split pea soup for dinner.  Andersen’s takeout.  All of it probably unwise.

            This is our fifth annual writing retreat on the Oregon coast, two weeks of beaching. eating, and writing.  A self-quarantine in a tiny cottage where the Pacific Ocean laps against a fog-dark forest of mossy and gnarly red cedar and fir.  There will be blackberry picking and blackberry pie.  Clam chowder.  Banana slugs and banana slug licking.  And Youngest Daughter with husband in tow.  She has people to interview and a new book to write for Norton, Brave the Wild River, about Lois Jotter and Elzada Clover, two botanists who explored the Grand Canyon in 1938.  Dick has a project of short, funny, and poignant vignettes about the poets and writers—Robert Frost!—he has known since the 1960s, and I’m finishing an anthology of prison writing that spans 50 years of Dick’s prison workshops.

            But mostly I will be running the beach, exploring the forest, and laying cool, salty air against my skin.

The only way to eat Andersen’s split pea soup.

And the only way to eat fresh-picked Oregon blackberry pie.

Youngest Daughter offers me a nice fat banana slug.

A friend demonstrates how one joins the club of banana slug lickers. The slime contains an anesthetic—why the slugs have no predators—and, as a club member myself, licking one will give you a slimy, numb tongue for hours.

And, of course, there will be birds—50 species including many I have never seen before.  Here’s a teaser.  Much more to come!

Common in moist woods along the Pacific Northwest, a Chestnut-backed Chickadee visits our Yachats beach house.

Found all across North America, this Least Sandpiper probably followed me to the Oregon coast from Arizona.

Life bird #421, a Pigeon Guillemot spends its summer along the Oregon coast.

What Dick Shelton does while I’m birdwatching.

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