Robert Root

Last fall, gazing through the glass wall of our rental and across the screened-in lanai and beyond a row of trimmed bushes and a shallow stream toward the sprawling Champions golf course, I continually caught sight of plentiful birds and squirrels and golfers and golf carts and, at least once, an alligator floating past. This fall, we've heard a host of cicadas and observed a few sandhill cranes, one solitary ibis, a handful of limpkins and half a dozen blackbirds, but none of the other birds—osprey, wood stork, black-bellied whistling ducks, and many more ibises—that engaged my attention on the course last year. Directly across from us the breadth of white—likely ground seashells—under tall trees has expanded. I mostly notice a wide range of powerful sprinklers alternately spraying different sections of the fairways at different times throughout the day. Despite spotting course-bound golf carts on our morning neighborhood walks, we've yet to see anyone golfing. Occasionally, a barely visible golf cart in the distance speeds along a pathway, probably manned by someone in maintenance. The golf course, started 60 years ago, has once again been renovated, "tee to green," bunkers altered, fairways stripped and then furnished with new greens and grasses. It's not ready yet for golfers to return.

Visiting Sarasota family in earlier years, we felt like vacationers. Autumn in Wisconsin didn't seem so problematic then: Sue's allergies were less intense, the ragweed season shorter-lived, and leaving home didn't feel urgent. In Sarasota we became familiar with certain restaurants, supermarkets, specialty food shops, including a yogurt outlet the grandkids enjoyed, and a well-stocked liquor store. We returned annually to a couple favorite coffee shops and breakfast spots, certain museums or libraries to visit with the kids, city parks for walking, a botanical garden, a wooded preserve near the kids' neighborhood, a state park with abundant waterfowl. We drove across Little Sarasota Bay to Siesta Key to stroll or swim at beaches along the Gulf of Mexico or tour a well-stocked aquarium. We went to places where we added some pleasure to the life we shared with family.

But this is a second pandemic year, more intense now in Florida than last year. Last autumn, before vaccine, people expected Covid-19 would run its course and vanish. When we visited our daughter and her family, everyone wore masks and kept safe distance as best they could. The grandkids wrestled with online learning, their parents balanced work from home with work on site, and restraint ruled social interaction. By this fall the two older children and their parents have been vaccinated and only the eleven-year-old hasn't been yet. Sue and I have had our necessary first two inoculations and she's had one more booster shot. At least this year none of us in the family wear masks when we visit at their house.

In Florida, as in too many other states, the pandemic now takes its toll principally on the unvaccinated and the anti-vaxxers, encouraged in their folly by a governor—himself appropriately vaccinated—who insists that citizens, especially school children, stay unmasked while mingling with others. We're persistently uncomfortable being here, disinclined to enter places we often used to go, relying still on curbside pick-ups and home deliveries, uninspired now by the same locale that formerly invigorated us. We've merely traded the familiar semi-isolation of our northern home for the more humid but fiercely air-conditioned isolation of our southern retreat.

We've been visiting family in Sarasota for decades now and often leave moved by the changes they've gone through: our oldest grandchild began college this fall, her brother and sister have continued growing taller and smarter, their parents appreciate their children's expanding maturity and hold their own in their workplaces. Not least of what I regret about the pandemic is how it distracts me from aspects of my life I value most.

In recent days a snowy egret landed on the stream's far bank, unnerving two nearby limpkins. After they departed, only a distant high-arcing sprinkler activated the scene. One day five sandhill cranes honked repeatedly while looking across fairway and stream at our lanai. Another day, during a heavy downpour, three powerful course sprayers added to the inundation at length. Yesterday, briefly, a wood stork and a spoonbill showed up; today an osprey perched in a treetop. I wondered if life here might again become as familiar, as active, as it used to be, even in the absence of golfers.

We'll leave Sarasota soon, expecting to return next autumn, when ragweed will be rampant again back home. Which Sarasota will we visit then, the one our grandchildren were growing up in before the pandemic or the one that now hauntingly makes us unsettled and uncertain about the future? Where we be again?

How many times in your reading do you cry out "Oh, my god!" or "No, no ki dding, no"? How often is it likely to be in a book that intends to be mostly informative? I read a lot of nature memoirs or narratives in which writers wander around outdoors and contemplate what they see—Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Gretel Ehrlich, John McPhee, and others. I've read a few birding memoirs as well: T. H. White's The Goshawk, Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk and Vesper Flights, Jonathan C. Slaght's Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl, Susan Cerulean's I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird, and J. Drew Lanham's The Home Place. I own several different bird guides, some a uthored by familiar names—John James Audubon, Roger Torey Peterson, and David Allen Sibley (men who write bird books usually have three names). National Geographic's Field Guide to the Birds of North America (Third Edition) rests on a shelf near our front door, so I can identify the birds who snack at our front yard feeders, and the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: Eastern Region travels with us in a backpack in our car. I'm pretty certain that none of these made me blurt anything out loud.

But here I am reading a lovely gift from my daughter and her Florida family, What It's Like to be a Bird by David Allen Sibley. I imagine that Sibley has authored the most read bird guides after Audubon. Here I am, past the fact-filled multi-pages of introduction and into the dual-page treatments of individual birds, and I find myself having to stop on pages about Alcids to exclaim once again "Oh, my god!" and "Are you kidding?"

We're past the Loon, perhaps the bird I admire most, denizen of Lake Superior and favorite sites along the shores of Isle Royale, of whom I've written before, having discovered how fast their offspring grow to become independent feeders and what good parents they are—I know this—and how they need open lakes to catch flight into the air—but three pages later I'm looking at Alcids, "equivalent to penguins but unrelated," their large bills "strange and wondrous" and unexplainable, and how their related Murres can dive 200 feet below the surface, "unlikely using vision to locate and pursue prey, but"—and I quote here—"nobody knows what senses they are using." "Similarly, no one knows how the birds withstand the pressure of those depths . . . or how they can travel that far and fast without breathing."

And then Sibley goes on to Cormorants, another of my favorites, "the most efficient marine predator in the world," where he explains that, unlike humans, whose vision blurs underwater, they have a flexible lens that lets them see clearly. When talking about Sandhill cranes, which I encounter annually, he tells us that "what we call a bird's foot is really just the toe bones," and what we think is the bird's shin is actually its ankle. The book is rich in this kind of information.

Did you know that if you record bird song and then play it back at half-speed, you'll hear a wider range of notes and pitches than you thought you'd heard? My recent reading, in a variety of nature books, has made me aware of how much more complicated and sophisticated relationships within and among other species are than our human-centered attention to the world has led us to believe. I noticed this in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and anticipated it in Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, our current dinner read. I'm learning it in Elizabeth Kolbert's writing on the shrinking of Lake Powell and Rivka Galchen's article on the potential to view the earliest ages of the universe, both in the August 16 issue of The New Yorker.

Almost weekly, sometimes daily, I realize how much what I've always taken for granted was wrong, partly because I gave no thought to it at all but partly because little in my information sources or, to be honest, in my education made me consider it. We're living in an age where what we're doing to our planet's climate is rapidly altering the kind of future it will offer us and learning what we've overlooked in the life forces all around us, including the nature of humanity as well as the nature of the other creatures that we need to share the planet with. Even as I'm exhilarated by what we're discovering about existence, I'm dismayed to realize how long it's taken us to get here and how little time we have left to understand it more fully.

Notes: Sibley, David Allen. What It's Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing—What Birds Are Doing, and Why. New York: Penguin/Random House, 2020.

I once saw, somewhere, a display of Audubon's original double-elephant folio format (29½ by 39½ inches) colorplates depicting life-sized and lively birds. He later published a smaller seven-volume octavo edition. My copy of the Audubon Society Baby Elephant Folio edition of Audubon's Birds of America, edited by Roger Torrey Peterson and Virginia Marie Peterson, contains all 500 plates reorganized to meet contemporary classifications and measures 4 by 4½ inches. The Spring 2021 issue of Audubon, the Audubon Society magazine featured an article by J. Drew Lanham (his book The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature was then on my nightstand) titled "What Do We Do About John James Audubon?" The article prompted me to re-read a graphic biography of Audubon I also own.

Audubon: On the Wings of the World by Fabien Grolleau, illustrated by Jérémie Royer, follows Audubon's early nineteenth-century travels in search of North American birds. It opens on the Mississippi River in 1820 as Audubon and rafting companions seek shelter from a storm in a cave where he draws an owl. This prologue establishes Audubon's tendency to ignore people around him and concentrate on his sense of artistic mission. His obsession with art is his most elemental characteristic. He continually wanders alone, shooting birds and posing them for his drawings. Pages of panels go by without words, any text only quoting his original writings or appearing as dialogue when he interacts with others, such as his patient wife or infrequent traveling companions. One narrative thread emphasizes his relationship with Alexander Wilson, his prominent predecessor at bird illustration, which later is portrayed as imagined encounters in Audubon's delirium and ending with Audubon's dying fantasy of morphing into an eagle, destroying a vulture-like Wilson, and reigning supreme over a world of birds. The book simultaneously celebrates and complicates Audubon's career.

In his foreword Grolleau acknowledges his "retelling" as "a more 'romanticised' version of Audubon's life." He admits that "views expressed in Audubon's writing and in the speech of the characters" reflect "the oppressive attitudes and terminology of the time towards African American and indigenous peoples," but credits him as "an unparalleled ornithological painter" and "one of the fathers of modern American ecology." Endnotes revealing that "numerous episodes . . . were inspired by Audubon's writings" cite specific chapters in his Ornithological Biography and admit to having "invoked a little artistic license" (as when Audubon meets Darwin). Alluding to the section where Audubon meets a runaway slave and gets him to return with his family to his owner, Grolleau acknowledges, "This book does not show that Audubon kept slaves" and his having "chosen to evoke [the subject] only in this episode inspired by his writings." Given his attention to Audubon's art and its enduring influence, was that an appropriate choice?

J. Drew Lanham doesn't think so. He claims that, though "relatively few men of his time" spoke against slavery, Audubon "enslaved at least nine people," identified as "servants" or "hands," and was seemingly "unconcerned about" their status. Audubon himself, Lanham suggests, was possibly of mixed race, since his mother might have been (or perhaps wasn't) Creole. Lanham expresses admiration for Audubon's art and acknowledges his enduring influence on ornithology, yet his sense of the artist's racism continually undercuts that appreciation. Identifying himself as a Black birdwatcher and declaring "I don't just love birds, I'm in love with birds," he's continually conscious of his separate status among birders, who are overwhelmingly white.  He identifies most nature writers as "a pantheon that speaks to the white patriarchy that drives nature study in the western world."

As a retired pre-boomer heterosexual Caucasian male educator of multi-generational European-American descent, I can easily, in 2021, be accused of racist, sexist, political, and/or philosophical bias no matter what position I take, so I won't take much of one here. Based on the evidence Lanham offers I don't find his argument fully convincing but appreciate his explanation of his mixed reactions. I don't identify myself as a White birder (to the extent I'm a birder) and am seldom self-conscious about my race. Perhaps, if Lanham hadn't examined Audubon's biography the way he has, the race issue would not have intruded between them. We would never be aware of it if we concentrated on the art—the accomplishments— of the person under investigation and didn't explore the artist's potential for flaws of character. I read Lanham's The Home Place without much attention to issues of race until the final chapters, more attuned to his personality and humanity, the elements of family and personal growth that gave me more insight into the human condition. What disturbs Lanham about Audubon is not to be found in Birds of America, a book that Lanham still keeps on his shelves. I'll keep my copy as well.

Notes: Grolleau, Fabien, & Jérémie Royer. Audubon: On the Wings of the World. Trans. Etienne Gilfillan. London: Nobrow, 2016.

Lanham, J. Drew, "What Do We Do About John James Audubon?" Audubon (v123:n1, Spring 2021: 28-35)

Children are usually introduced to storytelling and learning to read through picture books, only gradually outgrowing reliance on the visual and gaining mastery of the textual. Reorienting myself to bookstores I once frequented but mostly avoided in these pandemic years, I realized that children's sections helped us become aware of our grandchildren's aging. Where we once browsed picture books, we later browsed various fantasy or adventure or sports series, depending on which grandchild we were shopping for. Occasionally we took all the kids to bookstores to make their own choices—how could we be sure which Harry Potter novel or Wings of Fire adventure they hadn't yet read? Eventually, one by one, they wandered off into teen or young adult sections where we were less familiar with titles and authors. I assumed that, just as I had, they'd outgrow books with illustrations and read narratives presented solely in words. But times changed—one familiar bookstore relocated their voluminous offerings in manga and graphic novels unavoidably close to the restrooms, the last thing you see going in, the first thing you see coming out.

I haven't bought a newspaper in a long time, so can't report on what's become of Sunday funnies or daily comics pages. I read them regularly as a child, adventure stories in particular: "Terry and the Pirates," "Steve Canyon," "Prince Valiant," "The Phantom," "Tarzan," "The Lone Ranger," many of them also accessible on radio or in comic books. Often on Sundays my father took my sister, my brother, and me down to Kipp's Cigar Store to pick up a copy of the Buffalo Courier-Express and buy each of us a comic book. I first favored superheroes and western adventures but eventually began collecting Classics Illustrated, the comic series offering illustrated versions of long-established novels and epic poems. I especially preferred those with swashbuckling or frontier themes: The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, Ivanhoe, The Knights of the Round Table, The Talisman, The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, Men of Iron, Two Years Before the Mast, and the like.

Cinemascope films then popular often emphasized historic spectacle, and I bought comic book versions of them as well—the comic version of the film Helen of Troy disappointed me because it changed the movie's ending and didn't square with The Iliad in my Classics Illustrated version. Classics Illustrated convinced me that serious stories could be told visually—I also saw any movie adapted from an adventure novel or epic tale—and they often sent me to the literary works they illustrated, enhancing my reading.

In recent years, I've frequently read books that my grandchildren read first or were reading when I visited. Some were clearly designed for young children—A Treasury of Curious George and Sandra Boynton's Snoozers—and some were clearly trafficking the market for print works in series—graphic adaptations of the Wings of Fire adventure novels, for example—while others merited attention for visually exploring aspects of young people's lives—Raina Telgemeier's graphic novels like Smile, Drama, and Ghosts, or Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts. The New York Times Book Review offers monthly lists of Children's Bestsellers (Middle Grade Hardcover, Young Adult Hardcover, Picture Books, and Series) and a separate list of Graphic Books and Manga, all aimed at younger readers.

As it happens, long before I started reading my grandchildren's graphic books, my affection for graphic storytelling had been fostered by a gift copy of Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman, published in 1991 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the same year Maus II was published, concluding the story based on Spiegelman's father's experiences as a Jew in Germany during the Holocaust. The Jews are portrayed as mice, the Nazis as cats, and other nationalities as other animals. The concept challenged some critics, but most readers found it powerful and absorbing, and it opened the door to the concept of the graphic narrative or graphic novel.

The aftermath has been a highly effective and affecting range of graphic narratives, including novels, biographies, and memoirs. Marjane Satrapi's powerful Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2004) and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2005), set in Iran, were eventually made into an animated film and, like Spiegelman's Maus, published in a single volume. Alison Bechdel's first graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, was published in 2007 and its sequel, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, its title playing off P. D. Eastman's classic children's book, in 2013; her third memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength was published this year. All the books I've mentioned are engaging, expressive, and as powerful as many of the recent text-bound memoirs I've read. I have a feeling we'll keep going graphic for a while.