Dave Carty's Blog, page 3

Swallow Song: The Tree Swallow Migration

I spend many of my summer evenings on my porch with a glass of wine.  After I built my house, I  began a ten-year project of planting trees and shrubs, and now, 35 years later, all have come to fruition. My two acres is largely wooded, home to deer, an occasional rabbit,  and more birds than I can count. One of them, a tree swallow, lives with her mate and family in the bird house I built and installed on the fence that surrounds my garden.

She’s a drab little creature, and owns nothing like the spectacular blue-green iridescence that marks her peacock of a husband. Instead, her back and wings are a muted brown, but, like all tree swallows, she wears the same starkly delineated mask that divides her handsome face: brown above, a soft white below. On this evening, she sits in the circular opening in her house, watching.

I can’t help but think she likes what she sees. While her mate performs impossible aerobatics above her head in search of  insects, she, like me, sits comfortably on her tiny porch and gazes at all before her: the trees, my small home, the flowers in my yard. Sometimes I would swear she’s watching me. But then, as if that moment of interspecies connection embarrasses her, her mate arrives, and in a twinkling she’s out of her home and rising up into the air, circling ‘round a beam of sunlight, soaring and diving far above earth in an impossible aerial ballet.  

Hers will be a brief, difficult life. Very soon, she’ll leave her  garden home and begin the long, dangerous migration to Mexico, where she’ll spend the winter. It is quite possible she won’t survive to return to it the following spring, which makes her few brief months with me all the more precious.

And so it is thus. Two days later, when I return, her house is empty. Sometime the preceding day, she found a beam of sunlight and rode it into the sky, up and up, into the clouds and the wind that took her away from me. That evening, two swallows returned to soar overhead, both males, their iridescent colors flashing in the sun, taking one last look to carry them south. But she was already on her way.

I wish her a safe journey. If tiny birds own that ineffable capacity, and I think they do, then I hope her days are filled with the spark of wonder she brought to my porch. 

I await her return.     

Fired On a Novel by Toby Thompson

Fired On

Toby Thompson

I’ve long been fascinated by artists. This is due, in no small part, to my longing to be a member of that fraternity. Is writing art? I flatter myself that it is, and if writing is indeed art, then it must follow that the writer is an artist. But I’ve been a professional writer for most of my adult life and calling myself an artist has always seemed a bit pretentious. After all, don’t artists paint and sculpt? Don’t artists make music and movies?

Now comes a book that marries the two and blurs the faint line between writers and artists even further: Fired On – Targeting Western American Art (Bangtail Press), by Toby Thompson.

Thompson teaches creative writing at Penn state, is a good friend of mine, and most importantly, is a damn fine writer. I’d been waiting for the publication of his book for months and I haven’t been disappointed. It’s the perfect bedside read, where, incidentally, I do most of my reading. There are chapters on actors, painters, writers, film makers and more. Many of the stories are gleaned from Thompson’s years as a highly-paid freelancer for major national magazines like Esquire and Vanity Fair.  I can crawl into bed, pick a story from among the dozens in the table of contents, and then, a half hour to an hour later, drift off to sleep secure in the knowledge that my intellect has been piqued and my taste in fine literature indulged.

Thompson is a good writer; in fact, he is a very good writer, in the Gonzo journalism vein of Hunter Thompson (no relation). His story on the film maker David Lynch, as one instance among many, is impressive not just for the quality of the writing but for the depth of his research. Indeed, Thompson told me he spent 10 days practically living with Lynch to do the story. It shows. 

Thompson has a string of books he’s written over the years; I’ve read a couple of them and both more than surpassed my expectations. I don’t recommend books I don’t like; and I recommend this book.

The Montana Mask Mandate

They didn’t tell me about this. I’m on board with social distancing and the closure of businesses and whatever else needs to be done to ameliorate the spread of coronavirus. For God’s sake! People – tens of thousands of them every month -- are dying. And I’m more than willing to wear a mask in public. I’ll even concede that wearing a mask, to the extent that it hides my face, improves my looks. (Thank you, concerned readers, for tactfully pointing that out). So most of the time I do wear a mask. But not all the time. Certainly, not as much as I should. 

I don’t have any good reasons for not doing so. I don’t have any qualms about being considered a closet liberal; I’m an out-of-the-closet liberal. But when is it safe to not wear a mask, and when is it absolutely necessary? There are few distinct lines being drawn by the people in charge of this stuff – safe here, unsafe there – and what is considered appropriate mask-wearing changes from state to state and from city to city. 

Recently, I visited the REI store in my hometown in southwestern Montana. There was a sentry posted at the door making sure that everyone who entered was wearing a mask. Stickers on the floor told me where I needed to stand in order to socially distance myself from the next guy in line. It was comforting, having well defined boundaries that I didn’t have to think about. 

A few minutes later, I visited Sportsman’s Warehouse, which is literally next door. Not only was no one wearing a mask, I got the distinct impression the patrons would have been pissed off if anyone had asked them to wear one.  

I hate wearing this stupid mask. But – no big surprise -- I also hate dying. I may be old, but I’m still too young to die, and you can take that to the bank. So I’ll keep wearing my mask when it seems like I should and take it off when I think I can and maintain the vigil for someone, anyone, to come up with some guidelines that apply. To everybody.

The Worst Dog

She may have been the worst dog I’ve ever owned. 

There’s a delicate balance a truly great bird dog must have: an insatiable drive to find and point birds that exists in tandem with the concomitant desire to be a team player. Hanna had plenty of drive; there were times I could have made the case that she had too much. But the team-player gene was missing. In fact, it wasn’t anywhere within a hundred miles of her lovely, snow white body. 

Time and again, I turned her loose from the back of my truck only to watch the little setter disappear over the nearest hill, deaf to my shouted commands to return, the bell around her neck fading and then disappearing all together. Only a stiff jolt from an electric collar would turn her, and then she did so reluctantly, one eye on me and one eye still set on the horizon she longed to return to. Don’t misunderstand: she found plenty of birds and handled them well. But that was of little use when she was 800 yards away when the birds flushed.

Finally, after years of futile aggravation, I’d had enough. One day, on a hike, she ran away, as she had hundreds of times before. Furious, I left her, then drove home alone. I received a call minutes later from a couple who had found her and brought her to their house. When I picked her up, she was noticeably chastened. But it didn’t last. It couldn’t.

A few years later, on my annual grouse-hunting trip to Wisconsin, she bolted into the forest and I spent the next half hour chasing her blindly through the woods, trying desperately to stay within earshot of her bell. When, by chance, she crossed the trail in front of me, I dropped my shotgun and tackled her. I’d had it. 

She spent the next couple years in comfortable retirement. She gradually became deaf and nearly blind, but her infirmities seemed, oddly, to mellow her, and she was content to sleep in her dog bed in the corner of my office. Perhaps she dreamed of her days in the woods and fields. 

When she was nearly 14 I decided to put her down. I’d put off the decision for way too long, since she did not seem to be suffering. But what kind of existence could it be, to be trapped in a dark, silent room, when your entire life has been spent outdoors running into the wind?

I suppose I should be relieved that she’s gone. But now, six months later, I still gaze at her bed in the corner and half expect to see her small white form there, quietly asleep. And I still hear her bell.