Maybe you know my cousin?

I grew up in a Vermont community much like East Charleston, where everybody essentially knows everybody else. If you don’t know somebody personally, you can at least say, in all honesty, "No, but I know who he is." I hear the occasional, "It’s getting so I don’t know anybody anymore", but by and large, the totally unknown neighbor is still an aberration. In a town where the population can be counted in hundreds, a new citizen would need to make a conscious effort to remain unfamiliar. Some do, of course. This warm fuzzy stuff isn’t for everyone, and I have deep respect for those of the "none of your beeswax" persuasion.

That said, I personally find a degree of comfort in "everybody" knowing my business, at least up to a point. There is a certain security in having my neighbor ask if everything is okay, since my lights were on all night (I fell asleep in the recliner) or call me at work to say that someone is poking around my house (it's all right - it’s the appraiser). I like my space, but for the most part, I don’t mind your knowing what I do in it.

When I was twelve, we moved to a city of about 12,000, a hardening off period of about five years before I landed, bag and baggage, at a dormitory in Boston. Talk about culture shock! From a proper small town upbringing (smile, be polite, make eye contact), I suddenly found myself in an environment where making eye contact wasn’t always a good idea, and you didn’t want just anybody knowing your comings and goings.

A funny thing started happening in the big city when people learned I was from Vermont. They started asking "Maybe you know my cousin in Burlington?" Or Rutland. Or Brattleboro. I thought it was sweet that city folk had such a charming concept of Vermont, but in retrospect, it was likely lack of real knowledge about Vermont, that we aren’t all in a little cluster in sight of one another. So imagine my shock a few months ago when I found myself saying to someone, "Hey, you’re from Atlanta..." and realizing I was on the precipice of continuing, "maybe you know my cousin?" What an ignoramus that woman would have thought me. She probably would have smiled condescendingly, perhaps patted my arm, and said, "I’m sure you don’t realize that the population of Atlanta is over four million..." Close call.

Odd things do occur. My brother in North Carolina once visited Virginia, and ran into a friend of my daughter’s from Brownington...my brother could have said "Maybe you know my sister?" and not have made a fool of himself. But despite such anecdotal evidence, I’m statistically more apt to be struck by lightning while winning the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes than I am to know your cousin in Burlington. Times have changed somewhat, even here, and I probably don’t know your cousin in Island Pond either. Nevertheless, I inherited from my mother the optimistic belief that in any given group I am surely within arm's reach of someone with whom I share something remarkable in common, perhaps even a few degrees of separation from his or her cousin. Maybe I’m spoiled by living once again where I can wave back at every other car that passes my house, and where most people still consider not knowing everybody else a bad thing. I’m just enough my mother’s child that I believe that somebody reading this knows my cousin in Connecticut, Georgia or Ohio. Any takers?

I didn’t participate in the Christmas bird count. I like birds, and can recognize a fair number of them, so I seriously considered volunteering, but I never did get around to researching what the event actually involved. I think I was stuck on the word "count". I’m not big on numbers to begin with, and birds are typically not going to sit quietly in even little rows while you tally them up. Even the relatively slow-moving mourning doves under the bird feeders meander around like a feathered little drill team, causing me to question Bob silently when he tells me he has thirty-two doves.

Even if these quasi-pigeons were to stay in one place while I count, how do I know that the thirty-two here now include the sixteen that were here early this morning? I’ve spent many minutes standing with my nose pressed to the glass in the front door comparing doves, looking for slight variations in color or pattern, and I’ll tell you what: they all look the same.

If you think counting mourning doves is hard, try counting chickadees. If I ever do sign up for the bird count, I’ll let somebody else take responsibility for my favorite songbirds. They dart back and forth from maple tree to feeder in dizzying rhythm, zipping in from several different directions at once, and snatching seeds with a sleight of beak that I can’t catch even from two feet away with my glasses on.

I think that waterfowl may not be included in the bird count, but I’m not sure. That would be a deciding factor for me. I see a ripple in the Clyde from the corner of my eye, and spot a duck slowly moving east. I reach for my binoculars, focus and scan, but there is no duck. It was a ghost duck, or a shadow of a tuft of grass, the reflection of a cleft in the riverbank. I turn back to my work until Bob says, "There’s a duck...no, two ducks." I look again, first with the naked eye, then with the binoculars, sweeping back and forth, but I see only water, only the current moving. I must be losing my mind, or else they are mergansers.

Last fall I watched a herd of Common Mergansers for a few days, a mother and approximately eleven babies. I know the correct term for multiple ducks is "flock", but that word somehow implies organization. You know, as in birds of a feather flocking together, with "together" being the operative term. There is nothing organized about a family of mergansers, at least to a non-merganser such as myself. I tried a few times to count them, but resigned myself to approximate: ten or eleven. Thereabouts.

Counting was tricky to start with, because the ducklings were old enough to be allowed to explore a bit, check out the side of the river farthest from mama’s wing. Because they were permitted this freedom, they were never in one neat little circle around their mom. Counting had to be done at warp speed, trying to squeeze in all the numbers within the split second before they moved again. Onetwothreefourfivesixseven, no wait...onetwothreefourfive, oops... and so on.

They were also of an age to exercise their capability for rowdiness, chasing each other around madly, two or three at a time. When in hot pursuit of one another, their rapidly paddling little feet stirred up such a splashing wake that their tiny bodies were obscured by flying water. With two or more groups engaged in this horseplay simultaneously, the issue was even more confused.

To further complicate the already frustrating task, the little mergansers, like the previously mentioned mourning doves, all looked alike to me. I couldn’t say "I’ve already counted that one". I couldn’t divide them into types or sizes, because they were all the same type and size. Approximately eleven little carbon copies.

I think that any other type of duck would have been easier, if not easy, to count. Mergansers (also known as fish ducks) are magically disappearing waterfowl. Now you see them, now you don’t. Ghost ducks. One clue to making an educated guess that a duck is a merganser is that you DON’T see it. A merganser can go from placidly picturesque to scuba diver in less than the blink of an eye. Even when there was a lull in the splashing and chasing, there was no way to tell how many of the approximately eleven duc.klings might have been underwater. One pops up, another disappears, like an aquatic arcade game gone berserk. Whoever coined the expression "getting your ducks in a row" obviously never saw a family of mergansers.

I may never get officially involved with counting birds, but through the years of working at the Post Office, I could always count on a good conversation about birds every summer with Sue Follett. I will think of her as I am enjoying (but not counting) the mourning doves, the chickadees, and the mergansers. And I will miss her