Sexamiliamilarium

Never a dull moment, as my mother used to say. When I went out to move my car yesterday, I found the entire passenger side slathered with pine needles and mud, as if mulched by a passing hay wagon. Also, the license-plate holder on the front was mangled and hanging by a plastic shred. I had driven the day before to the Queens International Film Festival, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel near LaGuardia Airport, in East Elmhurst, and parked on a wet and leaf-strewn street, but unless someone was leaf-blowing in the rain, I don’t see how all that gunk could have attached itself to my car.

I had to get two things off my mind before I could consider a car wash. One was the outboard motor, my 6-horsepower 4-stroke Mercury, purchased from Buster’s Marine of Broad Channel on August 25, 2007, which I needed to have winterized and to submit for repairs, covered, I hope, by the three-year warranty (# OR055963). I lugged the motor from the bungalow to Buster’s. It must weigh fifty pounds and is extremely awkward, with its propeller and all, unless your name is Buster and they don't call you Buster for nothing, in which case you can take it from a lady and sling it over a mechanic’s rack as if it were a lantern. I had arrived with the idle-speed control switch, which had broken off the carburetor, sealed in a plastic bag with documentation, and was even ready to submit my ship's log, if necessary, but nobody was the least bit interested. Buster was doing some interior decorating and foisted me off on his helper Dave. Apparently, as soon as they hear the word “broke,” they figure somebody was doing something that made the part break. I maintain that it was defective and broke all by itself, but it looks like I am going to have to take it up with customer relations.

My other item of business was the remaining gas in my three-gallon tank. This gas dated from a time a few weeks ago, when gas cost twice as much as it does now. This gasoline could not sit in the bungalow all winter. There is no safe place for a can of gas except for the tank of a car. So I had to rig up a system of funnels and spouts to pour the gas into my tank. Some of it spilled on the street. O.K., most of it spilled on the street. I just hope it evaporated before anyone tossed a cigarette butt in the gutter.

Every time I looked at the car, I thought, Oh, poor Éclair. I really should go to the car wash. But it suddenly became important to get in a walk on Jamaica Bay. I had noticed the ravishing colors of the trees in the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge last weekend. This weekend the colors were somewhat dimmed, but as I was walking among birders at sunset—hopping down to the turtle-hatching beach, to see if I could come here by boat next season—an egret came soaring around a bend, banked when it saw me, and continued its flight, so beautiful and so silent.

On the way home, I remembered the odometer. All the driving back and forth between Buster’s and the bungalow had brought my mileage up sooner than I expected to 59,999. Heading north on Woodhaven Boulevard, past Rockaway Boulevard, I looked down just as the 9s were aligning, and the tenth of a mile rode up—5, 6, 7, 8—until it was 59,999.9, and then, as I braked for the next light, it turned over to 60,000.0. Happy Sixty Thousandth Mile, Sweet Éclair! Still a cream puff at eighteen. I found her a lovely Tuesday-Friday spot, barely clearing a crosswalk, to celebrate Veterans Day. I wish I had sprung for the car wash.

Notes on Winterizing

It didn’t take much to talk me out of winterizing my outboard motor. I called my friend Pete and told him that the Boss had said I had to take it to Buster but I was thinking of doing it myself, and he said, “Take it to Buster.” So I took it to Buster. So much for my burning desire to master the complexities of the internal combustion engine before it becomes obsolete.

The infamous Buster didn’t seem so bad to me, although you have to wonder, if a man is content to be professionally known as Buster, what his real name is. A hale and hearty fellow of around sixty, he wears reading glasses, which give him a professorial look as he stands at a counter behind a window festooned with marine paraphernalia: Mickey Mouse ears to flush your cooling system, emergency flares, multicolored rope for towing a children’s banana boat. Buster said it would take forty-five minutes to an hour to winterize the motor. “Put it right in the tank,” he instructed an employee named Wayne. I could wait, if I wanted, or I might like to go to a restaurant across the street, with a view of the bay (it would be cynical to imagine that Buster, like my car mechanic, also owns the waterfront restaurant), or drive up to Howard Beach. I remembered to ask how much it would cost, in case I had to go find a cash machine: $65. Not exorbitant. If I could kill time without spending money, I could pay out of my pocket and have two dollars to spare.

I decided to go to the Wildlife Refuge, where I walked down a trail I’d never been down before, between high reeds and birch trees. Two women with field guides and binoculars blocked my way. “Is there something up there?” I asked. “We think it’s a merlin,” one of them said. I couldn't see anything, so I went on ahead of them. At the East Pond were cormorants, Canada geese, swans, snow geese, gulls, flights of smaller birds, ducks, including some gorgeous green mallards. I got out my binoculars and watched a duck fishing, its butt bobbing in the water like an upended football with webbed feet; when it surfaced, I saw that it had a huge bill that came right out of its forehead. It seems funny to say that a duck has an “aquiline” nose, but that was the only way I could think of to describe it. The two women I’d passed on the trail came up behind me. I told them I had seen some kind of duck and tried to show them where it was, straight out in front of me, to the right of a piling. The woman to my far right made a derisive sound; she had a German accent. “Don’t be dismissive,” her companion said, and then to me, “Would you like to use my guide?” I declined. “Ah, you’re like me," she said. "You’d rather look around as long as you’re outside. I could stay here all day.” I agreed—plenty of time to look in books when you get home, and the pond was pretty. (Also, I can never figure out how those field guides are organized. I'd have spent a half hour on the flamingos.) The geese and swans had swum up to us, looking for handouts. The disgruntled German leafed through her guide.

I retraced my steps and took the other fork in the trail, to Big John’s Pond, where I’d been before. There is a blind, from which I once saw a whole pondful of what I have it on good authority were glossy ibis: prehistoric-looking crooked-necked long-beaked shorebirds. At first I saw nothing—well, foliage reflected in a shallow pond with some oil making rainbows at the edges. Then I saw a long-beaked brownish-gray bird with extraordinary long legs—a sandpiper?—stalking out to a mound of debris in the center of the pond. I got out my binoculars, hoping the zip of my backpack wouldn’t scare the bird away, and now on the mound I saw something black with white spots, like a gull’s tail. It turned out to be the head of a turtle. And on the other side of the mound was another turtle. I wanted to point them out to somebody, but there was no one with me in the blind or nearby on the trail. On the way back to the car, I ran into a couple who were too absorbed in each other to care about turtles, and then two more middle-aged ladies, one of whom fell behind the other and asked me, “How’s your memory? What are those . . .” and she indicated the many trees with branches full of yellow and orange and red berries. “Bittersweet?” I said. “That’s it! That’s what I was trying to think of!” she said. Hurray! I knew something.

I drove back to Buster’s, paid him and picked up my winterized outboard (it turns out that I do not need one of those Mickey Mouse ear contraptions to flush my cooling system; Buster said once a year at his place is enough), drove home, lugged the outboard into the bungalow, and stood it up properly in a corner. Later that night, I found myself reaching for the field guide to see if I could identify those birds and add them to my life list. The sandpiper might have been a willet or a dowitcher. There are a lot of different kinds of ducks. I don’t think this one was a coot, or an eider, or a shoveler. It might have been a bufflehead. Or a phalarope. All I can say for sure is that it was definitely some kind of duck.

For the Birds–II

Forget everything I said about birds. I went to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge with some serious birders out of Connecticut over the weekend. They toted the Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America and gigantic binoculars and huge monocular spotting scopes on tripods, and wore floppy hats and spray-on Off!, and at least one of them had a special vest with net pockets over the buttocks for her water bottle and field guide. It is certain that what I thought all along was a skimmer (because of the way it flies low over the water with its beak open, skimming the tiny foodstuffs off the surface) is an oystercatcher (its beak is orange right to the tip; the skimmer’s beak has a black tip), and what I have taken for piping plovers, those little birds that run back and forth on the beach, are most likely sanderlings (the plovers are plumper and have a ring around the neck). So I am still on the lookout for the piping plover, but I like sanderlings and am glad they're not endangered.

At the last minute, I was joined on this excursion by my evil twin, and so, though I tried to behave, the avidity of the type of birder who keeps a life list struck me forcibly as absurd. Here is what my life list looks like: Birds–check. My evil twin’s life list is more extensive: Big ducks, Little ducks–check, check. The leader never spoke directly to anyone: he was always scanning the treetops, his attention snapping away as if he were afflicted by some birder’s version of attention-deficit disorder, and saying things like “Cedar waxwing at two o’clock” and “That was a yellow-tailed warbler—actually, it was a tail-less yellow-tailed warbler.” At one point, in a blind from which voyeurs had spotted a pair of doves and a muskrat, the leader was making an expert birdcall to attract something, and my evil twin almost split her sides because she wanted so badly to say, "I hear it, but I don't see it."

I saw a green heron, and a soro, and a semipalmated plover, and I learned that a passerine bird is not, as I thought, a bird that is just passing through but a sparrow (it’s from the Latin). The birders got excited about birds I see all the time: There were snowy egrets, of course, roosting, fishing, flapping their big sail-like wings in flight; and cormorants; and ducks and geese (which my mother used to call “long-necked ducks”). There were terns wheeling, their wings sharply angular (though I cannot distinguish the least tern), and laughing gulls, with their distinct black heads and heartless cry: Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah! Later, on the beach, we noticed one rather aristocratic-looking gull slumming among a flock of herring gulls competing for Cheetos—a Bonaparte?

So I have made fun of the bird-lovers and the bird-haters. I’m sure that somewhere in the great pecking order of the universe, some big bird is making fun of me. Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah Hah!

Dominion

A discussion of traffic tickets among the crew at the marina over the weekend veered off suddenly onto the piping plover, and so I can say with certainty that in Rockaway, at least, “plover” rhymes not with “lover” but with “Dover” (or, rather, since this is Queens, “ova,” as in eggs). A cop brought up the subject, speaking on the understanding that everyone present loathed the plovers. And they do. Even the one woman present (besides me), a mild creature whom everyone loves, and whom I’ve heard singing the praises of the swallows, said that when she sees plovers in the marina she throws pebbles at them. The cop, who had just been talking about driving a car on the boardwalk (cops do it all the time), said he ran into a friend who spends August fishing off Cape Cod. “Why aren’t you at the Cape?” the cop asks. The friend goes rigid. “He thinks I’m kidding him. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ he says. 'You can’t go anywhere up there now. The plovers built their nests all over the beach, and everywhere you go’”—meaning on the beach in your truck—“‘there’s someone from the Audubon Society, pointing and saying, "There’s one!"’ He went on for a half hour. He says the economy up there is tanking because of the plovers.”

They all shake their heads. One of them quotes the bumper sticker “Piping Plover—Tastes Like Chicken” and laughs. “I wouldn’t wear one of those,” someone else says—not, I think, because it’s in bad taste but because the birders would be all over him. They have such a sense of entitlement—they're not going to let some little birds push them around—that if anyone spoke in the plovers' defense, one of them might start quoting Genesis: "And God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and OVER THE FOWL OF THE AIR." The resident Francis of Assisi—he puts out pans of water for the pigeons—claims he doesn’t know what a piping plover is. “You know, those little birds that run back and forth on the beach.” He knows. He is just not going to admit it in this crowd. "I thought those were sandpipers," he says. I pipe down.