Gone goose
I wore my brown fedora, black jacket, black shoes and blue jeans. Clearly, I have no taste.
“Never wear brown shoes after five o’clock,” ghost Robert Sterling advised Topper in the ‘50s television series of that name. Ghost Ann Jeffries seemed to agree, as I recall these many years later.
Does that mean the black shoes I wore with the above mentioned ensemble this morning was improper? It was before five o’clock. Should my shoes have been brown? How could I? I have none.
During my walk I heard Canadian geese overhead and looked up. A small flock of maybe a dozen honkers was migrating. Northeast.
Moments later, a smaller flock – half a dozen, maybe – were going directly east.
Soon after that, I saw a flock of two dozen or so snow geese were heading east southeast.
Otherwise the sky was blankly blue.
Sadly small flocks of birds migrating every which way. Emptiness. Pause to wonder.
When I first came to the Sacramento Valley I was a reporter-photographer on the Independent-Herald, god rest its now dead soul.
In the course of some story or another, a museum director showed by old photos taken in the 1890s and 19-aughts. They showed the 100-mile wide valley sky black with migrating birds.
When Fremont first came to the valley in 1848-49, the sky was even blacker, journal entries attest.
Other pictures had groups of duck hunters posing in front of, and among, hundreds of dead birds. As proof of their prowess, the hunters proffered strings of geese corpses and the guns that had brought them down.
“Why they called themselves hunters, I don’t know,” the museum director told me.
“The sky was so thick with birds they could just point their shotguns up blindfolded and bring down one or two,” she said.
The hunters in the photos had killed far more geese than could be eaten or stuffed.
Seeing the pitiful flocks now was proof positive that “hunters” had, just for fun, fished the sky dry.
Another thought occurred to me, as well.
Not only were the skies thin with geese, they were migrating in the wrong direction.
Was global warming – another man-caused problem – finishing the job off?
posted by Tom Nadeau at 10:15 AM
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