Aiming for Perfection

a story included in the Same Walk, Different Shoes project

habitat

This work of fiction was included in the collection, “Same Walk, Different Shoes” as a community writing project created and organized by

Ben Wakeman

as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise wass simple: A group of writers would anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life, then each participating writer was randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a first-person short story.

You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release.

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About this story: the prompt I was given was a glimpse, a side-angle view of two people drawn together by love, who parted, then came together again, in a different love. Without knowing them I could have imagined and written them in a million different ways, though none of my ways would replicate their relationship. This lead me to wonder about how what we believe of someone can become the truth of someone, or something, we love. Until of course, it no longer is.

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Aiming for Perfection

For a college town Corvallis is small; you can’t walk four steps without seeing someone who might know you. Case in point, just as I opened the coffee shop door, there was M-T-Th Intro to Bird Banding 3rd row, seat 37 walking out: the girl with the braids who raised her hand Thursday with 30 seconds left, asking one of those earnest questions I would have asked at that age too, the kind that grate on me now. I’d listened, pretend-listened, to the long and detailed question meandering the outskirts of the entire point of the class, cornered behind the podium, the finches rattling their cage pecking the bite of the new red tags.

As I walked in I saw the girl and wished I’d had my parka hood up, but it was dark and the girl had her head down. A shift of hesitation as we passed, but the girl didn’t stop.

It wasn’t until the barista called out chai for Anna that I wondered if I was supposed to order for Ellis too, but couldn’t recall if he was coffee with or coffee without; cream? sugar? soy milk? He’d have to deal with it. It was his idea to meet here and walk to campus, though it seemed a pinch with our timeframe: just before dawn, done by nine, unload back at the lab. No other coffee place opened this early on Saturday so Ellis seemed to think we’d manage.

Forgot all about my backpack and bumped the table as I sat down. Back up for a napkin to wipe the cloud of foam from the to-go cup. Sit down to wait.

Robin from the department: botany? was at a table. We’d met at the new Ag lab building ribbon cutting and I’d liked the turkey’s feet wrinkles of his eyes, though the perfectly-pressed button-down shirt put me off. Someone father would have introduced me to then later posit was out of my league.

Aim for perfection nonetheless, my dear.

Robin was with a woman and they seemed equally rapt. He leaning toward her and she reaching out to touch his face, thin bisque fingers resting against his tan cheek like a starfish on a beach. A poet, or in the writing seminar. The woman pressed in closer and then the breaking glass tinkle of her laugh, a worry-free sound lilting and flirty and full of itself from behind a glint of white; teeth, or maybe the angle of light. The woman leaned back and crossed her legs, casually kicking one back and forth as she talked, her pointy black shoe like a flicker’s beak stabbing at the mossy green of Robin’s chinos.

A large canvas rucksack landed beside me as Ellis dragged out a chair. When I looked back Robin and the woman were standing and hugging.

Behind them in the street through the glass students with cardboard sharpie-sloganed signs were gathering, selfie-sticks and phones to capture whatever they all hoped would come down, two cops on the corner under an alcove with their hands across their chests.

Ellis seemed to know the barista and when he walked back to the table he was smiling and chuckling to himself. He had a spot of cream on his beard. The beard thing, plus the ponytail thing; with both, the older the longer. After I was offered my position I reached out to a grad school friend from Portland, who summed it up with a one-liner in lieu of advice: Oregon, an interesting mix of loggers and old hippies.

Ellis slung his pack up off the chair, took a swig of his drink then looked at me and said The early bird gets the worm as he pointed with his other hand and pulled an imaginary trigger. The department was calling us Team Rambo and Ellis ran with it, tying a bandana around his bald head one time at a budget meeting, calling himself an apex predator. An apex predator in Birkenstocks. I pulled my hood up and kept my head down. On the pavement across from faculty parking we stepped over a white poster with red markered Free Palestine bleeding on the cardboard from the dew, and I glanced at Ellis to see his reaction. New week, next target, he said and shrugged, not breaking stride. He’s been teaching twenty years to my five.

I had the keys to the rental truck. Better not to advertise had been the decision after the initial outcry, social media latching onto photos of the university van and the Join the Flock! and Are you a bird nerd? So are we! bumper stickers the department sold at fundraisers. Fish and Wildlife pulled in as we were lowering the tailgate and Ellis was telling me one of his long stories about some ball-breaker hike he’d done, rattling off something about a brown bear and somebody else’s food hammock, the width of the elk rack, sturgeon jerky and craft beer on the way back in Hood River. I recognized the Wildlife guy from the scoping meetings. He nodded at me and then he and Ellis confirmed the GPS coordinates. When they were done the officer handed me a neoprene gun case which I unzipped far enough to reveal the serial number on the stock, and initialed the forms. Then the box of shells and counting aloud one through twenty, initialed the next forms, stuffing each shotgun shell into the elastic loops on my orange vest the way I’d been taught. Ellis did the same but was using something he called a chest rig for his shells.

Everything to Ellis was a rig: his ancient Dodge pickup was a rig, the gear we stowed and the rental truck we loaded it in were both rigs, my all-wheel drive Subaru was a rig; a classic chic rig he’d called it. The time we drove to the certification shoot after he offered me a ride in his rig he’d asked me to open the jockey box. I knew what he meant but asked him anyway and he’d shaken his head the way dogs do when they have a foxtail burrowed in their ear, pointing to the glove compartment. I opened it and my father’s face stared back. Ellis hit a bump and then my father’s face tumbled onto the floor from one of his famous field guides. The one on buteos, with the fawn-colored cover. The summer he wrote it I was sent to camp and mom moved into the guest bedroom.

That night I dreamed I was teaching phylogenetics to a group of people and an old man with red hair stood up and asked me to spell niche, but I couldn’t do it. Every time I opened my mouth a different bird song came out.

The drive wasn’t far. The map listed it as mature forest, code at the university for old growth, old growth code for Spotted owl habitat. Spotted owl code for loggers and conservationists and divided communities; Audobon vs. The U.S. Forest Service, new locals vs. old locals, everyone vs. the judge who decided it all. Now, it’s Spotted owls vs. Barred owls which means scientists and Fish and Game folks and Audobon folks and the Feds on one side, Barreds on the other.

Here is the thing with owls, most birds, the truth tucked inside the nesting doll of ornithology and things with wings: they don’t stay in one place. They are mobile to a fault, flying across maplines and county lines, over forests, into backyards and glades and thickets on private property as carelessly as they wing into the public trust.

We hiked together until the GPS showed the split point, Ellis down the ravine and across the creek and I’d head up just below the ridge. The pack was heavy with the gun case strapped to it, and as soon as Ellis was out of sight I stopped and took it off. I unfastened the suspenders from my rain pants and pulled them down, then wriggled my jeans down and squatted. Swirls of steam from my warm urine rose from the pine duff. I’d never minded peeing outdoors, and my mother liked to say it was a sign of a true field biologist: to be in nature and not expect the comforts of home. But mother was an artist, so what did she know really, aside from seeing me and my father’s birds through a viewfinder, mixing the chemicals just so to uncloud the images in her darkroom.

It was father who lead the way outside, pointing at a slight shimmer on a branch, naming fluttering things rising from marshes and meadows and hedgerows as we drove: ornithology at 50 miles an hour he called it. Waking me with a tap and saying be ready in ten, absentmindedly chewing his bologna on rye and jotting notes in his journal while I dragged a stick through the moss, writing my favorite words. He lifted me to see nests, brought home specimans and used an old bottle stopper to show how the tiny ventricles pumped. He taught what to listen for, Paying attention is the province of the ornithologist he wrote, though he never said it, just how to stop and be still and wait. How to note the shape of a wing, the tiny skitch marks lined under a chin or the blip of color on a rump. Where to look for what you hope to find.

On the ground as well on the wing he admonished, when I’d get it wrong.

He taught science as a kinship forged through observation, his version anyway, the version taught after the dead bird decades, collections of carcasses, understanding snared at the behest of dissection; when what they really meant was that a dead bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. But knowing is an evolution itself, and by the time I had my Ph.d father had retired, and algorithmic modeling had helped make it all clear again, and less messy.

When the owl project was in the proposal stage, Ellis called it the incubation phase, a renowned ornithologist declared his gun as a research tool. Another theorized that, by stepping in as humans and taking that role in nature, we may be able to achieve more biodiversity in the environment. We must rebalance the forest ecosystem! a grad student implored, wide-eyed behind wire-rim glasses. When I phoned home father was asleep, mother singsonging about his health and the pair of over-wintering Anna’s at the feeder.

Before I learned to shoot the owls, I’d never fired a gun. I eyed the big female Barred owl, her feathers streaked brown and white, perched on a branch at just the right distance. I squeezed the trigger and the owl fell to the forest floor.

According to everything I’d been taught I wasn’t expecting to be comfortable with the 12-gauge in the field, so it was a surprise when the kick didn’t hurt.