Reviews & Interviews

The sky is much bigger than I’m used to, stretching uninterrupted in front of me; over water as far as I can see in three directions. The sky is clear, but such a bleached, pale blue that it seems to have faded with age. In a sky like that, the sun doesn’t even seem bright. It’s just too white to look at. 

Right now, the white sun is sliding down the afternoon sky toward the sharp, curved line of the horizon and out there, at the edge of the world, the tops of the waves are royal blue, and the shadows in the troughs are navy, or even midnight.

Somewhat nearer, the color turns sullen: a dark, chalkboard gray that highlights the curling white edges of the waves. Nearer still are the breakwaters: 50 yard-long piles of granite, maybe 100 yards apart, and 100 yards from shore. They stretch along the coast from left to right, as if a dotted line on the map manifested itself in real life. They were built in 1992 by the U. S. Army Corp of Engineers, in their campaign against the driving wind and waves that constantly reshape the peninsula. 

We don’t know what the Erielhonan people, for whom Lake Erie is named, called this glacially-deposited arm of land, but French explorers named it presqu’île in the 1720s, meaning literally, “almost an island.” The problem is, it’s been an actual island four times since then. The lake, so gentle and serene at this moment, is the size of an inland sea and given to violent tempers. In stormy moods it tears away at the sandy coast, dragging those glacial deposits out to sea, dumping them further north and further east.

The stone breakwaters protect this restored shoreline from the full force of the waves, moderating elemental forces so that over 4 million people like me can drive out from the mainland every year. Right now, I’m soaking in beauty that the grand forces of nature got bored with back in 1819.

It’s not just the tourists who benefit, either. Presque Isle is home to 89 species of dragonflies and damselflies, 35 different butterflies, 48 kinds of mammals, 13 types of amphibians, 19 reptile species, and 318 different birds—of which 45 are listed as “endangered” or “threatened”.

This is an example of an indigenous american philosophy that author and botany PhD Robin Wall Kimmerer describes as reciprocity. To paraphrase one section of her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, you could say that a posture of reciprocity refuses to grind creation underfoot.  It does not accept things as poet Gerard Manly Hopkins described them:

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Nor does it slink away from the created world, tail between legs, and try to avoid contact. Reciprocity takes off its shoes. It learns to feel the soil, and it cares for a place in ways that allow that place to care for us in return. Like the way this beach is caring for me right now.

Inside the line of breakwaters, the water is distinctly green and translucent, and waves curl in to break on the sand. I focus on the sound of the surf: steady, sibilant, the soothing rhythm of our planet’s heartbeat. It’s the cliched song played by every seaside, everywhere, but it seems magical here, 273 miles from the nearest ocean.

 There is a strong breeze sweeping across the lake and up the sand to where I’m sitting, and thanks to the sound of the waves, I half-expect it to smell of salty brine. Instead, it’s odorless and too cold to be quite comfortable. But that’s ok, too, because the afternoon heat is still a bit much, and the combined sensation is a quiet, wavering thrill, like facing a blazing fire on a cold night. The soft sand beneath me has compacted under my weight and my seat is going numb. I relocate a couple feet to the side, and smoothing the sand draws my attention to the shimmering, flickering light around me.

Here on beach nine, I’m doing something else you can’t usually do by the seaside: I’m sitting on a sand dune underneath a group of cottonwood trees. Their thousands of leaves are small, spade-shaped with jagged toothy edges, and a leathery texture. They flutter endlessly in the steady sea-breeze, not whispering together so much as rattling, and it’s a sound somehow more quiet than silence.

On my right, just out of reach, a fleshy root has snaked out from under the sand and lays in the twinkling sunlight. It’s a cottonwood root, testament to the stabilizing, homemaking role that these native trees play here. Cottonwoods seed themselves right in the sand, growing quickly despite the free-draining, low-nutrient environment. Their leafy crowns break the wind for inland neighbors, and their roots buttress the sand dunes that are stitched so delicately together by the roots of grass and milkweed. 

I turn to look inland, where small shrubs have sprouted in the ground stabilized and fertilized by these pioneer plants. The shrubs hold their gnarled and twisty twigs stubbornly still against the wind, standing only a little taller than the grass stems that sway around them. Glistening green and blue dragonflies navigate like bush pilots along the edges where light meets shadow. Along the crest of the dunes, a flock of chipping sparrows pluck grass seeds, skitter along the sand, and crowd into the lower branches of the shrubbery, moving like a crowd of pre-teens in a department store. Despite all the movement, they are so well camouflaged that I would have missed them if it were not for their frequent calling. 

Looking back across the water, I see a foursome of cormorants have landed on the nearest breakwater. They’re standing on the rocks with their wings spread, drip-drying like freshly laundered scare-crows in the sun. I’ve been told that these fish-catching waterfowl must drip-dry after diving because their feathers lack the waterproof oils used by ducks. This makes them less buoyant, which makes them better divers and more deadly fishermen. It also makes them look silly, silhouetted with their long, snakey necks twisting around and their wings rigidly cruciform. 

This is one of the things I love about Presque Isle: With seven distinct ecological zones in such a small space, I can often move between different worlds just by turning my head. The watery world of the cormorants and the grassland ground of the chipping sparrows are within eye-shot, but it’s not likely either flock will ever see the other.

Just over the dunes, not much further from where I sit than the breakwaters, is yet another kind of habitat, with white pines, oaks, and other forest trees. There is a lull in the sea-breeze, and the ecstatic song of a catbird reaches me from those trees.

 I climb by stages to my feet and stretch. Rested for the moment, I feel a sudden restlessness. It’s time for some bird-watching.

There are at least two kinds of birdwatching: communing, and collecting.

Collecting birds (usually by keeping lists) can mean spotting a species for the first time that season, or the first time in that spot, or both together. It can mean finding as many different birds as possible in one day, or on one trail, or without moving from one spot. Sometimes, it means watching a bird you’ve never seen before in real life or, even more rarely, discovering a bird that you never knew existed at all. Then you watch and listen with your full attention, building a mental description of its shape, color, size, and behavior.

You refer to your field guide of choice, and often learn that you’ve failed to notice the most distinguishing characteristics. Are the legs black, or pink-ish? Were the crown of the head and the nape of the neck different colors, or was that the angle of the light? If you’re lucky enough to have the time, you check and double-check until you’ve answered all the questions, and you end the day knowing something about the world that can’t be learned except by observation and experience. 

I remember vividly my first meeting with an unknown bird. I was about junior high age, sitting with some homework in front of my bedroom window. I was staring at the maple tree outside, trying to avoid making eye contact with the textbook, when a medium-sized bird appeared swaying among the leaves. I thought for an instant that it was a robin, but it was very obviously not a robin. It was a little shorter, a little plumper, and much blacker. Its sides were rusty red, but its chest was black, and its belly was white. I had never seen or heard of such a thing, and I went running for my dad’s bird guide! It took me a little while, and a lot of turning pages, but I eventually identified my visitor as a male Rufus-sided Towhee. (By the way, the species’ name has since been officially changed from “Rufus-sided” to “Eastern” Towhee. What can I say? The weird and improbable names are part of the fun when you’re bird collecting.)

For me Presque Isle has been a wonderful place to collect birds. Here I’ve seen two or three birds that I knew only by reputation, and at least one species that, like the Towhee, I’d never even heard of. Still, I keep the collecting simple: Just one list for all the birds I see in Erie, Pennsylvania each year. I put an exclamation mark next to the names of new acquaintances. 

Collecting bird sightings is a high. It is exploring, and treasure-hunting, and an assurance that the world has not lost its wonder. That’s why people will drive or even fly hundreds of miles to see a rare bird; why they schedule vacations during unpleasant weather to lonely places visited by migratory flocks. It’s why I lug binoculars, the Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America (my favorite), a journal, and a pencil just to walk a path between the cottonwood dunes and a stand of white pine. But its not the only way to birdwatch. There is also communing.

Communing doesn’t require rare birds, it just needs a bird and enough time to pay attention—which is the reason it can take me forty minutes to walk a hundred yards down this path. To me, it means sharing a space, watching and listening to the same few birds until I feel like I know something about their personalities, or at least how their days are going. It helps to separate me from the anxiety of my own life, and makes me feel like I’m in good company. As my favorite Jewish teacher said, 

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.”

As I descend toward the sandy path, the sea breeze is cut off by the cottonwood dunes behind me, and the sun becomes a welcome, baking warmth on my shoulders. In front of me, the path runs left and right, with white pines and scrubby growth spreading along the opposite side. The catbird burbles again somewhere to the left, so I turn that way. My steps are slow. I drag my sandaled toes through the hot sand, walking with my head tilted back, looking from branch to branch and bush to bush. Crows clamor from somewhere beyond the treeline. Maybe they’ve found an owl to protest, or maybe they just want to hear themselves yell. 

I idle on a few more steps, disturbing a sand-colored grasshopper who flashes the undersides of his wings as he takes flight, buzzing away in a flurry of pale lemon. A long, searching pause reveals no birds, so down the path I shuffle.

From somewhere in the trees comes a clear call: sweet sweet sweet weetaweet

Thanks to a biologist on Instagram, I recognize the call of Presque Isle’s most numerous warbler, accurately but unimaginatively named the Yellow Warbler. The bird sounds close, so I wait. 

The sun feels really hot, now, so I take a few steps backward, into the shade of the cottonwoods. I wait some more. 

There! A spot of greenish-yellow flutters in a honeysuckle bush. I pop the lens covers off my binoculars, fumble with my glasses, and find the warbler is hopelessly out of focus. Twisting the binocular dial makes things worse, a little worse, a little better, then mostly better. Now I can see clearly that the warbler has disappeared.

I lower the binoculars. Squint. There, near the bottom of the bush, the warbler scoots along a branch, picking at bugs too small to see. I raise the binoculars. He’s gone. Today is not, it seems, a day I’ll get to admire his bright black eye, or the rusty racing stripes on his yellow breast. I cap the binoculars, and take another step backward so I can sit on the slope of the sand dune. 

The yellow warbler continues to appear and disappear; now picking along this branch, now gone again, now in another bush. He seems to be aware of me; not terrified, but shy and un-comforted by my stillness. For a while he perseveres, and we share this small section of the path, just the two of us. Finally he disappears for the last time, but my seat is warm and the air is still, so I stay where I am, thinking about this idea of birding as communing. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to appreciate the common sights. Other times, they meet us in uncommon ways. In 2021, I met a Ring-billed Gull. 

If you’re familiar with North American gulls, that will sound a lot like a joke. Almost anywhere you go, including Presque Isle, Ring-billed Gulls are the most common gull you’ll see. They congregate around lakes, rivers, harbors, even parking lots. It makes more sense to talk about being mobbed by a gang of Ring-bills than to say you met one. But I did, although I don’t think he noticed.

The years of the Covid-19 pandemic brought wrenching changes for many people. For some of us the changes were permanent, and sweeping changes, good or bad, bring grief with them. Then in August of 2021 I experienced an extra loss: A friend of friends, whose writing and pastoral ministry had been a strong and strengthening influence in my life, died unexpectedly in a car crash. A few days later I found myself on the beach at Presque Isle, watching the waves come in one after the other, and wondering what to do with all the grief I felt. 

As I sat on the sand, absorbing lake water through my swim trunks, a single Ring-billed gull landed nearby and waded knee-deep into the waves. I don’t know what he was doing. I’m not sure he knew what he was doing. But he pottered back and forth, looking out over the lake, scurrying up onto the dry sand, then moseying back down into the water. As I watched this gull, placidly living his life, I realized something: 

My God loves this gull.

Sure, God loves all gulls, all birds, and all creation. But He loves THIS gull, and He gave it a story, even though no person but God Himself will ever bear witness to it. And I couldn’t help thinking that if THAT’S true, then the wave after waves of grief, the unbearably unanswered questions—they all carry in their wake some promise of goodness. 

In that moment, my unspoken prayer could have been the cry written by the great American songwriter, Rich Mullins:  

Oh, Sparrow Watcher, Lover of the flowers 
Heavenly Father, Keeper of the stars
We come now with hunger, we come now with thirst
Clothe us in Your glory, feed us on Your Word 

Jesus our Brother, Dresser of the fields 
Greeter of the morning, who keeps the waters still 
Judge between the nations, turn our hearts from wrong 
We join all creation, and pray Thy kingdom come 

And with that solitary Ring-bill gull came the answer that, even though we enter, traverse, and depart this world alone, we are not forsaken.