When our seasonal mallard friends, Maude and Claude, return to our pond again this Spring, I think of their presence on our land as a visitation from some relative I only heard about occasionally as a child. We are now entering the fifteenth year our duck pair will visit and I still see them as a kind of stand-up replacement, in a rather comical way, of my great Uncle Leonard who I only met a few times, or my great cousin Audryella, who arrived with a purse that could have been a suitcase. Kids tend to remember details like that, the perfume on a relative when they hug you or whether they wipe their feet before they come in the door.
What is it, after all, that gives the stamp of effortlessness to some family members? Why is it that we can sense affableness with some and bristle at the company of others who don our doorstep? I have not seen our duck pair yet this year, but when I look out one morning and see their tubular forms floating on the pond, I shift gears towards Spring and feel some movement in our urban setting that feels like we just adopted a homeless chicken or opened our door to a miniature Fiat 500 without any wheels. It’s a low ride that squawks and only hits the ruts, but we love them just the same.
In fact, when Maude and Claude finally arrive after delayed flights and drop like a couple of duck bombs in our backyard, I began to wonder whether our dawdling ducks don’t possess all the strengths of character I am looking for in some kind of family legacy: regularity, humor, forgiveness, sharing, appreciation. Mallards I am told, return to the place of their birth every year, which mean that our mallard pair was born in our yard, and come back to reacquaint themselves, if only for a few weeks and natural inclination bordering on something like gratefulness, to where their life began. They are a rarity, as only thirty percent of ducklings survive the first month, and another fifty percent perish after that.
No one that I ever knew, past or present, has ever returned to the very spot where they were born. I was supposed to be born on Valentines’ Day, but my father, in an all-out race across our industrial city, tore across thirteen sets of railroad tracks setting off a rapid chain of contractions leading to my early delivery and hour and half early. I can tell you I have no desire to go back there or repeat that journey now, for fear that I might be forced to be re-born, a physical and spiritual position that I may never come out of alive.
But mallards do go back, every year, and at quite the risk. Hunters shoot thousands of them out of the sky like popcorn as they migrate, and great swaths of ducks lose their way as they are rerouted away from airspaces where they can be sucked into engines and ram into glass cockpits. It is hard to believe, but in past wars, both the British and French Air ministries conceived that ducks and other birds could be trained to attack enemy planes for those very purposes. I can’t really see our mallard pair diving into a F-14 Tomcat, but then I believe, like most ducks, Maude and Claude hold themselves to a higher purpose.
Back during those Great War days, as my grandmother worked on the assembly line at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company she built enough equity in the company to later will me some shares that still yield a dividend years later. While the dividends are only a couple of dollars each year, it is that generational thing again that can only be felt and not explained, a sense of family appreciation that sees itself out the door and lets itself back in at around 8 pm when ice cream is being served.
I used to sit with my grandmother at about that time and share a dish while she explored the woods around the Virginia farm where she grew up and told me of evidence of Confederate raids during the Civil War. I did not know it then, but I was learning a second language as her stories inevitably fell into poetry, stanzas that were surprisingly long and complicated with language that was antiqued and nuanced, but smooth and silky like her hankies. The voices she recited were those of soldiers of many wars like the knights of the round table who went out to battle with King Arthur and carried a hawk on their shoulder. And they spoke of the vultures who circled overhead as widows searched for their dead in the muddy aftermath of ancient medieval battle.
It is difficult to explain what is like to be raised in the company of poetic language. It is not a misspoken one, and does not respond to questions, but instead responds with words like “whilst,” or “perchance,” or a line from a sonnet or an epitaph from an English gravestone. It came from another century, had a slower rhythm that like a loon in the night, and you go to sleep by it, like a good Gordon Lightfoot song. And I don’t know a bad one of those.
In the mallard language it is only the male that has a call. The female relies on her quiet deflections, camouflage, and sheer luck to protect her ten chicks from others – fish or mice and bigger predators like possums, owls and roaming racoons. Although as many as ten eggs may be hatched over several days, in a remarkable bit of nature’s timing, all of the chicks will find their way out within an hour of each other. Can we humans attest to that same sort of sibling loyalty, of an emergence for the sake of our brother or sister and fall in line behind each other when our mothers tells us it is time to go visit our relatives? Or maybe revisit the place of our birth, wipe our feet and say hello, I’m the kid who lived here once.
I bought a dozen duck eggs at the grocery and scrambled up an omelet with feta cheese the other day. Duck eggs, for those of you who don’t know, are bigger than a chicken eggs, but I couldn’t quite wrap my tastebuds around them, attesting to my homogenized view of food. I have the same narrow view of body types, and I probably won’t be able to look at Maude and Claude when they arrive without wondering how they came to look so ungainly on a diet of mostly veggies. Their shape is disproportionate, and they cannot walk without shifting back and forth and, as if anything could make up for their awkward waddle, they sport a bill that looks more like a child’s beach shovel than a beak. This would not be the least bit important except that most recently, as my wife and I recovered from Flu A, we obliterated the peace of our household with deep raspy coughs very similar to a quack, which would be charming once or twice, but not for a whole week.
“Did I hear Maude and Cluade outside?” I said to my wife one day as we wobbled through our hallway full of Kleenex and air heavy with flu-residue.
“No, that was me sneezing,” she answered, “sounded pretty real, didn’t it?”
“Not really,” I answered. Sounded more like someone sliding into second base,” and went back to bed.
Still, this is not a fair assessment of a mallard’s call or coordination. The woodland duck is the only bird that can launch itself straight up off a pond or a lake from a sitting position, a feat that is accomplished by spreading their wings across the water and pushing up. It’s not something you are going to see unless you do a video and slow it down to observe what looks like a mallard push-up, followed by a panic attack of flapping wings. It’s not pretty, but how could it be with a body like theirs and a bill that looks like it was flattened in an iron press.
We have had a couple of seventy-degree days here, but Spring is just faking it. Still, I I find myself looking towards the sky for a couple of ducks scouting for their birthplace. The duck pair, when they arrive, will toddle forth exuding some ugly form of jet lag, and sit down on on the concrete porch warmed by the sun. They will stare at us as if they have just returned from an middle Eastern concert where the Sitar was played – on some high existential plane – and I’ll try to deflect my glance away from their wide duck bill, their paddleboat shoes, and a body the shape of a submarine sandwich.
I’m going to do my best to be a good host when they arrive and come to sit and stare at me. I won’t ask them to wipe their feet. I know who their habits and their strange song, and it is a song that began when two unknown mallards made a brood of chicks we never knew anything about until the pair of them landed back in our yard. Now when Maude and Claude hear my raspy flu cough they will know it is not quite right, but they’ll answer quietly with a single quack, stand up and wander off to the quiet place of their birth, where their mother once sat and covered them with protection and maybe hummed a song from the Gordon Lightfoot playbook. And I never heard a bad one of those.