The Bankhead Gleaner is a gain of function commonplace book, a collection of annotated quotations gathered from my reading. Art is by Artist, unless otherwise stated. Sampled / referenced today:
Youtube. Sandhill Crane Vocalizations.
The Davenport Gazette. “Curious Habits of the Brown Sand-Hill Crane.” January 23, 1855.
The Bristol Mirror, August 5, 1829. Ladybirds at sea.
The Chattanooga Daily Times. Superstitions. December 1, 1911.
The Essex County Standard, etc. September 6, 1854.
Mavis Gallant. Going Ashore.
A Fairly Good Time.
The Moslem Wife.
Green Sky, Green Water.
Jorinda and Jorindel.
Out for a walk the other day — it would have been Wednesday, 11 a.m., because that’s when I go to the post office; I never imagined I’d be an old man in a tiny prairie town with a regular time for checking his letter box, but that’s how it’s worked out — I heard some passing sandhill cranes: an early migration, or maybe something preparatory, a training exercise for new recruits.
That southward journey of the sandhill cranes, the auditory evidence of it, is one of fall’s most musical harbingers in these parts. Hearing these birds is, for me, a rare event and always a welcome one. That the high passage of the cranes and my earthbound walking should be coincident feels like a lucky chance: a blessing conferred. Like any unlooked for meeting at the crossroads of right place and right time, it’s nothing that can be anticipated or prescribed. Happenstance accounts for much of the delight I take from the natural world.
I walked to the post office and the birds flew over. That sound! It’s as evocative of this place on the planet as a distant train whistle or the anxious bark of chevroned geese. To the cranes, when they allow gravity to have its way, belongs a fishwife bellow that, communicated from a high altitude, becomes a haunting holler. Heard from on hight, the cry of the cranes is like a screen door in an abandoned house swinging in the wind on a rusty hinge. It’s the more ghostly because they fly so high that I can almost never ally sound with sight. It seems to come from nowhere. Occasionally I’ve caught glimpses of them on the ground, in the marshiest of the fields around here, their heads rising above the grass or grain as they execute their tell-tale hop. What’s visible of them when they’re airborne, in full flight, is the luggage of their long legs; “spindly” must have been coined with sandhill cranes in mind.
I found this marvellous piece of writing in The Davenport (Iowa) Gazette, January 23, 1855. It first appeared in “The Prairie Farmer,” and that the writer is unnamed is really too bad; I would happily read anything from his (as I suppose) pen.
Curious Habits of the Brown Sand-Hill Crane.
Many of these noble birds still nest in this vicinity, but their number is small compared with the numerous flocks that a few years since might be seen holding their strange dances on some favourite knoll, or feeding while their sentinels, judiciously posted, stood ready to give warning of any suspicious intruder.
Some are incredulous as to the dancing of cranes. It is true their movements are not as graceful as a Frenchman’s, nor their quadrilles quite a la mode, but dance they certainly do. As for their music, though lacking the harmony, it is about as loud and melodious as a fashionable opera air.
The Sand-Hill Crane is omnivorous, devouring pretty much everything eaten by birds. The nest is a simple pile of rushes or grass — flat on the top, built in some deep slough or pond. The eggs, two in number, are shaped much like those of the common turkey, of a light amber color, splashed with brown. The nest is usually surrounded by deep water, but the young birds swim readily, and leave it as soon as hatched. It is believed by many that they separate, immediately upon leaving the nest, each oof the old birds taking care of one — the supposition being that they would fight if allowed remain together. In corroboration of this somewhat singular idea, I can only say, I never found two of the young birds in company; and a pair which I had caused a hen to hatch, fight from the time they left the shell, till, in fact, they killed each other outright.
The article continues — I’m adding a facsimile of the original — with an engaging account of how the author kept one of these disputatious sounding birds as a pet.
A dozen years ago, when I first began spending time in this beautiful, surprising, largely unsung part of the world, and the cranes became an emblematic part of my experience, I would visit my bird-loving, dementia-hobbled father, in his Winnipeg care home, and tell him about my rare sightings of the migrating birds, of their trailing legs, like the lightest of pencil traces on sky-blue paper. The image stuck, and he would often report to me, on days when he hadn’t been kidnapped by the gang who lived across the river, or when he wasn’t obsessed by some horrible encounter with the “proprietress” — as he said — of the hotel to which he was inexplicably confined, that, looking from his window on the third floor of the Lion’s Manor, he had seen strange birds with long, long legs, flying past. Well. Maybe he did.
It’s not in Nature’s nature to be compliant, but I'm reassured when it behaves more or less in the way we’ve grown to expect, especially given its many rogue acting-out episodes that dominate the news cycle. Some reliabilities are more to be cherished than others. This is the time when the ladybugs (lady-birds, some say) typically start massing, and this year is no exception. This house is old and porous and affords many points of ingress for these hard-carapaced invaders with their cheerful orange capes. Quite what they imagine they’re escaping to, I’m not sure. Someone has sold them a bill of goods if they think this is a promised land. No good luck awaits them here. When I come back in the spring I’ll sweep their corpses, hundreds of them, from every surface, nook, and cranny. I read this in The Bristol Mirror, August 5, 1829.
An immense quantity of insects, commonly known by the name of lady-birds, have fallen in every part of Brighton lately, and the fishermen say, that at sea they were literally covered with them. It is not a little curious, the these insects swarm this year in most parts of the West of England.
It’s spider season, too, and they (and their webs) are as numerous as they’ve always been. They’re every bit as ingenious and persistent as the ladybugs at sneaking in and making themselves at home. I keep jars beside the tub and kitchen sink specifically for their scoopage and gentle deposit out the back door. I don’t enjoy killing any living thing — with possible exception of wood ticks — but with spiders I’m particularly cautious to do no harm. (I did, I have to confess, deprive one of her lunch a few days back when I found a grasshopper struggling in a web and chose to liberate it: a moment out of Aesop or LaFontaine.)
Arachnid lore is rich and varied. I enjoyed this gleaning from The Chattanooga Daily Times, December 1, 1911.
Quite how Mavis Gallant, to whose work I’ve been paying close attention, felt about spiders I can’t say, but I’ve been interested to note that they turn up now and again in her stories, and in her novel, A Fairly Good Time.
Her parents, a lost pair, cycled off into the dark. They became smaller than a small living spider. … With a spider for company she shed her Sunday clothes, then ran water in the ocher-stained bath. A Fairly Good Time
Eddy could be so witty when he wanted to be, sending clockwork spiders down the bar, serving drinks in trick glasses that unexpectedly dripped on people’s clothes. “Going Ashore”
Italians had taken over the hotel. They used the mirror behind the bar for garget practice. Oddly enough it was not smashed. It is covered with spiderwebs, and the bullet hole is the spider. “The Moslem Wife”
It was a hand brushing the edge of folded silk, a leaf escaping a spiderweb… My father placed a card face on the table and watched to see what Georgie made of it. She shrugged, let it rest. There she sits, looking piggy but capable, Angus waiting, the precocious pain in the neck turing pages, hoping to find something in the National Geographic harmful for children. I brush in memory against the spiderweb: What if she had picked it up, remarking in her smoky voice, “Yes, I can use that?” It was a low card, the kind that only a born gambler would risk as part of a long-term strategy. She would never have weakened a hand that way; she was not gambling but building. He took the card back and dropped his hand, and their long intermittent game came to an end The card must have been the eight of clubs — ‘A female child.’ “Voices Lost in Snow”
I think I’ve mentioned before this quite moving recollection of MG. The visit to which the writer refers has no date attached, but it must have been a year or so before her death when her acuity was, as I’ve been told, no longer consistent in its quality or reliability. It was this anecdote that first made me wonder about MG and spiders.
I visited Mavis in her flat in the 6th arrondissement. It was to be the last time I’d see her; she died in 2014. One of her first questions was, where was I staying? At a friend’s house, I replied, which was a bit rundown and full of spiders. With the mention of spiders, something was triggered, and they quickly became the leitmotif of the afternoon. Each time Mavis spoke, she would include them in the sentence, either in her replies or else to address an imaginary spider at the window. Her thoughts travelled back in time to her childhood in Canada, where she and her brother once found a large spider in their house, then returned to the present to the imaginary spider in her flat. Telling it to go outside, she was now very concerned with the seen and unseen in her home. Chloe Aridjis, Frieze, Issue 205
That something delusional was underway on that day seems likely. Did Chloe Aridjis misremember the conversation, or was MG, an only child, not wholly herself when speaking of her brother? It calls to mind this passage from the story “Travellers Must be Content,” which is also a chapter in the novel, Green Water, Green Sky. The speaker is the fragile Flor, daughter to Bonnie, world’s worst mother.
“Did you ever go out in the morning and find a spider’s web spangled with dew?” she said suddenly. “You’ll never find that here. It’s either too hot and dry or it rains so much the spider drowns. At my grandmother’s place, you know, summers, I used to ride, oh, early, early in the morning, with my cousins. All my cousins were boys.”
Cousins turn up about as often as spiders in MG’s short stories, American cousins most often; Boston or New York cousins. There’s George, Flor’s cousin, who’s a kind of pawn to be played by Bonnie, who numbers him among the possible suitors for her daughter. He and Flor, as adults, compare their childhood memories and find them at variance. Likewise, in “The Wedding Ring,” the narrator and her male cousin, years after the fact, recall a charged summer quite differently. In “Rose,” a very peculiar early story, Irmgard travels from Montreal to visit her American grandmother at Christmastime and meets the mysterious Rose. The whole encounter, remembered quite differently by her bonne d’enfant, Germaine, takes on a hallucinatory quality. Irmgard and Germaine make another appearance in “Jorinda and Jorindel,” which appeared in The New Yorker Sept. 19, 1959, but was probably written — or, at least, drafted — years earlier. In this case, Bradley, the American cousin, has come north, to Canada, to spend a few summer weeks. He comes with his tennis racket and a bad case of poison ivy and Irmgard, four years younger, is smitten, even if reluctantly. She forsakes Freddy, a local boy from a year-round family — Irmgard and her clan of feckless party-givers are summer people — and experiences a crisis of conscience. It’s a wonderfully intricate story, one of my favourites, a great example of MG’s genius for remembering and interpreting the complicated republic of childhood. It’s also suffused with all the stuff of summer’s end, and it makes for perfect Labour Day reading. And yes, there are spiders.
“The sun had gone in. She was uneasy, because she was swimming in a forbidden place, and frightened by the water spiders…”
Cousins and spiders. They come together in at least three stories: “The Moslem Wife,” (Jack and Netta are cousins), “Travellers Must be Content,” and “Jorinda and Jorindel.”If I were younger and less worn down, I might apply for a grant to look into this more deeply. For now, I’ll just wonder if MG, when she was fantasizing about spiders at the end of her life, might have been remembering some summer adventure with an American cousin. This is not unlikely, which doesn’t mean it matters. Not much does, really. Here’s a final quote from Jorinda and Jorindel — I love the last sentence, especially. I think I might have it inscribed on my tombstone.
They are talking quietly at the breakfast table. The day began in fine shape, but now it is going to be cloudy again. They think they will all go to Montreal. It is nearly Labor Day. The pity of parties is that they end.
And by way of final spider season envoi, “Farmers, Note This,” from The Essex County Standard, etc., September 6, 1854.
Old man? The sixties are the youth of old age. Also, far too young to be considered for high office in the world's most powerful democracy.
You're not the only one who keeps a flat cardboard and an upside-down glass at the ready for catching and freeing spiders (and bees, wasps, and moths) found in the house. I don't have the same empathy for mosquitoes, flies, or ticks; but still feel a bit bad about killing something methinks is a conscious being that wants to live just as much as I do. BUT sorry, not in my house. I've been particularly fanatical about swatting flies this fall. And I feel mean.