ernst

3:19 a.m. - 2022-06-02
ospreys

I landed back in New Jersey w/a knit cap and gloves tucked in my rucksack, but after a few frigid April mornings Spring found her toehold and the mercury began to climb. My assignment this trip was to help my cousin move out of his house, which had listed and sold immediately after I'd finished the previous round of renovations, and then drop him off at his dad's place in Maryland. There he would wait for his Japanese Visa to clear while I drove the van back to Texas as a sort of bonus for a job well-done. So after wrapping out the manic moving bit we balled down the turnpike, over some epic bridges and snaked through suburban Maryland - eventually pulling into my uncle's driveway.

Pushing 80, my uncle is a retired academic and former university president, a marathoner who used to row competitively in Hawaii; a fisherman, an avid quilter(!), and a serial volunteer at state parks and wildlife sanctuaries. He's currently lending his time and expertise at Jugs Bay Estuary in MD and hence, the morning after our arrival, Jugs Bay was where we put the kayaks in. It was a clear day and the water stretched to the horizon like sagging glass…like something Eakins' paintbrush had polished, and the trees were thick with ospreys. As his old-man shoulders dipped the oar relentlessly and I labored to keep pace, my uncle related, in his unhurried academic cadence, this ornithology fun-fact: ospreys mate and nest in the same spot for life, but migrate separately to South America every winter. Then, after a season spent wilding solo in Brazil, they make the epic flight home and arrive back at the same tree ON THE SAME DAY.

They may be on to something, ospreys.

Sunburnt and sore I slept hard that night…if I dreamed of ospreys I didn’t remember and left out before sunrise. It had been years since I'd driven D.C.'s beltway and while the loop felt familiar, its ancillary arteries had expanded to consume great swaths of old suburb. Burying shade trees, family diners, crosswalks and the like. But even with so many miles of new asphalt (and even at this early hour) the inbound city traffic was congealing like bad cholesterol. I was motoring west though…outbound across Virginia and then south through the Shenandoah Valley towards the Blue Ridge Mountains. The air was mild, the van was in fine fettle, and the ratio of redbuds to blooming cottonwood was sublime.

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