By James Kanady
Pissed Again
The first time the geese appeared, they flew low over our trailer house and lightly landed on the pond. There was a small island in the middle where my wife Julie and I set up a large plastic nest with a bed of hay years ago in hopes this day would come.
The pair prepared their nest, and mom settled in. Over the next few weeks, we noticed how doting the male was, and how they both gave out beak taps of love. When the chicks hatched a month later, we ran to the pond excited to watch those little ones paddle around.
Before the family took off, I bought a bag of bird feed, walked out to the pond and nest, and poured out a line of it. Everyone needs a treat. Making a racket, both dad and mom chowed down on the feed like it was the greatest meal they ever had.
When they and the chicks flew away, we both prayed they would return next year, and . . . they did.
Seeing them land, I immediately shook out a row of bird feed and sat down cross-legged at the end. They ate voraciously of course, but they eventually, one-at-a-time, paddled to me, nodding and quacking as if saying thanks. I spoke softly, thanking them for coming.
They performed their parental duties and weeks later they and the chicks flew away. We hated to see them go.
The next year had been a wet-wet spring. So much water was in the pond; it overflowed the banks. The island where the geese nested had water halfway up the sides. Julie asked: “You think the water might reach the eggs?”
“I doubt it. You know how much rain would have to fall for it to reach that nest of hers?”
And then it did.
A huge, black thunderstorm rolled in one afternoon after Julia got home from grade school. The lightning was blinding, and thunder shook our trailer house to the core. I looked out at the pond. The water had risen to the edge of the plastic nester. “Oh, no.”
“What’s wrong?” asked Julie.
“The pond.”
She gasped seeing the rising water getting into the nest. “She’ll lose her eggs.”
Julia heard her, looked out the window, and cried: “Go out and save those eggs, dad!”
I thought about it. Dash to the pond in a swimsuit holding a bucket with a thick towel in the bottom. Swim out, carefully put the eggs in the bucket, swim to shore, run to the garage where I’d set up a nest and a heat lamp for mom and a blanket just for dad.
“There is no way you are going out there in this lightning,” said Julie.
“Mom, the eggs will drown!”
“I’m so sorry, honey. Bad things can happen in nature.”
We looked outside to see the mom goose nuzzling her floating eggs. Eggs that would never hatch. Julie and I cried openly. I will carry that image with me for the rest of my life, and it breaks my heart every time.
The year after that tragedy, they returned and knew exactly what they wanted, walking across the yard, and tapping on the windows of our new, recently constructed, house. I quickly threw bird feed in the yard before their beaks cracked a windowpane. I put out grain for them every morning before Julie and I went to work; Julie at the local health department as a nurse practitioner, and me at New Beginnings, a homeless organization.
Having them arrive every year was a joyous anniversary. They started their families with us for eight years. We were so blessed, but then Climate Change accelerated overnight, it seemed. So much has changed. Our pond dried up. Prairie grasses and cottonwood trees now stand where we and the geese swam and sunbathed, and had picnics. And the drought we are in feels like a life sentence.
The pair never came back. I like to believe they just moved to another pond. I didn’t want to think about them being dead. I remember what Julie told Julia: Terrible things can happen in nature. And human beings are part of nature.
In 2016 our house was invaded in a smash and grab burglary.
In March of 2017 wildfires raged through these Kansas Sandhills. Our house damage was not as bad as some, but Julie and I were displaced for 5 months and 12 days.
On Oct. 20, 2017, the day before my birthday, my sweet Julie died in a car crash driving home from work.
Our daughter is now a sonographer—a healer like her mother. Both of us are still, in our own way, wounded after all these years.
I sometimes sit on the front porch and look south toward the pond. After wishing Julie would come up the driveway for the millionth time, I just gaze at what used to be a thriving little ecosystem. The pond belonged to me, Julie, Julia, and the geese. It was as much theirs as ours. Not to mention frogs, snakes, carp, and a variety of birds—especially red-tailed blackbirds who’d nest in our tall cattails—and swoop at us if they thought we were too close to their young.
All of it dried up and gone.
How many such losses will happen as the Earth continues to burn? Beyond the actual science, the cause boils down to ego, power, and greed. The human animal has evolved to foul all nests. Roy Scranton said it best in his book “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:”
“The experience of being human narrows to a cutting edge.”
And within that narrowness, will love, compassion, and childlike wonder disappear? Bill McKibben, in his warning shot to the world in 1989s The End of Nature, wrote: . . . the world we inhabit is not the world we grew up in, the world where our hopes and dreams were formed.
Without nature, dreams are muted, and our lives incomplete and false.
James Kanady is the resource/program development advisor and creator of special projects for New Beginnings in Hutchinson. He is a published author and avid reader.