H is for Hawk
by Helen MacDonald. Grove Press, 2015.
We were at my boyhood baseball diamonds next to the second set of railroad tracks, because just there, in the last of April and the first of May, it's hawk time here on the US-Canada border. It's half a mile in from the lake and there are thermals, if one cares to look up, and on those invisible columns of air rise and circle hawks in their spring migration. Among them are eagles, giant Goldens and the famous Bald Eagles, and falcons in many varieties from the little colorful kestrels that eat grasshoppers to the big hunters of faraway Canadian subarctic forests. There are hawks of specific wing-shape and coloring in addition to the customary red-tailed, white-chested roadside hawks that migrate but also stay around in every season, that glide soundlessly through the woods and look down upon our footprints in the snow. Nowadays, there are vultures, too, because these southern turkey vultures have been coming up here to our country’s northern border, but back when we played baseball, when Kennedy was President, when our house was new and we had new small brothers and sisters, we didn't look up much the way the birders do, the way the hawk-migration trackers do.
Perhaps we were too close to the ground, where, in baseball season’s first days, along the hard mud and cinder track parallel to the railroad tracks, there were wild strawberries, and this is no gilded nor exaggerated story meant to tell you how the world has fallen: we sought the wild strawberries out, and we ate them when we were feral children for a few hours at a time in the afternoons, after school. We ate wild strawberries in June, in America. Then our wild palates grew, with wild raspberries and blackberries as the season unfolded, after school let out. There were pheasants to chase and to flush on that dirt roadway. Pheasants cackle like chickens when they run in front of your bicycle bumping over the stones and ruts that one must keep both eyes on. Bad boys caught the snapping turtles in the cemetery's pond just across the road from the baseball diamonds; snapping turtles are heavy. It takes two bad boys to carry a turtle in a galvanized steel washtub. Muskrats: there were muskrats in that pond, too. Rumors of mink in the mysterious tracks in creekside mud. A flying squirrel in a cage held tentatively by the Wesolowski boys next to our creek, and there were gray swifts that nested in the clay banks of the stream, and always the raucous kingfishers, and in winter, just the one time, an enormous snowy owl right there, right there, in the fields between our house and the railroad tracks and the roadway that in summer had berries and pheasants and, eventually, red sumac above and milkweed pods that goldfinches pulled apart, on which monarch butterflies light.
To get to the ball diamonds, we walked east from my house the hundred yards or so to the mud and cinder roadway next to the first set of New York Central tracks, and climbed down the embankment to where the stream ran, because in summer, the stream wasn't very deep. Then we walked under the second set of tracks, and emerged in the cemetery, where the pond was always getting illegally fished by the bad boys who caught turtles. But look skyward at the eagle and hawk and falcon and now vulture migration, which happens in both spring and fall? We never knew about that. We never looked up.
Now, this spring, we go to Hamburg, to the baseball diamonds and to the cemetery across the street, just the other side of the railroad tracks, and we join the hawk-watchers, and look up, and see all those specks in the sky, that with binoculars become hawks, so tiny, so high, circling in the thermals.
The hawk-watchers call those circling hawks “kettles,” because they are social migrators swirling together in the air like tea-leaves in kettles. What got us there was social media, then a remembered reference in a journal article about the murdered Neutral nation, the Iroquoians of the Niagara Peninsula, who congregated at what for the last couple of hundred years has been called Grimsby, a bit west, across the Niagara River toward Hamilton, from where we row our races in St Catharines. Grimsby is a place like Hamburg, a place near the lakeshore, a place where the hawks arrive in numbers in the spring migration. The Iroquoians of the Niagara Peninsula held the place in special regard because of the springtime massing of hawks. The Neutral nation is gone, conquered (per the Europeans) or adopted (per the Hodenosaunee) but the hawks still go there. On social media, which crosses borders easy as birds, the bird-watching guy had posted a snapshot of somebody’s radar of migrating hawks heading northward toward Buffalo and north-westward toward the Niagara Peninsula, which led to a Google of the Niagara Peninsula hawk migration, which revealed a website that listed dozens of reporting sites all networked, including Hamburg, precisely Hamburg baseball fields, the Buffalo Ornithological Society’s well-established hawk-migration observation site, right where in childhood we never looked up, except for fly balls, and precisely Grimsby, where the scholars inspect the bones of massacred Neutrals from 400 years ago.
And, fortuitously, this sky-watching comes the week after picking up a most disturbing book at a Toronto used bookshop: H is for Hawk, by the falconer Helen Macdonald.
Hawks and stories
Her book is a report of her working through her insane grief for her just-lost father. It’s a text in which she also re-enacts the 20th century British author T.H. White's training of a goshawk.
Most Americans know White’s work. This British author, in the period between the World Wars, when Britons knew that the old social order of Britain was changing and so reached out somewhat desperately to embrace old cultural expressions, made himself indispensable to his countrymen and countrywomen as the re-presenter of the legendary King Arthur. It’s he who created all the virtues and dramas we now know about Camelot and its characters, because nobody now reads the medieval romances or Malory’s Mort d’Artur, not when we’ve seen the Walt Disney animated version in The Sword in the Stone. If this isn’t too much layering to convey, this book of Mcdonald’s, this grief-work about her own hawk-training, delves deeply into T.H. White because White made not just King Arthur but also himself legendary with his book about his failed attempt at training a beautiful, big, northern falcon called a goshawk.
Today’s author Mcdonald grew up in the 1960s and 1970s with parents who encouraged her in her early interest in the romance of falconry. It’s her deep mastery of both falconry and of the tragic T.H. White’s struggles, as a falconer and as a soul, that carries us through her grief-narrative.
She was a fellow at Cambridge when Dad died, and she undertook the big step, the purchase of a very large bird, a goshawk, to train it up and to challenge herself after years of training little, pretty falcons. By the time she was at Cambridge as a successful adult, she had long known all about falconry: the sequence of training these creatures, of course the antique terminology for all the gloves, tools, bird behaviors, and such, which she shares because people who read books like to learn a little bit about fancy stuff like falconry. Macdonald shares those terms, and writes wonderful prose, and so she gets away with also telling us how she’d read the old and good and the old and lousy books about falconry. This Cambridge academic star had known since early adolescence about what goes into training a hawk. It’s recognizably English territory she travels, but in her persistently precise and electrically charged language that is intimidatingly, minutely particular about blades of grass, individual items of weather, stones, nuances of light on feathers and features of landscapes, it becomes a new country, new because of the language that the rest of us think we speak and write reasonably well gets a new life in her book. English in her pages has been jolted into new, unheard-of agglutinations and juxtapositions that make one breathless in the reading, breathless from racing to keep up, breathless with exasperation that none of the rest of us can write so well as she does, and then sometimes, because it’s too rich, the reader just wants to tell her Stop, you can stop now. Enough.
This book of hers, this nuanced memoir of meditation on death (what hawks do: they kill, trained or not) -- my first instinct is that because it’s so good, I want to force all my daughters to read it.
But why would a father want that, really?
So that they'll feel their own father’s inevitable death as jarringly as this one felt hers?
So that they'll be moved as I am by the language of explicitly experienced grieving?
Upon further consideration, no. No, no, I don't want this book for daughters. This is a book for fathers to read, and reading it to know that children fathered well will have had range and training, loosing from dependence, the training that a hawk gets, on a carefully-braided leather string that cannot be broken, repeat: that cannot be broken.
One reads Macdonald and wants for the children to recognize and cherish the memory of the reins that in falconry are called creances, in gallant mediaeval French that got anglicized around the time our thug ancestors crossed the Channel. Creances. Creances, not leashes. We like the terms of the technology. Reading about hawking gives us something to learn about as we contemplate parenting adult children who will feel something when we die. Poor them if they suffer their father’s death as Macdonald suffered hers.
More interesting words: the little hoods hawk-trainers use are called something else beside hoods in the several languages of Old World hawkers: the term in Arabic for a hawk-hood being burqa. Hawk shits are called mutes. The book is full of hawking stories too: like in the crusade when Spain's King lost his white falcon because it flew over the castle wall to where Saladin was, and he called a halt to the siege so that he could trade to get his bird back, but Saladin said No. But mostly the writer writes about the loner T.H. White and his struggle with Gos, his hawk, before he went on to write all that followed from his Arthur story The Once And Future King, and so create, for the last several generations, an enduring set of stories about a spotlessly admirable royalty. It’s White’s conception of Arthur that gave us The Sword in the Stone, and JFK’s Camelot, and then the grown-up movie lovers Lancelot and Guinevere. And for all of them, T.H. White imagined their companions, their noble hawks.
It's an Old World thing, falconry. Here, when we're not being predators ourselves, we see predators in zoos. We don't try to control them, and there's an aristocratic discordance. At the legendary American singer Josephine Baker’s chateau in France, there are lovely people who demonstrate their control of gorgeous hawks, and it’s fitting, with the castle and the tended gardens just there, just so, but we’re proud American yeomen, and most of us don’t hunt anymore anyway, but we do love the idea, and the sight, of raptors. I've watched bald eagles hunt fat slow fish in the Potomac, and glimpsed a peregrine stooping at a duck, and witnessed the close flight of a lone osprey over steelheading waders on the Cattaraugus, and have many times measured New York State Thruway trips by the number of red-tailed hawks perched on Finger Lakes fence-posts and in bare-branch trees. Albany is usually a five to seven-hawk drive. Falconry? No. It’s not an American thing.
American raptors are wild. Just this spring, we've been to join the hawk- watchers in Hamburg, one of fifty sites that the North American raptor-tracking volunteers report on. The spring flight is almost over, but the northbound hawks of spring will come back this same way come fall but not in these massed flights. Species we don't observe here do pass through: broad-winged, sharp-shinned, golden eagles, goshawks like the one White and Helen Macdonald trained, all headed up to Canada for the summer.
The Cooper’s Hawks stay and hunt on our street, and perch in our pine trees, and eat sparrows and city rats. The little kestrels and merlins stay, but we don’t see those, except by accident. The Red Tails, they’re the highway birds. Hawks here are wild.
So I think that here, hawking would be an affectation. But one can’t put her story down. In Macdonald’s telling, it takes about $1,000 to buy the hawk and weeks of exhausting training for both trainer and hawk, and then one has a hawk to care for, rather like a quite specialized dog with very exacting needs, such as specific places and times for hunting the prey animals -- pheasants, partridges, rabbits -- that we North Americans leave to wild hawks, and to licensed in-season hunters who use guns.
A man writing this book wouldn't have sold many. The woman writing this, writing about the fragile gay White along the way as he worked through his metaphors and suffered his isolation and his 1930s secrecy, eventually lets readers see more of her adventuresome and artistic and brave dad (a well-regarded news photographer from a major British daily paper). Macdonald gets deserved praise for her exquisite sensitivity.
As an American parent of nature-observing children who will one day find their own short or deep vocabulary of grieving, I hope they don't read this appreciation or find this book, not until after, well after. For dads, though, I recommend it strongly, for it is so very good to know how much better you should be, but perhaps, surprisingly, already are, but won’t ever really know, until an adult child like Macdonald finds the specific vocabulary of remembrance. As you are doubtless not a trainer of falcons, that vocabulary will be something quite different.