An achingly luminous Rorschach of greens and blue bespattered with puffy white cumulus clouds, the riverscape before me looked smooth as glass and lush and timeless, at once still and moving, silent and noisy. A palm warbler sang somewhere close to a light green tamarack on the far bank, a Lincoln’s sparrow near the base of a dark green spruce five yards or so to my left, the electric spark-crackle of dragonfly wings frissoned like staccato static every few seconds.
We lowered our faces closer to the water to watch damselflies mating and dipping their abdomens into the river, depositing their eggs just below the surface, leaving wisps of gentle turbulence among the water lilies. We heard a large fish jump and splash loudly just beyond the stern of our canoe.
Suddenly, literally out of the blue, I heard a deafening pneumatic sound as my wife disappeared in a shadow, and I remembered experiencing a sonic boom while sitting at my computer two years ago, a frightening, inexplicable blast of noise that had me out of my chair and out the door in seconds, the better to be outside if the house collapsed. That thought just beginning to take shape in my mind, not even half-formed, I felt a blast of air that tousled my hair and knocked the sunglasses off my nose.
During the sixtieth of a second or so my wife disappeared in the shadow I hunched my shoulders and tightened every muscle, expecting an out of control glider plane or a dislodged piece of aircraft fuselage to kill us both on the spot. Then my wife reappeared in sunlight, her mouth wide open, her eyebrows on the verge of somersaulting over her forehead,
“It’s an eagle; it tried to take that fish that just jumped!”
I spun my head around and saw a huge, mature bald eagle, probably a female, low over the water, and a delicate trace of faint lines on the smooth surface of river it had just raked with its talons. It banked to the left and then up about twenty feet, circled us twice and landed near the top of a large white pine on the far bank, only to dive a moment later and land near the edge of the near bank.
We paddled into the middle of the Osgood and then slowly made our way upstream to where the eagle had landed, a hundred, maybe a hundred-fifty feet away, just beyond a small peninsula of blossoming bog laurel.
We couldn’t find the eagle, which hadn’t flown since we saw it land and in all probability hadn’t marched stealthily into the dense understory of alder and laurel and wild sprinklings of spruce and pine and tamarack saplings. It simply disappeared.
I put my sunglasses, safely dangling from their neck strap, back up on my nose, thought briefly about the meaning of life and, swiping the hair off of my forehead, heard my lips click in an enormous smile as I spotted my wife, looking existentially bemused, smiling lovingly at anchor with me.
That perches in the soul…
John Thaxton writes the “Birdwatch” column for Adirondack Explorer