Recompense

Very brief essay from last summer

Recompense

A grown bald eagle flew down the eastern shore of Marshfield Lake that early morning, its whitenesses all the whiter for the sun whose dome had just now shown. The moment was short, to be sure, but tinged with grace.

Compared to many I’d known, however, the grace seemed minor: eagles are well recovered where I live. So, my mind still being the only mind I own, the instant was tinged with melancholy too. One more wonder, I mused, that has lost its brilliance as I’ve proceeded into my spoiled old age. Yesterday’s news.

But then, as if in rebuke of such jaded perspective, a genuine wonder was revealed, and what had I done to deserve it? I was utterly blessed to see the bird that now frightened the bald eagle, whose flight became an evasive series of dips and loops and zigs and zags. The more common eagle’s ivory head and tail, dazzling a moment before, turned strangely dull. What generous fate had brought me this view of the other, whose breathtaking wings moved in a way to which the plain verb flap was pedestrian, even somehow insulting? Imperiously lazy, how could it hold that gilded frame aloft? The very physics of the flight appeared a kind of anti-motion.

A golden eagle in Vermont.

I rapidly surveyed my surroundings. A bright sheen veiled the water with elegance. My paddle spilled long seams of silver. Hills around the lake shone greener. A pair of trout rolled momentarily, leaving a vivid froth.

Amateur and professional seekers alike devote long years nation to spy this rare raptor in the eastern part of the nation, and do so for the most part vainly. Yet here I was, who’d merely launched at dawn to dodge the horrid heat that had afflicted the past five days, under the magnificent bird’s shadow.

As I gently rocked there in a slight lake-effect breeze, for some reason it suddenly struck me that the noblest sort of kindness is the one you may have offered unconsciously. The thought had no obvious instigation. Still –and this is not hyperbole– I believed for the moment that some strange power concluded that I’d now and then shown such kindness.

Or was it rather, I wondered next, equally at random, that the power concluded I’d mourned enough by now? A favorite former student had lately died, and well beforehand, beloved upcountry elders like Earl Bonness, Annie Fitch, and too many others to count in my 81^st year, lay in the village graveyard.

All that crushing goneness: I’d lamented it in company, of course, with others who were like me, no doubt, as full of questions as of tears. But in all honesty, it was my own case I pondered. Why was I still hardy? I had no traitorous joint or tendon. I’d contracted a minor cancer, but, without chemo or invasive surgery, it had been dispatched and not returned, unlike that of my beloved my brother-in-law Chip’s and my old friend Bill’s, younger men for whom I’d always felt my expressions of love were inadequate, never more than after their lives were taken young by that wretched disease.

Nonetheless, I was being recompensed. Again, it made no rational sense, but that’s how I felt after that grand eagle disappeared over a ridge– at which point the rest of the world began to stir. A squirrel scolded me from a branch. A far off truck downshifted. A muggy south wind flicked at listless leaves in the hardwood forest. A dog yipped at great distance. A young man and woman emerged from their tent onshore to clatter smutted cookware. A ragged crowd of ravens gawped.

And yet all this took its time in dragging me from my reverie. To have watched that golden eagle in its lordly drifting out of sight was to hope that in my life– somehow, sometime in my tiny life – I’d shown a few kindnesses. At least I hoped so.