In Praise of the Lowly Hammock

September unspools idyllic days one after the other. Quiet is pervasive by day and night. In the wee small hours barred owls and coyotes converse from one or another patch of the broad neighbourhood. More than five miles stretch between the cabin and the stretch of blacktop descending from the top of Kelly’s Mountain to the big bend at New Harris—too short a distance to entirely squelch the Jakes brakes of 18 and 22-wheelers. But by 4 a.m. there are interludes happily bereft of any machine-made noise at all.

September is harvest time. Jan is once again a canner: blueberry jam, green tomato chow, Astrachan-and-mint salad dressing. Fisherman pal Stuart delivers a lode of fresh mackerel. We have a deal: he does the catching and filleting, I do the smoking. We divide the proceeds which I claim do not take a back seat even to the handiwork of wunderkind fish-smoker Willie Krauss.

One of the cabin’s accoutrements is a hammock supplied some years ago by the folks at Lee Valley Tools.  Being more inventive and sensible than old fogeys, children—great-nieces and great nephews—find all manner of ways to delight in it but when the niblings are not here the hammock goes largely ignored, these days drawing little more than early fallen leaves. Yesterday I decided the hammock is a wasted resource. With afgan, pillow, binocular and good book in hand I decided to give it a go. Revelation ensued.

The hammock stretches between two fine specimens in a little stand of birches above the shop; maples and aspens, firs and spruces complement the birches. Give an inattentive fellow an attractive leafy canopy, blue sky, a few scudding clouds and he is thereby easily distracted from reading. Soon the book is abandoned altogether: I suddenly spot one, then a second, then ten songbirds foraging in the canopy. They are mostly silent and would likely have gone undetected had I not been stretched out in a hammock.

Downy woodpecker, chickadees, juncos, nuthatches make themselves known. At the sight of a black-and-white warbler I try a little ‘pishing’—the frivolous, frequently futile noise birders make to draw birds. Most warblers ignore such foolishness but the black-and-white is an exception. Within seconds I am nose-to-beak with a curious female, then a wave of warblers emerges in the canopy—yellow, blackburnian, black-throated green, magnolia, myrtle, more black-and-white. Some folks need a lottery win to truly feel their good fortune. Give me a mixed gang of warblers dropping in on their way to Central America and I am deluded into thinking I’ve struck gold.

Once upon a long-ago time I was a hard-core ‘Big Day’ practitioner: I would spend most of a 24-hour period in May or September rushing about with a couple of similarly demented pals trying to find and identify as many species of birds as we could squeeze into a binocular field. We wouldn’t be satisfied if we didn’t have a hundred species by lunch time. Because the Big Day is labour-intensive, some folks prefer the alternative of the ‘Big Sit’—park a comfortable folding chair in some advantageous location, picnic basket and cooler at one’s side, and count the birds as they fly past.

As I progress ever deeper into the dark forest of senescence I’ve now decided that Big Days and Big Sits are as nothing compared to the joys of the Big Snooze: stretch out in a comfy hammock and see how many birds you can count between naps. You don’t even have to crane your neck.