Years ago, I left home one morning without the book I’d asked my students to prepare for that day’s class discussion. Happily, my research assistant was in that day, so I gave her a dollar and sent her down Green Street to get me a copy — the cheapest used copy she could find, please, as I planned to use it once and then throw it onto a high shelf. She came back with a badly abused volume, its cover scuffed and torn, its pages dogeared and underlined.
The underlining fascinated me. Literary historians learn to look closely at things like that, and I had made a small career out of using just that sort of evidence to understand the way people read five or six centuries ago. But here was a nut I couldn’t crack. The cheap pages of my latest acquisition offered what looked like plenty of clues, but I just couldn’t figure out what principles had guided my underliner. So I turned it over to my RA. Who, naturally, came up with the answer in a jiffy. It wasn’t the moving passages, or the problematic passages, or the passages that s/he would use in a term paper that our reader had signaled. No, not at all.
It was the hard words.
I should have learned not to overthink these things, but it’s irresistible when the fatum of a pre-owned libellus drops it into my hands. A couple of months ago I spent another of my dollars to pick up a pretty copy of Ralph Hoffmann‘s New England and Eastern New York, one of the most important publications in the history of North American birding. The cover’s a bit dinged, but I was delighted to find the book block tight and bright, every inspired word clean and readable.
And I was a little disappointed, too. You’d think that in the 110 years between the book’s being printed and my snatching it up from the junk table, someone, someone would have come up with something to write in the margins. There are a few penciled check marks, of the sort a desultory lister might enter once in a while. And there is a single solitary verbal annotation:
Too much to hope that anyone would recognize the handwriting, of course, which strikes me — way outside my paleographic comfort zone, admittedly — as the stereotypical school hand of a woman born in the first third of the twentieth century (note the failure to distinguish u and n and the classic d, above the line and with a big loop in terminal position).
But still, doesn’t that single, neatly anonymous entry — nothing more than a place and a date — preserve all the excitement of a bright spring morning 85 years ago, when among the migrant sparrows gathered in the yard there was a buzzy-voiced outlander singing from beneath a badger-skin cap? Even the vagueness of the location, so maddening at first, is suddenly touching when you consider the geographic scale in which this birder must have been working: Country Club Road (how vastly many must there be in New England, New York, and New Jersey?) was quite enough in an era when leaving town by train or auto still constituted a journey.
I know just how she felt. I have always loved White-crowned Sparrows, and among the many sightings of this species I can still recall with clarity and precision was one at the Beemer Road silo of an early May morning. Dave and I were scouting for a big day, and as we pulled up to listen for Vesper Sparrows (they used to breed on the hillside there, lo these many ago), we heard instead the slow whistles and buzzes of White-crowns, the
pure sweet notes that suggest the Meadowlark’s whistle or a Vesper Sparrow singing louder than usual, and continu[ing] with notes that recall the Black-throated Green Warbler.
Never will I forget the sight of the puffy-crowned sparrows moving along the fence while a Solitary Sandpiper fed on the pond beneath them; that is what I think of when I think of Sussex County, and I hope that something similar is what the earlier owner of my copy of Hoffmann thought of whenever she heard that buzzy whistle.
