Chapter 7
Celeste set her alarm thirty minutes early, but a mishap with the French press and a fascinating story on the radio caused a short delay. When she swung into the parking lot at 7:05, John was waiting for her at the trailhead, leaning against a boulder with his head in a book.
He wore cargo pants and a light blue T-shirt that clung to his chest and shoulders, and was pulled even tighter by the brown straps of his backpack. A worn baseball hat shaded his face as his fingers rubbed his beard.
Celeste allowed herself one long exhale to enjoy the view. No harm in looking.
After a count of five, she exited the car and slung her backpack over her shoulder, warmed by the buzz in her sternum that came with new things.
Since seeing that first bird with John’s help, the world around her had been altered. Even though her competitive side wanted to learn each name and acquire her own expertise, she gave herself a few days to follow John’s advice, and she simply saw birds—outside her kitchen window, bobbing on a leaf of the sunflower growing on her porch, or at the top of an electric pole, scanning the ground below.
Now some sort of hawk was drawing a giant circle in the blue expanse of sky above. John didn’t look up until she was almost upon him, and he greeted her with his warm, quiet smile.
He nodded. “Morning.”
She clapped. “Let’s do this!”
A flurry of wings erupted from a bush behind her.
“Sorry.” Celeste adjusted the brim of her ball cap, blushing. “Just excited.” She kept her voice low. “Good morning. I’m ready to see some birds, partner. I have some questions, though.”
John motioned for her to continue with a nod and the hint of a smile.
“I was rereading the rules last night, and I don’t get how we actually prove to anybody what we saw. Like, we’re just keeping a list, and then we turn it in. What’s to stop us from just making it all up?”
John pushed up from the boulder. “It’s an honor system. We all keep our own records.”
Oh, these birders were adorable. “An honor system? For the whole contest?”
“That’s generally how birding works. If we were to claim to see something totally out of the ordinary for this region or time of year, like a pileated woodpecker, someone would challenge us on it.” He laughed lightly. “That’s not a bird we would see, of course.”
“Obviously.” Celeste nodded seriously.
“But if we did see, say, a northern goshawk or another bird that wouldn’t typically be seen here but that wouldn’t be too out of range, we’d try to get a photo or a recording of the sound or something, as proof.”
“That’s another thing,” she said. “The sound thing. The rules said it counts if we even hear the bird but don’t see it. How is that even bird-watching?”
“Think of it as the same as seeing a bird, just with attention to different details. Sorting out the specifics of a call is actually pretty similar to parsing out a visual identification.”
As if on cue, a sharp trill pierced the air, followed by a series of looping notes. It sounded like every birdcall ever. Celeste tipped her head up toward the sound. “So you can just hear that and know what it is?”
“To be honest, it’s sort of a specialty of mine. Just a result of spending too much time listening.”
Celeste watched him rub the back of his neck, his eyes fixed on the ground. She hadn’t ever thought that there might be people who specialized in identifying birdcalls, but it seemed to suit John. “How does that become a specialty for someone?”
He didn’t answer right away, so she waited. She knew from her time in the classroom that sometimes when someone was quiet, it wasn’t because they had nothing to say, just that they needed time to say it. Her strategy was rewarded when John’s hazel eyes finally returned to her.
“My mom made us all take piano as kids. I only lasted about four years, but it was enough to learn to read music, to hear one line from another. That’s how it works for me with birds, picking out lines of song and almost seeing them on a page. Visualizing them like that as a kid helped me tell them apart, and then it was just way too many hours listening to recognize one from another.” His gaze flitted to a tree. “I grew up in Santa Rita, a small town about an hour south of here.”
Celeste had been there a few times on day trips with a young Morgan. The one-hour drive saw the landscape change from the gray-greens of the desert to golden grasslands dotted with short, wind-worn trees. “It’s beautiful down there.”
John’s mouth curved up. “Great birds, too. And not much else, so I had a lot of time to listen.” Behind Celeste, another bird pew-pewed like a laser gun, and John’s smile went higher, rounding his cheeks. “Once when I was birding with Linda, the woman you met the other day, she told me that she loved learning how to pick out songs and calls because it helped her understand the story that was going on around her.” As he spoke, John looked from tree to tree, like he was building the story of the air around them. “Who was hungry, who was territorial, who spotted a predator.”
When his eyes swept back to Celeste, his lips closed quickly as he swallowed.
“That’s beautiful.” She was suddenly hungry for details, not just about what the birds were saying but about his piano lessons and everything in between. Details of the life of a man who’d learned to pull stories out of the air. “So we could just sit here and let you listen and you’d be able to add, what, five birds to our list right off the bat?”
“Maybe a few more. But we’ll work up to that.”
He reached into his pack and pulled out a pair of binoculars, passing them over to Celeste. The weight of them was more than she expected, her arm dipping as she measured the feel of the object in her hand. “This feels like a big moment. Am I officially a birder now?”
Celeste looked from the binoculars back at John to find his eyes trained not on the sky, but on her. “I think you were already one,” he said. “Just waiting to be discovered. I saw the way you were looking at the bird the other day. You’re a natural.”
“A natural at not knowing anything about birds?”
He shook his head, closing up his backpack. “That all comes with time. But it’s nothing without the desire to do it.”
She shifted the weight of the binoculars from hand to hand, the cold metal warming in her palms. “There’s something about realizing that the birds have been here all along, and all I have to do is learn how to pay attention. It’s sort of like reading, I think, looking for those little gems in the text, the words and phrases that call out to you, weaving together the story.”
John had been turning away as she spoke, but he paused, his eyes settling on her for a moment, setting off a little storm in her chest. “That’s right.”
His look was as warm as the sunshine on her back, and almost as intense. She was more accustomed to people’s eyes glazing over when she started talking about stories, not… this. Not understanding. She didn’t know where to put the feeling it gave her.
“Anyway.” She cleared her throat. Surely a bird would fly by any second. “Thanks for that help the other day, seeing that bird. I don’t expect you to do that all the time. I know there’s a contest afoot.”
“Actually,” John said, “that sort of goes along with how I was thinking we could do this. I want you to get more out of this than just making a list. And the other day I just—” He paused, sliding his tongue along his bottom lip as his brow furrowed. “I liked doing that, slowing down and looking at the bird. I think that’s maybe the kind of guiding I would want to do. For beginners. And maybe if you were up for it, you could… be my first?”
Celeste straightened and smiled at John, who acted as if he was asking for a favor rather than offering one. “I would love that. I could be your practice run.”
“We’d still have to speed things up more than I’d like, since we do have to make this list for the contest. Ideally we’d go out a few times and just get to know everything around us before we even worried about making an ID, and that’s not going to work in this circumstance. But we can do our best.”
“Okay.” She nodded eagerly. “That sounds really good. If you don’t think it’ll mess up the contest stuff for you. I could just tag along so we’re obeying the team rule and you could see all the birds. I’ll even write them down for you.”
“Not a chance. We’ll do it together. We have almost five more weeks, so I don’t think starting a little slow will hurt us. We can fit in a lot of birding in that time, if you’re up for it.”
Celeste wiggled her eyebrows, grinning. “You bet I am. And who knows, maybe by the end, you’ll be tagging along with me.”
Birding was awesome.
The trail they’d followed wound through the low desert before climbing gradually through a canyon walled in by soaring granite. Celeste loved the muted, dangerous landscape of her adopted home, rich with every hue of brown and green, from the snaking bark of the palo verde trees to the waxy leaves of the jojoba bush.
And all around stood towering saguaros, arms always reaching, spines shining white in the sun.
With John’s help, she was adding to their count, scribbling the name of each bird excitedly into her messy spiral-bound notebook on the pages between a grocery list from six months before and the draft of a poem she was working on.
Each time they started slowly, watching the bird and asking simple questions: What is its size and shape? Is it on the ground, in a bush, in a tree? On the top of the tree, against the sky, or among the sparse desert leaves? Those answers led to more questions: How is it behaving? What might it eat? Is it alone, or in a group?
Each bird was its own meditation, and only once all the initial questions had been covered did they look at color and start to determine an identification. Celeste figured John knew them all, but he was patient as they went step by step, until finally he’d help her thumb through his worn bird guide to land on her best guess.
At one stop, she’d seen four birds without even shifting her feet, just letting her eyes drift from plant to plant. John always kept his voice low, his movements slow and deliberate, explaining how she should look to specific parts of each bird to identify it.
“So for this one, you’re going to look at the cap, the belly, and the rump.” He’d motioned with his chin toward a small gray bird flitting among the yellow flowers of a creosote. Celeste had choked back a giggle as he sighed, shaking his head. “Are you going to laugh every time I say ‘rump’?”
“I can’t help it, it’s such a funny word.” She’d taken a steadying breath then, enjoying the curve of John’s cheek as he smiled at her. “But I do observe the rump on this bird, and given its coloring and size, I’m going to say it’s a…” She’d thumbed through the first pages of her new book, which covered the most common birds of the area, until she landed on the right page. “A black-tailed gnatcatcher?”
When he’d nodded, looking actually proud of her, that thing in her stomach had twisted again, another sign that birding with John was more complicated than she’d expected. They’d only covered a couple of miles, but the birds weren’t the only thing catching Celeste’s attention on the trail. When John spotted a bird, it was… an experience. His body stilled, nothing moving but the muscles of his neck as he followed the animal’s movement. Sometimes he’d draw the binoculars up wordlessly, training them just where he wanted as he slowly used one finger to adjust the focus with a quiet competency that actually made her blush.
She’d taken to doodling all over their bird list in an effort to keep her eyes to herself.
The morning went on like that. Walking, stopping, watching. John was patient but enthusiastic when appropriate, and he had a gift for encouraging Celeste to sort out which bird she was seeing without doing the work for her. In between bird spottings, the two rarely talked, and Celeste found herself appreciating the way John didn’t need to fill a silence.
They were at a whopping twenty-seven species spotted that morning alone. Celeste hadn’t had a clue as to how many different birds coexisted here until John showed her the distinct differences between a gnatcatcher and a verdin, or a canyon towhee and a curve-billed thrasher.
The trail climbed slowly through the canyon until John and Celeste were directly across from Seven Falls, the trail’s namesake. After heavy rains, or when snow was melting off the mountains, a stream ran down the mountainside, gathering in one pool after another. Narrow falls dripped from pool to pool, untold years of erosion creating gathering places for the water out of the smooth gray rocks, each surrounded by tall green reeds and rushes.
A group of hikers sat snacking and lounging in the sun at the base of the lower pond, so Celeste scrambled up some rocks to the pool above. The water reflected the sky in all its glory, bright blue with little wisps of clouds that would disappear in the coming weeks as the spring gave way to summer and its baking heat.
She was already unlacing her hiking boots as John appeared beside her.
“I can’t resist,” she said, looking up at him. “You coming?”
He shook his head but smiled.
“Suit yourself.” She shrugged, both disappointed and relieved that she wouldn’t see him in wet clothes. His constant adjustment of his binoculars was about as much as she could take.
Celeste dropped her pack and peeled off her socks, wiggling her toes in the fresh air. If she’d been alone, she’d have stripped to her underwear and bra before getting in, but that seemed over the line on a birding trip, so she opted to stay in her shorts and tank top, knowing they’d dry easily on their way back down the trail.
A toe dipped into the pool told her the water was so cold that a step-by-step submersion was impossible. She glanced back at John, sitting in the sun and opening a granola bar, and almost opted to join him. She could stay dry and have a snack.
But then she remembered the Post-it that had caught her eye that morning. It had been bright pink, with four words scrawled in pen:
When in doubt, jump.
She dove in.