It was hard for Erskine to get his mind around the Ivory-billed woodpecker and the tantalizing suspicion that he and Floyd had witnessed its presence. Not hard in the sense that he didn’t quite believe it. He actually did believe it. He didn’t buy the chalkboard-filling equations of ornithological dithering. He knew what he and Floyd had heard and he’d thought about it enough to trust both his logical and intuitive conclusions that it was the most reasonable explanation.
So what does a person do with something like that? Certainly, in his prime, Erskine would have attacked it as the happy warrior that he was. Then. But losing his family in the horrible way that he had lost his loved ones had broken his spirit the way a bare-fisted punch can break a jaw. It’s stunning the work people can do when they can unloose the love within them. But when it’s taken from you, the flatness and the emptiness pounds your spirit the way an August afternoon in the Carolina midlands easily pounds the flesh into submission.
Erskine’s curiosity had not been flattened. And he knew where it was driving him on this. He knew and he dreaded it. It was more than the goddamned collectors and their shotguns. The forests of the American south were astonishing in the years after the Civil War, with countless acres of mature longleaf yellow pines 50 yards high and as thick across as a bull. And then a cow started a fire in Chicago, and the big city burned to ground. And then to replace it, the northern woods were leveled to the point where the newspapers warned of a “timber famine.” And that led the timber companies into the deep south, for these majestic trees, the home of the Ivory-bill. It was utter devastation, as special trains with mechanical loaders carrying men with crosscut saws chewed into the canopy everywhere and from every direction.
That kind of stupidity can make even a strong man weep. And Erskine just couldn’t weep any more. To cry now would just kill him. And so he had to approach this problem from its contemporary edges, in the way he could see new trees growing to take the place of those long missing, in the way that he could see God somehow forgiving and then offering to shelter and nurture quiet inner constructions of sugars and hemicellulose and lignin. That gave him hope. So did the tantalizing knowledge that at least one place in the midlands, what is now the Congaree Swamp National Park, had miraculously survived the worst of the timber rampage. It wasn’t a very big place, only about 20,000 acres. But he knew from experience, as a young father afoot in the place, that it was possible to lose track of children in those big trees. Maybe you could lose track of a couple big woodpeckers too.
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