As in:
It helped, in the end, that Jerry Kayro decided he would be a good sport about the whole thing. He was smart enough to realize that the embarrassing meeting in Woods Hole was not something he could disown or run away from. And so he finally decided that he would stow his dignity in a smaller suitcase and roll with it. In walking it back in his mind he understood that the reason Erskine sought him out was that he really had been so hard on the earlier claims of Ivory bill sightings and, thus, without ever intentionally setting out to do so, had nonetheless made himself the supreme court of American woodpecker identification.
There was not much fun in being dragged from his perch in New England to Columbia, South Carolina, in the middle of summer for a press conference when a commute to Cornell or even to an air-conditioned room at the Atlanta airport would have done just fine. But, on the other had, he had been all over the world looking for birds by now and no one could make such journeys without having to suspend all sorts of comforts and expectations. Eskimos had taught him that.
Beneath the shade of a Magnolia outside the president’s office at the University of South Carolina, there were more microphones than there was space for them on the podium. Kayro said what he needed to say, was courteous and complimentary toward Erskine and Silent Floyd, and even opined that he hoped more land near the Congaree National Park would be acquired for habitat.
As the print reporters gathered around him, the t.v. cameras gathered around Floyd’s granddaughter, Nita, and her little brother Ned. Nita and Ned were decked out in almost matching Ivory-bill woodpecker costumes, only with Ned’s bearing the red crest and Nita’s bearing the black. It was cute. It was hilarious. It was very photogenic. When Kayro was done answering questions, Silent Floyd asked him if he wouldn’t mine posing with his grandkids.
“I’d really love that,” he said.
“Do I look real to you?” Nita asked him.
“Yes, and I’m really sure you’re an Ivory bill,” he replied, with mock scholarship. “Not a magpie or something like that.”
Erskine took this in with more than lingering satisfaction. He had an unhurried awareness that he would never experience anything like this again, and a glow of gratitude that it had come to him in some part because of his recovery from grief and his persistent curiosity.
“Are we still doing the Edisto Sunday?” Floyd asked him as the crowd began to thin.
“If I can find my binoculars,” he replied.
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