A BIRD, A BOOK, AND A CABIN
I rolled out of bed at 5:30 a.m. at a fishing lodge in Michigan to go see a bird. I’m really not a birder, so that was an ungodly hour for me, and as a Philly-born, Washington DC-area resident, I had no particular affinity for the Midwest, either. Nevertheless, I was with my birder spouse Neil and some birding friends, and we were signed up for a 7:00 a.m. tour with Michigan Audubon, in cooperation with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. After hitting a diner for eggs and coffee, we drove over to Hartwick Pines State Park with hopes of seeing a once-in-a-lifetime life lister. Although I’ve always been more into scenic landscapes than cataloguing all the tiny beautiful things of the world, I go ga-ga for birds with a wow factor: the flaming salmon color of the American Flamingo in the British Virgin Islands, the Fruit Loops appeal of the Keel-billed Toucan and Scarlet Macaw in Costa Rica, the accidentals and rarities that sometimes show up in the Mid-Atlantic, like a rainbow-hued Painted Bunting in Maryland. I’m not so into the LBJs (little brown jobs), but I’m a sucker for the flashy and the rare. And what is the ultimate rare? The endangered. That is how I came to personally plan that improbable birding trip to Grayling, Michigan. The idea in May 2016 was for us to lay eyes on the Kirtland’s Warbler, one of North America’s most endangered birds—before it went extinct. The birds are fussy about geography: In North America, they breed only in the forests near Grayling, a very small range where they return each spring after wintering in the Bahamas. The birds are particular about their trees—they will nest only on the ground in jack pine forests that are 4 to 25 years old and approximately 5 to 20 feet tall, in an area of at least 80 acres. The trees have requirements for reproduction, too—their cones are sealed with a resin that requires heat, usually provided by fire, to open and liberate the seeds. Decades of humans suppressing natural fires reduced the number of trees of the right specifications, thus reducing the warblers’ habitat, until only about 400 birds remained in the world. The Kirtland’s have also suffered from the effects of Brown-headed Cowbirds, a native but pesty species that has been parasitizing nests—laying their own eggs in Kirtland’s nests for Kirtland’s parents to raise, displacing Kirtland’s eggs in the process. State and federal wildlife managers have been trapping cowbirds to protect the Kirtland’s Warbler. At the same time, managers have been planting, cutting, and replanting forests per this migratory songbird’s detailed specifications for almost 40 years, to maintain a suitable habitat to save them. …Which is how we ended up there in the very precisely managed forest on a brisk day, holding up our binoculars in the rising sun.
Twelve years earlier, in 2004, another DC-area resident, the writer Elinor Horwitz— a woman I did not yet know but who would eventually put my and Neil’s photo on her refrigerator along with her grandchildren’s drawings—made the same offbeat trip, with her husband Norman. She was 75 years old on her trip; I was 45 on mine. She hatched her plan while birding in the rain along the Potomac River with Norman, when a fellow birder planted the seed of the Kirtland’s in her mind. “Although birding trips are something Norman and I do,” she wrote in an unpublished manuscript, “driving from Washington, DC to Grayling, Michigan, to see one bird suddenly seemed a lot more harebrained than, say, flying off for two weeks to Kenya or Thailand.” Once in the Upper Peninsula, her Fish & Wildlife Service guide explained that the Kirtland’s numbered only 200 singing males in North America in 1971 and was one of the first species listed as endangered after the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973. Her guide was decked out in “seriously protective rain gear,” Elinor wrote, while she and Norman were in “short rain jackets and sneakers” and “squished into the woods.” The rain, she said, kept the birds inactive, but not the insects—and biting ones, at that. To pass the time in the rain, the guide showed them a jack pine cone. Elinor noted the sandy soil of the forest. They heard a Chipping Sparrow, Hermit Thrush, junco, robin, Cedar Waxwing, and Scarlet Tanager. But, she bemoaned, “They were not the guys we’d come to see.” Twelve years later, we would compare notes on our journeys.
In 2012, during our search for a simple weekend dwelling in Rappahannock County, Virginia—a little-developed bucolic area in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where Neil and I got married in the 90s and spent much time while hiking in Shenandoah National Park—our real estate agents found a rental they thought we’ll like. It was on roughly 40 acres of forested terrain surrounded by the national park on three sides, a one-room cabin at the top of a winding, half-mile driveway, overlooking a pond, a meadow, and the mountains, a quiet getaway far from our normal lives. I couldn’t make it out to see the place on the day the agents were available, so Neil drove there on his own. He liked the look of it: a contemporary 1970s vibe and floor-to-ceiling windows. The walls, ceiling, and floors were all made of tongue-in-groove knotty pine boards with intricate, artistic wood-grain stripes and swirls that emit a golden glow. I was back home working on a journey-through-history memoir about our hiking experiences in and the history of Shenandoah National Park, struggling to finish it and get it published. So when the agents mentioned to Neil that the place was owned by the parents of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz—author of Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, a travel journey through the South that was, at the time, one of my favorite nonfiction books—Neil knew it was the place for us. He signed our first lease for a year. Perhaps, he thought, this hideaway would be good karma for my book; perhaps the vibe of Tony Horwitz would rub off.
On a Sunday afternoon in 1973, Elinor and Norman Horwitz bought that vast chunk of land two hours from their stately Maryland home “in a fit of passion,” as Elinor wrote in a 1974 Washingtonian article, and decided to build a do-it-yourself shelter. It would become the centerpiece of my and Neil’s world during our mid-life years. Neither of them had any experience in carpentry or house building. “What we kept insisting we wanted all along was ‘simply a shelter,’ a place where we could sleep at a slight remove from God’s other country-loving creatures,” she wrote. So they bought a kit to build a 12’ x 12’ square with a covered porch, with no running water or electricity. According to the New Hampshire company’s 1971 brochure,
The underlying philosophy of Shelter-Kit Incorporated is to develop a house…[that]can be completely assembled by two persons – with no prior building skills – in four days.
To prepare, she explained, Tony, a teenager, “put up a monkey swing in the tallest white oak in the area.” At the same time, Norman, a neurosurgeon in DC (who operated on the police officer wounded in Reagan assassination attempt), had to remain on call, so he “convinced the telephone company to put a phone in a weatherproof box on the next oak over. “The place,” she wrote, “was beginning to look like home.” Everything needed for cabin construction was contained in 50 packages with 50 pages of instructions and hand drawings. “How two ordinarily skeptical adults … decided they could build a house over Thanksgiving weekend is a bit difficult to reconstruct,” Elinor wrote. “The idea was that if two people could do the job in four days, then eleven people (husband, wife, three large children, hearty visiting grandparents, four enthusiastic young friends) could surely do it in three and eat turkey besides. We were undeterred by the fact that we found the large construction manual impenetrable.” After setting off “willy-nilly” to dig and pour the concrete footings, she deemed it a “bad weekend.” By Thanksgiving morning, she reported, “it was apparent that we’d been more imprecise than we’d imagined.” On the second day, they assembled and raised the frame “with great triumph,” but on the third day “nothing fit.” Beams were installed upside down, and A-1 brackets were placed where the A-2 brackets should have been. They had to take the frame down, and on Sunday, the holiday weekend was over. The Horwitzes went back home, surrounded by their collection of Persian miniatures and Islamic pottery, a place where I would one day be invited to lunch with Ellie to talk about writing and the cabin while eating quiche on the screened-in porch. Months and years after the Thanksgiving ordeal—before the Horwitzes modernized the cabin the way Neil and I would come to know it, with indoor plumbing and baseboard heat, a small modern kitchen and full bathroom, and moved the old rotary-dial telephone to the bathroom wall—Elinor was able to see the grace in the project. “Part of the charm, we decided, was that—like the Parthenon—it had no two parallel lines. The spring water is delicious. At night we sit by the radiant heat of the stove and reminisce. When you’ve washed in a bucket and snuggled into the 48-inch-wide top bunk, and the oak tree out back begins to ring like crazy—it’s pretty surreal.”
In Michigan, it was sunny and warm. Though I was prepared to wait out the big sighting for hours without complaint, as I know birding sometimes requires, the small crowd of bird nerds didn’t have to crane our necks into “warbler neck” for long before we saw them: the singing males, with their bright lemon-yellow breast and grey body. They flitted around at the tips of their beloved jack pines, pumping their tails, and warbling like they owned the place. I couldn’t exactly say I was disappointed at how easy it was to lay eyes on and hear that rare bird, once we flew all the way to Detroit and drove to where they live, but it did feel a bit anticlimactic. There were no close calls, no moments of dramatic tension. We came, we saw. For Elinor and Norman’s trip, things weren’t quite as easy. They had to stand in the “uninviting woods” in a “downpour” and wait. Elinor’s pants were soaked. She could feel water between her toes. She had a black fly bite on her face. Then, for a moment, the rain stopped, and a singing male “flew into the top of a tall bare scag (sic) in perfect view,” singing “as if it was a beautiful day in the Bahamas.” Then suddenly, she wrote, the sky darkened again, and the rain pounded down. The bird flew off into the dense foliage. She summarized her experience in a literary fashion, expressing how I would come to see our entire relationship at the end of ten years: “Something somehow biblical had just occurred. The heavens opened; the heavens closed. In the brief interval between storms the bird sang.”
Five months after Tony’s untimely death, neither Ellie nor I even noticed an opposite kind of news that occurred: On October 8, 2019: the Kirtland’s Warbler was taken off the endangered species list—not because it died out, but because it had recovered. It is still the rarest warbler in the United States, still living on the edge, with a population of 4,600 that remains dependent on human management. But I found it astonishing that we missed this unexpected twist in the Kirtland’s story. We never got to have a conversation about it. Things had changed with Ellie. After the first couple years of pandemic time, she didn’t always remember who I was when I called, or she seemed to forget who she was talking to. She didn’t return my emails. I finally mailed a note to her senior living home but did not get a response, which surprised me because Tony once described her as someone “who never met a conversation she didn’t want to have.” At the end of 2023, I googled her, and that’s when I discovered the obituary I never noticed in late 2022—Ellie’s, gone at age 93. None of her family had let us know. Perhaps they did not expect that the two “cabin people” from long ago would have missed her. I never got to tell her that we are still at the cabin more than a decade later, that our lives have become entwined with it like the twisted honeysuckle vines called snake canes she highlighted in her book on Appalachian folk craft—not to mention the effect of the cabin on thousands of strangers who have stayed there as members of the hiking club. The club cabin has become a great equalizer—a place where any person of modest means can get away from the stress of regular life, watch the birds in the treetops, and feel, for a few days at least, like the weekend refuge in the mountain woods is their own. I didn’t get to tell her, as I turned 50 and beyond, how lovely it has been for me to see myself so keenly in an older person. She was similar to my mother in many ways—interested in the arts and literature and in what is happening in the nation and the world and in her own city—but she was also so unlike anyone over 80 I’ve ever known, with a history of eagerness and fearlessness to engage in manual labor, a willingness to take risks, an interest in being rugged and even uncomfortable for fun. I don’t get to tell her we’re still planning to visit the Kirtland’s wintering grounds in Eleuthera, a tiny island in the Bahamas, where she’d appreciate the challenge we’ll face finding them in their preferred habitat of goat farms, burned areas, and lands that have been bulldozed and abandoned. But she has been with me lately. In 2024, certain decisions within the club, combined with new rules from the county where the cabin is located, put the cabin’s continued operation at risk, like a treasured bird on the brink of extinction. I did a lot of emailing and calling and planning and strategizing, finally identifying the allies I needed to try to rescue it. That’s when I started hearing Ellie’s calming voice in my mind: encouraging, grateful, pleased. Twice, I drove the three-hour roundtrip from home in the evening dark to provide testimony at county meetings, standing at a microphone at the front of the room under harsh white lights before the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors with my stomach in knots, filmed for YouTube, reported in the paper. I’d never been in the position of fighting to fulfil the wishes of anyone I’d known after their death, never experienced the warm feeling that radiated through me like syrup as I did it. To have prevailed in saving the cabin—with the wooden trunk that Tony painted blue and red when he was a kid still inside it, and Ellie’s 1950s ceramic bowls, her lamps, her woven baskets and snake canes—to have ensured her legacy in this little patch of forest and meadow, for the future, for the people, for the birds, and for us—the only people left at the cabin who remember this family: well, it felt a lot like love.
Sue Eisenfeld’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Forward, National Parks Traveler, and nearly all the publications and literary journals in the Washington DC area, including The Washington Post, Washingtonian, Potomac Review, Delmarva Review, Little Patuxent Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Full Bleed, After the Art, and, now, Gargoyle. Her essays have been listed six times among the Notable Essays of the Year in The Best American Essays. She is a faculty lecturer with the Johns Hopkins University M.A. in Science Writing Program. www.sueeisenfeld.com