Salem by Jeff Burt

The camper shell exploded as it hit the highway in front of me. A spectacular dismantling of the shell, followed by pots and pans, utensils bounding as if they had legs, cereal boxes opening on impact, cups, clothes, and a mattress that fell on one corner and then seemed to walk toward my car before bowing. I could not swerve; there were too many objects flying around on a broad path. I chose to break in the right lane and come to a complete halt.

The driver turned around his truck and settled it on the opposite side. I say settled because it still reverberated and bounced as if gelatinous.

“Not the first time,” the old man yelled, smiling. “It all picks back up. The sides stay as one piece, you know, the ceiling roof, too. Designed that way.”

He actually seemed jovial about the mishap.

I moved my car off the highway and set my flashers on. We were on a highway in Wisconsin heading to Salem near Fond du Lac.

I walked over, shook his hand, and told him his tailgate was hanging by a thread of a screw, and both taillight assemblies had been yanked from the vehicle. The truck was leaking oil in a stream, which suggested a rude puncture of the oil pan.

“You won’t be driving this,” I said.

He looked where I looked. “Guess not.”

“I can give you a lift into Salem if you’d like.”

“I would,” he said. “I’m Clint, a birder,” he said loudly, shaking my hand. “Supposed to be in a caravan of campers heading up for bird tallies and identification. Can’t miss it. One of the most important events of the year. They need me. I am the one who brings the fringe birders back to reality with what they think they saw. I’m necessary.”

I nodded. I had no idea what he was talking about.

He set to quickly dragging items over to the truck, and I assisted. In ten minutes, we had all of the major pieces and, except for broken glass and cereal and oat flakes over the highway, had cleared the items. The strewn carnage had more items that I would call survival stores than emergency food tins with ten-year expirations, dried eggs and milk, dehydrated soups, and two industrially sealed metal containers that did not burst open. Several cars had slowed and picked their way through the trash as if it were a minefield, and one semi had blown through as if the driver had seen nothing he couldn’t smash.

When he climbed in my car, I noticed he had a hat that I first thought was one of those fisherman’s hats with twenty or thirty flies hooked into the band, but the lures were actually tiny feathers. Odd, but then I thought bird watching odd. He reminded me of an older hippie, perhaps a hippie farmer, long hair tucked behind ears, a natural smell of half gas fumes and half outside air, snack nuts and bars poking out of two pockets.

“How many birders go to Salem for the tally?”

“About fifty. We cover a large amount of ground. We’ve just been to the Horicon Marsh, which mostly has tallies of a few species. But for some reason, Salem has many species, some quite rare, with only a few tally marks. Stimulating.”

“Do you travel with these birders often?”

“Six or seven times a year. It can get pretty competitive. We’re not Audubon Society. Not that organized or clever. We do have a habit of being rather hard on those who divine a species that could not possibly exist in Salem. We call them witches, birders who make up a bird sighting. Concoction, we call it, like a witch makes. Last year, one woman said she saw a Tundra Crane, if you can believe that, which has been spotted a few times before, but not after the type of winter we have had. Could not happen. She made a concoction. Birders are all about believability, you know. Not science that says a bird can’t be in Salem, but that it shouldn’t be, and you have to go to great lengths to prove it flies in Salem.”

“So, do you kick the witches out?”

“No,” Clint smiled. “We dunk them, in a manner of speaking. A small-town trial, a court. A court is just a reflection of a town’s attitude toward skepticism and truth. We are the judges. We give the verdict.”

“You have a witch in your caravan?”

The old man laughed. “No, no. We have a scientist in our midst this time. A scientist. Most bird watchers go by biologist, but not this one. All the rigors of science and none of the wonder. She had cheated before, as I said, and her partner once reported a cattle egret, a whisper of white on the back of a cow in a blurry analog picture. Faked data, that’s what we called it. A frog that lives in boiling water. The hair of the dog. A witch.”

“Fifty people is pretty impressive. Salem’s a small town. Must fill up the motels.”

“It does, and part of Fond du Lac. But we used to have seventy-five, eighty. Fewer people every year. It’s an aging population, bird counters. Some folks now just do it for hookups. Lonely widows and widowers, if you get my drift.”

“Have you ever spotted a rare bird?”

“Yep. A Trumpeter Swan. And a Whimbrel. Neither should have been there. The Trumpeter—I waited twenty hours to spy that bird for a few minutes but got the photo to prove it. Got frostbite. Figured the swan had its geography screwed up, a bang on its head, maybe a missed turn.”

“I must be a swan then. Missed many a turn. Get tunnel vision on the highway,” I said.

“Some birds do that,” Clint snickered with wild hand gestures. “Just get going, higgledy-piggledy, and before they know it, they’ve lost the contours of the fields, the plots of the land. Off to nowhere. That’s me. That Whimbrel, though. That was a find.”

We drove the few miles to Salem to a tire shop that also did repairs. Clint adjusted his hat about fifty times in the five-minute conversation. The tow truck driver, decked out in wet mud up to his knees, had no room for Clint, so I offered to take Clint back. He didn’t seem too happy with that and became fussy and fidgety.

“You okay?” I asked. “You seem to be breathing hard.”

Clint grunted. “Just fine. Don’t want to seem like a freeloader, that’s all.”

“Just helping you out as the need arose. I thought we were companions on the road, just in different vehicles.”

“Pleasant to think so unless your truck is the one that broke down.”

I stopped conversing and let him wallow in his mire. He kept taking in a breath, holding it, then releasing it as if in meditation or anxiety control. Then, he started holding his breath for long periods. I mentioned it, thinking he might have an injury.

“I’m just practicing,” Clint replied curtly, “not in trouble and not meditating. Sometimes, especially when spotting and taking a photo, you have to hold your breath for up to a minute. Breathing out has to be controlled. Breath, you know, is moist and wants to come out with a rush. But you have to release it slowly so that it’s cool and the moisture remains in your mouth. That’s how you photograph a Whimbrel and, by God, a Trumpeter Swan.”

“I’ve got a pair of hummingbirds,” I said, “that comes by my bedroom window every morning and every evening, hovering under the yellow bells of the Chinese lantern and then up against the red bottlebrush. The bottlebrush is not in bloom, but they come and check every morning and every evening to make sure. Maybe they can measure how the buds are doing in some secret way we cannot, perhaps by smell. I’ve coached many teams. I like to think that’s been my job, checking in to sense when people are about ready to bloom and encouraging them along the way. I sometimes think I’m more of a hummingbird.”

“Quaint. Got nothing to do with birding. You’ve got a run-of-the-mill observation there. Birding is about the tally, the strokes with the slash through them, and then that one, the single stroke, the lonely item, meaning you’ve hit paydirt, the stranger, the uncompanioned, the loner. That’s birding.”

I thought how the birder sitting next to me resembled his own explanation of birding, those little feathers fluttering in the internal breeze of the moving vehicle.

He invited me to the Dunk and Drunk, the meeting when the birders would adjudicate a rare finding and judge the evidence, as well as the person with the evidence. Then, as in Salem, Massachusetts, they would dunk the person near a Salem pond and get drunk. It was supposed to be fun. It turned out that the witches, over the last fifteen years of the celebration, had not all been women. Some were men. I checked the registry of witches but could not find a single instance in which men were dunked, only women, except for two entries marked “Anonymous.” A few had their birder rights taken away. One man had suffered a head injury during a judicial brawl before the dunking and had been hospitalized.

I watched Clint circle the crowd, renewing acquaintances, describing the crash of his camper in words that lit the night more than the campfire. He brought laughter at every stop, a hearty, exaggerated handshake that shook the other’s hand like a water pump.

I intentionally sidled each time he moved to hear what he said. He was ex-military; his wife had died of injuries from a fall while interceding in a neighbor’s domestic violence incident. His wife had fallen over the rail of a deck, hit her spine on a concrete abutment, and dashed her head on a six-by-six redwood support. The injuries didn’t kill her, he’d say, but the recovery did.

I heard around the fire that this group also celebrated the punishing of witches in a few other towns, Horicon, where the great Horicon Marsh sprawled its acres of cattails; Quincy, Illinois, the dunes of Indiana; and a winter retreat along the Rio Grande in Texas.

Clint drew back to me. “Great people. Great. Even the ones on trial are good people, just cheating to get recognition.” He smiled. The campfire made his face glow and his eyes radiant. He looked years younger, even healthy.

I asked, “Why do you have these tribunals. Seems like a horrible way to administer justice. The witches, as you call them, already know they’ve been caught by the panel. Why put them through this?”

Clint snickered. “You see the fun here? You can feel it, like electricity, running up your arms and shaking your torso, giving you an ecstatic buzz in your head. But it’s not for us. It’s for the birds. The lonely birds. Why make up a sighting? Just to say you found a lonely bird. What honor is there in that? You see, there’s only a few couples here. That number dwindles every year. What’s left is a bunch of old, pardon the expression, coots. You see? But it’s more than that. This new generation—they’ve taken on the occult, computer doctoring of photos, evidence, intentionally blurred photos that could be any number of birds, geolocations where a bird would never be found alive or dead in. That’s witchcraft, you see. In our world, that’s like a felony. People get punished for a felony in some way or another. This just happens to be our style. Most of us don’t trust anymore. We are fearful of Audubon birders, just like people fear politicians or vaccines. We have learned to trust in the margins of mistrust. Did you know that half of Christian and Jewish and Muslim businessmen cheat on their taxes? Polls cheat, statisticians cheat on their data, and scientists even rig their results to get published. Birders, too. But politicians don’t pay the price; statisticians, pollsters, scientists, teachers, the military, and the CIA. They keep their jobs and interest. We birders, we said the hell with that. We punish you if you lie, if you break the trust. Birds are sacred, holy, and we don’t want half-truthers around.”

Two women and one man were led to the pallet that stood by the pond. The women were drunk, and the man was serious and downcast. Tears fell from his jaw on each side of his mouth.

“Why these three?”

“They made up sightings. They are all of the younger group. They have jobs, the two women have husbands back home. Interlopers. The man there, he’s from Cyprus, and the woman on the left, she’s originally from Macedonia. They talk birds, but they have empty tallies, all stroked in perfect alignment, with a perfect slash every fifth. Nothing hurried, perfect penmanship. That’s how we know. Let it go on, and birding has lost control.”

“And the dunking? Literally Puritanical.”

“That’s why. It’s purifying. We don’t do it to test them. It’s not really a dunking. Years ago, someone made a catapult-like thing with a bucket. We fill it with water, and the bucket tips and the head birder douse their heads. Some laugh. Those that do, stay with the group. You watch, those two women, they’ll have a good laugh, they’ll mend their ways, they will go on to the next weekend watch in Oshkosh or Lake Winnebago. But that man, he’ll hate it. He’s the first man to be willing to be dunked. All the others fled. He’ll feel embarrassed and picked on. He’ll leave and never be seen again. Those are the types that cheat again and again. They never get purified. We won’t ask him to leave, but he’ll leave the group.”

The head birder, a thin, almost emaciated older man with enormous square glasses, fastened the first woman into a chair, barely twisting a couple of ropes around her arms, and without saying a word, while the woman smiled, moved to the rear lever, raised it, and the bucket dropped the water over her head. The dunk lasted just a second, and he pulled the rear lever down. The woman arose. She beamed, brushed the water from her face, and was handed a towel. I’d thought I’d seen this before, this glee, this towel softly brushing water from the face, a baptism, a repentance.

The second woman came and dutifully sat. Her nerves, or perhaps the coolness of the night, made her shiver. The head birder doused her; she smiled, used a different towel, wrapped herself in a blanket, and moved back into the circle with shoulder taps and rubs and laughter.

The man came forward and began to protest immediately, shouting about his innocence and the documented discoveries that he had made. It was of little use. The dunker offered him the chair. The man sat. The head birder let the ropes lay lax. The dunker raised the lever and pulled it down, but the man was no longer in the chair. He had jumped out at the nanosecond before the water fell. He scowled, his left hand in a fist.

“I will show you. I will come back.”

The birders lined up and patted him on the back, but none said they’d see him at the next stop. His tour was over.

“Purged,” Clint said, sighing, as if the ecstasy of the moment had dwindled. “No more emails. No more tweets.”

That night in the motel, I thought about the birders being single, traveling alone to meet up, perhaps no different than I was, with a photo of my wife, my children, and spouses, and their children on my dash as I drove from state to state.

The next morning, I met Clint for breakfast and took him to the repair shop. He re-stashed his supplies in the repaired camper shell, took off his hat and reviewed it, smoothed back his hair with his left hand, and put the hat back on. He waved and yelled he was off to Oshkosh and a wetlands marsh.

“You ever been dunked?” I yelled.

Clint smiled. His face turned upward into the sunshine.

“Twice.”