The ducks have come to mean more to me than a mere waterfowl designation, or household responsibilities and backyard chores. They are a pleasant novelty… like having thick curly red hair must be for some lucky people, or discovering that the old book one just bought from the thrift store was actually signed by Erma Bombeck. I’m still a little surprised every time I watch the ducks on tour in the back yard… wait, how is it that we have ducks?
But wait; there’s more. They’re even more than a novelty; they’re a metaphor… one that changes constantly to answer varying emptinesses or longings in me. Sometimes they mean that abundance never fails, that hope floats, or that gathering is possible; sometimes they speak of resilience; sometimes I am certain they’re little brown feathery love notes from God, crafted exactly for me, with jokes and sweetness and a little bit of mystery and randomness written on them.
They’re also a place-holder. When loss and grief weigh too unsorted and heavy on me, when reality is too raw to share out loud, but I’m on the spot and someone is expecting updates, I can tell a duck story. Even just mentioning them, how they line themselves up or crowd their plump bodies on sprinklers and in water bowls, how they rush to and from me, how one secretly and at great expense to her own duck body built a meta-nest—in the telling of a duck vignette, the ragged parts of my heart are smoothed over, as if telling duck things is somehow an unruffling of tousled feathers, a gentle brushing away of tangles.
This doesn’t change the fact that they will always be messy, will remain forever a twice-a-day chore and almost as much a nuisance as an asset. But even the difficulties of ducks—mmm… said out loud, my affections clinging to the words– somehow soothe me.
Now, with late winter melting, our ducks are ranging farther, little explorers seeking their own Northwest Passages, reasserting their ancient water-fowl privileges, even though they’re molting (half naked) and the nights are still freezing. The slough is just around a corner from us; all last summer, determined to play there, the ducks would waddle off our property (we share just one fence with a neighbor, whose property abuts the slough), sometimes toddling in a line down the highway to circumvent a weedy ditch and navigate the short distance to the slough edge (they think they own the road– we desperately need more fence).
They are always in duck heaven in the slough, free to float their beautiful boat bodies with elegance and buoyant grace, having tricked death on the highway, death from the sky, death from behind a bush yet again.
There was a night last week that I thought we’d lost them. In the wake of our long, cold winter, we’d just barely become casual about shutting them in their house at night. They have always sought out their house and yard at dusk on their own anyway, and aside from the neighbor’s dog, who occasionally escapes her kennel only to race around and ignore our ducks (she’s a friendly, all white bird dog, her body speckled with tiny brown spots, her head completely brown… in the dark, she looks like a headless, frantically happy dog-ghost), there have seemed to be no predators about.
When I went out to put them away that night, not a duck was in their duck yard, or in their house. Usually they greet me with a chorus of quacks (are they indignant? Happy to see me? Newsy? Worried? I wish I knew), but that night– not even crickets said hello (it’s still too cold). The silence and emptiness felt spooky. My heart fell… I knew they could all have easily been taken. Throats slashed by a murderous skunk (though there was no residual smell), sweet curvy duck bodies dangling from long elegant necks, like bags of treasure in the clutches of masked robber-raccoons.
And then I heard a distant, faint, happy duck sound, off towards the slough. I called out, “Ducks?” A faint but still joyous refrain rose with my query, and kept increasing the further I ventured from the house to the mysterious regions of the slough. Darkness made edges and slopes unfamiliar and threatening… even with a flashlight I couldn’t see, much less reach the ducks, though now I could clearly hear them. Verging the slough, the skeletal, prickly remnants of last year’s weeds (poisonous hemlock, for one, ragweed for another) seemed too dense and impenetrable to get closer, the edge of the slough indecipherable and thus a threat to my continuing on. I called again, wavered, flashed my light around, saw nothing. My rebel phantom ducks kept chuckling somewhere beyond in the dark. Defeated, I went back to the house and announced to Frank that we’d lost our ducks to the Wild.
We like making dramatic announcements. This makes our life seem significant and exciting.
Frank didn’t accept this one. “Oh, no, we haven’t!” he said, gravel rumbling in his voice. “I’ll get them back.” His expression was so certain, so clear-eyed and steady— the white knight standing tall in the face of ambush, gunfire, mutiny (Grandma would have remarked upon broad shoulders)– that I half believed he could (as Grandpa would say, “That ain’t no hill for a climber”). But how? I had no idea. Getting the ducks back from the slough seemed to me as fraught a problem as bringing Apollo 13 home from the void, and I was mapless, blind, mathless.
But Frank was confident. He grabbed his most powerful flashlight (how he loves flashlights), his flannel shirt, and his shoes, and asked me about mud conditions before he strode out into the dark. I felt almost like a reassured child again; Frank was the dad who could mysteriously do any impossible thing, Just Because.
By the way– It’s important to know Frank hates mud. He doesn’t like to swim, doesn’t like wading in opaque water, even. He dislikes messiness and soaked-ness in general, becomes miserably distracted when his socks slip down and bunch around his ankles (once, driving in a snow storm, he leaned down beneath the dash to pull up a fallen sock, nearly careening off the road). These sentiments seemed to me to stack the odds even more against the possibilities of persuading the ducks out of the slough and home again. He wouldn’t want to get near the slough bank for fear of mud– slipping, sinking. His socks might snag bull thistle burrs, drag down around his ankles. And I wouldn’t want him to jump in… the man drops like lead; he does not float.
But he’s more familiar with the slough than I am. Just beyond the edge of our property, it plunges beneath the road; in the spring and sometimes in the summer, the narrow channel that dives under the road can become blocked with debris. None of the powers that be (state? county? township? the Three Musketeers?) seem to care if it clogs and floods, but after experiencing the overflow of slough waters onto our own property a couple of winters ago (flooding our septic field), Frank periodically investigates slough conditions, scouring its edges, clearing the grate.
Soon he was back in the kitchen again, dry, unmuddy, unruffled, socks in place. I wondered if he’d given up just as I had, but no, he announced without fanfare that he’d gotten the ducks back and locked safely in their house.
I seriously couldn’t believe him at first. What? No way! How on earth did he get our wild child ducks out of the slough (which neighborhood body of water– 12 to 15 feet deep and almost as wide– almost drowned a local farmer, who dared stand on the ice to fish one winter, and fell in)?
Powers of persuasion, it turns out. And fearlessness. The ducks respond well to Frank’s confident, brusque, no nonsense voice.
He told me that at first, the ducks resisted his rumbling invitations from the slough bank (I’m re-imagining here, quite familiar with Frank’s rumble. Also, Frank’s fearlessness and familiarity took him right up to the same edges that I had been afraid to approach… So he actually could see the ducks, while I hadn’t). Their initial response to his voice was to swim away, fast and upstream. Nevertheless he jogged beside and then ahead of them on the bank, and bellowed again over the water into the dark: “Girls, what are you doing? Where are you going? Get out of there! Go home! Go to bed!” He said they quacked a lot in objection, but nevertheless turned around, paddled to the edge of the slough, and ran-waddled ahead of him– in a line– all the way home, and into their safe little duck house. And that was that. Shut the door. Exactly as he called it, so it went.
Apparently managing ducks is a Frank thing.
And what does this mean? What is the metaphor here?
I cannot tell you. But it’s really cool that I’m partnered with a fearless man with a husky voice, who knows without a doubt that he can boss ducks. Maybe he’s not a duck whisperer, but for sure he’s a duck gatherer.
Lucky me.
