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There is a beach, and beyond that, islands. There are dune grasses that buckle in the wind and a cold sea frothing on the shore. There is the call of the gull, a volley of rasping cries above the ocean. And there is a woman standing on the edge of the sandbank. She squints in the sunlight to the basalt rocks of the Farne Islands. She stands watching clouds scud across the sky and light playing off the ocean—slate gray to petrol blue, olive green to steel—then follows the path down through the dunes to the shore. Beyond the islands is the thread of horizon between ocean and sky. She feels the pull of the line between the visible and invisible. And she thinks: What if?
This is the beginning. As I remember it.…
As I cycled along, I wondered what it was about birds that drew us to them, even subconsciously. Was it their music of the sky? The freedom of wing that allows them to travel thousands of miles over oceans? Their disregard for borders? Seeing the bent wing of the snow-white whooper swan, like Japanese origami against the Irish sky on Lough Neagh, had made my heart flutter. I imagined as a child that if I dared to touch those great white wings, I’d feel the exotic iciness of a far-flung North. If I hung on to its long, muscled neck and commanded it to take me to the icecaps and snowfields of its Icelandic home, I would see the Northern Lights. I envied its freedom in the air—its strong, downward beat of wing across the ocean. My father was warier of the swans on Lough Neagh, as one had attacked him when he was younger. He felt happier among the beige greylag geese, with their orange-bright beaks and feet, another winter visitor at Oxford Island on our lough.
Now on the Dutch lowlands, I watched the familiar fawn and white of geese reach for the sky above the pylons, their harsh honks echoing in the chilled May air. And for a moment I was that child again on the lough with my father, when life was sweet and uncomplicated and full of love.
