Nonfiction by Susan Pope

In early May at the shorebird festival in Homer, Alaska, I was invited to read my goshawk attack story at the site where it happened. Since the assailants were not yet nesting, I felt safe from any potential assault.

The event was a fundraiser for the land trust that had rescued a piece of forest and wetlands from bulldozing for development. Here was an opportunity to support a cause I believed in, plus a chance to plug my new book. Birding, hiking, storytelling, snacks. A perfect fundraiser. Local merchants donated food, the trust handled the logistics, the festival advertised the event, my friend Nancy provided bird identification assistance, and my husband Jim supplied the moral support. All I had to do was show up at the trail head, hike to the viewing platform, and read for ten minutes.

I visualized. I timed. I practiced out loud.

I was ready.

But not for leading the hike because the official leader, having no childcare, was forced to bring up the rear with her squealing, squirming toddler. Or for the frequent stops and starts to accommodate the grandma who thought she had signed up for pre-school story hour and kept sprinting off the trail to capture her rubber-booted fleet-footed three-year-old dashing after squirrels. Or for the six-year-old junior birder so eager to find those birds she slammed into my heels each time we paused to listen for one.

Or for the young moose who blocked our path and would not move—despite our clapping, shouting, and pleading—until she’d devoured every last fiddlehead fern. Or for the helicopter circling overhead at the viewing platform where I was to read my story.

Or for the Wilson’s snipe punctuating the roar of the helicopter’s rotors with a furious ack, ack, ack each time I imitated the goshawk’s scream in my story. Or for the pair of Canada jays who swooped in to raid our unguarded snacks when no one was paying attention.

But none of this mattered as I shouted my story in a very non-literary way to people politely trying to listen. The sun shone, the birch and willow leaves popped open, the wrens trilled and twittered, the sandpipers, ducks, geese, and cranes frantically fed or nested or headed north, and parents and grandparents did their best to ensure that the next generation had a chance at this one unpredictable and magnificent life.

Susan Pope’s work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction Short Reads, Alaska Magazine, River Teeth Beautiful Things, and The Bluebird Word Literary Journal, among others. Her memoir Rivers and Ice follows five generations of one Alaskan family in the rapidly changing landscape of the North. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska.