What It Takes to Raise a Family
My father had this large train set hanging from the ceiling in my parents’ Florida sunroom, and when they moved I inherited it. It now hangs below an outdoor trellis. I have it set up so it’s motion-sensing, going on when you’re nearby. One day the train screeched to a halt — well, not really but it’s more dramatic at full scale, right? — and I had to remove a twig from the tracks. But it still wouldn’t move because the twig was just one of hundreds, part of a nest some stupid bird was building. Who… who… who? A mourningdove. So, the train schedule was reposted and all the important shipments of absolutely nothing were postponed indefinitely due to possibly the least endangered species on Earth. Running a railroad is a tough business; don’t take it on if you don’t have the stomach for it.
The bird sat on that bridge — the paperwork from my dad shows that that bridge alone cost him $170, handmade — keeping its eggs warm day and night. A few weeks later, one fledgling seemed to have made it out into the wild, and another died on our patio. Parenting is tough, too.
I cleaned the residue of the nest off the tracks. We went away for a weeklong vacation and when we came back I reactivated the train, and it automatically started moving. Again it screeched to a halt, but this time accompanied by a violent squawk… and a mourningdove fleeing the bridge in outright panic, what with the mighty Casey locomotive of the famed Lake George & Boulder line roaring down the rails right at it and its precious eggs. I was so alarmed I almost dropped my beer. You know it’s bad then.
That damn bird was trying it again, round two, now in late August in the 40-degree North latitude of Pennsylvania. It probably knows more about global warming than we do. On second thought, I’m sure it does. Shut the system down; republish the schedules; alert the customers, notify the EPA, PETA, SPCA, etc., etc.
And along came Ida. Sounds sweet, but she’s a hurricane… or what’s left of her after traveling north from Louisiana and she was still not in a good mood, so to speak. Two miles from our house, what was left of Ida was enough that she ripped the roofs off of many building and toppled or decapitated trees by the hundreds. And there was the water. The six-inch-deep creek immediately beside our house rose 12 feet, to within a foot or two of overflowing the roadway crossing it. And all through that furious, howling, drenching Hell, that bird sat there on its eggs the whole time. We had a little wastebasket outside during the deluge. I’m pretty sure it showed that we got a foot of rain. And that bird sat there the whole time. It stared down a roaring locomotive, at full speed of 1/10th of a mile per hour, and a hurricane with near tornado force winds. I think I read that a bird has to keep its eggs at 93 degrees Fahrenheit to keep them alive. The eggs were abandoned and are now captured in their nest in polyurethane. Running a railroad doesn’t seem so hard, come to think of it.
