Reading: I Capture the Castle

Moving: Nothing yet; it's only 9:30. I didn't go skiing.

18 March 2000: Mostly pictures, or so I thought at first

I haven't added anything to the page that's supposed to compile the tidbits I learn in my daily life. That's telling.

This is for Kate, to whom I am eternally grateful because she is the first--I shan't be coy: the only--journaler upon whose page of "Other Journals I Read" I unsuspectingly found myself. She likes ravens and crows. I like magpies, which are related to crows and ravens but don't grow where she lives, which is a reason I might never return to the East Coast.

Anyway, with the understanding I'm on a perpetual quest for better pictures, the magpies along my stretch of the Highline Canal:

First, a prairie dog. A small, presumably much inbred colony subsists near us. All the earth around their holes is barren; grass grows maybe fifty feet away but I seldom see them so far away from shelter. They ignore cars driving by but always give a warning cry when we walk by. The lovely thing about a digital camera is that as I approached, snapped, paused, snapped, approached, I could just snap away without worrying about wasting film.

There are pocket-sized colonies all around the outskirts of Denver. What development doesn't kill off, genetic weakness will, because the population is so Balkanized. Last winter after I railed against hunting domestic felines a reader suggested that cats killing prairie dogs was okay because prairie dogs are an agricultural nuisance. I'm not sure prairie hawks and coyotes feel the same way.

The prairie dogs have dug their colony in the last scrap of undeveloped land on our street. That's not true: they didn't arrive here, find it good, and dig in; they probably have retreated here throughout the sprawl of the last 20 years.

After the prairie dogs, you turn left, climb a hill (yes, they exist here), and arrive on the Highline Canal. There are apartment and condominium complexes on the left bank and just a few private houses--small, impoverished homesteads that nonetheless have trees. On the right bank are much larger houses hulking on much larger plots of land, also with trees. My father says there are two kinds of horse-owners: those who can afford them and those who can't. On the left bank the latter scrape by; on the right, the former luxuriate. It was on the right bank that we once saw a fox, but most of the magpies live on the left.

When we first moved to Denver, I had never seen a magpie (except for the thief in The Castafiore Emerald). We had been in Denver for ten days when we drove to Aspen for the first time to visit my sister. Driving in the mountains around a curve on a kind of road I had previously assumed had been invented only for movies--cut out of a cliff with a sheer wall on one side and a chasm on the other--I noticed a flash of black and white. "What's that!" I exclaimed. I didn't remember my Hergé right then with my hands convulsively seized around the wheel. RDC didn't know (he's never read Tintin). Soon after that, my grandmother sent each of us--my sister and me--an Audobon bird book, and that's when I could name that streak of brilliance. A magpie. It was then I began to care about birding, for here, 2000 miles from home, I didn't know a lot of the species. I miss cardinals, and I'll never like pigeons, but I like seeing so many kestrels and prairie hawks and peregrine falcons here. I dislike seeing seagulls where they so patently don't belong, but I like dark-eyed juncoes and flickers, which are one of RDC's favorites because they're a) speckledy and b) have a fly-patch over their tails. A fisherman wears on his fishing vest a patch of lambswool, upon which to hook the flies he's not currently using. Perched, a flicker's wings covers its fly-patch, but when it flies away the spot flashes white, as much a signal as the flag of a white-tail deer. Flickers are cute, but I've always liked magpies best:

• They're the first bird I remember not being able to identify
• I saw my first one on my way to Aspen for the first time, to see my sister
• They're clever and raucous and splendid and penguiny and I bet they could learn to mimic nearly as well as crows.
• They're not sexually dimorphic, which I think is only fair. Blake is such a sexist.
• They flick their long tails in a most arrogant manner

So when I learned that someone read me who likes crows, when I like mapgies so much, well, her reading me meant that much more.

This magpie is looking at me straight on, and chattering up a storm. I myself have never heard "mag...mag...mag" in their calls, but I don't hear "Quick! Three beers!" in the olive fly-catcher either. The Hispanic name is Urraca, which I'm sure is much prettier if you can speak Spanish, and seems like a better onomatopoeic name than "magpie." It was chattering at me because it didn't much like being stared at by a human at its own eye level.

Look how far it spreads its legs. I don't know much scientifically about magpie behavior. I anthropomorphize cockatiels and magpies both, but I know more about cockatiels (at least in captivity) so when I see a magpie doing something vaguely 'tiel-like, I figure I know what it means. When Blake stands with his big monster feet very wide apart like that, he's being assertive. He might be asking if we would please stop tickling his belly. Unfortunately I've never tickled a magpie's belly.

Of course, the most striking thing about a magpie, at least at first, is its coloring. Black and white, very simple and elegant, but how the black and white are arranged, and how iridescent the black is, make the bird very beautiful. The wire fencing obscures its face, but you can see its head is all black, and it's black all the way down to a swooping bib. Really only its belly, shoulder-patches, and wingtips are white. With wings folded, the shoulder-patches become epaulets.

The little pissers don't pose very willingly. Turn your back on me, will you? Its tail is longer than that of a crow or raven. Blake doesn't do much with his tail to express his opinions (or perhaps, like Junket, he doesn't have very many, but that seems unlikely).

(Jessie, I mentioned Junket because Robert McCloskey illustrated it. It's out of print. Damn. That's a favorite, too.)

Despite its unwillingness to model, I have captured a little of the blue-green iridescence on this magpie's wings.

Both RDC and I look at birds' bloomers now. We're a little obsessed. From the ground up, scaly reptilian feet, gristly drumsticks, and then the thighs, which are, in the stronger birds, meaty and thick and distinct from the body. (In most perching birds, you notice just scrawny sticks.) Eagles, of course, needing to seize swimming fish from flowing water and to pounce on rabbits and prairie dogs, have good strong thighs. And they're covered with feathers that we call bloomers. I'm not at a good bloomer-capturing angle here. In the profile picture above, you can just see the bottom of the left leg's bloomer.

Of course, the thing to do is photograph the top of a flying magpie, not the side of one. In time, I'll figure out how to do that. It's just taken off and hasn't tucked its feet properly yet, but otherwise I like this shot. The bird is in focus instead of the truck, which is a feat for me. The white fingertips flip up at the ends, the beak is pointed down along with the eyes for better scanning, and you can just tell what a wonderful diamond-fan shape a magpie tail takes in flight.

Magpies make my day every time I see one.

---

A better drawing of a magpie from England, where, as Tintin and Signora Castafiore knew, there are lots.

These lucky people got to raise a magpie from a chick--and they knew how, and they knew how to teach him to be wild again as well.

---

I'm reading I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, who wrote 101 Dalmatians. It's reminding me of both Into the Forest and Cold Comfort Farm.

I really liked Into the Forest, and I gather from Amazon that I'm not alone. Its most common criticism is a sound one: no one wants to have sex soon after being raped, and most particularly not with one's sister. Nonetheless I gave this book to my sister for Christmas. As she hit her teenage years, with its attendant moodiness and small-town-induced homophobia, CLH no longer would accept my physical affection and started calling me LIRp, for lesbian incest rape. Our circumstances were rather different than Eva's and Nell's, but whereas otherwise that scene probably would have turned me off the book completely, CLH and my shared shared joke made it okay.

I Capture the Castle doesn't have very much in common with Into the Forest. There are two sisters and a distant father, but Rose and Cassandra also have a brother and stepmother and foster brother. They're both told in the first person by the younger of two sisters--was Nell the younger in Into the Forest, or do I remember it that way only because I am the younger? The main similarity that strikes me is the absence of the outside world, the gradual stripping away of everything normal and familiar until both families subsist on a minimum of bland food and have no material possessions, and the mood.

I Capture the Castle has a lot more in common with Cold Comfort Farm than with Into the Forest. Cold Comfort Farm is told from the point of view of a young woman without a sister and in the third person, but again, the books' moods and much else are alike. Similar uncomfortable living environments (all three books have that in common), peculiar relatives, a young man who might look good in pictures, set in England in nearer times (Cold Comfort in the '20s and Castle in the '30s). And of course, matchmaking, which both Robert Poste's child and Cassandra attribute to their reading plenty of Jane Austen. (I can't remember the name of Cold Comfort Farm's protagonist, but she is always called "Robert Poste's child.")

I wasn't very many pages into Into the Forest when I realized the characters' names, Eva and Penelope (Nell), were deliberate. I knew Eva would have to propagate the species, and as civilization devolved and they saw no one, I knew she was going to be raped. I was thinking of Nell as a nickname for Ellen or Helen at first, and therefore I could think of no obvious literary or cultural baggage for her, but when I learned Nell was short for Penelope, I realized her role would be to wait. A reviewer at Amazon said the character Eli was completely thrown in without reason, and I wondered if the reviewer would have made the connection if his name had been Ulysses more obviously.

Similarly I was only a few pages into I Capture the Castle before I realized Rose and Cassandra's names would dictate their fates. Rose, of course, is the lovely one, and even without the Jane Austen parallels, she'll be Pride and Prejudice's Jane Bennet. The device for Cassandra's first-person narrative is that this is her writing (not diary) journal. She is practicing her speed-writing. Two people so far have tried to read what she's written but they can't. This isn't quite like no one believing Cassandra, princess of Troy, and dragging in the gift horse anyway, but it's close.

You know, it's rude to look a gift horse in the mouth, so the Trojans didn't, but d'you think they could have had a look in its belly, particularly after Laocoön said he feared the Greeks even when they bear gifts?

I told RDC about I Capture the Castle and Cold Comfort Farm. He watched the Kate Beckinsale movie of the latter with me, and, as I expected he would, he made the same joke I'd been thinking of all day, tolling "Thomas Mortmain's child."