Chanute Field

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker has flown. Lord to God I wish it was not true, but now I have to tell his story. After all, he left me $20,000. And a stamp collection, a Boy Scout Handbook from the 1930s, a metal-encased pocket bible from WWII, and a little black book that looks its age -- eighty years, if it was eighteen years younger than he.

Who, by the time he was legal drinking age, had already experienced more extremes than most people do in a lifetime, today – at least my generation growing up in our safe, clean, homogenized little Minn-Dak border town. But he never said anything about it, not to us.

Probably thousands of junior and senior high school students went through his classroom in fifty years. Anyway, he did not call me “foolish” when presented with evidence of my furtive attempts to write a novel in math class (since I was going to flunk anyway, I believed it a better use of my time; he was just an old substitute teacher so didn’t he know it was supposed to be a “sluff day?”). Foolish: his antique go-to word for teenage behavior confronts, a relic from the bygone era of polite restraint that he personified. It did apply to just about all I did or tried back then. Yet, now he left me all these artifacts and scribbles, a century of clues to condense into a suitable brief for -- posterity? Of course. Old teachers never really die. They just leave homework assignments.

Who knew about all the anonymous scholarships or fellowships, who the confidential recipients were, why and how he did this on a teacher’s salary all these years? His broker merely indicated, “He thought you could do better,” and handed me his scribbles and well-worn 1947 edition of A Field Guide to the Birds by Roger Tory Peterson. There was no slot allowed among the woodpeckers in the “Life List” section for an Ivory-billed checkoff, although its description and illustration appear on page 145. “One should always use caution in making identifications, especially where rarities are concerned,” warned the Field Guide preface and user instructions. To the ending Index was appended Scotch tape bound sheaf of age-yellowed pages. Tiny handwriting detailed the place, date, species and circumstances surrounding notable birds seen by the book’s owner, starting in 1953. This part was followed by a final new tape-bound section which elaborated on the owner’s 1942 sighting in Florida of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a.k.a. the Lord God Bird, and his hopeful joy hearing 2005 news of a reported sighting in Arkansas.

It was the same area where he had gone in 1951 with a motley crew of Native men to get twelve school buses purchased by a Bureau of Indian Affairs agency under the Canadian Border. It was his first teaching job; he had heard there was a Turtle Mountain in North Dakota. So there he went, because skiing was his main environmental requirement. In Arkansas, he bought out a watermelon stand (volume discount!) and loaded his bus with a hundred watermelons. These he “planted” n the gardens of school staff and families on the Indian reservation which had been his point of departure. He surprised the local baseball team by inviting them up to get a watermelon iced in bathtubs in the employee quarters. He further surprised everyone by marrying the “most lovely intelligent girl on the reservation,” which event he counted as the greatest good fortune of his life.

Extremes of luck were the stuff of his life. Orphaned in the Great Depression at age ten he and his twelve-year-old brother went to work for a bootlegger uncle whose household they joined. His little brother was yet a tot. Big brother became the youngest Eagle Scout in America, and he himself wrote that he lived by the Boy Scout creed all his life. His brother became a pilot and died in the extremes that were World War II, as did relatives in Germany who had made preparations to adopt the brothers in the 1930s – “lucky again.” He “would have been on the wrong side of history.” The grandparents had risked their lives by smuggling bits of gold jewelry in the Pfeffernüsse cookies sent at Christmas to their grandsons in America. It was thought that the jewelry-making German town could produce munitions, so it was fire-bombed to rubble by Allied air strikes.

He was nicknamed “the Red-Headed Woodpecker” in his youth. Surely, the intended mental picture was of a Pileated Woodpecker instead, with its flaming topnotch, prominent beak, and long-necked rangy, wiry build. Through my guilty teenage hangover, I could hear him whistling the haunting tune of a mysterious extinct bird down in the kitchen at dawn on a weekend, getting ready to report for National Guard duty. I don’t know why I imagined this odd sort-of-connection. It was decades later that I learned he had been touched by the Lord-to-God Bird, that bigger more exaggerated holy grail version of a Pileated. I jokingly dubbed him “the Ivory-billed Woodpecker” considering his blue-eyed, pale, archaic character. I also called him Dad, since he was my father.

The things I never even knew.

The little black book was full of names of men who, even if they could have told me anything, had probably all died years, if not decades, ago. It had acquired a worn patina, soft to the touch but woven strong like old blue jeans back when denim was expected to fade and tear from appropriate use only – on the farm, prohibited at school or other local institutions like the American Legion pavilion polka hall in my hometown (a sign on the door warned wearers of blue jeans they would not be admitted). The nearly-rubbed off gold lettering on its cover said: ADDRESSES – CHANUTE FIELD. What the heck is a Chanute Field, I asked the internet? A decommissioned Air Force base in Illinois. The creepy crumbling grandeur of the “Abandoned” images and videos online were exactly the right ticket if one were looking to more fully experience the horror-show of grief.

Chanute Field was hastily built to crush the Hun in WWI, but my German grandfather, shot and run over by an artillery wagon and left for dead, woke up and crawled out of the mud that stanched his wounds and saw the empty battlefield. He laughed at his good luck and joke, rising from his muddy grave to surprise any friends he had left. There were none; all the young men in his hometown unit had been killed. He was by then an artillery commander who had survived four years on the ground, wounded six times, awarded the Iron Cross, and awaiting the promised “fresh troops” who turned out to be his father and other old men. He walked home to console his best friend’s widow and marry her. There were no prospects in Germany, so they sailed to America.

In the wee hours of the New Year, a motorist heading home from the parties thought he saw an elderly ghost on an antique bicycle speed in front of his vehicle just as he was rounding the curve on the old Ski Jump Hill road into the city park in the town where I still live. In the spotlight cone of the street lamp he thought he saw the ghost pop a wheelie and fly off the slick hilltop sled run, end over end, with his arms extended in perfect form with his feet-first finale into the deep-snowed ravine. The motorist went home and replayed the sight over and over until his blood alcohol count resided sufficiently to call the police. Decades earlier, when towering ski jumps were still allowed in the frozen flats of Dakota, the Ivory Bill in perfect form, arms outstretched like wings, ski poles in both hands, was a memorable sight flying through the air then landing in his famous “telemark” stance. So I am told by that old friend.

Oh! He made one last run and slipped the surly bonds of earth. The TV channel in North Dakota into the 1970s used to sign off with a film of Air Force jets flying and the poem High Flight by John Gillespie Magee. Then, there was nothing to see but a static blizzard until morning news. For most of my life I never even knew my father was in the U.S. Army Air Corps, WWII. I never knew he would have died in Germany or Vietnam if not for pure luck. He never marched on the Main Street in parades or hung out in the VFW or any of those things that local veterans did. Instead, he was seen around town constantly playing tennis, softball, basketball, skiing, skating, running, and riding his old bikes. He was a lover of nature and creatures and books, always reciting poetry and rescuing wild animals and studying plants and birds and such. He was recalled by everyone as a kind, gentle, scholarly old gentleman and extremely eccentric. His practical jokes, physical comedy stunts and public antics were legendary and sometimes embarrassing to his wife and children.

When he left his home and family, he was no more than a boy. At age seventeen, he went to the Yukon and made enough money to buy a farm building the Alcan Highway and playing poker in camp. There his younger brother prospered but on December 7, 1941 Ivory Bill headed to Chanute Field along with thousands of other young men. There were other bases and places I have yet to sort out. Just once, I asked him how come he was in Florida and saw this Lord God bird way back in 1942. He told me a funny story about how he had orders to go and round up alligators at the camp. The place was over-run with alligators, many of which were small enough to catch and detain in an impoundment. Naturally the alligators resented this treatment and were not helpful. There was no rationale or further instruction offered as the alligators piled up in the fenced area, crawling all over the top of one another. Finally, the chain of command determined that the alligator prison was at capacity since prisoners could escape by climbing to the top of the heap. That is all any military-trained alligator wrestlers knew about the operation. On a similar operation he was startled by the Holy Grail Bird whose habitat they were usurping and was surprised by the size and beauty of it and the slight tiny sound of a nuthatch that it voiced.

And that is all I ever knew about the camp until I saw an old photo of Boca Raton Provost Office online. He had never said a thing about it except to mention that Boca Raton was an upscale wealthy community now but it had once been an Air Force base out in the boondock Everglades. My homework commenced:

The atomic bomb may have ended the Second World War, but historians now agree it was radar that won it. Exactly how has been classified as top secret until now. This is an unknown chapter in the Sunshine State's rich and diverse history told by WLRN, your South Florida Storyteller station.

The details are astonishing. It was the only radar school in the country; nobody was allowed to take notes or say the word “radar.” Yet, this chapter is not even the most remarkable thing about his life. He lived every minute of it the best he could, for those who couldn’t and those who should’ve. He loved the wild birds. He was touched by the Lord God Bird. Twice, his National Guard unit was called up for Vietnam on short notice. He went downtown on his lunch break and bought a house outright (on a schoolteacher’s salary!) so his family would have a place to live since he likely wouldn’t. The orders were called off in the nick of time. I was lucky.