The queue for the ferry to the Isle of May was a lesson in the hierarchy of outdoor gear. The couple standing in front of Malachy and me spent the twenty minutes before boarding arranging and rearranging waterproof layers, quietly squabbling about whether they had packed the right things. Ahead of them, a man in a tweed face mask played with the settings of his telephoto lens. Four more people with telephoto lenses were waiting to board the ferry. Another couple brought a drone. Behind us, the required two meters apart, stood a man with not one but two tripods protruding from his bag.

 

The Isle of May is 8 kilometers to the east of mainland Scotland, and it is a national nature reserve. From April to October, weather and pandemic permitting, it is possible to take a ferry across the Firth of Forth and spend three hours observing the seabirds that migrate here to nest. Walking on the island takes place on well-trodden, designated paths, in part to discourage off-trail wandering that might endanger nesting birds. In theory, this setup should not require a parade of outdoor gear, but I’m slowly learning that for some, kit is a form of social status and thus requires display.

Our trip there took place on Greek Easter. This was my first Easter since my mother’s death, a loss that conferred upon me the status of being the keeper of the memories: the lone survivor in the immediate family who remembers how we used to mark time. In some ways, this Easter was a celebration drained of ritual, the recurrent sanitizing of hands notwithstanding. When I recounted to Malachy my conversation with a relative who had expressed concern that I was spending Easter “alone in a foreign country”, he asked if she felt reassured by the fact that I was not, in fact, alone. We were together.

It is hard to translate that the togetherness Greek traditions require steamrolls the intimacy of a couple. A celebration requires several cousins, a grumpy aunt or six, a fight about the order of food preparation, and someone being force-fed someone else’s specialty roast potatoes despite insisting that it is not possible to eat any more, not even one bite. The rituals I remember come with at least one broken dish (complete with one of said aunts muttering that the spell of the evil eye is broken too), and the obsessive recounting of every Easter that came before this one, definitively deciding that everything was better at an undefined ‘then.’

In lieu of lamb on a spit, we packed bread rolls for our picnic lunch on the Isle of May. Though our jeans and unimpressive boots were no match for our fellow passengers’ level of preparedness, the binoculars around our necks were our most obvious contribution to the hierarchy of gear. This was our first time seeing the sea since January, and I was determined to really see it, even if peering through binoculars at cresting waves made me a little seasick.

On water or dry land, I am still learning how to see through binoculars. The motions are not seamless. It takes effort to spot a bird with my own eyes and then direct the binoculars to the right place. It takes a smoothness that I have not yet developed to slowly scan the sky so I can follow a bird’s movement, wingbeat by wingbeat. My motions are too abrupt, flinging from branch to sky like a toddler trying to take a photograph, only capturing a blur of life. Perhaps because of this lack of grace, I prefer to look through binoculars before I have spotted something I’d like to see. On land, I scan a tree methodically, top to bottom, left to right, like a lifeguard scans the surface of the water.

In many ways, I am new to seabirds too. The guillemots, puffins, kittiwakes, Arctic terns, razorbills, and great skuas that flock to Scotland in the summer are different than the seabirds I knew growing up in Greece. Some, like puffins, I recognized because their cuteness has become a passport to universal fame. Others I’ve learned through reading, observation, and the gentle accompaniment of humans who know much more than I do about birds. Through following the enthusiasm of a 6-year-old girl (who is the daughter and granddaughter of birders, and therefore far more confident than me when it comes to such pronouncements), I now know that guillemot chicks are known as “jumplings.” They emerge from their eggs at nest sites on top of cliffs and, due to their underdeveloped wings at the time they leave the nest, they have to jump down the cliffside to the ocean.

The first time I watched the jumplings make this journey, I could only peek through my fingers. A celebration of the tenacity of new life sits too close to a tumble towards death. Anyone who has sat through a David Attenborough documentary recognizes this theme: The triumphant music gives way to the poignant tune, as Attenborough reminds the viewers sniffling at a dead flamingo that the natural world moves in cycles of violence and birth. I know not to weigh down a bird with all the metaphors it did not ask to carry. Sometimes it is just life and death, not a metaphor for hope or rebirth. Sometimes a puffin is just a puffin.

If I were looking for an Easter metaphor, a spring metaphor, or any sign of the renewal of life, the Isle of May would provide. The skipper on the ferry told a hopeful story. The guillemots have paired off, he announced, and so have the razorbills, and some of them are sitting on eggs. You’ll see eider ducks nesting, he said, and the island delivered on this promise. Cautious to resist metaphor, I was still moved by the loudness of life. The cliffs were noisy with bird chatter, drowning out the sound of the sea below. Rock surfaces that had at some point been black were now white, gleaming with layers of bird poo. I had never considered poo as a marker of time, as material evidence of migrations past.

Alongside signs of this raucous life, the Isle of May is dotted with evidence of death. There are bones everywhere: skulls with teeth still attached, stray beaks, bones that once supported wings. The entrances of the puffin burrows are littered with decomposing rabbits. The tiny bones disorient my sense of scale such that I can’t tell whether a leg bone used to belong to a rabbit or a cow.

More than the hopefulness of an egg on a nest, it is the co-existence of the promise of new life and the visible reminders of the materiality of death that I find moving. In this year of no funerals, many of us did not get to see the lifeless bodies of our loved ones. Many years before her death, my mother had insisted she had wanted to be cremated. At the time, this was neither legal nor common in Greece. “You’ll have to send me to the Balkans,” she said, telling me about a TV program that sang the praises of funeral homes in Bulgaria that would accept the responsibility of cremating dead Greeks.

I did not tell my mother that we, too, were in the Balkans. I also did not know then that I would have benefitted from her having a burial–or at least a funeral. I did not know that until I did not get to have it. The confirmation of casting eyes on a dead body, of recognizing that life as linked to this life, to your life, is necessary for the living. Wandering through grass dotted with the remains of feather and bone, I wished for something more than scattered ashes. I wanted the certainty of cold skin still on bone.

On the day that would have been my mother’s funeral in Greece, Malachy and I walked through Glen Finglas, just at the edge of the permissible perimeter of travel from our house in Scotland during that phase of the pandemic. In the face of death without the familiar rituals, I felt a need to reimagine how to honor a life and its ending. We looked at mosses and marveled at lichens. We saw the first of the migrating fieldfares arriving from Scandinavia to spend the winter in Scotland. Multiple times during the walk, we remarked on the light.

Since then, both bird migration and subtle botanical shifts in the garden have been ways to mark time. I have rarely known with certainty this year what day it is, or where I am. The answer, invariably, is always here, here, here. Here in a Microsoft Teams window, nodding a little too eagerly, so that my students feel less alone. Here in Track Changes, commenting on their sentences as a form of accompaniment. Here, on the same sofa, receiving news of death, graduation, becoming a professor. Here, remarking on the light.

When I do not know if it is Tuesday or May, where we are in the pandemic, where I am in my own grief, bulbs emerging from the ground, the song of the first skylark, the arrival of the seabirds anchor me in place and time. This is not because of some illusion that “nature is healing,” either itself or me. I am keenly aware of the devastation humans have caused to other creatures, and of the ferocity with which other living beings treat one another. While I do not doubt that it is possible to find what feels like relief when spending time in the company of puffins, I hesitate to assign ‘nature’ the role of addressing my wounds or lifting my weight. Mostly, I am grateful that bulbs and buds and migrating birds provide a companion clock by which to mark time when the clocks on which I more readily rely become unreliable.

Bodies recognize an attempt at deception. Forest as funeral; marveling as memorial–they are fair, alliterative attempts at ritual. But ritual also requires community, repetition, shared memory. The pandemic has made those inaccessible, and the replacements I have invented are no more satisfying than artificial sweeteners’ attempts to pass as sugar. That leaves me on the Isle of May, laughing at myself for envying the surviving rabbits for having such visible, tangible evidence of the remains of their dead kin. That leaves me standing on a cliffside, holding on to beauty, letting it seep into me, no longer as a conscious attempt to honor the life that ended, but as a compass with which to orient the lives that persist.

We eat our picnic lunch on one side of the cliff, with two men pointing their telephoto lenses in our direction from the opposite side. We are not the subjects of interest; humans rarely are when in the proximity of puffins. One of the men makes wild gestures and loud noises in the hope that the puffins fly in the direction of the lens. This infuriates me. How dare he disturb the birds for the sake of arranging his photograph! By the time we have moved on to our biscuits, the men have set their drone loose over the guillemots sitting on their eggs. Anger and superiority rise up in me. I look for order – where are the rangers, the ornithologists, the caretakers! I consider yelling out, waving my arms to ruin the picture, but realize I, too, would be scaring the birds on this side of the cliff. So we move on, keep walking, keep pointing our fingers and binoculars at seabirds. Those men, and us, in simultaneous search and denial of metaphor.