Searching for Alexander

Yankee, July-August 2018

Near the peak of Mount Mansfield on a sunny July morning, Nate Launer cradles a small gray-brown bird in his hand. He has just released it from a mist net, and will soon wrap its tiny pink leg with a wafer-thin band before letting it go.

It is a Bicknell’s thrush, the rarest and most secretive of North America’s breeding thrushes, and is now under threat as its natural habitat—the coniferous alpine forests of northern New England, the Adirondacks, and Canada—progressively dwindles in a changing climate.

“As the air warms, the deciduous trees move higher and begin to squeeze out the balsam and spruce where the Bicknell’s thrushes make their nests,” Nate explains to me later. The banding he was doing that morning, he says, will help track the birds’ movements as they attempt to adapt to the change.

Nate is 21 years old, a senior at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, where he majors in conservation biology. His morning on Mount Mansfield today is the result of a summer apprenticeship, the Alexander Dickey Conservation Internship, awarded by the Vermont Center for Ecostudies (VCE) in honor of another young man who once walked these woods in search of the Bicknell’s thrush: “a mostly solitary soul,” as the VCE announcement described him, “who found in nature refuge from a world that often seemed too much.”

Nate admits he knows little about the young man in whose name he is passing his summer. “I’ve been a little afraid to ask,” he says. “I can sense there’s a sensitivity there.”

I was working in the study of our New Hampshire home, around 4 in the afternoon, on Saturday, October 19, 2013, when the phone rang with a call from my wife, Landon. She had just read a text message from her 28-year-old son, Alexander, written an hour before: I’ve gone for a walk in the woods. She asked if I thought she should worry. It was clear to me that she knew the answer already.

It was a sunny fall day with the maples near their peak. It had been much the same the morning before, when Landon had driven two hours south to visit Alex at the small therapeutic community in western Massachusetts, Gould Farm, where he had been living for most of the past 15 months. They had gone to a garden center, where they wandered the stalls of apple varieties and bought jars of maple syrup and apple jelly— “the sort of place he loved,” she says. Afterward, they had driven back to Gould Farm and sat in the car and talked for nearly an hour, about his illness and his fears of the future. Alex cried, overwhelmed by regrets. Landon assured him that she would support him through whatever came next. On the drive home, she remembers, “I felt encouraged. Very daunted but still encouraged. We were in a new phase, and it was going to be all right.”

~~~

The full story (as well as sixteen others) is available in the collection, ‘The Grifter, The Poet, and The Runaway Train’ (click title to access the book).