Laura Erickson's For the Birds

A couple of weeks ago I was stuck in the Cleveland airport when first my one o’clock flight got cancelled, putting me on a 5 o’clock one, and then, after we boarded that plane a half hour late, we waited out on the runway for over an hour and a half while the Cleveland radar system was down. Normally this would have sparked a program about how birds are so much more evolved than us mere humans, never bound by airport schedules and pilot strikes and radar systems, but I had just started a book that was so absorbing that the time flew, and by the time I was finishing the book the plane was in the sky.

The book is titled Kingbird Highway, and is about how the author, Kenn Kaufman, came to be the youngest person to see over 600 birds in a single year. He was 16 when he dropped out of high school to pursue his birding dreams, and a couple of years later he hitchhiked his way around the continent, from Florida to Alaska, Maine to Baja California, amassing a total list of 671 species while spending less than $1000 for the entire year. He budgeted a dollar a day for food, and quickly learned that dog food could keep him going for a long ways.

The book sounds like a birding book, but it’s really a lot more than that. In part, it’s a coming of age book. As the year goes on and on, Kaufman gets more wary and cynical about people, and less interested in the acquisitiveness of birding. He starts out completely focused on the size of his list, but by the end, he’s growing more fascinated by the birds themselves and less and less in his big list. The book is also a vivid picture of life in the 70s. Kaufman’ s descriptions of some of the people who picked him up are wonderfully written, and his discussion of hitchhiker strategies fascinating.

Kaufman met his wife during this year. His account of their meeting and growing relationship was extraordinarily sweet. The only mention he makes of how things ultimately tum out is when he describes the day she surprised him by showing up at Bar Harbor, Maine. He wrote:

As I walked in the front door, with the glare of early morning sun still in my eyes, I had the illusion that I saw someone I recognized. She was sitting in a chair near the door reading a magazine, and she looked for all the world like– But it couldn’t really be her, of course. She would have had to talk her protective father into giving her permission. She would have had to drive all night from Baltimore, taking the freeways and turnpikes north through New Jersey and New York and New England. That was the only way she could be here now, putting down her magazine and rising and coming toward me with a smile on her face. If I could have looked down the years then and seen everything from beginning to end—the good times, the best times, the bad times, the bad decisions, the indecision, and then finally the divorce—I still would not have traded anything for that moment.

That passage tells us something remarkable about Kenn Kaufman’s honesty and his amazing ability, through his journals and something of his spirit, to recapture his own innocence and joy in meeting life, and all the birds he could find, head on with joy and gusto. Kingbird Highway is as good a travel and adventure story as any I’ve ever read, and the birds lend it a spice that makes it just about the perfect book. Even if you’re not a birder, you just might enjoy reading it.