Gregory's Pond

A short pathway to the lake . . . 

I saw three Pileated Woodpeckers darting in front of me and in back of me and around me the other day – while I was walking on a footpath leading from the main street of our suburban neighborhood to the lake where I walk daily, right in back of Greg’s house . . .

Greg – the neighborhood nature photographer who died of pancreatic cancer a few months ago.  I only know he died because I saw his obituary in the newspaper.  Greg lived about two blocks up the street, and I never knew his last name or his wife’s name, though I saw him often over the course of many years when I walked around the lake and he stood or sauntered around the lake -- his head up in the trees or down to the ground, much equipment always around his neck or crosswise on his chest.  We talked briefly about what he had seen each time we passed, and many years of brief talking had added up to what I call friendship.

. . .  quietly teeming with wildlife 

I think his wife moved from their house only a month after he died – a moving van was outside of it the greater part of one day – and just yesterday I saw a young girl talking in the front yard on her cell phone with a great flurry of arms and a pitch of voice – Oh . . . the new owners, I said to myself.

The Blue Heron is patient with the amateur photographer . . .

Anyway, I walked along the footpath that runs in back of Greg’s house (his former house), and I saw three Pileated Woodpeckers darting back and forth, in front of me and in back of me – as though to accompany me on the trail which is not very long, just long enough to let one imagine being somewhere more expansive than the suburbs of a city . . . leading to a small lake where I can walk a few laps while taking in a bit of nature. 

And on this short walk leading to the lake, I thought of Greg to whom I would have reported my finding when I saw him next – or who would have beat me to it and said, “Yes, I know, I saw them too – I got the shot!”  By shot, of course, he meant the picture.  He would have known the secret of quietly waiting on a bench or standing still – to get some wondrous close-up shot that would possibly be on the front cover of Virginia Wildlife magazine.  His “amateur” photos made several covers of this and other magazines, he had told me.  He could somehow make his lens zoom right up to a tree, if not miraculously behind the tree, to get a snapshot of a thing you could never see while just looking – you can never get that close in real life – and of course the object always darts away before you can be sure of what you’ve seen – and you can’t preserve the thing at all except by insisting on what you saw in memory alone – and memory is always changing . . . at least that is my experience. 

There were six right before I snapped the shot

But the picture lasts forever – and Greg knew the miracle of capturing the picture to prove what he had seen.  He worked at it, patiently, almost every day when he got home from work, or early in the morning, or on Fridays, his day off.  He once told me he had a closet full of boxes of negatives and photos of the wildlife that no one would guess existed at this small lake in the middle of a suburban neighborhood, enclosed by houses and busy streets – owls, kingfishers, cormorants, egrets, fox, and even a turtle the size of a small ottoman!  I didn’t know it at the time (time being the course of many years) – didn’t know it, but Greg taught me to start looking when I walked – to keep my eyes open, my ears too.  He said,  NO ONE WOULD BELIEVE WHAT WAS THERE . . .  

The last time I talked to Greg's wife, and that was during one of his several declines about a year ago, she said that Greg always joked that the lake was named after him.  Everyone in the neighborhood refers to the lake as “Raintree Lake,” for it is located right off Raintree Drive – but old county records or surveys, Greg found out, refer to it as “Gregory's Pond.”  And so, she joked, “Greg considers this to be his pond.”

I've seen turtles snatch goslings from beneath

I thought of all this while the three Pileated Woodpeckers darted side to side in front of me and in back of me – sometimes perching high in the trees above, playing hide and seek as they went around the backside of one tree before re-emerging on another tree to find me – all the while voicing the characteristic laughing sound, Ha ha a a a . . . Ha ha ha ha ha ha a a a – at least that’s what it sounded like to me, like they were laughing at me.

I stopped right at the spot on the footpath behind Greg’s old house.  I noticed through the thicket of trees that all the hanging baskets and birdfeeders were gone from the deck.  The three woodpeckers were still playing their games, in and out of trees, laughing at me – and I said, sort of out loud, but in a whisper, “Wow, Greg, did you see those three Pileated Woodpeckers?  And right behind your house!  Did you get the shot?”