October 16, 2008
I promised myself this week that I wouldn’t write about politics. I was going to write an autumn idyll about animals and nature and the changing of the leaves. Maybe throw in something about the harvest holiday of Sukkot.
But like Michael Corleone in Godfather III, “Just when I think I am out, they drag me back in.”
I live near an elbow of the Hackensack River, and we’re regular visitors to an adjacent pond that attracts a mob of waterfowl: mallards, egrets, cormorants, herons, Canada geese. Turtles laze on sunken logs, and carp work the inky shallows. Lately we’ve been blessed by sightings of a wood duck, the gaudiest of the visitors. With its Mardi Gras mask, color-block body paint, and extreme bicycle-racing helmet, it looks like a duck designed by an Italian fashion house.
George
What brings us back evening after evening is an injured mallard that we have been nursing and feeding since the summer. We found him in July, tattered and bloodied after an attack by what we think was a fox. His left wing was shredded (see what I mean about politics?) and his right foot was missing half its webbing. He seemed stranded on a little patch of gravel that stuck into the pond.
My wife began feeding him bread crumbs in the evenings, and as the weeks went by, George (We named him George. A lame duck, get it? Like I said, they keep dragging me back.) seemed to get stronger and stronger. We like to think we got him through his first few bad weeks, when he couldn’t feed himself. One of the happiest nights of the summer was when he was missing from his patch of gravel and came paddling over to us from the middle of the pond. George couldn’t fly, but he was able to get out and about and dabble for grub.
By the end of the summer, George would find us at the sound of my wife’s voice. Now he flop-flops ashore and quite literally eats out of the palm of her hand. He also made friends. He is often accompanied by a female mallard who joins him at our feet. George is jealous, and makes a protective circle around himself and my wife, but we make sure to feed his friend.
And her friends. And the wood duck. And the geese who got the memo that there’s free food at Indian Pond.
And here’s more politics: We’re worried that what started out as a rescue plan for one injured duck has created a culture of dependency for him and all his friends. We could have let nature take its course — George might have died, and Birdland would have weathered his loss. But that’s easy to say if you don’t have a bloodied duck twitching at your feet. And yet. It doesn’t look like George will ever fly, but have we turned him into a shnorrer? Is George the Duck the Welfare King of the Hackensack?
This was once a hot public policy debate, or at least until Clinton’s welfare reforms of the 1990s. But it’s back, this time as it relates to financial institutions as opposed to single mothers. According to today’s hot new cliche, the government bailout plan has allowed industry to “privatize its profits and socialize its risks,” leaving the taxpayer with the bill without forcing the captains of finance to face the consequences of their bad behavior.
Of course, there doesn’t seem to be much of a choice, with the twitching body of the economy at our feet. The government allowed Lehman Brothers to become a dead duck — but soon learned that what felled Lehman was contagious. And now, of course, the disease is spreading across the pond.
Admittedly, my analogy is a stretch, and I know as much about economics as I do about ornithology. Which is perhaps why our visits to Indian Pond became so important these past few months. With so much of the world spinning out of control, and so much we didn’t understand, here was one small chance to make things right. George isn’t a symbol, but an unlucky duck. And we weren’t just saving George. We were saving our sanity.
