The Birdbath

AMID the flutter, the vibrancy of life, John Simmonds was thinking of death.
If he believed the television screen in the corner of his room, life was all smiles and blue skies. It was spirited, lively, action-packed and fast-paced with happy endings. And here he was in a wheelchair, a paraplegic.
John Simmonds, tired of television, would look out of his window at the birdbath positioned in the centre of the garden lawn. Over the years he increasingly looked to the birdbath, looked away from the television set that was a constant symbol of what life was supposed to be, an existence he couldn’t share. Although robust and free-flying, free of the strait-jacket of paraplegia that restrained him, John Simmonds felt no distress when he looked at the activity of the birdbath, felt no bitterness or self-pity. The birds and their actions, in fact, eased his creeping loneliness, his creeping despair.
After his accident he had never been short of company to help him through the day. It seemed that someone always wanted to call, chat and joke and bring a bottle of wine. He had no need for the spectacle of the birdbath then, its pleasant distraction from the reality of what his life had become. His friends kept his mind off his private agony, too. Although he couldn’t walk, couldn’t visit the office they once all shared, the gossip they brought about the people there and the wider world made him feel a part of things, part of the bigger picture. Life hadn’t forgotten him, hadn’t passed him by.
There were even outings to restaurants. They still laughed about the incident on the night they all went out to a cheap Italian restaurant staffed by students. After the meal Simmonds had placed a white-wine bottle he had used as his urine incontinence drain on the table, intending to take it with him as he always did. A waiter had swept it up, thinking it was wine left over, and one of Simmonds’ friends had to snatch it back; the student was about to put it in the fridge and take it to a party. The waiters and waitresses had to be told . . .
The story of the bottle of urine kept Simmonds and his friends amused for weeks and when the friends had left, and he was on his own with only the television for company, he would ponder how little it took to raise his weak spirits, and raise a weak laugh.
Over time the stream of colleagues and friends, and the bottles of wine they brought, had gradually dried up, as did the excursions to restaurants. Did anyone really want to have dinner with a person in a wheelchair, with a wine bottle at their feet? And who could blame them for not coming to his home? They must have felt they had exhausted all the stories, all the gossip. They had also exhausted their capacity to display sympathy. The laughter about goings-on in the office had become forced smiles now, genuine sympathy had become pity. Who could blame them for not coming, or at least not coming so often?
John Simmonds had been one of them once, relevant, “being”, as he would put it. He had lived and loved as if there was no tomorrow and he could laugh at it all during his better moments, laugh at the phrase he had coined of those happy times, “taking excess to extremes”. When he had first said it, with former colleagues gathered around his bed, they had all laughed out loud and said Simmonds had not lost his touch for words, he was a wordsmith through and through. What they did not say, did not add, was there was no outlet now for his trade.
Simmonds had been a journalist, a fine one, working in his later years as a newspaper sub-editor and ace headline writer. He had also been a drinker, and driver, and one night he had set out with too much drink aboard to drive home. He lived on the outskirts of Hobart, in semi-rural country, and on the way home he had realised his headlights were not working properly. When he switched them on full beam, the lights faded. Some motorists might have slowed so they could drive within the dipped beam. Not Simmonds, with drink on board, and the desire to live life at full speed, to live life “in the fast lane” as he would have written in a headline about his own fate.
Simmonds was trying to establish if he could drive by moonlight. The journalist had pressed his foot to the accelerator, confident he would be able to spot any danger in good time, be able to apply the brakes in an instant, even try a handbrake turn if the situation demanded it. It was not to be. The junction that marked the end of the road he was driving on, a road he thought he knew backwards, had come too quickly. Before his brakes took hold, a wall on the far side of the T-junction rushed towards him. They say in a crash you see everything in slow motion but you can’t act. Simmonds didn’t see a thing, only the brick wall one minute and then a white hospital wall and ceiling the next.
He learned later the car had hit the wall, pivoted on its nose and Simmonds had gone through the windscreen and been thrown into the road. Miraculously he did not have a mark on his face, no cuts, no bruises. The car, though, had rolled over him and broken his back. Simmonds would never walk again, would have no control and feeling in his body below his hips.
Simmonds now compared his predicament with the five stages of dying – denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Simmonds had read about them in a book once, in the days when he could walk, and now he complained they all applied to him. He might disagree with the acceptance part, though. He was in a wheelchair, unable to walk, and he wasn’t prepared to accept that. He wanted out, not from the wheelchair, which was an impossibility. He wanted out of life.
For the time being he had a distraction, a spiritual, emotional release; the birdbath and the antics of the birds attending it on sunny days when the spray from their dunking and diving and dipping filled the air with droplets of sun-lit water pearls.
This was a life removed from the television set in the corner of his room, the birds’ existence was without exaggeration or gloss, real and not contrived, gratuitous. It might not be a TV “soap”, but there was drama all the same. A life with good days and with bad, with triumph no doubt mixed with misery and pain when the birds’ main foe, the brown goshawk, came to call.
The visitors to the birdbath certainly lived life at the edge and during the hours he watched them Simmonds would ask himself a question: did they know hope? Did they view a glass half full, were optimistic and positive, resilient, meeting challenges. And then he’d turn to himself and ask the same question. For the paraplegic, the glass was half empty. He too had once known hope, and the loss of this most intangible of the human spirit dropped him into despair. It made him think death was better than this thing that posed as life.
Hope came immediately after the car accident that had crushed his spine. He had faced his tragedy with resolve, he had become a cliche of the indomitable human spirit, he had put on a brave face, he was a battler, a man of courage, as he might write in a headline. The real test was to come, however, when he realised he would never walk again, despite all the talk of miracles and advances in medical science. He now confronted his own mortality, planning to be the instrument of death itself. It had not become a question of courage, it was in fact the easy way out, but it was the mechanics and logistics of arranging his own demise, and the red tape involving it, that was proving most difficult.
John Simmonds had drawn up a plan for a sympathetic friend to wheel him to a cliff-face, parking the wheelchair on a slight slope. Simmonds in his own time would simply release the hand-brake. Predictably, no one could be persuaded to help, the friends recoiled in horror at the prospect, without even considering the legal ramifications. Then there were the sleeping pills stored for several months, but Simmonds’ doctors reduced his supply. And then there was Dr Death and his suicide kit, but it needed someone to administer it, and no one would come forward.
It was while John Simmonds considered his options, tired of all those people on satellite television diving and swimming and running and making love, that he had looked anew at the birds coming to the birdbath.
As the seasons changed in his outer Hobart backyard, so did the birds that came to visit, part of a bird migration that ebbed and flowed through the garden, in the way John Simmonds hoped feeling would ebb and flow through his legs. He had become so interested in the birds that he augmented the birdbath with a bird table and his carer supplied this with small pots of honey, fruit and seeds each day, when she replenished the birdbath with water.
A passing parade of nature. A kaleidoscope of colour, the seasons given shape by the travelling birds arriving in spring from the mainland over Bass Strait, leaving as the days shortened in autumn. With the departures, the birdbath now filled with domestic migrants, birds like crescent and spine-billed honeyeaters moving towards the coast from breeding grounds in the high country.
The new holland honeyeaters, clothed in a uniform of pulsating yellow and black and white, represented the neighbourhood watch, forever warning of danger. The tiny spinebills, the pick-pockets, the artful dodgers of the bird world, darted from flower to flower in the beds close to the birdbath, to steal pollen and nectar from under the beaks of the bigger birds protecting their bounty of food. Aware of the sheer joy that Simmonds derived from watching the birds, his friends installed a drip-feeder with a mix of honey and water. The spinebills hovered like hummingbirds to dip their scimitar beaks into the feeder’s nozzle or sip from the tray underneath.
Comings and goings, the migrants to far-flung horizons. Come autumn Simmonds dreamed of joining them. What adventures awaited the birds as they moved north, he asked himself, crossing ocean and rivers and the dry outback. Mobile and free, their course guided at night by the stars, the position of the sun by day, the birds lifted and carried north by the wind.
Then as winter approached, early snow on kunanyi/Mt Wellington, Simmonds switched his thoughts to their eventual destination; they’d escaped Tasmania and traded the cold for the warmth of the sun. He imagined where they might be at any given hour, with the certain knowledge of only one destination. That of the silvereyes. Those of the species that called Tasmania home had distinctive colouration that marked them apart from mainland sub-species. The birds of Simmonds’ garden and beyond had russet flanks to go with the colour of moss on their backs, silver undersides and a white ring around the eye. They were easily spotted in winter along the Gold Coast in Queensland, more than 2400 kilometres from where they fledged.
Coincidentally, it was also a common destination for Tasmanians in winter. Simmonds had been there himself in happier times but he hadn’t noticed silvereyes, not then; the knowledge of their wintering grounds derived from a growing collection of bird books and field guides he had been given by his friends.
Tasmanians, feathered or not, spending winter under the sun, amid the palms and fig trees, the surf and sand. It cemented the connection, the bond that tied Simmonds to his friends of the sky, of the dunk and splash of the birdbath, of the dappled shadows of banksia and bottlebrush.
The carnival of the avian world did not know human boundaries, did not recognise or honour borders but some cemented boundaries of their own, permanent residents holding territories within just one location.
The new holland honeyeaters, unlike the birds that came and went with the seasons, remained all year. They might chase off new arrivals, possessive of their space, but their vigilance served a greater purpose within the avian garden community. The honeyeater clans posted a look-out for both aerial and land-based predators, guardians who emitted a far-carrying alarm cry when danger threatened, a call that birds of all species knew, and all birds were warned.
John Simmonds learned from watching his avian friends that the essence of a bird’s existence was not just about struggle and survival; they were capable of play, empathy and seemed to know that industriousness could bring rewards.
The more he watched the birds the more he saw parallel lives – birds and humankind were both on a remarkable journey, the beginning known, the end uncertain. A journey strangely mirroring the seasons. Bonding and birth in spring, a summer of fruitfulness before a slowing down in autumn and then a hunkering down for winter.
Although the dinosaur-descended birds and humans were separated by millions of years of evolution they had an intimate connection, an affinity. Sometimes Simmonds believed he and the birds were at one.
Television had been John Simmond’s contact with the human species beyond his friends’ company at weekends. He now knew it distorted life, threw up extremes, the extremes that had fuelled his own life before his accident. The television said life had to be lived to the full, but it was a life of exaggeration.
If only be could turn back the cliched clock. He’d leave the fast lane for a slower pace. He’d eschew the car and, where possible, walk or at least make time for a lengthy meander each day. Since discovering the daily bird spectacle, John Simmonds told his friends a slow pace would allow him to observe all about him. He would take his time and take in all that he had missed before.
The more John Simmonds watched the birds at the feeing table the more he saw the parallel existence, the mirror of human society. A pecking order of sorts, literally, but it was largely benign without menace, an order of priorities rather than status or greed, or needless brutality.
Industriousness brought rewards to share with family, food to raise chicks so they were healthy and strong and intelligent enough to listen to the lessons of life passed on to them. Was it so different for people?
Lessons of life important for both birds and people, and John Simmonds had delighted in the honeyeaters teaching their offspring to fly, to seek out nectar and pollen in the bottlebrushes, and to sing. That was real life, and that was how the birds at the bird table and birdbath lived it.
And there was a wider lesson for humans that Simmonds now understood. Birds did not take chances, were not frivolous and cavalier. No taking risks in the birds’ domain. Birds knew life had its dangers, of talon and sword-beak, and danger was something humans appeared at times to ignore, or dismiss. Birds were strictly attuned to instinct, responding to coded messages in their DNA. Unlike birds, humans were prepared to put their faith in second chances, death presented a challenge that could be defied.
Birds didn’t live in hope and chance, he came to realise. They just knew.
The choice between life and death, it was in the gift of humans, it was exclusive to their species. Sick, injured and old birds merely soldiered on until the time came for them to fall off the perch. Or perhaps succumb to a quick death delivered by owl, hawk or falcon.
When his friends pointed out that the wild world was not without its ruthlessness and apparent brutality, Simmonds simply maintained the killing had a purpose – for food, survival in the predator’s case – and was not random and wanton, like the wars he saw portrayed on television. He now turned off the TV in the morning, what was being shown on the news from Gaza and Ukraine was too horrific to contemplate.
John Simmonds had given so much thought to committing suicide, and the elaborate plans to achieve his objective, that he had sometimes lost sight of the objective itself. It had become a game, a selfish one because it drew in his remaining friends who did not want to play.
After his deranged idea of wheeling himself off a cliff, John Simmonds did not go back to the drawing board of death. He went back to the birdbath and took refuge there. Watching the birds one morning, he remembered a honeyeater he had hit once in his speeding car before his own accident, a bird with broken and limp wings that had struggled in his hands, a bird that refused to die, a bird that refused to accept its fate.
Perhaps the honeyeater had hope, a desire to see what tomorrow would bring and it was better to wait and see than to die.
The memory of that bird now gave John Simmonds strength, not in body but in mind, to carry on. Life was about surviving, getting by and it was no less of a life for it.