As gifts go, the better part of a day in a mean wind standing on a bunch of rocks will strike the average person as itself somewhat less appealing than a nice bottle of red and a $10 gift card at Blockbuster.
I was so happy when my wife gave me such a day. People who watch birds really are different.
I parked on top of Mount Wachusett. (There's a parking lot! Mountains don't have parking lots!) I got out and walked to the peakiest bit, the rocky outcrop where I saw the scopes set up and the people standing around and hoping. It's an odd feeling when you step into someone else's little ritual, a lot of someone elses' thing that they do, and there you are in an alien landcape on your own feet and walking but off balance. It would be like if someone showed up at a speech I was giving about search technology and they came up after and stood quietly and someone else asked me about, I don't know, Boolean Search versus Natural Language Query, and we talked for a while. They would see pieces, like the stitches scribbled on a baseball tumbling toward the batter, but not really comprehend.
I stood on the rock. A woman I met in the parking lot, affable and outgoing and the site coordinator, called out that everyone should call out any bird they saw. I looked around, and saw more Swarovski and Leica and Zeiss binoculars and scopes than I had EVER seen. Lovely bright glass. I carry Nikons, and they were dear. I show them to engineers and they look through them then hold them out a few inches and look at them like they're reading them. Somehow engineers like glass. But Leica! Swarovski! Zeiss! Oh my.
It took me a while to get used to the circle around us with the calling marks. "Near Joe English, left, streaming right, across Joe English, up two glasses from the horizon. Into the blue, the gray, across the cloud shaped like a, like a, like an arrowhead. Two Wings and a Sharpie." Which meant, left of a mountain called Joe English, moving right across it, up two diameters of a binoculars' viewing field from the horizon, across a cloud shaped like an arrowhead. (I never saw said cloud.) Crossing a blue section of sky, then a cloudy section, two broad-winged hawks and a sharp-shinned hawk.
That's the point of the day: The hawks. One goes to a hawkwatch to hold binoculars to his face until his eyesockets chafe while looking for hawks. From a venal perspective the idea is to see birds before others do. From the transcendent perspective, it's a chance to sneak into a massive, eldritch migration. If you hold the binoculars to your face long enough, you can see dots spinning in a vortex, which turn out to be broad-winged hawks, which have the good manners to stream overhead like revelation with rhinestones on it.
All the hawks move faster when they stream. They all hunch their shoulders and push their wrists behind them and hold onto their path like it was a wire. For hawks, they look wrong. But they absolutely define speed, and distance, and the burr of travel like a sharp needle dragged across glossy metal with a corkscrewing thread of filing spinning out behind.
Of course, transcendent is nothing. At one point I took my binoculars down and saw something closer. "Treeline!" I shouted. "Osprey!" And a fellow watcher looked. "Eagle," he corrected. Later he said, "Whoever saw the eagle, thank you! Otherwise it would have gotten by and we never would have seen it!" The man was wearing a sweater that looked like it came out of a footlocker except that the the loose weave was perfect and the color sublime, and his accent very nearly Brahmin. And when he thanked me I melted. I mean, just melted. And I said "You're welcome." Out loud. Which gave me time for the transcendent part.
Man is born to watch, and the hawks fly upward.
