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. She would have had to talk her protective father into giving her permission. 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.
He wrote:Īs 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. 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. His account of their meeting and growing relationship was extraordinarily sweet. Kaufman’ s descriptions of some of the people who picked him up are wonderfully written, and his discussion of hitchhiker strategies fascinating. The book is also a vivid picture of life in the 70s. 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. As the year goes on and on, Kaufman gets more wary and cynical about people, and less interested in the acquisitiveness of birding. The book sounds like a birding book, but it’s really a lot more than that. He budgeted a dollar a day for food, and quickly learned that dog food could keep him going for a long ways. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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