Jon Franzen birds!

So, when my friend Pam first advanced to me the idea that most birders were well-to-do white people driving to remote locations in their DVD-equipped SUVs and adjusting the lenses of their expensive cameras with polar-tech-encased arms, I pooh-poohed her. Now that I'm paying attention to who seems to share my fascination for tromping around in woodland scrub after Northern flickers and Ruby-crowned kinglets, I'm discovering that their may be something to Pam's criticism.

In a way, this class-concentration is not unexpected. Who has the leisure time, financial freedom, and enough education to pursue, observe, and delight in cataloguing our various avian species? But there has always been something rebellious for me in the stalking of a white-breasted nuthatch, or sudden discovery that Cedar Waxwings have nested in the sawed-off oak by my bedroom window. Something clandestine is captured in such a voyeuristic act, something larger and more beautiful than our everyday glimpses of the world. Something outside of the pounding ceaselessness of the mundane, divorced from our economic and social realities. I guess I was foolish enough to believe that, like the birds themselves, we as human beings could use birdwatching as a vehicle to break away from the class-conscious clay of which we are all born. But how could we? Like the Golem, we always seem to discover that our desires can never escape our origins.