This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems. Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.
THE PEACOCKS OF BABOQUIVARI By Erma J. Fisk. Illustrated by Louise Russell. 284 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. $14.95.
ERMA J. FISK is a little old lady in tennis shoes. Her husband, whom she adored, died a long time ago; her children are grown and scattered. She is obviously affluent - Mrs. Fisk has homes on Cape Cod and in Florida and travels a lot - and her prose style is that of the correspondence column in an alumnae bulletin. (Her announcement that she went to Vassar comes as no surprise.) She is a dedicated birder and given to haranguing the reader about wild life, the environment and The Interaction of Man and Nature. (That's how she'd write it: Mrs. Fisk is fond of capital letters.)
Anyone who has traveled the better suburbs or the older country clubs has met a Mrs. Fisk - usually a wiry, blue-eyed lady whose wardrobe appears to be more accreted than purchased. Most Mrs. Fisks are museum docents or active in a preservation society. This Mrs. Fisk, at 73, lived alone for five months in a tiny cabin in the foothills of Arizona's Baboquivari Peak, recording and banding birds for The Nature Conservancy.
To do so, she hiked miles, battled mice and, every day, shooed peacocks out of her cabin. She ate a lot of bananas (for the potassium), made her daily bread, drank the occasional sherry and kept a journal. The journal, along with letters written to friends Outside, makes an enchanting, if somewhat slapdash, book. ''As you will see,'' she says in her introduction, ''I am neither The Perfect Observer nor The Meticulous Scribe.''
Instead, Mrs. Fisk is a woman who, having acknowledged the inconveniences of age and a gimpy hip, chooses to ignore them. When she dresses to climb the skyline ridge of Baboquivari, she is torn between the straw hat that will shade her from the sun and the red beret that will make her visible if she falls. The climb exhausts her. ''You are a fool to keep going, my sensible self scolds. You are tired. You will fall, and who will find you? Don't you notice that when you stop, lie down to rest, above you against the blue sky a raven flies over and eyes you with evil intent?'' But she makes the ridge. ''I could go higher, but now at last I am on the rim, and see what I have come for - miles and miles of blue space between me and Yuma, between me and Mexico, the great world mine.''
If, however, Mrs. Fisk had had her way 17 years ago, she wouldn't have had that view from the ridge. ''After Brad (her husband) died I passionately wished each night for years that I might wake up dead in the morning.'' Obviously, she did not, but her pleasure in the present - ''Contentment is not the same as happiness, but it is a very solid state. When the sun is shining and I am handling a new bird I consider I am the luckiest widow in the world'' - is shadowed by memories of a remarkably joyous past. ''When the day is dreary . . . I often wonder: What am I doing here on this mountain, feeding peacocks? Then I think - I make myself think - where would I rather be? Back in that Boston hospital cradling that red and marvelous baby? OH YES!''
Continue reading the main story''The Peacocks of Baboquivari'' is ostensibly a birder's journal, and it is indeed full of bird lore. But it's also a book about loss, not only of a husband but of anyone to take care of. To no longer be responsible for anyone is perhaps the cruelest of all of age's consequences; small wonder Mrs. Fisk exults in being responsible for birds. But she also exults in being responsible for herself. ''Long ago I asked - you asked - WHAT AM I DOING HERE? I still don't know. It doesn't matter. Do we need excuses for being? The happiness welling through me is a gift from the high gods, a strength to carry me to whatever is the end of my days. No clock ticks. No one waits for me. In the utter silence of noon only the sun moves.'' Mrs. Fisk on Christmas, alone in her cabin, listening to the ''honking and foot-thumping of peacocks on my roofs'' and dressed to celebrate the day in red ''from top to bottom,'' is a sight to imagine, and treasure.
Continue reading the main story