Sixty years!?!

(Listen to the radio version here.)

Exactly sixty years ago this week, on high school freshman registration day when I was 13 years old, I got a huge crush on the boy sitting in front of me in homeroom.

In the same way that adolescent geese, swans, and cranes meet their lifetime partners when large flocks gather and hang out through the months that coincide with much of a school year, high school becomes the human form of a big mixed flock.

Russ and I had a lot of classes together, became debate partners, and were both members of the science club and a social group that formed around that interest in science. Some geese, swans, and cranes single out the mate they’ll stick with for life during their first winter together, but some take years to know who they might be compatible with, and many make a bunch of false starts in courtship before things grow serious. Russ, the more methodical, less impulsive half of our partnership, waited three years to ask me out, but long before our first date exactly 57 years ago today, on August 30, 1968, we had a lot of shared history and a solid friendship.

People often quote Leo Tolstoy’s opening sentence of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” as if it’s a sacred truism, but Tolstoy got it only half right. Every happy family, and every happy marriage, is happy in its own unique way, too.

People who understand and appreciate the natural world understand and appreciate diversity—among and within species, including our own. So I have absolutely no advice for anyone about love and commitment, because we’re all different. We love who we love and muddle through life hoping for the best, each dealing with our own unique sets of hardships, difficulties, interests, passions, strengths, and weaknesses, and we each change over time in ways that no 13-year-old child smitten with puppy love could anticipate. If things haven’t always gone well between us, they usually have, and the worst of the rough patches, decades ago, left us with greater love and appreciation for each other.

I was not a birder when we got married; indeed, I’d never heard of a field guide and didn’t realize that regular people could own binoculars. We didn’t have enough money for Christmas gifts for each other back then, but it was Russ’s idea to tell his mom to surprise me with binoculars and a field guide for Christmas in 1974.

The first time I ever looked through binoculars in my life was on Christmas 1974.

Russ knew me well enough to be pretty sure I’d enjoy birding, but how could he possibly have guessed that I’d immediately become monomaniacal about it? During the years when he was working on his Masters and Ph.D., we were both consumed with our own concerns while supporting the other as well as we could. I read and helped edit every word of his Masters thesis and Ph.D. dissertation, which he wrote with me in mind—he wanted his work to be understandable for people in other disciplines, too. He came along on some of my Michigan Audubon field trips even though he wasn’t a birder, and I went along on some of his field research data-collecting jaunts.

Birding, especially the kind involving Big Years and other intensive listing pursuits, has damaged a lot of marriages. When our kids were still home, Russ had to pretty much stop coming along on my long-distance birding trips and I had to stop tagging along when he had scientific meetings in birdy places, but we wove birding, along with everyone else’s interests, into our family vacations.

My whole family, including Piggy, was along to see Atlantic Puffins and Razorbills on Machias Seal Island when we took a family vacation to New England in 1993.

Our kids were grown when I did my Big Year in 2013. I went to a lot of places Russ would have loved to come along to, but just before the year started, his mom, 94 at the time, moved in with us, and because of her dementia, we couldn’t leave her for more than a few hours at a time. So during that entire year, Russ was only along with me for one morning in February, when we drove up to Two Harbors and stumbled upon the closest, most cooperative Boreal Owl we’ve ever seen—one of my most treasured memories of that entire, thrilling year.

In the past three years, Russ and I have gone together on two trips that were entirely focused on birding—to Alaska and Hawaiʻi. We knew he’d enjoy all the places we visited even if he wasn’t that interested in the birds.

Russ will be retiring at the end of the year, and the one thing he’s been yearning to do is to visit the Galápagos. This time it will be his trip, not a dedicated birding tour, so he’ll make the plans and arrangements. Just as he got to see beautiful scenery and wildlife in Alaska and Hawaiʻi, I’ll get to see plenty of birds in the Galápagos.

It's lovely, and lucky, to still be running side by side with my best friend as we sprint through the final stretches of this life-long marathon.