David set his paper airplane flying towards the Columbia River. It flashed through the sky in a high arc. He watched it soar, balancing on his toes on a flat rock along the river’s bank. The wind was calm but the water was choppy; waves washed loudly on the bank below.

Back home in Colorado, David dealt mainly in balsawood aircraft. In Colorado his airplanes had wings with two tiers, propellers that whirled on metal bearings, and loud racing stripes—yellow and green just like his older brother Cody’s high school baseball uniform. The one he wore when he pitched his way through the last home game of the season. When each ball found its way past fast swinging bats and into the catcher’s mitt. David’s brother lined them up, back behind the chain link fence of the visiting dugout. Ugly mugs all pouty, noses wrinkled up like David’s dog Chester when he’d smelt a good mole.

Fleeing west in the small, dirty-white motor home with his mother and sister, David’s model kits had been left behind with Chester and Cody. Left in the baby blue Colorado house where David had grown up. In the last days before leaving, his parents discussed—in strained voices used to arguing and not to this kind of sad, reasoned decision making—the logistics of David’s overflow of things.

“I can ship out anything you need that you can’t fit,” had said his father. “He can also keep some stuff here. I assume he’ll be coming back to visit now and again. Won’t you sport?”

“Yeah,” said his mother. “Visits. Probably in the summer. When he doesn’t have school. After we’re settled.” She had looked past David, sitting with them at the dinner table, gluing a fin to a wing.

David bounced on the balls of his feet. Peering up into the sky, he shielded his eyes with one hand from the sun. His airplane swooped up, up and peaked. Down, down—softly, a perfect angle for landing. It hit the water at the peak of a wave. Nose sinking, it swelled. Carefully creased corners plumped and unfolded. Tiny blue lines, the even fainter pink margin that ran perpendicular, softened. Dye pushed back and forth, slowly washing away. The airplane, now a flattened soggy triangle, rode the waves of the river up and down—flashing in and out of sight. 

With these makeshift paper models he traded in carpentry for engineering. The airplanes lost the detail of the balsawood models but gained air, speed, simple aerodynamic properties that David, a smart eighth grader by all rights, could only grasp the edges of. But good engineering wasn’t simply about equations, theories, and laws. Engineering was about how far you could send a square of paper soaring on a windless day. How many loops you could make in a loop-de-loop. There was a certain amount of intuition to engineering and a whole lot of trial and error.

David went back to the camper for more paper. The door creaked loudly on rusty hinges and the metal step groaned under his dirty tennis shoes. He sat himself at the camper’s flowered linoleum table where he had his paper all spread out.

“How you doing hon?” His mother, back from the coin operated camp showers, burst into the creaky camper smelling of soap.

David ran a dirty fingernail along a fold. His mother’s long black hair was wrapped up in towel, resting on her head in a towering spiral. In a gray hooded sweatshirt, shorts and pink plastic flip flops, she looked like the neighborhood girls back in Colorado who ran up and down their street shouting cheers every spring before cheerleading tryouts. David’s brother Cody had made one of those girls his girlfriend. The two of them spent hours together in front of the television watching movies. Cody’s hand hooked around her waist and up her back, just partly covering the second C in REBECCA.

His mother set a pot of water to boil as David finished up the final touches of his airplane. Setting the creases sharp and folding up small flaps in the back that would make it turn over itself in the air like a roller coaster.

“You’re getting pretty good at those,” she said, glancing over at him. Her smile revealed the half broken off tooth she had yet to get capped.

David held the airplane by its base and repeated a throwing motion towards his mother standing in the camper’s kitchen. The plane’s paper wings flapped audibly as he thrust it through the air without letting go. 

He set his plane back down and ran his fingernail hard along the longest crease, the one that formed the bottom spine. His fingernails were long. Dark half crescents of dirt caught underneath them. Some of that dirt was Colorado dirt. But that dirt, that home dirt, was mixed with sand. Sand from the banks of the Columbia, slowly dislodging the Colorado dirt from its place. 

***

Most birds, to the surprise of most people, migrate at night. In the cool air of evening, when the violent updrafts of the day have calmed and the wind is more still, hundreds of thousands of birds pass above our heads unseen and often unheard. But not always. Lying awake on the top bunk of the small camper, his mother and little sister sound asleep in the bed below, David could hear the soft honks of Northern Canadian Geese heading south. The geese flew too high for their call notes to echo off the rock faces that lined the Columbia River Gorge. They flew nearly level with the high prairie; the tops of hills. Where the Gorge carved through eastern Oregon, just before the bend that would take it up through Washington and into Canada.

Each call was distinct, clear and soft. Muddled only in the multitude. David did not know that the geese always called as they flew over this stretch of the river where the canyon narrowed, bottlenecking the geese over the water. Crowding them in the near blackness, they called so as to not run into one another. A warning song, a song of excitement, a song to keep their long wings flapping in the darkness of night and the light of the stars. They flew by an ancient internal compass. Like ship captains, they read the stars and the magnetic poles of the earth. Gravity, the light tug of the moon, and the iron oar of the north, forces felt even at one thousand feet and higher still.

If David’s mother had pulled the camper over only an hour earlier, chosen a different triangle on her map to set up camp, David’s night would have been silent. Conscious of this noise, David was unaware of the flighted spectacle above them. If the world could turn on a light for just a moment, like the flashbulb of an old-fashioned portrait photographer, David would be astounded. Not simply a few passing geese but the sky, so clear in the day, choked with geese. Their tear shaped bodies set in overlapping V’s of broken formations.

Countless in number, it was the night that allowed them to be specifically counted. The scientific community should feel especially indebted to this. On a night like this, where the sky spread out cloudless, the stars as bright as any in Colorado, all David would have to do was to lay on his back in the sand of the small beaches that dotted the Columbia, watch the moon’s bright face, and count the eclipses of geese as they flew past.

It was a full moon. Reflecting off the water’s waves, a rippling light. As the birds passed across the moon they showed up black. Like the Halloween witch across a harvest moon, goose shaped shadows emerged and disappeared in the sky above the camper. Watching in this way, if attentive, David would have counted that from ten o’clock to eleven o’clock one hundred and seventeen geese were illuminated by the full moon. If David, who had always been a good math student, had calculated correctly he would have known that in that hour, as the moon and stars traveled a small portion of their arc across the night sky and as David’s mother and sister slept soundly in the bunk below, forty thousand six hundred and ninety-nine geese passed overhead.

But David did not know any of this. Lying awake he could hear the geese calling but he could also hear the river lapping at its banks, his mother’s soft snoring, and the hum of a gas generator in the distance, a clear violation of the park’s rules. None of these noises had woken him. Not even the train horn that blared a half an hour ago had woken him. These things might of, if only he had been asleep. But David couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t sleep and could lay awake for nights on end.

His mother blamed the hard, rough mattress of the camper beds, even stopping off to buy a soft-fingered, yellow foam pad which she slipped under his sheets.

“It will only be a few more nights hon. I promise,” she told him, patting him on the head and messing his hair that needed cutting, her broken tooth hidden under pursed lips.

But David knew, as he lay awake at night, that even in Newport he wouldn’t sleep. The sound of the surf pounding in the distance would keep him company. Not waking him but keeping him awake. The same way in which the bird calls overhead hadn’t woken him but would not let him sleep. He would listen to the surf, to the gulls calling the first sunrays over the mountains in the east, diving at the sparkling light cast on rolling waves. He would start school next fall bleary eyed and unable to focus, withering in the mist and rain of the Oregon coast.

 

Yet David is only half right. For sure it is not the rickety trailer that is at the root of his insomnia so much as the daily movement it makes. David is correct that in Newport he will not sleep, at least not for the first month or so. His mother will try all the remedies she can think of. She will warm his milk and rub his shoulders. Take him for long walks at sunset, pointing out sandpipers and sea urchins, the long arcing fin of a killer whale. She will sing him lullabies and feed him turkey. She will read a book called On Raising a Healthy Happy Child and ask him if he feels shaky and anxious. She will give him a mantra to repeat over and over in his sleep.

“When you get shaky hon just say to yourself that you have a guardian angel. Repeat it with me. I have a guardian angel.”

David will chime in half-heartedly. He will yawn. A string of saliva stretching like a guitar string in the back of his throat will break.

“You know that it’s true right?” she will say. “You have an angel who watches you and just you. You just need to think about that and not the things that make you shaky.”

After this David will lie awake, listening to the waves and the gulls, still unaware of the many migratory shapes passing silently above the clouds and over the moon, now set over the ocean, repeating silently to himself that he has a guardian angel, until the words start to lose their meaning and a guardian angel starts to sound like something he didn’t really want to have in the first place.

Eventually, because he is young, and because for most people insomnia is an episodic thing, David will start to sleep again. It will return as it always was, a habit that never really left him. By the time the next summer comes around and the geese have begun to fly back north, spending their days floating, resting, bobbing up and down in the bodies of water that surround him, it will be hard to remember what it was like to lie awake at night chanting to himself. David will drift from his airplanes. In his own high pivoting arc he will begin to cross the threshold of puberty and all of the clichés of angry young boys living in small rundown houses on the Oregon coast with single mothers will start to come true.

 

When summer comes around plans of David visiting Colorado have been long since abandoned. It is over a year after the camper arrived, rumbling and nearly out of gas, in Newport, after David’s things, airplane kits included, have arrived via UPS only to be left untouched in their large boxes in the garage, and after David has completed his first year of high school and hated it. Fifteen now, David roams the Newport night on his own, a bottle of vodka in his backpack. He rides his bike up and down empty streets and over the hard packed sand along the surf, stopping every so often to chuck a sand dollar or stone into the waves and take a burning swig of vodka, the liquid sloshing, turning over itself inside the bottle as he caps it.

Making his way inland David weaves on the sidewalks, his head swimming. His bicycle keeps tipping over and all he can do is laugh hysterically from underneath its light cold frame, his right knee ever more and more battered and his ankle starting to swell. It takes him down sideways, his wrist reaching out instinctually in the way they tell you not to do. David is down and sideways and staring up into the moon which is almost laughing back down at him except it keeps being obscured by fast moving clouds and shadows.

Under the street lamps he is a shadow too, although hardly as graceful as the geese whose calls become more and more apparent the longer he listens, straining his ears past traffic and dogs barking and airplanes to the soft honking that is almost like a trumpet except muted in a way that trumpets don’t get muted.

Eventually David just gets sick of it, the falling over, his knee starting to bleed, his rolled up pant leg an unacceptable dressing, and drags himself onto a patch of grass next to a church, out of sight of any windows. Spinning his tire with his uninjured arm, he lies back on the grass and lets the reeling of his head calm. Opening and closing his eyes, the stars swerve sideways, sliding and crashing into one another. His racing heart begins to beat in time. His bleeding knee slows but does not clot. 

The mess of stars starts to make him feel nauseous. He rises onto all fours, his left leg kicking hard against his bicycle, crawls to a bush, and empties his stomach. It doesn’t burn so much coming up as it did going down. Sliding back towards his bike, mud caking his pants, mixing into his bloody knee, he lies back down. The sky stabilizes, the stars now moving only one at a time and not very often. He counts geese against the moon, marveling at the pale white circumlunar mist. Almost as bright as the moon itself. 

Counting against the moon, this is something he has learned from an older girl named Cassie. Cassie is a junior in high school who wears tight pants, thick-framed glasses, and a ponytail. She is a girl who sits alone on the sand reading books when the sun comes out. Whose mouth tastes always of spearmint, even when they have spent all past sunset on the greens of the golf course near the seventh hole, drinking beer and watching the stars.

“I learned about it for a report,” she told him. “I had to read a study on emperor geese. I guess they can count them with radar and stuff but for the most part the moon is sometimes a lot easier. The moon works everywhere, in places where you don’t have radar. Well, at least so long as its clear out and the moon is full.” She told him this as they lay together, not more than two weeks ago tonight, on a tablecloth he had spread out as a blanket.

This was a night when David had tried to surprise her. He brought blueberry muffins, candles, and a bottle of bad wine obtained through a friend’s older brother, out to the greens with them. “I couldn’t carry a pie without you noticing,” he told her as he spread out his tablecloth.

 That night, when they’d finished the wine, he wrapped his arm tight around her shoulders and whispered into her ear that he loved her. These were words he had never said to anyone he wasn’t related to. She was small, although in truth not much smaller than him, but with his arms squeezed tight she felt small. Her shoulders were thin, the bones pressing up through taut skin and her thin blue wool sweater. His bicep, worked from his mother’s weights kept next to the television, flexed against her spine where he knew a large red poppy, bloomed. Her tattoo with roots exposed to the tips with tiny caps, one bent over bud, and a seedpod still green but with top popped. Lacy veined leaves and pistons rendered in incredible detail, down to the individual hair-like fibers that lined the stem. Which were, as she told him, how you could tell it was not a drug poppy but its purely decorative, and in this case wild, first cousin.

The first time he saw it they were alone in her bedroom after school, both her parents at work. “Drug poppies have smooth stems,” she said.  “A meadow poppy,” she called it.

“But you know,” she said—he remembers her rolling onto her back so the meadow poppy was hidden and her small bare breasts revealed, nipples like flowers themselves. He handed her a cigarette, which she held, dangling over the side of her bed, “when I used to help out that landscaper last summer we’d find drug poppies all the time. Hidden in old ladies gardens. Planted in the midst of a bed of posies. They didn’t even know they were there or what they really were. Usually we’d leave them, except for one we found too close to a sidewalk, its seedpods had been razor bladed to death. I kept some of them. I still have them, dried out. The seeds might even still grow.” She puffed a smoke ring into his face. He hadn’t been able to make one back.

She has many talents. He thinks she is beautiful and she amazes him. But she had not said it back. That night, or any of the time since. Those three words he can only courageously confess when drunk.

Alone tonight, on his back in the grass of the church David laughs and chokes, coughing. A shadow passes over the moon. Too long. It is a cloud not a bird. Slow moving cumulus clouds drifting in from the mountains out to sea. By morning the wind will shift and they will drift back in again, quicker, on stronger air. Breath out, breath in.

David stands up. His head goes heavy than light, expanding and contracting. He lifts his bicycle upright, brushing dirt from its saddle. He is cold. He’s lost his goose count. The soft honks have died away. He is unsure if they were ever there at all. A gull cries from far off. He can picture it swooping through the dark, landing on the sand, wings stretched almost straight up, then folding seamlessly into its body like they weren’t even there. He is starting to like the gulls.

When he first arrived in Newport he hated them. Fat bodies, always a dirty white. Chunky, hooked bills, picking at garbage. He once caught one dragging a dirty diaper, almost larger than itself, down the sand, leaving a trail of stuffing and turned over sand in its wake. A larger one followed, cawing loudly. Hopping up and down with wings out. Trying to steal the diaper and failing over and over again.

He has started, only very recently, to watch them fly. The way they ride the turbulent air currents above crashing waves. Hovering, nearly still, in roaring wind. Finding a pocket, a location of equilibrium. In the air their calls sound more free. The ugly honking of the diaper-following gull transformed into the sharp staccato attack of a high, soaring note. Scavengers they are, but he is beginning to see how they watch for it. Riding the air, searching. Finding, from twenty feet up a sand dollar, still whole, that all of the beachcombers parading the sand in search of treasure can’t find.

David mounts his bike, scraping his muddy shoe against the pedals. He rides unsteadily down the grassy slope and steadier, onto the sidewalk. His pants are wet and his knee has started to throb. He passes Cassie’s house on the way home, taking a route that is significantly longer than necessary. Her window, on the ground floor, is dark. He pictures her sleeping, her face calm, eyelids fluttering lightly with dreams. The sky to the East is beginning to take color, a deep violet stripe against the black above him. He mouths it then, at her window. Not making a sound.