Through the dining room windows of the Douglas Lodge, Lake Itasca glows in the morning mist, a deep pool of memory my brother and I have come here to tap. It’s been thirty-five years since I’ve been back, but time here has frozen. The breakfast plates drip with buttery hash-browns, eggs and bacon, sausages and pancakes as if it were still 1963, not mid-July, 2001. In ordering a bagel I’ve committed a faux-pas. It’s been savaged in the kitchen in response to my sin, basted with a pastry brush and now stares up at me, sodden with butter, a packet of cream cheese on the side.
       
        I remember the story my brother, Tom, told me of his visit here one year ago, how on entering the gift shop with our brother, Steve, the cashier had looked up and said with conviction, “You’re the Coles,” had looked right past their graying hair and burly forms and, peeling back the years, had seen before her two young boys, the faculty kids who would come from Arizona to these Minnesota woods when the biology station opened in June. And so it’s been everywhere we turn—the culvert, the graveyard, the bathing beach, the crappie hole—an eerie stasis, memories surfacing as, years before, my father would haul up his dredge, uncovering from the lake bottom fairy shrimp, daphnia, copepod.
       
        Now, we’re here for birds as well as memories. We head back to our room for our field glasses, butter and wood smoke scenting the air. Inside, we gather field guides and notebooks, hang binoculars from our necks, and set out from our spartan room, narrow twin beds, a dresser, a fan, and no TV. Were there one, I’d be tuning in CNN, as I’ve been doing all month long, following the search for Chandra Levy through the urban wilds of Washington. The TV images fill my head, policemen fanning out in Rock Creek Park; corpse-sniffing dogs searching boarded-up buildings; Chandra, smiling from the dining room table; Chandra, eyes closed, curls entangled on her mother’s head; Chandra, twenty-four and maybe alive. Our search is more hopeful. Last year Tom saw the chestnut-sided warbler, a true life-lister, and now wants me to see it too. We know it’s out there, but patience and diligence and plain dumb luck will determine if it makes my morning list.
       
        We begin at our old haunts, the faculty cabins and the long, straight walkway past the student cabins to the dining hall. Here, we spent hours playing ping-pong and listening to Rubber Soul back in 1963, five Cole kids and our close companion, Bill Underhill, son of an ichthyologist from St. Paul, a strong, lanky teen who moved between my preteen brothers—fishing, boating, and roaming the woods—and my teenaged sister and me. Bill life-guarded at the bathing beach, Bill introduced us to bog and fire-tower and Yeti lore. Bill gave us his picture, bare-chested in his cabin, lifting weights. I have it still, the sinewy boy, face contorted with the strain. His memory infuses this place.
       
        There’s a bend in the park road that calls up for Tom every time we pass it Bill’s encounter there with some young hoods. “I was sitting right there,” Tom recalls. “I thought there would be a fight, that Bill was so tough.” But when the hoods demanded, “Where’re you from?” Bill swaggered, then fizzled: “What’s it to you? St. Paul.” All these years we’ve remembered that retort, Tom, as if it were happening before him, and I, as it was told to me, Bill’s bravado. Then, one Christmas, a card arrived from the Underhills, “Have you seen Bill?” He had left a party, headed home to St. Paul, then turned up missing. “Please call us if you hear from him.” And then, the next year, a Christmas card with the same request. And then nothing more.
       
        Now, Tom has a kingbird in his sights. I raise my glasses to the spot and fall into the rhythm of birding, scanning the canopy, zeroing in, calling out coordinates then, finally, looking in tandem. We see red-breasted nuthatches spiraling down pine trees; song and chipping sparrows; cat birds, like mockingbirds in yarmulkes; great blue herons; ring-billed gulls and cedar waxwings; barn swallows in frenzied flight; black ducks with chicks; an immature bald eagle and, bright against the foliage, a scarlet tanager. We check each bird against the drawings in our field guide, confirm its markings and its range, then press a mental “Enter” key to file it away. In birding, I realize, much of the pleasure is after the fact—the checking and recording—as Tom and I will do tonight over Summit Ales, writing in our notebooks this first “day’s list” then three day’s hence our consolidated “trip lists” and finally, at home alone, our now enhanced “life lists,” each new bird recorded in the back of our field guides until one day, ideally, we’ll have seen them all. Birds, unlike people, require but one sighting. If we fail to see the chestnut-sided warbler, if every chestnut-sided warbler vanished suddenly from the earth, Tom would still have it, marked on his life list, written in stone.
       
        Our wanderings have brought us to the faculty cabins where we meet two biologists coming from the dock. They know of our father and tell us the news: Jim Underhill has died. I register the details—cancer, last August—but am jarred by the symmetry. One man, like my father, is from ASU; the other, like Jim, from the U of M. They could be our own fathers, thirty years back, Bill’s and ours, who had stood on this very spot, speaking in their summer tongue, a Latiny jargon, as we’d run by. And strangely, before these men, Tom and I remain faculty kids, though we’re ten years their seniors, at home are faculty ourselves. In the pause that follows I ask the Minnesotan, “Did they ever find out what happened to Bill?” He stares at me blankly. “His son,” I add, “who vanished in the sixties.” “I’m sorry,” he answers, “I hadn’t heard about that.” And I am truly shocked—that Bill’s story had been swallowed up with him, his slate wiped clean, especially here at Lake Itasca where bends in park roads play back voices and clerks see visions of our childhood selves; especially now, with Chandra’s mystery filling the airwaves and newsmen dredging up the long-cold case—Jimmy Hoffa, Etan Patz, Amelia Earhart, Ambrose Bierce—or the merely cool: Jill Behrman, who went for a bike ride in May of 2000 and never came back; Matthew Pendergrast, whose SUV, clothes, wallet, and money turned up last December in an Arkansas swamp, everything but him. How, then, could Bill’s name ring no bells, not even in the halls of his father’s department, not even by the shores of this mnemonic lake?
       
        Feeling awkward, we change the subject to one as dear to us as Bill and warblers: Cabin Four, our old summer home. It appears to be vacant; do they think we could go inside? They tell us what we long to hear: not only is it vacant, it’s unlocked. It’s as if they’d announced an extraordinary sighting—the red-cockaded woodpecker, the coppery-tailed trogon. We’re off in a flash to revisit Cabin Four.
       
        As the door swings open, whole decades dissolve. Inside it’s still the sixties, the same log walls, fireplace, tiny bathroom, and two-bedroom loft where we children slept. It’s all still present, Jeff sleepwalking on the balcony, our father calling out the species as a bird sounds from the thicket, the boys at midnight throwing pillows at an errant bat, our mother, heading out for groceries in Park Rapids. For her, these summers must have felt like golden times that she could bottle up and carry with her. In the late seventies she made a cardboard replica of Cabin Four, then built the real thing with my father and anyone who’d come to help outside Flagstaff, Arizona, their retirement home.
       
        Now, these rooms transport me in space as well as time. As I gaze up at the balcony, I feel both lake and mountain at my back; upon turning feel as likely to see, black before me, the slopes of Mt. Humphrey as Itasca’s shores. And my children, I think, who’ve never seen Itasca, but summered in Flagstaff, would bask here as I do, in this cabin’s glow, pre-Vietnam, early Beatles.
       
        It’s been an eventful day, despite that gap on our morning list—the chestnut-sided warbler—its slot more than filled by Cabin Four. And the next days continue true to form. In the graveyard through a light rain, we see white-breasted nuthatches, eastern wood peewees, downy woodpeckers, chimney swifts, a yellow warbler, an American redstart, a red-shafted flicker, a black-capped chickadee, and a red-eyed vireo. Down a lonely back road toward the Loonsong B & B, we pick up ticks, and a rose-breasted grosbeak, then, yellow through the high grass, an American goldfinch. By an old cabin in the park, Tom calls out a bird I’ve never seen, the Blackburnian warbler, as he does so recalling the words of our father who said of some naturalist, Tom forgets who, “He saw the Blackburnian warbler, and it changed his life.” Tom repeats the quote. And in its cadence I too hear my father’s voice, “Bring the glasses to your eyes,” a birding fundamental, while sensing how feeble my memories are, how sparse, compared to Tom’s, which form a rich, dense foliage through which we peer. For three days in fact, as much as looking I’ve been listening to the voices that Tom replays: the cashier’s, my father’s, Bill’s, and even Jim’s. Our last summer at Itasca, after Bill’s disappearance, Tom remembers asking Jim if they’d heard from him and his chilling reply, “We don’t expect to be hearing from Bill,” hope, like some lost lure, sunk in the profundal ooze.
       
        Our time running out here, we wander down to the dock at dusk and watch the fireflies floating through the cattails. A loon calls from across the lake, haunting and distant. I remember the summer before when, sleeping on the roof of the Flagstaff house, I awoke to coyote cries in no way dog-like, impossibly high-pitched, wild and manic, “like laughter,” I had thought then, “almost like loons.” And as I tell Tom this story, the loon sounds again, but this time I’m hearing coyotes; then unmistakably it’s the loon, until Tom solves the mystery: it’s both coyotes and a loon, the dog pack answering the lonely call, our two Cabin Fours distilled into sound.
       
        Sunday morning at the Douglas Lodge, our last buttery breakfast consumed, our bags half-packed, we decide to spend our final hour here birding in a leafy grove just beyond the dining room. As I’m zeroing in on a yellow-bellied sapsucker, Tom cries, “There it is. That’s it. The chestnut-sided warbler.” And for five slow minutes it lingers in our view, weaving in and out of leaves, but staying in one tree, perfectly in focus, at one point, obligingly, hopping onto a leafless branch and turning to expose its chestnut streak. This is just too much, I think, this plum of a sighting, here at the eleventh hour, life, as it often does, mirroring art: loose ends tied up; in the final chapter, quests fulfilled. And were this trip a text, I know what would follow: our warbler sighted, Chandra would be found, as a necessary adjunct to its design. But this is life, where all is random, this sighting mere coincidence, its timing pure irrelevance, on this July day, in these Minnesota woods, on this small blue planet hurtling through space.
       
        Walking back to our room with Tom, I think of Chandra, and I think of Bill, of open ends and hanging threads, of mystery and hope and faith and the wisdom sometimes of letting go. But there’s something bothering me, one thing I have to know. I wonder all the way through the car ride to the airport, and all through the plane ride back to New Orleans, through the parking garage and the car ride home, through the piled-up papers and the wagging dog. Once inside I boot up my computer and punch in the words, “Minneapolis Star,” select “Archives,” “Obituaries,” “August, 2000,” “James Underhill.” Then I skim through the praises of colleagues, “an exemplary role model,” “an avid gardener,” “a first-class guy,” and those of Mary, a daughter whom I don’t recall: “sharp wit and banter,” “warm, generous and compassionate,” “We’d call him our Renaissance man.” But what I really want will be below. I scroll to the bottom and find what I feared I would: “In addition to his daughter, survivors include his wife, Anne of St. Paul, and another daughter, Sarah Holm of Radisson, Wisconsin.” How could no one have thought to, have needed to, write Bill down?
       
        It’s late, but I’m wide awake. I file away my document and print up a copy to send to Tom. Then I walk the dog, sift through the mail, peruse the headlines, and turn on CNN. Unpacking my field guide, I flip to the back and look up my two new birds, the chestnut-sided warbler and the warbler that changed a man’s life. With my blackest pen, in my finest hand, I write them both down.

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