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For Lucy, Wester and Flint
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With a dream in your heart you’re never alone.
—BURT BACHARACH & HAL DAVID
It is easy to keep from walking;
the hard thing is to walk without touching the ground.
It is easy to cheat when you work for men,
but hard to cheat when you work for Heaven.
You have heard of flying with wings,
but you have never heard of flying without wings.
You have heard of the knowledge that knows,
but you have never heard of the knowledge that does not know.
Look into that closed room,
the empty chamber where brightness is born!
Fortune and blessing gather where there is stillness.
—The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
Translated by Burton Watson
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1
Hello, Christian!
My name is Gieles. I saw you flying with your geese on an air show. I thought it was a magical spectacle. You were very high in the sky with your flying two-seater motorbike. My father says you were flying with geese barnacles, but I have certainty they were geese lesser white-fronted.
I apologise for my French. I have big problems with your language. I try to do good.
I am for years impassioned by the geese. I have fourteen years old. I have two brown geese, American Tufted Buff. They wear a tuft, very beautiful and very elegant.
Like you I am a goose explorer and I am training my geese for a project. My geese listen moderately average. They are not shy. Indeed, sometimes they are insolent. They resemble the children of Dolly, my neighbour lady. My neighbour lady is above average good-looking.
I do the training with a stick. The stick is not for violence but for obediencing. I always use different stick. When geese know my stick longer, the obediencing disappears. This is not desirable.
Your migrating varieties excel in listening. My compliments, also on behalf of your wife. Your geese regard you and your wife as an adoptive father. My geese regard me, I cry, as a cousin or brother to obtain tricks on. Just like the children of my neighbour lady on whom I babysit.
I live in the Netherlands, next to an airplane path. Geese next to an airplane path gives difficulties, you will observe! I am in great agreement. Fortunately my geese do not fly through the path. That comes, I cry, from my training (I have a small pride in this). Rest assured, my geese do not live in captivity. Captive birds are a scandal that should be terminated. My geese live in liberty on our campground. It is a campground for people who adore airplanes. They collect airplanes as if it was postage stamps.
You ask of course, why does the boy write? I do not write in order to fly in the two-seater motorbike with you, although for me that would really be spectacle. Being the same high height as the geese in the sky, together with the migrating varieties past the cumulus clouds! Unfortunately, your professional tourism is too expensive for me. I am writing you for a very different motive, for the content of our mutual training of the geese.
Gieles hesitated. How could he make contact with this man—this world famous goose specialist, meteorologist, pilot, filmmaker, ornithologist, photographer, writer, vegan and activist—and ask him the most important questions without revealing too much about his incredible scheme? It had to be kept secret. Gieles stood up from his desk and walked to the open attic skylight. Leaning out with his arms on the roof tiles, he gazed over at the runway. Less than sixty metres away was a straight black strip with lights embedded in it, as well as pastures and fields. In two minutes’ time Gieles could be out on that runway, causing chaos. He wouldn’t have to do a thing. Just standing there would be enough to get himself on every TV station in the country. But then his father could kiss his job as an airport bird controller goodbye.
Gieles looked over at the lights of a descending plane. The sky was calm. The only vibration of air that could be seen was around the wings. The roaring of the engines swelled steadily. He walked back to his laptop and filed the letter to the Frenchman Christian Moullec in a special folder. He had come up with just the right name for the folder: Expert Rescue Operation 3032.
In thirteen weeks and four days his mother would be coming home on flight 3032. Ellen had never been away so long before. Last week she had flown to Africa in the wake of a flock of wild geese. Geese migrated to survive. He understood that. But he didn’t understand why his mother had to migrate. She went to places where there was nothing to eat or drink. His mother was migrating backwards, going against the flow. The birds would have thought she was out of her mind.
He went downstairs to the kitchen where Uncle Fred was sitting at the table peeling apples. ‘Hey, Gieles,’ he said cheerfully. Uncle Fred was always in a good mood. ‘I’ve got peels for the geese.’
Gieles poured himself a glass of milk, swallowed it down in one gulp and wiped the moustache from his upper lip. The smoothness there irritated him. Not even a sign of peach fuzz.
His father and Uncle Fred were fraternal twins, but they didn’t look at all alike. Willem Bos hardly had any hair left, while Uncle Fred had way too much with his mass of salt-and-pepper curls. His father held himself as erect as a statue of a powerful statesman. Uncle Fred, on the other hand, had a slight build and a shuffling gait, the result of childhood polio. He rode around on a mobility scooter and walked with a crutch. He refused to use a cane. There was something about the crutch that suggested a temporary condition (not that his leg was ever going to heal).
The brothers’ personalities and hobbies were also different. His father was fond of birds and comic books. Uncle Fred liked cooking and literature. The only things they had in common were their height—almost two metres—and taking care of Gieles.
‘Don’t forget the goose poop,’ Uncle Fred said, handing him the peels wrapped in newspaper. ‘We have guests. A married couple.’ He sounded pleased.
Gieles got a shovel and bucket from the barn. The
