I was introduced to the passenger pigeon as a child – not personally but through a gritty classroom filmstrip probably meant to relieve the teacher more than it was meant to educate her young students. I’m not sure what the plot of the film was, but I recall a stranded man struggling to overcome his wilderness entrapment. At some point, a homing pigeon entered the picture and the man was saved via the pigeon’s delivery of a message to civilization.
And with that, my daydreams of a pet passenger pigeon commenced. I imagined I would send the bird out of my bedroom window – message tied to its leg – with the explicit instructions to find and deliver a message to Michael Jackson (how the pigeon would actually find MJ was its own problem). As my imaginings went, my pigeon would return to me with a note from Michael Jackson and thus THE correspondence would begin -- the correspondence that would put me at the top of the fan mail and lead to my own discovery as the next big singing sensation. These were the days before email or cell phones or GPS existed, so this was clearly a brilliant plan. The only hitch was that I needed to locate a passenger pigeon and convince it that my house in Northern Wisconsin was its home base.
There were a few problems with pigeon acquisition, though. First of all, my parents brushed off all of my questions about pigeon breeders. We did not live in a place of pigeons; we lived near a lakefront swarming with the most boorish of birds: seagulls. No. My parents would not entertain my pigeon obsession. Judging from my preceding Alec Guiness obsession - which my parents wouldn’t even throw an Obi-Wan Kenobi figurine at – I’d have to go this alone.
Then there was the problem of the local pet store – The Aqua Hut. The Aqua Hut was located in my town’s dying shopping mall and was the only place other than the roller rink that provided a kid under the age of 11 any entertainment. The Aqua Hut owners knew all of us town kids. After school, they’d find us pressed up against the aquariums, taunting fish and iguanas with our tap-tap-taps. If they found one of us particularly doe-eyed over a guinea pig or hamster, the owners campaigned for us to campaign our parents for a pet. They were the interest group fueling the pint-sized politicians. Our presence and affinity for the furried and feathered worked to their advantage; fingerprints on the glass aquariums were a small price to pay for potential business.
One day – hands placed coolly in my corduroy pants pockets - I asked the store owner when she thought the next shipment of passenger pigeons would arrive (granted they wouldn’t simply fly to the store’s location with leg-bound adoption papers). The owner looked at me and cocked her head a little. The feather dangling from her earring caressed her face. “This way,” she labored through a saloon-style door near the store counter and led me to a far-away corner populated with chirping and whistles. Here, I saw preening white birds and fussy little gray birds in bright wire cages. But there were no bona fide pigeons. “Here you go,” the store owner pointed toward the spastic avians. I looked at her questioningly. “Why don’t you bring your mom by, and we’ll talk,” she responded while gesturing toward a small yellow bird. I dug my hands deeper into my pockets and shrugged.
I was not going to find a passenger pigeon and the limits of my imagination stopped me short of pondering the possibility of training a canary. Lifetime obsession #2 halted just a few weeks after it began. There were surely other routes to fame for an isolated Midwestern girl and a new set of television reruns about a pre-fabricated rock band got my brain churning. Soon I had posters of The Monkees adorning my wall and a promise from my father that we could attend a Monkee reunion concert in Minneapolis. As I transitioned into great lifetime obsession #3, I abandoned the idea of pigeon-as-conduit and wistfully began daydreaming about backstage break-ins.
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