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Dayton O. Hyde grew up in Marquette, Michigan. Here he is pictured with his family in the “Worm Boat” where worms were raised for fishing at the family’s cabin at Deer Lake. His lonely days keeping wheelchair-bound father company deeply affected the rest of his life.
“My father used to play football for a big university, but now he was paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. We spent summers on a
wilderness lake where I had no one to play with, and things got pretty lonely. I spent my waking hours watching birds and wandering in the forest or playing cards with my father, who sat out his days in his wheelchair on a screen porch overlooking the water.
One summer, I went to town only once, to help my mother with groceries, and as I waited for her I saw a knot of kids on a street corner. I longed for company but just as I came up behind them, a Model A Ford roadster chugged by, steered with one hand by the star high-school quarterback. With his other arm he was hugging his pretty blond sweetheart.
I chose that moment to say, “Hey, know what I found? A Blackburnian warbler’s nest.”
The group turned on me like a weather vane in a changing wind.
“The nest had four eggs!” I said in a weak voice, knowing it was no use, that no one cared.
There were hoots of laughter as I ran to my mother’s car.
When we got back, my father grinned and said, “Guess what I found today! A cedar
waxwing’s nest. It’s in that cedar tree just outside the screen.”
“What do I care?’ I retorted. “It’s just a silly old bird.”
I turned and ran off barefoot into the forest, where I sat in a little bog, spinning a yellow
violet between my thumb and forefinger..... When I returned, the porch was in shambles.
Torn from its hinges, the door lay flat, and my father’s wheelchair lay overturned halfway to the
lake. And then I saw my dad. He was lying flat on his back beneath the cedar tree, his clothes
torn, his bleeding face covered with dirt and leaves.
“A snake!” he said. “It tried to climb the tree and rob the nest. I saved the nest, but I can’t say
the same for the snake. It’s somewhere under me.”
I rolled the big man over, and there was the snake, looking flat as a snakeskin belt.”
– Dayton O. Hyde, The Dangers of Birdwatching , Highlights for Children, December 2002.
For other stories based on Dayton’s childhood, The Bells of Lake Superior and Island of the Loons
are available from our web site: www.daytonohyde.com