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Obsession and sacrifice

LIFE LIST:
A Woman’s Quest for the World’s Most Amazing Birds
By Olivia Gentile
352 pp. Bloomsbury $26

Reviewed by Ruth Douillette

The power of a biography becomes apparent after the book is back on the shelf. When some aspect of a tale lingers, to be recalled at various odd moments, the book has left its mark.

Such is the case with Life List: A Woman’s Quest for the World’s Most Amazing Birds, by Olivia Gentile. Gentile, a journalist with an MFA from Columbia University, documented the life of Phoebe Snetsinger, world-renowned birder, who traveled the globe with binoculars and a desire to see as many of the world’s avian species as possible before she died.

After college both Phoebe and her husband David planned to become scientists, but when they married, his plans fell into place and Phoebe accepted the traditional 1950’s role of wife and mother of four.

Phoebe wasn’t meant to be a housewife. She was “starving” under the constraints of house and children, she told a friend. She chafed and wilted, a failure—or perhaps more accurately, a drop-out—of the Betty Freidan Feminine Mystique era.

Brilliant, but unfulfilled, she became depressed, pouring her pain into poems, each a silent scream her husband David discovered after her death.

A neighbor introduced her to birdwatching while her children were young. It was the small Blackburnian Warbler that encouraged her to spread her wings and fly from her nest of despair. Instantly caught up in an avian enthusiasm that never abated, she took to wandering, recording local birds—the beginning of her “life list.” At the time, birding was becoming increasingly popular, but few women pursued the hobby seriously.

About the tipping point that took Phoebe from backyard bird watcher to globe-trotting, record-breaking birder, Gentile lets us speculate—a lifeless marriage, a sense of adventure, a need for fulfillment—but the proverbial straw was the diagnosis she received in 1981 at the age of 49: deadly melanoma. Told she had a year to live, Phoebe came alive for the first time. She wrote:

In retrospect, this death sentence now seems a blessing in disguise (admittedly a heavy disguise). It forced me to make some quick decisions, to change my style and develop a “now or never” approach, to establish my priorities and learn to live for the present moment. Foreign birding provided the perfect mental and physical therapy. I could live from one short-range goal to the next and concentrate fully on this totally absorbing passion.

When her youngest was in high school, she used her inheritance to finance her many trips across the world. “I had an understanding, tolerant husband who has accepted the importance of this compulsive approach to birding,” she wrote in notes intended for publication. In reality, David was not so understanding, but seldom were feelings about anything—including dying—discussed.

With death knocking, she took risks that would rival cancer. She braved the elements, cannibals, earthquakes, thieves, a broken hip, and a vicious sexual assault to fulfill her goal: see the most birds. Phoebe said, “I don’t go out of my way to court danger, but on the other hand, if you’re looking for safety and security, there really isn’t any anywhere.”

Fearing an ugly death, she got a gun and stashed it with a note in her closet—her form of a cyanide tablet should she choose that way out. And then she lived for another twenty-five years to die in 1999 at age sixty-eight, fully engaged in an avocation she loved—a death far from home and family, but one she probably would have chosen.

After her death, David graciously shared what little he had of Phoebe’s life: poems, letters, and birding journals. Gentile, sensitive to the family’s feelings, cautiously probed what was both hurtful and a source of pride for the family. Gentile treads delicately as she interviews David and their four children, and writes with restraint and respect.

In following an obsession, something typically gets sacrificed; in Phoebe’s case it was her family. She was furious when David asked for a divorce. Counseling, and promises to stay home more, kept them together. Although her promise was broken, the marriage suffered until death did them part.

If birding was the drug that suppressed her pain, Phoebe required an ever-increasing dose, until eventually she was away from home nine months of the year, year after year, looking for elusive birds to add to her “life list.” In time the pleasure diminished; there weren’t enough birds left that she hadn’t seen, and no places left she could realistically travel at her age. Setting a record drove her. When she died she’d done that, having seen “8,674 out of 10,223 species, or 84.4 percent of all living birds.”

Recounting decades of birding expeditions as culled from Phoebe’s obsessively kept journals becomes at times list-like—weather and living conditions, food and fellow birders, species and counts. Phoebe was a statistician, not a documentarian. That Gentile often peppers the sentences with single word quotes is annoying and makes for choppy reading. For example:

Some of the trips ... had been “tough,” with “long steep” treks, “miserable” living conditions, “uncomfortable weather,” “awful food,” “little sleep,” and long drives in bad cars on bad roads.

But the book is far more than a birder’s journal, and stylistic annoyances fade behind the greater picture: a woman’s quest and determination to live well while dying, which is, after all, what life is all about.

Although I’d never heard of Phoebe Snetsinger until I read the book, not a day has gone by since I closed the book that I haven’t thought of her for one reason or another. It’s the questions left unanswered about this woman, the things she took to her grave, that create a lingering urge to know more. Mostly, was it worth it? Would you live life this way again, given the chance?

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Ruth Douillette retired after 35 years as a middle school teacher, and now freelances as a writer and photographer. Her essays have been published in the Christian Science Monitor, Cup of Comfort, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Under Our Skin, an anthology about breast cancer. Her photography has been featured in flashquake's gallery of art. Ruth is a member of the Internet Writing Workshop where she’s an administrator for the Practice group. For a sample of her writing and photography, visit Upstream and Down~.

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