Wanted: A Follow-Up Fillip

By CALVIN TRILLIN

I was literally awakened by something preying on my mind. I sat bolt upright in bed and said, "We never found out what happened to those vanished pigeons!" My wife stirred. She'd heard me use that tone of voice before at around that hour in the morning, usually to say something like "Did we forget to drain the pipes?"

Seven or eight weeks before, I'd read in the Washington Post that on a single autumn Monday, 2,500 homing pigeons, competing in two completely different races in Virginia and Pennsylvania, had vanished into--well, into thin air. Some people, it almost goes without saying, blamed El Nino. Some people speculated that cellular phone activity had interfered with the electromagnetic fields that pigeons use to help them navigate. That theory led me to another theory: people who take great pleasure in shouting into their cellular phones as they walk down the street had finally shouted loudly enough to scare all birdlife senseless. Nobody knew for certain.

And I had never found out. I suppose the Post might have run a follow-up, but there's a lot of news competing for limited space these days. Also, even a news junkie can't read everything. More and more often, I find myself reading a disturbing story in the newspaper--for instance, a story in the New York Times headlined MUBARAK VISITS SYRIA IN EFFORT TO DEFUSE CRISIS WITH TURKEY--and then realizing weeks later that I have no idea how the story turned out.

Until Mubarak went to defuse the crisis, around the time the pigeons disappeared, I hadn't realized that the Turks and the Syrians weren't getting along; that was part of what made the story so disturbing. The Turks used to be pretty good about waiting their turn to become involved in an international crisis: every five or six years they'd have a flare-up with the Greeks over Cyprus, and in between they'd manage to content themselves with some routine Kurd oppression.

Not any more. Less than two months after Mubarak's visit, the Turks got so mad at the Italians that everyone seemed to forget what the beef with the Syrians had been about. When I tried to remember, what came to mind instead was reading at around the same time about a crisis between Iran and Afghanistan--two countries that you'd think might be bound together by a shared affection for arresting women who show their faces in public. I couldn't remember reading about anybody going to defuse it. Did that mean it was still fused?

And what did happen to those pigeons? What troubled me was not simply that I didn't know but that I might never know. In early 1996, I reported in this very column that 4,000 pigeons had disappeared from Trafalgar Square, and I still don't know what happened to them. Could a phenomenon--some sort of Bermuda Triangle for small fowl--have swallowed up both the sooty waddlers in Trafalgar Square and the sleek homing pigeons who flew over the Mid-Atlantic states? The answer, I realized, might lie forever in a sort of phantom file of mine that's growing thicker and thicker--the lost follow-up. Meanwhile, at my wife's insistence, I drained the pipes.