Sunday, August the 22nd, 2004
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Throughout his career as an indefatigable pamphleteer, Dobson was also a keen lecturer at windswept seaside resorts. Each winter, he would go on tour, booking evenings in halls, meeting houses and clapboard huts, his mission to instruct and entertain simple fisherfolk and their kin, condemned to spend the season of ice and cold in their sinister towns abandoned by the tourists who overran them in the summer. Riding in on a half-dead horse, Dobson would put up in a guesthouse and take the measure of the place by roaming its deserted promenades in the middle of the night, usually in the teeth of a high wind and that persistent, steady rainfall that besmirches the soul. No wonder he could at times be cantankerous.
Dobson chose a different topic each winter, and in this brief essay I have chosen to concentrate on that time, somewhere between the Tet Offensive and the incident at Chappaquiddick, when the subject of the lecture series was “Mythical Birds”.
“Ladies and gentlemen!”, Dobson would shout, brandishing a lump of metal in his bony hand, “Has it ever occurred to you that there are quite enough real birds in the world without the need to make up new ones? I mean, what on earth is the point of pretending that once there existed, on the marshes of Stymphalus, crane-sized, ibis-like, man-eating birds with beaks, wings, and claws made of bronze, like this lump of metal I'm holding, birds that had to be scared off with a pair of huge clacking metal castanets? Is that likely? Would you give any credence to the fancy that even a single one of these ever-so-scary monstrous Stymphalian birds would be the least bit worried about a noise like this?”
So saying, Dobson took a second lump of metal out of his pocket and bashed it against the first a few times, each thump harder and louder for dramatic effect. Then he looked over the faces of his audience, each one rapt, puckered in fascination.
“I don't see any of you rough tough fishing folk scurrying out of the door at the sound of clacking metal, yet we are to believe that the Stymphalian birds, whose incredibly sharp metal feathers speared people to death and cut them to ribbons, these very same man-eating birds flew away from the marshes of Stymphalus in terror, never to return! What a lot of poppycock.”
Refreshments, usually including lukewarm tap water and breadcrumbs, would follow the lecture, after which Dobson would head off to another godforsaken town by the wild and wintry sea.