Preface from my book, Chronicles of the Pleistocene Mind, which is forthcoming from Torrey House Press in April, 2013.

Preface

 

We will not serve what we do not love.

And we cannot love what we do not know.

 

–Loyal Rue, Everybody’s Story:

Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution

 

This is a love story. 

 

Although I do indirectly refer to sexual, courtly, and platonic forms of love in these pages, I am mainly interested in telling the story of the complex animal attraction that includes yet reaches beyond our typical understandings of these feelings and our expressions of them.  This inclusiveness is what distinguishes ecocentric or biotic love from anthrocentric or strictly human forms of love.  Love in this deep sense describes humans, but it is also shared by and extended to other animals and to the environment.  My wife Kim’s mother-love for our 16-month-old son Wilder is powerful and familiar, but so too is the pleasure she feels when she watches the sun rise in the mountains or crouches on a grassy river bank—fly rod in hand—sight-casting to brown trout as they devour mayflies in the late spring light.  Wilder does not yet know the word love, but when he waves hello to the moon, or follows a honey bee from flower to flower as it probes for nectar, or points excitedly at an ant carrying a lace-wing like a panel of lead-paned glass, the expression on his face suggests he knows the feeling first-hand.  Love and awe and wonder: they’re all wrapped up in his tiny body.  I share his loves, of course, but I have others, too, like rain when I have shelter and fire when I am cold.  I seek out rivers when I want to rejoin other life and remember my own.  I eavesdrop on an alpine meadow; ponder a pod of killer whales hunting seals in the dark waters of the North Pacific; I savor the dark pink flesh of wild salmon when I am fortunate enough to eat it; and I am momentarily stunned by the ruby conflagration that is an Anna hummingbird’s throat when the sun hits it just right. 

We take pleasure in and are attracted to certain things in part because we know their opposites.  The sight of the rising sun and food give us pleasure because we know night and hunger.  Thus, the attraction to which I refer is known just as much by what it isn’t as by what it is.  The complex and deep-seated connections we have to the little piece of ground we call home should remind us that the world as a whole is a life-giving and loveable place, deserving of our most ardent interest and care.  The connection springs from our primordial relationship with the physical world and it is therefore as much the province and provocation of science as it is the quandary of philosophers, the revelation of mystics, and the inspiration of poets and rock stars.  It demands that we bring our entire being to bear on the question of what it really means to be human, to live better, and more wisely on what has become an increasingly imperiled planet.  But to do this, we’ve got to do a better job of exploring and telling the truth about human nature and the nature of existence. 

This is why our stories are so important.  As the vehicles of our values, they teach us our place in this precious and difficult world.  Humility, reverence, indifference, domination, and hostility are familiar themes in our individual and collective narratives.  What is clear, however, is that regardless of the values we may communicate through our separate stories, we all will decide what kind of world we will inhabit, one that is characterized by its integrity, health, and diversity—including a humanity whose respect for the finite world is the guiding principle of our conduct—or a world of dust and impoverishment and horrific violence; life without birdsong, forests without a single bear-bed or spider web or uncontaminated drop of dew. 

I enjoyed many natural wonders in my childhood, and I know life is worth living as long as these wonders remain.  When I contemplate the dominant stories of North America, however, it does not seem to me that we have an especially enlightened view of nature and ourselves.  The marketing slogan for the X Files—perhaps one of the most popular shows in the history of television, and which spawned a vast array of popular successors—is illustrative.  It assured viewers that “The truth is out there.”  If all we were talking about were preternatural plots and alien abductions and conspiracies, I wouldn’t think twice about the former show’s 25 million-member audience.  But in the context of the real world, one that lives or dies by the truthfulness or the falseness of its stories, an audience of this magnitude is indeed unsettling, if only because the “truth” to which the show refers is not here, but “out there,” flying around in an alien spacecraft, or emblazoned in Moon tableau, hopelessly locked in enigmatic celestial writ.  In reality, the truth may be unknown to us at the moment, but it is not alien, nor is it a conspiracy: It is we and we are it and it is everything, a vast community of species spread across the planet in a web of amazing variety and tantalizing complexity. 

Fortunately, our scientific interests are many, and the world—our gorgeous, mysterious, and fleeting subject matter—is unquestionably real and accessible.  (Who needs Martians when we can ponder the natural history of a marbled diving beetle, or the courtship behavior of the satin bowerbird?)  Often times, however, we seem paralyzed by the world’s grandeur and mystery.  Perhaps it is enough that we simply have these experiences of awe and wonder.  Who cares what—if anything—really lies behind them?  Why is it important that we know?  Given our undeniable emergence from, connection to, and dependence on the environment, I think we are wise to ask these kinds of questions.    

Having a robust sense of mystery is natural and necessary to realizing our potential, but when it distances us from the real challenges we face, it can be debilitating and destructive.  This seems especially true when it comes to what might be described as unassailable mysteries, or those mysteries in which we readily believe but for which no evidence or data are available.  Under these circumstances, enlightened solutions to our personal and collective struggles don’t come easy, if at all.  Our belief in subjective truth may be personally fulfilling as far as our own definitions are concerned, but the belief may isolate us from other dimensions of ourselves and the world we inhabit.  One of the claims I make in this book is that we are never more informed, fulfilled, and human than when we attend to our complex, wonderful, and sometimes troubling nature, particularly as it relates to the physical world. 

But how can we possibly hope to understand such mind-boggling intricacy and complexity?  What tool is best suited for the job?  I share the long-standing, well-established, and widely accepted feeling that the epic of evolution is the truest means we have for addressing these questions.  This is not a matter of pitting one story or world-view against another.  It is a matter of rethinking our priorities in the context of what we know to be true about the planet and ourselves.  If our morality includes a commitment to posterity, don’t we have an obligation to preserve the planet’s health and richness, the very conditions that make our lives and stories possible?  If so, what on Earth is stopping us?   

I explore these kinds of questions in various ways throughout the book, but let me offer two abbreviated and interrelated reasons for our apparent stubbornness.  The first is that like most other organisms on the planet, we tend to be biologically conservative.  Whether it comes to our ideas and the language we use to express them; our interests in music and food and mates; we usually stick with what we know—the “usual,” as one recent fast-food commercial put it—unless we are forced or think to do otherwise.  I think most of us would agree that change is difficult for us and that beyond fulfilling our day-to-day needs, we guard our time and energy.  That we are naturally conservative is also reflected by the relative simplicity of our major cultural and religious narratives, which appear to posit unassailable mystery as a condition of religious devotion and conviction. 

Certainly some degree of demystification occurs when we use science to understand the natural world and ourselves, but does that make the subject—whatever it may be—any less amazing?  I would argue that our increased understanding and knowledge of how things work not only makes the world more wonderful, but it enriches and empowers us to make better decisions about how to live in it.  Science does not have all the answers, of course, and much remains unknown and mysterious to us, but instead of viewing the mysteries of existence as inscrutable, science views mystery as an impetus and invitation, in the same way that a puzzle is both mysterious and inviting when its pieces lay face-down and scattered on the floor. 

I must say that as someone who is trying to figure out what I am and my place in this astonishing world, the notion of ghosts passing through walls or aliens crashing in the desert or gods intervening on behalf of certain humans and not others would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic.  As I write this preface, the world is in the throes of an unprecedented environmental, social, and religious crisis.  Within the last two months, 8,000 people of have been killed in sectarian violence in Syria.  My journalist friend tells me that to date well over a 100,000 Iraqi civilians, many of them children, have lost their lives since the United States invaded Iraq.  Now the focus is the war in Afghanistan, a conflict with no end in sight.

Here in the U.S., PBS closes the news hour each night with still photos of our dead, sometimes ten to fifteen at a time, the majority of whom are smooth-faced boys in their late teens and early twenties.  Regardless of who dies, whether solider or civilian, war is a crime against humanity and is one of the single greatest, preventable failures of our species.  This is to say nothing of the crimes we’ve committed, and continue to commit, against the nonhuman world in the name of progress.  Writer Linda Hogan once commented on how our conflicts with the environment and with each other actually stem from the conflicts we have within ourselves.  I think she’s right.  I know that our reasons for doing what we do are complex, but if this is where our current stories have gotten us, I think we need new stories about our place in the world.                

Scientists and naturalists have long been applying evolutionary theory to any number of different organisms in an effort to understand how they have come to live and behave in the ways they do.  In recent years many of the hard, soft, and social sciences—including cellular biology, ecology, psychology, and sociology—have been reinvigorated by applying evolutionary theory.  More importantly, perhaps, is that the humanities have been resuscitated (and, ultimately, grounded) by the publication of several works that show evolutionary theory’s relevance to the arts, religion, and other arguably transcendental and distinguishing characteristics of our species.  In general, scientists and humanists who do science know that their theories are valuable to the extent that they can be tested and thus explain and predict phenomena.  This is no less true for those working in the evolutionary sciences.

In fact, Darwin’s theory can be applied in any number of interesting, surprising, and worthwhile ways.  The fact that my own approach is personal and speculative has not come without its risks and challenges.  I do draw on current research throughout the book, but my goal has not been to argue a single claim and marshal a body of evidence in support of it.  Instead, I use the personal narrative and memoir to tell the story of how Darwinian evolution might be used to improve and deepen our understanding of day-to-day life in all its forms.  I knew going into this project that evidence would be crucial to at least a segment of my readership, for whom speculation without substantiation may not be satisfying.  But I also know that no writer can be all things to all readers.  We each do what we can, in other words.  Having said that, and although I have not written a single word without thinking of how I might meet the expectations of both scientists and nonscientists alike, my main audience here is the general reader. 

Years before I actually started the project, John Steinbeck alerted me to the challenges of applying the all-encompassing theory of Darwinian evolution.  In Log from the Sea of Cortez he cites the “looseness” of nonteleological thinking, and warns how one must avoid the various hazards associated with so much freedom and flexibility.  Fortunately for me, I have had some great teachers.  Through my associations with Darwin scholar Bert Bender and biologist John Alcock, as well as through my own vigilance, I have made every effort to avoid distorting or confusing evolution’s possible relevance to our lives. 

We are descended from humans who emerged during the Pleistocene period, so what we are as a species is the direct result of this ancient lineage.  Therefore, if we wish to know more about our origins, we can begin by looking no further than the mirror.  On the evolutionary timeline, then, each moment is the moment of the Pleistocene mind.  I chronicle an expanse of time ranging from 37 (my age at the time of writing) to roughly 11 million years ago, which is around the time the Pleistocene Period began.  Rather than starting at some point in the recent past and moving forward in time, I begin in the present and then gradually work my way back through deep history, which of course is where speculation proves very handy. I admit that speculation is far from certainty, but it is still inspired by at least some degree of evidence.  Otherwise, on what grounds would anyone speculate?  Call it a hunch.  Although I do not often draw definitive conclusions, I am not unlike a detective who works his way backward using the evidence.  Granted, I attempt to reconstruct events that may have happened thousands of years ago, and instead of examining hours-old corpses and ancient fossils, I look to the living for evidence of genetic events that have come to characterize the development and behavior of particular species. 

When I mention genes, I’m guessing images of scientists in lab coats, microscopes, slides, and tiny glass vials come to mind.  But there are other ways of gaining insights into existence.  Provided one has a healthy sense of curiosity and a basic understanding of natural selection, one can make significant inroads in the search for self and other knowledge.  Natural selection refers to the long-term process whereby survival-enhancing genes are selected over those genes that do not impart fitness benefits to their bearer.  We might then think of ourselves and other creatures as survival machines that have taken thousands if not millions of years to refine.  Therefore, when we look at our own bodies and behavior, and at the other organisms with which we share our lives, we are in effect seeing the culmination of this process.  Suddenly the questions “How old are you?” or “Where are you from?” aren’t so easy to answer, are they?   

  Keeping in mind the complex co-evolution of genes (the biological unit of transmission) and memes (the cultural unit of transmission), we can also look to our cultures if we wish to gain insights into human nature.  Human cultures have some important differences, but generally they are uniform due to their biological underpinnings.  For example, human and other primate societies generally have strict taboos against incest, but it is also true that reproducing with closely related DNA is detrimental to genetic integrity and, ultimately, to genetic survival.  In fact, primate studies have shown that siblings who are raised together for the first 30 months of life develop a sexual aversion to one another, suggesting what sociobiologists describe as an epigenetic rule or, in this case, a rule of inhibition.

It is this complementary relationship between genes and memes (the nature v. nurture dichotomy) that makes it possible to explore both the biological and the environmental implications of our stories, especially as they are expressed through and reflected by the arts and other human activities.  Thus, in Part I of the book, Arachnophilia, I spend considerable time attending to the lives of several species of spider with which I share my yard, but I also lament how the stories told by our culture have really done a disservice to these remarkable creatures.  Of course it’s always wise (and natural) to be mindful of potentially dangerous creatures (I can think of only a handful of spiders in North America that actually pose a significant threat to humans), but there is a crucial distinction between being mindful of and unnecessarily hostile toward other creatures which are, after all, simply trying to live their lives.

Over the course of about three months I studied a particular black widow that had made a home on the east side of my house.  I learned a lot from her, but one of the more poignant realizations I had was how fundamentally similar all animals are in their day-to-day lives.  Most of us never get beyond our differences of appearance, but if we did, we would see that our basic needs for food, safety, and shelter are essentially the same.  How different species go about fulfilling their basic needs for resources and shelter is truly amazing.  Habitat theory, which is the subject of Part II of this book, argues that animals select habitats on the basis of how well they fulfill our biological needs for prospects and refuge. 

For example, we have a mature orange tree in our back yard, and for the last week or so a pair of mockingbirds has been busy constructing a nest in the tree’s inner reaches.  What I find so interesting is that in the three years we have lived here, I have never seen any birds nest in the tree.  Our two cats patrol the yard, so I’ve always assumed that the birds opted not to nest so close to predators.  But here these birds were, building away.  What had changed?  The answer to this question was suggested to me by another bird, the curved-bill thrasher.  Each afternoon a pair of thrashers would spend an hour or so rummaging through the leaf litter and rocks beneath the orange tree.  I quickly realized what they were looking for: we have two box turtles and the female had laid her eggs beneath the tree.  I don’t know if the thrashers were actually digging down to the eggs themselves, but I do know that they and other birds enjoy the mucus plumes that signal the location of the eggs. 

Many species of bird have their chicks in the spring, a time during which protein is in high demand.  Animals must balance their needs for resources and safety, so I’m guessing that for the mockingbirds the benefit of the resource outweighed the apparent cost or risk of nesting so close to predators.  I imagine that living above the turtle protein would be a little like living above a butcher shop.  All similes aside, animals—birds, humans, and even black widows—are generally attracted to habitats that put them in proximity to resources while at the same time minimizing risks to themselves and to their offspring. 

One of the reasons habitat theory is so interesting and useful from a human perspective is that it informs our ideas about beauty and aesthetics.  In addition to speculating about how the theory might explain my own habitat selection and, as it turns out, creation (I’ve spent hours beautifying our yard), I also cite recent research, including exhaustive studies of landscape paintings, which suggests a biological—as opposed to a strictly cultural—basis for our aesthetics.  While environments can evoke complex and sometimes conflicting psychological responses, the studies and my own research show we generally find beautiful environments that signal prospects and refuge, whereas we usually have negative responses to environments that do not.  This helps to explain why the landscape painter Thomas Kincade is a multi-millionaire as well as why people who are unfamiliar with deserts often have difficulty thinking of them as beautiful. 

In the third and final part of the book, Implications of an Ecochildhood, I reflect on my experience growing up in the deep woods of northern Maine and, later, in the high deserts of Utah, where I spent hours engaged in various outdoor activities, including hide-and-seek, fort building, stick fighting, and hunting.  I don’t think anyone would argue with the notion that domestic kittens are predisposed to stalk one another in part because it helps them develop the skills necessary to procure their own food later in life.  Thus, to the extent a kitten’s interest in stalking helps to ensure she will reach reproductive age, the behavior might be described as adaptive.  I therefore began to wonder if my own and, by extension, other children’s play interests aren’t also adaptive.  If so, might this not give us a richer understanding of play’s importance and complexity, as well of the need to preserve and create sites for that play? 

Playing tag and rock fighting might both be described as adaptive behaviors, but obviously we are likely to encourage our children to play tag, whereas we forbid them to rock fight.  That said, we risk missing the point altogether when we label these behaviors (or kids) “good” or “bad.”  For isn’t our ability to effectively address these tendencies among children and ourselves contingent on our understanding of those tendencies?  That’s another thing I love about Darwinian evolution: used honestly, it serves everyone or no one; includes everything or nothing; it embraces our finest moments and our worst; it is awareness in the deepest and truest sense.  The question is do we have the courage to seek out this knowledge and the wisdom to live by it once it’s found.         

On Hiding Water and the Cost of Beauty

On Hiding Water and the Cost of Beauty

A few months ago, a fellow Utahan chided me for revealing the names of the rivers I was fishing. Apparently, he was afraid that people would visit them and further strain the resource. My initial reaction to his reprimand was irritation: Where did he get off telling me what I should say and what I shouldn’t? Didn’t he understand the importance of using the right word or, in this case, the right name when describing a place and the experience of that place? But I also felt like I had made an irreparable mistake, which is of course the worst kind. I wanted some perspective, so on our early morning, inaugural drive to the Junco River, I shared my mixed feelings with my friend Banjo, who is one of the most sensitive, moral, and level headed people I know.

To my relief, he made the point that I hadn’t revealed anything that the many websites, fly shop staff, and Utah fly fishing guide books hadn’t revealed already. Now before anyone accuses me of cherry picking the jury, keep in mind that Banjo is the guy who famously said he hated all other fly fisherman except those he was with, and sometimes he even hated them. Amused by his misanthropy, I laughed. But rather than retract or soften his rhetoric, he topped it by saying “I’d hate myself if I weren’t me.” Suffice it to say, Banjo would rather not see more people on the unspoken rivers, and if I had written anything that might effect that outcome and further erode his solitude, he would be the first person to tell me.

Those of us who belong to the fly fishing community are the keepers and the disseminators of precious information. Fortunately, as a column writer I am not obligated to share the where, what, when, how, or who of my adventures. Whether I disclose all, some, or none of this information depends on the place and how disgusted I’m feeling about my fellow man. In my October 2010 column The Lunkers of Secret Creek, I was convinced that not many people knew about the creek in question, so I was careful not to reveal its whereabouts. But when it comes to the places that are on the tongues of just about every fly shop staffer this side of the Rockies and are recounted in great detail in the locally published fly fishing guide books, I don’t worry so much about using their names.

However little merit my fellow Utahan’s criticism of me may have had, it did raise the question of how writing about fly fishing benefits me and the sport and if these benefits outweigh the apparent costs. The benefits to me personally are considerable, and I don’t mean economically. For although it is nice to be compensated for one’s work, rarely does that compensation reflect the true cost of producing any given piece of writing. I suppose it’s possible that Geirach gets what he’s worth, but he may be the exception. Still, I think even he would agree that his pay check for the Sporting Life doesn’t always cover his expenses or the value of his work. And how could it when a good piece of writing may very well contain insight that changes someone’s life?

Norman Maclean was likely alluding to the clarifying power and value of writing when, in A River Runs Through It, he said that “all good things. . .come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.” No one knows this struggle better than a writer. The exchange at the very end of the book–when Norman and his father the Reverend Maclean are talking about their murdered brother and son, Paul–illustrates this difficulty:

“Once my father came back with another question. ‘Do you think I could have helped him?’ he asked. Even if I might have thought longer, I would have made the same answer. ‘Do you think I could have helped him?’ I answered. We stood waiting in deference to each other. How can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions?”

Indeed. Shortly after, the Reverend Maclean offers a kind of answer to this question when he encourages Norman to “make up a story and the people to go with it. . . . Only then will you understand what happened and why.” Thus writing not only allows us to see what we know, but (and this is the point the Reverend is making) it allows us to exhume and articulate the elusive aspects of our lives. Norman Maclean put it this way: “Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.” And how is it that he reaches out to them? Through his book, of course, which is one long and beautiful prayer.

But therein lies the rub: If grace and art don’t come easy, neither does beauty. That is to say, it comes at great expense to the writer, who in this way lives life twice. All it costs the reader is the dough to cover the price of the book or magazine or whatever. And then there will be times like these when it doesn’t even cost him that.

Thinking Like a River

Thinking Like a River: Fly Fishing as a Way of Life

On days when I don’t have much time, money, or willingness to drive, I fish close to home; the exceptions being when my fishing buddy Banjo or Metcalf is doing the driving and I’m along for the ride, or when I hear rumors from credible sources that the hopper action or green drake fishing at such-and-such a place is in full swing. But generally, I try to spend as little time driving and as much time fishing as possible. At roughly 50 miles east and north from where I live in Salt Lake, the Provo and Weber Rivers are close. Driving out to Currant Creek or the Duschene River, however, which are about two hours and almost a full tank of gas from Salt Lake, might happen once a month, if that.

Like other leisure activities, including golf and alpine skiing, fly fishing is said to be an emblem of economic status. When I think about all the expense involved in a day of fishing, let alone a day of fishing at an exotic location like Jurassic Lake, I am inclined to agree. But I do so reluctantly: Somehow it’s hard for me imagine that someone with my meager resources would register on the economic status scale. But of course I do register, because as long as there are people out there who are worse off than me from an economic standpoint, I’ll appear that much better off. Still, using a tank of gas to go fishing is a luxury I cannot often afford mentally or economically. Anymore I find it harder to justify the expense.

If the only question I have to answer is whether to spend or not to spend, that isn’t be so bad, right? I mean, at least I have the money to spend. But is that all there is to it? Depends, doesn’t it, on how broadly or narrowly we define expense. The word justify is of course related to the word justice, a concept that adds a moral dimension to our status as recreants and users. This suggests that expense is not just a matter of whether you have money or not. We are generally mindful of how a particular purchase affects our personal budgets, but do we reckon much how that same purchase might impinge on the budget of the Earth?

If poverty is measured by one’s inability to meet basic needs, then wealth must be measured by one’s ability to exceed those needs. Thus, the narrative of our culture seems to be, “Whether you have the money or not (there‘s always credit!), in the name of commerce, consume: Doing so is a symbol of your success and it stimulates the economy.” These related notions have, paradoxically, become the ultimate social justification for all forms of selfishness and, consequently, they reveal what can only be described as humanity’s contempt for the Earth. Fortunately, the fly fishing industry generally seems to have resisted the temptation to produce junk in an effort to remain competitive. This is partly because there are only so many ways to repackage floatant holders and design line, for example.

I’d also like to believe it is because these companies respect the environment upon which their livelihoods and the sport depends, but the only way to know for sure is to take a good, hard look at these companies‘ business practices. Where do they get their materials? Who does their labor and where is that labor done? In what concrete ways do they give back to the environment and thereby help to safeguard the planet as well as the sport? What are their philosophies and are their business practices consistent with them? As people for whom fly fishing is a way of life, are these companies we would be proud to own? Does the company engage in reciprocity with the planet, or does it simply take from it? If fly fishing is a way of life, then shouldn’t that mindset inform every aspect of life, including our behavior as consumers?

I don’t think I’m alone in my belief that there is something fundamentally flawed about an economic system that falls apart if people aren’t out buying huge cars, flat screen televisions, and a host of other products they could not possibly need. In reality, the system is already broken; we just don’t realize it yet. For coupled with the human population problem, which is another subject the leadership has yet to address, a system that encourages unnecessary consumption is as morally objectionable as it is unsustainable. At some point in the not-so-distant future, something is going to give. So what is the answer? I don’t know what it is, exactly, but I am fairly sure I know what it’s not: Unchecked human population, junk culture, and materialism run amok.

Whenever I see a poll indicating America’s chief concerns, or hear politicians address those concerns, rarely is over-population and its effect on the environment even mentioned. To do so would be political suicide. Even before the current recession, the economy was usually the first word out of the leaderships’ collective mouth. And understandably so. But talking about the health of the economy without also talking about the health of the environment is like talking about lung function without talking about the quality of the air we are breathing. It seems pretty obvious that the health of the one depends on the health of the other, and yet this crucial connection is basically absent from public and political discourse. We’ve got to start equalizing our concern for ourselves and for the environment.

For many of us, it seems awareness of or concern about the environment arises only through catastrophe, such as the Exxon Valdez and BP oil spills. The leadership might use these episodes of environmental crises to educate the public about the overall importance of the environment, but usually the treatment is topical and short lived, and the political parties use the crisis as an opportunity to find fault in their adversary. However deserved these criticisms may be, by turning the crisis into a political event, those in power not only undermine its seriousness, but they also skew the public’s perception of the environment’s true importance.

Put simply, the health of the environment should be a sustained and prominent part of our personal, state, national, and global narrative. In terms of air time, it should supersede discussions of Gods, the economy, sports and the weather. Environmental welfare should replace consumerism as the governing principle and indicator of progress, morality, and success. What I am saying is that as the context for all the issues facing us today, the environment and our stewardship of it should be THE topic of conversation. What I am not saying is that people give up wilderness and their time in the outdoors for fear of exacerbating the problem. In fact, when people no longer feel they have a connection to the environment, it ceases to exist for them except as a means of fulfilling the limitless void of material desire.

Fly fishing is said to be a way of life. This designation seems promising by implying responsible behavior toward the environment. I have yet to meet an angler who, when he walks along the river, does not recognize the connection between the health of trout and the integrity of the ecosystem of which they are part. My concern is what happens to this awareness once he reenters contemporary life and its trappings; where the workings of ecology and our absolute dependence on the environment are harder to discern. When he is confronted with the omnipresent directive of heedless consumption, will his mind dull and weaken in the throes of such vast waste and meaninglessness?

If fly fishing truly is a way of life and we are who we think we are, we ought to be able to walk the edge of a smoldering dump and down the blinding aisles of Wal Mart and still think like a river. When it comes to impinging on and caring for the environment, no matter who is driving, we are never along for the ride.

Fire Season

One of the handful of occasions I feel truly ridiculous and embarrassed is when I am alone, driving my truck. Granted, my truck is small by comparison, but that is almost beside the point. The moment I drove it off the lot back in 1999, I could have parked it and never driven it and still I would have become part of the problem. But of course I did drive it and have ever since. On one of those occasions I was driving to work and found myself idling at a light on Foothill Blvd. As I watched dozens and dozens of cars (which as the morning wore on would become hundreds and hundreds of cars) inch their way up the boulevard, brake lights flaring in the dark, I felt hopeless and disgusted. The sight inspired me to ask the question I often ask: What is it going to take for us to start living with environmental realities in mind? I looked at the people around me, sitting alone in their cars, putting on make-up, listening to music, drinking coffee, and I wondered if we were the same.

Did they also feel ridiculous driving their gas guzzling cars? Did they think about how their actions had some effect on the world around them? Did they feel the moral obligation to reduce that effect as much as possible, pleasure when they succeeded, and shame and guilt when they did not? Were they worried at all about the planet and its myriad species? Did they know what they would tell their children when they asked why we did so little to protect so much? Was it possible that they detested the inaction and complacency we see in others because that is what we not-so-secretly detest about ourselves? Or were they merely free of environmental conscience? Were their own small lives so important or difficult that it was not possible for them to think about the environment? And what is worse, being ignorant or hypocritical?

The fact is, to be an environmentalist is to be a hypocrite. The challenge to us all, especially us writers, is to close the gap between the old adage do as I say, not as I do. But for those people among us who are not environmentally aware, there is no problem, simply because they do and say nothing. If they are not aware of the problem, it does not exist, and so there is zero reason or motivation to examine their lives in an effort to live more responsibly. And why would there be? There are several forces at work in our lives that severely undermine our ability to make necessary changes, including rampant materialism, antiquated world views, and ineffectual leadership. For many people, these forces are linked and planet Earth is a kind of weigh station where, by whatever means necessary, folks get to work out their self-worth and their salvation. It is a testing ground, a place where the ground gets torn up so we can measure the lethality of our bombs and, as one astute reader said, “kill all the right people.”.

Regardless of what, if anything, lies beyond the range of our intellects, bombs, and telescopes, for many people the Earth’s importance lasts only as long as they are here to define it, which they do through their words and through their actions. Although having no environmental conscience or ethic is the greatest moral failure, I am afraid that for too many of us environmentalism is limited to an important game of words or whatever the art form. I think it is safe to assume that being an environmental writer means that one is also an environmental doer. I know that is true for me, but not a day goes by that I do not look at my life and ask to what extent that is true. I think it is better to have an environmental cause than not to have one, but that cause cannot be so great and consuming that it separates one from the most important environmental cause of all: one’s day-to-day life, which is full of opportunities to live responsibly.

As it stands, the environmental movement is not really a movement at all. It is impersonal for most people. It is a decontextualized image on television. A polar bear face or a dry river bed or a fire climbing into a foreign sky. It is a sound byte or a bumper sticker. Propelling the movement is a group of other people who are portrayed as anti-job, anti-progress, and anti-human. These people are not here, but out there, somewhere, and because of their distance they do not understand our problems. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. And yet these oversimplifications and distortions have come to characterize public perception of the issues. The related problem is that without an informed and coherent narrative, people must either provide the context or have no context at all. I know that there are pockets of environmentally-minded people the world over, people who are trying to do right by the Earth and for whom environmentalism is less a trend than it is a way of life. But right now we are too fragmented. We are not yet a movement and chances are we won’t be until the air turns pale from the smoke of fires burning on the other side of the world.

Environmentalist

The problem with labels is that they rob us of our complexity, and this is nowhere more apparent than with the label environmentalist. When I use the word environmentalist (and I don’t use it very often for reasons I will explain in a moment), I am referring to someone who literally thinks about the environment, and who may therefore live in such a way that his impact is reduced. Although I could go into more detail, this seems to be the general meaning of the word, at least in the pack I run with. What I find so curious, though, is that the word is rarely used among the very people who it is intended to describe. In fact, whenever I do hear someone use the word, it is usually in a disparaging manner, as in “Those environmentalists care more about animals than they do humans,” or “If they had their way, environmentalists would rather preserve wilderness than create jobs.” Of course these are not actual quotations, but they and sentiments like them have come to characterize public discourse about the environment and the people who are concerned for its welfare. How are we supoosed to have a discussion and make progress if the discussants don’t know what the words really mean?

For the people using them, labels serve as a quick and easy way to diminish those who oppose them and still maintain a firm grasp of what little they know. We use labels as a matter of convenience and social convention, e.g. anyone who opposes the United States is automatically reduced to a “terrorist.” This is so everyone knows what we mean without us having to provide details or an involved explanation. But that is exactly what we (or those people who use the word environmentalist or other labels) should be doing, that is, they should explain themselves instead of relying on words whose meaning is, finally, unknown to us. If I explain myself, that my meaning will be known is most assured. At the same time, the more insight into my thinking that I give you, the more you may disagree with me. This is why politicians are so careful to keep their answers as short and succinct as possible. Of course politicians are not the only people who measure their words for fear of inadvertently disclosing that single thread that, when pulled, unravels what they hold to as truth.

Having worked with university students for the last 17 years and witnessed more than my share of disagreements, my sense is that most people view their truths as unassailable rocks to which they must cling if they are to have an identity and their lives are to have meaning. They “stick up for what they believe” at all costs when what they should be doing is listening and letting the new ideas broaden their equation. We are not good listeners because we have not had to be. It is more important to defend what is wrong than to consider what is right. What is the purpose of listening? Understanding. And what happens when we understand something? We become unmoored. By definition, one cannot truly understand something and remain unchanged by it. This is why we don’t listen. There is too much at stake. We don’t want to start all over again. It’s better to cling to the ideas of our own founding, no matter how ineffectual and antiquated they may be. One of the consequences is that we get bogged down in the middle of an intellectual and moral backwater.

The Catholic Diocese of New York decried the legalization of gay marriage in that state as a troubling departure from the “historic” definition of marriage. This is a familiar, effective, and logically indefensible tactic. It’s the old, This-is-how-it’s-been-done,-so-it-is-right-and-by-god-we-are-sticking-to-it argument. But the best ideas, including those that stem from our religions, are those that change and adapt as we learn more about the world and our place within it. Religion did not make morality so much as it described it at a particular moment in time (hence the diocese’s reference to history). For many of the world’s major religions, that time was around 2,000 years ago, give or take. Our concept of morality was of course extremely different 200 years ago, let alone 2,000 years ago. Think about how little we really knew about ourselves and the planet back then. Much has changed, and yet the diocese would have us hold fast to a point in our history when, by comparison with what we know today, we were basically ignorant about ourselves, our origins, and how fully we rely on this beautiful planet. As time goes on and we learn more, our concept of morality will necessarily have to become more complex and inclusive if we intend to realize our potential and avoid catastrophe.

Sentences

Sentences

 We will not serve what we do not love.  And we cannot love what we do not know. — Loyal Rue

1.

The question I keep coming back to in my life and in my work is how or by what means do we come to know ourselves and the world we inhabit. A person with clear eyes may see well in both a made environment and a natural one, but the natural environment inspires awe in a way that nothing else can. Why is this? No matter what answer we give, that nature inspires us to ask this question is reason enough to guard it with our very lives. However, when I have known or understood something, I have done so at great cost. It is hard to leave dimness and open one’s eyes in the sun. But I am not feeling around in the dark anymore and I haven’t for awhile.

I am still very much a lover of darkness, mind you, but when I enter my own dark house or some other, I know where the light switch is on the wall. This is not to say that I live in a constant state of awareness because I don’t. Awareness comes to me in a slow, staggered dance. Not everything strikes me. Not everything is important or worth noticing. I’ve got priorities. As much as I love and come to love individual humans, the idea of humanity troubles me. We are mouths with dreams and anuses. The water is always running high and it is easy to get swept up and knocked down, and getting knocked down is the best thing that could happen. But at what cost? I start swimming for my life and each time I save it I hear this: Du muss dein Lieben andern. You must change your life.

I am not sure how Rilke came to this wonderful and frightening awareness, but I do know he was a student of the moment and sat for long hours watching life and was instructed and moved by what he saw. But what we see is determined and filtered by what we are, and what we mostly are is an accident and a big mistake. I am not a misanthrope. I am talking to people now and I need them and this shows that I believe in them. We have quarrels and feuds within our own immediate families. I have a very large bone to pick with the human family, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love them in my own troubled sort of way. Over the course of my life, I have experimented with different ways of sharing my displeasure with human baseness, and these approaches have ranged from invective and vitriol to reasoned pleas to change our ways. I am at the point now, however, where I am much more inclined to use story to encourage more responsible and thoughtful behavior from fellow human beings.

2.

I try to make amends with all the robins I’ve killed by giving their ancestors plenty of space when they hunt in my yard. But my reasons are selfish. I love being lulled by their songs at night. In the summer of 2009, a pair of robins laid a single egg in the nest in the crook of our apple tree. Whenever I thought about it, I would watch the birds through my son’s window. Although the female constructs the nest by herself, both the male and the female take part in feeding and protecting the nest and chick. Over the next two or three months, I watched those robins nurture that chick into a beautiful fledging. Etymologically, fledge means “ready to fly,” but that isn’t quite true, especially in the early stages of fledging, when the birds are capable of leaving the nest but aren’t yet strong enough to take full flight.

Like so many other things in my life, I learned about this form of behavior through experience and with the help of someone more knowledgeable than me. Our old blue spruce is a magnet for all sorts of birds. black capped chickadees, California quail, English sparrows, starlings and juncos frequent the tree at different times during the year, but so far as I can tell, only the black billed magpies nest in it. There is also an abandoned magpie nest in our apple tree. Although the nest in the blue spruce is harder to spot, in general magpie nests are among the most conspicuous in the avian world, which raises some interesting questions. Compared to the discrete robin nest in the crook of our apple tree, the magpie nest is an attention grabber, both because of its size and because of the large, protruding jumble of sticks from which it is made. Such a structure would seem to jeopardize precisely that which it is intended to protect; the chicks. So why would magpies do it? Why would they build such enormous nests in such exposed places?

A few possibilities come to mind. Magpies are one of the larger birds in the area, and if need be they can throw their weight around to protect their interests. They also form large groups and look out for each other that way as well. So maybe part of why they build how and where they do is because they don’t have very many predators. This reminds me of that moment in King Kong when the Americans first see the great wall that the indigenous people had erected around their village. I don’t recall the exact exchange between two of the Americans, but it had to do with how the wall connoted a similarly large threat, which of course was the mighty Kong. We could have the same conversation about the magpie nest, whose size and construction has at least something to do with size of magpie predators.

Although from time to time I see a small falcon patrolling the skyways above the neighborhood in search of prey, the only consistent threat to the magpie is the crow, and not just one crow: an entire murder of them, consisting of around 30 individuals, lives just west of us in the old cemetery pine trees. Adult magpies can take of themselves, but eggs and chicks are another matter. Just last summer I saw two magpies chasing a crow that had one of their chicks in its beak! My neighbor Arlene tells me the magpies once flourished here and that there were great flocks of them. She speculated that one of the reasons their numbers have suffered is because of the crows, which no doubt raid the magpie‘s nest in search of edibles.

In order to mitigate this plundering, the magpie not only makes a large and well-fortified nest, the bird also seems to have obscured the nest entrance. Combined with two or more angry, squawking, and dive bombing magpies, an obscure entrance would likely prove very useful in preventing a hungry crow from accessing the nest. Incidentally, this is also true of the entrance to the rat nest I dismantled a while back (see Killing and Enlightenment). But birds and rats aren’t the only species to attempt to conceal , fortify, and deemphasize the entrances to their refuge. A cursory glance around the neighborhood reveals front doors and windows (also possible access points) adorned with different types of vegetation, including hedges, trees, bushes, and so on. If it seems like I am making too great a leap here, keep in mind that the word adorn comes from the Latin adornare, which means to “equip, provide, embellish.” The word perfectly captures the different and complementary explanations for this behavior. If asked why they plant vegetation in these areas around their homes, most people would probably point to aesthetic reasons for their choices, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still acting on the human animal’s predisposition to find ways to safeguard against danger. It seems likely that all aesthetics can in some way be linked to our evolutionary past.

3.

On one of those many mornings when I awoke early to order and beautify the yard, I heard a magpie carrying on in the old blue spruce. I went outside and saw a magpie hopping in the lower branches and squawking loudly. The bird was very agitated. As I studied the scene, I realized why she was so upset. I had cut and piled branches beneath the tree, and in the midst of that pile was a fledgling magpie. But that in itself was not the issue. My cat Bella Jean was nestled in some high grass on the corner of the house. I don’t think she saw the fledgling, but the parent bird saw her and I supposed was communicating instructions to the young bird: Be still. Danger. At the time, however, I didn’t realize that what I was seeing was a fledgling, so just as I had done in the past when I came across the hawk locked in a batting cage (see Whiskey Larry and the Cooper‘s Hawk), I combed through the phone book and contacted a bird rescue outfit.

After a brief conversation with a bird rescuer, I learned that it was perfectly normal for a young magpie to be on the ground at this stage of its life. Still, I was ambivalent about this information. I was relieved because apparently this was a normal part of the magpie’s fledging behavior. But I was also worried because the strategy clearly was not without its risks. I did what I could to tip the scale of life and death in the young bird’s favor and scooped up Bella Jean and put her in the house. What would she have given to realize her own instincts by stalking and killing that magpie? Cats take a tremendous toll on birds. This is especially true of feral cats, which must fend for themselves. I’ve heard stories of at least one man who traps and drowns feral cats in his neighborhood. I guess one person’s rat is another person’s cat.

I love cats, and although I don’t think I could ever muster the bravado needed to drown one, I don’t disagree with this fellow’s decision to do so. As a species, cats aren’t anywhere near threatened or endangered status, but the same can’t be said for many of the avian species that cats dispatch each year. I must also confess to enjoying birds 100% more than I enjoy feral cats. I would be fine if I never saw another feral cat again, but the idea of never seeing (and hearing) birds again? The idea makes me shudder. And as is true with every other species with which we become intimate, the more I come to know about the lives of birds, the more I love and value them. That is what happened with the robins who built their nest in the crook of our apple and raised a single chick. I think most people would be surprised to learn just how much energy and effort goes into raising a single chick, which is odd because the same is true of us humans and our offspring. In general, humans seem to notice very little about the living world around them. And that is unfortunate because there is a lot to notice and to love in this amazing world.

4.

Anyone who has loved well and hard knows that love comes at a cost. Don’t get me wrong: Paying this debt is more a part of loving well than are the oversimplified conceptions of love we impose upon too few things in our lives. I came to this awareness by watching the lives of the robins. These are their life sentences. Question: What lies at the end of every life sentence? A period? A question mark? Answer: A death sentence. Life is necessarily about the here and now. Beliefs are secondary to this fact. Ask anything that has ever died. I’m not comfortable asking the dead I know such a personal question, so let me ask the robin chick: Robin chick, are beliefs secondary to the fact of death? (If there were answer, this is where it would be). I don’t mean to appear nonchalant about something as serious as death. But if I talk about it in a new way, perhaps I will find previously hidden connections and my view of it and the pain it causes will seem less severe. There is a difference if death appears to me as a child or a painfully beautiful woman or a river sliding under the trees at night.

5.

This is what I am trying to say, what I‘ve been trying to say all along: On one of the only goddamn days when the cat was out, the robin chick was on the ground and both the cat and the bird were unknown to me. I don’t remember what I was doing out in the yard, but it was back breaking and I just wasn’t thinking about all that could go wrong in the world. I had blisters on the palms of my hands and sweat in my eyes and dirt in my shoes and worry in my heart. That is all I was: blisters, sweat, dirt, and worry. Next thing I know, the adult robins are perched on the fence, flapping their wings, chirping wildly, and doing the robin’s version of losing their minds. Out of my other eye I see my cat Bella Jean slinking off across the grass toward the house, belly down, as if she knew at any moment one of the birds may swoop down on her. I’m thinking, What have you done? And then I see the chick hopping along the ground, trying to hide, wide-eyed, beak to its chest and slightly to one side, its distress calls weak and sporadic. And then to my horror I realize the chick’s neck is broken.

My neighbor Arlene was out in her yard and she came over to see what was happening. We watched the chick for a moment and then I asked if I could borrow her BB gun. I hadn’t killed a robin since I was a kid and I was sick at the thought of doing it now. On top of that, I felt angry at my cat and overwhelmed with sadness for this chick whose short life I would now end. I had grown attached and now I would pay for it. I knew what it had taken for those robins to grow this chick and I was appalled by this senseless waste. For all these reasons, it wasn’t long before I started tearing up, which I did my best to hide from my son because I didn’t want him to know what I was about to do. He would have time enough to learn about death and to confront the complicated emotions it inspires. I asked Kim to take him in the house and then I did what had to be done.

Usually we do not know the extent of our love until that which we love is removed from us and on some level I don’t think it could happen otherwise. Loss offers a knowledge that cannot be had without losing. This is what I tell myself. I also know we can know something logically and rationally without knowing it experientially. In other words, we don’t have to wait for the world’s planetary systems to fail before we can start easing the pressure we humans have placed and continue to place on the rest of life. But it takes an enlightened human to resist his tendencies toward rote function and self-interest. I probably could have reached this conclusion without contemplating the life and death of this robin, but not in precisely this way, and so I should thank the robin and I would, but the robin is dust and last I heard the dust cannot hear me.

Whiskey Larry and the Cooper’s Hawk

Whiskey Larry and the Cooper’s Hawk

  Before coming to Utah, I spent over a decade in Arizona, not far from the relatively pristine Sonora Desert, arguably one of the most biodiverse habitats in the world.  During that time, I had several naked-eye encounters with a variety of species, but my most instructive encounters were with birds living (or at least hunting) within the city limits.  When I first became interested in birding about eight years ago, I was not then in the habit of carrying optics with me wherever I went, simply because I did not realize the extent to which wild birds inhabit our cities, suburbs, and rural environments.  Although it would seem that birds would be repulsed by urban environments, cities are resource rich and are attractive to all sorts of animals precisely for that reason. 

While in Arizona, one of the places my wife and I lived was a little condo on the border of Mesa and Tempe.  The condo was a short walk to the community college, where my friend Bart and I would often meet to play outdoor racket ball.  The courts were located just west of the baseball diamond and south of that was a large batting cage.  One morning we had arranged to play and on my walk from the parking lot to the courts, I spotted a large bird perched on the webbing inside the batting cage.  Bart was outside the court, stretching, so I waved him over and together we approached the cage.  At the sight of us, the bird flew around and then landed as far away from us as he could.  The door to the cage was locked, which I found puzzling.  Large terrestrial animals like us have the luxury of keeping our eyes to the ground or straight ahead.  Unlike the squirrel, we’re just not given to looking up much of the time.  Maybe that explains how someone could have locked the cage and not seen this large bird of prey. 

Bart was eager to play racket ball, as was I, but I couldn’t leave the bird in the cage: In the morning it is somewhat cool by Arizona standards, but in summer the temperature quickly reaches and exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  Without any shade, the hawk would have little chance of surviving.  I’ve got to take care of this, I explained, and Bart reluctantly followed as I walked around to a maintenance building in search of someone to open the cage.  As I rounded the corner, I saw that one of the big bay doors was open.  Inside, a man in coveralls had his fists on his hips and was looking hard at a machine of some sort.  I called to him and walked into the building.  He said hello and waited for me to approach.  When I got close enough, I could see that he had been going at it for a while: His close cropped, red hair and scalp glistened with sweat and he had a big smudge of grease on his nose which created the optical illusion that half his nose was gone.  He laid his gloves on the machine and listened as I explained the situation and asked if he could open the cage.  A ring of about forty keys hung from his belt and I was relieved when he went for them, but then I worried that he wouldn’t be able to find the right one.   Let’s walk over there and see what we got, he said in that way that suggested he was no mere maintenance man, but an expert on bird rescue as well.  I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt if it meant he could open the cage.   

Despite my concerns, the man quickly found the right key and opened the door.  The hawk had since returned to the top of the webbing and apparently felt secure enough up there that he didn’t budge when we walked inside.  On the ground were the hours-old, ravaged remains of an Inca dove, the bones and the feathers, bright ribbons of flesh and tendon.  Nearby, huge eucalyptus trees threw long shadows and I imagined the drama beginning from there: Perhaps the dove was perched with a few others when the hawk alighted above it.  The dove bolts and makes the fatal mistake of leaving the cover of the trees.  Out in the wide-open air, the nimble hawk has the advantage, but somehow the dove reaches the cage.  That both birds were willing to enter such a confined space attests to the power of fear and hunger.  The man regarded the hawk and then toed the dove and wondered out loud what he was seeing.  I thought to tell him, but I was more concerned with springing the hawk. 

I studied the scene and realized that the hawk , whose tendency is to fly up and away from danger, would probably not think to fly down to the door and escape, at least not while we were standing there, and maybe not even then.  Under the circumstances, it seemed unlikely that the hawk was going to escape the cage without some specialized assistance.  Eventually, the man shrugged his shoulders and walked out of the cage.  Well, I’ll leave the door open, he said, walking away.  Hold up.  When I started talking to his back, he turned and faced me, squinting in the morning sun, his scalp again shining with sweat.  I’m not sure that is going to do it.   I felt a little uncomfortable because here I was talking to a grown man as if he were a child.  He didn’t respond right away, so I looked at the hawk to ease the tension.  I admired his curved, slashing beak, and the light hit his eyes just so and I could see their amber richness.  Then I looked back at the man and told him I was going to go home, make a few calls, and see if I couldn’t get someone out here to safely rescue the hawk.  The man produced a hankie and wiped his forehead and then returned it to his pocket.  OK, he said.  Then he turned and walked toward the cool, dark building from which he came.

Much to Bart’s disappointment, I rain checked on the racket ball and headed home.  Soon I was frantically searching the Yellow Pages.  Usually, five minutes is a relatively insignificant increment of time.  But when that same five minutes is spent worrying that someone might find the hawk and do him harm–death by rock or BB gun–the notion that five minutes is always five minutes simply isn’t true.  In other words, these were five, very long minutes.  I finally called Animal Control and they referred me to a volunteer operation that focused on raptor rescue.  I had hit pay dirt.  I drove back to the batting cage and a half hour later, a small white pickup pulled up and a skinny, aging hippie eased himself out and walked around to the bed of the truck.  He mumbled to himself as he searched through unseen items, until eventually he produced a pair of heavy leather gloves, a small blanket and a cardboard box.  Tools of the trade he said, smiling and walking toward me.  We shook hands and introduced ourselves.  His name was Larry and he gave me his card.  It was about 11:00 a.m. and the breeze was blowing and I could smell the sweet reek of coffee and whiskey on his breath.  I thanked him for coming out on such short notice and he said it was nothing and we walked over to the cage.

That’s a young Cooper’s Hawk, Larry said, looking up at the bird.  His chapped lips looked very red in the sunlight, as if he were wearing lipstick.  The maintenance man I had seen earlier must have been watching because next thing I know he was standing there with us acting like he was running the show.  He picked up one of the dove’s primary feathers and rubbed it between his fingers as if by that means he could augur the birds final moments.  Then he concluded that the bird had been in the cage for no more than eight hours.  I wanted to ask how he came to that conclusion just to watch him squirm.  I didn’t, though, because Larry was quick to indulge him, which only emboldened the man more.  I was chapped: This guy didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground and yet he was talking as if he were Audubon himself, risen from the dead for just this occasion.  Impatient with Larry and the man’s chatter, I stepped into the fray: What’s the plan, Larry? and he sort of snapped out of his lingual embrace and put down the box and pulled on his gloves.  We’re going to get him moving and tire him out, he said, seating the glove’s fingers.  Then he’ll drop to the ground and we’ll get this blanket over him and put him in the box.  1 2 3.  I thought the method sounded rather crude, but I had no alternative and apparently neither did anyone else.  You guys ready? Larry asked.  Sure, I said.  Let’s do it, the man said, cracking his knuckles.  Larry walked toward the hawk and threw the blanket up at him.  The hawk left his perch and flew around the cage.  Keep him moving, Larry huffed as the hawk flew toward me.  I waved my arms to discourage the hawk from landing and resting.  It continued to fly around the cage, until finally it could fly no more and clasped onto the cage fifteen feet off the ground.

For a moment, the hawk managed to stay upright, but then he leaned back until he was hanging upside down.  I was standing directly beneath him and he was looking directly at me.  It was an unsettling sight. His eyes were wide with fear and he was panting with exhaustion.  I’ve seen dogs and cats pant, but a bird?   Compared to the faces of insects, which are probably the most unlike our own, a hawk’s facial features are somewhat familiar, but even they seem remote in terms of recognition.  And yet at the sight of the hawk‘s expression, I felt overwhelmed with worry.  Over a decade later, I can still see the gaping beak, the white-pink edges of the tongue, and the wild eyes gone dark in the bird’s own shadow.  Not wanting to make things worse, I stood there, frozen.  Larry and the man were now standing on either side of me, and when the hawk dropped to the ground, Larry was there with the blanket.  The hawk tried to lift off again, but it was too late: We had formed a barrier that deprived the hawk of the space needed to take flight.  As he prepared to drop the blanket, Larry moved very carefully, so as to avoid stepping on the hawk or frightening him further.  But the man moved aggressively, like an adversary, and I was sure he was going to kick the hawk to prevent it from escaping.  If he did, I decided at that very moment that I would knock him to the ground. 

There we go, Larry said, casting the blanket over the hawk.  He calmly spoke to the bird as he wrapped him up, taking care to secure the beak and talons that give Coopers and other raptors their namesake.  Once we were outside of the cage, I grabbed the cardboard box and held it open so Larry could place the hawk inside it.  Ok, thank you, he said, easing the bird down into the box.  Why don’t you go ahead and stand back now and I’m going to close it up.  I stepped back and looked at the man just in time to catch a bead of sweat fall from the tip of his nose.  There you go, sweet heart.  With the hawk safely inside, Larry closed the box and took off his gloves.  We were standing in a loose circle around the box and I could again smell whiskey and wondered if Larry had taken a nip when I wasn’t looking.  We were standing there sweating when Larry said You guys did a good job.  Then he ran his hand through his long blond hair, sweeping it behind him.  He wiped his hand on his pant leg and shook the man’s hand and then he shook mine.  Any time, the man said, glad to be of help.  Larry bent down and lifted the box.  I could hear the Cooper’s talons on the cardboard and, farther off, the breeze rattling the dry leaves of the eucalyptus trees.   Well, we sure do appreciate it when folks take an interest in helping these birds.  Larry then explained what would happen now: The hawk would be taken back to headquarters, where it would be hydrated and kept for observation.  If all went well, in a couple week’s time the hawk would be returned to the wild. 

Larry and the man walked off toward Larry’s truck, joshing and bullshitting as if they were long lost pals.  I was beyond irritated: I’m the “folks” who took an interest, Larry! Your pal there wouldn’t have lifted a finger for that hawk if it weren’t for me!  I didn’t actually say that, but I certainly thought it and a few other things as well.  A couple weeks later, I called the number on the card Larry gave me.  A young girl answered the phone: Raptor Rescue and Rehabilitation.  She had a sexy phone voice and I wanted to say something sexy back to her but I was married.  So I did the complete opposite and did something very unsexy and asked to speak with Larry.  Please hold, she said.  Instead of John Tesh or Kenney G., I heard a loud beep every three seconds, and I counted six beeps before the sexy voice returned.  I could hear rustling papers in the background.  Are you holding for Larry, she inquired.  I was a little confused by her question because hadn’t I just asked for Larry six beeps ago?  Did six beeps represent the same amount of time where she was?  I wondered.  I didn’t want her to sense my puzzlement, so I quickly answered her and said yes that I was holding for Larry.  More rustling papers.   A pen tink against a coffee mug.  May I ask who’s calling? 

Things were getting weird.  I knew she wanted more than my name, so I gave her the whole story and told her that I was calling to follow up on the Cooper’s hawk I had helped rescue.  Larry doesn’t volunteer here anymore, she finally said, her words steeped in suspicion.  Larry had obviously been fired, arrested, or done something egregious from the perspective of RRR.  I didn’t see that it mattered when all I wanted to do was find out about the hawk: Ok, well, can you tell me about the hawk?  Was he released?  The girl leaned forward in her chair.  Actually, we’re not sure.  Larry never showed up with the Cooper’s, a Zone tailed hawk, and let’s see. . .she paused here to turn the page. . . a Great Horned owl.  The police think maybe he sold the birds in Mexico.  As she speaks, I fly out over the desert along the Superstition Freeway and I see Larry broken down on the side of the road near Florence Junction.  The little truck’s hood is up and steam from the radiator is drifting out into the desert.  Three boxes sit side-by-side on the front seat.  The heat causes the boxes to soften, expand, and then open.  One-by-one, the two hawks and then the owl shake the blankets from their shoulders and fly out the open window. 

Larry doesn’t see any of it behind the hood.  And he’s got a lot on his mind:  Night is falling, the whiskey is gone and he still needs to drive out to Superior, where a large red-tailed hawk got caught up in a barbwire fence.  There is nothing to do but wait for the engine to cool, so Larry steps away from the truck and walks into the desert and pisses dark urine on a jumping cholla.  Things change this fast.  Hidden, the owl watches from the branch of a Palo Verde tree.  A witness to the proceedings.  Were it not before my own eyes, this would seem an impossible vision.  It is late in the day and the sky is on fire. Silent and light-boned, the hawks are coming low, hard, and fast.  This is not magic.  It happens.  Larry zips up and thinks about the whiskey he’s going to drink and where.  He doesn’t know what hit him.  He doesn’t feel a thing.

Killing and Enlightenment

Killing and Enlightenment

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.  I am large. I contain multitudes.” — Whitman

I had been thinking about hunting and killing because I had just done some killing myself. Before I get into that, let me first observe what an odd admission this is and how it is utterly illustrative of contemporary life. I don’t know exactly how long ago we here in North America figured out how to mass produce food, but it has not been long. Up until about 50 years ago, we purchased food from merchants who bought food from small scale operations and before that we might have grown or hunted it ourselves. My point is that at one time during our history we had a much more hands-on approach to killing and food acquisition. These days we rarely kill, or even grow a garden for that matter, and so it is not surprising that most of us do not have the stomach for blood and dirt. I wonder if this is not another example of cheating ourselves of experience. This assumes that one believes, as I do, that varied experiences are necessary to living a full and rich life. A few nights ago I destroyed a rat and now I am more complex and more deeply rooted to the Earth.

Our home here in lower Millcreek was built in 1952. As is true with a 60-year-old human, a 60-year-old house has seen better days. Once we had cleared away the debris from the previous two owners’ lives, we found that while the house needed some upgrades, it was still very much in tact. The yard, however, had been allowed to grow unchecked for many years, and I spent a good two weeks pruning, trimming, raking, chopping, shoveling, and clearing before I liked what I saw and was comfortable letting my children explore their new yard. One of the advantages of buying an older home is that they typically have older vegetation as well. In addition to an enormous blue spruce pine tree in the front yard, I also found a Bartlett pear and a Bing cherry tree in the back yard, both of which were nearly as old as the house itself. Why the first owner decided to plant several fruit trees (there is also an apple tree that is currently infested with coddling moths) is partly explained by the two sizeable fruit cellars in our basement, where canned goods were stored. Interesting to think that the building styles of only 60 years ago could have archeological and anthropological significance. Today the fruit cellar is largely a remnant of a past culture and value system.

For the past two summers, my children and I have made a ritual of picking cherries, and my wife Kim will often walk out to the pear tree in the evening and pick a few to ripen on the window sill. Before then, however, most of the fruit would rot on the ground. We harvest 2/3 of the cherries, but only a ¼ of the pears, which are produced at such a rate that we cannot hope to eat them all. “We” includes not only me and my family, but also the myriad birds, insects, mammals, and rodents that feed on the fruit. As a riparian corridor, the Millcreek area attracts considerable wildlife. Unlike the majority of suburban developments here in the West that have water in their names and thus attempt to tap our innate attraction to water, the Millcreek area really does have a creek running through it, and the creek attracts any number of animals, such as the sizeable, infamous, and misnamed Norwegian rat (Rattus norvegicus). This large rodent actually hails from central Asia and now inhabits every continent on Earth except Antarctica.

I had never seen a rat until moving to Millcreek. I was taking a walk through the neighborhood when I saw it cross a driveway into a juniper hedge. I saw it for two or three seconds, but that was enough. After seeing mice for my entire life, the considerably larger rat made an impression, especially its long, hairless tail. Apparently, at one time the rats were much more abundant in the area. Within days of our arrival, my neighbor Arlene informed me that they had once run rampant in the neighborhood, but then the residents went on an extermination campaign and their numbers were greatly reduced. This explains my surprise when, a few weeks ago, I discovered a rat nest on the east side of my house. I was surprised not only by the presence of the nest, but also by its size and sophistication.

The nest was about the size of a bicycle tire, roughly a half-foot high, and made of materials that became increasingly fine from the outer to inner part of the nest. Imagine placing a dinner plate in the center of a bicycle tire. The area around the plate was made of coarse sticks from our apple tree. Many of these sticks were cut to size and carefully weaved into an impressive fortification. The very center of the nest, or that area represented by the dinner plate, was made of long yellow grass, and looked very much like a large bird nest, right down to the careful weaving and interlacing of the grass. Another similarity was that the nest was lined with soft bedding, including down and extra fine grass. The nest’s entrance was located on the top and in the center of the nest and was the size a coffee mug.

As I dismantled the nest, I couldn’t help but respect the architecture and, consequently, the architect. Who would have thought that one of the most demonized creatures on the face of the planet, suspected carrier of the black plague and a host of other diseases, could construct such a beautiful and functional refuge? But this is a very peculiar application of the concept of beauty, isn’t it? Couple that with my aversion to destroying the nest and suddenly it seems we are talking about something much bigger than either the rat or even me. We are talking about deep history, which attempts to illuminate the emergence of our species by placing it in the all-inclusive context of biological reality. The question I ask myself is why would I feel a thing for this rat, let alone a feeling as big as beauty and aversion to destroying that beauty? Am I unique? Am I special? Am I crazy? Maybe. But what is more likely is that both the rat and the human and just about every other animal constructs and therefore instinctively values refuge. Of course different animals express this value differently, but that we all value a nice place to live is indisputable, which is why destroying even the lowly rat’s refuge gave me pause.

The best refuges are constructed or selected according to a certain logic. If one were to study the location of robin nests, for instance, one would likely find that the birds prefer to build them in specific places with particular orientations to both weather and resources. Sounds like a lot of humans I know. This is not to say that every bird gets to build in the most optimal place, and that is because there is less ideal nesting habitat than there are birds to occupy it. But clearly some places are better to live in than others, a fact that, incidentally, has given rise to the study of environmental racism among humans, which basically shows how people of lower socioeconomic status are often forced to live in the most inhospitable places, whereas people with more resources, which they may have acquired because of luck or inheritance and not necessarily because of intelligence, often inhabit the prime locations.

The other and perhaps most important factor affecting a refuge’s desirability is its safety or how well it protects its occupants from the ill-intentions of predators, including one’s own kind (other rats are the number one cause of mortality to other rats, just as humans are the primary killers of other humans). Rats are excellent diggers, so what puzzled me about the nest is why the rat built it in the first place. For despite all the measures taken by the rat to keep out danger, the nest is still on the ground, where it is conspicuous and vulnerable to all sorts of predators. One can only speculate about why the rat would spend all that energy to make what would seem to be such a vulnerable refuge. Perhaps all the prime nesting habitat had been claimed by other rats? Hard to say for sure.

When I finally reached the inner sanctum of the nest, I was relieved to find no one home, but the rat’s absence also raised another question: If rats are for the most part nocturnal, where was the rat? Then I just happened to look into the window well and see what appeared to be a recently excavated hole. For all the reasons cited above, I concluded that the rat must have also decided that the nest was less than optimal and abandoned it for the more traditional burrow. In order to find out for sure if a rat had taken up residence in my yard, I stuffed the hole with chunks of mud. When I returned the next morning to check on the hole, it was clear and slightly bigger than before. The question before me now was how to exterminate the rat (it didn‘t occur to me to let the rat live). Initially I thought to ask my neighbor Arlene if I could borrow her BB gun. But when I told Kim of my plans to sit in the dark and wait for the rat to appear, at which point I would “flash the light and shoot the fucker in the head,” she suggested my idea was impractical as well as brutal. Although I was dissuaded from that particular method, I was not discouraged. I had morphed into the hunter of my early days and I was happy to think my hunter thoughts.

Last winter we had mice come in from the cold and to deal with them we bought those rectangular sticky traps and set them out. At first these traps were ineffective because (I realized later) I did not know where to put them. But that changed when, one morning, I was out on the porch admiring the new winter day and I saw a mouse run along side the house. That little misstep would spell disaster for that mouse and four others. All I had to do was place the trap along their travel route, add a bit of cheese, and viola! Five dead mice, five dead mice, see how they died, see how they died. But seriously, like other traps, these sticky traps remove one from the act of killing, but one cannot escape the aftermath of any trap, and the sticky traps are certainly no exception. This is the equation: five hungry mice + one determined human + two chunks of cheddar cheese + 1 well-placed sticky trap + freezing temperatures + a fierce will to survive + bad luck = five dead mice that damn near pulled off the bottoms of their feet trying to escape and then froze to death in the night in sight of the cheese that they never did get to eat. Of all the deaths that one can buy, this has got to be one of the worst. I would prefer a bullet to the head, thank you.

Two sayings come to mind here: “You can’t argue with success” and “If isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” While I was at Home Depot looking for a rat-sized sticky trap, I noticed all the different deaths I could buy, ranging from basic to sophisticated. The electronic trap is an example of the latter, but it is expensive and for no good reason at all I was skeptical of the technology. So I purchased the sticky traps and went home. Rats are like other animals that use the same trails over and over. I could see the trail my rat had been using to get in and out of the window well, but I thought it best to place the trap right outside the entrance of the burrow. Very rude, I know. Before I did so, I excavated the ground and seated the trap so that it wouldn’t move or appear higher than the ground outside the entrance.

The next morning I checked on the trap and found that the rat had kicked dirt onto it and ruined it. Oddly, I wasn’t disappointed. I was just the opposite. This was a smart rat and would therefore require me to ramp up my own intelligence if I intended to realize my objective. But then it occurred to me that the trap may have been ruined accidentally. Rats make home improvements, so it is possible that the trap was covered when the rat cleared out the burrow entrance. I was curious if the rat was now using the main entrance again, so I placed some large leaves in the entrance and waited. A couple days went by and the leaves had not been moved. I was stumped. But then I discovered another entrance to the burrow system, which I again plugged and which was again clear a day later. It was time to try some different technology.

My neighbor Keith down the street had lived through the rat invasion of several years before and he suggested I buy the standard, spring-loaded rat trap. These are like the well-known wooden mouse traps, but of course they are five times bigger and, therefore, five times more powerful. Keith has been on the planet now for sixty-some-odd years and I had no reason to doubt his knowledge, so I again headed to Home Depot and bought the new trap. Looking at the packaging, I had not realized that there was a right and a wrong way to lay the trap. The right way is to abut the trap against a wall. I am not sure why. But I followed the instructions to the letter because I was determined to do this right. I realized, though, that this trap could also kill a cat, a likelihood that would be increased once I baited the trap with a large chunk of tasty cheese. I needed to figure out how to entice the rat and at the same time repel other animals that might be attracted to the cheese.

That is when I got the idea to make a cage for the trap that would draw in the rat while keeping out other animals, which I did by driving sticks into the dirt (see image). Once I had my walls, I made a roof from small pieces of blue spruce branches. I hoped these branches would deter a cat both because of their strong pine smell and their prickly needles. I also imagined that their smell might help to conceal my scent from the rat. I then carefully slid the trap into position against the fence. To further prevent a cat from accessing the trap, I made a tight entrance by placing sticks at a forty-degree angle. A rat could pass through and under them, but a cat would get poked.

The next morning I found the rat. I had done what I had set out to do. And yet the moment I turned the corner of my house and saw the dead rat from several feet away, I felt ambivalent about what I had done. The first thing I noticed about the rat was its size. What struck me even more was the auburn color and fine texture of its fur. I did not touch the fur, but my eyes could feel it and it was soft and silky. But I had made a mess of things. The cage had worked perfectly: The rat went into it like a key goes into a lock. And then the trap did it exactly what it was designed to do. It was such a crude instrument, I couldn’t believe how well it worked. I am almost certain that the rat didn’t know what hit him. And that is important. If I were going to die violently, I wouldn’t want to know. The act of dying isn’t what is difficult, it is the process leading up to it, and for intelligent species like us the more time we have to ponder our death, the worse it becomes. Although a rat probably isn’t pondering much of anything, it might very well know fear, which is something that the spring loaded rat trap does not inspire. In my book, dying by rat trap is about as good as it gets.

Beyond whatever discomfort and fear an animal may encounter leading up to its death, death for the dead is not a problem. But it is the problem for the living, or at least half of it. The other half is wrapped up in living. Everything dies and we get to think about it without making very much headway most of the time. Regardless, with each death we witness, we get strapped with stones of various sizes, each of which corresponds to the weight of each loss. Seeing a rat die likely doesn’t weigh much on peoples’ minds, but it is not weightless, not for me. Milan Kundera distinguishes between the two “faces” of death: “One is nonbeing, the other is the terrifying material being that is the corpse.” No one would argue the heaviness of the material, of the corpse. But here on this planet, nothing resides outside the reach of gravity. Not even the idea of killing a rat. We can take away the body. Put it in the garbage or in the incinerator, but the idea does not depart so readily. We carry it. The gravity of ideas informs the human face, but it does so from the inside out. It isn’t the sun or the wind, which can distort the subtlety and the sometimes stark reality of the human face. As an extreme example, look at the face of a soldier who has killed or seen people killed. There is something remote and inexplicable in that face.

A rat is not human (although I can think of a few gray areas), but whatever life is, there is continuity between its forms. And that fact might add complexity to our lives and to our thinking.

Hunting and the limitations of technology

I did my fair share of hunting and killing as a boy, and I am repulsed by those memories because I hunted and killed for pleasure and not much more. I enjoyed stalking, surprising, and outsmarting the birds where I lived, but it is unlikely that anything except rote intelligence had anything to do with it.  Hunters will put meat in an barrel, climb a tree, and when a black bear comes to the bait, they shoot it. The bear doesn’t stand a chance against the rifle any more than the black capped chickadee stands a chance against a well-placed BB. This type of hunting–sport hunting I guess they call it–is the equivalent to shooting fish in a barrel, which involves little if any skill, and where there is no skill there is usually no respect.

Apart from those occasions when early hunters scavenged meat, they procured meat at great cost, and out of that exchange emerged a deep knowledge and respect for the animals they hunted and that hunted them. Given the limitations of early weapons, making a kill was not easy. Knowing what I do about my own experience of hunting with both early and modern weapons, my guess is that early hunters had a much fuller appreciation and understanding of the animals with which they shared the environment.   What these hunters “lacked” in technology, they made up for with their attentiveness to the animals whose lives they had to understand if they hoped to take them. 

Technology is often at odds with this ancient relationship, and rather than improving our experience, it steals it from us.  In many cases, the purpose of technology is to make complex tasks easier to perform, but the easier technology makes something, the less we must personally invest in it, and without that investment, our connection to the world around us is severed.

What is also true is that early hunters, because of their circumstances, were naturally inclined to understand and, eventually, revere animals and the land that sustained them. They really had no choice but to know the animals they hunted because their technology did not afford them alternatives.  They did not know any better, but we do.  Moving backward through human history, our ancestors did not have the choice of using a gun instead of a bow or a bow instead of a spear or a spear instead of a rock or a rock instead of teeth and bare hands. Judging by these examples, as technology has become more sophisticated, our physical and intellectual proximity to the animal and to the land has become more distant.

 The very notion that the animals we hunt deserve a fighting chance of escaping our bloody intentions is a recent development. The idea likely did not exist prior to the invention of projectile weapons. As the most deadly type of this weapon, the firearm changed hunting from an often dangerous and demanding necessity to a removed and periodic past time for most people. Granted there are exceptions to everything I’ve said here: there are modern hunters (including anglers) who insist on limiting their reliance on technology not because they are into deprivation but because they recognize that excessive technology removes them from precisely that which they seek to experience.

Although hunting parties were known to travel relatively great distances to reach prey, most of the hunting probably occurred within a certain home range or territory. The benefits of hunting a particular area were significant. The underlying benefit was intimacy with the environment, which in turn made it more predictable and, therefore, more survivable. Hunting was a way to not only procure much needed protein and foodstuffs, but to familiarize one’s self with the plants and animals that formed one’s world and, by extension, world view. Put simply, a lot was going on during those hunts.

Precisely the opposite is true in the case of hunting today, especially when those hunts require one to leave the home range and travel into unfamiliar environments, which are sometimes hundreds if not thousands of miles away. In addition to being quite unthinkable to our early counterparts, who could not imagine traveling thousands of miles to hunt a certain species, if hunts of this type are to be successful (and here “success” means making a kill since few hunters, after they have traveled thousands of miles and spent thousands of dollars, care about little else), one must hire a guide whose job it is to make sure the “client” gets what he paid for.

Generally, the guide’s job is not to educate the client in the local flora and fauna or other important information that situates both the prey species as well as the hunter whose mind is not open to being broadened. And why would it be? The client will likely never again set foot on the guide’s home ground. If this is true, and the client is not paying for, nor has the expectation of acquiring the guide’s local knowledge, then the guide in effect becomes more of a paid escort. The escort’s job is to locate prey well in advance of the hunt and then take the client to it so that he or she may shoot or catch it and still expend very little physical or mental energy. In fact, most of the energy is spent up front in the form of fuel, permits, gear, fees, and other expenses. This is not hunting as I understand it. The important work has been done for you. The hunter has earned the dollars but not the privilege of thinking like and laying hands on a wild animal.

If the deep-seeded benefits of hunting in all its forms are to be preserved, they must come at a personal and not merely economic cost to us. The hunter who hires the plane to shoot wolves as they run across open ground and the angler who hikes four miles to fish his favorite mountain lake are in essence compelled by the same ancient urge to hunt, but that is where the similarities end. In my view, to hunt is to be an animal. Unlike the angler imagined here, whose senses are aroused, the aerial hunter is severed from the land and from the subject of his pursuit. The wolf should have shaped the man.  It should have put fear and awe in him.  But here the hunter is without referent. He is reduced to a gun in the sky, to a finger on a trigger, and he cannot think of anything except himself and his own pumping blood because in that moment all that matters is the kill and nothing of lasting value lives beyond it.