There will not likely be a revolution. But a shift did happen on Tuesday night. I join the world, less those who despite all evidence to the contrary believe things were going swimmingly, in a collective sigh of relief. And revel in the miraculous ability to still be moved by the power of words spoken by a – gasp! – politician.
Down Parkside, Bedford, and Winthrop, the line does wind.
Jess & I fixed some tea and headed to the polls right at 6 am, when they opened here in New York. While it seems that everyone I know in other parts of the country already voted long ago — early voting, mail-in ballots — it’s today or nothing here. People were streaming in from all directions to join the quickly growing line that went around the corner, and around the corner again. An hour and a half later, I was in the solid metal booth, strangely reassured by the old-school machine being used in the 63rd precinct. And not reassured that the other booth for the same district was already out-of-service. I stepped in. I cranked the red lever to the right. I voted. I pulled the crank back to the left, and with a resounding THUNK, my vote was cast. I believe. I do believe. If one doesn’t believe, then there is nowhere to go from here. I fear my cynicism runs deep, yet still I hope we are on the brink of some paradigm shift we are long overdue to make. Age of Aquarius anyone?
OK, I know I said I was only going to do this blog thing while I was on the road, but… I got to go to a pre-release screening last night of Slumdog Millionaire, the new film by English director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting). It takes place in teeming Mumbai, following Jamal from his boyhood in the slums to his fidgeting moment on national television when he lands on the game show, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” — and answers the questions correctly, one by one. The story unfolds in aching beauty and agony. Keep your eyes out for this in 2009 when it is released.
Afterwards, I went to see the latest by Banksy, who I only knew as a graffiti artist, famed for his politically charged images and his eternal inability to be identified, well, maybe. Bansky’s West Village Pet Store, on Seventh Avenue, is set up in a small shop space and filled with displays of animitronic animals and procesed food products that you can see here and here.
Having recently written a piece about a falcon cam for The New York Times, I stood soaking up the uncomfortable irony of the scene behind the storefront window — two baby surveillance cameras, sitting in their nest, eagerly reaching up to their surveillance camera mama, all moving in a decidedly birdlike manner. Further down the window, chicken nuggets bobbed into a plastic container of sauce.
“I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming,” Banksy explained in an official press release. “But it ended up as chicken nuggets singing.”
Inside, an eerily lifelike chimp sat in his cage, headphones on, transfixed by the television set showing Discovery channel images of chimps mating, face-to-face. His face moved in subtle response, his belly rose and fell with breath, and one hand held a remote while the other rested easily on his groin.
The odometer read 10,859.1 miles when I turned onto the cobblestones that mark the beginning of my street in Brooklyn. If I ignore the pile of reporter’s notebooks, the infinite hours of audio recordings that need to be transcribed, and the stack of books I’ve amassed in this two-month trip, the things that I’ve collected could fit in my hand. They rode with me in the little carpeted nook next to the gear shift. I started with a soapstone carving of Ganesh, a token of the gods I have carried with me for longer than I can remember. He’s led me along the ribbons of highway in safety; maybe it was his presence that kept me from sideswiping that guy in my blind spot in California, and being sideswiped by the lady whose blind spot I was in in Montana. The elephant god who, along with audio books, Radio Lab, This American Life and gallons of caffeinated beverages, kept me alert and mostly at the speed limit.
There is an acorn, small and dry enough that it rattles when you shake it, that Jim Weaver stopped his truck and got out to pluck from the dwarf desert oak plant. He waded through the waist-high grass to get it, handing it to me as he told me of the Indians that once roamed this New Mexico plateau, when a bumper crop of the acorns would “beat the hide off your shins,” the plants were so thick with them. “They say,” he told me looking across the endless stretch of flat land over the steering wheel of his truck, “that Bonnie and Clyde hid out here.” Burrowing owls stood like sentries among the sand sage as we bumped along in the ruts past them.
There is a shiny copper bullet that has been shot through ballistics gel, causing its tip to flare into an O’Keeffe-like flower, four-petaled and deeply grooved. Peter Jenny of the Peregrine Fund handed it to me as I sat with him and Tom Cade at the Fund’s World Center of Birds of Prey in Boise. It’s weight is solid and in it lies the hope that condors can fly free again in the places where men now hunt with lead ammunition, mushy and toxic and most unflower-like in its firing.
More copper. A penny, year 2005, found face up on the threshold of a Super 8 motel in Salt Lake City like some lucky charm telling me all was right with the world despite word of an economic collapse in some far-off place with tall buildings. In two months, I only needed or wanted to stay in a hotel less than seven days. I camped when I could, in my brother’s backyard, in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, overlooking the canyon of the Colorado River. To everyone who put a pillow under my head, fed me and let me use their washing machines and bathtubs, I thank you. The people who had to smell me after I visited you thank you also. The generosity was as boundless and welcome as the western skies I traveled under.
I took a bit of the earth with me. A rock from a dried up tributary that I ventured into with a friend as we climbed down to the edge of the Colorado River, wide and determined as it headed toward the Grand Canyon. I hold the image in my mind of our two shadows contoured to the red desert rock, two forms instead of one. We passed a couple returning, leaning heavily on their walking sticks as the shadows grew longer, who warned us that it was tough going ahead. We scrambled onward into the fading light, confirming our mutual belief that the idea of waiting until you retire, until age has leached the motion from your limbs, to see all the magnificent, magical and nearly inaccessible places in this world is a waste indeed. Every person I have interviewed, every friend I have visited with on this trip, seemed to me to hold this belief like some core guiding light.
Add a small bough of cedar to the dashboard.
Add a sprig of sage, pungent and hopeful.
Then there is the invisible, collected along the journey as well, the reason for the road, the stories of the people I had planned for months to see, and those who were an unexpected surprise. Their words filled in the blanks in my mind, their faces took shape in my memory, the way they held themselves, their reserve or openness when faced with my notebook and recorder and onslaught of questions. We talked of subspecies variation within Falco peregrinus, about migration and movement and breeding and believing, but we also talked about the books they read as boys that led them to go out and trap their first red-tailed hawk. The impact of a Disney movie or a National Geographic article. Scientists, biologists, zoologists, geneticists, toxicologists, falconers, all people with questions that drive them forward in inquisition. They seek answers, but I think that more than that, they seek the next question. They make statements knowing they can shift. That it’s all a work-in-progress.
And intertwined in the travels were friends and family, precious and scattered across the continent, and the joy and despair in learning about the latest chapters in their lives. Of lives that are just beginning and others that are reaching their end.
I am now the keeper of these tales, and all I can do is try to pass them along, to share them with those who care to listen. In the stories we remain. In the stories life persists.
The Society of Environmental Journalists met in Roanoke for their 18th annual conference. This was my third time attending and the gathering of 800+ journalists from around the country (and globe) is always overwhelming in its content (which can make one walk quite sure that we are, indeed, toast), inspiring in its breadth (making you once again rise to face a new day), and a good reminder that I am part of wide community of people who are telling the important stories that link humans to the physical and fragile world we inhabit. Some highlights:
I already wrote about concerns about lead poisoning from ammunition, but Marc Edwards from Virginia Tech has been studying lead in drinking water at public schools. While the EPA has set 10 ppm (parts per million) as the acceptable level (and there was discussion of this too being much too high to mitigate low-level poisoning), Edwards has found levels in the hundreds and even as high as 5,000 ppm. This is a hazardous waste level. His research found that 30% of the schools tested had elevated levels beyond EPA standards, yet there is no requirement for testing because the public water source has been deemed acceptable. “You’d have to eat six Thomas-the-Trains to get the same level as what we saw in some of these schools,” he said.
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, gave a keynote luncheon talk about climate change. Someone, Dr. Pachauri said, once asked Gandhi if he wanted to see India reach the level of prosperity that Britain had. It is a question that echoes in different forms today more than ever, usually in the context of the West having no right to now tell those in the East that they have to hinder in their development. Gandhi’s response? It took Britain using resources from half the world to reach their level of prosperity. How many planets would India require?
The last day of the conference was a blessing, tearing at the thin fabric of my skin after these two months on the road, on thinking about place and the creatures that fly above and what we’ve done – are doing – to the land below our feet. The conference crowds had thinned and a cold front had dusted the sidewalks with frost when we gathered around our coffee cups in the small intimate room to hear Wendell Berry – Kentucky farmer, activist, and writer – read and talk with fellow Southern authors Ann Pancake and Denise Giardina. They spoke of the greatest environmental disaster in their region, and quite arguably the country: mountaintop coal mining. While I once spent a good part of my time fighting to keep large trees standing upright upon the land, this is a battle for the mountains themselves. See images here to grasp the extent of this devastation. John Prine’s song, Paradise, came filtering into my mind.
And just in case you haven’t heard of Wendell Berry, here’s one of his classic poems, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. Read this and then read more.
Here’s a video of him giving the same speech he read to us – “a speech against the state government,” he said in his introduction.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgfMu2NxtZI]
It was a room full of journalists and they asked the unanswerable question of how to get this information out so people will care, so that it will effect them. Write the stories, said Wendell, that you are authorized to tell. And find the one way to tell it. He quoted this, but I don’t know if they are his words or someone else’s. Either way, they bear repeating:
A thousand deaths, a thousand sufferings, makes a plateau. It is a bed of nails you can lie upon. But one death, one moment of suffering, one Lear, one Hamlet, is the point of sorrow.
summer falls
I drove into autumn, leaving the warmth of Texas behind, seeing Arkansas for the first time, traversing the breadth of Tennessee and arriving in Roanoke, Virginia with the trees ablaze.
fly! be free! Photo by Gregg Doney
“It’ll change your life.” This was said to me more than once by multiple people I’ve interviewed on this trip – Bud Anderson, Tom Cade, and other men who have worked with peregrine falcons all their lives. They were referring to the study of peregrines that has been taking place on South Padre Island in Texas for more than three decades.
And so I came. I happened to be back in Austin the first week of October, peak migration season for the peregrines, specifically Falco peregrinus tundrius, the northern birds that range across northern Canada and Greenland. The anatum falcons of New York only make smaller migrations, if they choose to move at all, but at this moment in the fall, the tundrius are peregrinating their way across the breadth of the Americas on their way to Argentina and Chile for the winter. Many of them, and I do mean many, pass over the sandy flats of South Padre. It provides an opportunity for study virtually unparalleled in North America.
South Padre is not known so much for its birds, but for a gathering of a more carnal type. This is where heaps of college students come for Spring Break, filling the hotels along the beach and proceeding to get drunk and naked. Usually in that order.
I only saw one naked woman, and she was well over twice as old as she might have been in college. She was walking along the beach smoking a cigarette, her small white poodle cowering in the shade under her large pick up truck, which was rigged up with a large striped umbrella. She’d parked along the shore further north on the 26-mile-long beach, miles beyond where the hotels, kite shops and paved road ended. The shore-side sand, in true Texas form, is a state highway, open to all traffic.
I caught her image quickly. I was flying by on a four-wheeler Honda ATV, trying to keep up pace with Gregg Doney, Alastair Franke and Mark Prostor, while we slalomed through the debris left behind from Hurricanes Dolly and Ike that had passed through the month before. All the salvageable lumber had been gleaned and what was left behind was the waste. The organic matter tossed up from the sea, but also the plastic jugs and plastic garbage cans, the plastic bottles and plastic parts that where once important for something but now have ended up here, severed from their utility, their shape unidentifiable. It was a mess.
We pulled hard to the left and left the waves and trucks and people behind. Into the wash, the dunes sheltering an endless expanse of flat sand that stretched inland toward Laguna Madre, a mile or four away depending on the tides and the wind that moves the land. We killed the loud engines and lifted binoculars to eyes as the quiet settled in. Immediately, we saw a distinct upright form standing on the sand.
It was the same form I have seen now on the stone formations of the Riverside Church on the Upper West Side and the wires of the Brooklyn Bridge. On a severe cliff face at the edge of Lake George in the Adirondacks. I have seen the 18” upright shape on the window ledge of a sugar beet factory in Boise, Idaho, Tom Cade and I standing in the light rain with our binoculars.
I spent the rest of the day following along with the men as they trapped the falcons, mostly yearling females, and collected the data they would need to test for avian flu and West Nile virus, to monitor their size and understand variance. They carefully drew blood for genetic studies, moving quietly and quickly to keep the birds calm. An ID band was cinched around a leg for future identification. None were already banded on the day I spent with them, but about 10% of the birds they catch are. One female from this season had been banded fifteen years earlier. “Think of the mileage that bird has on her,” Alistair said, amazed, and you could see him doing the multiplication in his head…more than 6,000 miles each spring and fall, for at least fifteen years.
Gregg, used to working with peregrines in places like Colorado and Greenland, where they’re all on cliffs, looked out across the sand flats and up, as yet another falcon came into view. “You’ve got a vector there with cliff-nesting birds,” he said, looking up at the brilliant blue sky dappled with clouds, “but here they’re right on the ground. You’re in their world here.”
When the work on the bird was complete, she was daubed with temporary red dye so that she wouldn’t be caught again and then, they handed her to me to release. I held her in my hand, the steady warmth and weight of the wild heavier than the two or three pounds she would register on a scale. Her round dark eyes gauged me calmly and on the count of three, I let her go.
Eddie Feltes overlooks the Kaibab Plateau
“Eliminate lead and we’re there,” he said, leaning over the edge of the cliff to see the condor sweep by. We were perched on top of the rosy-red cliffs at Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, looking out over the Kaibab Plateau in northern Arizona. On the horizon the land vanished, then reappeared – the hint of the leading edge of the Grand Canyon’s North Rim 30 miles away.
Eddie Feltes is in his prime, imprinted with the indomitable attitude of someone who gets shit done. He’s the field manager for the Peregrine Fund’s condor release program, which has helped bring the California condor population up from a low of 22 individuals in 1982 to more than 300 today, 60 of them flying free along the Arizona-Utah border where we stood. As the day warmed up, thermals formed above the Vermilion Cliffs, curling invisibly above the coves until we saw one, then two, then four condors soar by us on wings that spanned 9 1/2 feet and catch the heat wave as it lifted them up in a spiral. Their perfect black forms floated on the current, clear numbered markers affixed to their wings.
Another condor, #367, flew by and lifted its wings to land on a rock outcropping a hundred feet below us. Their roosting spots were clear on the cliffs, the white frosting of their droppings crusted onto the red rock. She watched us and we watched her, her crop full with the weight of a recent meal, expanded to the point that it was bursting through her breast feathers. She wouldn’t need to eat again anytime soon. She could sit and watch and soar and sit again. Her biggest worry, were she to think of such things, was the approach of hunting season, and with it, carcass remains that are saturated with the shrapnel of lead bullets.
That lead is a hazardous substance isn’t exactly news. Look here and here . The risks of lead poisoning were known as far back as Roman times, and some have even speculated that the ancient empire fell as their population succumbed to low-level lead poisoning that caused illness and developmental problems. Today, we can’t avoid public health posters warning against children eating lead paint chips, and unleaded gasoline is now the norm. That lead is still the common base for ammunition, even for the hunting of animals that sportsmen then proudly take home to feed their families, seems to be one last sticking point that hasn’t quite reached public consciousness and even meets a steadfast resistance, at least here in the United States. Lead shot has been banned, according to Feltes, in Germany and Japan as well as other countries.
There are alternatives. Copper, tungsten and steel bullets all exist, and are being used in limited areas in the U.S. If a hunter gets a permit in the Kaibab, for example, Arizona Game and Fish Department sends them a coupon for lead-free bullets in the caliber of their choice, and the state of California has banned the use of lead bullets outright in the range of the condor. They work better and are cleaner, and although they can be a bit more expensive, it’s an incidental cost in the expense a hunter accrues over a season.
X-ray photographs show that lead leaves – in the words of several biologists I spoke to – a “snowstorm of fragmentation.” The Peregrine Fund published a paper in 2006 in the Wildlife Society Bulletin to this effect and continues, along with others, to conduct studies demonstrating the deleterious effects of lead on the health of the humans and animals that ingest animals shot with lead bullets. People can pick out the shrapnel and think they’ve cleaned their meat, but microscopic lead dust remains in the animal that can neither be tasted nor felt. Major amounts of the ammunition are left behind in gut piles that are then fed upon by condors as well as other scavengers.
Feltes is an avid hunter and falconer. He loves guns and has a collection of hero shots of himself with animals he’s slain. This was not an eco peacenik leaning over the cliff face before me. “If condors were just going extinct because their time here was done, that would be one thing,” he said. “But it’s because of humans that they’re in such trouble, and we’ve got a responsibility to them. Hunters are the biggest conservationists in this country. We don’t have to stop hunting. We just have to stop using lead.”
Feltes is also a rock climber, part of the job when working with these cliff-nesting creatures that have life spans that rival a human’s. In the process of monitoring one nest site that appeared to have failed, he climbed down the cliff face and into what turned out to be cave big enough “to drive a truck into.” Inside, he found an ancient Anasazi ruin complete with the untouched signs of human habitation left behind by a people that lived in these rock dwellings a thousand years before Christ walked the earth. “It’s a prehistoric bird in a prehistoric place,” Feltes said, as we watched the four condors funnel out of the top of the thermal and head off to the northwest. It was a scene that could be witnessed a hundred years ago or a thousand. Will it be seen a century hence?
Columbia River gorge
A pang went through me as the sign hurtled by , stabbed into the roadside: Continental Divide. I was heading east, after coursing through the interstate veins of the western United States for more than a month. I’d traveled up the I-5 corridor and then veered in, passing from one flank to the next along the Columbia River gorge as I hummed Woody Guthrie all the way into Missoula. Roll on, Columbia, roll on… It was raptor country. Chris and Julie (along with a couple small kids and more than a few animals), were kind enough to put me up and put up with my comings-and-goings as I attended the Raptor Research Foundation annual conference, dedicated to John Craighead, of the Craighead brothers who forged a life and a name as naturalists of the highest order, writing about and studying everything from falconry to grizzlies to river ecosystems to widlflowers.
One evening’s program of the raptor conference was a showing of Life with an Indian Prince, and I walked through the broad quiet streets of Missoula to get to the theater. John Craighead was there. He is 92, his brother Frank now dead. He will go also, sooner – most likely – than the other 150 of us gathered in the Missoula Children’s Theater on Broadway to watch the film the Craighead brothers made in 1940-41.
K. S. Dharmakumarsinjhi, an Indian prince known to them as Bapu who had a great love for birds of prey, had read about the Craighead’s falconry and written to them, a letter that must have taken weeks for them to receive. The correspondence continued, the young men both inviting the other to come visit, until finally, surprisingly, the prince showed up in America. The Craighead brothers showed them life of a young man in America. There is mention of roller coasters and milkshakes and the mysteries of co-ed college dormitories. But also hunting and fishing and the sport – or art – that had brought them together, falconry.
In 1940, the Craigheads bordered a steamer in San Francisco and set sail for India to return the visit. The film we watched is the virtually uncut footage from the trip. The three men are in their prime, strapping sexy outdoor men enjoying adventure and the privileged life of a prince, although that entitlement would come to an end seven years later as India gained its independence from Brits and Indian royalty alike.
I watch the images pass in front of me, wrestle with the incongruity of Indian custom — a stork is left in peace as the raptors are flown on their hunt, while later a massive Asiatic lion is gunned down. The royal shot was a poor one, but two staff quickly made up for the miss and then emphatically patted him on the back in congratulations. The narrator informed us that there were only 200 of these lions left.
I left the theater as people gathered around John, small and leaning over at the table they’ve set up for him, deaf to the actions around him despite the large hearing aid. They come to have their books signed, their photos taken, capturing this person who has done so much for the natural world, often amidst controversy, through a combination of passion and power. If I had more time I would write more about the magic of getting older, of the unfolding of a life and then the return to something slower and more dreamlike, where the memories of our lives play out in an untold drama within our heads. But right now, the sun is setting and I seem to be running out of time. Somehow, that seems appropriate.
John Craighead
Are you still pretending that I’m still in Portland? Good. I learned around the campfire at the wedding ( I love that…campfires and weddings should always go together) that the Vaux’s swifts were passing through Portland on their southerly migration and that they roosted en masse in a now defunct boiler chimney at the Chapman School in northwest Portland. Of course I went to watch. Of course I hoped that not only would I see thousands of roiling swifts circling in a vortex, which I did, but that one of P’town’s resident peregrines might come to nab some dinner. As 17,000 swifts — according to the Audubon volunteers situated at the top of the hill overlooking the school — gathered into a tighter and tighter cloud as the dusk light grew fainter, a peregrine shot out of nowhere and dove into the fray. It made a few failed attempts. The flock of swifts, at one point, broke off from their swirling momentum to seemingly pursue the falcon, mobbing it away from them. But the peregrine was determined.
The 800 or so people who had gathered to watch — spreading their blankets and beach chairs, sipping on wine and eating their packed dinners — instantly formed two teams. One rooted for the swifts, booing the peregrine as she (I say she because the falcon seemed rather large, and most raptors have reverse sexual dimorphism, the females larger than the males) tore through the flock. The rest cheered her on, claiming victory as she thrust herself into the greatest concentration, right above the mouth of the chimney, where the swifts were draining into in an endless stream, and came away with a small form clutched in her talons. And then off she went, likely to the Fremont Bridge that straddles the Willamette River.
Interestingly, that was the first peregrine I’d seen on this road trip, one month in, one month to go.
Here’s an image, not mine, from YouTube:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECBraaz1-sE]
