Sight, Sound, Touch, Taste, Smell
There is nothing quite like a cross-country road trip with your family. By the time we reached Niagara Falls, I had been in the car with my parents for two days, and we were all desperate to escape one another. So instead of plowing on eastward to New Hampshire, we got out of the car and, walking in opposite directions, hurried to put distance between us. It was mid-March, and the railings around the lookout points over the falls were coated in thick layers of smooth, opaque ice, like fogged glass. Leaning dangerously far over the safety rail, I gazed down at the thundering falls. The water plummeting to earth was breathtaking, but what captured my attention was the color of the pool below. It was like no water I had ever seen — not blue like my Lake Michigan at home, or clear Caribbean aqua, or stormy gray like the North Sea by our summer cottage in Northumbria. This water was a dark, brilliant, emerald green, startingly serene. I consumed the color, inhaled it. I got high off green. Before returning to the car, I made a detour through the gift shop. Among the pyramids of "real" maple syrup, moose paperweights, and panoramic postcards, I found a jade maple leaf pendant, which my friends later informed me more closely resembled marijuana. The trinket itself was tacky, but the color leaped out at me. I ended up buying the necklace, not for its taste or craftsmanship but so that I could hold the color of the water in my hands. When I was 6, I was diagnosed with a rare retinal disease called Stargaardt’s and told that I would be blind by the age of 16. I grew up with the assumption that all of the beautiful things surrounding me would gradually fade and then, one day, disappear. I had stared at the water, knowing that I might never be back or, that if I did return, I would know only the low growl of the falls and the wet slipperiness of ice beneath my fingers. But on my 16th birthday, I vividly remember gloating in the brightness of each candle. I could still see. Seven years later, there is no knowing how long my vision will hold up. It may decline rapidly or remain stable for years. The fate of the beautiful things around me is, however, even less certain. Behind my home in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, there was a wood. In spring, which does not come until late May, fallen trees were velvety with soft green moss, and wood violets perfumed the cold twilight with aching sweetness. In early summer the forest floor was an ocean of glossy dark green periwinkle leaves and violet-blue blossoms. To cross this ocean, I used to inch my way across a fallen birch trunk. When I wasn’t hurrying to get to dinner before my older brothers ate everything, I would sit on the old log, dangling my feet in the cool leaves and silken petals. Peeling the papery thin bark from the log, I would study its secret blushed underside, which mirrored the streaming coral clouds that lingered in the treetops after sunset. And then the land was sold by the neighbors, and a gravel road was cut through my woods. A chic summer cottage now stands where our rickety tree fort used to be. The woods beyond, with their maze of deer trails through trillium and wild strawberries, have been transformed into a massive complex of expensive condos. Blindness, I thought, would rob me only of the visual impression of the things I loved: the flickering silver shadows of the quaking aspens, the pearly radiance of a snowy moonlit forest. I assumed I would still have the sound of the wind shaking the leaves and the fragrance of the frozen trees. But listening to the bulldozers grunting up the hill, I realized that they would take everything: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. A narrow strip of trees remains at the bottom of our yard, and if I tilt my head to one side I can almost make the cottage disappear into my blind spot. But I can still hear the sound of car engines where before there was only hushed rustling and birdsong. I’ve never seen anything that captures the colors, scents, and sounds of my woods. I wish there were some way I could keep a little piece of it with me, like the jade pendant. For although I will continue to come back again and again to these woods, long before my sight is gone there may be nothing left to see.
Excerpt from:
Sight, Sound, Touch, Taste, Smell
In Touch With My Inner Reptile
It seemed simple, how I found myself at the Watering Hole lounge in Sebring, Florida, beside the cage of a 14-foot alligator. Driving, I’d noticed a sign touting his size, pulled over, and entered a bar. The reptile did not flinch at my arrival; with my face inches from his, not a spark ignited the shiny black surface of his eyeballs. I resisted an urge to stick my finger through the cage mesh — and began to wonder if I wasn’t under the sway of forces more powerful than roadside advertising. Unreasonably, I wanted his recognition. Why do we yearn to connect with animals? More immediately, why did I imagine that this cooped-up alligator seemed glum, in the way other humans believe, say, that their Chihuahuas enjoy wearing tiny sneakers to the mall? Tragedies abound that testify to the impossibility of fully taming and befriending members of another species. Travis, the chimpanzee that tore off a Connecticut woman’s face last year, for instance, could also adeptly sip from a wineglass. Yet we persist in our efforts to understand and be understood outside our genus, Homo . Why? In 1977 the novelist John Berger wrote an essay called "Why Look at Animals?" in which he suggested one answer: despite our differences, finding existential similarities to other animals makes humankind feel less cosmically alone. But pet ownership and animal attractions don’t offer a communion with nature, he argued. Rather, they are evidence of society’s complete withdrawal from nature — relics of a bygone era when humans defined themselves in relationship to the other sentient beings with which they lived side by side. We can’t truly "encounter" animals in captivity, Berger wrote, because they are merely reflections of ourselves. That may be. But it isn’t always so clear where our thinking ends and an animal’s begins. Take my alligator. Though I knew his massive body housed a brain less hefty than a poker chip, I couldn’t help but wonder what was going through his mind. Most likely, absolutely nothing: alligator thoughts are probably "like a dial tone," a zoologist once told the New Yorker . And yet, while unintelligent by our standards, crocodilians possess homing instincts that can return them to a pond of origin over a span of both months and miles. In captivity, alligators congregate at an appointed hour for regular meals. Despite a natural wariness of humans, they become bold if habitually fed, shy if frequently hunted. One Miami resident who kept an alligator named Gwendolyn in a backyard pool for years even swore his pet knew her name, came when called, and enjoyed the music of George Michael. Behavioral scientists agree that familiarity with another necessarily breeds interpretation, by both parties. Empathy is the basis of all communication, but practiced between species it can also lead to disappointment. Once, when an alligator that had become a fixture in a neighborhood lake in Florida ate a little girl, a resident told the local paper, "I never thought these things would hurt you, but I don’t know what they’ve got in their minds now." In his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" the philosopher Thomas Nagel explains the problem: our imagination, constructed with human references, can’t approach the experience of another being. A person endeavoring to envision what it is like for an alligator to be an alligator is picturing instead what it would be like for her to float in a lake with only her eyes above the surface, catch fish in her mouth, and weigh 500 pounds. I did that for a while at the Watering Hole. I imagined how hopeless and bored I would feel living alone in a cage barely longer than my body. I couldn’t help it: getting up to leave, I whispered, "Hey, I’m really sorry." Somehow, it was easier to accept that the alligator might feel bad than that he might have no-zero-feelings at all. Now I wonder if what I’d really wished him to have was an identity immune to my projections — if it was a desire to provoke his independence, not relate to him, that tugged my hand toward his head. The alligator’s ancestors had arisen in the Triassic; in him lived unfathomable stretches of time on earth. That humans had utterly subdued him, that I could look at him and see only myself, was, in a way, like the end of the world.
Continue here: In Touch With My Inner Reptile
Phantoms and Prey
It’s the middle of the night in central Idaho. Twenty miles from my house, hunters wait on wolves for the first time in decades. My two little sons sleep upstairs; I fill a mug at the kitchen sink. Outside, in the moonlight, the driveway pines seem tenuous, unrooted, as if they might start striding quietly past one another, swapping places in the night. Today a friend drove me to the World Center for Birds of Prey outside Boise without telling me why. He showed me a female gyrfalcon, a Swainson’s hawk, a harpy eagle; we watched a trained American crow take dollar bills from the outstretched hands of a half-dozen visitors and stuff them into a donation box. Then we crossed the parking lot to the collections building, where thousands of brown-speckled peregrine falcon eggs sit in drawers, each egg in its own box, each numbered and dated. Shards of eggs in nearby jars stand for the many nestlings that have been hatched and reintroduced into the wild. Before we left, my friend opened a steel cabinet, slid out the top drawer, and showed me a passenger pigeon. It lay breast up on its wooden tray, a paper tag tied around its left ankle: "Chicago Market, 1886." Here was a species driven from the earth in a matter of decades, a species once so numerous it migrated in flocks a hundred miles long, a species we now believe constituted more than a quarter of the bird population of pre-Columbian North America. Billions of individuals, all gone. And yet here was this one: a male with plenty of rosy cinnamon color still in his breast, his feet red, his eyeholes white with taxidermist’s cotton. Even in the flat, fluorescent light he looked as if he might sit up and flap off over the bookshelves. I blinked back tears. We count salmon at dams; we count hawks at migration bottlenecks; we conduct infrared camera surveys to count passing deer. But estimating populations of animals is brutally difficult, especially in the seas, where we aren’t sure how many species might exist, let alone how many individuals there are. Lately ecologists have been fond of writing about the "shifting baseline syndrome," a theory that argues that we measure the current state of things — the number of starlings in a town, say, or the coldness of winters — against what we remember from when we were young. What we think is baseline wilderness, runs the argument, is the wildest place we saw when we were kids. In truth, what we experienced was only a degraded version of what our grandparents experienced, which in turn was a degraded version of their grandparents’ baseline. Earth eats the bones; present swallows past; the baseline shifts. To know what is still here is difficult enough. To know what was once here is basically impossible. Who is left who can envision the United States with its original populations of bison, salmon, and whales? Who can imagine the Atlantic with the great auk, or the South with the ivory-billed woodpecker, or the Midwest with its billions of passenger pigeons? How many oysters filtered the waters of preindustrial New York Harbor? How many beavers stitched together the ancient wetlands of Connecticut? And how many Rocky Mountain wolves once loped through the Idaho midnight? Now there are about 850. Tomorrow there may be a couple fewer. Ours is a landscape aswarm with ghosts. We live in an afterworld, struggling to imagine what we’ve already lost, while we peer into a greenhouse future in which our grandchildren may have to prepare for cataclysmic droughts, massive human migrations from the coasts, and worldwide conflicts over freshwater. What is sustainability? What is hope? Here is J. J. Audubon, in 1842, writing about the passenger pigeon: "When an individual is seen gliding through the woods and close to the observer, it passes like a thought, and on trying to see it again, the eye searches in vain; the bird is gone." I think of my sons asleep upstairs. I think of that passenger pigeon, leaching his last colors into a wooden drawer. I think of the hunters, two valleys away, drowsing beside their guns, waiting for the howl.
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Phantoms and Prey