The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011

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The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 Page 26

by Mary Roach


  But I am the descendant of rural ranchers on one side and artists, scholars, mountaineers, and businessmen on the other. As a daughter of the American West—both the old version and the new—what I have felt about my homeland could easily be characterized as a form of cultural schizophrenia, a psychic swing between my frontier-busting forebears and my Patagonia-clad, Sierra Club card–carrying contemporaries. For many years, I chose a side—shoring up my persona by way of education (higher), occupation (as both a national park ranger and a paid public-lands advocate for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance), and recreation (bourgeois style, like rock climbing, river running, and skiing). And as I grew into this role, I grew apart from the other side of my family and their cowboy ways. I kept them at arm's length with a subtle (so I thought) sense of superiority. Feeling right served as a shield for my own mind—which felt as if it would shatter if I attempted a mental straddle between two worlds.

  What I missed was this: hunting is a vital part of life for both sides of the family—whether it's hooking rainbow trout to grill for a streamside Mother's Day brunch, shooting antelope to complement the garden harvest feast at summer's end, or plucking pheasants to roast alongside the Thanksgiving turkey. For such events my mother's and my father's sides still sometimes come together—the men combining efforts to bring home animal flesh, the women uniting in the kitchen to cook it. The universal acts of procuring and preparing our sustenance have always served as our species' most common denominator—and among my kin, they have always made faint all other disparities.

  By calling through the shed window, Herb finally got our most geriatric dog, Jack, to come off the porch just far enough to distract the bear while he made a break for the house. For an old guy, the Aussie put on quite a show, and Herb finally got the head start he needed. He and all three dogs just squeaked inside the house; when they turned to look back through the glass, they saw the bear's snout pressed up against it.

  The creature pawed at the door, attempting entry. Herb dashed to the bedroom closet, grabbed from the top shelf the only gun kept in the house—the .22 revolver, complete with cartridges. Not that this particular gun could have done much harm—for a bear, a perfect shot would still be nothing more than a bee sting. But Herb was thinking more complexly by this point. There was no time to call for help from the neighbors, and the nearest law enforcement was, at best, twenty minutes away. Besides, he wanted to get to the goat. He was banking on the fact that if the impact of the shot didn't scare off the bear, its report would.

  Herb beckoned the two younger dogs, and together the three of them sneaked out the back entrance and crept up on the bear, which was still on the front porch, facing off with Jack through the glass door. Herb got as close as he could, and as the bear turned in his direction, he fired a round at the animal's underbelly—the only place a low-caliber bullet could have any kind of impact. Before Herb could blink, the bear turned and disappeared into the dark of the woods, black devoured by black. Then Herb headed to the goat pen to retrieve Dora's flayed body.

  It wasn't the best scenario; the bear was still alive. It could come back for its kill—or for Herb. Nevertheless, Herb was momentarily relieved. His strategy had been a serious gamble, for the animal could have turned on him just as quickly as it had fled into the woods. I can imagine my husband at that moment, contemplating all that was happening along with that which might have been: his jaw would have been set like a steel trap. And yet the encounter would have resulted in bright eyes, flushed skin, and a larger-than-life grin—indications that an ancient inner sense of vitality had been pricked.

  Herb was adamant that we not tell Ruby, who was only three and a half at the time, what had happened to her goat. He begged me to speak euphemistically—to say that Dora got sick and passed on. But I knew our daughter would see that something was wrong. I thought it worse to lie to her, to undermine her intuitive perceptions by telling her that things were not what they seemed. Besides, to deny the bloody realities of animals eating animals—including our family's consumption of meat—would only distance my daughter from her budding relationship with the natural world. I needed to believe Ruby could handle the fact that something had tried to eat her goat. Just as I was banking on the fact that she would be able to face on her dinner plate the elk I hoped to shoot in the fall, the chickens we had raised and would butcher, and be able to eat both with reverence, gratitude, and delight.

  And so I tell her.

  She cries.

  And after her initial outburst of grief, her pale, tearstained face blooms red with fury: "I hate that bear, Mommy. Bears are bad, bad, bad." I think then that maybe Herb had been right. Maybe this is too much for her. But it is too late to recant.

  "We can be sad for Dora, sweetheart. And we can be sad for the bear too—because if he's still alive, he will probably be destroyed."

  Yes, and yes again. I hold my breath and wait for some sort of resolution.

  For the next two days, we find the bear's tracks, punctuated with small splats of blood, encircling our fence line. The local game warden surmises that the single small round Herb put in the animal will probably fester in the gut—eventually killing it. On the third day, the bear returns in the middle of the night and digs up Dora's body—which had been buried three feet deep beneath a big rock slab at the far edge of the property. And then we never see sign of him again.

  For several weeks Ruby acts out the drama of goat and bear with her toys, and each night at bedtime asks me to repeat the story of what happened. One night she awakes in terror. Shaking, howling, she scrambles onto my lap and tells me she had dreamed that a bear was trying to kill her. I think of Carl Jung, who suggested that the image of the bear in the unconscious is a representation of one's own potency. To run from a bear in your dreams is to flee from your own potential. To turn and face such an animal is to reckon with the Other—not just its beloved aspects but also that, perhaps especially that, which is wild, ravenous, even terrifying—and with the parts of our own wildness that we fear more with each passing generation, with each species' extinction, with each acre of land razed.

  I tell Ruby that if the bear comes again, she must stand her ground, ask it what it wants. I stroke her strawberry-blond curls as she falls back asleep. A few hours later, she wakes again, whimpering.

  "Mommy, the bear came back, and when I asked him what he wanted, he said he was hungry. So I gave him a carrot."

  Ruby is no longer terrified, but tentative. She falls back into sleep, and I am still sitting next to her when she starts to giggle. Then she sits straight up, her eyes shining in the pewter moonshower falling through the window.

  "Mommy, the bear came back, and this time he looked just like Winnie-the-Pooh!"

  For a moment, I cringe at my daughter's reduction of a wild creature to a cartoon character. But then I see that she has, on a deep level, bent the bear into something she can manage—and in this way she has digested her conflict with the animal and its deeds. Afterward I notice in my daughter a deeper appreciation for the animals around her—she loves them more than ever. And yet: she now holds a realistic and healthy respect for those that have the potential to harm her.

  I learn more slowly than my daughter. The day after her dream a neighboring rancher stops by to inquire if we've seen the bear around. He whistles at the claw marks on the shed's threshold and has a good laugh at Herb's small pistol. But, as the new long-haired attorney on the mesa, my husband scores points for having a gun at all—and a few more for being willing to use it. And when, in order to prove his adequacy, he pulls out his 7mm mag, the rifle his grandfather had used for killing Cape buffalo, he really gets a slap on the back. "Next time, son, you drop that bastard dead in his tracks."

  Herb just shrugs and smiles. I, however, feel compelled to interject my belief that we don't want to kill interloping bears—that we merely want to keep them at bay. The rancher cocks his frayed ball cap and juts his grizzled chin at me.

  "Notice how the bear that pai
d your husband a visit thought nothing of your three dogs? That's because you nature lovers thought you were doin' right for the bears by making it illegal to hunt 'em with hounds. Now you got bears strollin' right by dogs, into backyards and barnyards, with no fear at all."

  Facing my neighbor, I feel a powerful impulse to pull back. This is where civil convention dictates that I silently agree to disagree, that I make some remark about the weather. Later I can air my opposition among like-minded people who will fan my flames of indignation. Emboldened by their passionate agreement, I'll feel justified in penning letters to the editor, e-mails to the Division of Wildlife—any venue that is capable of presenting the issue in black and white, any venue that is impersonal enough to isolate my beliefs from my neighbor's.

  And yet. In Aspen during a two-week period this past summer, a bear sauntered right through a fur salon, another broke into a house and attacked the owner, and another bit into a woman's thigh while she lay sleeping on her deck. During the same time frame, a bear broke into a steel enclosure down the road from our house, killing five Shetland sheep and maiming two others—only to return in broad daylight for more. Three days after the offending bear was trapped and removed, another one moved in and killed three additional sheep. And in the nearby tourist town of Ouray, at least two more bears ate an elderly woman who, every evening for years—despite harsh reprimands from state and local officials—had watched from a fenced-in porch as bears came into her yard to feed on the dog chow she set out for them. The coroner's report concluded that the woman had been dragged out of her makeshift observation cage and devoured by the very animals she fed.

  Standing on my own bear-clawed threshold, I am caught in the spell of a familiar misanthropy, only this time I begin to sense how it stunts my understanding of the world. And suddenly I find myself willing to consider my neighbor's perspective, to extend an open-mindedness toward his knowledge and experience that I haven't even granted my own rural family members. It comes down to this: by retreating from that which we oppose, we render lifeless all opportunities for intimacy, and for community. To smile and step away is as fatal to possibility as is brandishing a finger of blame.

  And so, after a long, awkward silence I offer my neighbor a seat on the porch and a cold beer. Then I lean forward. I seek luminosity—the deep bruise of blue that hung on the fence alongside the man's coyote hides, complemented by the soft rose of empathy that emanated as he knelt in my goat pen the summer before, showing me how to revive two kids half dead with scours. I was new to goat-keeping then. With my young animals, my neighbor was as tender and gentle as I've ever seen a man. And in eyeing these two tints of him at once, I find a newfound level of humility reflecting back.

  "Tell me," I say, haltingly, "how you would restore the equilibrium."

  "For starters," he says, "git yourselves some outside working dogs—no more welfare critters. Then load one of them bigger guns you got there, and for god's sake, keep it where you can use it."

  F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." But perhaps it Isn't brains so much as courage—the courage to say yes, and yes again. At the very least, I am learning to bring into singular focus my double-edged essence. For if my preschool-age daughter can behold the whole of each animal, then surely the rest of us can embrace two seemingly opposing elements with every nuance, every context, every color in between.

  We'll need a language of delicacy to articulate such complex thoughts and feelings—one that can carry us across the muddy mire of moral, spiritual, political, and environmental ambiguities. And if we wield our words with heartfelt compassion and respect, it just might be enough to repair the psychic fissures we have suffered in this age of sharp divisions.

  Now I keep a loaded rifle within arm's reach. We have two new dogs that roam our fence line, day and night. And I find myself hoping that hounds will give chase during the next bear season. It's not a contradiction to say all this—and then to say I am still rooting for the bears, for their rightful place on our mesa, and across the remaining wildlands in the West. Indeed, as my family prepares for the rigors of the autumn elk hunt in the Colorado high country, I am reminded that it is no small thing to inhabit our place on the carnivorous continuum—a place where we not only consume animals but, in turn, we consent to the possibility of being consumed. This place, an edge of sorts, awakens us to our biological inheritance, and we become viscerally, sensually invested in our surroundings and their ability to sustain us.

  These adjustments to my view of the world have not made me a more typical westerner; nor have I become a more conventional environmentalist. But if our model of advocacy, no matter what the cause, requires that we stridently defend our territory without leaning across the fence to consider, wholeheartedly, another view, if we cannot embrace the Other in both its delightful and repelling pigments, then the world has little chance to be spared. For this is what it means to forge meaningful conduits between our existence and every other bit of biota. Swallowing the spectrum whole is to devour the exquisite breadth of life. After all, diversity is the strength of a people. Of an ecosystem.

  The hunter and the hunted. The Old West and the New. The wild and the tame. We must be lithe enough to stretch between.

  The Spill Seekers

  Rowan Jacobsen

  FROM Outside

  SHE NEEDED TO GET OUT. Wide of beam, forty-three feet long, and 11,000 pounds of lead in her keel, she'd been built with oceans in mind. Her name was Dolphin's Waltz, and she was sick of putzing around the shallows of Alabama's Mobile Bay, where she docked. Now stately breakers rolled across her bow, muddy waters giving way to the gray-green Gulf of Mexico. She was on the hunt.

  We passed within kissing distance of shrieking rigs, hunkered down and drilling away like mosquitoes; dodged a swarm of shrimping boats that looked like giant waterborne grasshoppers, their spars deployed as they searched for oil slicks; and then made for Dauphin Island Pass and the wide open. A Coast Guard chopper slashed overhead, and a blimp hung in the southern sky like an alternate moon. We were the only pleasure boat around. A west wind snapped the jib taut as dolphins hot-dogged across our bow wave, exploding into the air. For being smack in the middle of America's biggest environmental disaster, it was pretty fucking nice.

  You might say July 2010 was an odd time for a pleasure cruise in the Gulf of Mexico, and maybe a sailboat—slow, bulky, with the upwind quarter of the world off-limits—is an odd way to do any sort of journalism. I won't argue. I wasn't going to scoop the Wall Street Journal, but that was the point. Perhaps, as the press hordes stampeded past us in their helicopters and vans, chasing the latest oil sighting, they were missing the real story.

  So we'd take it slow, on the gulf's schedule. I'd challenged our skipper, Josh Deupree, to a wind-powered tour of a particularly stunning corner. I'd heard rumors of cleanup operations gone awry—workers pelting each other with eggs from Louisiana rookeries—so we'd head west to investigate the situation on Petit Bois Island, known as the most pristine wilderness island in the gulf and vital habitat for more than 250 species of birds. From Petit Bois we'd cross Mississippi Sound to see the marshes and seagrass meadows of the coast, taking in as many marine ecosystems as we could in three days.

  A sort of nagging consumer guilt, and the desire for seafaring in its purest form, was the motivation to try it without fossil fuels—once out in the gulf, at least. Sailboats are docked in slips like parking spaces. Exiting had involved cranking up, making several right-angle turns, negotiating a narrow harbor, passing under a bridge, then following a dredged shipping channel across Mobile Bay and out into the gulf.

  As soon as we'd cleared the bridge and caught the shipping channel, we killed the engine and raised the sails. Close-hauled to the wind, Dolphin's Waltz heeled over and shot straight out of the channel toward Dauphin Island Pass. The smell of diesel faded, replaced by the slow oscill
ation of wind and wave. She was free.

  Not that we were making any kind of statement. Just getting to the boat, our crew had of course burned gobs of petroleum products. I flew from Vermont to Newark, where I looked down upon a grid of refineries and tanks, then to Houston, same damn thing, and then to Mobile. Oil was everywhere and in everything, not just the gulf.

  Like something out of Mordor, a refinery's orange methane flare blazed atop a black pillar on the shore of the bay. Fed by six rivers, Mobile Bay covers 413 square miles and spits out some 62,000 cubic feet of water every second, making it North America's fourth-largest estuary by flow. Its mouth was crawling with boats as we sailed out. Vessels of Opportunity—boats hired by BP to patrol for oil—darted across the channel. The program was the biggest gold rush on the coast. Even the smallest boats made $1,600 per day.

  About 3,000 VOOs, as everyone called them, were operating out of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. They came in every size and shape: sportfishing behemoths, Boston Whalers, pontoon boats. I tried not to think about how much gas they were burning in the effort to save us all from oil. All flew the triangular VOO flag and seemed to be zipping about with minimal coordination.

 

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