Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America

by Jon Mooallem

  She took a breath, then suddenly stiffened up. “My husband had Alzheimer’s,” she told me, “so our porch was a big part of our life.” By the time the First Family arrived, she and her husband had done all their traveling—I got the impression that those long trips had been a kind of farewell tour to see his family—and were settled in at home, prepared for his condition to get worse. “A big part of our day was watching them,” she said—drinking iced tea on the porch together, noticing the funny things birds did, and the cliques they formed. It was like people watching, but with birds.

  Gibbs felt bad if she’d spoiled any of the conservationists’ hard work, but she wasn’t apologetic. After all, she saw herself as being 100 percent on their side. She was grateful to these men and women who’d worked so determinedly to bring the whooping crane back, because, aside from all the usual reasons, they had made it possible for one of those birds to alight in her backyard and bless what were effectively some of her last real days with her husband. He was aware enough to get a big old grin on his face when he saw the whooping cranes, she said, and every time their sprawling wings unfolded from their bodies and the three birds lifted off, he’d almost lose his breath. “I was glad,” Gibbs told me, “that he still had enough to know that these beautiful birds had visited us.”

  Fifty-three million Americans feed birds outside their houses. But the First Family had chosen Clarice Gibbs, and so here I was. Her story was too idiosyncratic—too sad and beautiful at the same time—to reduce to some clear and prescriptive moral. Maybe every story about people and wild animals in America is.

  Instead, it illustrated only a universal paradox: how wildness fulfills certain human needs and is also trampled by them; how easily we can wind up short-circuiting and celebrating it at the same time. Here was a fundamental tension I’d noticed everywhere, in every era, crunched into the space of one backyard. All Gibbs had really done was appreciate our planet’s flashes of wonder so intensely that she couldn’t bear to watch them go away. It was a familiar longing, the same one that sends other people into careers in conservation.

  When we were done talking, she walked me to her front door and thanked me. I was exhausted and needed to drive four hours north to a place in the Panhandle called Jefferson County to reconnect with Operation Migration. Two months after leaving Necedah, they had finally crossed into Florida.

  As I made for my car, she called after me to stay safe. “There’s lots of nitwits driving out there,” Gibbs said.

  15.

  BACKPACKS FULL OF ROCKS

  Jefferson County, Florida, is a spare and bucolic spot east of Tallahassee. It bills itself as “the other Florida” and brims with weeping oaks and meandering roads. The county is named for America’s third president and most zealous moose collector. Coincidentally, I read that, because of some fluke of geology along the Aucilla River, archeologists have dug up many prehistoric mammoth bones in Jefferson County.

  Operation Migration had gotten the cranes to Jefferson three days earlier, setting down in a tremendous grass field miles from anything after another hot streak of flights. Brooke parked his trailer next to a pile of gravel and camped there alone, preferring solitude and the company of the cranes, while the rest of the crew found hookups for their RVs at a nearby KOA campground. All of a sudden, OM was threatening to polish off the migration, likely their last ever, within days.

  In Jefferson County, Operation Migration’s route forks. Ever since the storm surge killed the class of 2006 at the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge, the cranes have been divided between two refuges for the winter, to hedge against another disaster. Half the birds are taken to Chassahowitzka, but half are deposited farther north first, at the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge on the Gulf Coast. It’s a quick twenty-eight-mile hop to St. Marks from Jefferson County, and since the weather looked marginally better in that direction, the crew was staging to deliver those birds first. The refuge staff and the town of St. Marks were standing by to throw their annual arrival party, in which hundreds of Craniacs come out to witness the trikes and cranes fly in. A stage is set up. The crew gives speeches. It lends a feeling of finality to the months-long epic, even if the other half of the flock hasn’t yet reached its home.

  It was well after dark by the time I got to the KOA campground from Gibbs’s house. I knocked on the door of Operation Migration’s largest RV—the crew’s collective living room—and found Joe and two other crew members, Walt Sturgeon and Jack Wrighter, watching Antiques Roadshow in a near-anesthetized trance. They’d been grounded in Jefferson County for two days already. The wind was hostile, and the temperatures at sunup had been so obscene—twenty degrees, seventeen degrees—that, elsewhere in Florida, manatees were huddling around coastal power plants, warming themselves in the outflowing plumes of hot water, and volunteers were kayaking into the Gulf of Mexico to ladle out sea turtles that were floating belly-up, stunned by the cold, then rushing them to triage centers and bundling them into blankets.

  I’d expected that once OM got this close to their destination a levity or forgiving feeling of mutual accomplishment might set in. Instead, there was only the numbness of shift workers still a few hours from the end of a long day. On the television, a woman in San Antonio stood next to her set of Chinese porcelain paintings and told the appraiser, “It’s called The Four Seasons of Rice Planting.” You could see her practically pulsating, her hope that these heirlooms would be worth a fortune working hard to outstrip the shame of hoping for anything at all. The camera zoomed in on the joint of one bamboo frame. Walt, who has apparently done some woodworking, muttered from the RV couch, “The corners don’t even match up.”

  Without looking away from the television, Joe and Jack both said, “Nope.”

  Just then, someone read out the next day’s weather forecast from the RV’s back room. What he said was impenetrably numeric to me—lots of knots and altitudes—but, given the reaction in the RV, which was no reaction, I took it as bad news. It wasn’t. The forecast looked decent, but after seven states and sixty-five days on the road, no one wanted to believe it yet.

  —

  THE NEXT DAY, as it happened, was another squally down-day. After some waffles at the KOA, I picked up Brooke at his trailer and we drove to the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge. The tracking team was reporting that six older whooping cranes had recently returned to the refuge for the winter—the first birds to finish their southward migration that year—and we were hoping to catch sight of them. It seemed as good an excuse for an outing as any.

  The trip that Operation Migration had been waiting days to make in the air took less than an hour in my rental car. There was something immediately rejuvenating about St. Marks. Every migration stopover is purposefully remote, a cloistered dimple in the woods. But here the scenery was wide open and brand-new, seared with prismatic greens and blues. New kinds of birds—ibises and other shorebirds—flew in low lines between marshes.

  This was a homecoming for Brooke—he spends every winter at the refuge—and at the visitors’ center, a trio of women trickled out of the office to welcome him back. They’d printed out the online bios for that year’s cranes and were eager to know which five of the ten were coming to live at their refuge, pressing Brooke for their “secret names.” (Though Joe insists on referring to the birds by number only, Brooke finds it impossible to train them so closely and not give them nicknames. “Nobody has a kid named ‘Number Thirteen,’” he told me.) Brooke smiled coyly and divulged only one secret name, “Rocky.” Then, after some more chitchat, we were on our way.

  We wound up on the beach at the foot of the refuge’s old lighthouse and gazed for a while at the water as the sky turned overcast. I don’t remember what I asked Brooke, but it must have touched a nerve, because he started, once again, lamenting the discord inside WCEP and the friction between him and the other trike pilots. The other day, he said, he was at a Walmart, making a run for cut-rate canned foods, when he turned and saw a little boy at the
leg of his mother. The child was pointing at Brooke—he recognized him from OM’s Web site—and gawped, his mouth hung open so wide that Brooke could see the socket of a missing baby tooth. It made Brooke feel small inside. “I feel like I’m scamming these people—at least a little bit,” he said. By now, it’s as though he and his coworkers have been turned into human polar bears, emblems that some people desperately want to rally around and that help them believe in good. We, on the ground, are imprinting on these costumed men, too, hoping to be shown what’s possible with enough ingenuity and hard work.

  Brooke seemed to understand this. But, he said, he also knows how uncivil the partnership has been lately behind the scenes, and how guilty he is of getting carried away with his resentments. And he knew that if he let even a speck of that cynicism come across, standing in the aisle at Walmart, it might shred something priceless inside that little kid.

  All fall, I’d been stunned by how open everyone working on the whooping crane reintroduction had been with me—and especially the people of Operation Migration, whom, as the migration proceeded, it was clear I’d caught in a moment of great rawness and uncertainty. Now I leveled with Brooke. I told him that the coarseness I’d encountered in the partnership was making me lose hope a little, too. But how could he feel that same disillusionment and still throw himself into the sky every morning to push the birds forward?

  “I’m just fucking stupid,” he said. He was almost shouting now. “Believe me! At the end of the day, I want to call up my son and beg forgiveness. Because it was all an accident. I wanted to get my son involved in birds, because it seemed like a good thing to do, and I didn’t want to be a shitty father. And what did I do? I ran away to be a bird guy and wound up being a shitty father. Now he’s in college and he doesn’t even answer the phone half the time I call.

  “I didn’t give a shit about birds at the beginning,” he went on. “I’m not an altruistic person. I’m not even really a nice guy.” But the whooping crane project had materialized in front of him, and it was just as though he were driving down a highway, saw someone broken down on the shoulder, and knew he had a jack in his trunk. A very simple thought rose up in his mind: “I can do this. This is something I can do.” Now he was determined to keep at it until the thing was fixed.

  “The way I look at it,” Brooke said, “is that everybody, every one one of us, has this big sack around our neck—a backpack full of fucking rocks. Being evil, being bad, and being greedy—all the human shit, all of our frailties, everything that makes us human—they’re all packed in a great big bag on our backs. We’re born with it. For millions of years, humans have been loading that pack. So, unless you’re Jesus or Mother Teresa, you’ve got this pack to carry. And we carry it into WCEP meetings. We carry it on the flight with the birds. We carry it into the motor homes at night. We carry it into our relationships—into parenthood. Always, always: you’re carrying this fucking pack.”

  The whooping crane restoration, Brooke went on, is like a long swimming pool that everyone has to swim across together. “There’s not many people that are going to swim with the fucking pack on their back full of rocks!” he said. “But a lot of the people in this project make that swim. And even though they’re carrying all this negative shit, they’re down in there: splashing, splashing, trying to get to the other side.

  “I know I can sound negative. Everyone’s always telling me, ‘Oh, you’re so negative.’ I get out of those WCEP meetings and I’m just looking for a bridge to jump off of. But what I have to remind myself is that the people in that room were trying—they’re just all carrying their packs. We’re never going to shed that baggage, but at least we can carry it in the right direction.”

  The dysfunction didn’t surprise him, in other words. It was infuriating, yes, but not something to be defeated by. He was staring at the same absurdity that Joan McIntyre saw, the way people’s good intentions can so easily curdle when combined.

  But he wasn’t about to give in the way she did, to tender his resignation with bouquets of daffodils. There’s an inevitable entropy in people—a wildness inside us—that tugs at the threadwork of everything we do. Even a job that looks so idealistic and decent can get pocked with misunderstandings, egos, and competition. But that’s what every human enterprise is like. That’s what every ecosystem is like. To call it unfair is a cop-out. It’s the natural order that our species fights to transcend.

  “You can’t take humanity out of the equation,” Brooke told me. “Humanity caused the problem to begin with, and so it’s very hard for humanity to solve the problem. Because it’s humanity! You know what I mean? We bring to the table all the same crap that was brought to the table to create the nightmare in the first place!”

  Maybe this sounds deflating—too jaded and profanity-laced to lay out for a kid in Walmart, or, for that matter, for a high-schooler looking into a polar bear’s eyes on Buggy One. But I swear, on the beach at St. Marks, it felt like the most reassuring thing I’d heard any conservationist say. This is all there is, and all there ever could be: achingly imperfect people, working to achieve something more moral than they are. “It’s not a bird project,” Brooke said. “It’s a people project. The birds are an excuse for doing something good.”

  —

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, with a plum-red sun still concentrated at the horizon, I was scrunched into the backseat of a Cessna, looking down on Jefferson County’s quilt of cattle pastures, farmhouses, and radio towers.

  Piloting the plane were Operation Migration’s “top cover” pilots, Jack Wrighter and John Cooper—two retired commercial airline pilots who, on migration days, soar a thousand feet over the trikes and cranes, working the radio to clear any air traffic ahead, and keeping an eye out for wayward birds.

  This morning, the five whooping cranes bound for St. Marks were finally going to fly the eighteenth and final leg of their migration. While Joe Duff’s trike soared high and kept its distance, Brooke circled toward the lightbulb-shaped field where the cranes were penned. “Okay,” I heard him say over the radio. “Let ’em out.”

  The door opened. The cranes swaggered out of the pen, rather than surged, then gathered into the air lackadaisically as Brooke made a low pass to pick them up. They didn’t form a line at his wing, but vibrated slackly behind his trike as they climbed—five shapes, pumping like uncoordinated pistons. There was a protracted power struggle—a “crane rodeo,” as the pilots call it. But within twenty minutes, Brooke had sorted the five birds behind his left wing, and the migration settled in at twelve hundred feet. Soon we were crossing the Wacissa River en route to St. Marks.

  Joe was drifting five hundred feet above Brooke. We in the Cessna were five hundred feet above Joe, flying in broad circles to keep from creeping too far past the convoy. Ahead, I could see the tidy rows of pine forests bisected by roads, and the long coastal highway, mirrored by a parallel highway of high-tension wires. Beyond that, a silver power plant rose out of the flat earth, glinting and disgorging dull white smoke. Then, at the Gulf Coast, everything faded to blue. Jack, the Cessna pilot, announced that we were thirty-one minutes away from the wildlife refuge.

  At that moment, six hundred people and a couple of local television crews were waiting on a long, carpetlike lawn at the edge of the town of St. Marks, just across an emerald estuary from the refuge. Among them, I’d later learn, was a man from Ontario, Canada, who, a few days earlier, had read online that the migration was closing in on its endpoint and asked his girlfriend, “Want to go see the whooping cranes fly in?” An hour later, they were in their van, driving to St. Marks. There were two sisters, ages nine and twelve, whose parents had offered them each $25 to go to school that day, but who turned down the money so they could fake the flu and come collect autographs from Operation Migration’s crew. There was an elderly woman who, inexplicably, had brought a used space pen—the kind that writes upside down—as a present for Brooke. And there were two doughy, jovial young guys—volunteers at the refuge—wh
o’d sneaked into the observation tower next to the pen where the cranes were being delivered and, given that it was now the middle of December, nailed up five Christmas stockings, embroidered with each of the whooping cranes’ numbers, and a wooden sign that read HOME SWEET HOME.

  Thirty-one minutes from now, they would all look up and watch Brooke’s trike pass directly overhead at five hundred feet, low enough so that, when he banked left to steer the cranes over for a second showing, everyone on the ground could see the broad white arm of his costume waving to them.

  Soon we were twenty-four minutes away. Then eighteen minutes out. The whooping cranes hadn’t so much as twitched from their places behind Brooke. There was nothing to do. In the Cessna, Jack reached into the backseat beside me and pulled a granola bar from the pocket of his coat.

  —

  VERY LATE THE PREVIOUS NIGHT, I’d run into Joe at the KOA campground’s game room. I was looking for Internet access. That winter, when I wasn’t on migration, I was home touring preschool after preschool with my wife, and now I’d promised that I would bang out all the applications before I came home from Florida.

  It was dark out, and through the game room window, behind a nativity scene of porcelain miniatures, I could see Joe, sitting in a folding chair in an Operation Migration sweatshirt, one arm drooped across the exercise machine beside him. He had a load of laundry going in the coin-op washer outside and was waiting to dry it. His head was winched up—uncomfortably, it seemed—so he could stare at the television mounted from the ceiling. The only light in the game room came from a Christmas tree in the corner and the flickering of Two and a Half Men. I stopped for a second on the path outside, because I wanted to remember the image. It was a portrait of the twenty-first-century conservationist on the road—a man without the luxury of believing that anything would be simple, or of any expectation of closure, but still trying.