Wrack and Ruin

by Don Lee

  “I don’t know about equal, but contributing.”

  “That’s a crock.”

  “When you lie still, you’re increasing surface area.”

  “The density of the human body’s 62.4 pounds per cubic foot.”

  “Hey,” Woody said weakly.

  “Give or take,” Margot said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s not an absolute. It’s an average. Depends on a lot of variables. Body fat, temperature.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “The density of quicksand is 125,” Trudy said. “Almost double the density of water. A couple of pounds here and there aren’t going to make a difference.”

  “Depends,” Margot said.

  “On what?”

  “Uh, ladies?”

  “Sedimentary composition. Sand-water ratio. Salinity.”

  “Are you just going to contradict everything I say today?” Trudy said. “Is that your explicit objective? Did you wake up and tell yourself, I have an idea, I’ll just be the biggest pain in the ass I can possibly be?”

  “That’s right, because it’s always, always all about you, isn’t it, T.?”

  “Hey!” Woody yelled. “A little help here?”

  They pulled him out of the quicksand and, refusing to speak to each other, led him to their campsite at the edge of the woods, near the beach. Their little hideaway was neater and more organized than he would have guessed. They had a big tent, two collapsible chairs around a fire pit, a cooking area with pots and pans and stuff sacks hanging from a wire strung tight between trees, and even a hammock. Off to the side was a little garden with lettuce and green onions. There wasn’t a piece of litter anywhere in sight.

  “Okay, strip,” Trudy told him.

  “What?”

  “You’re filthy. Take off your clothes, and I’ll wash them for you.”

  “What will I wear in the meantime?”

  “Margot will lend you something. It should fit. She’s got a gargantuan ass.”

  “Like you should talk,” Margot said.

  “Lard ass.”

  “Tub of shit.”

  These jabs held little weight. Trudy was tiny, and although Margot was a big girl, with the solidity of a former athlete—swimming, rowing, perhaps—she, like Trudy, looked gaunt and severely underfed.

  “Camel toe,” said Trudy.

  “Hatchet wound,” said Margot.

  “Catcher’s mitt.”

  “Stench trench.”

  Trudy glared at Margot and hissed out, “Motherfucking bitch cunt slut whorebag cocksucker. Cum-belching cancer-eating dildo-humping donkey punch. Scaly rimjob turd-licking white-trash lesbo dyke.”

  Margot gaped at Trudy, utterly abashed. She snatched up a fishing rod and vanished into the woods.

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Trudy said to Woody, “but we’ve begun to get on each other’s nerves.”

  He changed into a pair of Margot’s shorts and a denim shirt, and Trudy took his clothes to the creek, where she rinsed the mud out of them while Woody washed up.

  “Want to see the plovers now?” she asked after she had hung the clothes to dry. “You’re in for a treat. The last chick has just hatched.”

  She packed a few things into her rucksack and showed him the way to the trail, which was well marked in this portion of the marsh. As they walked along, Trudy pointed out plants and wildflowers: buckwheat, beach primrose, yarrow, Nutall’s milk vetch.

  “This is an amazing marsh,” she said. “It’s got such a varied ecosystem—all the willows and cattails are perfect for nesting. One-fifth of all North American bird species have been spotted here. You hear the wrens?”

  Woody looked up at the sky. “Those are vultures, aren’t they?”

  “What?” She laughed. “No, they’re red-winged blackbirds. There’s an egret, and you see over there? There’re a bunch of great blue herons in the eucalyptus.”

  They traversed a tidal flat, the mud sucking on his boots again, sloshed through the shallow mouth of the estuary, and then climbed the back of some dunes. “Crouch down,” Trudy said. At the top of the dune, he followed her into the entrance of a well-disguised blind, jury-rigged with white canvas, tent poles, and driftwood, that had just enough room for two people. A telescope on a tripod peeped through an observation slot at the beach below. Trudy put her eye to the scope and trained it across the sand. “Here, take a look,” she said.

  They switched places, and Woody squinted through the eyepiece. He saw sand and debris, but no birds. “Where are they?”

  “Don’t you see them?” Trudy got on her knees next to him and peered through a pair of binoculars. “Look beside that clump of kelp.”

  He saw one of the plovers finally, a little gray-brown puffball on legs, scurrying down to the water’s edge, stopping and pecking into the wet sand. “It’s so tiny,” he said. It looked no bigger than a child’s fist.

  “That’s Eyebo, and Whygo’s right behind him.”

  “Eyebo and Whygo?”

  “Acronyms for their bands. AY:BO and WY:GO, father and mother. You see the color bands on their legs? You read them from top to bottom, left to right. Aqua, yellow, blue, orange. White, yellow, green, orange.”

  He watched AY:BO skitter up the beach, moving like a high-speed windup toy, but suddenly he disappeared—a vapor. “Where’d he go?”

  “He’s just sitting down. That’s how they camouflage themselves. All they need to do is hunker down to blend in with the sand.”

  Woody spotted him again, running up to a circular fence. He zipped through the wire mesh to two little chicks and straddled his legs over them. He squatted down, covering them with his belly.

  “He’s brooding the chicks, keeping them warm,” Trudy said. “When they hatch, they can’t thermoregulate themselves yet.”

  “The mother doesn’t do that?”

  “Not with snowies. The father raises them until they fledge. WY:GO, the mother, will probably take off in a few days and breed with another male. Plovers are—to use the catchword of the day—polyamorous. This is a really late-season nest. We actually got to see them copulate. It was quite shocking. I thought it’d be a quickie insemination—you know, wham-bam—but it lasted much longer than I would have thought. Boy oh boy, AY:BO has got some stamina!”

  Plovers bred on wide open beaches, sand pits, and salt pans, Trudy told him, and made their nests by scraping a depression in the sand and spreading pieces of driftwood, shells, and seaweed alongside it. After a pair of plovers laid their eggs, both sexes took turns incubating them for about a month, the female during the day, the male at night. The clutch size was usually three eggs—minute brown-speckled eggs that were barely visible even to the trained eye, easy to step on by accident—but if too many of them were lost during the long incubation, by high tides or blowing sand or predators, or if their habitat was disturbed too frequently, the pair would abandon the nest. After hatching, the chicks would almost immediately begin foraging on their own, led by the adults away from the nest to areas where they could peck up brine flies, larvae, insects, and amphipods. They could roam up to half a mile a day in search of food. The chicks would not be able to fly for four weeks, and thus were particularly vulnerable until they fledged.

  The odds were against them. They were fragile, defenseless birds, preyed upon by seagulls, crows, ravens, foxes, skunks, raccoons, falcons, owls, dogs, cats, pretty much every animal on the coast. But what really spooked plovers were people. Any sort of threatening human activity in the vicinity might make them abandon their eggs or chicks.

  “What we’re trying to do,” Trudy said, “is increase the number of fledglings from one to one-point-five per breeding pair. That’s the difference between a population on the decline and one on the rise.”

  “How many have fledged while you’ve been here?”

  “Three.”

  “Three? You’ve camped here all summer for three fledglings?”

  “The
re might be more if some of this clutch makes it. But it’s more complicated than that. We’re trying to establish this as a new breeding ground. If we’re successful this season, they’ll come back next year.”

  They were using methods based on the theory of social attraction, developed by a biologist named Stephen Kress, the head of the National Audubon Society’s Seabird Restoration Program. The idea was to lure birds into building new colonies with everything from recordings and mirrors to fake eggs and mating perfumes. Plovers didn’t really nest in colonies, but they could be enticed into aggregating in suitable habitats. The first thing Trudy and Margot had done was dig out the nonnative beachgrass, which had been imported for erosion control but had become invasive. Next, in the cleared sand, they had scattered oyster shells and decoys, widely spacing them apart, and put up signs and symbolic fencing—posts linked with string—restricting the entire dune area. Then they had waited. They watched the plovers build nests, marked their locations, erected enclosures around them, cleared sand from eggs after storms, surveyed the numbers and dates of eggs and chicks, banded the birds, monitored their feedings, and chased away predators.

  “They put a garbage dump at the end of the golf course,” Trudy said, “and that’s attracted more gulls and coyotes. You know what kind of an environmental blight golf courses are? An eighteen-hole golf course uses eight hundred thousand gallons of water a day, and requires four tons of germicides, pesticides, and herbicides every year. Most of the chemicals are carcinogenic—organophosphates, methylmercury. They run off and leach into the ground and kill everything within miles for generations. All of this development—it’s all big-boxification and Sprawl-Mart. Forty-six acres of farmland are paved over every hour in this country, and the agribusiness that’s left, you just don’t know what the hell you’re eating anymore, all these GMOs, cows and chickens fed with corn and soybean pumped up with antibiotics that breed resistant stains of bacteria, these farmed fish with PCBs. It’s Frankenfood. You just can’t imagine the consequences. That’s the problem: it’s a lack of imagination. Your SUV, for example. You know it produces one pound of CO2 for every mile you drive? You drive twenty thousand miles a year, that’s ten tons of CO2 expelled into the air annually. Multiply that by a billion cars, along with all the methane and chlorofluorocarbons released every day, and you wonder why the ozone layer is being depleted, why there’s a hole over the Arctic Circle, why there’s global warming?”

  Woody was disquieted by her rant. Almost certainly she was the person who had been vandalizing The Centurion Group’s property. “I’ve been thinking of trading in my Rover,” he said apologetically. “It’s been giving me trouble lately, anyway. Maybe I’ll get a hybrid.”

  She laughed. “I get carried away sometimes. Margot keeps saying I have anger management issues.”

  “My brother’s Brussels sprouts are completely organic. He doesn’t spray at all.”

  “One of the few remaining heroes. You two close?”

  “Very close,” Woody said, looking through the telescope again. There was some brightly colored webbing lining the top of the nest enclosure. “What’s that strip of orange for?”

  “To prevent bird strikes,” she said.

  Stupid birds, he thought.

  Suddenly alert, Trudy grabbed her rucksack and pulled out a slingshot. She loaded it with a pebble and flicked it out of the observation slot. Woody watched the pebble whiz toward a seagull on the beach, making it scamper and flush away. “Fucking gulls,” she said.

  “Let me ask you something,” Woody said. “It seems, well, kind of dumb for the plovers to make their nests in the wide open like this, where they’re so vulnerable to predators and people. Aren’t you interfering with the course of natural selection by protecting them? If they’re so weak, maybe they’re meant to go extinct.”

  “It might seem dumb to you, but they were doing just fine until now. They’ve successfully reproduced in a very harsh environment for thousands of years. Death—even extinction—is part of the natural cycle of things, but what’s happening to them now is unnatural. It’s solely because of man encroaching on their habitat. So we can passively watch the demise of a species, or do something about it. I don’t think there’s a choice. We have an obligation, a stewardship role, to save them.”

  The argument sounded like it was straight out of a lobbyist’s manual for the Audubon Society, and Woody didn’t buy it. It was easy to spout these bleeding-feather bromides, to squawk as a radical environmentalist, when you had a trust fund. Last night he had again talked to Christopher Cross, who had told him that Buzz Thorneberry had contributed ten thousand dollars a year—the maximum allowed without incurring inheritance taxes—in Trudy’s name to a trust since she was first adopted. According to Cross, Trudy had not spoken to the Thorneberrys in over three years, but Buzz was still putting money in the trust, so now she was worth half a million dollars. Yes, she had never withdrawn a cent of it, but still, the money was there. She always had it to fall back upon. She had, anytime she needed it, the sanctuary of wealth. “Isn’t man part of evolution?” he asked. “Isn’t progress supposed to be ruthless?”

  Trudy tucked back her hair and sighed. “You don’t appreciate how everything is related, how miraculous it is. You breathe in and you breathe out, and you don’t think anything of it. But on an atomic, molecular level, we’re recycling the universe with each breath. Don’t roll your eyes at me. There’s a dynamic balance between every organism. We expel carbon, and it’s taken in by plants, which in turn release oxygen, which in turn is taken in by animals, and it circles around and around, so that eventually all the atoms in our bodies are exchanged with every living creature from the dawn of time. We have the atoms of our ancestors in each of us. You have Mahatma Gandhi, the Buddha, inside you right now! The whole planet, everyone dead and alive, is breathing together! Isn’t that remarkable to think?”

  “Are you a Buddhist?”

  “I’ve studied Buddhism, and I have Buddhist aspirations, but it seems I have certain aggressive tendencies that are contradictory to the basic precepts,” she said, smiling. “The Dalai Lama says his true religion is kindness. Isn’t that beautiful? I’d like to be able to say that for myself, but it’s such an effort when there’s all this greed and evil around you. Do you think of yourself as a good person?”

  The question, as simple as it was, unsettled Woody. Nietzsche had said that what was good was anything that heightened the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself; what was bad was anything born of weakness; what constituted happiness was the feeling of that power growing, of resistance being overcome. But, as usually defined, was Woody a good person? He wanted to say yes, but if he had to be honest, he would have to say, fundamentally, no.

  “I met a woman in town the other day,” Trudy said. “She’s decided to give up everything and leave her family for a year to become a Tibetan nun. She’s going to Nepal next week. She told me the Buddha used to say the human condition is like a man shot by an arrow. The man will flail and wail, but instead of seeking immediate help, he’ll first demand to know who fired the arrow, why did this happen, what did this have to do with him, how can he avenge this act, be compensated, why is life so unfair, why is he so unlucky. He’s not dealing with the problem at hand, the here and now. He’s not awake. It’s what Buddhists call our ‘monkey mind.’ We keep swinging from past regrets to future worries, we vacillate between longing and loathing, craving and jealousy. That’s what poisons the arrow, not the arrow itself, because we’re not aware of what’s happening in the bloom of the present moment.”

  Woody had to confess to himself, this was exactly what he did all the time, fixate on the past and the future.

  “Tell me,” Trudy said, “which way is the wind coming from?”

  “Hm?”

  “The wind. It’s coming from the northwest. The tide’s coming back in. You see that dark patch of water there, where it looks a little windier, where there’re more ripples? Notice anything
unusual?”

  “Not really.”

  “The patch is moving. It’s going toward the wind. Keep an eye on it.”

  Nothing happened for a while. A couple of small birds hovered over the surface, following the drifting patch of water, then a few more. Without warning, a whole flock of them appeared, and they began diving frantically into the water, churning it into a boil.

  “What’s happening?” Woody asked. It frightened him a little, the ferocity with which the birds were plunging into the ocean.

  “Terns. There’s a school of mackerel or sardines chasing some baitfish—smelt or anchovies—up to the surface, and the terns are feeding on them. Look above.”

  A bigger bird—dark and bulky—was flying overhead, about fifty feet above the sea, and when it reached the terns, it folded its wings and plummeted head-first into the water with a huge splash.

  “Whoa!” Woody said.

  When the bird surfaced, there was a large pouch of skin bulging beneath its bill, water draining from it as it lifted into the air.

  “That’s a brown pelican, the only nonwhite pelican in the world,” Trudy said. “It’s on the endangered list as well, because of DDT. It can hold three gallons of water and fish in its pouch.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “What I’m saying is, it’s too easy for people to live in climate-controlled isolation and not see what’s around them. Even when people go into nature, they approach it all wrong. Have you ever read Edmund Burke? Yet another dead white male chauvinist, but never mind. He tried to come up with an explanation for our taste in art, especially landscape art, and he said things are either beautiful or sublime. The beautiful has a nurturing quality. It’s sexy, because it stirs our instinct for self-propagation. The sublime is awe-inspiring and terrifying, like the Alps or the Grand Canyon. It’s an encounter with otherness, and elicits an impulse for self-preservation. Later on, they added the picturesque, landscapes that are pleasant and domestic, reassuring. What’s the problem with this? I think we could all use several doses of the beautiful and the sublime every day, jolt us out of our complacency, but these categories, they’re just another example of anthropocentrism. Ultimately it’s glorifying man’s dominion over nature. Saying something is beautiful or ugly, sublime or picturesque, is beside the point. It’s arrogant. To truly appreciate nature, be a part of it, you have to replace arrogance with humility. Then you’ll begin to see. There’s so much to see, even in the smallest things.”