Treehab

by Bob Smith

  My Nature Boys aren’t peacenik hippies putting flowers in gun barrels. They’re more likely to hand a daisy to a greedy CEO and tell him to shove it up his ass. I’d like to tell God what a dick he is for creating ALS and punch him—if I could still make a fist. He might send me to hell for my disrespect, but I know my Nature Boys would back me up. It’s heartening to feel that in their afterlives, your best friends would pester God for billions of years: “Where’s Bob?”

  Since I’ve lost the ability to speak, it pains me that my limited communication—everything’s typed out on my iPad—might harm my bond with my closest friends. When I first met John, Eddie, Michael, and Michael, there was an immediate connection with each of them— usually a one-liner—and over the years those cords of humor have been woven into cables of love.

  There are also times when jokes don’t work as lifelines. My Nature Boys and I have been through the inevitable pain and wounds that all living things have to endure. Instead of a tick making life miserable for a deer, we’ve seen friends die of AIDS, sibling suicides, bad relationships, mean breakups, deaths of parents, and the caterpillar of depression munching on our thoughts.

  Recently, in Provincetown, Eddie and I saw our first pod of right whales. They’re an endangered species. There are only about four hundred in the North Atlantic since they were the “right” whales to kill. We stood on the sand dunes at Race Point watching a half dozen of them playfully breaching off shore. It made me happy, but it was also odd. Whales are big-brained mammals that can’t communicate with us. My illness has destroyed my voice and made me feel increasingly like an intelligent animal who’s trapped in his head. Because I have to type out every thought, half of my observations remain brainwaves. Even writing about my illness makes me feel I’m bellyaching—and I loathe perpetual gripers. But, right now, not writing about my ALS wouldn’t be telling my entire story.

  I saw my first rattlesnake with John. We were hiking with his father in the Malibu hills. It was early in the year—one of the first hot days—and as we walked the trail, I recalled that rattlesnakes often warmed up their cold blood after the winter. I’d never seen a rattlesnake and had wanted to see one since I was a little boy. Being especially observant that day, I noticed a rustling in the tall grasses by the side of the trail. Sticking my head over the stalks, I spotted a brown three-foot-long Southern Pacific rattlesnake as thick as a himbo’s wrist. The snake had stopped moving, and I called to John and his dad. As soon as the three of us started staring, the snake twisted into a coil and gave his rattle a shake. He seemed rightfully annoyed, as we were the ones threatening him. John and I kept a reasonable distance since that species carries highly toxic venom, but John’s dad was curious and moved within fanging range. It’s not right when the kids have to warn the parent to be careful.

  Michael Hart and I went on a camping trip to Canyon de Chelly in Arizona and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. We visited Chaco Canyon, an isolated national park, during the first week of September, when the purple aster bushes, aster bigelovii, with their lavender-and-yellow blossoms were flowering. The park had only a handful of other visitors, and the sight of the blooming bushes covering the desolate ruins of the capital of the Anasazi culture was otherworldly. I was healthy and fit then but can see now that it’s better not to ponder that every flower on earth sprouts on the grave of some living thing.

  At Canyon de Chelly, a Navaho woman was selling petrified wood. She had a tribal permit to sell the pieces, which made Michael and me think it was okay for us to soft sell ourselves and that by buying petrified wood from her, we were helping feed her family—not trafficking in looted fossils. We bought two firewood-sized logs for twenty bucks each. (There was no haggling. I had collected rocks since I was a kid and knew this was a good deal.) At the time, it didn’t register that I was buying a living thing that had died and been transformed into its own beautiful red, yellow, and orange tombstone.

  Michael lived in Santa Fe and during a Christmas visit, we drove down to the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, where you can see fourteen thousand wintering sandhill cranes, thirty-four thousand Ross’s and snow geese, and also the bald eagles, prairie falcons, and coyotes stalking the birds. I’ve visited the refuge several times. It’s always like watching a wildlife documentary, although it can be brutal. I’ll never forget seeing a bald eagle triumphantly gripping a bloody snow goose on a frozen pond.

  I’ve probably given you a wrong impression because most of my excursions into the outdoors have been more merry than morbid. Eddie and I did a stand-up show together at Russian River in California, where I was able to show him his first redwoods at Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve. The reserve is 805 acres, almost the same size as 843-acre Central Park. Redwoods make you think you’ve never seen a tree before.

  “No wonder you love redwoods,” said Eddie as we walked through the grove. “They’re California bodybuilder trees.”

  I laughed. “You’re right. They’re strapping hunks.”

  “You same-sex tree hugger.”

  “I did have sex here.”

  I told Eddie about the handsome blond I met at one of John Arnold’s parties. We dated for six months and one time, when I had a gig at Russian River, I brought him along.

  “The park was empty, and he blew me in the notch of an old redwood.”

  “You’re the only guy I know who’s had a three-way with a tree.”

  This might be too much information, but Nature Boys enjoy sex and believe people who think sex is dirty probably imagine French kissing is unhygienic and insist on both partners wearing tongue condoms. Walking through a redwood forest, you wonder why anyone would want to cut them down. I owned a house in Los Angeles that was built in the 1920s and was horrified to learn that it was built out of redwood. It’s like building a baby stroller out of baby bones.

  My partner, Michael Zam, loves animals, though he’s hilariously afraid of mice and can’t watch a nature documentary where there’s any bloodshed. Our first nature expedition was to Joshua Tree National Park. On our way to the park, we passed the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve, a spot I’ve visited with each of my Nature Boys. It has bubbling springs in the middle of an arid desert and is one of the ten largest cottonwood and willow habitats in California. I’ve walked the trails there and had a Cooper’s hawk rocket over my shoulder in the woods: I felt the air move from its flapping wings. It should have scared me but only made me feel lucky. I’ve also seen a hummingbird sitting on its nest. Hummingbirds build nests like Frank Lloyd Wright would. They’re made out of moss, lichen, and spiderwebs and are so organically camouflaged that the beautiful silvery-green egg house looks like part of the tree. The sweet, protective mother sat motionless in her nest, betting that in my stupidity I wouldn’t see her. Her bravery made me back off. I didn’t want to stress her out, understanding if you’re cruel to a hummingbird, Mother Nature should go Noah and gather two of every predator to kill you.

  One time I showed up at dawn at Big Morongo and was the first visitor to the reserve. I was greeted by eight turkey vultures sitting in a dead cottonwood. All the birds had their wings outstretched, warming up in the morning sun. When the vultures heard my feet stepping on the boardwalk leading to the trail, all eight heads turned in unison to check me out. Birds watching people is creepy.

  If you visit during the first two weeks of May, the Big Morongo Preserve is one of the best bird-watching spots in North America. Michael and I visited then. He had already mocked me as Miss Jane Hathaway, the bird-watching spinster on The Beverly Hillbillies. So when we parked our car and saw a group of gray-haired, baseball-capped birder ladies lugging around huge, unwieldy spotting telescopes, I thought, “Okay, this might be a dud.”

  So we walked over to Covington Park, a local town park that borders the reserve. I always check out that particular park for vermilion fly-catchers since that’s where I always see them. The bird is the size of a sparrow, but the males have iridescent fiery-red plumage that makes neon sig
ns look drab. Vermilion flycatchers are usually easy to spot because they sit on the end of a branch waiting for a bug to pass; then they loop out, feast, and return to their tree. They’re lazy eagles that won’t shop for dinner—but want it delivered.

  The birder biddies were checking out the park too. We had a great view of a vermilion, and in the same tree, I spotted my first lazuli bunting, a bright-blue bird with a white breast topped off with a rusty orange collar. Then in a neighboring tree, I saw a hooded oriole, a vibrantly orange bird. The best part was that the three birds were spotted by Michael, who was using my binoculars. Seeing any one of those birds would have been fantastic—but seeing all three was Mother Nature spoiling her children.

  I was flying as we hiked the rest of the refuge. I kept my eyes up, scanning the trees and sky, hoping to see another avian treat—perhaps an out-of-range California condor. Michael suddenly shouted, “Watch out!” Looking down at the ground, I almost stepped on a three-foot-long California king snake, a gorgeous brown-and-cream ringed reptile. It’s the only snake I’ve ever spotted at the reserve. And it’s a good omen since they eat rattlesnakes, and if you see one, venomous serpents are probably out of rattling range. It was the capper to our visit: three great birds and a spectacular snake in fifteen minutes.

  For years, I thought I had a Thoreauvian glimmer of insight into Mother Nature, but a voyage to the Galápagos Islands revealed that she would probably never be fully comprehensible—just like my own mother. The trip was two months after I was officially diagnosed with ALS. I’d been offered a job performing stand-up comedy on a small gay cruise with eighty-five passengers. At that point, I occasionally sounded drunk. So before I started my set, I had to announce that I had a neurological problem and hadn’t been drinking. Each passenger paid five grand for this trip, and while I felt unlucky about getting ALS, I gloated that I was able to bring Michael for free.

  The comic who had performed on this trip the previous year advised us to snorkel every time it was offered. Michael loves to swim, and he readily agreed to this plan. Our days in the Galápagos were vigorous and restful. There was a morning hike or snorkel. Then we returned to the ship for lunch, often made more leisurely with a beer. In the afternoon there was a hike, each time on a different island. And then we returned to the ship for a long dinner with wine. Before bed, there would be stargazing on the top of the ship with one of the ship’s naturalists. Looking up at stars from the middle of the ocean makes you contemplate how electric lighting has made our lives dimmer—although looking down into the water illuminated by the ship’s lights and watching the shadowy forms of hammerhead sharks was thrilling.

  Visiting the biggest town in the Galápagos, Puerto Ayora, we saw evolution in action. On the other islands, the iguanas ignored humans and remained motionless like scaly black rocks with eyes. Michael and I walked out on a dock and noticed the iguanas scampering to get out of our way. Then we saw a boy on his bike deliberately riding over the lizards’ tails. Increased intelligence has probably always been due to figuring out how to avoid assholes.

  Our first morning involved a visit to Española Island to see waved albatrosses. These are large birds: three feet high with a seven-foot wing-span. We walked through their nesting grounds and observed their courtship rituals. The couples perform elaborate head bobbing and weaving, followed by a rapid bill-clacking slap fight. It appeared that the couples were having a dispute, which is probably what an albatross would think if it observed human courtship rituals. The birds weren’t afraid of our intrusion, and their display of ignorance was more empowering than distressing.

  The animals of the Galápagos don’t fear humans, which is insane since nineteenth-century whalers stocked up on the islands’ tortoises for provisions. The reptiles could survive for months on ships without being fed or given water. (Not giving them water! Moby Dick was only meting out animal justice by killing Captain Ahab and sinking the Pequod.)

  What made me happiest on the Galápagos trip was how much Michael enjoyed the animals. The contented, unspooked critters in the Galápagos make you believe they love hanging out with you as much as you enjoy seeing them. We stood in shallow water, and a tiny Galápagos penguin zipped by our feet. We watched a sea turtle calmly chewing seaweed underwater while we snorkeled a foot away. After a hike, Michael spotted a huge sea turtle basking on the surface of the ocean. Then we turned our heads and saw a chorus line of blue-footed boobies feed by dive-bombing into the sea. We saw a chocolate chip starfish, which looks exactly like an unbaked cookie. We walked right up to a fierce-looking dark-brown Galápagos hawk whose yellow and dark gray beak sneered at all the gawking tourists. We were also horrified when our naturalist showed us a beach entirely inhabited by lurking stingrays. We did have a gay beach afternoon on another island. A nearby pond had three flamingoes more elaborately posed than any of the handsome muscle boys from our ship. On our last day, we saw our first Galápagos tortoises. Walking through a forest seeing these giants was like bumping into a stegosaurus on a hike.

  Even the plants were riveting. There’s a species of prickly pear cactus native to the Galápagos that looks like a tree. It has a bark-covered trunk crowned with thorny green pads. There were islands with prickly pear forests that made me think Mother Nature is warning: I could have made every forest this uninviting—but I didn’t.

  Our most captivating encounter with a wild animal in the Galápagos was on a morning snorkel around a small volcanic islet—a rock that stuck out of the sea. Since it had no shores, we felt we were swimming perilously in the middle of the ocean. Michael and I were joined by a Galápagos sea lion, which should be renamed the Galápagos sea dog; he definitely wanted to play. Swimming around and between us for most of our snorkel, he then stopped for a moment underwater—remaining motionless, staring at us. We stopped moving too. It was a kindred-mammal moment with three creatures sharing their delight in each other. His expression really seemed to say, “Love you guys,” and our buoyant expressions must have conveyed how much we loved him too. I got an extra kick out of our playdate with the sea lion since Michael couldn’t stop talking about it for the rest of the trip.

  Love is a neurological feeling that’s also a belief. It can’t be scientifically measured, but there are numerous ways to prove that love exists. The simplest method—but not one I’d recommend—is getting a life-threatening illness. I live in Manhattan, and when New Yorkers see me struggling, trying to swipe my subway card through the most handicapped-unfriendly entrance system, someone invariably asks, “Do you need help?”

  Without the love and courage of Michael, I would be physically and emotionally dead. I was diagnosed with ALS a year after we started dating. When I told Michael the news, he said, “We’ll get through this.”

  Really, I wouldn’t have blamed him for breaking up with me.

  Who wants a dying boyfriend? At some point it has to make you feel like a necrophiliac. But I don’t accept my prognosis of death. It might happen, but our lives are filled with close calls like suddenly finding yourself stuck on a cliff in New Hampshire.

  Michael has assumed responsibility for all our household chores since my hands now work as if they’re perpetually giving me a raised middle finger. He gets me coffee every day, which may sound trivial, but anyone who knows me understands that if lattes flowed through the circulatory systems of humans, I’d be a javampire. Even though I have to type out every thought on my iPad, I’m guessing we probably communicate better than a lot of couples. Michael still treats me like a boyfriend and gets pissed off when he discovers that I haven’t told him good news—such as a famous Broadway director wanting to adapt Selfish & Perverse, my Alaskan novel, into a play. And just like any other boyfriend, he also castigates me for a more conventional annoyance: leaving the bathtub drain jammed with a fur coat of my body hair. In fact, Michael gets angrier than a PETA member about my fur negligence.

  During the Harmonic Convergence in the summer of 1987, Michael Hart and I first visited Santa Fe. We pu
t up a tent at a New Age gathering. There were daily meditation classes where I usually reflected that the folks who thought of themselves as wise old souls had to have been smug and boring in their previous lives too.

  We did fall in love with Santa Fe. One of the attractions was the old cottonwood trees growing in the city. I grew up with American elms and maple trees, but a cottonwood tree’s branches often veer off at crazy angles giving it a wildness that makes finding one growing next to a sidewalk as exciting as spotting a black bear in your driveway. There’s a photograph from that trip of me in front of one of my favorite old cottonwoods on Grant Avenue—the tree is still standing—proving that a Nature Boy feels that snapshots with his favorite biological living things are family photographs.

  I know some people think Santa Fe’s adobe architecture is cartoony and when I see adobe convenience stores, I feel the tug of mocking them. But Santa Fe is a city that has embraced its regional history and identity. An adobe McDonald’s might appear ludicrous, but it’s a relief to visit one state that’s chosen not to be united by conformity.

  Michael Hart moved to Santa Fe in 1989, and I visited him there almost every year. In 2005, I ditched living in Los Angeles, and we bought a house together. It was on five acres, a fifteen-minute drive from the plaza. The beauty of Santa Fe is that it’s a town-sized city, and the landscape is natural. In the high desert, there’s not enough water for lawns and everyone’s front and backyards are piñon trees and chamisa bushes. One summer we had a lot of rain and there was an article in the Santa Fe New Mexican, one of the best newspapers in the country, about how rare wildflowers were blooming due to the torrential weather. There was a photo of a pale tubed flower called the blue ipomopsis, an uncommon species. The next day walking with Michael and his dog in the arroyo near our property, I spotted that exact flower. This was preposterously unbelievable, but now, after being diagnosed with ALS, I figure the universe owes me some unexpected delights.