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by Bob Smith


  Henry grinned. “I understand. My favorite call of the wild is making a friend laugh.”

  “I’ll put my phone in my car,” I said, trying to placate my literary idol.

  “You shiftless gadabout. You were just in Concord. You could have walked here.” Then he mimicked my flat Buffalo accent, “I’m an environmentalist, but I evolved legs to push gas pedals—not to walk or ride a bicycle.”

  “Henry, if you hadn’t written Walden, Americans wouldn’t be driving here.”

  “If I hadn’t written Walden, the pond would be surrounded by condominiums.”

  Let’s face it. You’ll never win a debate with one of your favorite writers, especially if he’s dead. Henry is one of my Nature Boys, which means he can hang out with me anytime, in addition to mocking me when the occasion calls for it.

  Since my diagnosis of ALS, I feel a particular kinship with Thoreau. He enjoyed walking through the woods while wolf packs of tuberculosis bacteria ripped out his lungs, and I dreamily hike among pine trees while my own body becomes a graveyard of dead-and-buried motor neurons.

  “Henry, are you my Angel of Death?”

  I explained to him about my you’re-gonna-die-agnosis.

  “Like I would help that bonehead?” he asked. “I hate Death. He made my life miserable.” He reached out and hugged me, giving me a brief whiff of an era before the Age of Deodorant.

  Henry said, “A life-threatening illness is like being chopped with an axe. You hope the axe breaks or the woodcutter tires while you still can enjoy being a tree in a forest.”

  “Or you hope the woodcutter quits chopping to kiss you.”

  “A woodcutter’s kiss is a satisfying hatchet to your heart.”

  “You sound like the Henry I’ve read.”

  “I’m not the author you book-wormed. Since my death, I’ve observed the extinction of passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets, and ivory-billed woodpeckers. Birdwatching isn’t meant to be an everlasting farewell. Selfish, greedy men are making the world as humdrum as they are. You’ll never enjoy seeing a tantivy of wild pigeons.”

  “I remember reading Walden and having to dictionary ‘tantivy.’ It means swift or rapid.”

  “Of course, you’d have to look it up. The goddamn pigeons are gone!”

  His eyes looked coldly menacing. “I’m not going to permit you or anyone else to witness the extermination of polar bears, rhinoceroses, or tigers. Everyone on earth has to understand: treat Mother Nature like dirt, and she’ll bury you.”

  I had read Thoreau but forgot that the reason he was in favor of civil disobedience was that he was passionate. He was fierce about his love of nature, opposition to slavery, and not having the words chiseled on your tombstone be more fascinating than your life.

  Henry smiled. “You’re healthy if you feel being alive for a minute is better than dwelling on being in heaven for eternity.”

  “People waste too much time,” I said. “They think clock hands are applauding when they’re really giving us the finger.”

  Henry stopped to admire an old oak tree. “This was probably an acorn when I was here.”

  Being surrounded by trees never feels claustrophobic, whereas one climate-change-denying Oklahoma senator on television makes the earth feel too crowded. “The trees here are so majestic,” I said.

  “Yes, they are.” His grin autumned into a frown. “It’s time to halt the assassination of Mother Nature. We need Birnam Wood to stop these murderers.”

  “That would be a great name for an environmental activist group: Birnam Wood.”

  “Bob, you and your friends might have to launch that organization. The earth has a fever, and it might not recover.”

  “Macbeth is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. It never occurred to me that I loved it because a forest metes out justice to an evil man. I also love Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for the same reason.”

  “I revere the Ents,” said Henry. “Sentient walking-and-talking trees that guarded forests and went to war after the evil wizard Saruman cut the ancient trees of Fangorn to use as fuel in his war-making kilns.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “Yes. It’s only in hell that you can’t read. Every book there is burned.”

  “Unfortunately, the Ents won’t rescue my children’s planet.”

  I told Henry about my daughter, Maddie, and my son, Xander.

  “My kids love wild animals as much as I do. Xander has a thick illustrated book of mammals, and when he was four, when I pointed to any picture, he could name the animal—from a gnu to a platypus. After a visit to Buffalo’s zoo, Xander imitated gorillas for the next month. And when her teacher went around Maddie’s class asking each student what animal they’d like to be, there were crates of dogs, cats, and bunnies. Only Maddie said, ‘A pygmy marmoset!’ My favorite picture of Maddie is of her holding a tiny earthworm in her palm. Her delighted smile seems to say, ‘Look at this slimy, precious jewel!’”

  “I wish I had kids the way you did. In my time lesbian couples weren’t soliciting sperm donors.”

  “It’s a shame you never met and married Emily Dickinson. She was in love with Susan Gilbert. In the nineteenth century, a gay man getting hitched to a lesbian would be having your wedding cake and eating it too.”

  “I loved Emerson’s son Edward. He understood me better than his father.”

  “Edward loved you, too. His memoir celebrates Thoreau the popcorn maker.”

  “Popcorn makes people happy, since it’s the only food that enjoys being roasted.”

  Henry’s comment made me beam as we arrived at a narrow beach on the pond.

  “You’ve reminded me of the dumbest thing a great writer ever wrote,” I said. “After your death, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about you, ‘I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party.’ No ambition? Your ambition was to be a great writer, and you achieved it by writing about huckleberry parties.”

  “Emerson was more stern Ralph than gleeful Waldo. He was a great man who couldn’t fully enjoy walking in a forest. The trees only made him think of working at his wooden desk.”

  The beach was crowded with sunbathers. Every body aped a shore-loving animal species from blubbery elephant seal to frisky sea otter to a squawking gull looking for a snack.

  “It’s gratifying that people still swim here,” said Henry. “I swam here with my friend Ellery Channing.”

  “Ellery said when you laughed it was an operation sufficient to split a pitcher. His comment made me wish you and I were contemporaries.”

  A red-haired Adonis with a perfectly sculpted torso rose out of the water, and both of us watched him walk to his towel on the beach. He joined his equally alluring girlfriend.

  “Nature is beautiful,” I said pointedly.

  “The birds and the bees are an echo that some body parts are more flighty than others.”

  “In Walden, there’s an infatuated portrait of a twenty-eight-year-old, blue-eyed, bushy-haired, woodchuck-eating, French-Canadian woodchopper. Did you swim naked with him?”

  “Alek Therien,” said Henry. “Now, he was a beautiful man. His hairy chest was my favorite meadow.”

  “You can’t read what you wrote about him and not sense the love and desire—especially the revealing aside about the lovers Achilles and Patroclus. Clearly you would have made room in your bed for some Québecois ooh-la-la. Please tell me you two hooked up?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I repeatedly emphasize his animal nature. Every man’s cock is a parrot squawking, ‘Polly wants him’ or ‘Polly wants her.’”

  “I think both our parrots are pollying for him.” I nodded toward an African American hunk in a red Speedo. Henry looked and said, “Squawk!”

  “Last summer I came here in the evening with my friends Eddie Sarfaty, Stephen McCauley, and his partner, Sebastian Stuart,” I said. “They’re all wonderful writers who are kindhearte
d and wickedly funny.”

  “It’s my favorite oxymoronic phrase.”

  “Mine too. It was about seven o’clock, and while my pals swam, I stayed onshore with my shirt on; my atrophying muscles make me feel like a vain peacock who’s lost his tail.”

  “We should judge our lovers by comparing them to our relationship with our bodies,” said Henry. “Our bodies always disappoint us with flab and wrinkles, and eventually we’re married to a murderer. It’s an abusive relationship we’re all trapped in.”

  “Tell me about it. It’s like I’m dating Jack the Ripper!”

  A bright-red male cardinal flew and landed on a shrub to our right. “Cardinals are new additions to the pond,” Henry said. “They used to live only in the southeast.”

  “Bird books claim bird feeders are the cause of their range expansion. I don’t buy that.”

  “They should be the symbol of global warming—a tropical-looking bird breeding in Canada.”

  “While my friends swam,” I continued, “a brown mama mallard— I recognized the species from the female’s distinctive iridescent-blue speculum feathers . . .”

  “Bob, I know how to identify mallard ducks.”

  “Of course you would,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

  “I just didn’t want you to believe I was duck ignorant. Please continue.”

  “Her ten ducklings were scampering on this beach. The mama duck kept a sharp eye on her curious offspring who were running near me and also wading into the water like kids playing. The pond is a playground for people and animals.”

  “Bob, you know me from my books. What made you walk into the wild?”

  “I’ve always been a Nature Boy. The first adult book I owned was a Golden Field Guide for reptiles and amphibians. My fascination with the natural world even withstood watching a garter snake unhinge its jaws and bite the back of my hand. My jaw dropped in astonishment after it left a complete oval of bloody pinpricks. The momentary pain was completely overshadowed by how cool it was to witness a snake’s flat bite for the first time.”

  “When an animal fangs you and draws blood and your heartfelt response is ‘Thank you!’ you’re a Nature Boy.”

  “Its chomp taught me that fear is a two-way street. A wildly enthusiastic eight-year-old boy is what every garter snake wants to avoid while taking a morning slither through a meadow.”

  “I wouldn’t allow boys to kill snakes on our hikes,” said Henry.

  “I loved that.”

  “Well, if you kill snakes because you think they’re Satan, you’re the one who’s evil.”

  Henry and I slowly strolled down the beach while I blurted out my Nature Boy adventures: bird watching in Central Park, sixteen trips to Alaska, traveling with my partner, Michael Zam, to the Galápagos Islands, and finally admitting that I’m a size queen and love whales and redwoods.

  There was a tiny prick on my arm. Looking down, I saw a mosquito lifting off, sporting a beer belly of blood.

  I said, “I’ve been trying to determine why some people fear mosquitoes like vampires, whereas I think of their nibbling me as if I were a walking bag of trail mix as a donation to keep the world wild. Is my acceptance of being used as a blood-filled canteen related to my feeling that sequoias are never looking down on me? Or that I enjoy eavesdropping on a conversation between a pair of blue jays but feel relieved that I don’t have to contribute anything. Or maybe it’s that I can make eye contact with a chipmunk, but when he runs off, I never feel rejected.”

  “Oh, that chipmunk is rejecting you. You’re deluding yourself.”

  “You’re right, but rejection by a rodent I can handle.”

  Henry said, “I enjoyed the woods as a boy, but I was also learning how to make pencils under my father’s tutelage.”

  “You made pencils and wrote classic books. You’ve cut down more trees than Paul Bunyan.”

  “It’s almost like loving Mother Nature even though she gave me tuberculosis and you ALS.”

  “I don’t blame her. If God really wanted us not to kill, he wouldn’t have created a my-dinner-is-your-last-supper planet.”

  We stood and looked out at the pond. Swimming children were at one end. A kayaker was paddling at the other end. The forest gripped the shore. “A park is where the natural world and people get along,” I said.

  Henry looked at me. “We have to start thinking of the entire earth as a park.”

  “When I was a boy,” I said, “my father unconsciously and unsuccessfully tried to make me heterosexual by wooing me with Mother Nature. While driving, he would point out deer or woodchucks grazing by the side of the road, which would make me pop up in the backseat, trying to spot—and usually missing—a wild animal. In kindergarten, our family lived from paycheck to paycheck, and my parents would pick me up at school at noon and drive from Buffalo to Batavia to get my dad’s salary from the state police. Afterward, he’d drive to the nearby Bergen-Byron Swamp to show me the thousands of migrating ducks and geese and also entertain me with horror stories about the massasauga rattlesnakes that lived in the spooky-looking marshland. In the summer, he took me fishing where I learned it was okay to kill an earthworm for the thrill of seeing a perch or sunfish for a minute before tossing him back in the river or pond.”

  “Fishing is a painful lesson about life,” said Henry. “Expect a treat and get a hook in your mouth.”

  “In the sixth grade, I celebrated the first Earth Day in 1970 by picking up litter on the way to school. Our garbage was collected and displayed in the school auditorium, a project no teacher would initiate today due to the reasonable fear that kids would collect junkie needles and used condoms.”

  Henry said, “I was very optimistic about flower power during that time. It seemed that people were uniting to save our planet, but the greedy resent the environment, since they believe every time a bird chirps, they should hear ka-ching.”

  He sat down on a stone retaining wall, and I joined him. The temperature was warm but not sweltering. Hiking isn’t fun when mosquitoes leave sweaty footprints.

  Henry said, “We’re constantly brushing up against death in the natural world: a dead minnow on a beach, a snag oak riddled with woodpecker holes, a croaked frog.”

  “We all end up as roadkill whether we choose the well-worn path or the one less traveled,” I said. “Robert Frost was an advocate of the road less traveled as you were. Frost recommended picking the right road, but I believe the more important choice is your walking companions. If you’re stuck with dud friends and lovers, you’ll soon be jumping off the first bridge you cross. And everyone needs a fun lover, or you’ll be building a cabin in your bedroom because you need some ‘alone time.’ Amusing friends can help make a disease detour an enjoyable journey, even though you’ve been told you have ALS, and your doctor is convinced you’re heading to the cemetery.”

  “You know, I traveled a good deal in Concord,” said Henry. “Do you feel the same about Buffalo?”

  “Part of my being a Nature Boy was a reflexive response to growing up in Buffalo during the 1960s. My memories of living in a grimy, industrially polluted environment are easily revived to this day when I visit my mom and stay in the house I grew up in. Buffalo has improved considerably, but I shudder driving through the still-gritty Black Rock neighborhood, where God, our strict teacher, punishes most adults by making them spend their lives sitting in a corner bar. The houses—with their forty-five-year-old soot-covered, frequently avocado-colored aluminum siding—remind me of reading when I was a kid that Lake Erie is dying, even though every summer we swam in it.”

  “How do you kill a great lake? It’s Lilliputians murdering Gulliver.”

  “Stop!” shouted a blonde girl who looked eight years old. She was being splashed by her younger brother; he looked to be about four. They reminded me of Maddie and Xander.

  “We also played in the fields surrounding the nearby Linde plant,” I said. “It’s now a Superfund site due to radioactive waste dumped from the Man
hattan Project. Pheasants lived in the fields, but now I wonder if they weren’t mutated sparrows. They don’t know what causes ALS, but soldiers have a high rate of the disease, and there’s speculation that it might be triggered by stress or environmental factors. It’s hard not to dwell on all that running with my friends through fields of plutonium probably wasn’t the best way to enjoy the outdoors.”

  “We were just seeing the dawn of factories when I was young,” said Henry. “It’s hard to appreciate nature when you’re spending your life toiling in a brick coffin.”

  “Buffalo was filled with elm trees and smokestacks when I was growing up. The elms were enough to make me love nature. Oh, and Charles Burchfield, the painter. He lived in a suburb of Buffalo when I was a kid. Do you know him?”

  “We’re friends.”

  “His watercolors are how you experience nature. He’s a genius.”

  “I agree,” said Henry. “You must have enjoyed Niagara Falls. It’s close to Buffalo.”

  “Niagara Falls and the Niagara River were my Walden Pond.”

  “I’m guessing not as swimmable.”

  “Actually, we did swim above the falls. When I was twelve, I used to go sailing with my friend Fritz. His parents let him use their sailboat. I’m not sure if that would happen now. Parents treat their children like employees who need constant supervision.”

  “Boys and girls need some autonomy, or else they’ll end up hating their bosses.”

  “There was a huge T-shaped dock that stuck out in the river. You could see the mist from the falls off in the distance. We jumped in the river off the right side of the T, and the current was so swift we were whisked to the left side of the T in a second. We had to grab the dock’s ladder. No life preservers. We could have been swept over the falls but never worried about that.”

  “Boys play like they’re immortal. That’s the real definition of childishness. The Angel of Death is still a Halloween costume.”

  “My grandparents lived in Niagara Falls, and my uncle had a house on the lower Niagara River—right on the gorge. The view made a four-year-old boy gawk. The best thing was there weren’t any fences in the yards. There was a deep plummet into the river. I played there after being warned by my grandmother, ‘Stay away from the edge. You don’t want to drop like a turd.’”

 

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