Wild Things, Wild Places

by Jane Alexander

  Still, in the clan there is a structure that is adhered to. If the Birds-of-Paradise need to be protected for their feathers it is likely they will be by a clan that preserves its traditional sing-sings. The young men in Port Moresby don’t care anymore, and things fall apart. It is a violent city with a high rate of crime and homicide. There are many cities in the world that tell the same story, cities in Central America, Indonesia, the Mideast, eastern Europe, and the United States, where the innocent have been killed by disenfranchised mass murderers. Violence is transformative—certainly for the victims, but also for the perpetrator. With a deadly weapon he becomes powerful, his persona changes, and he becomes an actor in his own play. Urban gangs or rural terrorists become companies of players writing their own destiny. They are not connected to the larger world because they have created their own. They are shape-shifters, dangerous ones.

  My trip to Papua New Guinea began with shape-shifting birds and ended with shape-shifting men. There is a correlation and a difference. The birds transform themselves to be the apex male, but it is the female bird that decides which is the worthiest. Men transform themselves for the same reason, but also to be the apex predator in society, a rite that becomes violent.

  When we lose societal traditions of transformation, communal rituals, and performance, we lose the extension of human experience. We turn inward, unable to express all the identities within us. We live vicariously through the stories of others on TV or in movies or books. We thirst for stories and tune in to reality shows, or gossip, or Google, or Twitter, or constant communication with friends to get the latest event. Ours is a virtual world because the real one has become stunted.

  A friend took her two daughters to see an exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The exhibit included two rare Galápagos Tortoises, some of the oldest creatures in the world. The girls walked right by them to see the video playing on a nearby wall. Their mother was shocked and explained how extraordinary the tortoises were. Her daughters said that it was unnecessary to bring the tortoises all this way when a video told the story better. Perhaps they were right regarding the tortoises’ welfare, but the virtual world diminished the girls’ experience.

  Bruce and Lisa stress that there is no conservation without people. But without people who care about wildlife, there will be no conserving it. New Guinea is one of the most remarkable islands on earth, with unique plants, animals, and human beings. There are hundreds of spoken languages but none written, and most are spoken by fewer than a thousand people each. The six thousand languages in the world are declining at an alarming rate, and New Guinea is the country with the most languages per capita. New Guineans are walking libraries, lives to be celebrated for their infinite variety of artistic expression and for their profound knowledge of the land and the creatures that live there. Cultural diversity and biodiversity go hand in hand; they thrive together and die together. It is fortunate that the clans own 98 percent of Papua New Guinea, because it is local people who will be invested in protecting what they own. It is the young men who need to be wooed back. Perhaps the marriage of technology and wilderness can work in the long run. Maybe the Irish had it right after all when they introduced cell phones.

  12

  Hawaii

  The east coast of Haleakala is not a well-trod route, but I was on a quest. I had read that the White-tailed Tropicbird lays a single egg on a ledge of a volcano, and I thought my best shot to see one would be to drive to Hana for the night, then continue the next day past Seven Pools and onto the dirt road that traversed the east side of Maui. This was the kind of thing I would do on my days off when shooting movies.

  Kris Kristofferson, Madeleine Stowe, José Ferrer, and I were in a two-part miniseries called Blood & Orchids in 1985. It was a compelling crime drama based on a true story of racism in Honolulu in the 1930s. I played the bad gal while Kris played the detective who ultimately takes me down. We shot in glorious locations around the island of Oahu, and when the weekends came, I flew to one of the other islands to see the birds there.

  My life as a birder actually began when I started traveling for work in movies or plays. I was looking for a hobby that didn’t require carting around a lot of gear, and birding seemed perfect. Wherever I went there would be new species, and all I needed was a field guide and a pair of binoculars. From the very beginning back in the early 1970s, I was hooked. At first I would contact birders in the area through Audubon or friends and ask if they would take me around to good local spots, but often an erratic shooting schedule would cause me to cancel the appointment, and so as time went by, I began to rely more and more on myself. This was a slow way of learning but more intensive. No one was telling me which bird I was seeing, I had to learn it myself with the help of the field guide; my observations became more acute.

  Every new location became an adventure, and I began to know the parks of Chicago, Toronto, Boston, and Los Angeles as well as I knew Central Park or my own backyard north of the city. And I explored parts of Spain, Germany, England, Australia, and Hungary as most tourists never did. Everywhere I went, people were helpful and sometimes amused at this lone woman walking in out-of-the-way places.

  I never had a problem, except once. Across the freeway from my twenty-first-floor hotel room in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I spied a waterway beneath an overpass and couldn’t resist checking it out. Criss-crossing the four-lane highway, I slid down a twenty-foot embankment, scattered some Mallards paddling about, and then caught sight of a real prize: a Limpkin. This large water bird was poking its impressive beak into a snail shell down by the culvert. I squatted down, binoculars to my eyes, fixated at the sight of this uncommon bird, when a creepy feeling made me turn around. There just thirty feet behind me was a scruffy man, sitting on the muddy bank and staring intently. Then I saw the knife in his hand, and wasted no time scrambling up the bank and dodging cars as I raced toward my hotel. I looked back, horrified to see him still in pursuit through the traffic. Intent only on getting to the safety of my room I tore through the huge lobby, never thinking to alert the staff to the creep. I made it to my room, hoping he had not seen the twenty-first-floor elevator button I pushed, and I stayed there the rest of the afternoon.

  Incidents like this, and worse, do happen to birders, but usually in remote areas of the world, not in a bustling city in Florida. Phoebe Snetsinger, a hero of mine and one of the most famous birders of all time, was raped in Papua New Guinea when she was on a mission to see more birds than anyone else in the world. Phoebe was indomitable; she took the incident in stride and became the all-time champion lister before her death in 1999, having seen 8,400 species, or 85 percent of all the named birds on earth.

  My mission on the back side of Haleakala in 1985 paled in comparison to the great Phoebe, but I had a deep desire to walk the ocean cliffs of Maui in hopes of seeing the White-tailed Tropicbird. After an exhilarating drive in rain the night before on the treacherous winding road to Hana, I thought the dirt lane past Oheo Gulch in broad daylight would be a cinch. I had a refreshing dip in one of the seven sacred pools, dunking my head under a chilly waterfall. Then I picked a bagful of soft ripe guavas before putting my car in low gear and driving on. The bumps were significant, jouncing me up and down like croupier’s dice, making me rethink my contract with Avis. But I made it to Kipahulu Point Park, just as a cool mist blew onto the slopes. Charles Lindbergh lies peacefully in a grave nearby, overlooking the unbroken ocean he must have flown over dozens of times. It is a lonely place but not desolate, befitting a man whose life had many sorrows.

  After walking the trail for a while I sat on some rocks, ate some guavas, and looked out past the waves crashing far below me. A few Frigatebirds, looking like small Pterodactyls, plied the air in easy circles. My bird would be more direct, headed toward something if she wasn’t plunge-diving from fifty feet up into the Pacific for fish. Somewhere high above I thought there must be a perfect rock crevice for her nest.

  I do not pray har
d for things, but I do envision them, and I had a vision in my mind of the graceful white bird winging her way in through the ocean clouds and then up over my head toward the crater above. The mist was enveloping me now, the air cooling, and I thought the drive back might take double the time. I was called for shooting in Oahu the next day and couldn’t miss my flight.

  One last swing of the sky through my binoculars, clouds crowding the lens, and then a tiny speck, not dark like the Frigate, but blending into the white of the fog, was riding the air currents far above the waves. This bird was moving with purpose; she closed the distance in my lens until bingo, there she was, fully revealed, my White-tailed Tropicbird. What a buoyant bird, graceful and sleek as any aloft, a line of angelic white against the fog as she headed toward the volcano, her long tail streaming behind her like a beacon of light! Did I call her in with my vision? It has happened to me before. I have sat where a bird is likely to be at a given time and waited, envisioning its appearance. Usually nothing happens, but when it does, there is a deep stirring of ancestral experience, that I am part of something far greater than myself in the juxtaposition of bird and me in time.

  —

  The Hawaiian Islands are some of the most remote on earth, a distance of 2,400 miles from the West Coast of the United States, and from Asia. They are young and volcanic, and some of the volcanoes, like Kilauea on the Big Island, are still active. Like all remote islands, the Hawaiian Islands were colonized in the very beginning by the three Ws—wind, waves, and wings—which carried seed and spore across the vast ocean. Birds probably brought most of the seed that took hold in the fine Hawaiian lava soil; it came in their gut, and on their wings or feet. Some birds are remarkable long-distance flyers, especially seabirds like albatrosses, phalaropes, and shearwaters, which spend most of their lives cruising the oceans, their great backyard. The Sooty Shearwater is special because not only is it a great long-distance flier but it also dives and swims underwater to depths of 150 feet.

  The record for the greatest long-distance flight, however, is held not by a seabird but by a shorebird. A satellite-tagged Bar-tailed Godwit named E7 flew across the Pacific Ocean from Alaska to New Zealand nonstop in nine days, a total of 7,145 miles. She closed down one side of her brain and then the other in order to “sleep,” and by the time she made it to New Zealand she had used up half her body weight, all the fat reserves she had stored up in the Arctic before taking off.

  No creature can top this record for endurance. For a human being, it would be like running more than 43 miles an hour for seven days straight. E7 was not alone in her journey; about seventy thousand Bar-tailed Godwits make this flight twice yearly, but their numbers are declining dramatically. One of the suspected reasons for the decline is that on the return trip to Alaska in the spring the birds stop to refuel on wetlands and mud flats along the shores of the Yellow Sea, between China and the Koreas. Rampant development has been changing the flats, obliterating a major staging ground for the birds. One seawall in South Korea is more than 20 miles long, resulting in more than 154 square miles of lost mud flats. While sediment from the dammed-up Yangtze and Yellow rivers is offsetting some of the food source decline, it is doubtful it will compensate for the traditional flats. In addition, with the fear of rising tides globally, it is unlikely that mitigating development along shorelines will stop. This is just one of the myriad complexities of trying to save species while meeting the needs of mankind.

  But back to Hawaii: reaching the islands millions of years ago as the early bird ancestors did was difficult but hardly impossible. Bats came too. The Hawaiian Hoary Bat is the only endemic mammal on the islands; it has been there for a long time, as fossils attest, but it is an endangered species today. Some insects arrived too. Even spiders, not technically fliers, get a lift on the filaments they spin, riding a storm front for hundreds if not thousands of miles. And some butterflies, seemingly so delicate, are formidable long-distance fliers.

  These early colonizers of the islands lived in a kind of paradise. There were no predators and no biting insects. Each island had its own riches and birds found their own niches in the abundant flora. With no mammals other than the bat and no reptiles to eat them, the Hawaiian Islands became bird islands. A single ancient finch fathered dozens of different kinds of honeycreepers, an example of radiation in species that puts other island communities in the world to shame. Darwin should have come to Hawaii, not the Galápagos, for variation within species. His understanding of what he called natural selection to explain how the Galápagos finches evolved so individually might have been accelerated had he stumbled onto the fifty-five kinds of honeycreepers in Hawaii first.

  All things alive on Hawaii were found nowhere else on earth before people arrived. This endemism is common to islands but extreme on Hawaii because of its remoteness. The honeycreepers probably descended from an ancestor of a Eurasian Rosefinch between 5.8 and 7.2 million years ago, according to the biologist Dr. Heather Lerner at Earlham College in Indiana. The Rosefinches are known to pick up in huge flocks and look for better food sources, especially when there are too many of them, a phenomenon called irruption. They could have flown across the Pacific on storm winds and colonized more than one of the islands.

  —

  The Ring of Fire forms an arc that hugs the Pacific coastlines from Chile to California, north to Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, west to Japan and Java, and south to New Guinea and the Pacific islands east of Australia. It is the most active earthquake area in the world, with 90 percent of the earthquakes and 75 percent of the volcanoes on the planet. The subterranean plates are constantly in motion, creating friction and ultimately eruptions of one kind or another. Earthquakes are more unsettling than volcanoes, because you cannot see them, you feel them. Volcanoes thrust into the air with fire and steam, and a kind of majesty.

  Ed and I were birding parts of the Big Island in Hawaii for most of the day, catching sight of the Hawaiian Hawk, or Io, in a myrtle tree peering below for insects and little rodents. This small graceful Buteo was one of the first to make the U.S. endangered species list in 1967, when the population was down to a few hundred birds. Its protection was successful and the bird rebounded to several thousand today, engendering a new debate about delisting the species.

  It was 1986 and we headed up the long drive to the top of Kilauea, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, spewing continuous steam and magma since 1983. The volcano may be half a million years old. From rustic Volcano House at 1 Crater Rim Drive we watched the roiling mass of fire in the caldera below and trails of molten lava making their way to the sea, where they arrived miles later with a steamy hiss of expiration, the breath of the goddess Pele, whose home this is. After dinner we left word to be called if there was any new action in one of the vents, and at 4 a.m. we were awakened by an enthusiastic operator who said, “The volcano is erupting.” We jumped into our clothes and drove through the dark searching for the flue of fire and brimstone. You would think it would be easy, but it took us a half hour, driving aimlessly on unlit roads, before we pinpointed a roar like a freight train barreling down the tracks, and saw the glowing red column of magma against the horizon thrusting from a huge lava field into the predawn light. The column must have been fifty or sixty feet high, and you could feel the heat of the orange flame even though it was a good five miles away. We parked and trekked for several hours across old smooth lava beds and then newer spiky ones that threatened to pierce our ankles if we broke through the crust. The noise drew us closer and closer, but the heat of the air, particles of soot, and empty stomachs finally forced us to turn back before noon. We saw no life on these lava fields created from recent eruptions—no ferns, grasses, or insects. The lava, rich with ash and its nutrients, was just beginning to break down as weather eroded the surface. It would eventually become some of the most fertile soil on earth like other areas of the islands, ready to accept seed.

  I have never been comfortable around fire, fearing it will escape the burni
ng logs with a single spark. It must always be watched, like a stranger in the house threatening to steal all.

  At fourteen I read about Joan of Arc, also a girl of fourteen, burned at the stake. The cruelty and pain of her death seemed far more horrible than the guillotine or the rope. It frightened me. At sixteen I was determined to play Joan and auditioned for the director Otto Preminger for the movie, a part that ultimately went to Jean Seberg. When I was twenty-five the director Ed Sherin, who later become my husband, offered me the part of Joan of Arc in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. Joan’s death by fire happens offstage, but the prior trial and Joan’s denunciation of her beloved saints was a spiritual agony all its own. In the finale Shaw exquisitely releases the actress and the audience with an epilogue played in heaven. Joan learns she has been canonized and suggests to her dead companions that she now return to earth as a living saint, a prospect they view with alarm.

  “O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?” says Joan as the curtain falls. How long, indeed? Joan has never been forgotten; though she is long dead, her spirit still lives. It is that promise I remember—the life after death. The seed of life flowering out of lava ash.

  I literally caught fire only once. In rehearsals in Scotland, while attending the University of Edinburgh for my junior year, I pressed myself and the long dusty rehearsal skirt I wore as Ophelia up against the warmth of a gas heater. The whoosh of the flame was instantaneous, engulfing the old skirt in seconds and me in it. My Hamlet raced across the room, embraced me, and threw me to the floor, rolling us over and over again until the skirt was a scraggle of disintegrating black fiber. The tights I wore saved me from burns. The shock of it never left me.

  Some say the world will end in fire,

  Some say in ice.