The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (34 page)

I tell Ruby that if the bear comes again, she must stand her ground, ask it what it wants. I stroke her strawberry-blond curls as she falls back asleep. A few hours later, she wakes again, whimpering.

"Mommy, the bear came back, and when I asked him what he wanted, he said he was hungry. So I gave him a carrot."

Ruby is no longer terrified, but tentative. She falls back into sleep, and I am still sitting next to her when she starts to giggle. Then she sits straight up, her eyes shining in the pewter moonshower falling through the window.

"Mommy, the bear came back, and this time he looked just like Winnie-the-Pooh!"

For a moment, I cringe at my daughter's reduction of a wild creature to a cartoon character. But then I see that she has, on a deep level, bent the bear into something she can manage—and in this way she has digested her conflict with the animal and its deeds. Afterward I notice in my daughter a deeper appreciation for the animals around her—she loves them more than ever. And yet: she now holds a realistic and healthy respect for those that have the potential to harm her.

 

I learn more slowly than my daughter. The day after her dream a neighboring rancher stops by to inquire if we've seen the bear around. He whistles at the claw marks on the shed's threshold and has a good laugh at Herb's small pistol. But, as the new long-haired attorney on the mesa, my husband scores points for having a gun at all—and a few more for being willing to use it. And when, in order to prove his adequacy, he pulls out his 7mm mag, the rifle his grandfather had used for killing Cape buffalo, he really gets a slap on the back. "Next time, son, you drop that bastard dead in his tracks."

Herb just shrugs and smiles. I, however, feel compelled to interject my belief that we don't want to kill interloping bears—that we merely want to keep them at bay. The rancher cocks his frayed ball cap and juts his grizzled chin at me.

"Notice how the bear that paid your husband a visit thought nothing of your three dogs? That's because you nature lovers thought you were doin' right for the bears by making it illegal to hunt 'em with hounds. Now you got bears strollin' right by dogs, into backyards and barnyards, with no fear at all."

Facing my neighbor, I feel a powerful impulse to pull back. This is where civil convention dictates that I silently agree to disagree, that I make some remark about the weather. Later I can air my opposition among like-minded people who will fan my flames of indignation. Emboldened by their passionate agreement, I'll feel justified in penning letters to the editor, e-mails to the Division of Wildlife—any venue that is capable of presenting the issue in black and white, any venue that is impersonal enough to isolate my beliefs from my neighbor's.

And yet.
In Aspen during a two-week period this past summer, a bear sauntered right through a fur salon, another broke into a house and attacked the owner, and another bit into a woman's thigh while she lay sleeping on her deck. During the same time frame, a bear broke into a steel enclosure down the road from our house, killing five Shetland sheep and maiming two others—only to return in broad daylight for more. Three days after the offending bear was trapped and removed, another one moved in and killed three additional sheep. And in the nearby tourist town of Ouray, at least two more bears ate an elderly woman who, every evening for years—despite harsh reprimands from state and local officials—had watched from a fenced-in porch as bears came into her yard to feed on the dog chow she set out for them. The coroner's report concluded that the woman had been dragged out of her makeshift observation cage and devoured by the very animals she fed.

Standing on my own bear-clawed threshold, I am caught in the spell of a familiar misanthropy, only this time I begin to sense how it stunts my understanding of the world. And suddenly I find myself willing to consider my neighbor's perspective, to extend an open-mindedness toward his knowledge and experience that I haven't even granted my own rural family members. It comes down to this: by retreating from that which we oppose, we render lifeless all opportunities for intimacy, and for community. To smile and step away is as fatal to possibility as is brandishing a finger of blame.

And so, after a long, awkward silence I offer my neighbor a seat on the porch and a cold beer. Then I lean forward. I seek luminosity—the deep bruise of blue that hung on the fence alongside the man's coyote hides, complemented by the soft rose of empathy that emanated as he knelt in my goat pen the summer before, showing me how to revive two kids half dead with scours. I was new to goat-keeping then. With my young animals, my neighbor was as tender and gentle as I've ever seen a man. And in eyeing these two tints of him at once, I find a newfound level of humility reflecting back.

"Tell me," I say, haltingly, "how you would restore the equilibrium."

"For starters," he says, "git yourselves some outside working dogs—no more welfare critters. Then load one of them bigger guns you got there, and for god's sake, keep it where you can use it."

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." But perhaps it Isn't brains so much as courage—the courage to say yes, and yes again. At the very least, I am learning to bring into singular focus my double-edged essence. For if my preschool-age daughter can behold the whole of each animal, then surely the rest of us can embrace two seemingly opposing elements with every nuance, every context, every color in between.

We'll need a language of delicacy to articulate such complex thoughts and feelings—one that can carry us across the muddy mire of moral, spiritual, political, and environmental ambiguities. And if we wield our words with heartfelt compassion and respect, it just might be enough to repair the psychic fissures we have suffered in this age of sharp divisions.

Now I keep a loaded rifle within arm's reach. We have two new dogs that roam our fence line, day and night. And I find myself hoping that hounds will give chase during the next bear season. It's not a contradiction to say all this—and then to say I am still rooting for the bears, for their rightful place on our mesa, and across the remaining wildlands in the West. Indeed, as my family prepares for the rigors of the autumn elk hunt in the Colorado high country, I am reminded that it is no small thing to inhabit our place on the carnivorous continuum—a place where we not only consume animals but, in turn, we consent to the possibility of being consumed. This place, an edge of sorts, awakens us to our biological inheritance, and we become viscerally, sensually invested in our surroundings and their ability to sustain us.

These adjustments to my view of the world have not made me a more typical westerner; nor have I become a more conventional environmentalist. But if our model of advocacy, no matter what the cause, requires that we stridently defend our territory without leaning across the fence to consider, wholeheartedly, another view, if we cannot embrace the Other in both its delightful and repelling pigments, then the world has little chance to be spared. For this is what it means to forge meaningful conduits between our existence and every other bit of biota. Swallowing the spectrum whole is to devour the exquisite breadth of life. After all, diversity is the strength of a people. Of an ecosystem.

The hunter and the hunted. The Old West and the New. The wild and the tame. We must be lithe enough to stretch between.

FROM
Outside

S
HE NEEDED TO GET OUT.
Wide of beam, forty-three feet long, and 11,000 pounds of lead in her keel, she'd been built with oceans in mind. Her name was
Dolphin's Waltz,
and she was sick of putzing around the shallows of Alabama's Mobile Bay, where she docked. Now stately breakers rolled across her bow, muddy waters giving way to the gray-green Gulf of Mexico. She was on the hunt.

We passed within kissing distance of shrieking rigs, hunkered down and drilling away like mosquitoes; dodged a swarm of shrimping boats that looked like giant waterborne grasshoppers, their spars deployed as they searched for oil slicks; and then made for Dauphin Island Pass and the wide open. A Coast Guard chopper slashed overhead, and a blimp hung in the southern sky like an alternate moon. We were the only pleasure boat around. A west wind snapped the jib taut as dolphins hot-dogged across our bow wave, exploding into the air. For being smack in the middle of America's biggest environmental disaster, it was pretty fucking nice.

You might say July 2010 was an odd time for a pleasure cruise in the Gulf of Mexico, and maybe a sailboat—slow, bulky, with the upwind quarter of the world off-limits—is an odd way to do any sort of journalism. I won't argue. I wasn't going to scoop the
Wall Street Journal,
but that was the point. Perhaps, as the press hordes stampeded past us in their helicopters and vans, chasing the latest oil sighting, they were missing the real story.

So we'd take it slow, on the gulf's schedule. I'd challenged our skipper, Josh Deupree, to a wind-powered tour of a particularly stunning corner. I'd heard rumors of cleanup operations gone awry—workers pelting each other with eggs from Louisiana rookeries—so we'd head west to investigate the situation on Petit Bois Island, known as the most pristine wilderness island in the gulf and vital habitat for more than 250 species of birds. From Petit Bois we'd cross Mississippi Sound to see the marshes and seagrass meadows of the coast, taking in as many marine ecosystems as we could in three days.

A sort of nagging consumer guilt, and the desire for seafaring in its purest form, was the motivation to try it without fossil fuels—once out in the gulf, at least. Sailboats are docked in slips like parking spaces. Exiting had involved cranking up, making several right-angle turns, negotiating a narrow harbor, passing under a bridge, then following a dredged shipping channel across Mobile Bay and out into the gulf.

As soon as we'd cleared the bridge and caught the shipping channel, we killed the engine and raised the sails. Close-hauled to the wind,
Dolphin's Waltz
heeled over and shot straight out of the channel toward Dauphin Island Pass. The smell of diesel faded, replaced by the slow oscillation of wind and wave. She was free.

Not that we were making any kind of statement. Just getting to the boat, our crew had of course burned gobs of petroleum products. I flew from Vermont to Newark, where I looked down upon a grid of refineries and tanks, then to Houston, same damn thing, and then to Mobile. Oil was everywhere and in everything, not just the gulf.

 

Like something out of Mordor, a refinery's orange methane flare blazed atop a black pillar on the shore of the bay. Fed by six rivers, Mobile Bay covers 413 square miles and spits out some 62,000 cubic feet of water every second, making it North America's fourth-largest estuary by flow. Its mouth was crawling with boats as we sailed out. Vessels of Opportunity—boats hired by BP to patrol for oil—darted across the channel. The program was the biggest gold rush on the coast. Even the smallest boats made $1,600 per day.

About 3,000 VOOs, as everyone called them, were operating out of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. They came in every size and shape: sportfishing behemoths, Boston Whalers, pontoon boats. I tried not to think about how much gas they were burning in the effort to save us all from oil. All flew the triangular VOO flag and seemed to be zipping about with minimal coordination.

As we passed within twenty yards of one diesel-burning rig, a man on the catwalk waved his arms and shouted. I thought maybe we were too close, but Jimbo Meador, one of our crew, said, "He wishes he was on this boat and not that goddamn rig." Virtually everyone I'd spoken with on the Gulf Coast had said, "Oh, you have to meet Jimbo Meador. He's the real-life Forrest Gump." Well, Jimbo's buddy Winston Groom did dedicate the book to him. And, yes, like Gump, Jimbo once ran a huge shrimping business out of Alabama. And, yes, for the accent, Tom Hanks studied Jimbo's speech. ("But I don't know why he bothered," says Jimbo. "He sounded like an idiot.") But there the similarity ends.

Born and raised on the Alabama shore, Jimbo is one of the best fly-fishermen on the gulf and, because he does it all by kayak and stand-up paddleboard, one of the fittest sixty-eight-year-olds you'll ever see. The ocean is his life. "If I get too far from salt water, I start to get nervous," he told me. With his deep tan and wavy light gray hair, he looks as if sand and sea foam crystallized into a man and strode out of the surf. If anyone cared about the health of this place, it was Jimbo.

Our other crew member, Bill Finch, was equally invested. A senior fellow with the Ocean Foundation, the fifty-one-year-old had been instrumental in creating one of the country's best oyster-restoration projects. A mile and a half of new oyster reef had been "planted" on Coffee Island, off the Alabama coast, in April—the beginning of Bill's Hundred Miles of Reefs vision, part of the Restore Coastal Alabama 100–1000 project for Mississippi Sound and Mobile Bay. It had seemed a heartening success until BP's Deepwater Horizon blew on April 20 and started spewing 205 million gallons of black goo.

I'd met Bill in early May when I went to document the oyster reefs before the oil arrived, and he told me something new and surprising at every turn in our conversation: Alabama has the greatest biodiversity of any state east of the Mississippi; the greatest diversity of freshwater fish and mussels; the greatest concentration of turtle species in the world; and so on. Sure, with such awful casinos, condos, and refineries, parts of the Gulf Coast do live up to the Redneck Riviera reputation. But few folks know about the other gulf, the natural miracle with arguably the finest beaches in the nation, the best diving, the best birding, the most productive wetlands, the thriving communities of shrimp and bluefin tuna and sperm whales. If we were to hold up the Gulf of Mexico in one hand and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the other, then agree to protect one and exploit one, the decision would be a no-brainer. Bill had helped me see that.