The End of the End of the Earth

by Jonathan Franzen

  For dinner I went to the only nearby restaurant with a full bar. Sitting with drinks at another table on the veranda were a voluble Brit named Nigel, two young British women, and, to my surprise, the Adventist birdwatcher. Nigel produces nature films for the Discovery Channel, and it transpired that the Adventist was taking him birding the next day. Nigel invited me to join them, but he and I didn’t have the same target species, and I was feeling sore with the Adventist for not having returned Lorraine’s messages and for not being at home observing his religion. I sat down at a different table and listened to Nigel gratingly regale the girls with stories of the fabulous Lesser Antillean birds he’d seen. The Adventist came over and apologized to me, explaining that he’d thought I was coming a week later. I told him not to worry about it.

  When I got back to A Peace of Paradise, Lorraine reported that the Adventist had just called her. “The first thing he said,” she said, “was ‘It’s not my fault.’ You get the dates in a text message and you write them down—how is that not his fault?”

  I voiced my suspicion that the Adventist had found it more advantageous to go out with a Discovery Channel filmmaker.

  “Hm, I hadn’t thought of that,” Lorraine said.

  I assured her that I was very happy with Melvin.

  The next morning, back at the Descartiers trailhead, we ran into Nigel and the Adventist and agreed to walk with them. The Adventist seemed like a nice enough man, and he certainly knew his birds; and Nigel, by burdening himself with a telescope and tripod on the trail, was showing himself to be not a dilettante or opportunistic birder but the real, avid, smitten thing. I mentioned to Melvin the poor impression that Nigel had made on me the night before, when he was drinking and impressing girls. Melvin nodded sympathetically: “He was excited.” Using Nigel’s scope, we had some fabulous looks at perching Saint Lucia Parrots, which have all the best parrot attributes: intense sociability, a rainbow of colors, gorgeous patterning on their heads and shoulders, and faces expressive of intelligence. Nigel’s pleasure in studying them completed his redemption in my opinion.

  It was starting to rain rather hard, though, and the Adventist was no more able than Melvin to conjure up birds that didn’t feel like showing themselves. Still missing the endemic Saint Lucia Oriole and Saint Lucia Black Finch, I took Melvin back down to the drier coast. There, at the thrasher spot, by squeaking repeatedly, Melvin managed to entice one female black finch into view. Hearing Nigel and the Adventist crackling around in the brush above us, we scrambled up a muddy slope and saw Nigel up to his armpits in foliage, in country that I’d repeatedly been warned was infested with venomous fer-de-lances. He looked over his shoulder and gave me an insane smile, the smile of a kindred spirit, and the Adventist reported that they’d so far had only one bad glimpse of the White-breasted Thrasher. I decided not to mention that Melvin and I, the day before, had seen two of them extremely well here in less than half a minute.

  I tried for the oriole again that afternoon, on the Descartiers trail, but the weather was foggy and rainy. By nightfall, I was very tired of failing to find the oriole, tired also of getting up every morning at 5:00 a.m., but I dutifully made plans to set out in the dark and give myself one more chance. When morning came, though, I didn’t feel like getting out of bed. The thing about games is that you don’t want to look too closely at why you’re playing them. A great yawning emptiness underlies them, a close relative of the nothingness that lies beneath the surface of our busy lives. I’d already missed two endemics in Jamaica: what did it matter if I missed a Saint Lucian endemic, too? What did it matter, really, if I saw any birds at all?

  I was rewarded for sleeping late by a tremendous rain shower from eight to nine o’clock—I couldn’t have seen the oriole anyway, and I was happy to have a chance to catch up on my email. But then, as I worked on my email, the sun came out. Suddenly mindful of the birds I could see in the several hours before I had to be at the airport, I packed my bag in a rush and drove back to the dry-forest places that Melvin had shown me. The birds had been subdued by the rain and were only now becoming active. And how happy I was to see them! I found a new bird for my life list—the Caribbean Elaenia, supposedly “common” on Saint Lucia but hitherto unseen by me—but I was no less happy to see the now-familiar flycatchers and bullfinches. I’d met them only two days ago, and they already felt like old friends.

  Farther down the coast, near the lighthouse at Vieux Fort, I watched a pair of frigatebirds fighting or courting aerially, directly over my head. I saw blue sky, blue ocean, green woods. A tropicbird sailing in leisurely loops above the water. Hummingbirds darting everywhere. I needed to head to the airport very soon, but I continued to walk the road slowly, still hoping for the Saint Lucia Oriole, still missing it.

  THE REGULARS

  (on the photographs of Sarah Stolfa)

  Georgia Russell by Sarah Stolfa

  (Excerpted from The Regulars; copyright © 2009 by Sarah Stolfa. Used by permission of Artisan, a division of Workman Publishing Co., Inc., New York. All rights reserved.)

  I didn’t like these pictures at first sight. They reminded me of several personal defeats that I prefer not to dwell on, particularly my failure to survive in Philadelphia. I spent the worst year of my life in Philadelphia, and that’s not said in hindsight: I was aware all along that I was having the worst year of my life. Philadelphia makes short work of a certain kind of ego; it refuses to flatter our sense of importance. It differs in this regard from the other great working-people’s cities of the Northeast Corridor, Boston and Baltimore, whose powerful sense of identity is proudly performed by each succeeding generation. More TV shows are shot in one year in Baltimore and more movies in Boston than are shot in a decade in Philadelphia. Except for the mournful opening montage of empty streets, accompanied by a Springsteen dirge, there was nothing especially Philadelphian about Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia. Philly is all about absence, about losses, about the spaces in between. As an idea, it never achieved full reification. Even in the slummiest recesses of Brooklyn you can see the distant skyline of Manhattan and feel protected by it—protected from engulfment by your emotions, protected by the importance of New York. A glimpse of the Center City skyline from Kensington or Point Breeze, however, is just another reminder that there is nowhere better to go; it puts you in mind of underlit commuter-rail platforms, excess office space, the cavernous chill of City Hall, and our nation’s cracked, silent Bell.

  The city has done a little better in recent years. In the mid-nineties, though, to set foot outside your Philadelphian dwelling was to be assaulted by loneliness and by the kind of beauty that is loneliness’s close cousin. An aesthetic experience unpolluted by robust identity. A beauty so pure it hurt. There was really almost nothing ugly anywhere in the Philly I knew. All of it—the winter-bitten grassy expanses of Logan Circle, the unreclaimed brownfields, the factories waiting their turn to be demolished, the plastic gas-station signage on Washington Street, the ghost of North Station, the seedy paraphernalia purveyors of South Street, the refineries and sewage-treatment facilities whose smell was the first thing to welcome visitors arriving from the city’s conveniently but desolately situated airport—existed in splendid isolation, at the end of a century of depopulation and industrial decline, and insisted on being seen in its particularity. Even the parts of the city of which its tourist office was proudest, the Art Museum, Rittenhouse Square, were beset by the big sky and poor weather, by the summer haze and the notably biting winter winds, and lay close to the abysmal Delaware, and were themselves therefore lonely.

  Plenty of people do live in Philadelphia, of course. And yet the population density is low by urban standards. When you see a person in New York, what you see is a New Yorker, one of many many. New Yorkers all share at least one story, which is that they are in New York. When you see a person in Philadelphia, you see an individual. You see a face unsurrounded by enough similar faces to be generalized about. You don’t know the face’s story but you kn
ow there’s got to be a story there, and you have plenty of time to etch the face into your memory while you wait for a SEPTA bus to arrive or for the next face to loom up on the underpopulated streets of Mount Airy. Philadelphia is a city suited to the purest and most fundamental form of short story, the form as practiced by Chekhov and Trevor and Welty—writers whose reservoirs of empathy and curiosity are equal to the endless particularity of regular people’s lives. Walking Philly’s streets, I used to be consciously oppressed by the greatness and virtue of those writers, and to wish I had the heart to imagine my way into the regular human stories whose tantalizing exteriors I could see everywhere around me. I felt defeated by the insufficiency of my own courage or curiosity or brotherly love.

  Looking at Sarah Stolfa’s forty photographs of regular Philadelphians, I experienced this personal defeat afresh. There are no unsightly faces among Stolfa’s Regulars. In fact, there are no faces that aren’t extremely beautiful. Stolfa’s images have the quality, shared by the city in which they were taken, of rendering the very concept of unsightliness nonsensical. Or, to put it more accurately, of reminding us of how instrumentally constituted our everyday notions of beauty really are. Philadelphia is ugly only to the extent that it fails to conform to what its beholder wants or approves of. This is why a beautiful Four Seasons resort erected on a formerly wildlife-friendly beach is ugly to me, the exurban sprawl of beautiful dream houses is ugly to me, and beautiful televised faces espousing abhorrent political views are ugly to me. And it is why, conversely, no animal or plant in nature is capable of ugliness unless we disapprove of it. The magic of good portraiture, such as Stolfa’s, is to frame and de-reference human subjects in such a way as to evade our everyday aesthetic judgments and restore the subjects to a natural world in which everything is interesting, everything incites sympathy and wonder, everything is worth a careful second look. She’s a classical short-storyist of the camera.

  She is also very rock-and-roll. Rock at its best derives authenticity from immersion in the regular. The fact that no art form is more anxious and insecure about authenticity than rock may at first seem paradoxical, considering that no art form is more readily available to regular people. (All you need to make rock is a voice and/or the ability to play simple chords, the latter requiring little more than two functional hands, a double-digit IQ, and a few months’ practice.) The problem is that as soon as a band becomes any good, its success and its expertise begin to feel like betrayals of the very thing that makes rock so great in the first place, its democratic availability to all. Much of mainstream music culture is dedicated to creating elaborate commercial lies to obfuscate the problem. (My favorite lyric along these lines sounds like it was written by Jennifer Lopez’s publicist and is almost poignant in the nakedness of its image-management intentions: “Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got / I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block.”) A more appealing approach to the problem is the indie approach, which consists, essentially, of a band’s resolutely continuing to be regular people making regular music. The Delta 72, the band that Stolfa played in while she worked her day job at the bar where these pictures were taken, released its first single with Dischord Records and Kill Rock Stars, the latter a label that enjoys ringing droll polemical changes on its name (Stars Kill Rock, Rock Stars Kill). In a thoroughly indie move, the Delta 72 relocated from Washington, D.C., a city that enjoyed at least a little notoriety as a birthplace of hardcore punk, to the deeply in-between and overlookable and therefore unimpeachably authentic city of Philadelphia. The indie aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, is all over The Regulars: unnatural lighting, working-class stimulants, affordable clothes, tedious jobs, low-maintenance personal grooming, cash in small denominations, proximity to depression and alcoholism and other forms of quiet desperation, affinity for dive bars and other smoky, beat-up places; and yet, withal, not a denial of rock’s glamour but rather a drastically democratic expansion of the field in which glamour might occur. Each subject in The Regulars gets to be the compelling star of his or her own frame, beautifully lit, with an almost studio-like blackness in the background and little nests of idiosyncracy in the foreground on the bartop.

  Stolfa’s inclusion of this bartop and its props, which lend the images both continuity and individuality, is cunning or felicitous. Here are a few statistics about what appears in her book’s forty photographs:

  Men: 27

  Women: 13

  Beer: 34

  With whiskey: 4

  With whiskey and a glass of water: 1

  Wine: 2

  Highball: 2

  No drink: 2

  Hat: 7

  Headband: 1

  Leafy hair ornament: 1

  Clothing with text (including badges and buttons): 8

  Tattoos: 4

  Fairly unambiguous wedding band: 4

  Clear or probable absence of wedding band: 19

  Cash: 18

  Purse: 5

  Printed matter: 8

  Stereo earphones: 1

  Cell phone: 2

  Cigarettes and/or lighter and/or active-looking ashtray: 25

  Food: 1

  To me the number that stands out here is the cigarette number, and it brings me to a third personal defeat: my inability to be the (indie? authentic?) sort of person who is comfortable in bars. The smoke problem has always been a big part of this, despite my own earlier twenty years of smoking, but even in smoke-free establishments I become miserable with self-consciousness and thrift and shame and shyness and etiquette anxiety, unless I’m part of a group. The result is that I can’t look at The Regulars without envy and longing—a wish to be one of the Regulars myself. The book is personal in that way. Implicit in its title is the relation to the photographer in which each subject stands. The twenty-five of them who are looking straight into the lens aren’t just looking at some shutterbug, they’re looking at their regular bartender, Sarah Stolfa. They may be lonely, but I’m the one who feels it.

  INVISIBLE LOSSES

  Imagine a slender mouse-gray bird, no bigger than a starling, that spends most of its life on open ocean. In cold water and all weather, the Ashy Storm Petrel—a warm-blooded animal that weighs less than an ounce and a half—forages among the waves for tiny fish and ocean invertebrates. Fluttering with dangled legs, its toes skimming the surface, it gives the impression of walking on water, like the biblical Peter.

  Although an even smaller cousin species, Wilson’s Storm Petrel, is one of the world’s most abundant and widespread birds, Ashies are rare and restricted to California waters. They have a distinctive strong musky odor; you can smell them in the fog. They’re most at home on the water, but, like all birds, they need to be on land to lay eggs and raise their young. For this, they prefer undisturbed islands. To escape the attention of predators, they nest underground, in rock crevices or burrows, and come and go only at night.

  In the Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, thirty miles west of San Francisco’s Golden Gate, a local artists’ collective has built a kind of sloppy igloo out of chunks of concrete from the ruins of old buildings on the main island. A small door in the sculpture allows access to a crawl space lined with plexiglass. If you go in there on a summer night and shine a red light (less disturbing to birds than white light), you might see an Ashy Storm Petrel sitting patiently on an egg at the bottom of its crevice, looking even smaller and frailer than it would on the water. You might hear the nocturnal song of one of its hidden neighbors, a soft and tuneful purr that emerges from the rocks like a voice from another world: the world of seabirds, which encompasses two-thirds of our planet but is mostly invisible to us. Until recently, invisibility was an advantage for seabirds, a cloak of protection. But now, as they disappear from the oceans, they need people to protect them; and it’s difficult to care about animals you can’t see.

  * * *

  The Farallons today are a small portal to the past, when seabirds were abundant everywhere. More than half a million birds were nesting in t
he reserve when I visited the main island in June. On steep slopes and sparsely vegetated level ground, surrounded by deep-blue water roiling with seals and sea lions, were puffins and guillemots and cormorants, tiny plump Cassin’s Auklets, weirdly horned Rhinoceros Auklets, and, in my opinion, way too many Western Gulls. The gull chicks were hatching, and it was impossible to walk anywhere without enraging their parents, which screamed at ear-hurting volumes and jumped into the air to strafe intruders with evil-smelling excrement.

  The gulls were a gauntlet worth running to reach the island’s colonies of Common Murre. One morning, Pete Warzybok, a biologist with Point Blue, the conservation group that helps the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service monitor wildlife in the Farallons, led me up to a plywood blind overlooking a murre metropolis. Like a blanket of coarsely ground pepper, twenty thousand black-and-white birds covered a sloping spit of rock that bottomed out in surf-splashed cliffs. The murres were standing shoulder to shoulder, pointy-billed, penguin-like, and incubating an egg or guarding a tiny chick on territories as small as a few square inches. The colony had an air of quiet industry. There were occasional outbursts of gentle clucking, and the menacing gulls kept sailing over, scanning for breakfast opportunities, and sometimes a murre landing awkwardly or scrambling to take flight would scuffle with a neighbor. But the disputes ended as suddenly as they started, the birds resuming their grooming as if nothing had happened.

  “Murres do what murres do,” Warzybok remarked. “They aren’t the brightest birds.”

  What murres do is exercise devotion. Although divorce is not unheard-of, they form strong pair-bonds and may live for thirty-five years, returning every year to the same tiny territory and raising one chick. Parents share incubation duties equally, one of them remaining in the colony while the other ranges over the ocean and dives underwater for anchovies, juvenile rockfish, or whatever else is available. When a bird returns from a long foraging trip, the parent that has stayed behind—increasingly hungry and streaked with guano—is still reluctant to leave the egg. In the literature of murres, there’s an anecdote of a mother whose egg rolled downhill as soon as she laid it. A gull came by and swallowed it, stood for a moment with an enormous lump in its throat, and then regurgitated the egg, which rolled farther downslope and hit a standing murre, which promptly climbed onto it and began to incubate it. “If they don’t have an egg,” Warzybok said, “they’ll incubate a stone or a piece of vegetation. They’ll lay a fish on an unhatched egg, trying to feed it. And they won’t give up. They’ll sit on a dead egg for seventy-five or eighty days, the two birds trading incubation shifts.”