by Dar Williams
“And that was perfect,” I told him. “Very helpful.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Usually, Myrtle gets all the camera time. I was a little nervous. Did my shirt look right? Oh, gosh, I could have worn a T-shirt from the endangered sea turtle project. It had a Web site.”
“We couldn’t have read it,” I assured him. Was this the same quiet guy who’d called me up a week ago? “What you did was really, really good.”
Joyce said, “She’s right. Really, really good.” She gave him a smile and a thumbs-up.
I pulled out the permission slip for Henry to sign for himself and Myrtle. “Let me know when it’s done,” he said. “My fiancée and I would love to see it.”
Joyce raised an eyebrow at me.
Henry took us farther up the ramp before we left. “In the late fall, there are always cold-shocked sea turtles that end up on the shores of Cape Cod. The Audubon Society hosts the volunteers who bring them to the aquarium for rehabilitation.”
“Volunteers bring them here?” I asked. “How?”
“In their cars. And the sea turtles can’t get too warm too quickly, so people can’t turn the heat on. That’s pretty cold for driving around New England at Thanksgiving.”
“It would be worth it to ride around with a sea turtle,” I said. “Even if it smelled, too.”
“Oh, I believe it does,” Henry agreed, “But I agree, it would be worth it to save one of these …” He pointed to a smaller sea turtle swimming around with the fish. “We’ve had to hold onto this one. He’s not quite rehabilitated yet. But he is the most endangered sea turtle in the world, a Kemp’s ridley.” That straightened my back a bit. What if I was the person who’d picked up a sea turtle on the beach, only to find out that if we didn’t save these animals one by one, there would be, as the definition of extinction said, a ceasing to exist of the turtle I held in my hands?
After loading me up with booklets and papers to read, Henry walked us to the entrance. Joyce and I waved good-bye and went to the car.
“Aquatic locomotion!” Joyce snorted as she turned on the ignition. “I hope you didn’t erase the good stuff he said.”
“No, no. I got it. That was awesome, how much he cares about it.”
“Yes, it was. Amalee, I think you’re onto something.”
I was beginning to think the same thing. Not because I was asking such great questions. It’s just that I was getting such great answers.
So now I had interviews with Betsy and Henry. What next? I decided to find out more about the deformed frogs from Minnesota that had made me want to use the two-headed frog narrator. I called the University of Minnesota and then the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and finally the North American Amphibian Monitoring Program. Everyone said they’d send pictures and some basic information if I sent a formal request. When I told the woman at the monitoring program that I was twelve, she said the kids who had originally found the mutated frogs were around my age. They’d gone off on a field trip and found one mutated frog after another; scientists were still trying to figure out what chemical was responsible.
When I got off the phone, I wrote three quick letters and put them in envelopes before I forgot to do it. I brought the letters out to the mailbox.
Kyle was washing his car. Before I could stop myself, I walked down the street to his driveway. “You need some help?” I asked. “I owe you a favor.”
“Oh, hi, Amalee,” he said, and turned off the hose. “I’m fine. I’m almost done.”
He wasn’t wearing a shirt. And his underwear was coming up from under his saggy pants. It was a good look for him.
“Hey, are you making that film?” he asked.
“Yes, I am,” I said as breezily as I could.
“Cool. Is it almost done?”
My ego shut down like a big machine unplugged from its socket. “No, not yet. I have the outline of it, and I’ve spoken with a marine biologist and a botanist. So it’s coming together.”
“I’d say,” Kyle agreed. “Let me know if you need some help.” He smiled. “You know, heavy lifting or something big dumb guys can do.”
I looked at his dripping car for a few seconds and said, “You’re not dumb,” which, out loud, sounded really dumb.
“Thanks,” he said, laughing. He turned the hose back on and started spraying the bumper. I waved and took off a little too fast.
The phone rang as I came inside, the screen door banging behind me. It was Sarah, inviting me to go swimming. “Take a day off!” she shouted into the phone.
I decided to take the day off since there was no way I could think of to turn it on.
While I waited for her stepmom to pick me up, I looked at my camera bag and decided to bring my camera with me. I put it in a plastic bag and put the whole thing in the canvas bag. There was enough space to fit my swimming things, too.
Sarah and her stepmom, Lydia, showed up twenty minutes later while I was reading the sea turtle articles that Henry had given me. A few things were becoming clear as I read. One was that species don’t need just one or two things to survive. They need the right ecosystem with all the right conditions, the right things to eat, the right things to eat them to control their population, the right climate, enough space to stretch out and go where they need to go without going through places where they’d be killed, and, of course, clean water and clean air. It was like a perfect and complicated fabric, and I couldn’t imagine talking about all of it in a short movie. I could cover only the tiniest thread. But I also wanted to know more. This was the kind of thing I wanted to study.
As we drove to the swimming hole, I saw the ecosystem of our woods, with moss along the trunks of some trees and ancient, knotty bark on others, some with giant floppy leaves and others with long needles spiraling all the way to a distant point. I thought about Betsy telling me there was a mathematical order to how things grow so that even when things looked wild, there was a natural design that made sense to the eye.
Lydia and Sarah wanted to know more about my interviews so far.
Sarah asked, “Do you have anything for the two-headed frog to talk about yet?”
I said not exactly, but that Betsy and Henry had both said things I might use.
“Let me know if I can help,” Lydia joined in. “I have a few skills. I can drive, for instance.” It always took me a few seconds to figure out when Lydia was joking. She had the tightest ponytail I’d ever seen, but she had a very loose, funny personality.
“She’s a great swimmer, too,” Sarah added, laughing.
After about an hour of swimming, which included about fifty cannonball jumps off the high ledge, I climbed onto the shore and stared at the sand, the grass, and the ants. I filmed them in their tiny ecosystem, even though I wasn’t sure I would find a place for them in the movie.
Then I filmed Sarah and Lydia, just because they looked so happy swimming and jumping. Sarah burst above the surface at one point and swam right up to the camera.
“I am Sarah Smythe. Remember who I am when you are a famous filmmaker!” Through the camera lens, I could see the sun glinting off the drops on her eyelashes and making her eyes sparkle. I told her she looked like a movie star, and she groaned and said she would splash me if I didn’t have my camera.
On the way home, we passed Kyle’s house. He was mowing his lawn with the same no-shirt, cutoff shorts, and underwear ensemble.
“Oo-la-la, who’s that?” Sarah asked, pressing her finger up to the window.
“That’s … that’s just my neighbor, Kyle.”
“What a god!” she gushed, hardly listening.
I sank into my seat, and so did my heart. If I was a guy and I had to choose between me and Sarah, I’d choose Sarah. She had made herself unpopular in our class by doing things like putting those gray streaks in her hair, but that was probably the kind of thing a high school guy would love, especially someone like Kyle who liked smart girls. She was smart and brave and beautiful.
“Uh, a little old for you,
” Lydia pointed out quickly. “And if you disagree with me, we’re going to lock you up like Rapunzel in a castle turret and shave your head every week, just in case.”
“I can look,” Sarah protested.
“No, you can’t,” Lydia answered. Then she joked with Sarah by saying something that hit hard for me. “You should be like Amalee. Think about endangered plants and turtles.”
Well, at least they hadn’t guessed how I felt about Kyle. Still, I felt like a big nerd. No, not a big one — a small, invisible one.
When I got home, I looked out the window once and saw Kyle pushing the lawn mower into his garage. Then I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Pale, with a very plain face, eyes too small, ears too long, nose …
“Amalee?” Joyce was calling from the front of the house.
I ran out to find her before she discovered me examining my features.
“How did it all turn out?” she asked excitedly. I frowned. “The film! How did the footage come out?”
“Oh. It came out fine,” I answered.
“Amalee, are you okay? Were you sleeping?”
“No, I was just looking at something,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything. You know that,” Joyce said with the kind of eagerness that made me feel uncomfortable.
How could I begin to ask if I was the dullest-looking girl in the world? “How does a person … get a style?” I asked. What had I just asked? But Joyce launched right in.
“A very interesting question!” she chirped away. “Well, the best way to do it is to just pick up whatever you love. I love pinks, purples, soft fabrics, summer flowers, a little bit of sparkle and shimmer, and, voilà, I think that’s what you’d say is my style, but it’s really just, well, stuff I like.”
“Do I have a style?” I asked quietly.
“Why, yes, you do. It’s classic. You tend to go for simple things in blues and greens, and you choose things that make the most of your lovely features!”
“I don’t have lovely features,” I murmured.
“What? You’re pretty and you have poise. Do you know what that means? It’s one of the best kinds of beauty. It means that you hold your head up straight and look like you have a sense of purpose. It means you have presence,” she gushed. “Oh, honey, are you worried about your style?”
“Oh, no, I … was just wondering.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. But when I was walking with you into the aquarium, and you were wearing that blue tank top that goes with your eyes, and you had that cool camera bag slung over your shoulder — it doesn’t look like a diaper bag — I thought you looked very well put together. And I wanted to ask where you got those cool sandals that go up over your ankles.”
I thought I might begin to cry, even though that was usually Joyce’s department. Luckily she didn’t notice, or she would have wanted me to explore my feelings. But I was feeling better. Seeing Sarah look at Kyle felt like getting a poisonous snakebite, and Joyce had just swept in on a vine to bring me the antidote.
Joyce was already getting herself a glass of water and asking every question she’d thought of in the car. Who would be the fourth and fifth frogs? Had I started writing a script? Was I getting the information I needed? I felt a little panicked. No, I said, I hadn’t come up with people for the fourth and fifth frogs, but I was working on it. The truth was that I didn’t want Joyce to volunteer. One big frog was enough.
I told her I was starting to fill in information for each of the frogs. So far, I had something for every one except for Frog X, the frog who we save from extinction for the sake of preserving all species from our harm.
“Well, Henry’s impassioned speech about all the colors and uniqueness of all species, that’s a defense of Frog X, don’t you think?” Joyce asked.
“I’ll write that down,” I said, pulling my tattered notepad out of the camera bag.
“Is that all you have to keep track of everything?” Joyce asked disapprovingly.
“Uh …”
“When you undertake a creative project, you need SPACE!” Joyce cried. “You’ve got to get big markers in different colors and a big pad of paper to write it on.”
The great thing about the summer is that one minute you’re talking about something, the next, you’ve written a quick note to your dad and you’re off in the car, heading to the art store to get a big pad of paper and lots of different colored markers. And on your way home, when it’s summer, and when the driver of the car is pregnant, you have ice cream for dinner.
It was after seven o’clock when we drove home. I stared out at the trees and fields. The sun was undertaking its creative project by filling up every space with pink and gold light. Suddenly I saw what I thought were four scarecrows, but they were all moving in a slow, almost eerie way. I gasped. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, those are the tai chi people,” Joyce said, as if they were something you’d see at a zoo. “You’ve never seen them before?”
They were slowly raising their elbows with their hands hanging down, and at the same time raising one knee.
“Are they imitating flamingos?”
“No, I believe they’re imitating cranes,” she said. “They also imitate other animals. They’re sort of channeling the energies of different animals.”
“Do you think I could talk to them about … about the film?” I asked shyly. I heard my old friend Hallie saying, with quiet disapproval, Not everything is about your little movie.
“Let’s ask,” Joyce answered, nodding to point out that they were finished for the night. Without waiting for me, she peeled off to the side of the road, arranged her skirt and shirt, and got out of the car.
The tai chi people, as she’d called them, were quietly dabbing themselves off with towels that had been draped over a wooden fence near their cars. A man with curly brown hair and a nice smile looked right up at us as we approached. No turning back.
“Greetings,” he said.
I assumed they didn’t want any sudden jerky movements or loud voices, considering how slowly they’d been doing their dance.
“Hi,” I said quietly. “My name is Amalee Everly, and I’m doing a film about endangered species. I was wondering if I could talk to you about the animals you imitate with your tai chi.”
“Sure,” the man said. “We can talk about that.”
“I would want to film you. Would that be all right?” I added. By now, the three other people, all wearing baggy shirts over leggings, were leaning over in my direction like fascinated giraffes. Did they imitate giraffes, too?
The man turned to the other tai chi people. “It’s fine with me. Is that okay with you?”
The other people nodded and murmured.
“Is this a movie for school?” the man asked.
“No, I just wanted to make a movie. I inherited my grandmother’s coin bottle, and there was enough money to make a movie.”
One of the women spoke. “Lucky you. My grandmother collected string.”
We all laughed — quietly, of course. Kevin said to come by any night, and Joyce made me promise to come back soon. She said she had a feeling in her gut that this would be a good interview. She pointed to her pregnant belly and said, “And that means there’s two of us that think so.”
Dad was home when Joyce drove me up, so both of them helped me come up with lists. Joyce was right about going to the art store — it felt great to spread out. We’d bought a pad of paper that came up to my waist. Since we were still feeling guilty from the lecture Henry had given us about human garbage and the destruction of habitat, not to mention pollution, we got one hundred percent recycled paper and nontoxic markers.
“Beyond that,” Joyce had warned, “I don’t want you worrying about wasting paper. You might need a lot of it to map out the big picture, pun intended!”
Now I was working on “the big picture,” with two pages for each frog.
On the Pollution Warnings page, though, I only had th
e deformed Minnesota frogs.
For Beauty I had Betsy’s plants and the fish Henry had shown me at the aquarium before he’d introduced me to Myrtle and the other sea turtles.
For Usefulness, Including Medicine I put tai chi and Henry’s comments about ideas for technology coming from sea turtles. In the back of my mind, I thought of Mr. Chapelle’s son communicating with dolphins, but that seemed so private. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to use him as an example.
Food Chains and Frog X were both empty. Dad suggested that I also call food chains The Web of Life so I wouldn’t limit my thinking to an actual chain. He was right. An ecosystem was all interconnected, not just an up-and-down ladder.
“I haven’t gotten very far,” I pointed out.
“What kind of people would you like to talk with next?” Dad asked. “If you could talk with anyone?”
“Good question,” I thought out loud. “A person who makes medicine that comes from plants or came from plants originally, a person who studies ‘the Web of Life,’ if there is that kind of person, someone who works at a zoo … that’s all I can think of.”
“That’s a good start,” Dad said as Joyce nodded. “I have an idea. What about the biodiversity wing at the Museum of Natural History? Biodiversity is all about having a wide range of species and what we need to do to preserve diverse ecosystems. An ecosystem is —”
“I know what an ecosystem is,” I said, pretending to be very bored. Then I smiled. “I found out yesterday.”
“That’s a pretty big concept. Did you get it?” Dad asked.
“Got it and loved it,” I answered.
Joyce laughed and then ducked out to make dinner for her husband. “And a second dinner for me,” she added, winking at me.
