Wild Things, Wild Places

by Jane Alexander

  How this came about is a mystery. Was it one person, a leader in the community long ago, who set the tone, and is this a trait that passes from generation to generation culturally or cellularly? It would be hard to know.

  I watched Ethel as she negotiated her computer as fast as a techie at the Apple store, although she is self-taught—there is no Genius Bar in Francois. She checked her Facebook page and Skyped with her daughter and grandchild in Corner Brook, ordered a mop online, and downloaded some books onto her Kindle. She rose at eight or later the mornings I was there because the sun didn’t slide down the granite wall until then. In winter there may be only a few daylight hours, and bed is even cozier than usual. They have another home in the next fjord, as many of the outporters do, a place to get away for the weekends where they collect wild mussels in the waters and steam lobster on seaweed in fire pits. They have sing-alongs on the beach during the long summer nights and dances in the community hall during the short winter evenings. All the women knit and quilt.

  Ethel’s nephew Darren took me out on his boat to see the Newfoundland coastline farther east. Cliffs towered above as a Bald Eagle eyed us from a windswept spruce snag. I was startled to hear the sweet song of a Warbling Vireo from a clump of green in the rugged landscape, perhaps blown off course a hundred miles east, or dispersing due to warmer climate. If he finds a mate with his warble maybe he’ll colonize the species for Newfoundland. We motored down a stunning fjord with a sheer rock wall rising from the shoreline to the east. Rock climbers from Britain to California find their way here; you can’t keep a subculture down. But there is no infrastructure for tourists, only a home or two where one can stay the night as I did at Ethel and John’s—that is, if you are lucky enough to be given the phone number. A few climbers, backpackers, and hunters make it here, but not birders, although this is one of the rare spots where you can see (and hunt) both Willow and Rock Ptarmigan.

  Darren showed me a spit with an old try pot on it where whalers 150 years ago rendered oil from blubber. Whaling was once the fifth-largest industry in the world and the United States ruled the seas, with more than six hundred ships carrying smarter harpoons and more precise charts than others. But with the discovery of petroleum, the overfishing of whales, and the increased costs of going to sea, investors turned inland. The entire industry collapsed in a matter of decades. Whales got a partial reprieve (some are still killed for meat), although they have never regained the numbers they had before the eighteenth century. The parallels today are striking. Drilling for oil and gas is hurting environments on both land and sea. The new energies from solar, wind, and wave power are being developed at a rapid pace and could replace fossil fuels in a matter of decades, reducing carbon in the atmosphere and giving nature a reprieve.

  An abandoned village stood on the prettiest slope of grassland around, the burnished reds of three dilapidated houses glowing in the late light of day. It was one of the outports that had been resettled, the villagers having been paid by the government to leave decades before. Resettlement was a controversial program that moved more than thirty thousand people from three hundred remote coastal communities between 1954 and 1975. The government of Newfoundland wanted to consolidate services such as education and health care in “growth centers” and encouraged families to move by paying them more than their annual income, which by the 1970s was about $600. All but about seven of the outports on the south coast of Newfoundland were resettled, but Francois, Grey River, Rose Blanche, Grand Bruit, and a few others could not muster the requisite number of people in favor of moving, so they held on. It is only a matter of time before they must capitulate and move as well; with no employment, limited services, and no youth to carry on, the outports are doomed. This is something Ethel and John understand well. They hope to live out their lives in the community they love and in the landscape of their hearts, and that will be it.

  Darren and I headed back toward Francois, passing rock outcroppings with seabirds preening on them, settling down for the evening: Murres, Guillemots, Kittiwakes—birds that spend most of their lives at sea, braving the vicissitudes of the wild North Atlantic and hanging on because it is still wild, the province of the invincible. There was a time when the hardiest of human beings braved it in the same way, fishermen like John going out at dawn in their precarious open boats, throwing out lines for the fish they know better than anyone on earth. John still loves these mornings alone, one man in the wilderness of the vast ocean.

  Darren gunned the gas throttle of the motorboat, and a cold wake of spray brushed my arm as we raced toward Francois. He tied up at the dock and I scurried up the hill to my last meal with my new friends. As I sat down at the kitchen table, John told me that Grand Bruit, seventy miles to the west, had recently decided on resettlement after many years of division among its thirty citizens. The government offered them the richest deal yet: a single person received $80,000 for his home, a couple $90,000, and a family with children got a whopping $100,000 to relocate. The final ferry was picking up the last of the people the next day, June 30, 2010. He bowed his head, murmuring thanks to God, then winked at me conspiratorially as Ethel placed our favorite dish, baked Halibut, on the table.

  I mourned the loss of these outports on the ferry ride back to Burgeo—the exquisite beauty of the landscape and endless sea, the comfort and grace of living in such tight-knit communities, and the courageousness of the people. This way of life was gone forever, as extinct as the Great Auk, which was last seen in 1844 in these same waters, clubbed to death by sailors. As the ferry pulled into Burgeo, I saw a small group of people standing together on the wharf near a pile of luggage and furniture. Some of them were crying, their arms around each other. “The folks from Grand Bruit,” said a fellow passenger.

  15

  Amazonia

  From my diary:

  October 2, 2001

  A huge moon glowed off the plane’s wing as below a cloud cover put the jungle to bed. I am struck just how far this is from the tumult of the last three weeks. The physical distance catches up to us by satellite—CNN is here in my Tropical Hotel room. But mentally the Amazon is another heaven and earth away. I caught an hour and a half of sleep and then…took a riverboat tour down the Rio Negro’s tannin filled waters to the meeting of the muddy Amazon, a striking contrast…We stopped twice along the river, the people’s road. Although the same tourist items are sold everywhere they are still using too many feathers (Scarlet and Hyacinth Macaw) and snakeskins and heads.

  A boy of 10 held a small sloth, while squirrel monkeys scampered about, one baby the beloved pet of a three-year-old fellow. Three sc. Macaws, 1 hyacinth, 2 caiman, a boa, an anaconda were held for photo ops. I am always torn about this—yes, it is better for the animals to be alive for tourists but will they simply get more and more for photo ops?…

  One old man in a tourist tent held my hand and said he held Americanos in “regardo”—they know the whole story—they all have satellite antennas on their shacks, all 10 of the river huts.

  It had been twenty-three days since the planes crashed into the Twin Towers, killing thousands. The old man gently held on to my hand, his eyes full. It was so startling to me that in this small Amazon village the news was as present as in New York and that this wizened old man let me know he cared, that my eyes too filled with tears. I was profoundly grateful for his sympathy.

  This world is smaller and coming together through technology and an understanding that we all affect each other. We affect each other emotionally because human beings are deeply the same. We seek food, shelter, and community—and we play. Everywhere children are playing, even when the situation is desperately poor or war-torn. Pull out a game, a ball, or a book and they join in. In this little village on the banks of the greatest river in the world the children smiled and laughter spilled out when the baby monkey jumped from one tousled head to another. The laughter of children is a balm like no other.

  The great Amazon forests affect the weather of the entire ea
rth. When huge swaths are cut, less moisture is held, more carbon is released, and weather patterns change. The biologist Tom Lovejoy was concerned with forest fragmentation back in the 1970s. The Brazilian government was subsidizing the settlement of ranchers and agriculture north of Manaus but ruled that 50 percent of the land had to be kept wild. Tom convinced them to let scientists decide which tracts to cut and which to leave standing. He and his staff and countless scientists have been monitoring the biodiversity of the tracts ever since, making it one of the longest-running studies of its kind.

  Tom invited me to come to Camp 41, where scientists stayed and visitors witnessed their work in the forest. He was a conservation biologist at the Smithsonian at the time.

  Tom played a pivotal role in my early days in Washington, D.C., as NEA chairman. I met him in 1993 at a dinner party given in my honor to introduce me to the movers and shakers of the town. I sat on a silly stool beside a low coffee table while four media and political giants peppered me with questions. “How do you define art?” began David Gergen. I burbled a boring and theoretical response that initiated more pummeling from the group before they rose as one and left me—a pallid, deflated version of myself, reduced to jelly on the floor. In a corner a few feet away sat a fine-looking bow-tied man with an amused smile, taking it all in. He rose and whispered in my ear, “Welcome to Washington. Let me take you to lunch next week.”

  I was grateful to Tom for showing me the ropes and becoming my friend. He was immensely successful in negotiating the political scene for science and managed to be a top biologist and ecologist at the same time. Tom coined the phrase “biological diversity,” or “biodiversity,” back in 1980. He knew that all living things depended on other living things for their existence. The tracts, or reserves, around Camp 41 were revealing just how impacted flora and fauna were by fragmentation of the landscape.

  Camp 41 was beautiful, deep in the forest. It was quiet, about eighty-five degrees, and there were no mosquitoes. I walked down to a stream that had been dammed with a few rocks to create a small pool. There I stripped and lay on my back in the shallow water, looking above at the canopy in the late afternoon sunlight. A five-inch Blue Morpho Butterfly wafted above me like something out of Fantasia, the sky blue of its wings glowing against the backdrop of green. Frogs and insects kept up a continual chatter while birds flitted by on their way home. I was in heaven.

  A dozen hammocks were strung in a line over concrete under the roof of a wooden porch. I put my backpack on one and joined Tom and a handful of other scientists for drinks in a circle of chairs. And then dinner—a most memorable dinner cooked by a local couple over a wood fire. The fish, called Tambaqui, is the most delicious fish I have ever tasted. It is a large Amazonian river fish that eats palm nuts when the river rises and floods the trees. It has molars for teeth, so it can chomp on the nuts. It was slowly grilled about three feet from the wood fire, infusing its soft flesh with palm oil.

  The quintessential ecologist Tom Lovejoy, in the Amazon in 1989 Credit 6

  As we rolled into our hammocks Tom said we would be awakened predawn by the call of a Motmot, as reliable as any alarm clock. The entire night was alive with an infinite variety of insect, frog, and monkey music. First light barely made its dim way through the trees when the Motmot softly whooped its wake-up call in stanzas of two, just as Tom had said it would.

  We spent the day walking the forest paths learning about the intricate systems of ant species from one biologist and the interplay of Red Howler Monkeys from another. I failed to see the deadliest viper of the Amazon when a young Bushmaster crossed the path in front of me, its dark back blending perfectly into the leaf litter. Tom behind me almost put his boot on top of it. The snake was more alarmed than we were; it took immediate refuge at the base of a tree, coiled to strike should we come any closer.

  More than thirty years of studying the isolated reserves of forest within the scrubland of ranching and agriculture has proved that the species count eventually drops dramatically—that fragmented parcels cannot continue to sustain the biodiversity found within large pristine areas. Elizabeth Kolbert writes about ants and the antbirds that depend on them for sustenance in her seminal work The Sixth Extinction. She too visited Lovejoy’s reserves and followed the expert Mario Cohn-Haft as they looked for marching ants. Antbirds were also looking. When no ants were found Cohn-Haft thought the ants must be in the stage where they stay in one spot for weeks to raise young. In fragmented areas there are simply not enough colonies of ants to sustain the antbirds, so the birds soon disappear.

  “When you find one thing that depends on something else that, in turn, depends on something else, the whole series of interactions depends on constancy,” said Cohn-Haft. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” wrote W. B. Yeats.

  In an effort to stem the anarchy Tom Lovejoy invited politicians, celebrities, journalists, and anyone else who might be influential to come and visit Camp 41 to experience the Amazon rainforest for themselves. Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, a staunch supporter of the NEA in its struggles with his fellow Republicans, came, as did Tom Cruise and dozens of others. Tom Lovejoy has been working tirelessly to effect change at the top, in the halls of Congress, foundations, and international agencies. Without legislation to protect ecosystems they will all fall apart in a “Tsunami of Extinction,” as he wrote in Scientific American in 2012.

  —

  The water comes alive at night in the Amazon. In the bend of hundreds of tributaries of the great Rio Negro, animals collect to feed in the dark. Our canoe glided into deep pools through air thick with insects. The fifteen-horsepower motor purred to a stop and we turned on our flashlights. There before us as far as darkness allowed were the glowing red eyes of hundreds of caimans waiting for a meal, snouts nestled silently below the surface. They had no interest in us; they waited for the Pacu, or for one of the many species of piranha, or for the juveniles of the Pirarucu, the largest freshwater fish in the world, which at maturity weighs up to 440 pounds and reaches 15 feet long.

  Their eyes reflected the black water like red marbles on a glass tabletop. These were the Spectacled Caiman, a smaller relative of the American Alligator, plentiful throughout Central and South America, its skin being unsuitable for leather products. The larger, aggressive Black Caiman, however, is hunted for its highly prized skin, despite being an endangered species.

  The canoe sliced the water as we returned to our floating lodge displacing fish right and left, many flying through the air into the boat, slapping us in the face on the way. Ah, breakfast! I longed again for the taste of these Amazon fish, the Tambaqui and others that feed on fruit and nuts falling into the water from branches above. They hang out below a nut tree, mouths agape above the waterline, waiting for the seed to drop. The Amazon Basin has more than a third of all the freshwater species of fish in the world, more than three thousand and still counting.

  Tom and I had left his Camp 41 and were staying with colleagues from WCS at the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in the heart of the flooded forest of Amazonia in northwestern Brazil.

  As a member of the Conservation Committee of WCS I had come to observe the work of the Brazilian biologist José Márcio Ayres, who was dedicated to the preservation of wildlife in this part of the Amazon. Every year in the rainy season between November and June the forest, or várzea, floods as high as thirty feet. The fish move up tributaries to spawn, their predators following, while mammals scramble to higher ground and treetops. Most of these mammals are well adapted to arboreal living, squirrels, howler monkeys, and sloths among them.

  The sloth, the slowest of all mammals, traveling on average six feet per minute, spends its life hanging from branches, sleeping, eating, and even mating upside down. It comes down from its tree only to urinate and defecate once a week, always in the same spot. We watched patiently as one took fifteen minutes to make the trip down, do its business, and make the equally sluggish climb
back up. With only leaves for its food, the sloth has limited energy and muscle mass.

  The Boto, or Pink Dolphin, patrols the Amazon waterways with grace and speed, looking like a giant blob of bubblegum when it surfaces. The first time I saw one I was on a ship from Rio to Manaus as one of a troupe of actors and singers from the United States and Canada who performed for the three hundred people on the cruise. Patricia Neal, Julie Wilson, Brian Bedford, and a young Anna Bergman were among those who sang or spoke or acted as we steamed upriver; they became friends for life. The two-week venture put in at the old colonial coastal cities of Recife, Salvador, and Fortaleza before entering the huge delta of the Amazon and heading into the heart of Brazil, and eventually Manaus, where we performed in the legendary Opera House built by rubber barons in the late 1800s.

  I customarily rose at dawn intent on seeing some birds despite the fact that the shoreline was sometimes thirty miles away. One morning I noticed that our ship was barely moving and saw our Greek captain outside the pilothouse scanning the water. I asked him what he was doing. The Amazon was a tricky river, he said, full of shifting shoals and flotsam. He was looking for the Pink Dolphin, which always swam in the deep water. Within minutes we saw the magnificent Boto as it lifted like the arc of a rainbow out of the muddy depths, leading the way to safe passage. They are listed as a vulnerable species today because of pollution, increased boat traffic, and hunting. Bolivia has given them protected status as a national treasure and perhaps Brazil will do the same.

  The animal Márcio Ayres chose to study as a young man was the rare and eerie-looking Bald, or White, Uakari. This primate, which lives only in the Mamirauá reserve area, has been called “man of the forest” by local tribes because of its resemblance to human beings. It has long shaggy pale beige fur and a bare red or pink face that gives it a distinctly human look, an odd-looking man with a bad sunburn. Sometimes as many as a hundred band together, but we saw only a few peeking at us from thick leaves high above, before they effortlessly leapt sixty feet to the next tree.