Bats … Conversations in a time of Plague… What’s Love Got to do with it?

The lie lulls or dreams, like the illusion. The truth is the only power, cheerful, inexhaustible. If we were able to live only of, and for truth: young and immortal energy in us. The man of truth does not age. A little more effort and he will not die.

— Albert Camus

We were up high in a cave, near the border of Laos. The one Vietnamese with us, a scientist, Viet, wondered what kind of crazy mad dogs and Englishmen we were.

He and I were the same age, 36, and most of the team members were in early 20’s, and one guy from Canada was 20.

Viet and I discussed his work on rural farming and the system of getting rice farmers to breed fish in the paddies, and to use fish to eat/take to market and utilizing fish poop to fertilize. Snails breed and live in abundance, too, for eating/market purposes. The water is actually cleaner this way for boiling consumption. Simple design, but lots of resistance and some hurdles to traverse. Even small twolight bulb output, low-flow power generators dropped in the water that slurries off through gravity: that’s another one of Viet’s passions.

Viet is one of hundreds of people I have come to love for their minds, souls and life’s passageways out of struggle and poverty (the war against Vietnam by France and USA, et al, for Viet and his family, tragedy piled onto tragedy), to a sense of purpose, a bit of calm. That calm is gained with intellectual fellowship.

We drank green tea and talked a lot.

I wonder about him, now, after 28 years have passed. His family, job, the state of Vietnam, the rapaciousness of capitalism conquering markets, tying up land, building exclusive resorts, and his own health with the additional pollutants in air, water, soil. The climate crisis. All of that, and then, of course, how’s he doing under this new plague, the other one, this bat plague and the attendant plague of various forms of fascism and mental and physical lockdown?

I wonder as life and death moves like a circle of locusts through the land, inside cities, in rural places, within families. I can’t shake Ouroboros from my mind. Snake shaped as an eternal biological cycle of renewal or a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The real snake I share the house with, ball python, leaves old skin sloughed off monthly, a transmigration of soul, his previous soul left for me to remark. Remade, in a sense, and the molt is the leftover negative of his (we call him Copernicus) life, monthly.

If only humans understood this transmigration. What a species we might become.

How can I touch the Ouroboros without thinking of a kind family man, Viet, who was not thrilled with my proclivity for finding real snakes in the hills and jungle. I did talk about the silver Ouroboros around my neck, the snake biting its own tail. I attempted to let him know that while it is a fertility symbol in some religions, with the tail of the snake a phallus and the mouth womb, that for me I hold it as circle of universal light, knowledge and rebirth, second birth, and death and struggle. Mine.

Circle, an encircling of my own beginning-middle-endbeginning.

I wonder about the symbol now, Ouroboros, in this propaganda operation lifting capitalists and technocrats above everyone… how out of synch are most scientists I know about, communicate with and read… being out of balance inside cages lined with hubris, well, that is the plague upon all of us. The battiness of our time. Shut- down conversations. A place now where love is not a driver for our relations and relationships.

This is a plague of gigantic proportions, as scientists as mad in the head as Mengele dance with the devil, fill-in for Mother Nature, tinker with genes, extend and retract lifespans at the push of a gene editor, with contagions hacked and transmissibility amped up.

The reverberation echoes deep inside me since my life has been one of discovery and open dialogue, critical and systems thinking, research and discourse, mutual aid and writing.

So many days the past two years for me have displayed spiritual near dead-ends, where meaning is stripped like that molting snake’s skin from my own grounding, or lack of grounding. Conversations are clipped, and deep dives into logic and ethos, they are blips, like sand between dry fingers.

The work in Vietnam 28 years ago was all about embracing constructs way outside my own, and the discussions and deep excavation of those around me and myself were both beautiful and challenging, sometimes rough.

In Vietnam, on this biological survey, I was the lone American at 36, the same age as my old man who was shot (wounded badly) in Vietnam, farther south of where we were setting up a dark bird net to carry out a haphazard bat collecting sweep.

The dragon shaped smoke billowing in the village tethered me to other people, and with the British graduate students yammering about this or that Vietnamese fag (cigarette) and beer, I demanded a shift out of their meanderings. I wanted to leap into the darkness and float to the small earthen floor homes and sit and drink tea, gulp homemade whisky and watch the plastic figures on their tiny TVs while attempting to talk about their world, and mine.

So I wrote in my journal.

The news, music and dramas were coming in from China broadcasters. It was surreal but familiar, rural, a place I had already been all my life.

Zither music ricocheted off near yelping dogs. The water buffalo pulled up air and mud with the sound of their reverse slurps conjoined like a dozen bowling balls smashing into a bog.

Time to think, time to contemplate. Again, the beauty is not always in the moment, but from a memory of a day before, maybe. The climb up was muddy, and everyone was wet. This was not a well-outfitted science team. Brits don’t always think of all the things to make it—roughing it—a little more bearable.

We dug our own latrine at base camp, cooked food on open fires, and there was one generator, and that was not for nighttime lighting. I crossed rivers (during the rainy season, so it was more like a wrestling match fully head in with leech-loving rapids) to resupply. The Russian motocross bikes we had bogged down and failed most of the time.

Now, the memories are raw, in the slipstream of poetic embrace, with some journalistic objectivity mixed in. At times, in the constant rain, isolated, in that jungle and in the primary forest, loneliness did mess with the mind.

Yet, there were always the Vietnamese and ethnic minority families we came across. And the deep recesses of limestone. Caves. The snakes, too, in trees, vipers and unmatched beautiful thin ones, as thin as flute reeds.

Caves of the mind and spirit, that’s an easy leap. Thinking of what we were doing as science and the fun of busting butt climbing through the underbrush, I knew that was a good thing, but the late night cave ceiling encounters and bats fluttering in and out, and the primitive villages down below (we hit five caves in five different places), and my own sense of mortality—the gut diseases, the shivers, the cuts and fungus between toes, and the wipeouts with the Minsk 250 cc motorbikes—this also shaped my stream of thought, the consciousness connected to these mates, and the idea of where I was.

Never another Vietnam. Those homeless guys I worked with back home. The military bases where I taught college classes. Guys like Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, and others I had run into back home as a journalist and literary hanger on, that too was evocative for me, in-country, on the edge of Laos. Real biodiversity work, but a haphazard way of shaping my feelings there.

I was the only American, and they came to know, not that kind of American. That was pointed out so many times. And the Vietnamese sought me out too, well, to embrace, arm wrestle, ask me what I thought of their country. My pretty nice diver’s watch they all touched, wanting to feel its weight.

“Is it real Rolex? You go under waves with it? Can we trade? Submariner, good shit!”

Amazing things were offered as trade—a huge chunk of jade bigger than a softball. A rare looking archeological carving of a turtle and tiger. A broken down 100 cc motorcycle. An M-16 rifle. Two book manuscripts that looked like they were from 1500, AD, Chinese or Korean. One gentleman offered to put me up for a year in his raised house on the edge of town. Just for the watch.

They all wanted to know what we were looking for in the caves. Again, ecology was not a word in the Vietnamese language, even with the scientists at the biological institute in Hanoi where we had gone before getting deep into primary forest.

I wrote many passages about what Vietnam is, what the war is, and what ecology might look like in a poor country, one where people were literally left starving to eat grass, bugs, and, bats.

This last cave went back pretty far, like an esophagus of our childhood’s worst nightmares. Monster chasing you into the night. Roaring and dark mouth, widening. Then, the sounds of bats way up, clinging before the appointed hour to break away and scurry into air for their eating hours, another evil memory soundtrack from movies. Rush hour out. Timed, this circadian urge, or the shape of sky with the sun over the horizon and filaments of photons hitting their eyes. Or electromagnetic fields emanating from heavens and bouncing into stones and valleys after the sun spills over into our night. Or the sounds of gnats and moths and dozens of other species turning sky into conveyor belts of feeding, breeding and flying toward light, or anything shiny or scaly.

The urge to leave and fly as mammals into the night, that is the wonder. The cycle of in and out, and then the hibernation, sometimes months at a time, depending on the bat species. Amazing species to learn from.

The corona virus blues, all that experimentation, all those samples collected. Specimens of viruses morphing from phase to serial phase. Labs, scientists, lights, hood ventilation, moon suits, all the research, and the nefarious ones, in spook-land, and the military, there, capturing data, unpublished reports and studies.

I had no thoughts of that stuff in 1994—pre-Covid SARSCoV2—C-19 blues. What three decades does to the shifting baselines, to the knowledge base, to the collective consciousness.

There are eight of us, and the seven of them smoke, with Viet only taking an offered rolled cigarette infrequently. We are not making fire, not making hot tea, not lighting the rocky floor with flames. Some have flashlights and some have head lamps.

Music below is clichéd ghostly. In the distance are the shapes of knobby up-thrust rock formations covered in matty jungle. Around us to the west us are hills, carpeted with picked-over jungle and then well-used paths leading to mountains, alpine, elfin and misty hidden cliffs.

The goal is to get bats going out (and then, later coming in), pull them gingerly out of the forgiving netting, measure them, weigh them, take notes, photograph them, and then, let them go their merry ways out to the hunting grounds.

In the dark, essential, with focused beams of light on their, well, let’s call them faces only a mother bat would love. These are not the faces of those fruit bats (flying foxes) illustrating the book, Stellaluna which I read to my newborn child a year and a half after leaving Vietnam.

Echolocation. More than 1,400 species of bats around the world (we’re still discovering more). Most bats are endangered. Many bats are sick. Homes, caves, caverns, outcroppings and trees are contaminated with the whistling, chopping, sawing, bulldozing, burning, spraying, digging, razing, desiccating, polluting, damming efforts of man.

This is just one animal, one part of the biodiversity equation (oh, each bat species has its own niche, which is amazingly complex, cooperative, competitive, symbiotic, parallel with other species) but still illustrative of the never-ending story of Western scientists (white guys and gals, mostly) parachuting into someone else’s world and ramming through this or that study, this or that report, this or that deep analysis or any variety of scurrying bioblitz, transect of THEIR land, of THEIR people, of THEIR species, of THEIR habits.

I was loosely part of that parachuting into Vietnam, with wide open eyes, an open line of communication, and what I knew, more of less at the time, was all that love having everything to do with my own curiosity and haggard walkabout in life. Why I went to Vietnam—to help people back home exorcise their demons.

I also knew I was different, un-American, a product of that Vietnam War, and I was unabashedly anti-imperial, and that included being anti-Britain, in many forms, to go along with my anti-American (USA) frame of reference almost anywhere I went, reported on and taught at.

Then come to now, 2022, with Wuhan, World Military Games, DARPA, University of North Carolina, Anthony Fauci, EcoHealth Alliance, and other topics for which I have done deep dives into with hundreds of others into the sciences—that science, around viruses, and then, the darker side, bioweapons research around “those” viruses— facts, unresolved debates, all of that, not just locked up in my head, but swirling around like bats in, well, a cave, or

would that be the belfry?

It began, or at least as we know it through the massive media system of command and control, with the end game selling us on a constant diet of fear: fear of not having enough, fear of not fitting in, fear of falling behind, fear of life, fear of death, fear of loneliness, fear of the unknown, fear of the known, fear of forgetting, fear of povertyeviction-foreclosure-bankruptcy-prison. The madmen of Madison Avenue intersecting with PT Barnum (that sucker born every nanosecond, now) and with Edward Bernays and the Chicago Boys and witch hunts, the Dulles Brothers and J. Edgar Hoover, and, well, so many tendrils to the root of evil for which this essay is not digging up.

Imagine a society brought up on duck and cover as a way to stave off nuclear annihilation. That science. That propaganda. That delusion.

That psychological fear of not being, or, of being this or that undesirable thing, for which has been preset, goes back hundreds of years, maybe more, but for us, now, 2022, this is the land of make-over after make-over; takeover after co-option; left-over after trickle-down, with the constant amnesia and marketing of lies, fabrications, half-truths and mythologies as the conduit for the fear of not having or fear of having. The process of studying this phenomenon, in anthropological terms, is agnotology which is using historical forensics to delve into the process of unknowing.

In this time of plague, corona plague, where oh where is the study of deliberate, culturally-induced ignorance or doubt? Throughout the land, throughout all those chambers of power, it seems, there is a hard and soft sell of a product, idea, concept, and much of this is through the constant publishing of inaccurate or misleading scientific studies. Propaganda as weapon, but also as teacher and marketer. Dangerous times. Mother and father, propagandists at birth.

Toward some ends, this agnotology illustrates a sort of paralysis, not just analysis paralysis, but this overlay in our culture of “more knowledge of a subject leaving us more uncertain—unknowing—than before.” It leaves many dry, confused, in a Stockholm Syndrome empty gut land of overeating, overspending, overdreaming.

The news broadcasts, already jimmy-rigged to confuse and colonize the average person, drew us in. It was lightning speed, the Wuhan lab, the plague, or in this case, a corona virus, setting us up with a novel awakening of the monsters and mobsters that are the characters of those many circles of hell Dante obsessed over.

For some, this was a military propaganda operation, and then others drew from history—a container ship full of papers, reports and books on the nefarious ways of the Western mind. We do not need to start with Josef Mengele, and we can go way back, seeing how Turtle Island, how all of the southern parts of America, was colonized using a sophisticated and effective contamination of not just the land and the spirit, but of the body.

It was religion ruled by the bank.

Before 2020, we had been looking into many plagues— bioweapons programs of the USA, in concert not just with the Department of Defense (offense) and DARPA, Fort Detrick, Plum Island, etc., but with the assistance of the web of scientists at private Tier One and state universities cooking up toxins, poisons, weapons of mass destruction. The same science that produces an X-Box is behind the illegal and murderous drone assassination program of Barak Obama, or the total awareness snooping programs and hacking which Edward Snowden uncovered.

The same marketing gurus and regulatory bodies that pumped out the many devilish heads of The Oxycontin Crisis are working their dark arts in the Corona Crisis. Except, now, since beginning in 2020, there are no real conversations, no critical debates about policies, about experimentation, about informed consent. We went from hating Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson, and Monsanto and Bayer et al., to, well, fill in the colonizing methodology now deployed. You can question “that” science, but not “this” science.

We are in a timeframe that leaves us on our own and then even though it is survival of the richest or healthiest, we have collectively been engineered to have a mob mentality on so many topics, tied to the drug companies, the government overreach, the cancel culture in academia, in the sciences and medicine.

Watching bats almost 30 years ago from a ledge overlooking a Vietnamese village, I am here now, in a world that is, to use the pejorative, more than just batty. Or bats in the belfry.

Big-eared, Pearson’s horseshoe, round-leaf, Himalayan whisked, Chinese rufous, large myotis, all bats we identified, in their indignant struggle to get out of our nets and our gloved hands.

A rush, for sure, since my bat days started when I was seven, in a cabana on the Costa del Sol. I was enlisted to shoo away or capture a bat that had gotten into the little hideaway my family had rented for two weeks in Spain.

But really, bats and I started at age half a year. After my birth in California, my family took us to the Azores. Imagine that, the only mammal endemic to the islands is a bat—the Azores noctule (Nyctalus azoreum) found in the dry forests of the Azores. That was also in my dreams as a four-month-old and 4-year-old, all products of those shadows and darks shades the skies when we went out for evening walks, first me in a stroller and then pumping chubby legs to keep up with adults.

Always looking up. Avian and aerial lives of my dreams and thoughts. Even as a diver 16 years later, I’d go 90 feet down, and then, stop, looking up at life, at oceanic life with a sun filtering through. Inside the riot, part of the riot of marine life. Water is soul craft.

Bats’ destinations were always in my mind. Where do they come from? How do they hu nt at night? Where do they mate? What do they eat?

Batty conversations later in life were tied to the bats under Lake Austin, in Texas, and the big rush of bats at Carlsbad Caverns. Bats were always on my mind, I guess since I was a child on the Azores when an old skinny, dory-exhausted, bent-over fisherman whose name I have forgotten showed me and my sister that one bat species—later in my life filed away as, “Kingdom: Animalia; Phylum: Chordata; Class: Mammalia; Order: Chiroptera; Family: Vespertilionidae; Genus: Nyctalus.”

He had it in a huge off-green glass jar. I watched it flutter, trying to escape the prison and the photons.

Always watching the science journals for any new news on bats, that was me. In 2011, lo and behold, in that same locale where I had been seven years earlier, three new bat species were “discovered” in Vietnam.

A small one, for sure, of the tube-nosed variety. Leave it up to the Hungarian scientist with the Natural History Museum to call it a tiny demon—“We chose the name Beelzebub to reflect the dark ‘diabolic’ coloration of the new species and its fierce protective behavior in the field,” said Gabor Csorba of the museum.

All the bats I held at bay had fierce dispositions. A given, really, since their modus operandi is to survive, and get out of the clutches of the evil demon, Homo sapiens. As I knew in 1994, bats represent a third of the known mammal species in South East Asia. As is true now, the correct number of bat species in the region may be twice the current count.

I must have held a hundred individual bats inside those caves.

Therein lays the problem of this conversation in a time of plague. Calling a spade a spade is one thing, but this naming of the “new” Vietnamese tropical bat, Murina beelzebub, displays both the fear in and the foolishness of the human species. What all those bats, civets, pangolins and myriad of other animals I interacted with in Indochina depend on is connected tropical forests for survival. The web of life is certainly not understood by most scientists, especially the virologists stuck in germ theory, stuck in a bio-safety level-four lab, with moon suits and all the equipment and sacrificial rodents and apes to play god with, or worse, to dance with the devil.

Bats are especially vulnerable due to ongoing deforestation in every region they’re found. We knew this before the French pulverized parts of Indochina, and we knew it during the American War on Vietnam, and I knew it in 1994. Today, we are more than in a time of plague— exploding myths, a propaganda exercise global and digital in scope.

I am thinking now, 2022, of Edward Curtain, a magnificent essayist, or shall I say, he turns the essay into an interlinking memoir of universal vigor. Words from him can for many be raptures enrapturing into philosophical depths, raptures of the mind, spirit and glory of finding love in all the right places. What’s love got to do with it is we have only ourselves to look to in the end for our own personal answers:

The person with whom we are all most intimate is oneself. It’s just the way it is. I don’t mean that in some oracular Delphic ‘know thyself’ way, or in any deep psychoanalytical sense, but very simply. We have our own thoughts and feelings that come and go like breaths, most of which never get expressed in words. Together with our actions, including speech, they make up our lives. We try to anchor them with photos and memorabilia and lots of things, but time has no mercy; it sweeps us all away. Then our things remain for a while until they become a burden to those who remain, and then the things go. As the song reminds us, ‘We come and go like a ripple on a stream.’

Hell, who knows if this is accurate, attributed to Heraclitus, but for me it is apropos, confounding, too—No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

I’ve used this and a dozen other quotes to ice break classes, to have fellow travelers (students) look at one epigram, deep dive into it, so they might find not only literal and denotative meanings, but so they can apply a sense of personal self and life passage to the quote.

Projection into the future, a new self, that self, hidden, but certainly trapped in our heads from the time of birth, and the birth of recognition, as butterflies alight on chubby baby legs on a beach, or through the shadows of dusk and the capes of wind where that Azores bat makes me, for the first time—me, my, his being, me, outside my “self” into the skies of another mammal…

We were ecologists, seeping into the mud, crossing leechinfested engorged rivers, jumping over cobras, dancing under the canopy as gibbons threw feces and branches at us. We were hunting for some personal connection to the diversity in the biodiversity game, hoping to unlock other forms of passion beside just knowing things in the scientific way.

We came to THEIR land to find OUR selves. That is what love is, really, a passion to unravel humanity’s connectivity, and to push away the fears that capitalism has feed us since its lofty reckoning with people, land, hopes and dreams. Imagine, carving up South America: Portugal gets Brazil, and Spain gets the rest… Edicts from the Holy See. God, Country, Mother Be Damned! This is the deadly game of capitalism—there is no love in it, and the getting is the game. Accumulation, consumerism, all the throwaway in the waste stream is anti-love, and it all draws closer and closer each year into a self-hate, a sort of misanthropy against self, against humanity.

We are not rubbish, and we are not Soylent Green, yet from all that emanates out of the powers that be, from all the literature and video games and movies, that seems to be the thesis of the day—humanity is the disease, the cancer, so be done with it, and this way shall be our way, according to the folks at Davos and partners of the World Economic Forum and Aspen Institute, et al. They have the narratives all written, either in plain sight or under their secret plague blankets.

I write to stop the plague. I visit with people outside my frame to learn how to continue to love people.

I just talked to a radical thinker, a farmer, who decided to email me and arrange a day to drive out to the coast where I live and have a beer and talk. Great guy. He’s been an inventor, been a restaurant owner, and now he is working a farm, three acres.

He sought me out in an act of love. Love being that innate desire of wanting the human touch. His isolation from many friends and family—who have decided to cut ties because of his deep analysis of things during the lockdowns and mandates for this batty virus—propelled him to contact me vis-à-vis one of the radical sites where I have been publishing for 17 years.

Human and humane touch. And while I can be sort of an anomaly or freak in the natural/predisposed/ prepackaged order of things in this country, yes, and I am naturally bombastic, recalcitrant, a regular A-1 ODD (oppositional defiance disorder), the reciprocation was an act of love on my part. Jef was seeking more than validation, more than a safe harbor from which to discuss and stay attuned to what we both agree is one positive aspect of Homos sapiens— critical thinking. We were having a conversation—we covered a lot of ground, from the bioweapons programs, to permaculture, transition cities, the staged economy, great thinkers like Ed Curtain, and others. That is the act of self-awareness and validation demonstrating humans can be cooperative, thinking, caring, and set in some ethos of mutual aid.

That is what those bat caves represent and symbolize for me. And a hundred other conversations, in other times of plague—the plagues centered around the oppression, the suppression, the depression, the inflammation, enslavement that this Un-United States of Amnesia under capitalism which has unleashed plague after plague through the powerbrokers and power hoarders of the world—trillionaire companies like BlackRock and Vanguard, as well as the billionaires and millionaires working their rackets. Murder Incorporated as a moniker for the USA is not my term. Far be it for me to steal so many prescient concepts of what this country is, has been, has become, is becoming and will be in 10 years. Try a century from now. Not even a ghost of ourselves will be in the air. The digital memory will be theirs, not ours. The Great Reset is upon us.

I am not sure how many reading this even know what the great reset is. So be it.

But Jef reached out, drove out from Albany, Oregon, and we broke bread (tortillas) and hoisted brew. One telling comment he made, for me as super emblematic of our times, and even for my own time working as an educator and social worker, is the desperation of youth: “My wife is an elementary teacher, and she says they are being trained on how to spot a suicidal youngster. What the fuck is going on? Elementary students over the past year have doubled and triple their suicide rates. Elementary kids. Overdosing on opioids. Goddamn this entire thing is crazy.”

Therein lays the critical thinking we traversed. The cause and the effect of those suicides, turning around to see now what the effects have turned into: new causes for ever more new effects.

Effect/cause/cause/effect. This is what is missing in deep dive discourses across the land.

But I go back to bats—Chiroptera. My Arizona days, after leaving the Azores and Paris and Germany (all those bats and gargoyle creatures throughout the Old World, I do recall). Running through the desert, into the mountains, I encountered riot after riot of animals—reptiles like Gila monsters, mammals like kit foxes, amazing arachnids like battalions of tarantulas after a monsoon, and sci-fi bugs like Palos Verdes beetles. And, the bats. In caves, under ledges, in abandoned buildings, inside mine shafts, hanging from cottonwoods. Typically, it was the vampires and the freetails which entranced me, but I loved the the lesser longnosed bat (Leptonycteris curasoae yerbabuenae), and the Mexican long-tongued bat, Choeronycteris mexicana. So many encounters I’ve had with these mammals since they give birth and raise their young in southern Arizona from early spring through summer.

Just the list of the more than two dozen bat species in Arizona is remarkable, poetic:

Ghost-faced bat Mormoops meglophylla

California leaf-nosed bat Macrotus californicus

Mexican long-tongued bat Choeronycteris mexicana

Lesser long-nosed bat Leptonycteris curasoae

Yuma myotis Myotis yumanensis

Cave myotis Myotis velifer brevis

Occult little brown bat Myotis lucifugus occultus

Long-eared myotis Myotis evotis

Southwestern myotis Myotis auriculus

Fringed myotis Myotis thysanodes

Long-legged myotis Myotis volans

California myotis Myotis californicus

Western small-footed myotis Myotis ciliolabrum

Silver-haired bat Lasionycteris noctivagans

Western pipistrelle Pipistrellus hasperus

Big brown bat Eptesicus fuscus

Western red bat Lasiurus blossevillii

Southern yellow bat Lasiurus ega

Hoary bat Lasiurus cinereus

Spotted bat Euderma maculatum

Allen's lappet-browed bat Idionycteris phyllotis

Townsend's big-eared bat Corynorhinus townsendii

Pallid bat Antrozous pallidus

Mexican free-tailed bat Tadarida brasiliensis mexicana

Pocketed free-tailed bat Nyctinomops femorosaccus

Big free-tailed bat Nyctinomops macrotis

Greater western mastiff bat Eumops perotis californicus

Underwood's mastiff bat Eumops underwoodi

Missing from the list is the vampire, the vampire bats, a species of the subfamily Desmodontinae, also of the leafnosed variety found in Mexico, Central and South America. They latch onto birds (turkeys) or cattle for a blood diet, a feeding trait called hematophagy.

I’ve seen the bats lapping up blood from the backs of cattle in Chiapas and Guatemala. I have talked to local ranchers and farmers, and guano collectors. I have talked with a few Mexican biologists. All about bats. This is a fascinating creature, and the 1,400 known species of bats cover almost a third of all mammal species, but not many are into hematophagy. Most bats suck nectar and dive for insects, fish, lizards, snakes.

The vampires were once in synch with nature, integrated into a balanced food web, until the “conquest” by Spain, when the blood, cross, steel and germs introduced cattle and horses and the corrales, which gave the species, Desmodus rotundus, or the vampire bat, an immobilized source of blood. There were not many of these vampiros before the Spanish invasion, since they fed (lapping up the blood) of the pavo, wild turkeys.

For Desmodus rotundus, every corral was a cafeteria, so the number of vampire bats in Mexico has been growing steadily for centuries. Think of life out of balance, Koyaanisqatsi, or Life-Unraveling from Cohesion, this one incursion into the land with these domesticated bovines creating a huge population explosion.

Alas, those unsuspecting cows and horses don’t just end up with open wounds, however, since vampire bats often leave them with paralytic rabies. The reaction of a rancher watching many of his animals die slow, horrible deaths, that is a sight to behold, and who cannot empathize with his desire to seek out the bats’ home and blow it to kingdom come.

This fear of bats—this misidentification of all bats as vampires—has put so many non-blood sucking species in peril, on the brink of extinction. Caves are blown up, or the openings are caged with chicken wire. All those millions of pounds of insects scooped up by the insectivores are now back as miniature demons in the out of whack food web. Whereupon, millions of gallons of insecticides are applied to “handle” the crop-eating and parasite-laden pests. The vicious cycle of man’s continuing fear, and lack of critical thinking and deep holistic understanding of how to stay in balance with the cycles of nature, with the food web—with bats—has much to do with our current epoch: a world soon to be without ice.

I go back to the movie, Koyaanisqatsi, which is actually a Hopi word defined as "life of moral corruption and turmoil" or "life out of balance." Getting deeper into the word, the prefix koyaanis—means "corrupted" or "chaotic," and the word qatsi means "life" or "existence." The film actually adds to the meaning— “crazy life, life out of balance, life in turmoil, life disintegrating, and a state of life that calls for another way of living."

We went to several caves, and we met some resilient guano collectors. We ate and slept in the caves, and the food—canned tuna and hard ramen noodles—came in contact with everything. There were no antiseptic wipes. We drank river water treated with iodine. Lots of quartsized bottles of beer. The Brits chain smoked. We played cards on the earth. Bats flew above, around, near, and on two occasions, slammed into my hat. Bia Hanoi, 333 and some Chinese brands we sipped during the breaks between rush hours. We carried out what we packed in.

One night I woke up shivering, around 3 am, before the rush hour back to the caves, and I pulled a huge black centipede from the thin piece of canvas I was using for a bedroll. Welts, shivers, temperature of 40 Celsius (104 F). Oh, the vagaries of roughing it in a country of dragon boats, Russian busses, endless streams of bicycles and motorcycles, dogs running around, and poor and good people. Plastic bags and junk stacked to the moon and back.

Bats, magnificent and weird bats. The cataloguing was haphazard, and one of the fellows was wanting to get (discover) a bat yet to be catalogued by Western science, and then he’d write about it, get a short article in the Mammalian Journal. Help with his doctoral dissertation. Cheers. He was a Scotsman, age 23, talking to me, 36. Asking me about the war, the American War on Vietnam, the effects of it at home, etc.

I reminded him of his history, UK’s: Operation Masterdom but also known as the Southern Resistance War (Vietnamese: Nam Bộ kháng chiến) by the Vietnamese. This was a post–World War II armed conflict involving a largely British-Indian and French task force and Japanese troops. They went up against the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese communist movement, for control of the southern half of the country, after the Japanese surrender. The Brits lost.

I reminded him that arms were being sent by the Brits to South Vietnam. I reminded him plenty of Brits fought in

Vietnam, through resignation and then enlisting in the armed forces of Australia and New Zealand. Canadians enlisted in US forces. Plenty of covert operations were carried out by Britain. Britain officially recognized and supported South Vietnamese President Diem who requested help and received it: British Advisory Mission to South Vietnam (BRIAM).

Down the mountain we slogged—dirty, disheveled, stinky. We ended up in one of the villages not located on our maps. We drank Bia Hoi by the gallon—draft beer. The kids and old people watched us from the slated walls. Definite oddities, as the guys had long hair, and the two women had shaved sides and beads in the back, braided. Red-haired Ian, with huge flowing scarlet beard. Doctor Viet helped with the translation. He was gulping green tea, steamy in the night air.

We drank and ate with miners, farmers and foresters. I ended up in a constant arm-wrestling match with all number of guys. We were in close quarters, and like all of Vietnam, it seemed, there were old and young, boy and man, some females, grabbing our hands as we walked through their small rural/outback town. We were on display, and back at the beer garden, slash restaurant (the lady and man who owned it let us crash there at night on benches and tables for a small fee), more people came out to see who these vagrants were.

We talked about bats, showed them a book of bats we used for identification purposes. We got one lead after the next on caves close by. Endless caves. Huge colonies. Amazing stories of flying foxes bigger than the dogs they were eating. One older lady that first evening brought our science troupe seven deep fried bats. Horseshoe. Down the hatch, bloke.

Most people were healthy, yet the men smoked cigarettes and bongs-full of tobacco. The women chewed betel nut, as the telltale aftereffect of dark stained teeth when they smiled. I asked to try some and they laughed, but I persisted. The numbing effects of a mild narcotic were not unlike the first few chews of a coca leaf.

Bats, for sure, and that love’s gotta have it for the people riff was running through my head, no matter how far away we were culturally, how unusual our thinking styles might have been. People of the land, simple people, survivors, cutting, slicing, gutting, shooting, frying, boiling, mashing anything around them to survive. To eat. I loved them inside, my own way. With these words, too. Then, and now.

Coffee plantations and fields of tea plants: all these operations were locally supported through local labor, but the products and the profits are shipped out of the region, many times lugged overland to China or in container ships to Europe.

The coffee and tea operations were cutting into more and more of the forest. More and more checkerboard pieces of land appeared. More and more fractured so-called habitat for any number of animals— reptiles, amphibians, birds, ground mammals, larger species like deer, and the elusive Asian tiger. And the people came to settle in order to work the plantations, and, alas, more trails up into the woods, more hunting, more rattan cutting, and, the bats. Caves to traverse, deeply spelunked, for that rich fertilizer, guano. Hunting in the dark for bats to eat. And then, down the hills and mountains, maybe great hornbills sacrificed for brooms sold at markets. Brooms of magnificent feathers. That is not ecology, Vietnam style.

Viet and I talked about ecology, and biodiversity. At the time there was no word in Vietnamese for ecology. Or at least no group of words to define it as a holistic concept— he was a tree expert with some engineering background who happened to fall into a job with the Hanoi Biological Institute. But drilling down, we did find common language for this field of biology that describes the relationships of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. The idea of one species being a large part of the whole is not always understood in most cultures. You know, take one colony of bats out of the equation, and in 10 years, you have children with skin lesions and with GI issues and tumors in the mouths of older people. Because of the pesticides!

How is that bat connected to us, the food, the air, the soil, and then we talked about the insects, the pests, the crop eaters, and even mosquitoes bearing malaria and other diseases, how in places like Mexico, the amount of poisons applied to crops goes up each year, and the pests that once were food for the bats, well, they are at war with the farmers.

Then, those toxins, those bug killers getting into the food chain, and through bioaccumulation in other species, like fish they eat, the toll comes later, in other forms of human degradation, including covered-up chronic diseases. We talked about the eagle, American Bald Eagle, and the application of DDT throughout the land cutting into the reproductive tracks of eagles and causing shells too thin, which in turn resulted in broken incubating eggs. Near extinction.

In Vietnam, and elsewhere, there is a rare mountain-hawk eagle, also known Hodgson’s. So many animals in Vietnam are on the edge of extinction, including the water buffalo; black-crested gibbon; Indochinese tiger; red-shanked douc; Siamese crocodile; Vietnam flying frog; Vietnamese gecko; Delacour’s langur; banded eagle ray. The Indochinese tiger is probably extinct, as is the Javan rhinoceros and Northern Sumatran rhinoceros. So many different bird, snake, and frog species are extinct in Vietnam, but actual numbers are unknown.

War, suffering, food, starvation, the will of one species, man, to live above all others.

Man, at the top, the progenitor of the Seventh Mass Extinction, it our tribute to over consumption and throwaway everything society, our Anthropocene.

So many of us even now in this great critical thinking extinction event—lockdowns, mandates, de-platforming, delisting, stopping the scientific method of testing and retesting hypothesis—want to know origins. Simple stuff, for most thinking humanity. How did we get bogged down in Afghanistan, or Vietnam? How did we allow the social safety nets to get frayed and shredded? How did we become so reliant on other countries’ farming and manufacturing? How possible is it that there’s life outside our galaxy? Is there water on Mars, and if so, so what? How do we get back to a precautionary principle and holistic approach to human health? First do no harm, isn’t that the medical credo, and where is it now?

The origin stories—who was on Turtle Island before “contact,” and what was that land bridge all about? Who were the ancient seafarers? How are we the sum total of the virome’s and biome’s magnificent interplay of bacteria and viruses?

We want history, and we are—some of us—looking at history with new lenses, new information, much more deeper considerations and intersectionalities. If there are social determinants of health, then there are determinants of vaccine policy tied to decades of research, both open scientific research and the nefarious stuff of governments/ militaries looking for weaponizing almost anything on earth, including bacteria and viruses?

If science can give us napalm, white phosphorous, depleted uranium ammunition, well, what else is science cooking up under the auspices of money-making, profits, and, well, paranoia vis-à-vis weaponizing?

The story of bat research goes way back. The bat is a good example of diversity, since there are 1,400 species, and more yet to be discovered. More than two decades of “paranoia” around bioterrorism have ramped up U.S. funding for a “subgenre of viral surveillance that entails hunting and studying previously unknown viruses in wildlife.”

“Outbreak prediction,” goes beyond just tracking diseases that affect people. The public health officials have relied on this for almost a century to understand the precursors and causes of epidemics. This new viral research is all about “discovering” the most dangerous pathogens before they jump to humans. But is that just it, discovery?

Again, many of us are for this robust form of research— basically hunting viruses in remote locations and then transporting, storing, and experimenting on the most dangerous pathogens. Many of us like myself are doubting the real value of this pursuit of viruses which have yet to infect people. In fact, we believe that this method of research could be the fuse that ignites the bomb, the next and the next and the next pandemic. There is much evidence this SARS-CoV2 is all about that sort of accident, those sorts of genetic and serial passage experiments. Some of the groups and government agencies are corrupt, and many individuals over the past twenty-four months have sought out my opinion about secret military and military-private sector research on disease, on ways to weaponize viruses.

Yet, if this were an essay on the history of bioweapons, on the Nazis, Japanese, Americans and the Russians working on various biological and chemical weapons, which are in simple terms, weapons of mass destruction, or mass death, then we’d be looking at an entirely different method of presenting the evidence, history, perspectives, quotes and conclusions. And implications.

This is the Conversation in a Time of Plague, however, looking at my own relationship with words. Accordingly, many times throughout even this writing process, my words are sounding hollow, anachronistic, empty. Given the subtext to this essay or my position, that is, of having a deep love of earth and people and those interrelationships with my own fears, doubts and frailties, now, in 2022, as I hit the speed limit of 65 years of age, almost each paragraph sounds off kilter, not of my time, or of “their” time.

Who the hell wants to read this batty shit?

I knew that fruit bats are natural hosts of the Nipah virus, which can cause brain swelling, seizures, comas, and ultimately death in humans. We found out the Zika virus, which causes babies to be born with very small heads and other potentially deadly birth defects, was isolated in a rhesus monkey. MERS, the coronavirus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome, was traced to camels from Saudi Arabia. And HIV infects baboons and chimpanzees, and whether it jumped species naturally or with a little help from science, the virus is responsible for killing 36 million people worldwide.

The current plague of silence, in this unfolding Decade of Corona, speaks of palm civets sold in markets, and then this SARS found in horseshoe bats living in remote caves in Yunnan Province infecting miners.

However, I embrace those bats, the pathogens, the love of evolution, this human terrain of ups and down, starts and false starts. I love the brains and the discourse which was so elegant and humane, before this love and death in a time of plague, or pandemic, or as it is now, endemic.

I was with many bat species, colonies and individuals, and I upset their homes, their flight patterns by playing scientist with “real” scientists. That was the essence of a truckload (vectors) of pathogens entering my body, and my mind. I like this statement from a pathogen person:

“Squirming, clawed and toothy animals bite and scratch during collection of body fluids. Teeth and talons easily penetrate the thin gloves required to maintain dexterity when handling fragile wildlife. And overhead, angry bats release a fine patina of virus-laden urine aerosols,” as infectious disease specialist Michael Callahan wrote of his virus-hunting expeditions. “The fact that researchers are not infected every time they do a field collection is a question that continues to stump us.”

That bat lady from China was featured in a Scientific American article, “How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus, in June 2020. Her name is Shi Zhengli. And just up until mid-2020, there was a robust exchange of research and knowledge between China, USA and other nations.

But in the time of coronavirus, the discourse has been scuttled. That’s the bat crazy angle of this I am coming from. Listen to her quoted in the article: The efforts paid off. The pathogen hunters discovered hundreds of bat-borne coronaviruses with incredible genetic diversity. “The majority of them are harmless,” Shi Zhengli said. “But dozens belong to the same group as SARS. They can infect human lung cells in a petri dish and cause SARS-like diseases in mice.”

In Shitou Cave—where painstaking scrutiny has yielded a natural genetic library of bat-borne viruses—the team discovered a coronavirus strain that came from horseshoe bats with a genomic sequence nearly 97 percent identical to the one found in civets in Guangdong. The finding concluded a decade-long search for the natural reservoir of the SARS coronavirus.

The horseshoe bats, man, are my friends in those caves along the Laotian border. The entire unfolding of today, as I write this, for me, is interspersed with my own evolution in this world—a dangerous one, for sure, since for me, Capitalism is a disease, and it is closing in on more and more people, not as something to benefit them, but for which to exploit them, and to rub them out, as Jimmy Cagney said.

The screws are being tightened. The propaganda set forth a hundred years ago. Our planned and perceived lives and deaths are all marketed, and put into play. There are both overt and covert agendas, and there are still some of us who want to see through the power plays, expose the actors in this theater of the dominant, and report on the suppression, oppression and obsessions the marketers (tin soldiers for the billionaires) foist upon children as soon as they are born!

Now, how is this going to connect and do a bang-up job concluding an essay on bats? You see, even with my love of nature, my engagement with people, in other places, through their own eyes and mine, as they are Eyes Wide Open, I still have this sense that even the crazy ones like those that reach out to me across states and oceans (I don’t mean crazy in that way, so hold your horses, Cancel Culture) are actually the ones that count. They have a truth in them from decades living their own truths in a world of lies.

Some call them batty.

Maybe the key for me know is what Jean-Paul Sartre said, succinctly: “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

The formulae have already been sketched out. We know what is right from wrong, deep down, if we decide to traverse that dark cave and explore the hidden meaning of being a man or woman in this world. What it is to be with bats, with the flights in and out of our own dark caves… that will always be the wave of human touch in me. Ironically, it is the bat which pulls the human from me.

Even in that darkness, there is light, and the bats are blended into space, that obsidian trench which for them is home and roost, the place of supplication to the energy god. And where they rest, we tear into. But we know deep down the flight of the bat is true, as is the gait of a wolf, even one espying a lamb out on old Jake’s ranch.

Ready for reconfirmation, or some moment in struggle when recharging of life is the memory. This is it, a bat essay, tied loosely to love of humanity—that humanity— struggling, for sure, and most times losing the battle. But to have that chance to be in the middle of bats, or on a reef with a hundred small hammerheads overhead, that is the shape of dreams and nightmares, both the balance of being alive in our time. grass and cut flowers—dandelions, daisies, little purple blossoms for which I have no name. The flowers are pretty and draw bumblebees and butterflies, but I’m told they destroy the lawn and must be eradicated.

On Friday, the garbage truck will scoop up the cart, turn it upside down and empty it into its stinking hopper of garden cuttings and rotting food.

The spinning of the earth makes me dizzy. I sit up and watch the robin fly into the tallest alder tree. Do the trees remember the men who came last year with chainsaws and cut away the branches hanging inside the fence? Do they feel the cuts? Do the raw edges burn in the sun?

What right do I have to cut the grass and trees? Like any animal, I have a right to a den, a burrow, a hideyhole, but do I need all this? I’m not that big. I’m just one woman, living in an 1,800-square-foot ranch house with four bedrooms, two baths, living room, family room, kitchen and laundry room on a third-acre lot which includes a deck, hot tub, and a garden shed. All for just me? But it’s my home. Is it my fault my husband died, and I’m down to one aged dog with titanium plates in her knees?

Sue Fagalde Lick

Sharing This Patch of Earth

Sweaty from mowing the lawn, I lie on the deck and watch the clouds slide by as the earth spins. Pines, alders, and spruce surround me like tall mother guardians. I am a tiny speck riding this patch of earth, held on only by gravity. What if gravity let go?

This particular patch is near Newport, Oregon, just across Highway 101 from the Pacific Ocean. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, the surf and summer traffic blend into one constant hum, but it’s quiet here in the forest.

I inhale the smell of cut grass and watch a robin hop two-footed near the cooling lawnmower. The bird glances my way then pulls up a worm, shaking its head to swallow it down.

From the trees to my right, I hear another robin singing. His mate? Are there chicks? The nest is well hidden by thick leaves. Come winter, the trees will be bare, and the robins will be gone.

Near the fence, the compost cart is half full of

In the 55 years since the house was built, four different families have lived here with their children, dogs, cats, parrots and goldfish. One built the shed. Another added the deck and hot tub. Another turned the original garage into a family room and built a new garage. My husband and I, retiring here after a life in California, installed the chain link fence to keep our dogs from running away.

I grew up in suburbia, where the native grasses were replaced by fruit orchards, which were replaced by post-war subdivisions, shopping centers, and high-tech factories. Non-native trees were brought in, and nonnative sod was planted and mowed to create perfect green carpets in front of every house. Six-foot wooden fences divided the properties into back-to-back and side-byside quarter-acre sections with paved streets, sidewalks and driveways. To find nature required a drive to distant mountains, oceans, lakes, or rivers, all crowded by other people seeking the same thing. In our San Jose yards, wild animals were considered invaders. People spread bugkiller, weed killer, rat pellets, and slug poison. This is our place, we said. We are not willing to share.

But I live in the woods now, surrounded by these glorious mother trees, kept company by all the creatures, seen and unseen.

In the Bible, God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.” In college, my English professors talked about the “great chain of being,” which put humans at the top, just below God, with everything else subservient. That seems pretty clear, but I’m not comfortable with reigning over all. I am not God.

If humans abandoned this place, nature would close in. It happened to the property next door. Pines, berries, ferns, and salal have grown too thick for humans to walk or even crawl through. How long would it take to erase all memory of me? While I sleep in my house, bears, raccoons, deer and wild cats retake possession. I see their droppings, their claw marks, and my garbage spread on the lawn. Are they just waiting for me and the dog to go away?

I can’t lie here all day. My arms are starting to sunburn. I have work to do. I pull myself off the deck and go to the shed. As I open the door, I hear the scritch of little feet. A black rat jumps off the rafter, runs down the far wall, and disappears. Is he still inside, or has he escaped through a tiny hole?

I don’t scream. I have seen rats before. I picked up a garter snake that wandered into the laundry room. I touched a possum feigning death on the lawn. I have had squirrels jump at me from the wood pile. It’s not like when we moved in 22 years ago and I declared I would never leave the deck because someone said there were garter snakes in the grass.

There are. They have beautiful black and red stripes, and they won’t hurt me.

I stand in the doorway, smelling rat dung, noting the shreds of empty dog food bags I saved to collect dog droppings. The crumbs left in just one of those bags could feed a rat for weeks. I have learned not to leave my trash out for the bears, but I forgot about smaller trash for smaller creatures.

Ratatouille, the 2018 Christmas rat, got in through the baseboard under the stove and snuck around my house for weeks. First I saw holes in the wrapped candy boxes under the Christmas tree. Then more holes in the dog’s Milk-bone box. Then I found droppings among the dishes in the china cabinet. I thought my visitor was a mouse and put out “humane” mouse traps, planning to catch and relocate it. But nothing went into the traps.

The mouse chewed into my corn meal box and left calling cards on the counter. When it nosed my expensive soap from the bathroom across the bedroom carpet, I wondered just how big this mouse was. Then one night while watching TV, I saw our invader, a black rat, flipping a mouse trap around in the hallway like a toy. I chased it into the office and closed the door.

When I called my neighbor, he came stomping over with his shotgun, big man to the rescue. Ratatouille was out of sight by then, and I didn’t want the neighbor shooting up my house or splattering the rat on my grass-green carpet. He went back home and got an oldfashioned rat trap, setting it up with a piece of cheese. A few minutes after he left, I was reading in the living room when I heard a snap. Ratatouille was dead, the bar across his neck. I felt sad. He had seemed so happy playing in the hallway. The dog at my heels, I put on rubber gloves and took the rat corpse out to the woods to become one with the leaves and pine needles—or to be eaten by whatever eats dead rats.

Ratatouille was in my house, eating my food, shitting in the good china, and running across my bedroom while I slept. This new rat in the shed has caused me no harm. I think about setting a trap. But I don’t. I ask him to please leave my new leather gloves alone, close the door, and return to the deck.

The dog, busy chewing on a piece of wood, missed the whole thing.

Do other animals watch me in fear or curiosity? Am I predator or friend? Why do I walk upright, legs moving separately instead of hopping on two feet like the robin or four feet like a squirrel? Why can’t I fly or climb trees? What about my canine companion? Would she kill them if she caught them? Could I stop her? Why is she with me instead of living on her own like the other animals? Why does she allow me to put a collar around her neck and lead her around on a leash?

Do the trees and the robins remember what this land was like before the house, the deck, the hot tub, and the chain link fence? Do they ignore the humans, knowing the land is really theirs, knowing nothing of real estate and mortgages, knowing we’ll leave eventually?

Can you really purchase a piece of the earth and everything that dwells on it? Money means nothing to the birds and butterflies. Do I own the rats and robins? Is not this exchange of money ultimately futile because our time here is limited and the earth will remain?

A dark-brown slug moves slowly across the deck, its feelers swaying side to side. I won’t kill it. It does not hurt me. Nor will I harm the spider coming toward me. I nudge it away.

A mosquito has bitten my hand between the ligaments of my index and middle finger. I didn’t hear it or see it, but my skin itches tremendously. Does the mosquito have a right to bite me? I’m sitting here, big and juicy like the blackberries I pull off the vines that grow wild by the fence. If I can harvest the berries for cobbler, why shouldn’t the mosquito feed off my blood? But if I see it, I will smash it without a second thought.

Hot and thirsty, I go into my house, followed by the dog. I close the sliding glass door and let nature have the yard for now.

At dusk I look down from my deck and see dozens of darkbrown slugs. It’s like an invasion of fat pus-colored snakes. I see the holes they make in the leaves of my roses and hydrangeas, but the plants survive. The slugs’ only danger to me is the sticky ooze if I accidently step on one. But I am not comfortable with so many of them. I’m afraid everywhere I walk is a slug. I think about putting out the “Deadline” slug killer I used in California or luring them to drown in a bowl of beer. But this is Oregon. This is the woods. I don’t want to kill things.

Yes, I eat meat every day. We won’t think about that.

In the house, a long-legged spider hangs above my shower. Another perches in the corner. Their webs line my house and grab me whenever I enter a room. I brush the webs away, cursing. If I can reach the spiders, I trap them in plastic containers and relocate them to the lawn. If I can’t reach them, I talk to them, tell them to stay where they are.

One insomniac night, twitchy and anxious, I decide to take a bath, turn on the red light installed by a previous owner, and see something moving in the water. Without my glasses, I think it’s a hair, reach for it, then realize it’s a spider. I jump back, run for my plastic container and scoop the spider into a puddle of water. I dump it on the grass outside. I never see the spider again; I suspect it drowned. When it’s the spider or me at 2 a.m., I choose myself.

A few days later, when I’m painting my shed on another hot August afternoon, I meet several spiders hanging on the pitted wood. I paint around them and nudge them away with the end of my brush, but I accidentally paint over a spider, paralyzing it as it dies covered in blue-gray ooze. Even if we try not to kill anything, we do.

The dog and I come upon a just-killed garter snake, hit by our gardener’s truck before he stopped to talk to me about trimming my hedge. I’m sure he had no idea he killed a snake. The snake is half upside down, its white belly arcing upward in a final writhe of pain. It will be flattened by more tires and eventually disintegrate and disappear. When I’m driving, bugs splatter on my windshield. Birds have slammed into my windshield and my bumper. Once, I hit a raccoon running across the Coast Highway near the Les Schwab tire store. How many other creatures have I killed or hurt without knowing it?

Now in my kitchen making dinner, I admire the view out the window. The robin hops, looks around, hops again, pecks into the shorn lawn. Near the fence, a Stellar’s jay squawks. Across the yard, juncos with black hoods skitter around seeking food. A pileated woodpecker floats down and joins the party. I admire the red patch on its head, the black ring around its neck, and the herringbone pattern on its wings.

I wish I could go out and join the birds, but they would fly away. “It’s okay,” I’d say. “I won’t hurt you.” But to them, my voice is like the growl of a cougar. So I watch from the window, knowing this place is as much theirs as mine. I imagine the rat asleep in the shed and the bears plotting their midnight raids while I plan what I’ll watch on TV. It all belongs to all of us.

I fill the dog’s bowl with kibble and canned food, hold it up while I say grace, and we settle down to eat, snug in our house surrounded by the mother trees.

Wallace McDonald

Windfall A

remembrance

For a several years, I didn’t know what had become of the Decorah. After Phil had decided to retire and had sold her, she’d been taken from Petersburg and was tied up for a while in a stall at Fisherman’s Terminal on Lake Union. During a visit to Seattle when I’d walked the docks and saw her there, most of the paint was gone and all the equipment with any value stripped off her. She was a hulk, still floating, automatic bilge pumps cycling on and off constantly to keep her that way. She was a sorry sight then, but when I looked for her a couple of years later, she wasn’t to be found and the harbormaster had no record or personal recollection of a vessel of that name. I assumed she must have been towed somewhere and sunk or demolished, so I was surprised when I visited Astoria a couple of year later that there was mention of her in the local newspaper. She had been tied up to a dock in Seaside, right down the coast, when apparently the automatic bilge pumps had failed and she’d become a nuisance wreck, sunk at the dock with just the mast showing at high water. I had no desire to see that.

I had crewed on her, fishing Tanner crab, Bairdi, out of Petersburg when Phil Clausen was her master. She’d been built at Sagstad’s in 1911 for a Norwegian come to Seattle by way of Iowa, constructed for sail to carry dories for longlining halibut. Later she’d been lengthened and powered, a wheelhouse added with cable and pulley steering, and a system of gears and jack-shafts for operating deck equipment, and she was operated as a freighter and salmon trap tender in territorial days. She was a schooner, ninety some feet of thick fir planking fastened to close-spaced oak ribs joined to a massive oak keel and bowstem.

It’s been over 50 years since Phil rescued her after she’d been run aground and had sunk on Colorado Reef in Wrangell Narrows. He’d gotten salvage rights from the insurers, and at low water when she went dry, he stuffed her full of empty 55-gallon fuel drums and inflated buoy bags in the hold, the engine room, the fo’c’sle, every nook and cranny. With a couple of portable gas-powered pumps working as the tide came in, she floated just enough so she could be moved higher on the beach. When she went dry again Phil patched tarps and plywood sheets over fractures in her hull so she could be floated off the reef and towed to a shipyard. There she was hauled out on the railway where cracked ribs were sistered with new wood, and broken planks replaced, then caulk and pitch in the seams, then paint and new zincs. And he had her sheathed with ironbark up the bow stem and around the waterline and extending up the starboard side where the crab pots would bang against her side when they came aboard as she rolled.

Phil’s crab grounds are north of town, up a long inlet that retreating glaciers left behind an eon ago, steep rocky slopes forested deep green beneath snow-covered crags, a place where Phil claims to know the location of every submerged rock within a fathom or two of the surface because he has hit every one of them at some time or other. That was why he had the yard lag an inchand-a-half thick steel bugshoe along the keel, in case there’s another rock he hasn’t found yet. Tanner crab is a winter fishery. Back then, right after New Year’s, we’d time the lulls between weather fronts to run out with the deck full of tied-up coils of buoyline and with red buoys with the Decorah’s identifying number painted on, hanging in bunches tied to the railings. An insulated wood locker would be full of boxed frozen herring, with a pile of empty plastic bait jars secured with gagnions to stainless-steel snaps.

We run the Decorah north out of Petersburg, Phil with his son, Steve, and me as crew. Up in the inlet Phil throttles down when we arrive at the particular spot where on a rising tide Phil maneuvers the Decorah to nudge up against a smooth beach inside a protected bight where he stores his crab pots in stacks along the beach fringe.

We row ashore in a skiff, trailing a long loop of buoyline. One of us gets to climb the spar tree that has a purse block lashed to its trunk high above, and pull up the bight and loop it into the block; then, climbing down, we begin. One pot at a time, strap its bridle to the loop and use the hydraulic-powered crab block to drag pots from the beach to winch aboard and stack them on the deck. When the deck is filled with pots, Phil backs the Decorah off the beach, and we begin setting them in the shallows, to each pot’s bridle we secure tiedup shots of buoyline and a buoy. We spend a few minutes on each pot replacing any worn lacings that attach the nylon web to the steel frame and replacing door hinges with new heavy nylon twine. Then we cut off what’s left of last year’s cotton twine securing the escape panel with new cotton. After each load is set, we time the tide to return to the beach for another load to set, until the last of the hundred come aboard which stay stacked aboard anticipating noon on opening day.

It’s a good time for a mug-up, so Steve and I head aft to the galley for coffee and some kind of snack. We share the cooking, so I get to do breakfasts while Steve takes care of dinner. It’s also my turn to make the soup of the week, which I’ve begun in a big kettle simmering in the middle of the cast-iron top of the Olympic oil stove that provides our cabin heat and hot water along with its cooktop and oven. The engine throttles down and slips out of gear and Phil lets us drift in the middle of the bay, climbs down the wheelhouse ladder with empty mug in hand and an unlit cigarette in his lips, gives the kettle a stir. “Southeast soup,” he pronounces, a local name for pea soup which is purported to bring the wind around to Southeast. “I guess that’s ok as long as it doesn’t blow too hard.” He sits down with us at the table, Steve slides a lighter across to him and he lights his cigarette. Rules of deportment include don’t wear your hat when seated at the table, no mention of barnyard animals is permitted, particularly horses, and absolutely no whistling or you’ll call up a Northerly. I’ve been assured it’s all documented, which is also why we never leave town on a Friday. “Let me have a look at the tide book” says Phil exhaling smoke, and he scans the columns. “Minus tide just after daybreak” he muses. Steve and I know what that means.

After our mug-up, we open up the bait locker and pull out a few boxes of frozen herring to partly thaw overnight, fill a tote with empty bait jars, inventory extra buoyline stacked on the foredeck, coiled and sorted by length. I guess we’re ready. Phil motors across to a particular spot and we drop anchor for the night. Next morning the minus tide reveals a wide flat beach, and Steve and I load shovels and rakes and empty five-gallon buckets and head ashore in the skiff, and we’re back in less than an hour with buckets full of clams, which we sort into mesh bags: little steamers, bigger chowder clams, a few cockles. They’re then suspended in the flooded hold to flush, in days ahead we can vote for clams du jour, a choice of steamers cooked till they just start to open, or the bigger clams chopped into a chowder of canned milk with potatoes and onions and bacon, or baked on the half shell, oozing cheese. Phil has the deciding vote.

It's time for Steve and me to fill bait jars. Half frozen herring is dumped from boxes into a hydraulic powered rotary chopper hung over an empty trayco tub, a real step up from chopping it all by hand. Every empty bait jar gets filled, then snapped on to a line next to the launcher. Phil idles the Decorah across the inlet and up into the bay where he always starts, and he finds the spot he wants at the edge of the submerged gully, positioning us so the pots will land at a particular depth. The first pot is on the launcher, baited up and tied shut, two shots of buoy line and buoy at the ready. Phil slides down the wheelhouse window, checks his watch, then shouts down “Trap!” and puts her in gear as we tip the first pot over the side, heave over the first coil of buoy line so it flakes as it lands in the water and uncoils as the pot begins to sink, heave the next shot of line and pitch over the buoy, then immediately I move to hook into the next in the stack on deck, Steve with hands on hydraulic valve manifold vangs it onto the launcher, each of us snaps in a bait jar, tie its door shut, and hear “trap!” from the wheelhouse and over it goes, Phil idles her along to space them evenly; we hook into the next one and do it again until the first 20 are set. We run over to the shallows where the next string of pots is ready, and we lift and stack another 20, run back out and begin to set this string of pots paralleling the first string. When the deck is clear, we do it again paralleling the string we just set so they’re in a grid pattern. Another 20 and Phil is satisfied with the grid he’s made. It’s gotten dark by now. We finish under floodlights glowing sodium orange from the top of the mast. The next 20 we set more widely spaced off the end of our grid heading out the bay along the edge of the gully where it narrows and deepens. Phil turns the Decorah around to run us back up into the bay while Steve gets going on making dinner and I head to the wheelhouse and take the wheel as Phil declares “cocktail hour” in a satisfied voice and heads down to the galley to sit down with a whiskey and a gab with Steve busy at the stove, while I lock in our course on the autopilot and, keeping an eye on the binnacle and radar, run past the buoys of the pots we set today showing in the floodlights. I throttle down and Phil reappears and disengages the autopilot, I climb down to the deck and head forward to the anchor winch, unlash the safety line, and on Phil’s signal disengage the pawl and tip the anchor so it drops from the hawsepipe, and chain rattles as the drum unwinds as Phil backs her down, then hum of cable feeding out slows as the anchor hits bottom. A few fathoms for scope until Phil calls down “that’s good,” and I dog the winch and head aft to see what Steve’s been preparing. After a quick meal, we head to our bunks for a few hours nap. I’m up first, to crank up the stove’s carburetor control and start a pot of fresh coffee and heat up the griddle to make hotcakes. Phil and Steve fill empty mugs left to warm on the stovetop. Breakfast is quick and then we start. The Decorah is a floodlit mote in the enclosing darkness, hydraulics are engaged and anchor winch valved on and turning, the anchor comes up shedding wedges of mud from its flukes, the shank rumbles over the roller, the drum is dogged and safety line tied off. Steve and I head aft for a few more swallows of coffee, then briefly savor warm dry gloves as we head back out on deck. The bow slices through the smooth sea and the first buoy appears at the edge of our sodium-orange halo. Phil throttles down and maneuvers close, we snag the buoy with a pike pole while Phil takes her out of gear and so we begin. I loop the buoyline into the sheave while Steve turns the rotary valve that starts the hauler to turning. Line peels from the sheave as I lay down a coil and set another on that and then another and another, each coil a little askew as the pile builds, then a knot to slip through and Steve pulls the pile of nylon line out of the way and I coil down poly line coil by coil until the pot breaks the surface. I hook a cable into the bridle and Steve winches it aboard to set on the launcher. A glimpse through the meshes of orange carapaces and waving red eye stalks, scuddering segmented legs and flexing claws.

We each loosen a heavy rubber band that hooks the pot’s door closed, begin sorting out the legal males that get pitched into the flooded hold while smaller males and all the females we send back overboard, grasping their behinds to avoid their claws. We count out the keepers two at a time as Phil puts her into gear and idles toward the next buoy. Used bait jars are removed and dropped on deck, fresh bait jars snapped in. We each tie a corner of the door shut and launch the pot, heave over buoy line, sling out buoy, finger signal the number of keepers up to the wheelhouse. Then the next buoy is there to do the same routine, switching so Steve coils while I stand forward of the hauler with hand on the rotary valve controlling its speed. Good numbers, good start, reason to smile. Thrum of the engine and hydraulics moan as line drools from the sheave. We move from pot to pot; Steve and I trade off coiling, develop the familiar rhythm: coil and hoist, dump the pot’s contents, re-bait, tie shut the door, tip it off, flake the coils over and heave the buoy, signal the number of keepers up to Phil who pencils that into a bookkeeper’s ledger.

The southern horizon now is just beginning to lighten, gradually reddening as sun’s rising glare reveals a line of buoys receding on the reflecting sea leading out the bay towards a black line marking the horizon. We coil and hoist, sort and set, as the Decorah idles, slicing through the mirror surface of the sea streaked with tide. The black smudge of the horizon thickens; sun’s red disc rises barely ahead of the advancing front. Now a skirling breeze ripples the water’s surface, a moist kiss, a breath that at first caresses us then begins to puff up a rippling chop as the black horizon thickens more and overtakes the sun, blotting out its glow. Swells begin to nudge the bow; wind and rain breaks over us borne by the southeaster that hurls spray across the deck as the tide turns and wind begins to run against the sea. We plunge on into the building swells; we’re hunched over under the hoods of our raingear, coiling and hoisting, sorting and launching, buoy to buoy, pot to pot. We’re getting closer to the end of the string and numbers of keepers are falling. “Stack it” Phil calls down as he quickly slides open a window then slams it shut. We begin to stack pots on the swaying deck, slip-tie coils of line, regiment and rank them with their buoys until the last pot swings aboard, and we hang on as Phil times the swells, guns the engine and brings her about. The stern yaws then settles as we turn to run before it back up into the bay. Phil shouts down, “mighty fine soup” or something like that as Steve and I head aft to the galley for a mug-up.

We’re back where the numbers were best and Phil calls down to us, and we set a pot, vang the next onto the launcher, slam it down. We hook into the next, set, then the next and again, timing our motions with the rock and sway of the deck as we swing the pots overhead until the deck is clear again. Phil calculating by depth and compass rose which way the crab might be moving as we start on the next string paralleling the first: coil, hoist, sort, bait, tie it shut, launch as the rail rolls down with the swell. Repeat and again, hand over hand coiling, nudging the pile of line with a boot, then lift, empty, bait, set, buoy to buoy, pot by pot, crab by crab we coil across the bay. A chug of coffee and a handful of grub if there’s time. The two of us on deck syncopating with the rotation of the sheave in almost a waltz but maybe more of a tango as we anticipate each other’s moves, bellowing stories and gossip or just silently focused on our own thoughts. When pots come up full there’s hoots and laughter, counting aloud between us as we pitch keepers into the hold 2-4-6-8 back and forth, then on to the next string as the wind falls and only echoes of swells linger. Daylight gone, we continue under the floodlights until we’ve turned over the whole 100.

The anchor splashes and dives pulling at the rattling chain then sigh of cable scoping out as flukes dig into the mud. Chain flexes with the tide as we drift tethered in our radius of floodlit sea that ripples swaying mast light around Polaris. In the bunk for a few hours, drifting off into coiling dreams uncoiling drifting while herring rise to the floodlights, schools contract, ball, spread flipping, attacked by the hungry who from slash and claw and beak and snap of jaw chunks and particles rain down from the sea’s surface. The detritus of life swirls in the current, cascading down on the way to the abyss, and the crab travel the slopes in herds following the trail of scent, raking in the bits, scurrying so the strong and swift survive, stalked by halibut sucking down the littlest ones, all in the depths of darkness, instinctual and soulless, of origin, of destiny.

Before dawn, the anchor breaks free as cable winds aboard clattering chain, anchor breaks the surface dropping mud from the flukes. We begin again to retrieve, coil, lift, dump, set. A flotilla of gulls forms up alongside, keeping pace to dive after spent bait we dump over from each pot. We toss keepers into the hold and they spin slowly as they sink settling atop a building pile of moiling carapaces and flicking legs flushed through with seawater brimming over the coaming. Along the gully the numbers are good, the crab are big, “the size of dinner plates” Phil remarks, adjusting his grid of pots as daylight shows buoys arrayed around us. He hopscotches one string beyond another. At the beginning of the string the numbers build, then start to taper off, so we stack a few. At the next string parallel, the numbers rise and fall, and then the numbers are better, so Phil sets another string beyond. Then we stack a few and Phil uses landmarks, perhaps a rock lined up with a headland and a lone tree exposed on the beach, and with an eye on the flasher fathometer in the wheelhouse, he locates rills and potholes he’s found before. A pot here, a pot there, “prospectors” he calls them. Daylight’s fading and he uses the radar to find our way through a narrow pass into a small bay where we set what pots are left on deck under the floodlights. We drop the hook and strip off wet gloves and raingear to dry in the heat of the engine room, pull off damp boots and socks, and slip on a dry pair and deck slippers before dinner. With floodlights switched off, the darkness encloses us. Main engine is shut down and the auxiliary drones, keeping the pump running seawater through our building load. We swing beneath our anchor light, gibbous moon rises over jagged icy skyline looming over us. It washes out the stars and draws life billowing and rippling in the sea around us. Dinner is one of Steve’s specialties he’s developed over the years, clams on the half shell, which I don’t recall eating anywhere else besides at anchor in the inlet. We’re in a good mood. Phil’s on them, lots of full pots, hardly any with single digits or zeros that induce shrugs, so stack it and find them somewhere else. Next morning we haul the ones we set last, and the numbers are good enough that we reset them for a longer soak. At daylight we head through the narrow pass back into the bay where most of our pots are set. It’s obvious we’ve had company when Phil spies closely spaced green buoys with white trailers clustered amidst his grid. The vessel is nowhere in sight, but Phil knows whose they are, as do Steve and I, and we join in with our own expletives, but we don’t speak his name, which is not allowed under any circumstances lest we invite some sort of disaster. Phil has a term for that kind of crabbing where, rather than setting out a grid and working an area over succeeding days, instead seeks out the concentration and wipes it out as quickly as possible then runs off to do the same somewhere else. What Phil calls this style alliterates with “clusterfouling.” We begin to haul our first string and the numbers are still pretty good, but when we get closer to the green buoys, set so close to ours that some buoylines intertangle, we waste time untangling them to get at our pot. When we hoist it up the numbers are disappointing, and Steve and I notice the doors are tied shut differently than our method we’ve repeated thousands of times. No surprise here. We continue with our string of pots, noticing which ones have obviously been hauled, probably in the middle of the night, and we set up an empty tote on deck. As we haul the rest of our pots, we measure keepers with a sort of caliper built to the legal minimum. We save all that are just a fraction undersized and pitch them into that tote until we’ve got well over a hundred, and towards the end of the day Phil runs to a spot he knows from long experience has no crab and we stuff one of our pots with the barely undersized ones and set it as if it’s one of Phil’s “prospectors.”

We’re back in our grid and begin to haul one where the buoyline comes up slack at first, we speculate that it must have been sailed by the tide when we set it, so it missed the edge and landed on the surrounding mud bank, it comes up full of starfish and snails so we release the load over the side and stack the pot. Then on to the next pot, retrieve and coil, hoist and, good, we’re back on them. Dumped on the deck, they sidle away flexing their claws as we measure and pitch into the hold or back over the side. We’ll see you next year when you’re grown up. From buoy to buoy, through change of tide and weather, ducking at times under flumes of spray, the sky dims and we’re under the floodlights again. The last pot of the day and the buoyline comes up slack till the pot pulls free. It wound up in the shallows up on the bank and it’s full of dungies. We look up for the word and Phil calls down, “stack it, but save some of those dungies for dinner, ok?” A knowing smile between Steve and me, sure, he planned that one. The biggest cookpot goes on the stovetop, the carburetor control’s cranked all the way up. On deck we butcher a good number of crab, breaking them over the rail. When the anchor drops from the bow and settles into the mud, the sections go into the boiling water while Steve slices through a loaf of French bread to make garlic bread in the oven. We sit at the galley table for our evening meal. Steve and I grab whole sections of crab, cracking and shelling, dipping the meat in bowls of melted butter, and scarfing down the meat while grunting and smacking our lips. Phil, in his accustomed place at the table, patiently picks and cleans and, without taking a bite, meticulously assembles a mound of crabmeat which he eyes briefly, then devours with particular gusto. Leaning back content, he speculates, “I wonder what the King of Norway is having for dinner tonight?”

Next day the green buoys have thinned out from Phil’s grid. Phil calls us up to the wheelhouse and we see a mass of them across the bay, surrounding our lone “prospector.” We run across and haul our pot which, no surprise, is empty. There’s a calm forecast so we stack a few and shuffle them out of the bay, tie on additional 25-fathom shots of line and set them through a ravine that funnels off the end of the island. When we pull them tomorrow, we’ll see how many crab are out on the hard bottom, and it’s likely we’ll wind up with a few grey cod to be sliced and diced for hanging bait. Running between pots, Phil is now spreading them out, time is measured in fathoms and numbers of keepers, pots lifted and pots to go, hand over hand, coil by coil. A pot comes up with just a few empty shells, and, rattling the carapaces he’s cleaned out, an octopus slithers to the deck and melts through the scuppers and escapes. Another pot comes up carpeted with tiny hermit crabs backed into repurposed empty snail shells. They must have marched in through the meshes. We speculate that down there there’s perhaps a cityscape of hermit crabs. We joke we must have landed that pot right downtown, imagining an expanse of little crabs each sizing up the other’s claw and scheming on a bigger home. Another pot’s buoyline comes up tangled with ragged poly line covered with growth. We strap on to it and get it into the hauler and pull up a pot we lost who knows how long ago. Its meshes are covered with growth and barnacles have taken over the frame. The escape panel is folded open where the cotton twine rotted away and allowed anything that was in there a way out. The pot gets stacked on deck, we can pick at all the growth and hose it off when we need something to do, then we’ll have a spare pot. Between strings, Phil hobbles down to the galley for coffee, complains of joint pain, especially his toes, rattles around in the cupboard looking for ibuprofen. Back on our grid the numbers have fallen a bit, but its still pretty good fishing. As we haul, Phil adjusts and spreads out the pots a bit more. Adjusting the volume and squelch on the single sideband radio, he listens in on all the weather observations from around the gulf and on out to the chain, moderated on schedule by Peggy Dyson in Kodiak. Other times, signal skips send us traffic spoken in Russian and in Japanese. The weather forecast broadcast repeating on the VHF radio calls for colder temperatures with not much wind. Yet. We haul in a string set a little further down the slope, a little deeper, and the Tanners thin out, and we pick up a few red king crab. It’s moulting season, so their shells are new and a little soft, we return them over the side so they can have a chance to fill out their new shells with meat. One particularly large one comes up with his shell crusted with barnacles. “It’s grandpa!” Phil calls down. “Be nice to grandpa, now!” as we carefully send the old skip-moult back over the side. We reset the pots a little shallower to get away from the king crab. They’ll all have full shells in the fall. We hope there’s a season then, but it’s doubtful. As darkness falls, the sky clears and we head up into the harbor, setting a couple of pots along the way, and anchor up off the pack ice at the river mouth. We’re enveloped by the night as northern lights swirl and ripple across the sky. Steve left a slab of corned beef to simmer on the stovetop all day, and we’ve just finished our tender portions with cabbage and potatoes and lots of butter when on the VHF in the galley, tuned to channel 16, we hear an unmistakable voice, two words, “you bastards!” We can’t stop laughing for several minutes. Phil gets up from the table wincing, the pain in his toes is unabated, one big toe is swollen red. He can barely make it up the wheelhouse ladder to his bunk.

In the still-dark morning sky, the northern lights are yet dancing when we raise the anchor, shattering the skim of ice that’s built around us, and the Decorah plows through out of the harbor ice peeling from her ironbark sheath. Another day begins, the pots are spread out now, and Phil has us stack a few. We run across the inlet and set in isolated spots and inside little coves, one here, a couple there. We spy our nemesis, a fiberglass Delta combination, through a pass at the top of the bay, no doubt setting clusters of pots wherever he thinks the crab might live. The light breeze shifts to southeast. Up on the chart table, a chart curls open showing a bay that’s a splotch of pale blue ink spilling across the paper, all stippled and spotted with a constellation of asterisks showing rock piles between yellow pincers of headlands. Phil plots our way through the cabbage patch of submerged, seaweedcovered rocks by lining up spike of rock with peak beyond to thread the channel on into the gully hidden there. We see off the bow where a rainbow ends, where for sure these pots will come up full. Those pots set, we run back out to the deeper ravine where we’d set a string for a long soak and hauling under the flood lights they come up with decent numbers. Phil speculates they’re on the march headed up into the bay. Phil runs us back up inside, and on the way into harbor, he has us set the three pots stacked on deck close to a small rocky point. We anchor for another night as the sky clouds over.

In the morning, as we head out into the bay, the sound of the main is muffled as the breeze drops off. Snow begins to fall in thick flakes, and each buoy is capped with snow. First we haul the three we set last night, two come up empty, the third has a couple of blue king crab males, which we gently dump over. Phil is pleased to see them, this is his secret spot where he has found a tiny colony of this species which survive only near glaciers, but somehow, for some thousands of years, this population has survived long after the glacier has left them. He’s always refused to take any, and we are sworn to secrecy. We stack the pots and head back out to start in on the closest string of pots. The light breeze swings around northerly and falling flakes become a swirling powder. Buoyline stiffens, freezing as it peels from the sheave. The green buoys are gone, their removal I suspect encouraged by Phil’s musing with one of his VHF radio buddies that he figured he’d found some good targets for sighting in our rifles. Receding tide reveals deer grazing on seaweed exposed on the beach. Phil, binoculars in hand, calls down, let’s take a break, lock and load. Steve and I head to the beach in the skiff, land and follow the beach fringe upwind, each of us picks a young buck, ignoring the biggest buck with his fine rack. When they sense our presence, they stop grazing and lift their heads. We fire nearly simultaneously, the herd bounds into the brush and disappears, except two bucks who drop. We pull out our knives to gut them, then bring the skiff up the beach and load them to run back out to the Decorah. Gutted and skinned and hung in the rigging to cure in the chill breeze, we’ll have venison enough, but first we’ll have fried liver and heart. We finish out the day coiling from buoy to snow-capped buoy, the wriggling mass of crabs mounded in the hold spreads out into the corners, getting deeper with every pot we haul. The big cast iron skillet heats on the cranked-up stove, diced bacon and onion smell pervades as anchor drops and sets into the mud. I slide in on the bench behind the galley table as the platter touches down steaming with slices of liver and heart, and when we’re stuffed, there’s time for a couple of stories and a few good laughs before we head for our bunks.

There’s a bit of a northerly building the next day as we stack the string set off the island’s end. The rising wind kicks up spray that freezes on the rigging and the bulwarks. Between pots, we beat at the ice with aluminum baseball bats kept handy just for this. The Decorah begins to travel further over as she rolls, pauses before rolling back. Spare shots of buoyline stacked on the foredeck are now encased in ice. Phil runs the string of stacked pots far up in the bay, and we set them in a protected bight where there might not be too many crab to catch, but at least we can haul them if the weather worsens. The northerly is building, snow squalls swirl around us. Phil runs us across the inlet to haul our pots scattered along that shore, then he hides the Decorah in a pocket of an anchorage, a lagoon reached through a narrow pass in the middle of an islet. From where we’re anchored, we barely glimpse whitecaps galloping past out front through the swaying spruce; we’re securely anchored here where the boat barely has room to swing. Phil takes to his bunk, groaning from the pain he feels in his joints.

We wait till daylight before venturing out. The northerly has abated but still sends gusts of spray across the deck as we begin to haul pots set in protected spots; its slow going. We’ve picked up a decent load by now, we’ve still got bait enough to keep us fishing, but the VHF crackles out a forecast for a stronger northerly on the way. The sky is clearing as daylight fades. Steve and I tie down the booms and batten the hatch cover. Phil points the bow towards home and we begin the run with the sea on our stern. In the galley, hung beneath the cabinet over the sink, a line of ivory coffee mugs, all with their openings oriented inboard, sway in their hooks. I take two and fill them from the pot of hot coffee secured to a corner of the stove, and reaching up set them at the top of the wheelhouse ladder. Climbing up, I see through the dark windows that we’re running with the chop, gusts of spray reflecting the floodlights. Phil’s face is underlit with pulsing raster glow from the radar and is marked by the orange glow of cigarette burning. He’s all creases and stubble; the mike for the VHF is at his lips as he takes a drag from the cigarette then continues his broadcast, in a perennial double-whiskey baritone, to whoever is listening. Call and response, conditions, outlook, forecast, sundry news from town. Call and response, he takes the mug from my extended hand and takes up the story he’d just been telling, glowing coal streaking light as he gestures and punctuates a tale I’ve likely heard before but why should I mind that the numbers of the catch seem to grow with each telling.

I take the helm, and Phil heads to his bunk aft of the wheelhouse where I can hear his groans of pain and muttered expletives. Our course is set around the cape following the far side of the sound to avoid the fresh water ebbing from the glacial bays on the mainland, a course marked by the lights on headlands and an island beyond, navigation lights flash green and red. The wind settles and the sea begins to smooth as we make our way further into the sound. I switch off the floodlights. Someone outbound approaches, a blip on the radar, running lights moving through the darkness pivot to show the red and all is well as we pass then nod bows over each other’s wakes. Closer now, a glow of streetlights, then we make out darkened houses as we run through the harbor mouth.

We tie off to fender piles at the face of the buyer’s dock, the unloading crew boards as the hold gets pumped dry, then tote by tote, legs flexing and clawing, the dock crane lifts and weighs. Weights called down to us are scribbled on a pad; weight by weight, the crab are dumped into flooded tanks on the dock until the hold is empty.

After the fish ticket is passed down to us and weights are checked against our tally, we move the Decorah first to the cold storage for a pallet-load of boxed frozen bait herring, then to the fuel dock, then to tie up at the end of an idle cannery dock and we plug in to shore power. It’s time to hose out the hold, change oil in the engines, fill the fresh water tanks. And then there’s a few hours for town’s burden of apostrophes, possessing and possessed, jumbled pronouns, obligations, dues, bills and penance, taken, bought, paid for, temptations offered or denied, confessions, expiation but no forgiveness. But now our tanks are full of fuel, the bait locker is stuffed with frozen herring, and the grub order has been delivered, stacked in cardboard boxes, and we’re ready for another trip. I’m impatient, ready to roll and slip from a clutch of talons, out from enclosing walls. But the Northerly continues to blow, the forecast is small craft advisory and heavy freezing spray: a harbor day.

Phil’s wife Darlene has offered dinner at their house. I accept to avoid the frozen reception and toxic atmosphere that prevails where I call home, ironically. Steve and I eat well, but Phil has taken to his bed. Steve has already downed a few cocktails, but I’m obliged to head with him downtown to one of the bars which is busy, fueled by the influx of crab money. Other crews are assembled there to trade tales and numbers, shouted over the too loud jukebox. Steve has always fancied himself a ladies’ man, and I see he’s blearily eyeing a tossing head that laughs loudly as she sips from a tall chimney glass. He circles and then approaches her. I watch from where I’m seated sipping at a beer. I see her smile change to a questioning look, then to red-faced fury as she hurls her drink into Steve’s face. If her forefinger had been a dagger…but Steve is unharmed and staggers back to his seat, signalling the bartender he’ll buy her another drink with a shrug and a sheepish smile, tequila sunrise dripping from his moustache. The bartender has a reputation for mixing particularly stiff cocktails. Who knows, once she finishes one, her attitude might change. I sense the rowdiness building; someone’s bound to ring the bell. I don’t need another drink. I need some sleep. I make excuses and leave as Steve begins to discordantly belt out lyrics along with Johnny Horton blaring from the juke box. If certain pot thieves dare show their faces here, I hope everyone’s too drunk to land any solid blows. I head down the darkened dock and climb down the ladder to the boat, and stretch out in my bunk. The auxiliary is shut down, so I lie for while in the quiet, unused to the lack of the thrum and vibration. The Decorah groans, her tie-up lines slipping on the pilings as the tide recedes.

In the morning we convene at Phil and Darlene’s for coffee. Steve looks particularly lumpy where he lays prone on the couch. Phil’s in his recliner with his feet up. One big toe stands out prominently swollen and red. A knock at the door and Dr. D.A. enters with his black bag, stethoscope around his neck, and a gruff exchange of conversation begins as I realize I’m witnessing a doctor making a house call. “It’s gout, Phil. You can’t eat any more crab. It’s called uric acid and it plays hell with your arthritis.” Phil is crestfallen, and I’m thinking the crab have taken some measure of revenge. There’s a scribbled prescription to fill. D.A. calls it in to the drug store, shares a few parting words including a suggestion to Steve that he needs less alcohol in his diet, and then he’s gone. Phil sighs and shakes his head, takes up the tidebook and listens to the weather forecast, sounds like the Northerly will lie down. He then announces when we’ll depart.

We untie in time to catch the ebb, headed towards the cape, timing the change so the flood sweeps us up into the inlet, again to chase an illusion of freedom. The first lift after the long soak should be pretty good, unless someone’s helped themselves in our absence. Coil follows coil as thought follows thought. I could’ve and should’ve and would’ve but for, if only, then and when, but where to begin, where will it end, coil to coil why didn’t you, why would you, how could you, coil by coil again and again, then launch and cast out coils, release regret, cast another query into the deep. We’ll haul back tomorrow for an answer, to discard or to keep. Setting sun reflects a rippling glare leading out the sound, fathom by fathom coiling down, we’ll soon enough be homeward bound, just show me the marks, chart me a course, grant me a way then set me on the edge and I will take that leap of faith.

With wax and wane and flow and ebb, swinging with the tide and wind, night to night and dream by dream, to then begin another day, weigh anchor and in the lights the first buoy shows, then hand over hand, hours ordered by a tidebook’s columns, the cycle pot to pot, from season to season, generation before and now to generation next, compass and course, wheel and vector, from life to life, coil by coil until

The anchor drops, the flukes wedge in, We drift beneath the coiling stars, Tethered now to the surface of time, Existing at the margin of the past receding, On the cusp of the future unfurling, Until the dawning of that day, When each of us begins to sink, Into Memory.

Until that day, then, Until that day.

Bill Sherwonit

In memory of Phil and Darlene, Steve, T.R., Colin, Nels…