hanklentfer.com » Conversation about Cranes and Conservation

 

True political heroes are hard to find these days.  Below is a letter I recently sent to one of mine.

 

Dear President Carter,

The day you signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation act into law happens to be my birthday.  Each December 2^nd, after blowing out my birthday candles and eating the last of the cake, I go to bed grateful to be living in a state blessed with your foresight.  My home in Gustavus (population 364) is a speck of city in a sea of wildness.  To the north lie the 3.3 million acres of Glacier Bay National Park, a stunning piece of this earth that your pen designated as Wilderness.  To the south lie the 17 million convoluted acres of the Tongass National Forest.  In contrast, New York’s Central Park is a speck of green in a sea of city.  Yet Central Park, so cherished by New Yorkers, is immune from the developmental pressures constantly trying to wring private profit from Alaska’s public lands.

In 2001, shortly after President Bush took office, I launched an effort to gather the wisest voices in the country to speak for the preservation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  You, along with dozens of other visionaries, graciously answered the call and helped birth Arctic Refuge: A Circle of Testimony.  This slim volume is a small contribution to the wide-spread, creative, and on-going effort to carry into the future the grand gift that you made possible over three decades ago.

Enclosed is a copy of my most recent book.  My daughter and I are on the cover.  Behind us are the mountains of the landscape you protected.  I offer this book as a small thank you for the gratitude born from watching my daughter grow up in such a wild and serene place.  Faith of Cranes tells the story of one man, blinded to present beauty by the fear of an ugly future, regaining his sight.

In light of all the challenges we are passing to the coming generations, I can think of no greater task, no project more worthy of our attention and creativity, no greater gift to pass along to our grandchildren than intact landscapes.  I have no doubt that our descendents, generations from now, will embrace the remaining tracts of Alaska’s wild lands in much the same way that New Yorkers cherish Central Park.  I dream of the day when it becomes political suicide to advocate the cutting of the last trees, filling the remaining valleys with mine tailings, or damning the last rivers for more electricity.  Rarity will demand it.  As the ecological fall-out from our industrial choices become increasingly clear, pieces of the earth still relatively intact, will become increasingly important sources of inspiration.

Each year, before blowing out my candles, I close my eyes and wish for wild lands stretching through all the days of my daughter’s life, for wolf howls echoing through the minds of her children, for salmon splashing through summer afternoons of her grandchildren, for whales breaching through the crisp mornings of her great grandchildren.  It is a wish that is, for now, vital and alive.  I thank you ever so deeply for your part in making it so.

Hank

 

 

 

Flow Food

(written for the NYT essay contest on the ethics of eating meat)

 

As a kid, helping my father peel the hide from a deer, I never questioned the hunt.  Growing up in an Alaskan town, meat was an integral, accepted part of our diet.  Not until my twenties did I become puzzled by the power of that tiny piece of lead hurled through the forest with lung-tearing, bone-shattering precision.   Each year, as my appreciation for the deer’s beauty deepened, I became increasingly troubled that I could end the life of an exquisitely gentle being with the mere twitch of a finger.

Not until meals of venison made their way through my wife’s body and lodged themselves in the rolls of my child’s thigh did the hunt fully make sense.  While listening to the gurgled slurping of my nursing girl, I imagined the rain and blueberry bushes, sun and skunk cabbage, dirt and hemlock needles all flowing through the deer, my lover, and then finding a place in the swelling body of my infant daughter.  My daughter, such an obvious embodiment of the deer, forced me to accept that all two hundred pounds of my gangly being must be just as beautiful.  Not until recognizing the deer’s beauty as my own did I truly feel that the violence of the hunt, like the pain and blood of birth, simply mark the shifting of forms.

Whether we are aware of it or not, all of our lives are sustained by the endless shape-shifting flow of birth and death.  While this ever-present current is almost impossible to feel in the sterile expanse of a supermarket, it is a tangible force flowing through the hunting, butchering, and cooking of wild game.   Through the years, the energy bound in the bodies of dozens of deer have been released into bike rides and fiddle concerts, tree climbs and tickle fests.  I am not suggesting a vegetarian diet would have kept my daughter from learning to ride a bike or play music.  But I am convinced that my family’s intimate involvement in the annual hunt has deepened our sense of caring for the landscape that so clearly sustains our lives.

Given the cruel confines of feedlots, the inefficiency of meat production, the health risks of hormone-laden steaks, the destruction of rain forests to support our growing appetite for a cheap burger, ethics demands that we should, for the most part, give up sirloin and start sucking down tofu.  But concerns about commercial meat production blur the underlying question about whether we should be eating animals at all.  Living a thousand miles from the nearest cow, I appreciate that the choice to consume the flesh of another creature comes into repeated focus beneath the cross hairs of my hunting rifle.

An ethical diet, be it based on venison or veggies, has less to do with calories consumed and more to do with gratitude gathered.  From the pool of gratitude spreads a widening flow of awareness.  From awareness grows respect and love, the best tools we have to discern right from wrong.   My daughter said it best when she told me, “Papa, we thank the deer by living a good life.”

 

The following is a conversation between Bill Sherwonit (asking questions) and me (tapping out answers).  It was originally posted on the 49 Writers website.

 

What are the roots of your memoir? Or, perhaps put another way, what sparked your desire to write the story that became Faith of Cranes?

 Prior to fatherhood I was doing my part for conservation: letters to the editor, trips to D.C., responding to action alerts.  When I first learned my wife was pregnant a couple of things quickly came into focus.  First, nine months was not enough time to protect wild places or ensure an ecologically intact world for my child.  Second, children are sponges and I did not want mine soaking up my despair for the future.  If I couldn’t stop the planet from heating up or ensure the cranes would always come, what could I offer my daughter?  If I didn’t want to pass on my despair, where could I put it?

 So, while our child pushed and stretched the skin of Anya’s belly, I set out to grow my sources of joy.  The book chronicles, in a way, that homework assignment.  It tells the story of how one man, blinded to present beauty by the fear of an ugly future, regained his sight.

 The memoir is episodic rather than continuous narrative; it skips around while presenting times, places, and/or events that might be described as turning points in your life. Did you have a clear vision of the book’s structure—and content—from the start? And how, if at all, did your vision for the book change over time?

 The first draft, finished a week before my daughter was born, had nine chapters, one for each month of my wife’s pregnancy.  I didn’t pick the manuscript up again until we were done with diapers, enough time for me to see the structure was flat, the content boring, and the sentences stiff.  If not for the encouragement of a couple of close friends, that first draft would have followed the diapers out the door and I’d have kept on doing all the things you do when you’re not writing.

 There was never a clear vision.  No ah-hah moments.  I made final tweaks to the narrative structure the day before it went to the copy editor.  A friend told me that a writer’s need for good editorial advice is like an owl’s need for a good fat mouse.  When it comes, you pounce on it, swallow it whole, and then puke out what you don’t need.  I was well fed.  A couple of great writers were deeply generous with their time.  My work was figuring out which suggestions to keep and which to hack back out.  I still find bits and parts of earlier drafts tucked into piles of forgotten mail or buried in the bottom of the wood bin.

 In your “Thanks” section, you mention that the book is “a journal of sorts, a chronicle of an ongoing inquiry about how to keep the diminishment of beauty from making us less alive.” When did that inquiry begin? Is that part of what inspired the book? When did you first sense or experience such diminishment in your own life? And what, exactly, do you mean that the world’s diminished beauty makes us “less alive” as humans?

 Urban sprawl, in this country alone, consumes over 3 million acres a year.  Most all of us can tell the story of a creek or canyon, meadow or mountain that is a part of that statistic.  We all see the same population graphs and climate models.  We worry, to some degree, about food security and ocean acidification.  Rubbed by the daily trickle of grim news, our hearts can form a protective callous.  While numbing us to the bad news, such a callous can make us less alive by closing out the beauty that saturates our days.  How do we respond to the grim news in a way that keeps us open to the joy of life?  This is an active question for me, one I’ve pondered for decades, and it’s a motivating force in the book.

 You also mention that “the conversation [about diminished beauty and its affects on us] is expanding . . .” Is one of your goals or hopes for this book that it will help to broaden that conversation?

 My front yard is one of the most biologically rich places on the planet.  The concentration of critters that show up to feast on the bounty is astounding.  Along with the whales and gulls, salmon and sea lions, thousands of humans show up each summer.  The animals are drawn by a hunger for calories. The people are drawn by a common hunger for beauty.  The human capacity to not only create but to absorb, appreciate, celebrate, be struck dumb, and moved to tears by beauty is one of our most fantastic qualities. 

 Unfortunately, the conservation movement in general is crippled by the notion that humans are ugly, that we are a cancerous, unnatural part of the world.  Even the ethic of “Leave No Trace” is rooted in the idea that a bear track is diminished by a boot track.  Now imagine some bizarre critter who sat on the beach or perched in a tree, simply observing and contemplating beauty while all the other animals dashed about gathering food.  If such an animal existed, it would be on the top of every totem pole every carved.  Well, that creature is us and we need to carve those poles.  We need to put them up every place we can.  While humans are obviously capable of great destruction, we are also capable of great beauty.  We need to remind each other that we have the choice.

 I found that several of the book’s most vivid and riveting passages focus on death (the death of a deer, a bear, a good friend, your partner Anya’s father). Did you sense the power of those passages while writing them?

 Encounters with death are the most powerful moments in our lives.  I like the Buddhist’s saying that the man who learns how to die learns how to live.  Holding a dying person’s hand or removing the heart from a still warm deer is loaded with lessons.  In those moments, we can feel our humanity wrapped in shared mortality and grief.  We can sense the insignificant flicker of our life spans. We glimpse that death is not a singular event but a constant flow.  We are reminded to move slowly and love fully.

 The stories of death in the book were powerful as they were experienced.  I did my best to bring a bit of that power onto the page. 

 What were the easiest parts of the book to write? The hardest?

 Easiest stories were moments of joy and beauty – the crane’s return, my daughter reveling in a gale, planting seeds, diving into the cold, rich sea.  Hardest were the most intimate – washing my friend’s body [after his death], sharing prayers around a pile of bones.

 The book’s title—and the story itself—make clear the importance of cranes in your life, but deer seem to play an equally important role, if not more so. One might say the cranes feed or nourish your spirit and deepen your connection to place, while deer clearly tie you to place and also feed you, in both a physical and spiritual manner. Perhaps one might say they simply feed you in different ways. What are your thoughts about that?

 Deer could have easily been the book’s central character.  Like the deer, I’m rooted.  I hunker down through the long winter, run around and fatten up during the long light of summer.  Deer hold the center of gratitude in my life.  They brought me and hold me together with my wife and dearest friends.  They feed me in so many ways. 

 But cranes were far more creative a critter to build a story around.  First of all, they are ancient.  They were squwarking away while deer were still a glimmer in the eye of some yet to mutate quadruped. They also migrate which turned out to be key in telling my story of being rooted.  The led me places I did not want to go, forced me to acknowledge that Alaska is not as big as I wanted it to be.  And through their movement, they connect my story to crane lovers everywhere, from Homer to Lodi, Nome to Nebraska.  Who knew, when I built a house under the migratory path of flying dinosaurs, they’d make such a handy literary device.

 What do you hope that readers will take away from your memoir?

 A high school sweet heart tracked me down after reading the book.  She told me she laughed and cried and closed the book with renewed gratitude for where she lived and what she wanted to share with her children.  What more satisfying feedback can a writer get?

 

My friend Mike tends a garden in paradise, a half hour south of Sacramento.  For an Alaskan boy, plucking an Asian pear off a tree and slicing it into hot oatmeal felt like a morning in Eden.  Pomegranates and persimmons all ripe and ready, mandarins and oranges green and ripening, plums and peaches already picked; the Central Valley is perfect, trees limbs bent with treasure.  No surprise there are millions of people jammed beneath that benevolent sun. 

 Mike loaded me with goodies before I left.  It was 33 degrees and blowing slush when I got home with my back pack laden with fruit.  I fired the woodstove in the sauna and warmed up our little 10’ x 10’ replica of tropical warmth.  After a meal of venison and spuds, my family marveled at the exotic shape and taste of persimmons, the succulent crunch of pears.  Picking apart a pomegranate and listening to rain drips on the roof, it occurred that to me that Alaska is wild precisely because it not paradise.  More than plans and policies, it is shitty weather that keeps moose outnumbering humans, cranes more common than cars. 

While a handful of us humans have learned to tolerate chilly sleet and short days, the real locals, the salmon, bears, whales, and wolves seem to thrive.  If crappy weather is responsible for Alaskan streams being choked with cohos, hillsides feathered with 500 year old trees, brown bears curled into caves, rivers unfettered with dams, shorelines punctuated with eagles, coves churning with capelin, meadows draped in silence then I say let it rain.  Let it be dark. Let humanity press together beneath the sun and let bears shake mists from their ragged fur.   We’ll finish the last of Mike’s fruit in a few days.  I’ll put on a raincoat, strap on a head lamp and talk a grateful walk in the dark and dripping quiet.

Picked up a Seattle rental car this morning.  One on ramp, 15 minutes of terror, and one off ramp later, I was pulling into my sister-in-laws driveway.  After a bowl of soup and two cups of tea I can still feel the adrenalin coursing through my body.  Nothing I do in Alaska feels remotely as dangerous as those twenty minutes of city driving. It is safer captaining a small boat in big seas or hiking up a bear-infested salmon stream or tromping through untrailed forests than changing lanes at 65 mph a few feet from the steel hulk of a screaming semi.  Driving is skirting the edge of catastrophic chaos, a tightrope away from sirens and emergency rooms.  On that freeway every part of me wanted to slow down, to find a sane pace, to get more distance between me and all those cars.  And knowing that slowing down only made things more dangerous, I just kept my foot on the accelerator and tightened my grip on the wheel.  The adrenalin helped my focus, made me keenly aware of the cars on all sides but now, nesting in the still comfort of a house, the residual drip does little more than tighten my shoulders.   If I could get from one reading to the next by hanging out with bears, I’d be a calm man.