hanklentfer.com » Conversation about Cranes and Conservation

Getting paid to listen.  Closely.  Deeply.  Using microphones to make the tiniest sounds, like the scratch of crab toes on sand grains, loom large and large sounds, like the gush of air out the dinner-plate-sized nostril of a humpback, even bigger.  For the next two years, I’ll be working (along with Richard Nelson) to create a library of natural sounds in Glacier Bay National Park.   From the sizzling pop of melting bergs to the twittering peep of just hatched birds, we’ll be listening and recording it all.  And yes, this does appear to be one of the coolest jobs on the planet.  And no, the position will not be vacated anytime soon.  But you can tune in here to check out the best of the wet, wild, and weird sounds that rumble against our ear drums in the coming months.  You can find additional sounds posted on Orion’s website;

 

Below are a few teaser tracks:

This racket is a mixed flock of mostly pine siskins with a few redpolls, black-capped chickadees, and a nuthatch mixed in.  They are gathered around a feeder in the neighbor’s yard.  Listen for the subtle fluttering of wings stirred in with the bird’s incessant chattering.

 

There is a hydrophone anchored in Glacier Bay.  Five miles of cable snakes along the ocean bottom leading all the way to the small corner office of Chris Gabriele, the Park’s whale biologist.  As Chris cranks out research papers at her keyboard, the sounds of the sea bubble, burp, squeak, and whistle, real time, all around her.  Two weeks ago, Chris’s office filled with the sound of socializing humpbacks, recently arrived from the Hawaii breeding grounds. Chris is one of a handful of humans on the planet who knew what she was hearing.  I’m thankful she reached over and hit the record button.

 

I’m not home right now and my daughter called early this morning to say that the meadow in front of our house was filled with sandhill cranes.  Sorry to not be with my girl soaking in the sights and sounds of the planet’s oldest bird strutting and yammering about  in the front yard.  Here’s a taste of what filled my daughter’s world this morning.

A window opens after every long run.  It happens in the cool down phase, hands on hips, walking it off. There’s a minute, maybe a bit more, when my lungs are no longer gasping but my heart is still thumping along like a mad man and my attention is consumed by that thumping which, unlike the rest of my waking and sleeping life, is a real tangible thumping, an actual knocking against my ribs and a rhythmic roaring against my inner ear.  Striding the path across the meadow back to the house, brainscape dominated with pulse, I realize I have no more control over the beating of my own heart than I do over the burning of the sun. Sure my heart picks up the pace when I jog, slows when I sit, but to say I have anything to do with the day and night, year to year ticking of that invisible muscle is like saying I can dim the sun by putting on a pair of glasses.  Thinking about who or what might actually be responsible for the thumping makes me think about the heart in the junco singing from the top of the pine tree and how tiny it must be (it would lay in the corner of my little finger nail) but there it is, pushing surging song from hopeful bird.  Yet the junco heart would look big alongside the heart of the shrew, beating furiously along at near 200 tiny ticks per minute as he scurries in front of my soggy sneakers and then there’s the heart of a humpback with an aorta the size of a dinner plate and each walloping beat gushing a geyser of blood that would blow your hair back and then there’s all the hearts thipping within a school of herring, pattering within a flock of siskins, thudding within a herd of moose, not to mention the billions of hiking, lounging, hoeing, typing humans running around every corner of the planet.  And, hands on a tree trunk, leg back to stretch out my calf muscle, pulse not quite settled back to normal, I think that all those billions blending into trillions of hearts pulsing within all those individual bodies are not really as separate as they sometimes feel.  Switching to stretch the other leg, I think all those lives, the days of a mayfly or decades of an elephant, are just blips,  just single beats within some larger pulse of a world we can never fully imagine.  And I climb the stairs, remembering that I forgot to defrost anything for dinner and have just enough time for a shower before I pick my girl up from school and suddenly I am quietly no longer thinking about the electric impulse twitching in my chest just as it has twitched in every heart that has ever been and every heart that ever will be.  So this is why I run, why I lace up when it’d be easier to stay at the keyboard, why I pound down pavement and paths, why I pick up the pace at the end, pushing my pulse as high as it will go with the hope that the force sloshing my salty blood about may pound its way, just for a moment, into awareness.

 

 

 

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?