MONTANA LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY

When I ordered “The Power of Art” -- which is a series of lectures on famous artists as presented by the BBC -- I had no idea who Simon Schama was.  He turns out to be a professor of art, history and politics who works both sides of the Atlantic and is almost the definition of “irrepressible.”  His language is so eloquently elegant, sensuous and inventive that it’s almost lascivious.  Tim has seen him in person and says his hands fly everywhere like wings.  Clearly his tongue also has wings.  A parody on YouTube goes for his bobble head.  He’s a high-concept, wry, mischievous fellow, six years younger than me, and what Montana folks would call a “character.”

The middle of the three disc series came first -- what did I think, that it wouldn’t have to come from out-of-state?  I’m just grateful to get these DVD’s.  But I had thought they would be about, you know, color and composition with maybe a little sociological context about the times.  But in the mouth of Schama, each artist (here, it was David and the French Revolution, Turner and the English awakening of conscience, and Van Gogh searching for God in creation) was practically a re-enactment of the Passion of Christ.  (In fact, that exact image snuck in here and there.)  Schama believes in the artist as daemon, inspired monster, outside any social restraints, and illustrates in some cases by providing previously forbidden images.

I suppose now it seems safe to show us Marat dead in his bath, sainted at last;  or Turner’s slave ship drowning its human cargo so they will be insured, forever damning the ship captain; much less Van Gogh stuffing a whole tube of Chrome Yellow oil paint into his mouth.  (I hope it was mustard.)  I can see why few in Montana watch this series, quite apart from not being able to get public television except on cable.  Modern cowboy artists are pleasant businessmen with very nice houses.  Charlie Russell is a grandfatherly gent who only hung around whore houses because he was . . .  well, nevermind.  No one expects artists to, um, “impact” politics.  For one thing, most of the buyers are Republicans, though Democrats like pretty scenery and animals.  There is no political niche for demented artists.  Even Governor Schweitzer’s mild excursions outside sober propriety get called down.  (Repubs are known to drink but never to be too drunk to drive.)

David (Da-VEED) was not above pandering to rich patrons and painted them very well.  According to Schama, the awakening came when he visited Rome and realized that the French sovereign order with all its wretched excess was heading for the same ruined fate.  Huge national debt, personal wealth sequestered from general poverty and privation, frivolous preoccupation with glamour and sex -- am I scaring you yet?  Or were you already pretty worried?  Maybe looking for someone to blame.  Thousands were guillotined -- the best, the brightest, and in some cases the bravest.  Hopefully we won’t do that this time, though unfunding education is probably as effective.

Van Gogh, Dutch son of a clergyman that he was, suffered from actual physiological damage expressed in epileptic fits.  Sensitive to the suffering of the poor, he had thought at first he would convert them and God would come to their aid.  By the end he was simply opening his undefended heart to the land itself, the sunflowers and the wheat fields where the crows flew up.  It proved unendurable, though his ecstatic work endures.

Turner never had a lot of use for humans anyway.  His woman and children were sequestered away from his home/studio.  People were puppets in the grip of a mighty sea of fantastic forces, gorgeously tinted and smeared with vapors.  He recognized the horror but it was always in a context of mighty waves and typhoons of a grandeur that miniaturized humans.

Possibly there are contemporary Montana artists who are painting in this highly charged way, but I can’t think of them at the moment.  Or maybe the media just ignores them as too disturbing, too ugly, raising too many questions about what a human being is on a land so vast, so deadly, so cold and so hot, so little sheltered from winds so powerful, so ranged with mountains with spiritual impact far beyond anything offered in a cathedral and badlands that suggest portraits of hell.

If you talk this way to a Montana person younger than fifty, they’ll think solemnly for a few minutes, then say,  “I have a painting by so-and-so.  How much do you think it might be worth?”   If you talk this way to a Montana person older than eighty, they won’t say anything but their eyes will fill with tears.  If you talk this way to a full-blood Indian (if you can find one), they will simply and quietly rise and leave.

Tim says that most people who listen to Schama have no idea what he’s talking about.  Wikipedia (we don’t approve of Wikipedia) says, prissily, “Schama has a literary way of writing that is attractive to both historians and a wider readership. It is ‘packed with evocative detail: rich fruit cakes crammed with raisins, currants, nuts and glacé cherries all mulled in brandy sauce’.  He has also received criticism from one critic for dumbing down history, presenting a ‘grossly oversimplified and mythologising view of the history of nations’ and not fostering critical thinking.”  This is a predictable sentiment from the snarky little overeducated white male twits who control Wikipedia.  They just cannot tolerate excess and passion.  They have neither the nimble vocabulary nor the sympathy with the masses that Schama demonstrates.

You know, when Ace Powell was still alive, we had conversations about such things.  That’s before he was captured, dried out and commodified.  He would have understood Simon Schama and his long sweeps of idea and theory, even from Ace’s John Birch point of view, which in Ace’s interpretation was a people’s movement.

Now I’m on the hunt for a copy of “Landscape and Memory,” either the book or the DVD.  On the face of it, these two words ought to be highly relevant to an understanding of Montana -- oh, why accept state boundaries?  Have a little scale!  Let’s say an understanding of the high continental eastslope prairie, at least as much as a human can manage.  

AN EAST SIDE MEDITATION

Thursday I left in the dark to be at the eye doctor in Great Falls at 8:30 AM. Eighty mile drive, clear dry road, rackety old pickup. Rackety old driver. I fastened my seat belt. I do not take the iPod because I think while I drive. I drive this road at least once a month. If there is a blizzard or a lot of ice, I don’t go. Along the road is a sign that tells me where to tune my radio to get weather news. There is no radio.

Dawn on the prairie in fall is like the tide going out on a long sandy beach like Seaside, Oregon, drawing back the sea of darkness with its million minnow stars to reveal the day. Do you know how the beach is not flat but has long shallow places where the water lingers and reflects shine? The east -- which is the direction I drive at first -- lightens.

Many people are on the road, going to work, headlights strung out behind me and red lights in front of me. The headlights are not like they used to be. Some are intense but purplish. When they pass, I see that their taillights are a cluster of dots: LED’s. Often one red light is high in the back window. The trucks, mostly new and very clean, are one-ton and one-and-a-half-ton, which is why the drivers need their jobs enough to drive so far. The cars have moved to hybrids, shaped like computer mice, urban, often from the Canadian cities to our north. Antennas like a single whisker on the back.

The first section is fifteen miles of two-lane, then I turn south onto I-15 and there are four lanes. Traffic thins. I trundle along at 55 mph, fast enough in the dark. Now and then is the long dark blood smear of a killed deer. Just the smear. No carcass. One can guess where the smears are likely to be: across from a wood lot by a ranch house or where a coulee leads up to the highway.

Now the vehicles are huge trucks, relentless, pushing the speed limit. Canadian. The land is tilted towards the west and south so that it’s easier to find momentum going south. The land swells so that the truck slows going up for three or four miles and then speeds for three or four miles. My little pickup has to fight to get to seventy so I can pass. If I do manage to pass, the trucker resents me being slower when he’s coming on the downhill (downlow) so he rides my tail and might have time to pass me again before the next upswing. I can see their faces, sometimes amused and sometimes full of rage. Resentment is a fuel that fights fatigue.

Pretty soon the white bands alternating with shoals of purple cloud begin to redden. Instead of getting brighter, the light grows rosier until all the grass and crops everywhere are brassy with it. More intense, redder, then it all begins to go pale again and the sun passes the horizontal shining streams of sky until it is veiled in cloud and everything has gone Payne's gray. The cursive dark script of the edge of the mountains is scribbled along the horizon, sharp-edged. Gradually one sees there is snow up there -- a little patchy, probably mostly gone by afternoon. The cinematography has gone to black and white or maybe blue and white. I ponder the Wallander series which I’m watching on DVD at night. Leaving the peach and purple, or the red and custard yellow, this designer likes bluish black-and-white with caution yellow slashed across it, hard-edged.

When I say I’m from Montana, people say, “Oh, it’s so beautiful there.” They mean the technicolor national parks with animatronic animals. This is different: a hard beauty seeded with the bones of what has been, made slick with primal volcano dust. The cows cluster, not knowing they will be killed and eaten -- not caring. Remnants of old brushy wind breaks still march in lines across the fields. Good places for crows to build nests.

Now I travel at roughly a mile a minute. Forty miles to go, forty minutes left. I kick it up a bit. One can go faster when it’s light. I pass the rest area without stopping. Fewer parked semis than usual. They like to idle there for a nap in the bunk behind the seats. I’ve never seen inside a truck cab sleeper. Some women make a living there. Others drive. The second is new.

Great Falls is not just located at the falls of the Missouri because it is a pretty place, though prettiness is the main industry there now where there are five museums, if you count the Cowboy Museum in a log cabin. Under the land that subsides to the southeast there is a great shelf of rock exposed by water. Not today’s streams, but the mammoth run-off that returned the water of the last huge North American glacier to the sea in the Gulf of Mexico. The continent creases along the Mississippi, like a folded letter responding to hidden motives, now open on the desk. That waterway allowed the Europeans access direct to the heart of the Blackfeet and took away their buffalo before the railroad got there.

Besides pretty the other industry of Great Falls is medicine. Off the freeway onto Tenth Avenue South, the commercial artery just renewed with cement, and I turn towards the campus of ugly modern buildings -- rafter ends and sheets of glass -- I turn a little too soon because I go by landmarks instead of street numbers. While I wait for the technician to test my field of vision, I hear the clerks say, “It was so hot in here yesterday it was just intolerable.” Nothing opens. One cannot roll up the edge of the tipi to let the breeze enter. If the electricity fails, these buildings will be uninhabitable. They won’t be able to use their machines anyway. I look straight ahead for seven minutes, clicking when I see a dot of light. It is just like driving in Montana.

When I return to my pickup, someone has put a small tab of caution-yellow paper under my windshield wiper. It says, “Repent. The end of the world is near.” As if I didn’t know. What THEY don’t know is that the apocalypse is continuous. Something is always dying; something is always birthing. Along the way I could see that the winter wheat has sprouted. Wind. Shield. Wipe your eyes. The tide of dark goes out to reveal the day. Then it returns with its million minnows.

CASSOWARIES

CASSOWARIES
Cassowaries are close to being the oldest living descendants of dinosaurs -- not the big ones like diplodocus, but the fast ones like the velociraptors in “Jurassic Park.” They are rattites, which means they have no keelbone in their breasts -- the anchor-point for the broad wings that allow eagles and geese to fly. Cassowaries like emus and ostriches, are without wings fit for flight. They look a little bit like guinea fowl on steroids, which is natural since they are found in New Guinea these days. The rattites evolved in Gonwandaland, the continent that pre-existed what today is South America, Africa, Madagascar, Antarctica, India, other parts of South Asia, and Australia. At one time it even included Florida and most of Southern Europe. “Science tells us that the Continents of Australia, India, South America, Africa, and Antarctica, existed together as a separate landmass as long as 650 million years ago. And as these continents only began to break up some 130 million years ago, this great supercontinent had a life of around 520 million years; making it perhaps the most important geological structure of the last billion years.”

Dinosaurs crashed about 65 million years ago. By that time Gonwandaland had reconfigured very slowly but quite a lot, changing ocean currents -- which changed weather -- and slowly separating in some places while staying attached in others, so that the evolution of those animals stayed connected as well. But the evolutionary paths were QUITE different, as platypuses, kangaroos and koalas demonstrate.

The inhabitants of the little complex of villages studied by a man named Andrew Gell in the 1960’s didn’t know anything about this plate tectonic geological history, but they knew a lot about today’s cassowary. The bird lives in jungle, has a five-inch blade of a claw, and can disembowel an adult human. They are the second biggest bird on the planet (after ostriches) and the third tallest. (After ostriches and emus.) So elusive that they can stand within a few feet without a person realizing it and then slip away without ever being sensed, they sometimes go on reckless crashing flights through the thick tropical growth, even smashing headlong into tree trunks, achieving speeds of over thirty mph and jumping five feet in the air. They are good swimmers.

A cassowary might be five and a half feet tall and weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, roughly the size of a sow grizzly. Like grizzlies, they are frugiverous (they love to eat fruits) and are interwoven with the forest in part because their droppings distribute the seeds of the plants (well-fertilized) over a wide area. Unlike grizzlies, cassowaries lay three to eight pale aqua eggs at a time, each one three and a half by five and a half inches. “The female does not care for the eggs or the chicks; the male incubates the eggs for two months, then cares for the brown-striped chicks for nine months, defending them fiercely against all potential predators, including humans.” And that scourge of wilderness, pigs.

On the tops of their heads is a kind of callus structure that is evidently a sort of crash helmet. But they are also very aggressive, ferocious fighters, which might make a protection like that an attractively potent silhouette for the ladies. Birds seem to admire headgear (which is ironic since so many were almost stamped out when they became popular decorations for human ladies). One experimenter “helped out” a certain kind of songbird with a plume on its head by gluing on additions and then showing the augmented suitors to females. They became ever more attractive as, like Bartholomew Cubbins, their heads became more elaborate -- until they could hardly hold their heads up. Google reports no athletic teams called “The Cassowaries” though one could easily imagine someone in a mascot suit disguised as a big aggressive bird with a helmet. (I note that there is no school mascot called the “The Pigs” either. “The Boars”? The Bores?)

New Guinea as it exists today is the product of a plate tectonic crash that left it with a miserable combination of swampy bug-ridden lowlands, tilted rocky foothills and highlands so tall that they cast their rain shadow over Australia, making it the fire-swept droughty continent that it is. The humans who live in New Guinea have a precarious existence, always on the verge of starvation. The people are among the last to be introduced to the contemporary world. One should not deduce from this that are not smart and resourceful -- indeed the environment is so harsh that the weak and stupid don’t last long and Gell reports that no man was able to point to a grandson -- only sons. Life was only two generations long.

When “law and order” arrived and dealt with a violent incident by removing the most aggressive men, some to prison and some to work on plantations, the seized men took note of the terrain through the airplane window as they were flown out -- over two mountain ranges. In the new place they immediately escaped and headed home. Only a few achieved the goal but none were stupid nor weak -- veritable cassowaries of men, single-minded. There are no athletic programs (instead of “modeling war,” they proceed straight to battle) or even schools to have mascots in remote New Guinea, but the men consciously identify with the monster birds. They feature largely in ceremonies.

My hypothesis is that meaningful ceremonies are as ecological as life itself is -- that is, what people believe is true is very much shaped by the world around them. The efficacy of their symbols is directly drawn from their familiarity with the phenomena. “The Lamb of God” can hardly mean much to an Inuit, but it means a great deal to a sheep rancher who has delivered a real lamb, held it in his arms, and taken it to maturity. Still, raising a lamb in Mexico is different from raising a lamb in Montana or Australia. So knowing that a cassowary is a vital symbol to the Umeda tells us what they think the world and the sacred is “about.” As always, survival. But how? At what cost?

Today most people in the world are no longer “emplaced” as were the New Guinea tribesmen of the Sixties who had never left their valleys. Now we look at ecology on a cosmic scale and see relationships over incredible spans of time. In spite of Planet Earth images, we no longer have as rich tactile and concrete nourishing connections with the local ecology since we don’t know where our food was grown, what it looked like before it was picked or killed, what its habits were, its style, its charisma. But the Umeda knew cassowaries very well, especially how they tasted.

More about this later.

PRIMORDIAL SOUP IS OUT

Yesterday the NPR news program briefly described a new take on the beginnings of life. They had a lot of fun with the theory of “primordial soup” as it used to be portrayed in Life magazine with a suspicious brew in a fish tank being zapped with electricity by someone who might have been Dr. Frankenstein’s nephew. The idea was that the early air was methane and ammonia which can form “organic” molecules when shocked. Then after the discovery of the entwined helixes of DNA, the thought turned to mud that might, when drying, push molecules into a twist. Now the attention goes to sea vents, not the big smoking sulphur vents, but small alkaline streams of warmed water that form “cells” or bubbles with a persisting membrane that causes a gradient -- a difference in concentration -- between the inside versus the outside.

The idea is that no matter how interesting and likely a form might be -- molecule or mud structure -- it doesn’t matter any more than an image of the Virgin Mary on a flapjack, unless it has a source of energy to fuel process. Life is process. An unmoving image is not life.

So can death be process. If you put salt on a slug, the water in its body will emerge through its permeable skin, making it shrivel and writhe. (Plasmolyzing it.) Likewise, if cholera gets into your guts, it will draw out all the water in your system through your permeable intestinal walls and throw it out of your body. The effect is deadly. Life needs water.

Cells are fueled by the gradient between the solutions inside and outside the cell wall, which is controlled by a tiny “pump” or gate in the cell wall. It works like water running through a mill race or dam. (That’s a metaphor, not literal.) Malfunctions in those teeny pumps are probably at the bottom of many bodily discomforts. I first started reading about the little pumps when I tried to grasp the literature of fat, how fat forms, what a fat cell does, how to make it stop doing bad things. (Maybe sugar plasmolizes cells?)

As an abstract concept, gradients are more primal than structure because structure is only form but gradients push movement. When we read the news and hear about a wheat glut in one country, starvation in the next or drought in one place but floods in another, my joke has been that we don’t have a shortage/excess problem -- what we have is a distribution problem. Some places get too much, other places don’t get enough. Socially we also have a distribution problem: some people know too much or are too wealthy, other people don’t know enough or are poor.

In fact, when I started really thinking about Native American artifacts, it became clear that there was a value gradient: in the SW there are so many artifacts and they are so inexpensive (“found” is a very good price) while in, say, the NE there are so few early artifacts and they are valued so highly (because that part of the country is obsessed with knowing things and valuing objects) that all one has to do is provide transportation and contacts to make a LOT of money.

Shamefully and tragically, this is also true of pets and children. There is always an excess that people don’t value and there are always people eager to buy them and devote themselves to them, sometimes in a good way and sometimes in a bad way. To successfully address the problem one would have to tackle both sides of the gradient: birth control for animals and people (which probably comes down to forcible sterilization in the end, the same as China, though they say education is also effective) on the one hand and on the other hand somehow diminishing the obsessive craving for puppies and babies, their intense mythic meaning in our lives. Not much chance of that. Drugs come to mind.

The alternative would be rational or at least compassionate management of the “gate” between the two -- excess and desire -- to control black markets (fat chance) and price gouging. Even using such terms to discuss such an emotional and sacred subject will draw volatile responses.

So let’s back off to carbon. We’re actually working on that gradient to try to balance and manage the economic gradient between those who make a lot of it and those who can still wean themselves. Part of the problem is that the planet itself is creating gradients all the time: too much snow for Washington, D.C. politicians, not enough for the polar bears. Instead of salt pumps in the cell wall membranes, we’re dealing with the huge ocean gyres and solar winds moving water and temperatures, but also unseen depths of magma. I keep wondering whether the alternation between la Nina and el Nino in the Pacific ocean isn’t driven by undersea volcanism, the stove top beneath the rising water temperatures. (Where’s that frog? We begin to suspect we are the frog?)

Meanwhile our political salt pumps, the energy-making gates back and forth between the two political environments, have gone awry. The two sides are too much alike maybe, for anything to move. But social pressures never rest and if the pressure rises and rises, the membrane will be ruptured. Hopefully not all the “water” will be purged from the system in a major revolution.

Wallace Stegner wrote a paragraph I’ve often quoted. It’s about the “peneplain” which is the flat and even surface that the prairie is always eroding towards, the movement of the wind and water trying to redistribute the elevations of rock by wearing them down and raise the coulees by filling them up, erosion balancing sedimentation, to make the planet into a bowling ball. But volcanism and plate tectonics -- maybe a few meteor strikes -- ruck up mountains and craters all over again.

I suppose it’s selfish to take this grand can-opening idea of gradient to my own life, but it does seem to me that the gradient between too much work and not enough work can be either productive or overwhelming. What is the membrane that manages the flow? Isn’t it rational planning? But one would not want to eliminate chance and joy, those great disrupters.

THREE NATURAL HISTORY BLOGS

The original idea of the “weblog” (which became “blog”) was to provide a log of websites visited so as to remember before “bookmarks” or links were devised. That was before the design of web templates was made automatic enough for we non-programmers to just call up a provider and fill in the spaces. I think I was born to blog. I resist progress in terms of adding bells and whistles all the time, but as a method of “publishing” a 1,000 word essay every day, it is a boon and a miracle. I became used to writing columns long ago and then newsletters plus, of course, preaching every Sunday, and then in seminary mailing out a one-page essay about what was happening. Very helpful since I had a struggle at age forty, learning to think in that linear deductive way, history-based, biblio-justified.

But as a reader, I dearly and in particular love the blogs that include photos taken by the blogger. (There are not many who post videos except for Barrus and the boys.) I cherish Stephen Bodio's Querencia (http:stephenbodio.blogspot.com ) esp. since Cat Urbigkit has come aboard. The Bodios are farther south in the Southwest, but Cat is ranching in Wyoming, a closer ecology, and she has a clear-eyed camera besides all those beguiling dogs. The Bodio dogs are like racehorses, but the Urbigkit dogs are guard dogs, almost bears, with cuddly cubbie little babies. Then there are startlers like the small herd of cranberry red sheep, dyed to be marker sheep in the way that black sheep used to be. If a marker sheep is missing, there are probably other sheep missing. I don’t know why a sheep should look so natural when it’s cranberry red -- maybe because I think of woolly Hudson’s Bay blankets.

http://prairieice.blogspot.com/ is John Carlson, a photographer who works both Antarctica and the North American prairie. His recent photos of bison in a blizzard are among the most mystical portraits of the animals that I’ve seen. When you look at John, you’ll see that he’s a hearty fellow capable of going out in such weather. Now that so many “ecology” and “environmental” writers are preoccupied with laws and regulations, numerical counts and so on, natural science seems to have migrated to photographs. I can’t say that I object.

I do appreciate http://trevorherriot.blogspot.com/ who says “I am a prairie naturalist who writes books, essays, and radio documentaries about the intersection of culture and nature on the northern Great Plains.” Trevor is a bit north of me in Regina, Saskatchewan. I’ve preached there several times but didn’t meet Trevor, who would have been a kid then anyway. He talks about “citizen science” which crosses politics with biology/ecology and he’s a great networker. Since he ignores national boundaries and so do I (even though I can’t even cross into Canada until I scrounge up $100 for a passport), he’s valuable in helping to break down the glass wall between the two sides.

In fact, it was Trevor’s link that took me to http://nativeshores.blogspot.com/ which is the blog of a man with so many eerie coincidences with my own life that I shiver while I read. We’ve made contact (which is the great thing about bloggers, who are neither dead nor so sequestered that they don’t answer mail) and he’s impressed by the coincidences as well. He’s living in Swan River, which is where my father’s family homesteaded a potato farm in the Twenties. He raises llamas, which my “sister-out-law” raises. He took classes from Jim Gustafson and Langdon Gilkey at the U of Chicago, two of my landmark professors who had the same effect on me. He went through a period of reading the object relations psychologists. (Winnicott, Kohut, and Klein -- what I call “the teddy bear books” since they key off the idea that little kids when separating from their mothers use a teddy bear as a transitional object for reassurance). But alongside this high intellectual stuff and serving a Lutheran congregation (which makes him liturgical, which I am also, though I’m not Christian), he is an organic farmer with a special interest in a little blue berry.

Not Saskatoon/sarvisberries but “haskap” which is a Japanese word because the berry is circumpolar and sounds like a very intense version of huckleberries/blueberries/saskatoons, though he says haskaps belong to the honeysuckle family. Are these other berries also honeysuckle family? Swan River is way the heck up there. But, oddly, sometimes weather farther north is better than here. Soil characteristics and geology count for a lot. I haven’t been up there since our family went back to visit in the Fifties.

We both spent time in Saskatoon, but I didn’t know that in Toronto they call it “the Harlem of the north.” It’s a tough town. Sharon Butala has moved to Calgary. Which is tough in a different way. More cowboy.

Right now the “Native Shores” blog is following out a line of thought about violence: what is it, where does it come from, what are the characteristics and so on. Daily anecdotes. I think about that a lot myself, but he is a boomer and marked by the Vietnam War. This is sort of where I part ways with boomers, because in the Sixties I was adult and in Browning on the Blackfeet Rez, more impressed with the interpersonal violence there, which continues. My sense of massacres is more historical.

The great power of blogs -- far more than Facebook, I think -- is to establish relationships in a network of affinities that go far deeper then Democrat/Republican, even deeper than Canada/US. The affinities among those who deal with animals, who grow things, who walk the prairies and tundra or even the snow crust of polar regions, are deep and strong. Unlike political parties, their byproducts are both beautiful and useful.

An early post on “Native Shores” is about meeting three wolves -- he says “timbre wolves” in one of those wonderful typos (think of howling) -- who have just made a kill. In fact, the deer is still alive when the writer happens onto the scene. The photo of the dying deer -- the wolves faded away for the moment -- is not pretty but it is real. Is it violent? Is the deer violated? The way we so often violate land? Ponder, ponder, ponder.

SLEEPING WITH BATS

At the back of this lot is a decrepit old garage/workshop where bats live this time of year. Bats separate by gender for the summer, the females creating a nursery and the males finding smaller hiding places, maybe in a tree hole. I’m not sure whether I’ve got a nursery out there or not, but it’s my suspicion that I do because sometimes there are very small bats dead out back on the old carpet where Squibbie mauls her prey. This year I laid all the ladders over on their sides, hoping that this will prevent bat assassination, but I’m not entirely successful.

In fact, a couple of nights ago I took an allergy pill so I could breathe through my nose while I slept -- I know, it would be simpler to boot the cats out of my bed, but I need a little cuddling in my life almost more than breath. Anyway, it meant that I slept heavily so when Crackers started batting something around that kept flying up the open window inside the screen, I thought it was a miller moth of which there are a lot right now. When I use the computer at night, they come as though magnetized. (That might really be the case. Have to read up.)

The next morning, this poor creature-toy was wadded up on the floor. I spread it out, but I didn’t look at it too much or too closely. I just put it on the scanner. I tried to put the cat on the scanner but she wouldn’t stay there and cat belly fur is not that interesting anyway. (Jokes.) So maybe someone out there knows much more about bat genitalia than I do and can make a diagnosis.



The first summer I had the cats they brought in bat after bat. What I hated most was when their silken wings were torn so badly they couldn’t fly, but they were still alive and making a sound so high one could barely perceive it. Once, as taught by animal control, I had scooped up the little creature in a paper cup with a bit of cardboard over it and could hear the scuffling in there. So I took it out of town to a creek with tall grass where bugs were flying around and dumped it out. When I looked back, it was crawling up the grass stalks. I hoped a predator, maybe a fox, would get it.

Back at animal control the veterinarian would have killed it and sent it in to be checked for rabies. He was a little cavalier about bats and kept leaving bat corpses on our lunch sandwiches in the fridge until I gave him an old under-the-counter fridge for his meds and critters. But when I got rabies shots for these cats, the veterinarian here wasn’t just cavalier -- he was almost resistant to the whole idea of checking for rabies, even though we were under a rabies quarantine at the time. A dead rabid raccoon had turned up. But evidently little brown bats rarely carry rabies, though they do carry bedbugs and tapeworms. Wait, BEDBUGS???

In Portland someone ran a check in the West Hills which showed that ten per cent of the bats from the caves up there (I had no idea there WERE caves up there) were rabies carriers. We officers all got vaccine shots, but only the young and the healthy had titres that went up, which led to a lot of teasing of the old guys. By now I doubt that I have any antibodies left. They tell me that if I’m bitten by a confirmed rabies carrier, the treatment is enormously expensive but fail-safe and that in most states, the health department will pick up the tab. I hope that’s true.
*
But that’s not really about the bat. Back east the bats are falling prey to “white nose,” a fungus that kills them while they hibernate in caves, dropping dead from the rocky ceiling. Little brown bats are the most common kind but now they are killed in such great numbers by this predatory fungus that they are beginning to be endangered.

Among “myotis lucifugus,” the formal name, the bats mate in the fall, the female receiving more than one inseminator and holding the sperm in her uterus until towards spring when she releases an egg and begins to grow it. She migrates back up north to my workshop attic and the babies begin to grow, for three weeks staying attached to the nipple whenever the mother is present. No rooting around or shoving to get a better nipple. In the fourth week, mom brings bugs to junior. In the fifth week, mom and junior go hunting together, just as mama cats teach their kittens. After that, the kid is on his own.

Here’s some interesting stuff from the website called “animaldiversity.com,” a terrific site. I ought to pretend I discovered all this from carefully studying my specimen, but it was someone else.

“The skull has some distinguishing characteristics. Myotis lucifugus lacks a saggital crest, has a shortened rostrum, 38 teeth, and a upslope profile of the forehead. In addition, the braincase is flattened and subcircular when observed dorsally.

“Myotis lucifugus does not possess a keel on the calcar and has a short tibia relative to the length of the hind foot (~55% of the tibial length). Myotis lucifugus lacks choroidal papillae and folded retinas, and therefore does not exhibit eye shine.”

It’s eyes don’t shine -- that’s kinda sad. But it can hear a gnat burp at a hundred feet. Here’s some stuff for cocktail parties but probably not dinner parties: “Mating occurs in two phases: active and passive. During the active phase, both partners are awake and alert. In the passive phase, active males mate with torpid individuals of both sexes; passive phase mating is approximately 35% homosexual. Mating is random and promiscuous.”

“Upon female struggle, the male may emit a copulation call to ease the female.” “Trust me!” he shrills in his tiny voice. (Not really.) “Males play no role in parental care.” (Is any bat surprised?) “Where’s my support check?” she shrieks. (They call this anthropomorphism.)

Little brown bats are fond of my yard and buildings (they use the attic of the house, too) in Valier because I have a lot of trees and I let my grass get long, so there are a lot of bugs. Of course, the bats are not fond of the cats. But they like to eat mosquitoes, which makes me like bats. Just not in my bed, please. And hold the bedbugs. There are limits to this web of life thing.