Old Songs in a New Cafe: Selected Essays Read online

  But I love otters and wanted to see the little folks out of their wire mesh cages and in the water. So I decided to grit it out. That was when the yellow school buses began to arrive, and I knew it was all over.

  I absolutely never go anywhere that involves yellow school buses. Never. Unless I am paid, and paid handsomely, for it. But the buses came and purged themselves of their cargos. The running, jumping, shrieking future business leaders of America poured from the open doors, glands pounding. But, what the hell. It’s better than another hour of Cooperative Living (For Seniors Only, Elective) taught from some smarmy textbook designed to kill creative passion once and for all.

  The students ran to be in the front row behind the rope barricades. I ran to the north side of the inlet where I figured the swampy ground would discourage those in new Reeboks. No luck. I had merely broken the ice by being the first into that area. Another veteran of the rivers soon joined me, grumbling about what a mess this was turning out to be.

  Then came a heavy-set guy pawing through the branches with a 35-mm camera equipped with at least a 14,000-mm lens. That not being enough, he had affixed a teleconverter between the lens and the camera, which increases the effective length of the lens. He was hand-holding the camera and lens and attachments. I lost track of him, but if he was able to avoid sinking in the lowland low and to lift the apparatus to eye level and fire, I can tell you what his pictures look like without seeing them. It’s the way the world looks to someone who has just been hit sharply behind the ear with a tire iron.

  More yellow school buses. Driven by the same drivers, of course. I finally sorted it all out a few years ago. There are only twelve school bus drivers in the whole world. That’s why they all seem to look the same.

  I staked out a couple of feet of ground, set up my tripod, and asked the ninth-grade boys behind me to please stop pushing each other into the tree branch that whacked me each time one of them fell against it. Why do ninth-grade boys always push each other? Why haven’t we shipped them all to North Dakota until they calm down?

  By this time, I knew exactly why the state trooper was there. He had a drawn and jaundiced look to him, a legacy of too many county fairs and otter releases. I estimated the crowd at four hundred, with more cars and buses still arriving. At 9:30, the promised time for the freeing of the otters, a Department of Natural Resources man with a new-age bullhorn got on top of a pickup truck and asked the crowd for its attention. Attention? He had to be kidding.

  Then he started a spiel about otters and their habitat and how lucky we are to have seed stock that may result in a viable otter population in Iowa. He tried to point out that we used to have lots of otters, but that they were driven to extinction by pollution, loss of habitat, and yellow school buses.

  His speech did not go well. It suffered the same problems as 98.73 percent of all other speeches—an inadequate sound system and length. It went something like this: “Baarraak… otters… (muffled words)… rrarkk… thanks to… kkkzzrraL.”

  He did manage somehow to get across that it would take decades before the otter population was large enough to “harvest.” There’s that word again! We persist in using the euphemism wherever the slaughtering of attractive animals is being talked about. Dammit, we kill them. We slaughter them, just like we slaughter cattle. We catch them in steel traps or blow them down with shotguns. We rip off their hides and wear their furs or hang their heads on den walls. We kill them, we don’t harvest them!Someday we’ll all grow up and face that reality.

  The speech droned on and on, the crowd became restive. You could almost hear it under people’s breath—a chant still in the mind but ready to spring forth if the speech continued. “We want the otters, we want the otters, we want….” The state trooper stiffened, sensing the otter-release equivalent of a feeding frenzy.

  But I don’t blame the DNR people. Cripes, they spend most of their time in obscurity, working hard with seines and handling squishy, crawly things under an August sun. By jove, for once they had a crowd, and this was a chance for their message to get across, whatever it was.

  While the speaker spoke, other DNR personnel dragged several of the cages full of squirming otters down close to the water. And, of course, the media photographers with their usual, but unwarranted, privileges crowded around with whirring gizmos and other gear, blocking the view of those who had come to see the otters. It was worth thirty-three seconds on the evening news, I later noticed.

  Braced, feet wide apart, I protected my Nikon from the high school boys on my left who had never seen a camera before and insisted on standing in front of it. They could be dealt with, though.

  The real problem came from the five-year-old boy on my right who discovered that if you stamp your feet hard in the water, the water flies in all directions. I asked him to stop and pointed at the drops of water on my camera equipment. He ran behind his father’s pant leg a few feet away.

  The DNR speaker shouted something about how the school buses would be organized to pick up the masses after the event. Personally, I thought the DNR ought to unfurl one of its large river seines, pull it through the crowd, and drag the lot of us all the way to Tripoli. I loved the image, dwelt on it.

  The moment was near, I thought. I couldn’t be sure, since the media photographers were practically riding the cages as they were moved nearer the water, But, here and there, I got a glimpse of brown fur in the morning sun, and this fur seemed to be moving toward the quiet water of Sweet’s Marsh,

  I crouched behind my tripod and concentrated on focusing the Nikon. Wham! The five-year-old boy I sent away three minutes ago was back. He had discovered that if you smash the water with a stick, the water flies all over everything. I straightened up, tapped the short-bladed hunting knife that is a standard part of my outdoor kit, and said in a low baritone, “Swamp devil die young.”

  I wiped the water from my camera, while the kid disappeared toward his father. Ready now, here they come. One of the cages was opened, and three otters waddled toward the water. After that, it was bedlam.

  The otters swam through the water, ran along the banks, and wrestled with one another in grass and sunshine. More otters were shown the water, and they knew what to do with it. The DNR man with the bullhorn shouted something about “rotating the crowd so everyone can see the otters.” Nobody paid him any mind. Instead they slithered under the rope barricade and plunged toward the banks of Sweet’s Marsh.

  The program was just getting under way, but I packed my gear and walked to the car. I’ll go back on some cold, rainy day in autumn, a few months from now. I judge it will take that long to get the ninth-grade boys back in their cages and for the yellow school buses to get loaded and back to Tripoli.

  What can be concluded from this event? First, I’m glad the river otters are back in Iowa, and the people responsible for this are to be applauded without end. I truly mean that. I am amplified in spirit just knowing the otters are out there giving it a try.

  Second, if I were a political candidate, I’d use my campaign contributions to corner the market on river otters and prodigiously announce the times and locations of their releases. Then, I’d get a sound system that works; I’d tell everybody how much I love river otters; I’d promise that we will never kill them, especially the babies. Furthermore, I’d promise that we will add more school bus drivers to supplement the existing twelve and that all books dealing with cooperative living will be burned at Sweet’s Marsh as a testament to free speech. I’d be elected president of the galaxy.

  Finally, in light of all the fun we had with the otter release at Sweet’s Marsh, I’m rethinking some of my earlier recommendations about Iowa developing a tourist industry.

  A Canticle for

  Roadcat

  ______________________________________

  I had a friend… and his name was Roadcat. He was young when I was young and old when I was middle-aged. Still, our lives overlapped for a while, and I am grateful for that.

  He was more tha
n a friend, really. Friend and colleague is perhaps a better image. In fact, I sometimes introduced him to strangers as my research associate. We worked together on cold, gray afternoons, poring over books and papers, while the wood stove quietly crackled its way through another Iowa winter.

  Sometimes he lay upon my lap and served as a round and honest book rest. He purred and occasionally reached out to turn pages for me, randomly and with a keen appreciation of the virtues surrounding leisurely scholarship. In the spring, as the days warmed, he moved to the desk, clearing a place for himself by pushing to the floor paper, pens, staplers, and other implements of a writer’s trade.

  He came from a field of long grass behind our house in Columbus, Ohio. Just a few inches in length, he walked along the cement of one of those smarmy subdivisions that make your teeth curl.

  A neighbor’s child abused him. He fought back, as any of us would, and the child’s mother screamed something about rabid cats. My wife observed that the child deserved something more than he got and brought the kitty home for the customary saucer of milk.

  I set him on my lap and said, “This is going to be a fine-looking cat.” But we were on the move in those times and had already promised our daughter one of the kittens from a litter down the street. So the migrant was fed and sent along.

  I sat down to read the paper, glanced up, and he had reappeared on the opposite side of the house at the patio screen door. He looked in at me, and I looked back. He coughed continuously and badly, tried to cry, but the effort was soundless. I picked him up, looked him over with a modest expertise gained from years of living around animals, and said I was taking him to the veterinarian’s office.

  The examination was lengthy, He had worms, ear mites, fleas, and a serious case of bronchitis. I asked the vet, “Is this a road cat?” The doctor smiled, “This is your genuine road cat.”

  We drove home together, he and I and, of course, four kinds of medicine in a brown paper bag. He sat on the car seat, small and uncomplaining, watching me, bright face hopeful The nursery opened. Roadcat had come to stay.

  And it is here, before going on, that I must deal with the issue of sentimentality. If I do not come to grips with that, you might dismiss the rest of what I have to say as mawkish and lacking sound perspective.

  Humans have an arrogant manner of ranking life, as if some squat, three-level hierarchy of existence were fact instead of intellectual artifice. God by various names is way up there, of course, in the first position. A little further down, just a little, lies humankind. Below that, and far below, according to common belief, rests a great squishy level of everything else. Here, we find plants and animals. Maybe even rivers and mountains.

  All right, let’s admit that some transcending presence roams above us. Some call it God, some call it science. Others of us see it as a design so perfect, a great swirling form of truth and beauty and justice and balance, that cosmic ecology might be our term.

  That leaves us and the rest. And if you’re going to attempt rankings, you better have some criteria, some standards of measurement, to use in making your judgments. The problem is that we humans generate the criteria by which the rankings are made. That’s letting the fox in with the chickens, or the cat in with the canary, or us in with beauty. Take your choice.

  I read the philosophers sometimes. They have criteria, such as consciousness and the ability to use technology, for determining who and what get to belong to various communities. But I do not trust their judgments, for the reason just mentioned. I prefer to think of civilizations that are, well, just different—separate, but parallel and equal.

  And I don’t spend much time trying to create workable taxonomies either. Others do that sorting rather competently. But taxonomies always end up looking like hierarchies, and things eventually get a little too classified for my taste.

  So I just coast along with the notion of parallel civilizations. It works pretty well for me. Bears and butterflies, trees and rivers. I try to live alongside rather than above them. Our world is fashioned to make this difficult, but I try.

  Those of you who see things differently, as a matter of “better than” or “on a higher plane than,” are to be pitied. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I know your view is only one way, and that is down. As such, you miss the grand vistas, the shuddering sense of wonderment that comes from looking out across all the civilizations riding along together on Eddington’s great arrow of time.

  And so it was with my friend Roadcat. Riding along on the arrow, we turned the days and marked the pages together. We grinned at each other over sunny afternoons on the deck, and, while he rested in the crook of my folded arm, we tilted our furry heads and stared high and hard at the lights of space just before dawn. Green eyes looking. Blue eyes looking. Wondering about ourselves and the others out there looking back.

  We did that for twelve years plus a month or so. And we came to care, and care deeply, one for the other. He clearly saw, as I eventually did, that power and exploitation were not part of the reflections from each other’s eyes. We came to a position of trust, and, in his wisdom and elegance, that was all he asked.

  I violated that trust only once. I must take time to tell you about it, for the event contains the thread of a hard lesson.

  Roadcat represented all the classic definitions of beauty and good taste. The long, soft pelage on his back and sides was predominantly black and gray. His chin was an off-white that flowed into creamy tan along his chest and belly. Symmetrically perfect were his markings, and he watched his world through green eyes of great immensity and color. His face was expressive, his conformation perfect.

  Given that, it becomes understandable why we fell into the snare of seeing him as an object. When the local cat fanciers association announced a show limited to animals of something called pet quality, we could not resist.

  So Roadcat was put into a wire cage and carried off to the show held as part of the Cattle Congress festivities in Waterloo. Along with the sheep and horses and cattle and hogs, the pet-quality cats would have their day in the ring. He was terrified and panting as I carried him through the crowds, past the Ferris wheel and midway barkers, past Willie Nelson’s touring bus.

  Roadcat’s world was the forest, the warm place under the wood stove, and a canvas deck chair in the summer. He was content with himself and required no conspicuous recognition to prove his worth. His colleague apparently did require it. My wife, my daughter, and I wore blue T-shirts we had made up for the occasion that said “Roadcat” in bold, black letters across the front.

  I watched him closely in the great hall where the judging was held. He was restless in the cage. Finally, he simply lay down and stared directly at me, straight in the eyes. I could see he was disappointed with me, and I was ashamed at having so ruthlessly shattered our mutual respect. Since a time when I was quite young, I have been angered by those public adulations of the human form called beauty contests, and here I was subjecting my friend to exactly that.

  Roadcat refused to be an object. Normally temperate and reserved around strangers, he tore at the paper lining his cage on the judging platform, attempted to push his way through the metal top of his containment, and, when the judge put him on a table for all to see, he simply slid onto his back and tried to scratch the well-meaning woman who was to measure his worth.

  Suddenly, confusion erupted among the various judges and assistants. A huddle formed around Roadcat, and I went forward to see what was happening. One of the assistant judges had lodged a complaint, contending that Roadcat was a purebred and did not belong in a pet-quality show. The supreme arbiter was consulted, and her verdict was this: Roadcat was the prototype image of a breed called Maine coon cats, descendants of random matings between domestic cats who rode the sailing ships from Europe and wild cats of the New World.

  In the American cat shows of the late nineteenth century, the Maine coon cats were the most treasured breed of all. The head judge explained that if this had been 1900, Roadcat would
have been the perfect specimen.

  But humans are never satisfied with nature, and the Maine coon cats, for reasons not clear to either Roadcat or me, had been bred over the decades to have longer noses. Thus Roadcat was held to be something of a relic, slightly out of date, and was allowed in the show.

  He scored high on appearance. The judge said, “He has a wonderful coat, a beautiful face, and the largest, prettiest green eyes I have ever seen.” But, sliding and fighting and slashing out for the nearest human jugular vein within reach, he received a failing grade on the personality dimension and was awarded a fourth-place ribbon. Those green eyes brimmed with nasty satisfaction when the judge said, “I’ll bet he’s not like this at home, is he?”

  Back through the midway, past the Ferris wheel, past Willie Nelson’s bus, and home to the woods. He was disinterested in his remarkable heritage, slept away his terror, and had nothing to do with any of us for sometime. Gradually, he accepted my apologies, and our friendship warmed. But he made me work on re-crafting our trust as though it were a fine piece of furniture.

  Roadcat was good-natured about most things, though, and seemed to enjoy the little inanities we created around his presence. On pasta nights, his name was changed temporarily to Roadicotta. When my wife, Georgia, held her seasonal pottery sales at our home, he charmed the customers by finding a large pot in which to sit and look out at the commotion. He became “The Retailer” on those occasions. He was “The Chief Inspector” for anything new that came into the house or onto the property, including musical instruments, canoes, and furnaces. In his later years, we called him “The Old Duffer” or “The Big Guy.” But mostly he went by Roadie.

  He even tolerated the nonsense of my singing songs appropriate to the can of food he and I chose each morning. Seafood Supper? I sang a verse of an old whaling song to the pitch of the electric can opener. How about Country Style for Cats? That got him “San Antonio Rose” in B-flat major, and Elegant Entre was served with a sprinkling of Cole Porter.