Wish You Were Here: Travels Real and Imagined

Review of Acid Row by Minette Walters

2010-03-04T16:54:00.000-08:00

I think I have a new favorite from Minette Walters' list of psychological suspense novels: her 2002 novel Acid Row.

The setting is Bassindale Estate, a poorly designed low-income housing development in England. Acid Row gets its name from the crumbling sign at the entry: "assi d" is all that's left, and the sign is a symbol for the entire poorly maintained development, which is little more than a warehouse for the eldery, the disabled, and single mothers on the dole.

Most of the inhabitants live in fear of each other. Many are angry about their seeming abandonment by the government, an emotion fueled by both drugs and injustice. A rumor that the government has now parked a dangerous pedophile in their midst without a word of warning combines with the disappearance of a child like petrol poured on banked embers.

Two mothers worried about the estate's children organize a peaceful Saturday morning protest march, but the event is hijacked by the estate's maddened youth. They barricade the four entries to the development with overturned cars to thwart the police, and set upon the suspected pedophile with Molotov cocktails. Those who organized the original march find themselves trying to hold back a demonic tide of violence. An idealistic young female doctor finds herself caught in the crossfire.

Most of the action takes place in one very long, very hot Saturday in July. Walters gives us a chance to see this small world poised on the brink of Armageddon through the eyes of a thief and drug dealer fresh out of jail, his pregnant girlfriend and her mother, and the idealistic young doctor whose been trying to improve the lives of those on Acid Row. These would-be heroes form unlikely allegiances with others in the estate as they try to defuse the situation -- or at least escape with their lives and loved ones.

The cold, quiet investigation of the missing child provides a chilling counterpoint to the scorching heat of the battle of Acid Row. The entire story is a page-turner peopled with sympathetic characters whose fate I grew to deeply care about, and the ending is both tragic and satisfying.

Review of Devil Bones by Kathy Reichs

2009-11-05T12:22:00.000-08:00

Kathy Reichs delivers an interesting and entertaining mystery in this 11th entry in the Temperance Brennan series.

During the course of this story, Tempe is residing in Charlotte, North Carolina, dividing her time between teaching at the university and doing forensics for the local authorities. Reichs as usual describes the geography and history of the city, but I could have used a few more sensory details to help ground me in Tempe's reality. Scenes unfolded at a variety of settings, including her lab, her home, a strip mall on the wrong side of town, a Wiccan bonfire, and a riverside body dump site, but all seem oddly remote.

The story brings together what could be a hodgepodge of ripped-from-the-headlines threads in a lesser writer's hands: the discovery of human remains used in some type of ritual, a Bible-thumping politician, gay prostitution, a cop killed in the line of duty, an ongoing tabloid media frenzy, fringe religions such as Wicca and Voodoo, and vigilante justice gone very wrong. Reichs does a good job of weaving all these threads into a solid story with emotional resonance. I did find myself skimming over a lot of the forensic and anthropological explanations -- I usually enjoy them, but they were too detailed even for a geek like me this time. And I was really surprised and a bit disappointed that it took her until chapter 34 to pick up on a key forensic clue that I zeroed in on right away.

Tempe's relationships with everyone from her boss to her daughter to her on-again, off-again boyfriend are the usual minefield, which I find tiresome. In this novel we get a better look at the personal and emotional lives of the two Charlotte detectives she works with closely, which compensates for having to deal with Tempe's personal soap opera.

Review of The Spellman Files and Revenge of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz

2009-11-04T10:31:00.000-08:00

Sometime early this year I read Lisa Lutz's Curse of the Spellmans, thinking that it was the first in the series. It's not, and because there are some references back to "previous documents" in the later books, I recommend that you read them in the correct order, which is:

1. The Spellman Files

2. The Curse of the Spellmans

3. Revenge of the Spellmans

The Spellmans are a San Francisco-based family who run their own Private Investigation business. They spend as much time investigating each others' secrets -- and trying to protect their own private lives from each others' prying -- as they do investigating outsiders.

The narrator is Izzie, chronologically in her mid-to-late 20s but emotionally stuck in an extremely awkward and rebellious adolescence. She is smart, devious, and determined. Her narrative voice is laugh-out-loud funny with wonderfully fresh and ironic observations.

The characters whose lives she chronicles include her extremely experienced, edging-towards-retirement mother and father; her retired cop uncle, Ray; her high-achieving, stick-up-his-butt lawyer of an older brother, golden-boy David; and her extremely smart, somewhat spoiled, and extraordinarily rebellious teenage sister, Rae.

Police Inspector Henry Stone plays such an important role over the course of the books that he practically becomes a member of this dysfunctional family. The assorted clients, bad guys, good guys, rival private detectives, lawyers, judges, and court-ordered therapists who show up tend to be drawn one-dimensionally, which I usually object to, but not in this case, since these caricatures make sense from Izzie's limited frame of reference.

My only negative criticism is that I don't think the reader gets much of a sense of place from these books. Although Izzie frequently rattles off the names of streets and sometimes gives a brief description of a setting, I never feel like I'm standing there with her. Although there was a definite sense of verisimilitude with the parking problems she encounters in the third book!

The first two books in the series had me laughing out loud frequently. The third book was still wonderfully funny, although Izzie is showing signs of growing up, which brings an unexpected -- but welcome -- poignance to the story. Lisa Lutz is a talented storyteller who plays with time and structure and pulls it off with page-turning intensity. I can't wait to get my hands on The Spellmans Strike Again, due out in March 2010.

Review of Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear

2009-11-04T10:01:00.000-08:00

I read a number of mysteries in October, and Among the Mad was the standout.

In this sixth Maisie Dobbs mystery, the psychologist and sleuth -- and the rest of London -- is still dealing with the aftermath of WWI. Although the tale is historical, set in London as 1931 draws to a close, its disabled soldiers, disgruntled workforce, and depressed populace resonate with today's world.

Maisie is drawn into working with the police on a high-profile case that could jeopardize tens or even hundreds of people if they can't catch the culprits in time. At the same time, she must help her assistant, Billy, deal with his wife's hospitalization and caring for his children. I really enjoyed seeing more of Billy's life, although the situation was heart-wrenching. I also loved Maisie's new sense of self-confidence as an accomplished career woman, and liked seeing her lighten up a little bit.

I've never been to London, and I can't say that Winspear's version of the city sets me on fire to visit it -- she paints a bleak cityscape inhabited by a downtrodden people, caught between the horrifying memories of WWI and the gathering clouds of WWII. But the setting is superbly crafted and had me shivering even on Indian Summer days.

I find the Maisie Dobbs series a bit uneven, but this is one of its stronger books, highly recommended.

Oregon Coast Aquarium Exceeds Expectations

2009-09-26T15:24:00.000-07:00

I’ve been a member of the Monterey Bay Aquarium for more than 20 years now, which means that I’m often disappointed when I visit other aquaria. Perhaps they don’t have a very good variety of critters on display; or their tanks may seem too small and barren for their inmates; or their displays may be jazzy but lacking in educational value.

I’d heard good things about the aquarium in Newport, but as I walked through the doors of the Oregon Coast Aquarium and paid my $14.95 admission, I tried to keep my expectations low. They’re a much smaller operation, I kept reminding myself. They haven’t been in business as long. They don’t have the endowments that the Monterey Bay Aquarium has. Don’t expect miracles.

The woman who sold me my ticket said that the sea otter feeding would be in 15 minutes, and the sea lion feeding 30 minutes after that, and pointed me towards their enclosures. I went out into a courtyard and wandered around with my mouth hanging open, delighted by the naturalistic setting the aquarium’s builders had created.

They had sculpted stacks and arches and sea caves like those of Oregon’s shoreline, and tucked the enclosures into this wild-feeling setting. A cluster of people gathered around a window marked the sea otter’s territory, and I moved in close to admire two of their sleek specimens dashing through the water to catch seafood tossed to them by a pair of keepers. The otter feeding was over quickly -- it isn’t a narrated deal like the one at Monterey -- and after a clicking a few photos of their underwater acrobatics I moved on.

I ducked through an arch into a small darkened cave and found a giant octopus curled in an upper corner of its tank, its tentacles furling and unfurling as it slept.

I ducked through another arch and found myself looking down on a pool with three fat harbor seals snoozing on the sculpted rocks around it. Walking around the rock mass, I found large and small windows tucked away where I could spy on the inhabitants both above and under the water. From another angle, I glimpsed the tail and back fins of a harbor seal that was standing on its head underwater.

Then I entered the sea lion zone, where three of the sleek pinnipeds flashed past the underwater window, zooming around in anticipation of their feeding. The harbor seals approached slowly from the other direction; a volunteer standing by to answer questions said that the harbor seals had been fed already, but would lurk in the background, hoping for an extra scrap or two.

The same keepers that had fed the sea otters appeared on the damp fake-rock deck of the pinniped enclosure, and all hell broke loose. The sea lions began charging through the water this way and that, flipping, slapping up against the thick glass of the windows, zooming out of sight, and flying back. The surface of the water foamed and churned, and I laughed, thinking it seemed more like a shark feeding frenzy than a sea lion show! A keeper barked a few commands, and the trio of sea lions split up. The two small ones dashed over to balance side-by-side on a boulder and follow the commands of one keeper. The huge male leapt onto another boulder and saluted his keeper by bringing his right forefin to his forehead. He was rewarded with laughs from the crowd and -- more important to him, I’m sure -- a fish from his keeper. He proceeded through a repertoire of waves, leaps, barks, dives, front tumbles, back flips, splashes on command, and kissing the glass in front of visitors. The show culminated in a kiss on the cheek of his keeper and a magnificent backflip off a high rock that raised a small tidal wave in the enclosure. I was so enthralled by the big guy’s antics that I barely glanced at the two smaller sea lions, and only wish I could have stayed for the afternoon feeding to concentrate on them.

I left the courtyard and wandered through the temporary exhibit, which highlights some of the odder-looking inhabitants of the ocean and discusses how they’ve evolved and what advantages their oddities might give them.

Then I found a room with a display of fish-print art. Fish prints are created by taking a dead specimen of a fish, applying ink to it, and pressing it onto a sheet of paper, kind of like a big rubber stamp. Artists use different colors and get some amazing details of scales, fins, and other structures. I’m normally not crazy about fish prints -- there’s something that kind of creeps me out about using a dead fish as a stamp -- but these were exceptionally beautiful and I found myself admiring them. They led me right to the mouth of the aquarium’s undersea tunnels, acrylic tubes that bisect room-sized tanks.

I stepped into the first one and was surrounded by sea life -- small bait fish clustering at the top, bigger fish swimming alongside me and right over my head. You walk through three sections of tunnels, one of which has you surrounded by sharks! A section of the floor of one tunnel was also acrylic, and it was quite a kick to be able to look down between my feet and see a halibut that must have weighed 100 pounds lying on the sandy floor beneath me.

One of the other visitors said she had come to the aquarium when it first opened and the entire floor of each tunnel had been acrylic, with water and critters underneath, but so many people were afraid to walk on it that the aquarium had to put in carpeting!

There was more to see, and plenty I would have enjoyed going back and seeing again, but I was up against my time limit...but of course I had to stop in the marvelous gift shop before leaving, where I treated myself to two new tee-shirts with great sea-life designs, and found a beautiful print that I now have to find room for on my crowded office wall.

More photos in my facebook album.

Eureka, CA: A Tour Aboard Madaket

2009-09-26T14:58:00.000-07:00

One of the highlights of our day in Eureka was an afternoon tour on a 99 year-old wooden motor boat called the Madaket. She’s been beautifully maintained, and has a gorgeous cabin with, the captain proudly pointed out, the smallest fully-equipped bar licensed in the state of California.

The crew are very proud of the boat and the captain recounted a bit of her history as we chugged up and down the channels of the bay. Madaket was originally used as a ferry to move workers to lumber camps, saw mills, and other work places in the decades before the bridges were built. She carried some 1500 people a day; to put that in perspective for us, the captain pointed out that there were only about 15 on our tour, although she is licensed to carry 45 at a time. Our uncrowded tour gave me plenty of elbow room for taking photos!

We crossed under the 255 overpass into Arcata Bay where tall white “sticks” mark the edges of mud flats. The captain confessed that he isn’t good at “reading the sticks” and stays back in the safe, deeper (...well, 25 foot deep...) water, but we saw another, smaller boat zoom past us, on its way to work the oyster beds. Something like 70% of California’s oysters are grown there, for both domestic use and export. The annual Arcata Bay Oyster Festival draws thousands of people (18000 according to their 2009 web site recap), who consume tens of thousands of oysters cooked in myriad ways.

The bay has provided bountiful shellfish for thousands of years. The captain pointed out part of an island that’s in the process of being reclaimed by the area’s native Americans.They can trace their ancestors’ use of the bay back some 7000 years via the shoreline’s enormous shell middens -- piles of shells left when the oysters have been shucked.

The boat chugged back beneath the overpass and we got a good view of a giant sculpted fisherman, a memorial to the area’s many fishing folk who have died on the job. We motored past the landing where we had caught the boat and out towards the breakwater to see a couple of now-closed pulp mills. One is the greenest pulp mill in the world, the other a not-so-green one that was shut down decades ago by Surfrider Foundation, which was then in its infancy. Apparently the chlorine used in the process of paper-making was polluting the water so badly it was burning the skin of surfers at the harbor mouth!

Although the pulp mills are no longer in operation, there is a stack of logs that would cover a city block, and a small mountain of wood shavings. Nowadays they are loaded into barges and taken up to the Columbia river for processing into paper by pulp mills up there. There is hope that the green mill, now owned by China, will come back online when the economy picks up.

As the captain gave us a narrated tour of the sights, he also pointed out wildlife, mainly in the form of birds: cormorants, pelicans, two blue herons, an osprey nest. We also caught a glimpse of a couple harbor seals.

Before going back to the Madaket’s landing, the captain took us past the amazing Carson mansion, which he claims (and I don’t doubt) is one of the most photographed buildings in the world. Colorful and covered from turret top to lowest porch step in Victorian wooden “lace,” this Painted Lady is truly a queen! It reminded me of one of the fanciful over-the-top wedding cakes on The Food Network and had me shaking my head at what can be done when too little sense is combined with too much money. But I changed my mind when the captain explained that the house had been designed and built by a local lumber baron during the depression. It seems he had decided to invest in building his mansion and a not-quite-so-grandiose one for his son across the street as a way to keep his mill in operation and his workers unemployed. His employees lavished their time and attention on it inside and out, and while he got rock-bottom prices on materials, the project kept his workforce going through the worst of times. Seems like an idea all of today’s bailed out bankers and corporate honchos might want to consider to jump-start our economy...

See more photos at my facebook album.

A Stroll Through Ferndale, CA

2009-09-24T10:37:00.001-07:00

Heading north up 101 to explore the far northern California and southern-central Oregon coasts, we took a slight detour to look at Ferndale. It turned out to be a photographer's delight.

Ferndale is a tiny community that looks like it’s still largely driven by agriculture. Plowed fields and fenced ranch land stretch from the highway to infinity, and one of the biggest welcome signs at the edge of town is sponsored by the 4-H club.

The town is known probably the world over for its amazing Victorian gingerbread buildings. The main street is lined with beautifully crafted storefronts, lovingly painted to show off the beautiful wooden adornments framing every window, every door, every corner.

Multi-story houses, some converted into B&Bs, dot the surrounding streets. Walking the quiet streets is a real feast for the eyes. Although this style of decoration is a bit too elaborate for my taste, I really had fun taking photos of these amazing buildings. I couldn’t help but be touched and impressed by the time, love, and attention to craftsmanship lavished upon them by not only their original builders but also the owners and craftsmen who have maintained and restored them.

As we strolled through the historic downtown, taking photos, admiring the architecture, and popping in and out of galleries and shops, I kept thinking of a new show I’ve been watching on SyFy, Warehouse 13. Ferndale seems exactly the kind of setting for the “bag and tag” team to find an artifact with supernatural powers...

Here's a link to a facebook album of a few of my photos.

Review of The Price of Silence by Kate Wilhelm

2009-09-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

I was a teenage science fiction addict when I first encountered Kate Wilhelm’s work in the form of her classic “Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.” A few years ago I was delighted to stumble across her mystery series featuring attorney Barbara Holloway. When I started packing for my current trip (I’m writing this in a motel in Coos Bay, OR), I hit the library to search out fiction set in Oregon, and was reminded that some of Wilhelm’s work fits the bill.

The Price of Silence is a mystery, but not part of the Barbara Holloway series. It’s the story of Todd Fielding, a young female journalist trying to support herself and her graduate student husband, Barney, who is trying to finish his studies in Corvallis, Oregon. Hard up for work in a down economy and with a dwindling array of newspapers, Todd takes a job in a small, remote town (““Where the hell is Brindle, Oregon?” she muttered, opening the envelope’ (which contains an invitation to a job interview).)

Wilhelm does a nice job of setting the scene. “On the left, a mammoth greenhouse seemed ridiculously out of place considering the temperature was 101. A motel, a gas station with a small convenience store attached, a Safeway...Another store, general merchandise, a tourist-type souvenir store, another motel with a cafe, a rock shop...It looked like a move set waiting for the actors.” Then after a few more turns of the car’s steering wheel, “Brindle had turned into a real village with houses and yards, green things growing, a restaurant, a few people going on about their business.”

Not all is well in this tiny hamlet, as Todd soon discovers when she goes to work for a feisty 80-year-old publisher named Ruth Ann Colonna. Ruth Ann has lived in Brindle all her life, and has memories of helping her father paste up The Brindle Times when she was just a child. Her son Johnny is the managing editor, and proves more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to collecting and printing real news.

A few weeks after Todd arrives in town, a young teenage girl vanishes on the walk to the school bus one morning. Todd is amazed and then incensed at how sanguine local law enforcement, the powers that be, and the community in general are about the girl’s disappearance. When a postcard arrives a week after she vanishes, everyone but the girl’s frantic mother writes her off as a runaway. Probing further, Todd discovers a pattern of girls gone missing over the last two decades, and begins publishing articles about her research in the weekly newspaper. Everyone except Ruth Ann views this as stirring up needless trouble, and Todd soon finds her life threatened.

I loved the characters in this book, and think Wilhelm captures the setting nicely -- I could smell the desert in the scenes where Todd and Barney are exploring the back country. I could have done without the supernatural aspect that came into play, I found the premise that an entire small town would shrug off the disappearances of five teenage girls a little hard to swallow, and I knew the identity of the villain about half-way through the book. But all those negatives didn’t detract from the unfolding of the story, which was logical and well-written and peopled by characters I genuinely cared about.

Review of The Ice House by Minette Walters

2009-09-15T22:54:00.000-07:00

I’ve read and enjoyed a number of Minette Walters’ mysteries over the last fifteen years or so. I just finished The Ice House, her debut novel published in 1992, and I’m glad it wasn’t the first of her works that I encountered, because I might have skipped her later books, and that would have been a shame.

Walters has a way of getting into the creepy psyche of her stories’ bad guys in a fashion that is almost too deep and intimate for my comfort. In this first novel, the twisted emotional and moral fabric of the cops investigating the crime was almost too difficult to stomach.

When a body is discovered in the ice house on the grounds of an English manor, it stirs up reinvestigation of a ten-year-old disappearance. The man who vanished was a scoundrel and a criminal, but his presumed murder turned the narrow-minded villagers against his wife, Phoebe Maybury. She has maintained her innocence and reinforced her isolation with the help of Anne Cattrell and Diana Goode, old friends who moved into the manor with her shortly after her husband vanished. All three of them have things to hide, even from each other and their now-grown children.

The two primary investigators, an inspector and his sergeant, are more deceitful and vindictive than the criminals they are trying to catch. They have a bizarre relationship that swings without warning between gruff fondness and antagonism.

Walters uses shifting third-person viewpoint to good effect, telling parts of the story from the vantage points of each of the cops, each of the women, and a few key witnesses. She does a masterful job of revealing just enough information in each scene to keep the reader turning the page.

Eighty-five percent of the action takes place in the manor house and its grounds, a setting drawn with loving detail. The big house has been divided into three separate flats for the three women sharing it. The characters’ distinctive personalities and careers --horticulturalist, interior designer, and writer--are reflected nicely in their natural habitats, and the reader gets a real taste of the isolation in which they live from spending so much time on the manor grounds. The sights, scents, and sounds of the houses and the pub where the cops encounter various suspects and witnesses also come right off the page.

I found the corrupted cops disturbing and the unfounded animosity of the villagers shocking, but was most deeply unhinged by the way Maybury, Cattrell and Goode all rolled over and accepted their victimization without fighting back. The Ice House was a good mystery with a logical solution and a satisfying ending. It will please readers who are already fans of Minette Walters, but I wouldn’t recommend it as the first of her books to try.

Review of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

2009-09-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

Precocious 11-year-old narrator Flavia de Luce is the highlight of this crime novel, the first in a series intended for adults, although middle-grade readers might also enjoy it. Ignored by her family and the adults around her, she takes solace in chemistry, spending hours in her glassware-filled laboratory at the top of her family’s mansion in the English countryside. When she stumbles upon a corpse in the garden, she sets herself the task of finding the murderer -- or at least saving her father, even if he is guilty, from going to prison for the crime.

I finished this book largely because I found Flavia’s voice so enjoyable. The setting was a disappointment in that the descriptions lacked the telling details that make you feel like you’re right there. I often had a hard time remembering whether the story unfolded in 1950s England, or some decades earlier.

Most scenes had a sketchy, dreamy quality that failed to transport me into our heroine’s reality; the only moments when I felt like I was with Flavia were when she was visiting her dead mother’s mothballed car in the estate’s carriage house, and when she was in the defunct garage that had been pressed into use by the village library for storing overflow materials.

I had a hard time picturing a lake with an island you could wade to, and never had a good picture in my mind of what the rooms of Flavia’s house looked like, or even whether the manor was well-maintained or going to seed.

I figured out early on who the murderer was, also a disappointment. Flavia’s unravelling of her father’s secrets during the course of the investigation was interesting but not terribly compelling.

Unfortunately I found the depictions of all of the other characters, with the exception of the inspector Flavia butts heads with, mere caricatures. Although I never really did understand the inspector’s quote that gave the book its title, I liked the way their relationship grew, and hope that the inspector will become something of a mentor for Flavia in future adventures.

In spite of all my criticisms, I look forward to Flavia’s next adventure, because her voice is so unique and her perspective on life so enjoyable.

Review of Winter Study by Nevada Barr

2009-07-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

This 2008 installment in the adventures of National Park Ranger Anna Pigeon combines Nevada Barr’s signature nature writing with thrilling action and chilling psychological suspense.

The novel takes place on Isle Royale National Park, an island in Lake Superior, in the dead of winter. Anna is flown into the snowbound park, which is closed to tourists during the winter months, to join a group of scientists studying the three packs of gray wolves that make ISRO their home. Homeland Security considers ISRO a potential path for smugglers and terrorists and is threatening to shut down the decades-long research project by opening the park to tourists year-round. Before that happens, Anna hopes to learn something about wolf management, a challenge her home park in Colorado will soon be facing. Instead she ends up investigating the suspicious death of a researcher, who herself was investigating the suspicious death of a wolf.

Barr does a wonderful job of describing the snowbound bunkhouse Anna shares with the researchers, evoking the crunch and squeak of dry, compacted snow underfoot. Through Anna’s eyes we witness a sick old moose harried to death on the lake’s ice by a pack of wolves and watch as the researchers perform a necropsy on a wolf who has died of mysterious wounds.

Anna’s tracking skills are put to good use in unravelling the mystery, and her wilderness survival skills are tested to the absolute limit by ice camping, a near-fatal fall through the ice into the frigid waters of Lake Superior, and her final confrontation with the human villain of the story.

In her characters and their relationships, Barr depicts the odd juxtapositions of isolation and intimacy, caring and hating that grows from the crowded living conditions and constant transience experienced by seasonal park workers.

The clearly drawn supporting characters are intriguing and easy to care about. Their love of their work makes it possible to believe their willingness to sacrifice such creature comforts as electricity and running water in sub-zero temperatures.

Winter Study is a good read for nature lovers, mystery lovers, or anyone looking for a cool fictional escape on a hot summer day.

Book Review: Fox Evil by Minette Walters

2009-03-26T12:23:00.000-07:00

Accomplished writer Minette Walters does her usual magic act in Fox Evil, bringing complex, three-dimensional characters to life in this psychological thriller’s pages.

At either end of the mystery is an isolated old man, retired Colonel James Lockyer-Fox, and his now-grown biological granddaughter, Captain Nancy Smith, who was long ago put up for adoption. Caught in the middle is the Colonel’s lawyer, Mark Ankerton, who is tasked with bringing Smith back into the family.

It turns out that Smith, whose character and features echo those of both her grandfather and his deceased wife, doesn’t really care about being a long-lost heiress. She’s more than happy with the family who adopted her, who are well-to-do themselves, as Ankerton realizes while he waits to meet her in the Smith sitting room. “A nineteenth century map on the wall above the fireplace showed Lower Croft and Coomb Croft as two distinct entities, while a more recent map next to it showed the two within a single boundary, renamed Coomb Farm.”

Farms, land owners, tenants, and property rights are recurring themes in the story, which deals with long-buried secrets, shame and blame, loyalty, and gossip. The Colonel hopes to leave his estate to Smith, largely cutting out her biological mother and uncle. The gossip mongers who have cruelly isolated the Colonel since his wife’s suspicious death live on parts of the farm that he’s already had to sell off to pay his wastrel children’s bad debts. The man and his property are both being neglected by his elderly servants, who live in a “tied cottage” on the property and cannot be evicted and replaced with younger workers. And now travelers are camped on adjoining land, intending to take over “waste property” and put down roots.

The action takes place in Devon, largely on the Colonel’s estate, which Walters describes deftly. “He opened the door on to a walled courtyard and ushered Nancy through...Weeds grew in profusion between the cobbles, and the terra-cotta tubs contained only the brittle skeletons of long-dead plants...They emerged onto an an expanse of parkland...Frost still lay in pockets under the shrubs and tress that formed an avenue facing south, but the bright winter sun had warmed it to a glistening dew on the sweep of grass that sloped away and gave an unrestricted view of Shenstead Valley and the sea beyond.”

The travelers are led by a man calling himself Fox Evil. His name hints at a connection to the Colonel, and he knows far more detail about the area and its inhabitants than a stranger should. He runs his band of travelers like a military group, even down to insisting they all wear black scarves and balaclavas when they face the locals. He alternately neglects and terrifies his own young son, Wolfie, and when some of his fellow travelers begin to balk at his treatment of both Wolfie and themselves, he ratchets up the fear with razor and hammer he carries in his pockets.

Walters does a great job of moving between points of view and raising tensions as she peels away layer after layer of the lies and deceptions from which her characters have woven their lives.

While the story is compelling, and its setting is beautiful, I can't say it's set me on fire to go and explore Devon in reality, just in case its inhabitants are all as deceptive, angry and vindictive as most of this story's characters.

Book Review: The Shanghai Moon by S.J. Rozan

2009-03-08T11:32:00.000-07:00

This ninth book in the Lydia Chin and Bill Smith mystery series is told from Private Investigator Lydia’s point of view, and is centered in her Chinatown community. The story has all the elements I’ve grown accustomed to from S.J. Rozan: wonderful characterization, interesting twists in a compelling plot, and evocative scene-setting.

A surprise element was a fascinating historical component to the mystery. Using letters and many interviews with “old Chinese men,” as a tea-bloated Lydia refers to them affectionately, Rozan deftly tells the history of tens of thousands of Jews who escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Shanghai at the outset of World War II. Letters written by 18-year-old refugee Rosalie Gilder bring to life her flight from Europe aboard a steamer bound for Shanghai, the ups and downs of life in a Shanghai ghetto, and the drama of forging new family bonds against a backdrop of war and oppression.

The letters and history are woven in among scenes and events in Lydia’s private and professional life, and the quaint mystery of a valuable long-lost jewel takes on urgency when it becomes the key to the murder of one of Lydia’s colleagues. Lydia’s unique voice is strengthened by her warring impatience with and appreciation for her own cultural background.

With help from her on-again, off-again partner Bill Smith, Lydia unravels the mysteries within mysteries and brings several wrongdoers to justice. During the investigation, Lydia scorns herself for getting so involved and caring so much about these people whose lives were in the past. I sympathized with her reading Rosalie’s letters late into the night, eagerly reaching for the next one to find out what happened next, since I was doing the same, neglecting sleep and chores in favor of devouring chapter after chapter of The Shanghai Moon, wanting to know what happened with both Rosalie and Lydia.

Through Lydia, Rozan brings to life contemporary New York: Chinatown bustling with people and redolent of noodles and exotic tea, the Diamond District full of couples gazing at engagement rings, suburbs with their small houses set in neat yards. Through Rosalie and her descendants, she brings to life the Shanghai of decades past, from walled gardens and plush restaurants to stinking wharves and crowded ghettoes. And as their stories intertwine, Rozan, Lydia, and the reader explore themes of separation and togetherness, family and belonging, cross-cultural relationships, and deception.

This story’s only real shortcoming for me -- and it’s a minor one -- was a lack of imminent peril; even when one of the bad guys is shoving a gun into Lydia’s face, the conversation is so civilized that I couldn’t bring myself to fear for Lydia’s welfare. Nevertheless, this latest installment in the Lydia Chin and Bill Smith mystery series is a wonderfully complex novel that leaves the reader wanting more.

A Visit with Lucy: Part 3

2009-03-05T20:03:00.000-08:00

After learning far more about Ethiopia than I knew I wanted to know, I reached an “interactive” gallery devoted to Lucy. It began with a recreation of the gully where Lucy’s remains were uncovered, and led you through a series of stations that explored the anatomical features that made Lucy so special.

The challenge at the dry wash full of pebbles and cobbles and boulders was to spot the four “obvious” (to a trained fossil hunter!) fossils that lay exposed amid the geologic rubble. I spotted one of the four bone fragments immediately, and wondered if that was the magical bone that had caught Johanson’s eye, too. After some study, I decided I could see two more, but the fourth eluded me until I hit the “I give up!” button and spotlights hit all four specimens. None of the visitors around me managed to spot more than three, either.

At another station, a human (or hominid -- they are so similar!) skeleton had been drawn on a table, and the challenge was to place jumbled bones (casts, of course) in the right spots. Yet other matching games involved trying to figure out which complete bones were represented by fossilized fragments.

Lucy, although fully grown, was about the size of a contemporary six-year-old girl. Several of the exhibits compared her features to a chimpanzee’s and a human’s, to show how she fit into the winding, wobbly, rather dotted evolutionary line that connects us.

At one station, three skulls -- chimp, Lucy, and human -- were attached via their foramens magnum (the hole in the base through which the spinal cord passes) to the tops of what looked like two-liter plastic soda bottles. The bottles were filled with blue water, marked with lines showing cubic centimeters (cc), and mounted so that they could be turned upside down. When you flipped one over, the skull hung down and blue water poured into the brain case, and you could see by the bottle’s marks how many cc’s it took to fill the brain case. The chimpanzee and Lucy were remarkably close, about 400 ccs each, while the human skull’s brain volume was around 1250 ccs. Up until Lucy’s discovery and analysis, scientists believed that brain volume had increased before walking upright -- bipedalism -- took root. This was one of the major theories of human origin that Lucy’s remains shifted.

Another station invited you to examine the pelvises of a female chimp, Lucy, and a female human. They were mounted to the wall, but on a ball-joint, so that you could really move them around and look at them from different angles. The signs pointed out differences between the chimp and Lucy (and similarities between her and the human) that made it clear that she was bipedal. They also pointed out birth canal similarities the between the chimp and Lucy (and differences between her and the human) that indicated that her offspring would indeed be small-brained as compared to a human.

Still other stations explored the differences and similarities among the knee joints, teeth, and posture of the three species.

From the interactive exhibit room, a long ramp led up to Lucy’s chamber. Every fifteen feet or so, the skull of one of our hominid ancestors stood on a pedestal: Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy’s species), Australopithecus robustus, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Neanderthal man, and finally Homo sapiens. They were just beautiful, and I kept going back and forth, comparing and contrasting. Just before the entry to Lucy’s room was a five-minute video interview of Johanson, and I made myself sit through it before I let myself go into the final darkened chamber, where Lucy herself lay.

The room was circular, and all around was a mural showing fleshed-out hominids in their probable environments. They carried babies, peered from behind bushes, snatched big flying insects out of the sky -- one even seemed to be wrestling a crocodile, which I found a bit jarring. From the explanatory text, I gathered that the latest thinking is that bipedalism began not in the grasslands, where it might give the advantage of seeing over the tall grass, but rather in the forest, where it granted better mobility.

To the right of the entry stood a glass case showing casts of Lucy’s bones put together as though she was standing upright. A mirror at the back of the case let you compare your body to her gracile and incomplete skeleton. The audio presentation for that display talked about how amazing it was that nearly forty percent of her skeleton was recovered, and how even more fortunate that there was enough to “mirror” her left and right sides’ missing pieces: how her lower right leg bone could be used to create a mirror image to take the place of the missing left lower leg bone, while the left upper could be used to complete the right, and so on.

On the other side of the room another upright case surrounded an “artist’s reconstruction” of a fleshed-out Lucy. Diminutive and sporting thumb-like big toes (her feet looked closer to chimps than humans -- they only ever found two toe bones), she was depicted covered with sparse but coarse hair, short and reddish-brown. The hair covered her entire body except for her face, chest, stomach, and the palms of her hands. Her exposed dark skin had the shiny, leathery look of a chimp’s, and her soulful brown eyes were surrounded by crinkles, which made me think she must have smiled a lot.

Finally I let myself approach the glass-shrouded table in the center of the room, where Lucy’s bones -- the actual fossils recovered from that hot and dusty gully in Ethiopia a lifetime ago -- were laid out in their familiar resting conformation. There are only about 30 bones, represented in whole or in part(s), and it was fascinating to see the hairline cracks where they hundreds of pieces had been fitted together to make them. In the short video introduction Johanson had said that most of those pieces had been partially encased in sandstone matrix, all of which had to be carefully removed before they even knew the true shape of each little fragment.

I couldn’t believe my good fortune to be standing there gazing upon Lucy’s actual bones. I went back and forth between the displays in her chamber, comparing every inch of bone to the fleshed-out mannequin, then backtracked down the ramp to look again at each ancestral skull, and then returned to Lucy’s chamber to marvel at her all over again. All told I spent three hours in the exhibit, and only left when I realized I was in danger of missing the IMAX film I had a ticket for!

The article that alerted me to Lucy’s presence in Seattle went on to say that other museums that had been planning to show Lucy’s Legacy were backing out of the deal in droves, afraid they, like the Seattle museum, would lose money on the show, which is very expensive to host. It’s a shame, and a wonder to me, that Lucy didn’t have a better showing. It will be a loss to us all if she has to go back to her vault in Ethiopia before her five-year planned tour of the US expires.

A Visit with Lucy: Part 2 (Ethiopia)

2009-03-05T20:01:00.000-08:00

For the first hour at least, I wended my way through several galleries that explored the culture and history of Ethiopia. I am ashamed to say that my concept of Ethiopia until I encountered that exhibit yesterday was of a barren land inhabited by starving people -- ideas planted by my parents’ frequent refrain of “There are children starving in Ethiopia” whenever I left food on my plate, and reinforced by photo and video images of the famine of 1984-85.

In Lucy’s Legacy, I learned that Ethiopia is the only African nation never to be colonized by Europeans. I admired cultural artifacts -- spears, water carriers, drums, stringed instruments -- that were both beautiful and useful. I discovered that Jews, Muslims, and Christians have coexisted relatively peacefully for centuries, and saw rooms full of boldly colored religious icons, elaborate carved and metal-work crosses, and religious texts.

Photos and models showed amazing churches hewn out of solid rock, and reproductions of colorful murals told both religious and historical stories. The exhibit included an audio tour delivered via a remote-control-like device which you used by punching in numbers and holding it up to your ear. One of the artists whose work was on display explained that it was customary for paintings of people to have slightly large eyes to show their purity of heart. People show face-on were good and innocent, while wrong-doers or those with dark hearts or suspect motives were shown in profile. A mural showing the 1896 Battle of Adwa, during which Ethiopia managed to fend off Italy’s attempt to colonize it, was a wonderful example of these traits, with nearly all the Italian ranks shown in profile, and the virtuous Ethiopians defending their territory shown full-face.

I learned just a little about Haile Salassie, the last Emporer of Ethiopia, who was deposed in 1974 -- the very year that Lucy was discovered. His rule began in 1930, and he brought Ethiopia into the United Nations. He was a vocal proponent of racial equality, and his work was so admired in Jamaica that Bob Marley named his music and movement “Rastafarian” after the last Emporer, whose birth name was Ras Tafari.

Before entering the galleries, I had planned to blow through the Ethiopian culture and history portion of the exhibit quickly, assuming that they wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as the science and romance of Lucy herself. But the folks who designed the exhibit outmaneuvered me. Between their carefully chosen artifacts, the artful way in which they displayed them, and the written and audio descriptions of what they were and how they fit into the complex and colorful puzzle of Ethiopia, they drew me in and made me care.

A Visit with Lucy: Part 1

2009-03-05T19:59:00.000-08:00

Just a few weeks ago, as we were finalizing our plans for our Pacific Northwest road trip, an article about the traveling Lucy’s Legacy exhibit popped up on the web. Lucy is the Australopithecus afarensis that anthropologist Donald Johanson and his colleagues discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. Her 3.2 million year old skeletal remains changed some fundamental ideas about humanity’s antiquity, and her story -- told in Lucy: The Beginnings of Human Kind, by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey -- fascinated me as a teenager and got me interested in writing about science.

The article said that the Lucy exhibit was appearing at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, and that although the show had nearly run its course -- it ends this coming weekend, March 8, 2009 -- only about 60,000 of the anticipated 250,000 visitors had come to see it.

On Monday, March 2, I became one of those lucky few. I arrived at Seattle Center via the monorail, which started handily close to my hotel, an hour before my 11 a.m. entry time for the special exhibit. I used the electronic kiosk at the entry to print my pre-ordered and pre-paid tickets (for the showing of the IMAX film The Mystery of the Nile as well as the Lucy’s Legacy exhibit), then wandered through the museum’s nice but far-from-earth-shattering dinosaur exhibit. At the appointed time I presented myself at the special exhibit’s entry, and spent the next three hours immersed in Lucy’s Legacy.

Beyond Napping: A Visit with the Elephant Seals

2009-02-06T16:56:00.000-08:00

After living in Northern California for more than 20 years now, I’ve had the great fortune to explore many miles of its coastline. While all of it is beautiful, some stretches of Pacific oceanfront draw me back again and again. Año Nuevo State Reserve, just 55 miles south of San Francisco and 20 miles north of Santa Cruz, is one of those places.

Nestled between the staircase steps of marine terraces forming the Santa Cruz mountains in the east and surf-kissed sandy dunes and beaches in the west, the landscape on it’s own is spectacular. But it’s the bountiful wildlife that elevates this beautiful spot to an animal lover’s mecca.

Climbing out of the car in the Visitor’s Center (VC) parking lot, you first sense the presence of wild animals in the distant sound of a bull elephant seal’s challenging roar. Meant to put would-be competitors in their place and advertise the beachmaster’s virility to nearby female Northern elephant seals, the sound creaks and ratchets like the putt-putt of a poorly-tuned outboard motor engine echoing through a giant cave.

Inside the VC you check in for your guided tour (the only way to see the seals from December 15th through March 31st) or your visitor’s permit (available for self-guided tours the remainder of the year). Then you can explore the wonderful books and stuffed animals offered in the store, and work your way through the VC exhibits, which explore the fascinating lives and evolutionary adaptations of the Northern elephant seal.

The VC’s well-designed and informative exhibits discuss the lifecycle of the elephant seals, which start out as 70 pound newborns, weigh around 200 pounds by the time they are a month old, and eventually grow into 1800 pound females and 3000 pound males. The exhibits include photos that show beaches packed with massive light-brown bodies that at first glance look like driftwood logs. But it can’t really prepare you for the sight, sounds, and smells you experience out in the field when you crest the dunes overlooking the beaches where hundreds of Northern elephant seals are giving birth, nursing their young, and breeding next year’s crop of pups.

In past years I’ve taken the tour on typical cold-and-damp or downright soggy January and February days. This year I was in short sleeves, slathered with sunblock, and was able to see and photograph more detail than I’ve observed in the past.

Among the volunteers, researchers, rangers, and other habitual seal-watchers who visit the reserve frequently, the elephant seals have a reputation for being more active on cooler, overcast days, so I was concerned that the cloudless skies and warm breeze on February 1, 2009 might actually work against us.

But as soon as we topped the first ridge in the dunes field, the cacaphony of roaring males, bleating pups, and exasperated females assaulted my ears. In the distance, a pair of subadult males reared up and smashed their chests against each other, fighting for supremacy. A scattering of what looked like driftwood logs closer to me sent up fountains of dry sand to cover their backs, and my eyes finally perceived dozens upon dozens upon dozens of prone elephant seals.

Keeping our voices low in spite of our enthusiasm, we followed our guide through the dunes, checking in all directions for seals -- they move around quite a bit, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act requires that observations be done from a distance which does not disturb the animal or change its natural behavior, quite aside from the fact that they have sharp teeth and short tempers. We stopped at half-a-dozen spots with good views of the rookery, and were able to observe behavior beyond napping, (which was the prevalent activity on most of my previous visits), including:

Subadult males displaying at each other and “practice-fighting,” smashing chest shields together and swiping at each other with sharp canines. (You can tell subadult males by their noses, which have begun to elongate but haven’t yet grown into the full “elephant trunk” appearance they’ll have if they reach maturity.)
Pups nuzzling moms to request a nipple, and moms either rolling over to grant the request, or barking peevishly and moving away a little. The mother’s milk is about 55% fat, and pups grow from 70 pounds to more than 200 pounds in about 28 days drinking it! We saw some females barking at other adults that were getting alarmingly close to their pups, and others barking gently at their pups to solidify the mother-pup bond.
Adult males roaring challenges to each other, and a few times saw them engaged in some chest-bashing, and heard reports that there had been a couple of “good fights” (meaning the males were well-matched, and the bashing and slashing went on for several minutes, resulting in some minor bloodshed) earlier in the day.
Bull males accosting females, but the females dodged all of the mating attempts that I saw.
Both youngsters and adults scratching themselves with their amazingly dextrous front fins, and throwing up fountains of sand to cover their backs. After decades of observation, researchers still don’t know if covering themselves with sand helps keep the elephant seals cool, or reduces itching caused by insects, or acts as a sunblock, or what.
Dozens of gulls and ravens (no vultures, although our guide said they usually could be seen circling overhead) flapping and hopping amidst the huge marine mammals, beady eyes on the lookout for the first signs of a birth in progress. (The birds will swoop in and carry off the very nutritious afterbirth.) We did not, alas, see an actual birth, although some of the pups we observed were obviously just a few hours old.

Most surprising of all, we saw a coyote down on one of the beaches, walking nonchalantly amongst all the enormous pinnipeds, many of which could have crushed it in the blink of an eye. Although coyotes are common in the reserve, that was the first time our guide had seen one walking around among the elephant seals, and speculated that it must, like the birds, be scavenging for afterbirths and the remains of dead seals.

Although the elephant seals only breed during the first few months of they year, you’ll see various factions of the population on the beach during other seasons, resting and molting in between months-long feeding forays out to sea. For more information, visit http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=523.

Book Review: The Last Kashmiri Rose by Barbara Cleverly

2009-01-30T00:48:00.000-08:00

One of the best things about “traveling by fiction” is that I can experience a different time as well as an unfamiliar place through a story’s setting. Barbara Cleverly’s first mystery in the Inspector Joe Sandilands series is an evocative introduction to the India of 1922.

Sandilands, a dashing survivor of the trenches of World War I France, is a Scotland Yard Inspector on loan to the government of Calcutta. He is just about to escape from what he considers a hellish country when he is dispatched to investigate the latest in a string of mysterious deaths on a British army outpost.

The victims have all been wives of British officers, all dying under strange circumstances in the month of March. The murders are strung out so much over time -- the serial murderer apparently interrupted by the advent of World War I, among other things -- that the first thing Sandilands must establish is that they were, indeed, murders. This he does with the able assistance of the woman who drew him into the mystery and Naurung, an extremely engaging and capable young native Indian police officer who becomes the Inspector’s sidekick.

The book held some disappointments and frustrations for me. I wanted a glossary to define unfamiliar terms that were used without explanation, such as “nabob.” The secondary and tertiary characters tended towards caricatures, to the extent that I had a hard time keeping the bereaved husbands straight. I was also disappointed at how easily Sandilands was manipulated by the young woman who drew him into the mystery. And I never completely bought his change of heart from a desperate desire to head home to England at the story’s opening to a growing emotional attachment to India by the end of it.

In spite of these flaws, the story kept me engaged, in large part because of the descriptions of the exotic location and the mores of a fascinating era.

About halfway through the story, Sandilands travels to Calcutta in search of the husband of one of the victims. “Initially, brass plates discreetly announced the presence of banks, insurance companies, the Calcutta office of internationally known trading houses, engineers, architects, and solicitors. But soon the brass plates got smaller as the number increased. Brass plates gave way to cards. The number of bell pushes multiplied. Names appeared on upper windows, front doors stood open. Kites circled the damp air and crows pecked crumbling cornices.”

Later he explores the countryside on horseback. “Topping a jungle-clad ridge, their road turned downwards towards a village presided over by a rhythmically creaking water wheel, turning and turning and lifting buckets to send a flush of water down the many irrigation channels. Thirty or so mud-walled houses with thatched roofs huddled companionably together, set out to no obvious plan and with no eye for drainage or ventilation as far as Joe could make out, but scattered, it seemed, haphazardly about a central square in which stood a venerable peepul tree. In the windless day spires of smoke rose from many households, bringing with them the sharp smell of dung fires and cooking.”

I’m glad I read the entire story, because the end was unexpected but logical and satisfying, hinging on the brilliant motivation of the seemingly unlikely killer.

Book Review: Lie Down with the Devil by Linda Barnes

2009-01-28T15:17:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed Linda Barnes’ early Carlotta Carlyle mysteries, but haven’t followed the series in recent years. Having finished Lie Down with the Devil, the 12th mystery featuring the Boston-based Private Investigator, I can’t wait to go back and read the ones I missed.

Carlotta’s at her best in this book: smart, courageous, and persistent. Her actions are gutsy, but measured rather than incautious. The action moves from downtown Boston to a shooting range on the Harbor Islands to a pastoral mental health institute to Cape Cod. Barnes’ deft descriptions bring these settings to life in a way that makes you feel you are right beside Carlotta as she teases apart and clears away layers of mystery.

Early in the story, Carlotta tracks her long-time friend Mooney to the Boston Police Department’s firing range on Moon Island. “Pulling into a space in the level gravel lot, I opened the cab door and sniffed an unexpectedly salty breeze. Living in Cambridge, the way I do, you can almost forget the proximity of the Atlantic. I inhaled the sea air gratefully. There’s something cleansing about the ocean, all that green water licking the shore, endless and timeless, soothing and hypnotizing...” Her relationship with Mooney, who is her former boss, proves both a help and a distraction as her newest case unfolds.

Also distracting Carlotta is the mystery surrounding her runaway fiance, mobster Sam Gianelli. She misses him and wants to help him, but also resents being kept in the dark about his “situation.” At one point she considers “borrowing” his Jaguar, but “The Jag would have been a lousy tail car. Too conspicuous, I told myself, scrunched behind the wheel of another aged Ford cab. The bucket seat in Sam’s car would have put me instantly to sleep, and the heating unit that kept it toasty under your butt, who needed it? The musky smell would have made me nostalgic and I didn’t need that either. The Spartan chill of Gloria’s cabs would keep me alert...”

Even as she takes on the new case, Carlotta realizes her judgement is not entirely trustworthy, because she is angst-ridden over the still unfolding recovery of her “little sister” Paolina. Recently retrieved by Carlotta from a kidnapper, the teenager is in a mental health institution for her own safety, and refuses to speak to Carlotta. The private investigator’s distraction with Paolina and her daily check-in calls become a factor in the story when Carlotta takes a few missteps.

In pursuit of the true identity of a client who lied to her, Carlotta finds herself parked in a run-down part of Boston. “Two overturned plastic chairs decorated the weedy yard of a two-family with peeling beige paint. The adjoining house was green with unfortunate yellow trim. The high, narrow structures, too close to the street and too close to each other, had stingy lawns and forbidding chain-link fences.”

Later, on the run from both the good guys and the bad, she holes up in a shack on Cape Cod. “There were two main rooms, one up, one down, connected by a contraption that was more ladder than staircase. The room on the bottom level had a tiny bathroom in a curtained alcove. The top room had a galley kitchen against a narrow wall, a child-sized refrigerator, a two-burner stove.”

The pace starts out a bit slow due to the intertwining threads of the case at hand and Carlotta’s multiple distractions, but it soon picks up. The reader learns more about Carlotta’s past, and by the time the story ends and all the loose threads are tied up, has great hopes for Carlotta’s future.

Wright's Lake: Moonrise, Perseids, and Lasers

2009-01-11T13:25:00.000-08:00

My husband Morgan Conrad's photo of the moon rising over Wright's Lake in August 2008.

While camping at Wright’s Lake, we saw several night sky shows, natural and man-made.

Tuesday morning everyone except Ellie piled out of our tents at 4 am and went down to the pier to see the Perseid Meteor Shower. The display was not quite as spectacular as last year -- I think the best viewing would have been a couple hours earlier, but the moon was too high and bright this year -- but we saw about 20 meteors while we stood around for 45 minutes or so. Several of them were quite spectacular and left a glowing trail in the sky, but most were quick and faint.

Tuesday night we noticed bizarre green lights flashing all over the lake surface from our campfire, so the kids and I abandoned our s’mores (temporarily) to investigate.

There was an extended family from another campsite down on the pier, and the uncle had two bright green lasers he was using to make a light show. He told us they were very dangerous -- he bought them in China, because it is illegal to sell (but not buy!) them here in the U.S. He claimed they are so bright that they can burn your eye and cause blindness in 1/100th of a second!

He then showed us how he can point out astronomical features in the night sky -- he pointed out Jupiter, and showed us Andromeda -- and then did another short laser show, flashing the lasers over the surface of the lake (wonder how many blind fish are in there now?) and up into the sky. It was really neat, although not quite as amazing as the Perseids.

Wright’s Lake: A Kayak is Just a Big Dog Toy

2009-01-09T13:47:00.000-08:00

During our week of camping at Wright's Lake, Boomer fell in love with our inflatable kayak.

When we got back from our swim across the lake, Ellie and I took the kayak out and encountered Alison and Ron finishing up their hike around the lake with both dogs. Boomer wanted desperately to get into the water, so I told Ron to let him go. He flung himself off the pier and momentarily disappeared, came up spluttering, and made a beeline for us in the kayak. He then proceeded to swim around and around us as we paddled along the shore, trying to get him to go back to the shallows where he could stand and catch his breath.

Several times he scrabbled against the gunwale or bow with his front paws, so we decided he must want to come up in the boat with us. I couldn’t lift his 70-pound bulk from above, but Morgan waded out and heaved him in.

Boomer sat in the center position, butt on one gunwale and front paws on the other, and let us paddle him around for a few minutes. Then he launched himself off the kayak into the water with a big splash, rocking the boat so much that water slopped into it. He continued to chase after us, trying to climb in, and we finally had to have Morgan drag him away on his leash before Ellie and I could paddle off on a tour of the entire lake!

The next day we had the foresight to put Boomer in his PFD (also known as a doggie lifevest) before bringing him down to the lake. He once again chased us all over in the kayak, and rode with us several times. He seemed to stay a little longer with each ride, as though he was getting more comfortable with it, and he learned to jump in more gracefully, so he didn’t threaten to capsize us.

Later in the day we encountered another family with a couple of inflatable rafts and canoes, and Boomer swam over to try to climb up and ride around with them.

Wright's Lake August 10-17, 2008

2009-01-05T14:58:00.000-08:00

About an hour west of South Lake Tahoe off Hwy 50, Wright’s Lake is nestled in a depression high in the Sierra mountains. We arrived late on August 10th with our friends Alison, Ellie, Ron, and Sam following closely in their own gear-crammed vehicle. (Their dog Aztec kept our dog Boomer company in our back seat on the drive up from the San Francisco Bay Area.)

Warm and shallow, Wright’s Lake is surrounded by primitive camp sites and long-lease cabins and cottages that have no electricity. No motors are allowed on the lake, and there are no RV hookups, so it’s a splendidly quiet spot. The ground is covered with a thick cushion of evergreen needles, and every step you take releases a wonderful scent into the dry mountain air. Nearly every camp site seems to have a dog, and they are as welcome as humans to swim and hike around the lake. The lake itself is small and can be easily hiked around in an hour.

Various configurations of our party -- me, Morgan, and Ellie; me, Morgan, and Sam; me, Ellie, and Sam; me, Ellie, and Boomer (who again and again jumped out after 90 seconds, then insisted on being hoisted back aboard); Ellie and Sam; Ron and Sam; Ron and Ellie; Ron and Ellie and Sam; Ron and Alison; Ellie and Alison; me and Morgan; and each of us alone -- spent time in our two-person inflatable kayak at all hours.

One day Sam and I swam across the lake while Morgan and Ellie paddled alongside for safety. Then Sam rode back, perched like an Indian Chief on the bow of the kayak.

Alison had never been kayaking before, so she asked her 10-year-old daughter Ellie, who had a whole week of kayak camp earlier in the summer, to take her out on a tour of the lake. Before they left shore, I supervised while Ellie gave Alison some instructions on how to handle the paddle. They had a fun time and Alison said that Ellie was a thoughtful and excellent tour guide and kayaking instructor.

Although from the kayak we saw fish lurking on the bottom and leaping out to snag bugs morning, noon, and night, our human fisherfolk had no luck with their fishing poles.

A pair of osprey living nearby had better luck -- or better skills. Several of us witnessed an osprey catching a fish: folding wings and plummeting to the lake's surface, snagging the prey with strong talons, and lifting it out of the water with strong wing beats. The osprey flew right overhead once, giving us a magnificent view of its straining wings and the fish held so carefully fore-and-aft, still wiggling in an attempt to break free.

Ducks, squirrels, and chipmunks were abundant, and a lone bald eagle often sat on a snag overlooking the lake or soared above. When we hiked to Dark Lake, Boomer flushed a mule deer buck with an impressive rack. One night just at sunset I went down to the edge of the lake and was mesmerized by a dozen or so bats swooping out of the trees to catch insects buzzing just above the surface of the lake. I sat and watched for half-an-hour, listening to the soft flap of bat wings and marveling at the flying mammals' aerobatic ability; again and again they dove and veered and skimmed and I just didn't see how they could keep from plunging into the lake.

Another evening I took the kayak out just before sunset and was half-way down the lake when a screeching ruckus drew my attention. Looking up, I saw an osprey in hot pursuit of the bald eagle. The osprey, which was far smaller than the eagle, flew above and behind, diving at the eagle repeatedly and screeching. I sat back in the kayak and stared in open-mouthed wonder until long after the eagle had vanished into the trees on the far side of the lake and the osprey had winged its way home.

Happy New Year

2009-01-05T14:54:00.001-08:00

I took a break from Wish You Were Here while traveling in the summer of 2008 and never really got back into the groove of posting regularly.

Well, new year, new year's resolution: POST MORE FREQUENTLY! And I will try to keep my posts shorter, too!

Book Review: First the Dead by Tim Downs

2009-01-05T14:47:00.000-08:00

The third book chronicling the adventures of forensic entomologist Dr. Nick Polchak, First the Dead is set in New Orleans during and just after Hurricane Katrina. Author Tim Downs draws a convincing portrait of the devastated city and the tireless rescue workers braving horrifying conditions to bring in the last the survivors of the storm.

Polchak and his friend Jerry Kibbee are part of a team that usually arrives in the wake of a disaster to process and identify the dead. Deployed to a small town outside New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina hits, the team is told in no uncertain terms that they must set aside their usual work and spend the first few days of Katrina’s aftermath in rescue work: “first the living” is to be their temporary new mantra.

Polchak, a brilliant and driven scientist, believes that someone is using the flooding of the Lower Ninth Ward to hide a series of murders. He is convinced that all forensic evidence of these murders will be lost before his team can recover it. With the help of his easy-going friend Jerry and J.T., a young African-American boy they rescue from roof on their first day in the Lower Ninth Ward, Polchak sets out to find and preserve the evidence. He soon finds himself the target of the killer.

Downs’ descriptions of the destruction wrought by Katrina are compelling. On the first day the Lower Ninth Ward is nearly deserted as Polchak steers his small boat down inundated streets and alleys. Families too large to fit into his craft choose to stay on their griddle-hot roofs rather than risk being separated. His boat gets hung up in tree branches.

At one point Polchak makes use of a flooded hospital lab. “In the doorway he stopped and looked back. The scene was utterly surreal: a medical laboratory half filled with water and a fishing boat floating in the center. Beyond the boat was a window with no glass; outside the window was an endless black lake.”

The search for J.T.’s father takes them to the Superdome, which is being used as an emergency shelter. “...the air reeked of sweat, and feces, and rotting food. The stench was nauseating...The noise was nearly deafening, and the buses only made it worse.”

At one point Polchak is trapped in a flooded house. “The lukewarm water was choked with particulate matter swirling around him like leaves on a windy day; he clutched at the largest pieces and felt nothing but clumps of soggy cardboard and waterlogged wood.”

Downs also does a great job of showcasing the chaos endured by the rescue workers in the first days after the storm. He immerses the reader in the military-issue “meals ready to eat” that the hungry J.T. devours. Polchak and his sidekicks sleep in an air-conditioned morgue truck to escape the oppressive heat and humidity. They scrounge rides in emergency supply trucks and hide their rescue boat to keep it safe from thieves and looters. Cell phones don’t work, patients die in the upper floors of hospitals because their life-support machines have no power, and nobody seems to be in charge.

It’s this lack of leadership that compels Polchak to reject the idea of “first the living,” and it’s this same vacuum that lets him get away with his renegade behavior. Like many brilliant scientist characters, Polchak comes off as a cold, distant wise-cracker. His few moments of warmth are short-lived, and he’s not a character who I want to spend a lot of time with.

Another character in the book, psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Woodbridge, was sometimes Polchak’s foe and sometimes his friend, sometimes his superior and sometimes his partner. Although there was the hint of a romantic relationship there, I found myself wondering why any woman as together as Woodbridge would bother with someone as maddening as Polchak.

What made this book a success for me were the challenges Polchak had to overcome to keep his investigation going and his genial entourage. I didn’t ultimately care very much about what happened to Polchak or his precious evidence; but I did want to follow the stories of easy-going Jerry and bright and courageous young J.T.

This is the third book in a series, and given my reluctance to spend time with the main character, I’m uncertain if I’ll go back to explore the first two.

Book Review: "Feint of Art" by Hailey Lind

2008-11-17T20:34:00.000-08:00

The first in a series to follow the adventures of artist and amateur sleuth Annie Kincaid, Feint of Art turned out to be the fun and witty read that its title promised.

Annie Kincaid is a gifted artist who, although struggling financially, is rich in friends. Several years ago she was bounced out of her budding career as an art restorer at San Francisco’s fictional Brock Art Museum for being the granddaughter and one-time apprentice of a forger. Since then she has built a good business doing faux finishes in the bay area’s hot interior decorating market, painting the occasional portrait to soothe her artistic soul.

Because of her intimate knowledge of forgery -- she went to jail in Paris at the age of 16 for flooding the market with faked Old Masters -- an old boyfriend who still works at the Brock calls upon her to render a verdict on a recent high-profile acquisition. Within an hour of her declaring the painting a forgery, her old boyfriend disappears, and another museum worker is murdered.

Annie lives in Oakland: “My home was the top floor...of a once-stately Victorian...The plumbing and electrical systems were suspect, but the rent was cheap, moldings were ornate, and if you stood on the toilet you could glimpse the San Francisco Bay from the bathroom window. The place was a lot like me: a bit quirky, occasionally contrary, but with lots of character.”

Those quirks make Annie a fun character to spend time with, and while her contrariness sometimes had me shaking my head at the fixes she got herself into, it certainly enlivened the story.

Annie’s San Francisco art studio has a “wide wooden plank floor and exposed brick walls; the inviting sitting area with the faux fireplace I had painted on the wall; the skylights high overhead; the half-dead ficus tree; the jumble of easels, shelves of art supplies, and worktables piled with paintings and pictures and artifacts at various stages of completion; the smell of linseed oil and turpentine. I loved my studio, and most of my clients were thrilled to get a peek at a working artist’s space.”

As Annie is drawn deeper into the mystery of the forged painting and her missing ex-boyfriend, she learns that several other acquaintances in the art world have vanished -- one with some extremely valuable Old Master sketches. Since the hunky but uptight new owner of her rented studio plans to double her rent, she decides to expand her sleuthing to track down the stolen sketches and claim a substantial finders fee.

The investigation brings her into contact with a laundry-list of forgers, thieves, and other colorful characters intent on double-crossing each other. It brings her the unwanted professional attention of a couple of San Francisco Detective Inspectors. And it sets up something of a budding romantic triangle between Annie, her straightlaced landlord, and an equally attractive but morally reprehensible art thief. The triangle was pleasantly reminiscent of the one in Janet Evanovich’s early Stephanie Plum novels, and in fact Annie’s motley crew of sidekicks and the characters and situations she encounters all rang a welcome but toned-down Evanovich bell.

Annie’s trusty beater of a truck transports her all over the bay area, and Hailey Lind’s descriptions were so evocative I felt like I was riding along: from San Francisco, where she can never find parking; to Oakland, where she eats some great food; to a bungalow-turned-antique shop in Napa Valley; to the ritzy island of Belvedere, where she is marooned by the cute art thief. Whether you already know and love the bay area, or are planning a first trip to it, Feint of Art provides a quirky and enjoyable tour.

The story reaches a satisfying climax during a gala event at the very museum from which she’s been banished, and Hailey Lind does a good job of tying up the dangling plot threads of this very entertaining debut book. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

The Elusive Moose

2008-07-29T14:41:00.000-07:00

Like any good trip leaders getting to know their clients, Peg and Ellie asked us during our first dinner together what -- aside from wolves -- we were hoping to see while in Yellowstone. I had learned from past experience that hanging the success of a trip on one species, especially an elusive, predatory, keystone species like the wolf, risked disappointment. So Trish and I had done enough research to know that even if wolves didn’t show up, we would see plenty of other wildlife: sightings of bison, coyotes, and elk were high on our wish list.

And I really, really, really wanted to see a moose.

Despite numerous weeks of summer childhood vacations in prime moose country in Maine and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and more recent trips to Alaska and British Columbia, I had never seen one, although not for lack of trying.

I got hooked on the notion of meeting a moose when I was about ten. Our friend and neighbor Marty Smith had spent quite a bit of time backpacking in the Maine woods, and he told a wonderful tale of awakening early one mornings to the wet snorting sounds of some wild animal snuffling the sleeping bag he had pulled up over his head (he hadn’t bothered with a tent).

Terrified that it was a bear, although they were rare in that area in those days, he had remained motionless, playing dead. The snuffler retreated a short distance, then began chewing something. Overcome with curiosity, Marty had eased open his sleeping bag, slipped on his glasses, and found himself almost nose-to-nose with a browsing moose.

Since being trampled by a startled moose (females can grow to 800 pounds, and males weigh in around 1100 pounds) would be every bit as painful and potentially lethal as tangling with a black bear, Marty went back to playing dead until the moose moved on.

After hearing Marty’s tale, I spent every hour our family drove through woodsy and marshy areas of Maine during our vacations with my window plastered to the nose, scanning for the big brown frame of the largest member of the deer family, but to no avail.

So one of the hopes I brought with me to Yellowstone was that of seeing a moose. Peg and Ellie thought they could deliver; they had seen one almost every morning on their way into the park with the group they had led the week before.

And so every morning, on the drive down from Cooke City into the Lamar Valley, whichever naturalist was at the wheel of my van would drive slowly, everyone scanning the woods that grew right to the road’s edge for the silhouette of the elusive creature.

Unlike the elk and bison we saw in abundance, moose are largely solitary. You’ll find mothers with calves, but adults are not likely to hang out together except during mating times.

Although their long legs let them navigate the deep snow, they lack the bison’s strong neck muscles for plowing snow out of the way as they search for food. Instead, when the snow starts to pile up, they abandon the willow thickets lining the streams and rivers of the park in favor of the surrounding fir-blanketed mountains. There the canopy of the subalpine fir and Douglas fir trees shades the snow and keeps it from forming the icy crust that would impede a moose’s movements.

The moose’s solitary nature and penchant for wintering in the deep shadows of a fir forest makes them darned hard to spot, and day after day passed with no sign of a moose. On the last morning we would spend in Yellowstone, Ellie drove our van at a crawl, determined to find me a moose.

As we neared the elevation line below which their subalpine pine habitat does not grow, I was steeling myself to once more leaving prime moose territory without having actually seen one of the magnificent creatures, when movement in a relatively open meadow across the road caught our attention. Ellie pulled over with a whoop of triumph, and we all pointed our cameras and clicked away at my elusive moose.

It was a good-sized female wading belly-deep in snow perhaps 30 feet from the edge of the road. Small fir saplings and other edible plants poked out of the deep white blanket all around her.

She leaned forward, reached out with prehensile-looking lips, and chomped onto a branch. With one smooth movement she dragged her rubbery lips along the length of the branch, denuding it of needles. She calmly chewed and swallowed, looked over at our van, and moved onto the next branch. With the efficiency of a silent woodchipper, she stripped every branch within reach of her long neck, and then moved on to another spot where the tops of several other saplings thrust through the snow.

She moved with the loose-jointed gait of a marionette, picking up each long leg and swinging it through the snow, leaving a track of deep holes connected by shallow grooves behind her. I was fascinated by the articulation of her rear knees, which bent backwards, like a flamingo’s.

We cautiously opened the van’s doors and quietly approached the berm of snow the plows had built up over the winter, crouching down to use it and the scattered bushes for cover as we approached her for closer views. In the snowy silence we stood listening to her snuffling breath and the ripping noise of needles being scraped off of branches until we grew so cold our nostrils pinched with frost.

It wasn’t even 9 a.m. as we climbed back into the van and dropped down towards the Lamar Valley, but the day had been a wildlife-watching success for me already: I had finally bagged my moose!

Puppies Playing in the Snow

2008-07-22T07:03:00.000-07:00

One day we spent hours watching the Slough pack wolf pups playing. They had staked out a resting spot between two beautiful pine trees high on a snow-covered ridge. The spot was about three-quarters of a mile from the road, so we had a good view of their antics with our tripod-mounted spotting scopes and binoculars.

The area between the trees was flat, dirty, and snow-trampled. When we arrived and trained our viewing apparatus on the spot, the wolf pups were curled up napping, looking like a scattering of black and gray and grayish-brown boulders. Just watching them lying in the snow gave me the shivers, although I knew their thick coat with its guard hairs was keeping them nice and warm – the cold dampness of the snow would never reach their skin. They had been born in March, which happened to be the same month my Irish Water Spaniel puppy Boomer had been born, and Peg estimated that they were about Boomer’s size as well – some 60 pounds each, and a little taller than two feet at the shoulder.

As we watched, one of the pups uncurled from its nose-under-tail napping position and did a yoga-like stretch to unkink everything from neck to tail. Then in sauntered through the snow and pounced unceremoniously on one of its snoozing siblings.

The snow exploded, and the intertwined pups rolled together like a couple of Hollywood stuntmen down the steep slope, creating a miniature avalanche. One of them broke away and tried to scramble back up the slope, but was brought down from the rear by the other, and they tumbled further down the incline, nearly vanishing in the deep snow.

Their siblings were awakened by the tumult. A couple of them uncurled just enough to sit up and watch their siblings’ antics. I wondered if they wanted to join in, or were watching to make sure they didn’t become the next target.

I had read that the alpha male and female were the only pair in a pack to have young, and that all of the other adults and subadults in the pack would participate in raising the litter: hunting for them, playing with and teaching them, and even babysitting for them. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the “auntie” or “uncle” in charge of this wild bunch, but all of the wolves we saw were about the same size, meaning they were part of the litter.

The two wrestlers made their peace with each other and began working their way back up the slope to the level resting area. A trio of the other pups stood up and sniffed noses and wagged tails, then vanished over the crest of the ridge. Peg and Ellie had been betting that there was a kill from last night’s hunt just out of our sight up there.

Sue enough, one of the pups reappeared in a few minutes later dragging what looked like a tree branch through the snow. Viewed through binoculars, the long brown object was a meaty haunch of elk, and it left a trail of blood as it was dragged through the snow.

One of the wrestlers had been resting beneath a tree; it now bounded over to its sibling and grabbed the trailing end of the haunch, dashing away with a flap of skin before the haunch’s owner could mount a proper defense. Another sibling came bounding over, but the haunch’s owner dropped its prize and stood four-square over it, snapping and snarling and lunging at the interloper, who beat a comically hasty retreat.

The haunch owner dragged its prize close to the left-hand tree’s trunk and settled down for a feast. A couple of other wolves came up over the top of the ridge, their muzzles and chests looking a bit dark, as though stained with blood. Some of their siblings exchanged sniff greetings and then disappeared over the ridge themselves, presumably to pick at the remains of the feast.

There was so much coming and going over the ridge, and so much wrestling and play-bowing and chasing through snow-banks, that we never did get an accurate count of those wolf pups. In the months after I got home, I watched Boomer put on another ten pounds and grow a couple of inches longer. And although he’s quite large for an Irish Water Spaniel, I still think about those wolf pups, which have doubled in size my encounter with them.

Howling in Yellowstone

2008-07-08T12:42:00.000-07:00

When I began researching our trip to Yellowstone, I realized that one big difference between this trip and some of the other wildlife-watching adventures Trish and I have shared was how close we could get to the animals. In British Columbia, we had experienced orcas swimming past our inflatable dinghy so close it seemed we could lean out and touch their six-foot-high dorsal fins, and had them dive right under our boat. On that same trip we had (accidentally) gotten within fifty feet of a grizzly sow teaching her second-year cubs to fish for salmon. In Laguna San Ignacio in Baja, Mexico, our 14-foot wooden boat had been bumped by numerous gray whale mothers and calves, and we had leaned over the gunwales to pet several of them.

But wolves are different, their curiosity tempered by wariness. They do not seek out human company, and if they discern with their superhero-like senses that humans are in an area, they simply avoid it. They undoubtedly come close from time to time, but they are so stealthy and so incredibly well-camouflaged that we mere humans with our blunted senses don’t have a hope of realizing they are near.

My research told me that the closest we were likely to get to our quarry on our Yellowstone wolf-watching expedition was a half-mile, and that a distance of a mile or two was a far more reasonable expectation. So we braced ourselves for the seemingly inevitable disappointment of seeing wolves a mile or more away, assuming that such a distant encounter could not have the magical quality we had experienced at close quarters.

We were wrong.

As Peg explained to us on our first day, the easiest way to spot wolves was to spot people who were already watching wolves. And even in the dead of winter, when the light lasts for less than ten hours, the temperature averages less that 30 degrees F, and more than a foot of snow accumulates each month, there are people watching wolves. Many of them are research biologists, some involved with wolf studies that have been ongoing since the first wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone at the beginning of 1995. Other wolf watchers are film makers working on nature documentaries, local citizens who can’t get enough of the magnificent carnivores in their midst, park staffers who spend all their free time following the wolves the way Brits follow royalty, and tourists like us from all over the world.

Our first glimpse of wolves was indeed from over a mile away, parked in a turnout that overlooked the Lamar River valley. Across the river and beyond the open valley lay a thin forest of winter-nude trees, and with a lot of coaching from Ellie and Peg, I finally discerned movement at the foot of the trees: a small pack of wolves skirting the woods, on the move in single file, dressed in shaggy coats of white, gray, brown, and black that made them look like moving boulders, patrolling their territory.

Yellowstone National Park covers more than 3400 square miles and, according to http://www.yellowstone-natl-park.com/facts.htm, is bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. In 1995, 14 wolves were brought in from Canada at the start of the reintroduction process. In 1996, another 17 Canadian wolves were brought in, and then ten orphaned wolf pups from a naturally recolonizing pack in Montana were added to the mix. These wolves were kept in large pens in various parts of the park for about 70 days for acclimatization. When the pens were opened, the wolves took off into the wilderness and each pack staked out its own territory.

The Lamar Valley, through which runs the plowed State Road 212 that we drove back and forth along every day we were in the park, is divided into the territories of several packs, including the Slough Pack, the Druid Pack, the Leopold Pack, and the Rose Creek II Pack. (You can see the known pack territories as of 2003 at http://www.forwolves.org/ralph/yellwolfmap-latest.htm) These territories butt right up against each other and any wolf crossing the boundary into another pack’s territory is likely to be driven out and perhaps mortally wounded in the process. A large and stable elk population seems to attract and keep so many wolves in the Lamar Valley; during the winter in particular, the snowfall in that area is lighter than in some parts of the park, and the elk flock to the Lamar Valley as a result.

The Mollie’s Pack, on the other hand, has a slightly larger range in the central part of the park that overlaps the park’s eastern boundary. This area is isolated from other packs, but it’s also subject to heavier snowfall, meaning that the elk tend to leave during the winter. And so the Mollie’s Pack is one of the few that has adapted to hunting bison, which remain in the deep snow areas.

The packs change in size, composition, and territory over time; some packs die out altogether, and a new one forms when a few youngsters splinter off from the pack of their birth and head out on their own. Lone wolves, both male and female, will occasionally move between packs in the search for a mate.

We caught sight of one such lone wolf out in the Lamar River valley. Rangy and wary, with a shaggy gray coat and eyes that made a shiver run down my spine even when viewed through the safety of a spotting scope, he was working his way west down the valley. He paused now and then and threw back his head; in the snow-shrouded stillness, his howl reached us a couple of heartbeats later. Each howl was answered by a howl from another wolf on the hill behind us, which stayed on the far side of the ridge, making it impossible for us to see.

We got into the van and moved west with the gray wolf to continue observing it. At one spot where we got out of the van and turned all of our cameras and binoculars and telescopes on the loner, he stood and stared straight at us, not breaking eye contact for at least five minutes. Peg said she thought the wolf was probably looking for an unpeopled spot where he could get across the road – they avoid vehicles and hate to approach the road closely during daylight hours, making most of their kills at night.

When the loner abruptly turned back east, Peg suggested we stay put to give him an opportunity to make it across the road unmolested, and we all agreed. We went to use one of the “comfort stations” at a parking area a little further west, which gave the wolf plenty of time to escape from human attention – it’s amazing how long it takes a line of about a dozen heavily-clothed people to use a one-hole outhouse!

We finally moved the van east and joined a group watching five wolves from the Slough Pack – one gray like the lone wolf we had been watching, and four black – stationed up on the hillside where the answering howls had seemed to originate.

As we speculated about whether this group of five had been the ones answering the loner’s howls, the loner came into sight again, this time on the north side of the road which he had obviously succeeded in crossing, heading cautiously, almost hesitantly up the hill towards the Slough Pack wolves we were watching. Ellie and Peg thought that we might see a confrontation during which the loner would be run off, or possibly even run down, by the Slough wolves. As the loner got within a hundred yards or so, the gray Slough wolf walked down the hill to meet him. Their fluffy flag-like tails were held straight out, and after they went through a sniffing ritual, the gray Slough wagged its tail and turned and romped back to its black-coated friends, with the gray loner close behind.

The black Sloughs did not race down the hill to greet the newcomer, but they did close in around him when he arrived with their pack-mate, sniffing and bowing and wagging tails. After a minute or two of this, they bunched close together and threw back their heads and gave a magnificent group howl. Another shiver ran down my back, and as we wolf-watchers cheered sotto-voce (sound carried so well in the snow-covered hills and valleys that Peg and Ellie were constantly reminding us to whisper so as not to spook the wildlife!) and gave each other mittened high-fives, we were astounded to hear an answering howl from across the river valley.

Louder than the wolves’ howls, this howling was the product of what sounded like at least a dozen separate voices. It went on and on, and open-mouthed, we turned to scan across the road and valley, but couldn’t see the source of the howling. As the howl trailed off it ended with a spree of yips and yaps, like a spectacular Fourth-of-July firework that explodes in a beautiful colorful fountain and then finishes with a succession of small, loud pops. “Coyotes,” Ellie and Peg stage-whispered in unison, and then the wolves on the hill above us sent up their voices in another howl. The coyotes answered, and for another ten minutes or so we stood there mesmerized by the howling volleying back and forth across the valley, wolves challenging, coyotes – growing ever distant – responding.

When the howling was over, Peg and Ellie rounded us up and loaded us back into the vans to warm up, explaining how they’ve had week-long tours where they didn’t hear a single wolf howling. We had been incredibly fortunate to witness such a howl-a-thon.

Persistence Personified: The Bison of Yellowstone

2008-07-01T13:25:00.000-07:00

Getting ready for my Yellowstone trip, I had been looking forward to seeing bison in their natural habitat. Those I had seen in zoos were unprepossessing specimens that looked small and ragged and smelled bad in their barren enclosures. They did not live up to their American icon status. I had to believe that the bison that had been central to the cultures of so many Native American tribes was majestic and awe-inspiring, and those were qualities I hoped to see by encountering bison in the wild.

On our first day in Yellowstone we came around a bend in the road and there on the left in the snow banks built up at the road’s edge by the plows were EIGHT BISON! Their shaggy brown coats were crusted with snow, and they swung their heavy heads back and forth, patiently scraping away several feet of snow to get at the grasses and sedge under its cover. Their bulging neck muscles, thick skulls, and sturdy legs are made to order for plowing through the deep snow to uncover food. These adaptations enable them to live year-round in Yellowstone and other places where mule deer and less hardy grazers fail to thrive.

Through our driver Peg’s open window we could hear the crunch of snow under their hooves and the snorts, grunts, and sighs they emitted. Clouds of white steam blasted from their nostrils into the freezing air.

Although each paused in feeding to fix our van with a round, brown eye for a moment when we first stopped, none of them seemed at all disturbed. We were so close – half a road-width away, not much more than a bison’s 10-foot body length – that we didn’t dare get out of the van, so everyone with cameras took turns getting up to the driver’s side windows and shooting through them.

The bison of Yellowstone are a true conservation success story. As every child learns in American history, tens of millions of bison roamed the west up until the coming of Euroamerican settlers. Eyewitness accounts preserved in letters and journals describe herds so vast that it took several days and several nights for all of the bison to pass a given observation point. During the mid and late 1800s they were slaughtered wholesale, and by the end of the nineteenth century only a few dozen remained. Almost two dozen of those lived in Yellowstone National Park, which was an American experiment when it became the very first national park in the world in 1872. In the park they were protected, but their numbers grew slowly. In the early 1900s, more bison were brought in from privately owned herds, and the population grew more rapidly.

During the early half of the 20th century, the bison were managed aggressively: bred, herded, relocated, protected from predators, and culled. In the mid-1960s the park supposedly backed off of such aggressive herd management and allowed nature to take its course; the official party line is that natural ecologic processes now control the number and distribution of bison within the park. And the official population numbers look impressive:
· 1902: less than two dozen
· 1954: 1500
· 1996: 3500
· 2005: a record summer population of 4900
· 2006: a summer population of 3900
· 2007: a late-winter (February) population of 3600
· 2007: a summer (July-August) population of 4700
· 2008: as of April 15, the population dropped to 2100
Although the general upward trend in the bison population seems like something to celebrate, the last bullet in the list above illustrates the downside: increasing numbers of bison wander beyond the boundaries of the park in search of food. Because the bison carry a disease called brucellosis, which might be picked up by domestic cattle, bison that stray outside of the park are “hazed” or harassed by park workers and employees of state and federal agencies in charge of bison management. The hazing includes buzzing the bison by helicopters and chasing them on snowmobiles, horses, and ATVs, using the noise of the machines to drive the bison back into the park.

Bison that persist in leaving the park in spite of hazing are rounded up, tested for brucellosis, and slaughtered if they test positive. According to the New York Times, nearly 1200 had been slaughtered by March 23 of the 2007-2008 winter, and the killing was scheduled to continue through April. (source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/us/23bison.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1) This culling of the herd supposedly protects the interests of area ranchers by keeping Montana brucellosis-free, but it’s an issue fraught with emotion on both sides. In at least one of the areas where the bison were hazed and captured for slaughter, there were no cattle present, and the owners of the land apparently had no problem with the bison being there. (source: http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/media/press0708/pressreleases0708/052908.html)

In the winter of 2007-2008, a total of approximately 1700 bison died (source: Jackson Hole Daily article http://www.jhguide.com/article.php?art_id=3078); the 500 or so that were not killed by humans were victims of winterkill, which is the toll that extreme weather and harder-to-reach food takes on the less fit animals. Surprisingly, the reintroduction of wolves hasn’t taken much of a toll on bison. Only one of the park’s dozen or so packs “specializes” in hunting bison by running them down in deep snow, and even they don’t take that many of the great beasts.

Probably because bison bulls can weigh 1800-2000 pounds, and even the slightly less massive cows (they’re not exactly diminutive at 1000-plus pounds) stand six feet tall at the shoulders. And not only does one bison feed a lot of wolves and other carnivores and scavengers for long time; their curved, pointed horns are quite deadly and are not shed every year like the antlers of elk and deer. Bison can move at 30-35 miles per hour in short bursts, and park regulations advise people to stay at least 25 yards from them and all other wildlife in the park (except bears, which rate a minimum distance of 100 yards, but which were hibernating soundly in their dens during our Yellowstone sojourn).

Peg, behind the wheel of our van, had all of this in mind and kept the engine running, ready to make a quick getaway if the small herd of bison we had encountered decided it was time for us to move along.

Their massive heads dipped down, swung left and right and back again, and then came up with white-coated fodder hanging from their mouths. Wise brown eyes looked into our faces and camera lenses. The great mouthfuls disappeared with a couple of movements of the massive jaws, and the heads dipped down again for another go. Our cameras clicked and buzzed and beeped. Our voices were hushed with admiration as we said “wow” and “amazing” and felt ourselves in the presence of ancient wordless wisdom.

We moved on after about ten minutes of watching these majestic animals go about making their livelihoods in their patient, dignified way, but we saw bison again and again throughout our days in the park. Usually they were in the distance, often mere dark dots moving through the deep snow in single-file lines that stretched for several dozen creatures.

One morning, dropping down into Lamar Valley from Cooke City, we found a lone bull grazing in a quiet pocket-sized meadow. It was about fifty feet away, armpit-deep (do bisons have armpits? Legpits?) in drifted snow, its muzzle crusted with a layer of white every time its head emerged with a mouthful. Peg pulled the van over. When the bull seemed undisturbed, we quietly opened the sliding side door. After ascertaining that the bull still didn’t mind our presence, I slid down to kneel just outside the door in the snowbank, glad I had invested in really thick quilted snowpants. Behind me the rest of the group clustered in the door, cameras shooting over my head as we gazed silently at the majestic grazer.

I have a friend who considers the bison his “spirit animal” because he admires their patience, their fortitude, their ability to keep putting one foot in front of the other no matter what Mother Nature throws at them. To remind him to “keep on keeping on” even in the toughest of times, a silhouette portrait of a bull, muzzle crusted with snow, eye gazing wisely at the camera, breath forming a cloud around its curved horn, hangs in his family room.

Having finally met the bison in the wild, I understand why.

A number of organizations are campaigning for less deadly bison management strategies in the greater Yellowstone area, including The Humane Society, Defenders of Wildlife, and the NRDC. Check their web sites and search for “bison” to get the latest information and find out how to get involved.

Stories in the Snow: Winter in Yellowstone 2007

2008-06-24T12:19:00.000-07:00

[In January 2007 my friend Trish and I spent several wonderful days in snow-shrouded Yellowstone National Park, hoping to see wolves. Here's a post about the first day of our trip.]

I grew up mostly in Connecticut and Wisconsin, and I moved to Northern California more than twenty years ago largely to escape cold weather. I don’t like snow, and I despise ice, which made the sidewalks and roads of my childhood impassible, broke branches off my favorite climbing trees, and knocked out electrical service for days at a time. The mere sound of wind whistling past the window gives me goosebumps, and a radio announcer reading out the wind chill numbers in predawn darkness brings back the worst memories of my teenage years. My extended family still lives in and around Madison, Wisconsin, but they have gotten used to not seeing me during any month that snow might fly.

They’ve also gotten used to my predilection for chasing wildlife all over the world. So they were not surprised to hear that I was planning a vacation to Yellowstone National Park. They were not surprised to hear that my main objective was to spy upon and if possible photograph the wolves that were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995 and 1996 with great international fanfare and more than a little protest.

They were a little surprised by the time of year I was going, though. “January?” My grandmother asked on the phone after a pause, perhaps wondering if she had heard me right. “But, Jen, what about the snow?”

It had taken my friend Trish, who is usually my “wingman” on land-based wildlife-themed adventures, a couple of years of talking to get me past the snow. The wolves of Yellowstone, it turns out, are best seen in snowy conditions. They don’t particularly like getting close to people, so the more people there are – and there are apparently a lot of them in Yellowstone during the non-winter months, judging from the photos of traffic tie-ups on the main park roads I saw – the less visible the wolves are. Their coloring, which varies from white to gray to black to brown to gold and sometimes combines all those shades in one pelt, helps them vanish into the background of the magnificent Yellowstone countryside. They stealthily move through the lush and thick tree and brush cover from spring through fall.

Couldn’t we go in really late fall, I had countered when she showed me the catalogs of black wolves staring majestically down from what looked like 20-foot high snowbanks, when the leaves had fallen off the trees but the snow was not yet on the ground? Or maybe really early spring, when the leaves were still curled in their buds?

But, no, more research revealed that Trish had it right: our best opportunities to view wolves in the wild would be when the park was shrouded in snow and there were only a few really dedicated researchers and really crazy wildlife watchers on the ground. So I signed up for the tour and booked my flight to Bozeman, Montana. Then I trekked off to REI to buy out their long underwear department, hit up another sporting goods store for a pair of insulated ski pants that made feel like a Michelin woman, and found waterproof, double-insulated snowboots, quilted gloves, and a matching parka at Lands End.

And so on the afternoon of January 21, 2006, Trish and I stood at the window of our hotel room in Gardiner, Montana, staring across the Yellowstone River at an elk walking down a neighborhood street. It meandered through one yard after another, browsing brown-looking tufts of grass or sticks that poked through the snow pack, ducking its huge antler rack to go under a clothesline here or maneuver around an ornamental tree there.

Gardiner is a little city just outside of the North Entrance of Yellowstone National Park, and Trish and I and the dozen other tourists who comprised our tour arrived there by shuttle bus from Bozeman in the fading afternoon light. Between the early darkness, the freezing weather, and the fact that Trish was in the throes of a horrible cold-flu bug (which I of course would get as the trip unfolded), we were not inclined to do much exploring. The glimpses I caught through the bus and van windows as we shuttled through the little town showed buildings with a very Wild West look to them, and there were some inviting-looking galleries and restaurants that I hope to return to sample during warmer weather someday.

That night, the lone elk was the only sign of life I saw outside of the Wild-West-Saloon-Style restaurant where our naturalist guides, Peg Abbot and Ellie Van Os, took us for our getting-to-know-you dinner. We sat around eating warm and welcome comfort food and introducing ourselves, talking about where we lived and worked and comparing notes about other natural history tours we had enjoyed.

Our group was fifteen travelers, three of them men, mostly from surrounding western states. The exception was James from Scotland, who charmed everyone in the group with his accent and his helpful ways. The next morning we began our wolf hunt after a 6:30 breakfast. We divided into two large white vans that each had three bench seats in addition to the driver’s and front passenger’s bucket seats. All of us were dressed as the literature on preparation for the trip had suggested, in layers of long underwear, jeans, turtlenecks, sweaters, snow pants, and parkas, topped off with warm hats, scarves, gloves, and mittens. Although the benches were wide enough for three people who weren’t bundled up for winter survival, we were glad to be sitting only two to a bench! I was worried that I’d overheat inside the van and end up feeling travelsick, but we stopped and got out of the van so often that the heater never really caught up with us.

As we eased out of Gardiner that first morning, it was clear and cold. We turned into the park and drove through the lovely stonework arch that forms the North Entrance. A herd of bison had been there recently enough to leave a trampled snowy field dotted with piles of dung. “They drive the custodians for Gardiner’s school sports fields nuts during football season,” Peg said.

The roads through most of Yellowstone are closed during winter, but the main artery running through the park from the North Entrance to Cook City just outside of the Northeast Entrance is plowed, and this is where we would be looking for wolves. “We don’t have to leave the road to see them,” Peg and Ellie had explained during our orientation meeting the night before, which had included a post-dinner showing of an old movie about Yellowstone’s natural history. Some of the most successful packs live in and around Lamar Valley in the northeast corner of the park, which the plowed road runs right through. Wolf researchers and tourists alike set up their spotting scopes in parking lots and pullouts up and down the road.

“We’re not looking for wolves, really, we’re looking for signs of wolves,” Peg explained as she drove us through the Park Headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs, which we would come back to explore later. “Keep your eyes open for black birds congregating around anything out in the snow – magpies, ravens, and vultures are usually our first indication that there’s been a wolf kill. The wolves usually make their kills and do most of their feeding at night around here, but then they often rest not far from the kill, and some of them may come back to the kill to carry away a haunch or whatever. So we may be able to track them from a kill to wherever they are resting.

"The other thing to look for is parked vehicles with people staring into the distance using binoculars, spotting scopes, or cameras. Chances are pretty good they are watching wildlife, and if we’re really lucky, they’ll have found wolves.” She held up a handheld two-way radio and explained that she knew a lot of wolf researchers from her years of working in the park when the wolves were first being reintroduced. If we weren’t having any luck, she could monitor the chatter of wolf researchers and check in with them for good wolf-viewing locations, as well.

As we wound down into the Lamar Valley, passing hillside after hillside swathed in snow that was a day or two old, I marveled at all the animal tracks that the white stuff had preserved. I could see the deep, narrow marks in the snowbank where elk had crossed the road and clambered up. They contrasted with the plowed-out paths left by bison whose bodies were like small bulldozers. Then there were small coyote tracks that barely broke the surface, and the delicate foot- and wing-prints of birds.

Peg parked us in a small pullout and led us up the road a short distance, saying, “We saw a lone wolf along the river down there yesterday, and he was coming in this direction. I think I see the tracks where he came up from the river and crossed the road.” She pointed to a narrow set of depressions that ran in a wavering line up from the river valley, and sure enough, we found several clear prints in the thin snow near the road’s edge. I pulled off my glove and spread my fingers above one of them, and was stunned to see that the print was bigger than my palm.

We loaded back into the van and went on, stopping to view a couple of old kill sites – places where wolves had brought down a lone elk some time in the week or two before. All that was left was a skull, a few rib bones, and a curve of spinal column sticking starkly out of the snow. Even the magpies had given up on the site, since it had been stripped of every bit of meat, gristle, sinew, skin, and even fur by the usual succession of visitors to a kill: the wolves who killed the elk as a coordinated group and then ate until their stomachs bulged; followed by coyotes, vultures, and even bald eagles, who would fight over the remaining choice scraps; followed by the ravens and the magpies, who hovered over the kill and darted in to steal scraps from the stronger, fiercer animals as they became satiated. Foxes might sneak in for a bite if they were in the neighborhood at the right time. The coyotes and birds would return again and again, removing the less and less choice bits, until all that was left were bones.

The entire story lay there for the reading in the snow itself, packed down by one wave of scavenger after another. The marks of running elk pursued by loping wolves vanished into a packed-down area formed by falling, rolling, struggling bodies. Blood stained an area where a wolf had pulled away a good-sized chunk of meat and retreated from the pack to eat it in peace. The scattered bones of a rear leg marked where a pair of coyotes had dragged a relatively intact haunch to feast upon. Wolf and coyote and bird tracks overlapped, and the snow was bloodstained, pitted and packed from being trampled repeatedly by every type of scavenger in the park.

We got back into the van and a few curves later came upon a snowy hillside that told a different story: the pell-mell flight of a small band of elk, the faltering steps of one of its members, blood and compressed snow, and then a drag mark leading to a stand of trees.

“That could be a cougar kill,” Peg said as we looked at the marks with binoculars. “That’s one difference between the canids and the big cats. The wolves can eat until they literally look like they’re going to burst – they pack pounds of meat into their bellies in one sitting and have to waddle away when they’re done. The big cats can’t eat like that, they have to eat just a little bit at a time, so they cache their kills, hide them away in a spot like this and guard them, and come back again and again to eat small meals. One kill might last a cougar a week or two if it can keep the carrion from being found by the birds. Once the birds find it, it’s all over with, because they broadcast the news to the world.”

We made a number of other stops along the road that day, pausing to talk to researchers, other wolf-watchers, and filmmakers. We saw coyotes in the distance, several small herds of elk, and a few bison as well. But although we scanned the trees and ridges with our binoculars and spotting scopes, we didn’t come across any wolves before we had to exit the park at the Northeast Entrance and make our way to our motel in Cooke City.

Snowflakes were flying by the time we bundled up for our short walk to dinner at a nearby restaurant, but I didn’t mind. Seeing the stories told by the tracks had given me a new perspective on snow, and I went to bed eager to see what stories a fresh blanket of the white stuff would have to tell me in the morning.

Review of The Fault Tree

2008-06-09T00:11:00.000-07:00

The Fault Tree: A Mystery
By Louise Ure
St. Martin’s Minotaur; 2007; 336 pages; $24.95 (hardback)

When I signed up to attend the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference in 2007, one of the assignments I gave myself to prepare for the conference was to read the first book of at least six of the faculty members I’d be encountering there. This exercise exposed me to some wonderful writers I hadn’t read before, and one of those was Louise Ure.

Her first mystery, Forcing Amaryllis, was a real pleasure to read. Her descriptions brought the southwest setting alive and her protagonist was a strong, smart, outspoken woman I enjoyed getting to know. So I was more than a little disappointed when, while talking to Louise during one of the conference lunch breaks, I learned that she considered Forcing Amaryllis a “stand alone” book rather than the beginning of a series. Her second book, which was due out in late 2007, would feature a new protagonist.

Just before The Fault Tree came out, I received another unwelcome shock: the protagonist of the new mystery was BLIND, and much of the story was told through her sightless point of view! I cringed. I’m a very visual person, and when I read, a movie plays in my head. For that matter, when I write, I’m describing a movie I see in my head – it requires some discipline and a lot of revising on my part to incorporate senses other than sight.

With these two strikes against it, I couldn’t imagine how The Fault Tree could possibly meet the expectations that Forcing Amaryllis had set.

I am happy to report that my preconceived notions were wrong.

Cadence Moran is an antisocial young blind woman with an ear for trouble. She makes her living as a mechanic who uses her senses of hearing and touch to troubleshoot engine problems that cannot be solved by reading meters or thumbing through a shop manual. Socially isolated as much by choice as by her “handicap,” she taps her way through life with a hand-carved cane, choosing well-known physical and emotional paths that hold no surprises and no variations – paths she’s so familiar with they’ve truly become ruts.

Early in the book, Ure immerses us in Moran’s world through her character’s keen sense of hearing: “A lawn sprinkler ratcheted around several yards to my left…and a horn honked down by the Guardian Motel on the corner. Although the air was cooling, Apache cicadas still thrummed in concert from the cottonwood tree down the block. Farther away I heard the dentist’s drill whine of a Japanese motorcycle…”

While navigating the virtual rut between the shop where she works and her tidy little house, Moran is nearly hit by a speeding driver. She soon discovers that the car was likely barreling away from the scene of a murder, and goes to the cops with what little evidence she can offer: a distinctive engine noise and the smell of antifreeze. The cops give little credence to her story until she has another violent encounter with the same – at least by the sound and smell of it – vehicle. But by then the police interest seems to be too little, too late. For the killer doesn’t realize that Moran is blind, and wants her permanently silenced.

As the story unfolds, Ure skillfully rotates viewpoints from Moran’s first-person narration to the villain’s and cops’ third-person points of view. In these differing points of view, descriptions of place help reveal character even as they anchor the reader in the Tucson setting.

The bad guy’s hideout is described as “Thin walled and tin roofed, with acres of creosote-choked desert between him and the nearest neighbor, the house was the perfect hideaway. No tourists or fancy buildings out here. Just rusty old vehicles and worthless land. Everybody on the shitty side of town had something to hide.” This character has fallen backwards into a quagmire of crime, and throughout the story I found myself rooting for him to make the right choice and find redemption.

The appealing sense of humor of one of the detectives, August Dupree, comes to light when he goes to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum to interview a friend of the murder victim. “Dupree’s favorite part was still Prairie Dog Town, a patch of sandy soil surrounded by a waist-high wall and studded with a warren of small holes the prairie dogs dug for concealment. It looked like a life-size version of a Whack-A-Mole game…”

Ure does a good job of escalating the action and the stakes as the story moves along. The backstory of the accident that resulted in Moran’s blinding eight years before the story opens is woven nicely into the novel’s fabric. Moran is an appealing character with understandable flaws and believable fears. Once she is jolted out of the narrow rut of her self-circumscribed life, she stretches and grows in both the practical and emotional realms.

Coincidence is always a tough thing for me to swallow in a mystery, and I did find it a little hard to believe that the only friend Moran has works as a crime scene technician for the Tucson police. The pigheaded refusal of one of the detectives to give any credence to a blind woman’s testimony also seemed, if not melodramatic, at least to drag on through too much of the story – I found myself hoping that a real-life cop wouldn’t be such a jerk, or at least wouldn't be such a persistent jerk.

But these minor flaws did not mar my enjoyment of The Fault Tree. I found myself turning pages quickly, unwilling to set the book down, and staying up later than I should to read just one more chapter…always the mark of a good mystery.

The Fault Tree more than met the expectations set by Forcing Amaryllis. I look forward to Louise Ure’s next endeavor, even if it is another “stand alone.”

Review of Shell Games: A John Marquez Crime Novel

2008-06-02T00:15:00.000-07:00

Shell Games: A John Marquez Crime Novel
By Kirk Russell
Chronicle Books; 2003; 347 pages; $12.95 (paperback)

[A truncated version of this review appears in the June 2008 issue of Between the Tides, the quarterly newsletter of Friends of Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. http://www.fitzgeraldreserve.org/]

I grew up on the east coast, spending most of my elementary school years in Connecticut. Every summer my parents took me to the coast of Maine for a week or two, and I fell resoundingly in love with the Atlantic Ocean and its inhabitants – especially marine mammals – as a result of those trips. After my parents divorced I spent a landlocked adolescence in Wisconsin. When I was twenty-one I lit out for the West Coast in the old Chevy Malibu I inherited from my mother before the ink was dry on my Beloit College degree.

I had completed my degree in 3.5 years, motivated by a strong dislike of being trapped in classrooms and hog-tied with institutional red tape, so it was late January when I first saw the Pacific Ocean. I no longer remember the route I used to cut across the state, but I was somewhere in southern California, twisting along on Highway One on cliffs high above the water, when I noticed a cluster of large boats very close to shore.

It was a spectacularly clear and sunny day, the kind implanted in my brain by hours of listening to the Beach Boys’ golden oldie “California Dreamin’” while I studied in snow-blanketed libraries and dorm rooms. Watching the almost motionless boats while I wondered what they were doing in a spot that was so obviously not an anchorage, I suddenly saw one, then three, then half-a-dozen puffs of spray.

Whales! I swerved into the nearest pullout, yanked my binoculars out of my backpack, and reveled in the sight, wishing my mother, who had been even more of a marine mammal enthusiast than I, was still alive to enjoy the scene with me. I learned from a roadside interpretive sign somewhere along the way that these were gray whales, and that they followed the coast of California on their migration north and south between Alaskan feeding waters and breeding lagoons in Baja, Mexico. It took me many hours, with many roadside stops along the way, to inch my way up the coast.

I arrived in Mendocino, California, late the next day, and by the time I had been ensconced in my Aunt Jane’s spare bedroom for a couple of weeks, some gray whales had worked their way that far north. I saw them daily on my walks on the trails of Mendocino Headlands State Park, and the three week California visit I had planned turned into a permanent relocation when I went to work at the historic Ford House Visitor and Interpretive Center. (http://www.mcn.org/1/mendoparks/mndhdld.htm)

For a year I worked there, exploring the myriad other state parks, wandering daily through Highlight Gallery and the Gallery Bookshop, and haunting the bakery and The (now-defunct) Chocolate Moose. (http://www.mendocino.org/html/shop.html)

After I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work as a technical writer, Aunt Jane relocated to Fort Bragg, the mill town twenty minutes north of Mendocino, and my visits included exploring the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, going to Glass Beach, walking the Ecological Staircase at Jug Handle State Reserve, and camping in Russian Gulch and McKerricher state parks. (http://www.fortbragg.com/fort-bragg-attractions.php)

In between visits to Aunt Jane I came to know and love other spots on the Northern California coast, including Sausalito, Bodega Bay, and Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay.

So imagine my delight when I discovered Kirk Russell’s Shell Games, a well-told mystery with numerous plot twists and turns, which begins with the discovery of a pile of hundreds of empty abalone shells and two abalone divers tortured to death in a fictional state park south of Fort Bragg. “They started up the creek trail, skirting waist-high greasewood and taller poison oak with dead leaves curled and drying. He smelled creek mud and the dry oaks…” Russell’s description of the scene transported me back to my old stomping grounds.

Protagonist John Marquez is a California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) warden, one of the unsung heroes in society’s struggle to save what’s left of our natural resources. Working undercover, he and his team of DFG agents are hot on the trail of large-scale abalone poachers who are threatening the survival of the species.

In the torture deaths of the two abalone divers, Marquez believes he recognizes the handiwork of a criminal mastermind he crossed swords with when he worked undercover in the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). As he carefully cultivates informants from abalone divers to seafood wholesalers, he learns – to his regret – that his own actions have sometimes tragic repercussions in other people’s lives.

Marquez and his agents stake out harbors, dive sites, and houses up and down the northern California coast, and Russell’s writing brings to life many of the spots that I’ve grown to love in my adopted home state. His descriptions of the various places where the action unfolds had me feeling the fog on my face and hearing the surf in the background.

Marquez lives in a house built by his grandparents on Mt. Tamalpais. “A wooded shoulder of Mt. Tam fell away to the right of the house and below there were stands of trees, open flanks of dry grass and folded ravines with oak and brush, then the ocean. In winter he watched the leading edge of storms approach…He had a partial view of the top of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge…and still, it was dark enough at night to see the stars.”

Early in the story Marquez meets an informant near Half Moon Bay, transporting the reader along with him: “Forty minutes south of San Francisco Marquez left Highway 1 and drove through fields of pumpkins out to a broad stand of eucalyptus trees along the bluffs. Fog shrouded the high branches of the trees and under the canopy the road was wet and dark. Droplets ticked onto the hood as he parked.”

The current undercover operation has Marquez’s team based in a house in Fort Bragg, where “They met on Elm Street and walked down the old road alongside the Georgia-Pacific property, between the blackberry bushes and down to Glass Beach where for decades earlier in the past century the citizenry of Fort Bragg used to dump its garbage into the ocean. Over the years the broken china, glass, and metal had been worn by the ocean, the glass rounded like small stones that glittered now in the moonlight.”

Glass Beach is a real place that you can explore the next time you’re in Fort Bragg, as are the Sausalito docks: “Sodium lights strung along the dock hummed and swung in the wind and the shapes of Bailey and Heinemann flickered through the pale light of their rear cabin window. Across the bay, the skyline of San Francisco glowed with a hazy brilliance and as the night deepened and quieted he listened to the water lapping at the dock and faint strains of music…”

Marquez puts a lot of mileage on his truck during the course of this investigation, and just reading about the long drives involved in a day’s work made me road-weary!

Time and again the team comes within striking distance of the bad guys, only to have their bust thwarted by a turncoat informant, an unexpected maneuver by the poachers, or – the most frustrating and frequently encountered hurdle – jurisdictional problems. The cops in the small towns where the action takes place are often more of a hindrance than a help. And Marquez and his team aren’t just up against the evildoers; in this post-9/11 world, they must also deal with their wardens and patrol boats being diverted to operations for Homeland Security. Finally, the FBI seems to be after the same perpetrators as Marquez is, and they don’t care how many abalone or game wardens get caught in the crossfire.

Marquez is a believable protagonist, physically and mentally strong and devoted to his work. He’s knowledgeable as well. “A century ago, abalone had been so plentiful along the California shoreline that all you had to do was wade in a foot or two and pick them up. Shellmounds attested to how plentiful they’d once been…Diving came after the easy stuff was gone and we’re down to the end game for a species that has survived for a million years.” And yet Russell’s deft characterization prevents Marquez from being a self-righteous know-it-all.

Although everyone around him thinks he’s gone off the deep end when he jumps to the conclusion that his quarry is a shadowy figure from his own dark days in the DEA, Marquez trusts his instincts. He is emotionally grounded in the world with strong feelings for his estranged wife and stepdaughter, affection for his agents, and concern even for the informants who may be betraying him – feelings that raise the stakes as the action unfolds.

The story isn’t flawless. There are so many minor characters that I had a hard time keeping track of some of the agents on Marquez’s team and his informants. And I thought the foreshadowing of the book’s ending was a little heavy-handed.

But Marquez and those characters close to him are people I enjoyed spending time with, and I loved the glimpses of how a DFG agent works. “Tell most people that white abalone was the first ocean species humankind could genuinely claim bragging rights to extinguishing and they’d shrug. Big deal, extinctions happened. Talk about managing resources and they’d agree with you, as long as it didn’t cut into their lifestyle too much…Not much glamour in an abalone and there never would be.”

Such a down-to-earth perspective is intriguing in a world where “going green” is fast becoming more of a fashion statement than a philosophy. This John Marquez character will be worth getting to know better.

I look forward to reading the rest of Kirk Russell’s series.

Welcome to "Wish You Were Here"

2008-05-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

My name is Jenna Kinghorn and I’m a recovering technical writer. A few years ago I cashed out some stock options, left the fast pace and high stress of computer networking, and started working on what then looked like a mystery novel.

Five years and nine drafts later (I am fortunate to have an extremely patient and supportive husband), WILD JUSTICE is indeed starting to look like a novel, but more of a thriller with a strong action/adventure component than a classic mystery novel.

With my tenth (and hopefully final) draft underway, I’m starting to look at ways to market my book – first to agents, then to publishers, and finally to readers. One of the items on my marketing To Do list is “start a blog.”

So I’ve been puzzling for months over what my blog should be about. Since my novel, WILD JUSTICE, is the first in a planned series, I want a blog topic related to my writing. I’ve read plenty of other blogs by aspiring novelists, so I know the world doesn’t need another one of those. And I love adventure travel, but there are plenty of travel blogs out there already, and since my adventure trips happen at the rate of one every year or two, it would be kind of tough to stretch that into a years worth of blogging.

But one of the factors that led to me writing WILD JUSTICE was an amazing trip I took to British Columbia, during which I had a slightly-closer-than-it-should-have-been encounter with a mother grizzly bear and her two cubs. (More on that in a future post. Suffice it to say nobody, including the bears, got hurt.)

What I came away with from that amazing trip was a deep appreciation for the amazing natural beauty of Vancouver Island, Knight’s Inlet on the Canadian mainland, and the narrow stretch of water in between. I was thrilled by the wildlife supported by the screaming tides, and mesmerized by the square miles of conifer showing off every shade of green in an artist’s palette. We saw a mink foraging in tidepools, watched eagles snagging salmon right out of the ocean, thrilled to hundreds of Pacific white-sided dolphins surrounding our inflatable dinghy as we motored along, almost fell out of the boat with glee when a pod of killer whales dove right under us, and witnessed a mother grizzly teaching her cubs how to snag salmon as they went upriver to spawn.

That is the backdrop against which WILD JUSTICE is set, and as I played with ideas for what I might contribute to the blogosphere, I realized that the setting of a mystery, and how well that setting is portrayed, is an important element to me.

I read books so that I can go places: places I’ve never been, places I’ve experienced but would love to spend time in again, and places I hope to explore in person someday. Some books take me there; others might promise to, but fail.

So this blog will be a combination of musings about adventures I’ve experienced in person and “reviews” of armchair adventures I’ve taken through mystery genre books. I hope readers will be inspired to take more armchair adventures via the books I review on this blog. And I hope they will be inspired to get out into the real world and see some of the beautiful places I report on. I look forward to hearing about your travels, real and imagined.

Bon Voyage!

Morgan’s First (Successful) Whale Watch

2008-05-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

My wonderful husband Morgan loves to tease me and knows he can always punch my hot buttons when he makes fun of my interests in ecology, conservation, and wildlife. So when I started planning our February 2008 trip to Maui, he pretended blasé disinterest. When I told friends I couldn’t wait to set eyes upon the humpback whales – creatures I’d been longing to see in their winter playground ever since I learned about their migration habits back in elementary school (I’m 42 now!) – he would shrug and say, “Ah, you’ve seen one big fish, you’ve seen 'em all,” shooting me a mischievous sidelong look.

Two plus years of marriage have taught me not to rise to the bait. My inner schoolteacher – or maybe she’s my inner encyclopedia fact-checker, I’m not sure – clamped her lips shut on the outgraged “Whales aren’t fish!” that she wanted to shoot back. And as far as seen one, seen 'em all…he was entitled to a bit of cynicism, since we hadn't seen a single whale on our previous attempt at whalewatching last summer.

The whalewatching part of our trip began officially on Thursday evening. While I was diving Molokini and Turtle Arches, Morgan had remained behind in California, slaving away for his corporate masters for a few more days. He finally flew to Maui after work on Wednesday and slept in Thursday morning while I went on yet another dive excursion. And so our sunset cruise aboard Ocean Voyager, a whalewatch boat run by The Pacific Whale Foundation out of Maalea harbor, was Morgan’s first taste of the humpbacks I’d been raving about on the phone every night when I called him.

I had our binoculars around my neck, and he carried our Nikon D200 with a 70-300 mm zoom lens. We boarded the big boat and took spots in the almost bleacher-like seats on the bow, and as we watched the ocean on the other side of the breakwater that forms the tiny harbor, a whale breached just a couple of hundred feet away.

It happened in a flash. A huge, dark, submarine-shaped creature broke the surface of the beautiful blue water. It soared into the air at about a 70-degree angle until it’s entire 40-foot-long body except for its tail flukes was visible. Water cascaded from its form, flowing down the beautiful dark creases of its white throat and belly, glittering like icing on the frilly margin of tubercles crenellating its fifteen-foot-long pectoral fins. Then it fell back into the water with a monumental splash, twisting around and landing on its back. White foam spewed thirty feet into the air, and everyone who had been looking in that direction surged to their feet with a gasp and a cry of “Look at that!” or “Over there!” or “Did you see that?!”

Everyone.

Including my supposedly jaded and blasé husband, who had peeled the lens cap off the camera and was holding it up, trained on the now smooth spot in the water where the whale had vanished. Farther out towards the horizon another whale breached, and then off to our left, a few hundred yards from where the first breaching humpback had disappeared, another whale rolled on the surface, smacking its pectoral fins in a frenzy of splashing.

All that before we even got out of the harbor.

Our big motorized catamaran soon pulled out of the harbor and we were free to wander the decks, munching on appetizers and sipping mai tais and soft drinks. Everyone on board, Morgan included, was pointing and gasping and oohing and ahhing almost nonstop. We were surrounded by whales performing their aquatic ballet.

The naturalist on board spoke over the public address system about the lifecycle of the whales and commented on the behaviors we were seeing. The humpbacks we were seeing had spent their summers off the west coast of North America, anywhere from Northern California to the waters off Alaska, feeding on schools of small fish and krill that they swallow by the ton. In autumn they had started migrating to the waters off Maui, where they spend the winter months giving birth to and caring for their calves, or mating. Some had traveled the 3500 miles between their feeding and breeding grounds in as little as 30 days!

On that first whalewatch trip, the whale activity seemed to die down as the sun fell towards the horizon. There were fewer breaches and tail slaps, and many more fluke up dives.

Researchers are able to track individual whales because each has unique markings on their tail flukes, which they typically raise out of the water – and hold in perfect position for photographing – just before they make a deep dive. Researchers and volunteers from the Pacific Whale Foundation count whales and photograph as many flukes as they can every year, and share the information with researchers working on the West Coast of North America to track the humpack population’s health.
The captain motored the boat slowly, often changing direction to either avoid humpbacks that had surfaced nearby, or to check out behavior happening nearby. At one point the captain stopped the boat and let us drift while the crew lowered a hydrophone and we eavesdropped on the singers.

While that first whalewatch was beautiful against the sunset backdrop, the whalewatch we took a few days later out of Lahaina was even more exciting. We were on another of the Pacific Whale Foundation’s boats, and had barely cleared the harbor when a mother whale surfaced nearby and started slapping her tail down on the water. The slaps rang out like cannon shots. The display went on for several minutes, giving us a good chance to get lots of photos. I had to admire the strength and endurance of the whale as she raised her tail – which measured at least 15 feet wide, and must have weighed at least a ton – and brought it down with a majestic splash again and again.

We also saw more close-up breaches, including one male who breached 23 times in a row – the naturalist narrating our journey and answering questions over the public address system said she and the rest of the crew couldn’t remember ever seeing such a persistent breacher!

Morgan gave up trying to be blasé as he and I passed the camera and the binoculars back and forth. We ended up being very glad we had brought extra memory cards. You can see more of our photos taken on our two whalewatch trips at http://picasaweb.google.com/BoomersParents/MauiFebruary2008

I highly recommend that you go whalewatching with the Pacific Whale Foundation next time you are in Maui during whale season. Their snorkeling trip to Molokini and Turtle Arches was also a lot of fun. Purchasing a membership gets you discounts on boat tours and merchandise from their wonderful shop in Maalea. Check out their web site, where you can do everything from reading whalewatch logs to ordering T-shirts to making advance reservations for tours, at http://www.pacificwhale.org/

Hide-and-Seek with an Octopus

2008-05-12T07:47:00.000-07:00

[Perhaps you will be relieved to read that this will be the last entry about my diving experiences with the Mike Severns Diving group in Maui in February 2008! I still have to write about some above-the-water whalewatching, though...]

I was about halfway through the dive on the back wall of Molokini, in 65 feet of water admiring a pair of butterfly fish hovering above a small coral head, when Dan the divemaster caught my eye. He waved me over to a coral bommie where most of the other divers were clustered. The bommie was dome-shaped, maybe six feet across and jutting four feet out from the wall, a lovely mass of plate coral, finger coral, lobe coral, and some wire coral. Deep crevices surrounded the area where the bommie was attached to the wall, and Dan pointed into a vertical crack with his flashlight.

There hung a beautiful bright yellow trumpetfish, about three feet long. These amazing ambush predators can hang nearly motionless in the water, hovering with the motions of tiny fins. They can change color at will and orient themselves any which way, from straight horizontal to a diagonal of ten, twenty, thirty, or forty-five degrees, or hang absolutely straight with tail up and horn-shaped mouth down. I’ve seen them blend into branching coral, tag along with a big predatory trevally almost like a remora, and sway softly in a bed of algae. I nodded appreciatively and gave Dan the OK sign to thank him for pointing it out.
He shook his head, wiggled his fingers, and probed the crevice with his light again.
And there behind the trumpetfish was the bright-red form of one of my all-time favorite underwater playmates, an octopus!

I whooped into my regulator and flashed Dan a double-OK sign, powered up my camera, and finned in for a closer view.

This was a small specimen, a little over a foot long from tentacle tip to the top of its blobby head. Hanging onto the side of a rock with a few tentacles, it peered at me with its intelligent eyes as it wound and unwound the rest of its sucker-studded tentacle tips. Cringing a bit – I’m a novice underwater photographer and don’t know much about the effects of electronic photo flashes on the sensitive eyes of my friends in the deep – I framed a shot and pressed the shutter.

Click, flash. The octopus shrank back deeper into the crevice, paused a moment, then came floating back out towards me. It wrapped a couple of blood-red tentacles around the rock above and pulled itself up, and I went with it, snapping pictures and laughing.

We played hide-and-seek for several minutes, the octopus oozing into a crevice too narrow for my fingers to follow (even had I been foolish enough to want to), then peering back out at me with only its eyes visible. I sank lower in the water and it came out of its hiding place. I finned up until we were eye to eye and popped off another shot, and the octopus stretched its legs behind it and squirted water like a jet through its siphon to swim several feet away, then settled back onto the bommie.

It crawled around the front edge and I slid around the side. It caught sight of me – it’s pretty much impossible to sneak up on something with such a flexible body and amazing eyesight – and oozed into another crevice. Its eyes came out of the crack like independent creatures, and then two tentacles unfurled and grabbed hold of a rock. It pulled itself out of its hidey-hole with a fluid motion, oozed over some open ground, and sank behind a bulge of coral.

I finned closer, suddenly aware that all the other divers in my party had moved on, and waited until the octopus’s eyes appeared above the bulge again. They ducked down and appeared again and again, each time coming a little higher, like a nervous cartoon character’s.

I took one last picture and waved goodbye, and reluctantly finned off towards the bubbles of my other human companions a few yards down the wall.

If I ever find my misplaced CD of photos from the trip, I will post one or two of my octopus photos!

An Odd Highlight for a Wall Dive: Slipper Lobsters in Action!

2008-05-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

[Continuing my diving adventures in February 2008 off Maui with Mike Severns Diving.]

Molokini Crater lies a couple miles southwest of Maui. An extinct vent of the massive Haleakala volcano that comprises about two-thirds of the island of Maui, the crater walls only enclosed three-quarters of a circle that measures about 1800 feet across. The crater formed as hot ash spewed into the air about 230,000 years ago – it was all above water back then – and was pushed by the steady trade winds to form the crater walls, with a permanent gap facing into the steady winds.

Now a good portion of the crescent-moon-shaped crater, the cliffs of which rise only about 160 feet above the surface, is underwater. The submerged rocky walls themselves have been overgrown with corals and sponges and the many lifeforms that live upon them, and the interior of the crater is filled with coral outcroppings and the sand formed by coral’s decay. The interior of the crater has a number of moorings used by both diving and snorkeling boats, but some of the best diving is in the deep water – you don’t hit bottom until about 300 feet – around the curved back side of Molokini.

The wall is nearly vertical. Holes and cracks ranging from fist-sized to twenty feet long run vertically, horizontally, and every degree in between. Surf washes up against the rock in a perpetual tumble of turquoise and white. There are no moorings on this side, so when you’re diving, you gear up, wait for the okay, and jump over the side of the boat when the captain says “Go.” You plunge into deep blue water that’s refreshingly cool after standing in the sun in your thin wetsuit, pop to the surface, give the “OK” sign to the guys still on the boat, and kick away from the boat towards the wall. The other divers make their entries and you all group up on the surface, do one last equipment check, and submerge.

The boat “stays live,” motoring and drifting along, keeping our bubbles in sight as we descend to eighty feet. Over the rumble of the motor, which cuts in and out as Andy maneuvers the boat to stay within easy pick-up distance at the end of our dive, I hear the low, elongated moans and whoops of a nearby male humpback. Glancing down to the sandy bottom some 220 feet below me, I watch a white tip reef shark working its way along the crater wall until it vanishes into the murky blue.

I glide along the wall, admiring the coral formations that jut from the underlying rock and playing hide-and-seek with the fish and moray eels tucked into their sheltering crevices. I keep an eye on the other divers strung like a line before and behind me, and we point out to each other particularly beautiful or interesting sights: a pair of fountain shrimp advertising their cleaning services, a bright yellow trumpetfish that must be three feet long hanging suspended dead-center in a vertical crack, a yellow-margin moray eel ribboning its way from hiding spot to hiding spot through stubby branches of finger coral. I check my depth gauge with near paranoid frequency, knowing how easy it is to lose track of one’s depth on a wall with visibility at 200 feet like this. And I spin around like an underwater dervish to stare out at the deep blue water, hoping for another glimpse of a white tip reef shark, or a passing humpback, or – that Holy grail of all divers – a whale shark.

Turning back from one of these perusals of the deep, I notice one of my fellow divers hovering to my left and maybe fifteen feet above me, semaphoring his long arms wildly over his head to get my attention. I make eye contact and decide he’s not out of air or in some other emergency situation. I start running through my catalog of hand signals for cool critters he might have seen: the waving fingers of an octopus, the hand-on-head-like-a-dorsal-fin that signifies shark, the little pinky wave that says shrimp, the flapping arms that mimic the majestic wings of a manta ray.

Shaking his head emphatically, he points with both hands to something on the wall just beneath him. I fin over and up, scanning the wall curiously, and am totally WOWWED by the vision of two slipper lobsters – the animal in it’s entirety looks just like the meaty tail of the succulent Maine lobsters I grew up on – tearing apart and devouring a red slate pencil sea urchin.
I whoop through my regulator and give my fellow diver the double-OK signs that are the diver equivalent of a surfer’s “awesome, dude!” I snap a couple of pictures and watch in awe as these two slipper lobsters, the urchin trapped between them, take turns reaching nasty-looking pincers into the center of its underside – which is facing up and out towards us, the way the lobsters are holding it – and yank out chunks of meat. The meat vanishes beneath the raised carapace of the lobster, and then the voracious claw is back for more.

While it’s true I feel a twinge of pain and sadness for the sea urchin, this is at the heart of my love of wildlife watching: not just seeing an animal and making a note in a guidebook about the place and date where I encountered it, but really seeing it in action, exhibiting a natural behavior, giving me a glimpse of how it lives its life.

The encounter brought up far more questions than it answered…Had one or both lobsters come upon the urchin hale and hearty and wrestled it into its present predicament? Or had they found the urchin lying upside down, perhaps already partially eaten by some other predator? Were these two lobsters competing? Cooperating?

I’ve seen hundreds of slipper lobsters and other crustaceans all over the world. While some have been bizarrely, almost frighteningly large, I've never considered one to be the highlight of a dive before! Seeing these slipper lobsters in action gave me a whole new perspective and reminded me how little I know about even the simplest organisms I share the planet with.

Turtles Everywhere

2008-04-28T15:11:00.000-07:00

[Continuing my diving adventures in February 2008 off Maui with Mike Severns Diving.]

In about forty-five feet of water, a little murky because of its sandy, rubble-strewn bottom, I rounded a compact-car-sized boulder and found myself hovering just above a green sea turtle. About three feet long from slightly hooked beak to tip of tail, the turtle was resting on the bottom, eyes open but apparently asleep. I dropped down to take a couple of photos, then swept around the boulder and found myself in turtle central!

Four green sea turtles even bigger than the one I’d just left rested on the floor to my right, one half-in a crevice and the other three looking like they were trying to squeeze in behind him. Straight ahead a slightly smaller turtle was paddling its patient and graceful way to the surface for a breath of air. To the left three more turtles lay on various humps of coral, a little more spaced out than the ones trying to crowd into the crevice.

Dan, the dive master who had told us on the surface that he always saw at least one turtle here, hung in midwater, grinning around his regulator as he watched us try to figure out which turtle to look at – and photograph – first! As he had promised, the turtles were quite used to divers, and were not disturbed as we eased in for a closer look. Their eyes were open and they followed my clumsy progress as I maneuvered all around them, popping off photos and simply admiring them.

Green sea turtles are the most commonly seen sea turtle species around Maui. Unlike land turtles, sea turtles cannot retract their soft bodyparts – head, four fins, and tail – into their shells for protection. Their front fins are quite long and thick, well-shaped for paddling, and I am always amazed at the grace with which they soar through the water. They can easily outdistance a diver or snorkeler if they are feeling harassed. They’ve been federally protected for three decades now, and like the humpbacks their numbers have made a gradual recovery and are at a healthy 10,000 or so individuals.

Federal protection means it’s illegal to harass a green sea turtle, and for practical purposes, harassment means doing anything that makes them change the behavior they are exhibiting when you encounter them. So we were careful not to touch them or get close enough to inadvertently bump into them, and tried to respect their personal space bubbles as we watched them rest. I tried not to get my camera too close, so that the flash wouldn’t bother their eyes, but I did want to get facial portraits of as many as I could, since I have learned that the markings on the cheek are unique to each turtle and can act as an identifying “fingerprint.”

Dan had mentioned that these turtles seem to have preferred resting spots, and that they will sometimes jealously compete for a prime piece of real estate. If one turtle arrives to find its favorite nap zone already occupied, it may repeatedly bump the snoozer, trying to dislodge it and claim the space for itself. If that fails, it may just lie down right on top of the first turtle! Dan claims he has found turtles stacked three high on some really primo spots.

The turtles on the left had space between them and seemed to be resting happily in their spots, but the ones on the right were definitely in competition for the best position, a flat spot where the lucky possessor could wedge its head and most of its body beneath an overhanging ledge. As I watched, two turtles bumped their shells against that of the guy who’d gotten there first, both trying to muscle in and pry their competition out of its hidey-hole. One of the interlopers gave up fairly quickly, but the other one kept up the harassment, eventually nipping at the half-hidden turtle’s exposed fins and tail with some vicious-looking snaps of its curved beak.

Green sea turtles can go for 20 to 30 minutes on one lungful of air, and only one departed for the surface during the ten or so minutes we were with them. Sometimes they rise and bob along on the surface for a little while, but from the surface you'll often get just a glimpse of a softball-sized head popping up, taking a quick gulp of air, and disappearing again. They eat primarily algae, scraping it off the rocks with their slightly hooked beaks or ripping off big chunks of limu, a seaweed growing in the shallow sandy patches.

They are quite single-minded when eating, and don’t let divers, competing turtles, or anything else distract them from their determined grazing. On an earlier encounter with a single turtle at another dive site, a fellow diver and I landed on the sandy bottom, one on either side, hunkering down so that we were eye to eye with the turtle, who was maybe three feet long. It looked at each of us and went straight back to hooking and gulping strands of limu like it couldn’t care less.

Review of Murder on Molokai: A Surfing Detective Novel

2008-04-24T17:11:00.000-07:00

A slim volume from Island Heritage Publishing, Murder on Molokai has Hawaiian Private Investigator Kai Cooke looking into the suspicious death of an environmental activist. Kai is a surfer and has an emotional, almost spiritual connection to the sun-soaked, wave-washed Hawaiian Islands. The first-person narration appeals to all five senses:

Describing his first glimpse of Molokai, the tiny island on which the environmental activist died: “Sloping plateaus painted the west in cocoa brown and rust red; sheer sea cliffs in the east soared in moss green.”
Awakening on Molokai itself the next day: ‘“Errr-errr-errooooo! Err-errooooooooo!”A rooster strutting the grounds of the ‘Ukulele Inn jolted me awake the next morning before dawn.’
Describing the lei-filled floral shop above which his office is located: “The ginger’s sweet, pungent odor raised the hair on the back of my neck.”
Narrating the long hike to the spot where his client’s sister died: “We hiked through the first few canopied switchbacks, nearly every turn bringing breathtaking views of the wave-pounded peninsula. In the open stretches, the sweltering sun beat down, but to our great advantage: No rain-slick boulders or gooey red mud to challenge our footing today.”
Describing the drinks over which he reports to his client: “They even tasted like milk shakes, with a coconut and pineapple sweetness that masked double shots of vodka.”

The plot could use a few more twists and turns, but the characters are interesting, and the glimpses of setting are well-done. This book is worth reading to get yourself in an island frame of mind. (It’s the first in a series, and the only one I’ve read thus far.)

Preview Your Destination with a Good Book

2008-04-24T17:05:00.000-07:00

Thinking about a trip somewhere? Whether you’ve already booked a long weekend away or are in the early stages of planning a multi-week trip to the other side of the globe, reading fiction set in your destination can give you a the flavor of the place before you even leave home. You can read before you go, or stockpile books and read them during your actual trip.

I always get a kick out of driving through a place just as I’ve reached mention of it in book I’m reading. The first time I remember this happening was on my first international adventure, a guided camping tour of Australia that I took soon after graduating from college. We of the Never Never, by Mrs. Jeannie Gunn, tells the story of a white couple managing an enormous cattle station in the rugged outback landscape 300 miles south of Darwin, Northern Territory at the turn of the 20th century. Reading the story as the gravel highway between Darwin and Ayers Rock unrolled beneath the bus tires transported me out of my plush seat in the climate-controlled vehicle right into the arid, dusty land zooming past outside the windows.

Audiobooks are another great way to get into a new place. On the last few driving trips I’ve taken through the American Southwest, I’ve been sure to pack along a couple of audiobook versions of Tony Hillerman’s wonderful mysteries. His series features Navajo Tribal Policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, and he uses myriad telling details to evoke the setting with such intensity that I can smell the rain falling on the parched desert of Navajo Country even when I’m holed up in my fog-shrouded house on the coast of northern California.

In 2007 I toured Mesa Verde on my own, then met up with my archaeologist friend Erica at Chaco Canyon. When I packed for the trip, I was disappointed that my local library didn’t have an audiobook of Nevada Barr’s Ill Wind, a Ranger Anna Pigeon mystery set in Mesa Verde that I had read several years before, for me to take along for the Mesa Verde National Park portion of the trip. But they always have a Hillerman on hand, and I had the great luck to find A Thief of Time, one of my favorites of his, in which a woman archaeologist working at Chaco goes missing. Reading about fictional pothunters destroying the picturesque, peaceful ruins with backhoes gave another layer of meaning to my own wanderings through the ruins of the store rooms and living floors and great kivas. As I admired and photographed the amazing stonework of the prehistoric complexes and contemplated the people who built and then walked away from them hundreds of years ago, I understood what might drive a modern-day researcher to try to trace one ancient artist’s work through time and space.

Has the setting of a story you’ve read ever inspired you to take a trip? Do you tap into fiction when you’re in the planning stages, or do you take along fiction set in your destination?

I had so much else going on when I was getting ready for my February 2008 trip to Maui that I didn’t get a chance to look for fiction to read ahead of time or even take along with me. I went to the Borders Express bookstore in Kiehei soon after I arrived and scanned their shelf of “Local Authors.” There wasn’t much fiction, and I found only one mystery: Murder on Molokai, by Chip Hughes. I’ll review it in my next post.

The First Singer

2008-04-21T08:46:00.001-07:00

(In February 2008 I spent four wonderful mornings diving with the Mike Severns Diving outfit in Kihei, Maui. Here's a writeup of another of our memorable wildlife encounters.)

We were motoring in towards the southwest shore of Maui, having completed our first dive in Molokini crater, when Andy slowed the boat and craned his neck, peering out over the bow at the water ahead.

Divers, divemaster, and deckhand all lunged to our feet and peered in that direction; this was my second day with the crew, and I knew by now that slowing down probably meant he had spotted whale activity of some sort.

“I think it’s a singer,” he said, pointing ahead of us as he slowed the boat to a dead stop and cut the engine. “I just saw it dive, and I’m pretty sure it’s alone. If I’m right, he’s hanging motionless underwater, with his head lower than his tail, and he’s signing. If we’re quiet, we may be able to hear him.”

We all stood silent as the boat drifted in the direction Andy had seen the whale submerge. At first the predominant noise was the slap of waves on the metal hull, but after a couple of minutes the boat found her groove and the slapping vanished. I heard a phrase of faint, deep moaning that lasted just a few seconds. When I looked around, wondering if my imagination was running away with me – I’d heard recorded whale songs dozens of times in my life – I was pleased to see that others heard it, too.

Andy was nodding excitedly. “Everybody put an ear on the railing,” he said, demonstrating the pose himself.

Somewhat skeptical, I set my ear against one of the round metal pipes that formed a cage-like railing system all around the boat – and heard more moaning, higher-pitched and very distinct. The metal hull of the boat amplified the sound like the body of an acoustic guitar and transmitted it through the railing to our ears. “Hey, Andy, pull the string tighter, I can’t hear so well,” deckhand Jeff joked, referring to the tin-can-and-string “phones” we had all played with as kids.

The sounds were fascinating:

Long, drawn-out moans at high, medium, and low pitches. The low-pitched ones really reverberated through the boat and into your flesh and bones.
Short, deep “huh” sounds that made me thing of punctuation marks.
Short and long squeals that reminded me a bit of recordings of dolphins, but seemed a bit lower-pitched and more drawn out to my untrained ear.
Noises I can only describe as “bubbly” – the sort of “glub glub” effect you get if you try to speak with your mouth underwater in a swimming pool.

The sounds got louder as we drifted over the singer, then started to fade as we drifted past him and away. When Andy was sure we were a safe distance past the singer, he started the boat and motored slowly away. We had listened for about fifteen minutes, and the song would go on for another five to ten minutes.

Although female humpbacks issue short vocalizations, only the males of the species sing, and they only do it when they are here in their Hawaiian islands breeding waters. Researchers don’t know if every male of breeding age does it, but many do. They also don’t know what prompts them to start, or why they sometimes sing over and over again and other times take breaks in between.

Remember singing “Row Row Row Your Boat” in school when you were a kid? The teacher would divide up the class into three groups, and group one would start whie group two would wait and start with “Row, row, row” as the first group began “Merrily, merrily…”, and then group three would join in later stil? The whale singing is like that, but far less organized!

Being underwater or listening through a hydrophone, you often hear several males singing simultaneously. They are all singing the same song, but in a “round,” so that the first phrases of one singer overlay the second chorus of another and the fifth of yet another.

There is one song for the season, and all males sing that song, with one of them occasionally making a change that all the other singers then immediately pick up on and incorporate into their songs. Nobody knows why they introduce these changes. The changes accumulate over the season, which runs from January through May, and by the time the whales leave the Hawaiian islands to go feed in the waters off Alaska, the song has changed considerably. When the first hydrophone picks up the first singer next year, he’ll be singing exactly the song that they left off with at the end of the 2008 season, and over the course of the season, other males will introduce changes so that it’s a different song by the end of the 2009 season.

The noise carries for miles; other whales, with their highly attuned hearing, can hear it for at least 25 miles around, while we mere humans, when submerged, can pick up the tune broadcast my a male some five to seven miles away. Scientists are sure it has to do with breeding, but they have yet to fully explain the meanings of the songs. It could be anything from advertising his presence to showing off his fitness for mating – we may never know the true meaning to another whale.

Close Encounter with Humpback Whales

2008-04-17T07:09:00.000-07:00

(In February 2008 I spent four wonderful mornings diving with the Mike Severns Diving outfit in Kihei, Maui. Here's a writeup of one of our memorable wildlife encounters, which happened before I even got my gear on!)

During Captain Andy’s introduction talk aboard the Pi’iili Kai, he went over all the usual safety stuff, pointed out various features of the boat – the side gates we would giant-stride out of, the stern ladders we’d use to get back onto the boat at the end of the dive -- and ran through what the day would probably be like. Then he said our first dive would be out at Molokini crater. “Usually it takes us 15 minutes to motor out there,” he said. “But this is humpback season, so it could take us a lot longer!”

Whales have right of way around Maui, which is the center of the Humpback National Marine Sanctuary. Also, since the humpback is both on the Endangered Species List and protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, people are supposed to give the humpbacks a wide berth – 100 yards, by law. “Sometimes these guys pop up right in front of the boat with no warning and I have to slam on the brakes,” Andy warned us. “It’s like having a three-year-old run out in front of your car.”

So it was no surprise to any of us that, five minutes into our cruise between Kihei boat ramp and Molokini, we were veering off course to avoid a small pod comprising mom, calf, and escort. Our veer took us closer to another pod, though, just as one of them started doing pectoral slaps. Andy cut the engine and we drifted, watching the 40-something foot long beast roll back and forth on the calm surface of the ocean, repeatedly flinging one 15-foot-long front flipper skyward and then bring it down on the water with a resounding smack. White water fountained up around the graceful pectoral fin each time it plunged into the sea, and cascaded off it again as the pec rose for another slap.

The long pectoral fins are relatively narrow and look thin compared to the animal they are attached to. Dark on the upper side, white beneath, they are rounded at the tips and have a lacy crenellation around the edges, which often carry barnacles the size of a toddler’s fist.
After a few slaps another pec – this one belonging to another 40-something-foot-long leviathan – rose into the air and smacked down, doubling both the sound and the whitewater fury of the display. The first humpback brought its second pectoral fin into play, rolling rapidly back and forth, smacking down first one, then the other, as though to outdo its competition. The only other sound was the occasional blast of a humpback expelling a breath at 300 miles per hour through the paired blowholes, or nostrils, on top of its head.

We drifted for five or ten minutes, and the pectoral slapping display showed no signs of abating as Andy started the engine and turned us again towards our dive spot. Researchers suspect the slapping is a form of communication between humpbacks – the sound carries for quite a distance both above and below water – but what it really means is for the whales to know and us to wonder.