Year: 2012

Otter Bliss

Mama and child, rockin' in the ripples.

“Look at the baby beaver!” Face pressed up against the glass, the little girl stared wide-eyed at the furry creature nestled on a ledge at the side of the tank.

“Stay behind the line,” cautioned one of the volunteers monitoring the otter exhibit at the Seattle Aquarium.

It had been a little more than two weeks since Aniak, one of the aquarium’s female otters, had given birth to an adorable three pound ball of fur. Crowds have been arriving by busloads to see the baby. You have to act fast when it comes to baby otters – they grow so fast. The new pup has already doubled in size, and soon her baby fur will be replaced by a sleek coat like her mother’s.

Those sleek pelts were what led early explorers in the Pacific Northwest to hunt the once thriving sea otters into local extinction. Fortunately, in the last few decades, with protective laws in place and concerted efforts by environmental agencies, sea otters have been making a comeback in the Great Northwest.

And the Seattle Aquarium has played a significant role in that process, by caring for orphaned sea otters, educating the public about marine life, and in 1979 the aquarium was the first to successfully breed sea otters in captivity.

I had never seen a sea otter before I moved to Seattle. At my first encounter with them at the Seattle Aquarium six years ago I was enchanted, thrilled and completely smitten. The experience inspired my most recent novel, The Goddess of Green Lake, the story of a young woman whose life takes an unexpected turn after she rescues an orphaned baby sea otter.

The other day as I watched Aniak cradling her baby on her chest while she paddled serenely around the small pools at the aquarium I felt that same sense of enchantment. Waves of children and their camera-toting parents came and went, ogling the otters for a while and moving on to other exhibits. The little girl who mistook the baby for a beaver wasn’t alone. Probably beavers are a more familiar animal to most kids. After all, when you think about it, there aren’t that many mammals who make their homes in the water aside from beavers and muskrats, and when was the last time you saw a muskrat?

Certainly few animals seem as at ease in the water as sea otters, who sleep, eat and give birth to their young in the water,  staying afloat in any kind of weather, unperturbed by the frigid water temperatures, coming back from the brink of extinction still buoyant, even when confined to a life in a fishbowl surrounded by gawking humans.

I admire their insouciance. I marvel at the wonders of the sea. I am grateful to the Seattle Aquarium for making it possible for us to witness the magic of sea otters.

Between The Woods and the Frozen Lake

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep." Robert Frost

Sometimes I can see the appeal of hibernation.

Forget slush. Forget black-iced roads. Forget the crack and thud of falling trees festooned in tendrils of live power lines.

Just curl up somewhere warm and dry and wait it out. Dream of spring.

Or, if you live in Seattle, dream of July, when the warmth of spring may arrive for a few days.

Do I sound bitter? I have no cause. Many in our wet and chilly region lost power for five days or more during our recent snowstorm. And the rains which followed the snow launched mudslides all over the area. All those dramatic hillside lake views come with risks.

So, all in all, I am grateful to be on the return slope of winter’s worst peak. The days are getting a few minutes longer with every sunrise. The robins have already returned. The perfume of the sweetbox blooming outside the kitchen door floats in the damp air.

We’re still a long way from turtle weather, but I see them in my dreams.

Hope, denial, call it what you will, we are a nation of dreamers.

The Pirate Principle

There's a little pirate in all of us.

The blizzard’s coming. Are you ready?

Got milk?

Got toilet paper?

Got internet?

Hold on to your routers, ladies and gents. If some members of Congress have their way, the world wide web is about to get squeezed to stop the freeflow of opinions, information and ideas that we here in the big old US of A like to think of as our birthright.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect I-P Act (PIPA) before the Senate aim to criminalize the sharing of images and music we’ve come to take for granted out here in the real world.

To protest the proposed legislation, internet giants Wikipedia, Google, Craigslist and others will join in a blackout of their services from midnight Eastern time tonight until midnight tomorrow.

President Obama and even some members of Congress have weighed in on the side of internet freedom. Rupert Murdoch, who wears his wallet on his sleeve, wants Google strangled. No surprise there.

As we hunker down and prepare to wait out a rare snowstorm here in Seattle, where internet access is as common as rain, we will watch this particular debate with concern. Some might think that as far as the internet is concerned the genie is out of the bottle and there’s no stuffing him back in. But censorship is a powerful and crippling tool. When government alone can tell people what to think there’s a danger that people may stop thinking for themselves.

Of course it can’t happen here, right?

There’s a reason history repeats itself. We forget the lessons our founding fathers worked so hard to codify.

The snow is getting deeper. The path grows more perilous. It will take more than hope to get through this mess.

Some principled pirates may have to lead the way.

A Game of Throws

Pitch Perfect

In an ideal world, for every throw there is a catch.

Yet we all know that human life is compounded of some successes and countless errors. We treasure the successes. We brood on the errors. And in the brooding a world of trouble breeds.

Readers who casually pick up Chad Harbach’s first novel, The Art of Fielding expecting it to be another baseball story about the struggle for greatness and its cost will not be disappointed. But this remarkable novel portrays a rich and complex emotional terrain that extends far beyond the diamond.

Through his careful, compassionate, and at times comic depiction of five characters whose lives become intimately connected at a small Wisconsin college, Harbach has created a work which transcends the sports novel genre, while at the same time remaining true to the love of the game which resonates throughout the book like the heartbeat of a team.

The story of Henry Skrimshander, a gifted shortstop whose uncanny fielding ability raises expectations in all who encounter him, The Art of Fielding is both an examination of the way we try to become the people we want to be, and how one slip, one bad throw, can change everything.

Set on the shore of Lake Michigan, the novel is enriched by a nautical theme anchored in a bit of Melville worship which works much better than you might think. As the Harpooners go through the long baseball season, we feel their pain, we share their hope, and ultimately, we come to believe in the redemptive power of the struggle itself.

The important thing is not whether you win, or lose, or make a great play or an error. It’s being in the game.

Put Down Your Pencils

Mantra of the Material World

Sometimes it feels as if all of life is a test, and none of us did the homework.

In the quiet pause between the old year and the new, tradition tells us to make bold new plans, reaffirm commitments, rid ourselves of past baggage.

Yet how those old habits cling. The vows to eat less, exercise more, live more sustainably and help uplift the planet all sound good and right in the watery afterglow of fireworks and festivities.

But come the dawn, the old demons also awaken. The forces of destruction keep pace with the ongoing work of creation. Perhaps this is part of The Plan. You know. The big one. The one many have claimed to see, yet none have convinced me. It all seems awfully random – the kindness and cruelty woven together in a tight mass of tweedy confusion. I sympathize with all the systemizers – the folks who claim to have figured it all out, to have gotten a message from God or one of His Facebook friends. It’s only natural to want to know why things are the way they are, and, of course, being human, we want to know whom to blame.

Some say we have only ourselves. Certainly that’s true in part. But it’s difficult to assess the situation from our limited perspective here on Earth. We’re like ants contemplating lightning. We can only ride out the storm and hope the bolts land someplace else.

So, another year older and deeper in debt. So sang Tennessee Ernie Ford some fifty years ago. Yet it’s still a good old life, in parts. Sure, it’s harsh and cruel and sometimes stupefyingly dull. But that only makes the moments of joy, the transcendent flashes of clarity and peace, more precious.

It’s a New Year. Breathe in, breathe out. Enjoy your moments. This is only a test.

Into the mystic we go.