The Wasting of Borneo

SOME SAY THAT WE are fully formed by the time we are eight years old. I would say that definitely by the age of thirteen, I was well on the way to becoming the person I was going to be, already was that person, to a large extent, to the extent that any of us is anybody. As Einstein put it, “A large part of our attitude toward things is conditioned by opinions and emotions which we unconsciously absorb as children from our environment.” For each of us, the place where we grow up becomes our inner universe, the locus of memories and dreams for the rest of our lives.

My education as an animist, which I consider myself to be—if you asked me what my religion was, that’s what I’d say—began there. What I mean by animism isn’t anything mystical or exotic, but a way of being alive to the communications and connections that are constantly going on between all living things—human, animal, plants. The way, as kids, we were attuned with all the life in the woods, and our pets, and the people we met. In Bedford those impulses were fostered by the days we spent in the forest, by the conservation-minded landowners, and by my own family tradition of the serious study of nature, as well as daily interactions with the melting-pot society of the village. By the time I walked into my first rain forest and met my first indigenous people, I did so with an ease that no doubt sprang from having grown up in a forest that nurtured my own animistic sensibility, and in a multiethnic community where interaction with people of different cultures was a daily experience.

If I close my eyes, I can hear the clinking of the chains on the cars and trucks going past our house on Route 22 during one of the frequent blizzards that dumped several feet of snow on northern Westchester in the 1950s. Route 22 was the Old Post Road from Manhattan to Montreal. An old milestone a hundred yards from us, in the village, right across from the movie theater, said:

TIMES SQUARE

43 MILES

It was still the main route north, and was just a hundred feet from our front door. Standing in front of which there is a photo of me, aged five, in a complete black-and-white Hopalong Cassidy outfit, taken in 1951.

Some winters there was a foot of black ice on Kinkel’s Pond, on the other side of the village, and everybody would dress warm, in scarves and mittens, wool hats and snow pants, and skate on it, like a Bruegel painting, or a Norman Rockwell tableau vivant. “The real America, which doesn’t exist anymore,” my older brother, Nick, now seventy-three and living across the Hudson River, in the Catskills, was telling me the other day on the phone. “That’s what we grew up in.”

“We caught the tail end of a lot of things,” I said to Davie at one point in the motel courtyard in Kuala Lumpur, and he said in his wonderfully calm and soothing way, “We sure did, Panda.”

There are no blizzards in Bedford anymore, or black ice—they became casualties of global warming in the late seventies—and nobody has chains hanging in their garage, since the advent of positraction and four-wheel drive. I used to ski in our backyard, carving out a run that went down to the end of our property, starting out steeply over the pachysandra bed next to the house, then between the big maple tree (before it came crashing down on our kitchen, where we were having breakfast, during Hurricane Donna in 1954) and the impenetrable thicket of deodar cedar, and on behind the garage, past another smaller maple on the left, then the catalpa tree, which in summer had showy white flowers, huge leaves, and later long stringy pods, and down past the big weeping willow to the wet meadow that Pa never mowed because it became solid blue with forget-me-nots, with little black-spotted orange and gray butterflies called American coppers dancing over their delicate five-petaled blossoms.

After the war—Pa had served on a destroyer in the North Atlantic hunting for U-boats to drop depth charges on—he bought our house, a white clapboard farmhouse with a barn on three-quarters of an acre, for $14,000, and commuted to Manhattan for the next fourteen years, an hour each way, while Mom took care of us: Nicky, who was four years older, me, and my sister, Tonia, who came in 1953, and gardened and talked for hours with her lady friends, disseminating the latest gossip, and had supper ready when he came home. I can still hear Papa throwing open the front door in his trench coat and business suit and fedora and briefcase, whistling the two-note call of the chickadee, and we would come running down the stairs and hug him around the legs.

The property had been the farm of the old Dumauriac estate on the corner. The estate had been broken up during the Depression, but the castle was still inhabited, by the Westcotts. You could see its slate-tiled turrets behind a high stone wall. Pa had acquired our house from a plumber named Tolman, who had done a big job for a nursery and had been paid in beautiful ornamental trees, hence the profusion of them on our property.

The Holdernesses were across the street, in a larger colonial farmhouse with a barn in back. I probably first met Davie on the way to school, Bedford Elementary, which was on Court Street, which came up to the village at the corner of the apartment building where the movie theater was, that our house was on the other side of, separated from the apartment building by a big sloping lawn. We would cut through the Phillips’ woods in back of our property and come out on Court Street at their pond, a hop, skip, and a jump from the school. Davie remembers it was called the fire pond because the fire trucks up in the village filled up their tanks with its water, and that there were big carp of assorted colors in it, which he was never able to catch.

After school, we sometimes stayed in the Phillips’ woods until it was time for supper. Davie can still hear my mom calling us in: “Nicky, Panda, dinnertime.” Davie was a quiet, gentle boy, with a special sensitivity to nature. He was always turning over rocks and logs to see if there were any snakes or wriggling salamanders or millipedes. I was more assertive, like a little Winston Churchill, my brother recalls, and on our expeditions in the woods, I was the leader, or considered myself to be, and Davie went along with it because he didn’t have the alpha-male personality or neurochemistry, although he was a better fisherman. He had a sixth sense about fish and how to catch them. One time, below the mill on Beaver Dam Creek, he just stuck his spinner into a swirling riffle right in front of us, two feet away, and pulled out a ten-inch rainbow trout. In fact it must have been Davie who got me into fishing, because nobody in my family fished.

The Phillips’ woods were mostly second-growth hardwoods, not even thirty years old, but in the middle of them there was an ancient maple tree that had been split by lightning. Half of its trunk was suspended by its branches parallel to the ground maybe six feet up, a scary distance to us as we jumped off it and grabbed one of the saplings that had sprouted around it and swung down to the ground. Twenty years later, I took my own two little boys to see the maple tree. “Boys, you’re gonna love this,” I told them. “There are these saplings you can swing down on like Tarzan.” But the maple tree had disintegrated. The suspended trunk had fallen to the ground and was melting into the soil, a long, six-inch-high line of rich red earth. I was stunned. I thought the tree would still be there just like it was when I was a kid, that it would always be there. I had not yet realized how impermanent everything is, even then, in my early thirties, because nobody important in my life had died yet, and Bedford was such a stolid, conservative place.

The old WASP upper stratum who lived on bucolic pieces of land on the maze of old dirt roads were almost all Republicans, as were my parents. Their lives revolved around three institutions: St. Matthews, the lovely old Episcopalian country church; the Bedford Golf and Tennis Club, which Jews couldn’t get into; and Rippowam, the private school, named for a long-gone local Indian chief. Some wag called them the Holy Trinity. The whole idea of the postwar suburban utopia was to insulate your children from the horrors you had known. If you played it straight and sucked it in and were active in the community, and educated your kids properly, it could go on forever. This was the theory of the golden Eisenhower years. But it only lasted until 1959. Then it all came apart in the sixties, for the Shoumatoffs, the Holdernesses, and many other dutiful, undeserving Bedford families. John Cheever, who lived over in Ossining, several exurbs west, was already exposing the dark side of the utopia in his short stories. His last book was a novel called Oh What a Paradise It Seems. But for Davie and me, it was paradise. There is no greater gift a child can be given than to have a forest to roam around in, plus we were also on the edge of the village, where there was a wonderful cast of characters, a multiethnic microcosm of the American dream, to interact with, which we were part of. A more glorious Huck and Tom childhood could not have been asked for.

Sometimes I would go into the Phillips’ woods alone or with our dogs, Basta and Capri (a chocolate-colored Lab-hound mix and a light taupe Weimaraner named by my mom after we went to Italy one summer and she fell in love with all things Italian), and poke around by myself. One time I sat down on a log and just stayed still, listening and looking. Three chickadees mustered the courage, in several bursts of flight, punctuated with nervous, curious chatter, to land on the branch right above me. Suddenly everything became radiant, flooded with light. All at once, I felt this kinship with everything around me, not only the chickadees but everything I could not hear pulsing, quaking, cheeping, and singing. I was them and they were me. There was no difference between us. The chickadees piped down and we just sat there together and enjoyed the moment.

I had a number of these St. Francis experiences, but didn’t tell anyone about them. My schoolmates would have laughed at me, except Davie. He would have understood, but I never told him about them either. I didn’t have to. He was deliriously happy being in the woods. “It’s what I lived for,” he tells me now in Kuala Lumpur. And there were a number of my parents’ friends who would have been delighted by a child’s account of such an experience. Maybe I never told anybody because I didn’t realize I had a religious experience. I didn’t see it that way. I was just rapturously happy, my senses were fully open and engaged in the woods. Only in the 1970s and ’80s, when I started spending time with animists like the Navajo and the Yanomami in the Brazilian Amazon, did I realize that these joyous feelings of identification with all life are perfectly normal responses to communications going on between trees, insects, mammals, birds, people, frogs, even fungi, all the time on many levels: vocal, visual, body language, olfactory, infrasound, mirror neuron, spindle cell, even quantum. If such states of heightened conscious have little currency in the modern material culture, it’s because most of us are living in cities and spend our waking hours indoors, in cars and subways and commuter trains, in the virtual worlds of screens and TV and video games, and we’ve lost the connections that most of the people who have ever lived, the nameless thirty-eight billion hunter-gatherers who have come and gone before and since the agricultural revolution, had on a constant daily basis with their fellow-beings and devised complex mythologies and cosmologies to explain.

Experiences like mine, such animistic flashes, are common for kids in every culture who have the opportunity to be alone in nature. Paul Shepard writes, in his book Nature and Madness, how children’s play going back to the Stone Age has always been about

imitating, starting with simple fleeing and chasing, going on to mimic joyfully the important birds, being them for a moment and then not being them. Feeling as this one might feel and then that one, all tried on the self. The child sees the adults dancing the animal movements and does it too. Music itself has been there all the time, from his mother’s song to the melodies of birds and the howl of wolves. The child already feeling the mystery of kinship: likeness but difference. Animals have a magnetic attraction for a child, for each in its way seems to embody some impulse, reaction, movement that is “like me.”

Gerald Durrell’s enchanting memoir of growing up on Corfu, My Family and Other Animals, also celebrates the child’s innate attraction to and insatiable curiosity about other living things. Erich Fromm coined the term biophilia to describe the psychological orientation of being attracted to all that is alive and vital, and Edmund Wilson defined it as referring to “the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life.”

On the other side of the village there was an abandoned road, overgrown with brambles, that went between Mrs. Colgate’s and Captain Woods’s imposing Victorian mansions to the Mianus River, which it crossed in an old narrow curved stone bridge. Below the bridge the river spilled into a large pool where there were always fish, so Davie and I went there a lot. One time at the height of summer we caught a couple of yellow perch and spit-roasted them over a fire we started in the woods on the other side of the bridge. The temperature was in the nineties, and all the broad leaves on the trees and understory shrubs were dripping with moisture, and the grating din of the cicadas was like a buzzsaw cutting into steel. It was just like being in a rain forest. When I entered my first one, in Jamaica in 1970, the feeling was not at all unfamiliar, except for the bewildering diversity of unfamiliar plant species.

Davie opened his pocketknife and dug into a rotting log, where he discovered some white grubs working a seam of it. “I hear the Indians eat these things and they’re delicious,” he said. So we roasted them over the flames and they were, crunchy and scrumptious. Davie and I at that moment were no different from any kids who live in a forest. We could have been Indians, Pygmies, hunter-gatherers in Borneo. Children are the same in any culture, until it begins to indoctrinate them. The curiosity, the intelligence are the same at what the expressionist Willem de Kooning (I think it was he) called “the magic age between the age of four and eight, when the imagination runs wild,” which he was always trying to get back to. Kids learn, like animals, being animals, by playing, and if they have a forest to explore, or a seashore, they will be endlessly fascinated by all the other forms of life and will make all sorts of new friends and connections.

When Davie and I stepped out of our houses, we had two choices: the woods or the village. The woods was the richest temperate broad-leaved hardwood forest on the planet, with forty-five hundred species of higher plants, from ferns on up then, which Bedford was in the heart of.

There was always something happening in the village. It was like William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, which I would read in the ninth grade. I never asked my dad why he chose to buy a house on the edge of the village, right on busy Route 22, when he could have picked one with more land on one of the quiet dirt roads, which, given his passion for natural history, would have seemed a more obvious choice. Whatever his thinking was, it enriched our lives immeasurably.

Usually when Davie and I went down to the village we were headed for Trela’s, the ramshackle general store that belonged to Al Trela, our neighbor Mr. Trela’s son. Trela’s was crammed to the gills and overflowing with everything a kid could possibly need. Model airplanes, toy soldiers and tanks and jeeps, fishing lures, caps and cap pistols, BB guns and BBs, Lionel trains and tracks, packages of postage stamps for young collectors (I eventually acquired the Third Reich’s entire series with the face of Hitler in various denominations and tints, and the bare-breasted Senegalese woman series from French Equatorial Africa). My stamp collection, learning that there were so many different countries with different people and cultures and animals as I pasted their perforated images into my album, nurtured a growing fascination with the world beyond Bedford, which I was already soaking up on our annual family summer trips to Europe, beginning when I was four.

And so Davie and I acquired, naturally, by osmosis, the accident of birth having placed us in this exurban paradise, a holistic, inclusive, ecological, egalitarian worldview in which we did not differentiate between man and nature, the village and the woods, or our own little consciousnesses wandering in them. This would influence my philosophy and approach as a conservationist, my way of writing, my whole outlook. My view of nature is more Shakespearean than Thoreauvian. It includes man and his works, however wondrous or, as I would experience when I became a journalist and started to see the treachery and violence humans are capable of, vile. It is all “nature”—what is out there, the material world. The only world, neither Davie or I doubted for a second.

The distinction between wilderness and human habitat is, of course, important for the protection of ecosystems and their native flora and fauna. The old WASP gentry, who lived in understated elegance out on the dirt roads, had a sense of stewardship toward the natural world that came with being hereditary landowners. They lived on at least four acres. There were several dozen large estates in Bedford, with hundreds of acres and columned brick mansions on their hilltops built by people who had prospered in the late nineteenth century, like the Sloanes of the Fifth Avenue department store, who had their own peacocks and grass tennis court. Every time a ball smacked the tape of the net the peacocks squawked so loud it could be heard in the valley below. None of these estates had walls and surveillance cameras like they do now. Their chatelaines, and indeed most of the women in Bedford’s upper-middle class, took great pride in their gardens. In fact, the first chapter of the Garden Club of America was started in Bedford in 1938, as well as the first chapter of the National Audubon Society in 1913, and the Nature Conservancy, now a worldwide wilderness-protection operation, began with the acquisition in 1951 of the virgin hemlocks in Mianus River Gorge, just north of Bedford’s border with Greenwich, Connecticut. There were a number of private nature sanctuaries in town, donated by hilltoppers, as the people with the estates were called, who didn’t want to pay taxes on so many acres and didn’t want to be encroached on by the hoi polloi, or simply loved their land and didn’t want it to be developed and turned into suburbia. Bedford had four-acre zoning, unlike the towns to the south like Chappaqua and Pleasantville, where the houses were on much smaller lots and newer and something you’d rather die than have to live in, if you were from Bedford. This zoning was not egalitarian. Developers to the south and crusading socially conscious lawyers trying to bust it called it exclusionary, but because of it Bedford still retained much of its original rural character.

The roads in the most desirable districts were still dirt, the old country lanes from farming days, which there were still vestiges of: barns, open meadows, and pastures. Some of the houses and gravestones dated to the seventeenth century. Old stone walls ran through the woods, which were almost completely cleared for pasture by the turn of the twentieth century and began to return after cars replaced horses as the way to get around and it was no longer necessary to grow hay. The transition was pretty much accomplished by 1918, so a lot of the woods were second growth and only thirty years old—about as long as our family had been in America. But there were many magnificent old trees that had never been cut: oaks—including the five-hundred-year-old Bedford Oak, less than a mile up Route 22, on the corner of Hook Road, a symbol of the community’s continuity, some of whose lateral branches are as long as it is tall and have had to be propped up—massive hickories, ashes, maples, walnut and tulip trees, red, black, white, chestnut, and pin oaks, hemlocks and white pines. The chestnut trees that had been the dominant species with the oaks now only made it to saplings before they were smitten by the blight that had come from Asia in the twenties, and the elms were succumbing to Dutch elm disease, but it was still a vibrant, powerful forest, awesome and in places cathedral-like to little kids like Davie and me. Plus there were all kinds of interesting plants that had escaped from people’s gardens: winged euonymus, Japanese bamboo, rhododendrons, and lilies.

In some of the caves in the woods my older brother, Nick, found arrowheads and shreds of beaded deerskin moccasin, and ceilings still black with the smoke of three-hundred-year-old campfires lit by the Munsee Delaware, most of whom were massacred by the Dutch in 1688 and the rest deported to a series of reservations in the ever-expanding West, eventually ending up in Oklahoma. Only their place names, now stops on the Harlem Railroad line—Katonah, Mahopac, Kisco, Chappaqua—survived. Aspetong, a lake a mile from where Davie and I lived, our favorite place to fish because it had big pickerel, meant “the highest place around,” because there was a hill nearby from which you could see in every direction.

One of the largest private properties in Bedford was the thousand-acre Westmoreland Farm. It belonged to Helen Clay Frick, the maiden daughter of the Pittsburgh coke baron and art collector Henry Clay Frick. Aunt Helen, as we called her, was a close friend of my grandmother and her brother, Andrey Avinoff, who had been the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh for twenty-five years, until three years before his death in 1948. It was she who had persuaded my parents to settle in Bedford after the war. Aunt Helen lived in the utmost simplicity in an old farmhouse, of which a lovely primitive by Grandma Moses, everything buried in snow, hung in the foyer. Below the farmhouse was a working farm that was technologically pre–World War I. The extensive flower and vegetable gardens were plowed by a workhorse named Roman Nose and the milk came from the teats of a cow named Buttercup. A little further into the property, behind a moss-covered slab dam with maiden hair ferns growing in its cracks, was a pond with a rowboat in which Davie and I would paddle to a small island that was dripping with water snakes, dozens of them sunning on the branches of its bushes hanging out over the water. The pond was shallow and slimy and full of big bullfrog pollywogs but no fish of interest, so Davie wouldn’t come with me to Aunt Helen’s very often. He remembers that the golden apples in her orchard were delicious.

Aunt Helen and my father bonded through their love of nature and the simplicity and austerity of their lifestyles, and we were almost like family. At Christmas she would give me a beautiful coffee-table book, about birds of the world when I was making watercolors of birds, about Florence when we had been there that summer. At the end of the fifties Pa was instrumental in her creation of the Westmoreland Sanctuary from half of her farm. He designed the cozy house for the resident naturalist and the nature museum, from the Methodist Church outside the village that was taken down and reassembled board by board, and he then served as the sanctuary’s first president. Back in the woods there was a beautiful lake that became known as Bechtel Lake. The Bechtels were major benefactors of the sanctuary. They lived on Succabone Road (where Glenn Close lives now) and had a labyrinth rose garden that I loved to wander in and find my way out of.

Pa was, like Davie, a genuinely humble and self-effacing person, a real gentleman, almost obsequiously attentive to guests and never putting himself first, but he was extremely knowledgeable, particularly about natural history. He was the president of the Bedford Audubon Society, a post that my brother would take over in the seventies, with me as secretary. We always took part in the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas bird count in December, freezing as it was. One time when I was four Pa took us all on a field trip to the Hudson, to a part of the shoreline where the Indians had camped long ago and where there might be some artifacts. Nobody found anything except me, who had been left playing on the rocky beach. There among the water-smoothed boulders I picked up a long grooved net sinker. The find made the local paper.

Papa was also the president of the New York Entomological Society, which met once a month at the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Entomology. Sometimes he took me with him. The society met in a room behind the scenes, behind the public displays, where the vast majority of the butterflies were, in glass cases that slid out from wooden cabinets. Pa pulled out one drawer of fantastic tropical butterflies, the famous Rajah Brooke birdwing from Borneo (Davie and I were hoping to soon be seeing some live ones), the numerous incandescent blue morphos of the Amazon. In another drawer, he showed me the by now rather ratty type specimens of Shoumatoff’s hairstreak, Nesiostrymon celida shoumatoffi, classified by Comstock and Huntington and named by them for my father, who had caught the first specimens known to science in Jamaica in 1934, when he was sixteen (and in the late nineties elevated by Johnson to species status, N. shoumatoffi). In the thirties, he and his uncle had taken six trips to Jamaica and made the definitive collection of the island’s butterflies and moths.

So it was only natural that I became interested in butterflies. The best place to catch them was the old Jewish golf course, a fifteen-minute walk from our house up Cross River Road, which split off Route 22 at the corner where the Westcotts lived. It had been abandoned in the thirties and was covered with all kinds of flowering plants for them to take nectar from and to feed on as caterpillars. Its overgrown fairways, like all the splendid gardens of Bedford in the summertime, were swarming with butterflies. There were several species of swallowtail in town. The tiger swallowtail was abundant, and the dark-morph female was common. Spicebush swallowtails were also abundant, the woods being full of the shrub. The pipevine swallowtail was less common, and the smaller black swallowtail was least common. It was always a special treat to see one. Monarchs were plentiful, with milkweed all over the place, as were their nontoxic mimic, the viceroy. There were five species of fritillary, red-spotted purples, white admirals, Hunter’s butterflies. The rarest butterfly in Bedford was the tawny emperor. I only saw a couple and managed to catch one, sitting on a rhododendron leaf in the Moss’s driveway.

I was especially on the lookout for Baltimore checkerspots after meeting Alexander Klots at one of the New York Entomological Society’s monthly meetings.

Klots was writing the field guide to the butterflies of North America for the newly launched Houghton Mifflin series. He specialized in checkerspots, small, intricately mottled brown, orange, and white butterflies whose favorite food plant is turtlehead. He showed me a photo of its creamy white blossoms, which were shaped like the heads of turtle hatchlings. “I bet there are a lot of Baltimore checkerspots in Bedford,” he said, “and I’ll give you five dollars for every one you catch for me.” This was big bucks. Think of all the stamps I could buy at Trela’s! I caught a dozen on the old Jewish golf course, hovering around turtleheads they had eaten as caterpillars, and presented them to Dr. Klots in triangles of folded paper with my name and the date and place of capture written on them.

Back home I mounted the butterflies I caught and made watercolors of them with a Series 7 sable brush and tubes of Winsor & Newton watercolors with marvelous names like alizarin crimson and cadmium yellow, on smooth Whatman paper boards, which my grandmother, a professional portrait painter, gave me. My butterflies were about one-twentieth as good as her brother Andrey’s, which our house was full of. I only did one, of an orange sulfur, that was halfway decent. I tried to get my wings as luminous as his by layering colors straight from the tubes with hardly any water, but they came out opaque and muddy. But looking closely at and appreciating the intricate design and palette of a butterfly’s wings or a flower’s blossoms had its own effect that made it worth the effort. It trained my eye and increased my awe of the creation. When you have to paint something, you have to come to terms with it—its shape, color, movement—much more intimately than if you just take a picture of it. Children see a lot of little things adults miss. They see in great detail, with a hyperspecificity more like that of animals.

In the late fifties my parents, after several trips to Europe, fell in love with Switzerland, specifically the Bernese Oberland and its snow peaks and glaciers and high meadows full of flowers and butterflies, and alpine environments became their ruling passion for the rest of their lives. We started to go the Alps every summer, renting a chalet first in Gstaad, then Gsteig, Kandersteg, Villars-sur-Ollon. I became, at eleven, the youngest person to climb the Mönch, the triangular snow peak between the Jungfrau and the Eiger, and dreamed of becoming a mountain guide and a fearless rock climber like Walter Bonatti. And when we were in Bedford, rather than go fishing with Davie, I would go climb and rappel down the cliffs of Indian Hill, on the way to Pound Ridge, with another kid named Roger Austin. I had a manila rope that I bought at Sharlach’s, the hardware store in the village, and a brace of pitons and carabiners.

During the part of the summer when we were in Bedford, I would walk over to the Club, where I’d usually find Davie sitting around the pool. He didn’t play tennis or golf and he wasn’t on the swimming team. “I was much more interested in going down to the pond on the tenth hole [whose tee was next to the pool] and catching painted turtles,” he says. “I spent a lot of the first half of the sixties sitting around the Club pool, waiting for something to happen. I don’t know where you were during those years.”

“In London, and climbing mountains in Switzerland, and one summer, when I was sixteen, my brother and I bummed around Greece,” I tell him.

We figure that the period when we were inseparable lasted from third to fifth grade. It spanned the last year or so of de Kooning’s magic age to the end of boyhood and the onset of pubescence at the age of eleven. I tell Davie I was just reading a profile of James Damon, CEO of J. P. Morgan Chase & Co., and he said he thinks he was fully formed by the time he was eight. “I think we were, too, Panda,” Davie says. “The rest of my life has kind of been an anticlimax.”

“I was in Bedford last year,” I tell him, “and it was unchanged, still exceptionally beautiful. But the abundance of frogs, snakes, fish, butterflies, is gone, like everywhere. There’s a new metastudy by the World Wildlife Fund that finds half the individual animals that were alive on the planet in 1970 have been killed. This summer I flew over the Alps on the way to a literary conference in Lake Como, and the snow is gone, the big peaks and the glaciers below them are just bare black rock and scree. Bedford’s magnificent forest is under assault by new introduced exotic beetles and fungi, which are attacking the beeches, oaks, ashes, hemlocks, spruces, and cherry trees. You don’t get the full orchestra of bullfrogs, katydids, cicadas, birds singing their hearts out at the height of summer anymore. There’s been a dramatic die-off even in a place as conservation-minded and pesticide-free as Bedford. The hardest hit are the freshwater clams, which are really mussels,” I go on. “They’re only found in the Northeast. Thirty percent of the species are extinct. Did you know they can live to be one hundred and fifty years old?”

“No kidding, Panda,” he says. “Who would have known? All I remember is they’re no good to eat. I remember there were some in Aspetong Lake and we boiled them up in a pot and they tasted awful.”

We fall silent, until Davie says, with a touch of sadness, “So the Eden of our childhood is still there, but the living things that made it so wonderful are pretty much gone.”

We talk about the importance of our pets, how we already knew that Descartes’s contention that only humans are capable of reason, morality, and emotions was a crock even though we had never heard of Descartes. Sometimes I slept with Basta and Capri on the living room rug. I never had the sense that there was any real difference between us. Sometimes they would yip excitedly in their sleep, so don’t tell me they were incapable of dreaming and self-awareness and didn’t have imaginations. Sometimes they knew when I was going to head down to the village before I did and would run excitedly to the front door, and we would go together. Wherever I was going, the village or the woods, they were up for it. Thomas, our regal Persian cat, was attuned to things that the dogs weren’t. One summer we entered him in a pet show ten miles away, and he escaped from his cage. Six months later, after what must have been an incredible odyssey, he found his way back to us. And when he got old, he simply went off somewhere and died. We looked all over, but never found his body. None of the recent findings of cognitive ethology about the moral and emotional lives and intelligence of animals are at all surprising. Of course animals care: for their young—as I saw when Basta had a litter fathered by Rusty, a bloodhound who lived on Court Street—and for us. “Our dogs’ love and devotion were total and unconditional,” I say, and Davie says, “Like our Labs.’”

I ask him if he ever had the sort of ecstatic feeling of oneness with everything in the forest that I did a couple of times, and he says no, he never did, but he felt alive in the forest, more alive than he did anywhere. I still get that feeling whenever I walk into a forest. “People say I have shamanic qualities,” I tell him, “but you were the one who was always turning over rocks and logs to see what was under them. I do, though, have an unusually responsive and inclusive biophilia. Animals, people, landscapes, forests, I love them all. I was probably born that way, but growing up in a family of natural scientists and with all the natural and human diversity in the woods and Bedford Village also nurtured it.

“The other day I asked my wife, who has a master’s in clinical psychology, what syndromes did she think I have, after living with me since 1988 and knowing me better than anybody, and she said, ‘Well, you’re bipolar, borderline, ADD, drug-damaged, narcissistic, and obsessive-compulsive, but none of them full blown.’ All of these things are definitely describing traits I have only recently come to realize I have, but they have had both positive and negative effects in my life, so I would propose a less judgmental and reductive term: borderless personality. When I walk into a forest, any wild place, things become alive. The usual barriers with animals and people from other cultures for me do not exist. I have kind of learned on the job, after getting down with so many animals and indigenous people who regard them as their brothers. But this does not mean I have the kind of empathy that can feel the way an animal or another person feels. I have only met a few people who have that, and you’re one of them, Davie.”

THE EDUCATION OF AN ANIMIST