Save Room for Pie

No, we did not eat the fugu, the blowfish which if prepared incorrectly is fatal. We did not eat that. If you must eat a blowfish, I always say, find one that comes without a waiver. Nor did we eat eel on a stick, ice cream made from whale fat, or a bowl of tiny squirming live fish. We did eat raw chicken.

Every day, a lawyer in Marin County, California, named Peter Buchanan does exactly the same thing for lunch: drives to the same restaurant and picks up the same take-out order: salmon grilled on one side, light olive oil no salt no pepper, well-steamed green beans, carrots, and four potatoes. And drives back to his office and eats. One day recently, a slight complication arose: as Buchanan left the restaurant, a road worker tried to wave him around a construction barrier. The next thing the worker knew, cones were flying and he was clinging—with what a witness called “a pretty shocked look on his face”—to the hood of Buchanan’s car, which proceeded up Highway 101, as usual, at forty miles an hour. When, after several miles, traffic halted momentarily, the worker got off. Buchanan went on, as usual. Police found him in his office, as usual, having his lunch. “A crazy guy was on my hood,” he said. “I told him to get off.” Buchanan, seventy-three, faces charges that could get him four years of a whole new routine.

I know, I know. Tell people you have eaten fried armadillo, for example, and they may turn up their noses, but they do so with some grudging respect for your exposure to folk food. Then they ask, and not just out of politeness, what it tasted like. (A little like fried chicken.) Tell people you ate raw chicken—people who scour and bleach their cutting board for fear that some faint vestige of raw chicken may lurk in the grain—and they look at you as if you have sunk to the level of an egg-sucking dog, or a geek (actually that would require a live chicken—in Japan we saw a sign for “Living Ham Pizza,” but that just meant “very fresh”), or a gerbil that devours its young.

So, were we disoriented, so to speak? Japan is a long way from where we live. You cross the international date line, which means that you journey earlierward for the better part of a whole day, and yet when you reach the Land of the Rising Sun, back home it is currently yesterday. Although for some time in the night, it will be today.

Were we bemused by what happens in Japan to our native tongue? There are shops in Japan called simply “Let’s.” Or “Get!” On the other hand, there is a bar and restaurant in Kyoto called (with all the dots and quotation marks) “Pooh’s?…” When you see a sign that says, “Relaxation Forest … For Rest,” outside a place where you go to unwind by sitting among potted plants and looking at videos of woodsy settings, you know that this is a culture that has its own way of playing around with English words. And mixing them with other languages, as in “Le Monde des ONLY YOU,” a private club in the Gion district of Kyoto. The Japanese word pronounced “taco” means “octopus,” and the magazine named B.L.T. stands for “Beautiful Lady and Television.”

But my wife, Joan, went to high school in Japan and remembered enough Japanese to keep us grounded and to order us several beers before we ate the raw chicken. True, she was not sure she was ordering them correctly because, since they were draft beers, in chunky glasses, she couldn’t decide whether they were tall skinny things or not. In bottles, they would clearly have been tall skinny things. The Japanese for “two,” when the two things in question are tall and skinny, is nippon. For two things that are not tall and skinny, it is futatsu. (For two animals of any shape, it is ni-hiki, for two people, futari.) Anyway, we had got several pairs of beers ordered.

And the fugu aside, how can you get poisoned, accidentally, in a country that produces such toothpicks? We brought home a package of five toothpicks (Japanese things never come in fours because shi means both “four” and “death”), dressed up, each one differently, in the wigs and kimonos of geishas. We also brought home Nice Day brand toothpicks. They come in a translucent plastic cylinder packed tight, not a micron of wasted space, so when you take off the top, you see a solid flat mass of blunt tips, ranging in color from burnt brown to tan. Together these tips suggest a cross section of a single many-stranded organism or cable. Or a beehive, but better organized. Eight hundred and fifty toothpicks, needle sharp and sturdy: I have been using one of them, off and on and respectfully but not gingerly, for two days now to see how long it will hold up, and so far it is only just a bit soggy at the tip. The blunt end resembles a chessman: a head, and where the neck would be, there’s a groove or circumnotch that fits your fingernail, and then there’s an elegantly beveled torso, and then a swelling like hips, and then another notch, this one less pronounced than the one above, and finally there’s the long shaft leading to the business end. Each pick would appear to have been hand turned on a tiny lathe and then cured and tempered. I have encountered such toothpicks before, in Japanese restaurants, but to have a jam-packed quiver of them, which should last for two or three years of strenuous use, is to love them. And in tiny English beneath the Japanese for “Nice Day,” we read the following message: “We wish to enjoy meals as we have them every day.”

From Japan we also brought back containers of ground pepper. A four-inch bamboo section with a wooden stopper in the top, where the pepper went in, and a tiny stopper on the side, where the pepper comes out. A label on the side says, in Japanese, “Seven different peppers.” Blended as to color and taste in seven-part harmony.

We brought from Japan stainless steel grapefruit spoons, very subtly serrated, engraved with Japanese characters that may be rendered phonetically, according to Joan, as “Gurepufurutsusupun.”

We brought from Japan a drawstring bag, on the inside red silk, on the outside green silk with little white rabbits and, in Japanese, “Little silk rabbit bag.” Nothing tricky there.

We brought from Japan a sumptuous spiral watercolor book. Opening its dusty-rose-colored boards to the white paper, just faintly creamy, inside, is like biting into a plum and finding gelato, or sliding a silk gown up over an even lovelier leg. “Human art materials,” it says on the first page.

We brought from Japan smaller notebooks, three inches by four and an eighth, in various pastel colors, all of which say on the cover, in small type, “Let simple and old-fashioned myself stay with you, while ordinary things have been disappearing in the world,” and below that, in minuscule cursive, “Gratitude for you.” We brought a larger notebook whose red-and-white-gingham-pattern cover says, “Be chic about a notebook. Facile/Tasty character is our basic criterion,” and another notebook with a clear plastic cover that says on the second page, “The proof of a pudding is in the eating, and so start up right now without worry about.”

We did have one worrisome food experience in Japan, in a small, inelegant inn on the Ise Peninsula, where we paid three hundred dollars for a room with meals and karaoke. Before we had a chance to order dinner, the proprietor showed up at our door with a spread consisting of an overbroiled lobster apiece; six baked clams of a certain type said to be named for the noise they make when alive (bapubapu); a cooked fish called, I think, asagi; heaping platters of octopus sashimi, tuna sashimi, salmon sashimi, and sea-bream sashimi; several enormous peeled grapes; some pale, unspecified sashimi in a boat of ice with a fake cherry-blossom bonsai garnish; and—sizzling sluggishly on a tinfoil platter over burning Sterno—half an onion, half a green pepper, and eight cubes of salami.

It doesn’t take long for a small morsel of fatty pork to pass through a duck. Alton Emory, of Canardia, New Hampshire, who has ducks, noticed this, and it gave him an idea for a surefire viral video. He tied a piece of fatty pork to a greased length of twine and placed it in his duck yard, and soon he had a string of ducks—going on with their lives unruffled, because Emory allowed for adequate slack. But the video footage—four ducks, then five ducks, then six—didn’t look like much. And the local humane society got wind of his project. Last week, as Emory stood in the yard arguing with the humane society guy, an eagle swooped down, grabbed the sixth duck, and flew off with the whole string—wouldn’t you know it: as the other five ducks, one at a time, slid down the string, fell through the air, and landed on his pond, Emory’s camera was in the house.

We couldn’t eat more than half of this repast, and we didn’t want to hurt the proprietor’s feelings, so we hid much of the sashimi in a plastic bag. Next morning we walked down to the water, off behind some craggy rocks out of sight of the inn, and tossed sashimi in the direction of hovering seafowl. Which hated our manners and flew away.

After a long awkward pause, a single bird reappeared. Birders tell us it was undoubtedly a black kite. It had in its mouth what looked like a tissue. As it made a pass over the sashimi scattered on the riprap, the kite transferred this tissue thing to its talons, as if to wipe them off. Then the kite dropped the tissue-like thing into the sea, where it seemed to melt. Then the kite soared, spiraled down, grabbed a bit of our fish, and flew away.

In a country where seabirds are that fastidious, how risky can the restaurants be? Generally, we found the restaurant food to be less eerie than it looked. In a Kyoto restaurant called Agatha, for Agatha Christie, we were served skewered eggplant topped by what looked like lots of tiny wee wings, moving on it. Were they supposed to be on there? Were they some manner of near-evanescent beings which, having been undercooked, had revived? At the time we didn’t have a cat back home, so we had to ask. They were flakes shaved from a chunk of bonito fish that had been dried in the sun, and they were moving because they were so thin they fluttered with every faint current of air in the place. The favorite treat of the cat we do have now, Jimmy, is a coarser version of those flakes.

It was also in Kyoto, in a mom-and-pop joint called Toridori, that we ate raw chicken. Tori means chicken and dori means street, but toridori could also mean chicken-chicken, because when the Japanese double a word to make a compound they always change the first letter the second time, as we do in “fuzzy-wuzzy.”

All our favorite eating places in Japan—ones specializing in soba noodles, or ramen with soup and luscious gyoza dumplings with soy sauce and vinegar—were small, packed, and inexpensive enough that you could eat well for under fifteen bucks apiece. Toridori, after we entered through the traditional hanging curtain bearing the establishment’s name, was just big enough to hold ten chairs along an L-shaped polished-wood counter, behind the counter a range and a cutting surface, and on a shelf the traditional welcoming cat: a plump poker-faced china figure holding up one paw in benediction. After we sat down, only one of the chairs was empty. Mom and pop sliced and diced and cooked and served and chatted with a cheery clientele.

We did not try to conceal the restaurant guide in which we had read about Toridori. We sensed an air of “Here come the hen-na-gaijin” (strange foreigners, a redundancy). Hosts and diners alike were undoubtedly bracing themselves for the sight of something barbaric, like a human being putting soy sauce on his or her rice, or pouring his or her own sake, or at least neglecting to lift the sake cup up from the counter while accepting more sake from his or her dinner companion. But thanks to Joan, we knew better than to do these things. And when she offered some pleasantries in Japanese, all present relaxed.

Our first course was excellent fried dried yuba (tofu whey). In a Tokyo restaurant specializing in all forms of tofu, we had made our own yuba. Big squares of tofu came floating in the whey, which was simmering over a charcoal burner. After you ate the tofu, with onions and various sauces, you took a bamboo-and-rice-paper fan and waved it over the whey until what formed was, to be frank, a layer of scum. And you picked it up with your chopsticks, and it was not at all bad, for scum, but nowhere near as good as Toridori’s three-by-five rectangles of extra-thin yuba deep-fried to a crispness that melted as you chewed.

Then we ordered some yakitori—fried dark chicken meat on one skewer, white meat on another, livers on a third. Oishii. Means “delicious.” Then we ordered steamed chicken dumplings. Very oishii. Then we ordered fried chicken dumplings. Even more oishii. And then …

We watched pop slice raw chicken breast extremely thin and serve up the slices in precisely staggered stacks. We watched two stylish Japanese women, svelte in basic black and pearls—women who gave every appearance of being much further removed from a low animal state than I—dip these slices into plum sauce and enjoy them. We saw that these women did not die.

Pop took a break from slicing to tell us there was another pun involved in Toridori: he came from the town of Tottori. Multilevel wordplay with the locals! And mom presented us with gifts: a felt chicken on a chain, commemorating Toridori’s fifth anniversary, and a series of chopstick rests, which she had made herself, some of them wine-cork halves wrapped in decorative paper, some of them origami cranes, and some of them paper-wrapped and lacquered oshibori ties—the strips of plastic that go around the wet towels served before meals.

You would have taken chicken sashimi from those nice folks too, or I would have been disappointed in you. It was pink, almost translucent, and each slice came with a slender ridge of raw chicken skin.

Something that happened to me in the Times Square Nathan’s still sticks in my craw, years and years after that Nathan’s has ceased to exist.

Back then, I was living in New York working for Sports Illustrated. Often I would lunch on Nathan’s hot dogs or Nathan’s fried shrimp, which happened to be fried the way my mother used to fry them in Georgia, with Nathan’s tartar sauce. (When asked what my favorite food is, I sometimes say, “Tartar sauce.” Not strictly true, but there’s something to it.) And Nathan’s corn on the cob.

Ideal corn on the cob is from farm stands: sweet, white, exquisite little-crisp-kernel Silver Queen or alternating yellow and white Butter and Sugar. But Nathan’s plump basic-yellow central-casting kernels were succulent too, in their way.

So one day I purchased fried shrimp, a vanilla shake, and a nice, juicy ear of that corn. And carried it all to one of the many Formica tables in the place.

In the Times Square of those days, you might well encounter fellow diners who were unsavory. But I have always had a strong stomach. I can count the times I have thrown up on the fingers of one hand. (I mean, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have thrown up.)

Once in 1969, from having eaten chili after sustaining what was later diagnosed as a bruised spleen from a company-softball collision. To my surprise, the chili had not settled my stomach. I was trying to make it to the Time Incorporated infirmary, didn’t want to throw up on Radio City Music Hall, scurried across Sixth Avenue while holding my toddler daughter’s hand—“I don’t want to hold Daddy’s hand! I want to hold Daddy’s hand when he’s well!” Got as far as the base of the Time-Life Building, up against which I lost it. “It’s all right,” my then wife, Ellen, told a disgusted-looking man who showed up with a broom, “he works here.”

Once in an Italian villa in 2003, from what must have been some extraordinarily bad mussels marinara di amore.

And once in Nashville, on a book tour, from the last ham-salad sandwich I will ever buy from a TV-station vending machine.

What’s that, four? I might well be better off today, weigh less, have a lighter karma (if I understand Eastern religion at all; maybe I don’t), if I threw up more often. But I don’t.

Vereen Elam, CEO of Inglow Inc., a Youngstown, Ohio, window-treatment firm, has urged his more than two hundred employees to have their auras cleansed at home. “It has come to my attention that many of you may have auras that restrict your full effectiveness,” says a memo received by the Inglow workforce. “This can be corrected after work hours. Sit in a chair while a family member does a firm but gentle chopping action around the entire body, coming within one to two inches from physical contact. The family member should then be sure to shake their hands out thoroughly.” Though the memo states that the cleansing isn’t mandatory, rumbles of in-house dissent have reached the local media. “We are Presbyterians and do not recognize the aura,” an unnamed employee tells the Youngstown Eagle. “Especially my husband. He doesn’t even acknowledge herbs.”

So I could handle the Nathan’s ambience. People milled around, the tables stayed full despite a rapid turnover, and they were shared by strangers. And I stress, strangers. Everyone was fully clothed and no one was lying down, or relaxing, but otherwise the Times Square Nathan’s was much like the beach at Coney Island, without sand. As I settled in, a frazzled mother impelled her three children, aged about four, six, and eight, and hard looking every one of them, into the three chairs opposite me.

Tim Philip Ditmars of Buford, Arizona, never heard of National Public Radio until two years ago. “At that time,” he says, “I had been a Buddhist for eighteen months. Had achieved prolonged tantric ecstasy for periods up to four and a half hours, and was looking around for something else. Then I turned on this portable radio I had stolen from my macrobiotic nutritionist’s office, just for the thrill, which gives you an idea where my head was, at that time. The radio was set at a station where people were just talking, in a normal tone of voice, for a long time. I was fascinated. A man in Kansas was saying something called secular humanism was a religion trying to take over America. Then a woman in Michigan said no it wasn’t. Either way, I was hooked.” Ditmars has started a group of recovering ultimate-truth addicts called Eureka Seekers, whose membership numbers over five thousand nationally. Among them is Ditmars’s nutritionist, who has stopped pushing millet.

“Now, what do you want?” the mother queried over my shoulder—her intention evidently being to leave the young ones there while she went for food.

“That!” said the largest of the three, a girl, and she physically poked, with her finger, my ear of corn.

I sat there. Staring incredulously at my corn. As it rocked back and forth slightly in its butter. And then I stared at the trespassing girl, who sat—with an air about her of not having exceeded her rights, or even having begun to exercise them good—some fifteen inches away from my nose.

“Cynthia…,” snapped the mother then. And I figured the girl was going to get a lesson in the inviolability, in a civilized society, of another person’s ear of corn. “That is not enough.”

So, against her will, Cynthia ordered a hot dog and a large Coke as well as some corn, and the whole family continued to take no notice of me as …

As I ate mine. I couldn’t even eat around the spot where Cynthia had touched it, because, as I say, she had caused my corn to rock a little bit in its butter, and I had taken my eyes off it to stare at her and then at her mother.

I guess you could say that by not speaking out, at least, by not standing up and saying, “Now, listen here. Now, listen here. People don’t do that to other people’s corn”—I guess by not doing that, at least, I was as guilty of ignoring their personhoods as they were of mine.

New York City, 1969. My daughter wasn’t three years old yet, her brother was a baby, and they, their mother, Ellen, and I had two cats, Abyssinians, named Kobar and Bale. One day Bale, in a comfortable cardboard box, with Kobar pacing back and forth and occasionally peering in and muttering, delivered four kittens. The fourth born was weak. It kept getting pushed back away from Bale, where it cried in an odd voice and twitched feebly. Then Kobar and Bale began to shiver. Shivering in the mother might mean eclampsia; Kobar was being hysterical.

We were living in Manhattan and had no car. Nor did we have a cat carrier that could accommodate six cats (two of them shivering, four of them tiny, and one of those impaired) comfortably enough that they could be carried alive on foot by one person for long. Nor did we have whatever it might take to load two adults, two small children, and six cats into and out of a taxi.

So we put Kobar in the cat carrier, and him and the two children in the baby buggy, which Ellen pushed, carefully, and I carried Bale and the kittens, carefully, in the big cardboard box of the nativity, with a top on it and holes cut out for air and light. Eventually, we all ten made it the twelve blocks to the vet’s.

The vet prescribed a lot of pills and powders that would make the whole cat family right, except for the feeble kitten. He would need to have butter smeared all over him. That would induce Bale to lick him, which would be stimulating.

And it worked. It felt pretty questionable, I can tell you, to smear butter, with a little calcium lactate mixed in, on a minuscule, faintly wriggling fur ball, but in the long run it lent him vigor. Soon the runt was tearing into the scrimmage like a tiger. Sometimes we would have to pull a larger kitten out of his way, but then he would latch on with a will and hold his own. In the process, he got butter all over his siblings.

Buttered kittens. Both parents enjoyed licking them. Let’s have a chorus of “Wo-oh-oh-oh-oh … fee-lines.”

Years ago I did a bad thing on a New York City subway, and I still feel responsible, although it was owing to the difficulty of modern life.

I was living in Brooklyn at the time and working in Rockefeller Center. I was on my way from the former to the latter. I had had the foresight to leave tardily enough that morning to get a seat. Still the car was fairly crowded, several unfortunates standing.

We pulled in to the Grand Street station. I was absorbed in the Park Slope News, our weekly neighborhood paper, which reported the seizure of $200,000 worth of heroin in a house near ours (we didn’t know them). Suddenly one end of the subway car was aflutter. It was the first time I had been in an even partially aflutter subway car. I was accustomed to subway cars’ having the interior atmosphere of quarter-ton trucks carrying enlisted men back at night from long, pointless exercises in the rain.

My end of this car, though, was filled suddenly with people gesturing, pointing to a spot just over my head, and saying, “The window.” Two men across from me had even risen from their seats and advanced in the direction the others were pointing.

I looked over my shoulder and saw what seemed to be the window in question—an adjustable horizontal vent over the big stationary pane. The doors had closed, the train was just beginning to move out of the station, and a young couple was running alongside, pointing at the window. It was open.

I can’t explain my reaction. All I know is that I felt I had to react quickly, and I suppose the only previous situations to which my mind could relate this one at the moment were situations in which my car door was open and other drivers were shouting at me to close it. I knew, in my mind, that you couldn’t be sucked out of a subway window the way you can, as I understand it, out of an airplane window, but I might have assumed subrationally that there could be something nebulously hazardous about a subway window left open. And I loved New York, even including its subways, and I wanted to be a good citizen.

The faces of the couple running along outside fell, as the train pulled away from them and a paper bag hit the inside of the window and dropped back, onto the woman beside me.

“He closed the window,” from another woman across the car, was the only comment on my action that I heard; its tone seemed moderately surprised but too tired to be censorious. The man who had thrown the bag picked it up off the lady’s lap and went back to his seat.

He and the man next to him opened the bag, revealing its contents to themselves only. The other people in the car murmured a bit and then lapsed back into their previous silences.

I couldn’t put the thing out of my mind so easily. I went over to the two men, losing my seat to a blind woman as I did. “What was that all about?” I asked.

It came clear to me then. The young running couple had left his or her wig and lunch on the seat by mistake and had been calling for someone to throw the bag out through the window to them before the train departed.

The two men put the bag back down on the seat. They didn’t want to wear the wig, and they didn’t trust human nature enough to eat the sandwich.

By getting involved, not wisely but too well, I had prevented what might have been the only spontaneous and niftily coordinated friendly effort among strangers going on at that moment throughout the metropolis. I felt bad. I wanted to account for my actions. But nobody would look at me. I glared at the blind woman and stood there impersonally rattling and groaning on the underground the rest of the way to work. Urban life is too complex.

A few years ago, after eight years of unmarried bliss, the artist known as Joan Griswold and I were wed. People (that is to say, men) asked me why. She put her foot down, I said: unless I made an honest woman of her, she would no longer check me for ticks.

In that there was a germ of truth. To be sure, we were wafted to the altar (or rather, Sunset Beach, in Tarpon Springs, Florida) by forces so gossamer, mutual, and luminous as to render laughable any notion of mundane quid pro quo. If, however, my beloved had laid down the tick ultimatum, it would have been dispositive. On the green rolling swards of western Massachusetts, where we live in tick season, ticks dine on us.

With sophisticated people of the Northeast—sophisticated, that is, in their way—I have long had an unspoken compact. They get their props for growing up comfortable with things like fresh mozzarella (when asked what possessed me to move north, I often reply simply, “Real, fresh mozzarella”), and I get mine for having grown up comfortable with things like ticks.

At last someone has harnessed the digestive powers of that minute reddish larva of the harvest mite known as the red bug or chigger. At one-sixtieth of an inch in length, a chigger is almost invisible to the human eye, but when it crawls up onto you (it has six legs), it begins to devour you. It digs down past your outer layer of skin, breaks down your inner-skin cells with its saliva, and chews. This, as you well know, makes you itch like original sin. (In hell, I have been told, chiggers are the size of squirrels.) So have scientists at Clemson University discovered how to stamp out chiggers? No. But they have shown that the key element of chigger saliva can be isolated and reengineered to focus on hair follicles. Is Madame’s down getting dirty? A little bit of repurposed chigger spit whisks away those unwanted whiskers for good. Because chigger saliva is almost laughably hard to gather in bulk, the commercial potential here may seem limited, but the researchers hope to synthesize that key element before long.

For many years, after moving up here, I was content in the notion that nothing in the New England countryside, except bears, was virulent or voracious enough to have much impact on a person who grew up in Georgia and Texas. I have been pretty brazen about Massachusetts poison ivy, for instance, because it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as strong as the Georgia variety, exposure to which may have blessed me, in retrospect, with the immune system of a boar hog.

In Georgia, we had copperheads, water moccasins, rattlesnakes, and chiggers, and our bees were strong. If a barefoot boy—even a barefoot Georgia boy—stepped on a Georgia bee, the arch of his foot would turn convex. I look at a Massachusetts bee today, and I think, Buck up, little buddy.

As for Texas, we lived there for just one year, when I was thirteen. But that was long enough to be faced with scorpions and … the asp.

The asp. Not the venomous snake from Egypt but a friendly-looking caterpillar, which, I was told by my eighth-grade peers …

Eighth-grade peers. Remember—shudder—them? Perhaps I seemed as unfathomable and potentially menacing to them as they did to me. But that’s what people say about alligators. And alligators have never shown me any signs that they perceive me as either a threat or a meal. Neither did my eighth-grade peers, in particular the ones who told me that if you touched an asp, it would rot your flesh away down to the bone.

In later years, I have come to realize that it’s eighth-grade peers who do that.

But the deer ticks of Massachusetts are bad. They can give you Lyme disease or worse. Georgia ticks latch onto you and suck blood until they get tight as a tick. And you find them and you go, yuck, and you pull them off. No. These Yankee ticks sneak in, little bitty things, and the next thing you know, they are gone and have left behind …

They. Have left a bull’s-eye. On me. After having their way with me and going off to wherever smug had-my-fill-of-that-Homo-sapiens parasites go.

It wasn’t a sign my marriage was slipping. I had gardened and walked in the woods all summer, virtually tick-free, and I had got careless. At the side of a road that runs along a stream, I had discerned a fallen tree as a great source of free firewood. I had parked downstream, waded upstream, and, wearing shorts, had bow-sawed great chunks of wood off that trunk and floated them to my car.

But then one morning I felt rotten. At my age I expect to hurt vaguely all over, but this was worse. And under my arm: the bull’s-eye. No joking matter. These ticks don’t just take blood, they leave serious sepsis. My extremely hardy son had to be hospitalized with a fever of 105 after getting a tick bite and being dismissive of it. After being pumped full of antibiotics, he was okay, but since then he can’t eat or drink lots of good things without severe indigestion.

A little bitty tick did that. Got between him and his appetite. So I embarked upon a three-week course of antibiotics—and yogurt, to restore the beneficial digestive bugs that the antibiotics kill along with the malevolent bugs. I had to pay for killing bugs by eating bugs! And you know what really gets me? Not so much that the tick is so little bitty it is able to eat and run. (Where does it go? Having got into my kitchen metaphorically, does it go there literally and make a sandwich?) What really gets me is that its great-great-grandparents are probably from Connecticut.

My assumption had always been that hyenas skulk because, something to do with a carrion diet, they feel lowly. They are said to have, literally, the worst breath in creation. But after observing hyenas in the East African bush, I am inclined to believe that mother hyenas say to their young, “How many times have I told you? Stop holding your head up!” A hyena’s laugh sounds like the whoop of an old boy who’s just heard a good one. It isn’t hard to imagine one hyena nudging another when a real jaw-dragger goes by and saying, “Look at that sumbitch skulk!” I’ll bet hyenas fed fresher fare in captivity lose their sexual appeal to each other until they’re given supplements of ripe offal. Hyenas are monogamous, by the way, and the male and female raise the cubs together. Oh, they’ll rob a human grave, all right, and in Kenya I met a plastic surgeon, Dr. Peter Davis, who once made a new nose for a man who’d had his bitten off by a hyena as he slept (or, more precisely, as he abruptly woke) in a tent in the wilds of Zaire.

“Oh, no, no. He was a real colonial. He didn’t mind. Said, after it was over, he thought I’d given him a better nose. That’s all.”

At any rate, the hyena population of East Africa is thinning along with that of other, loftier animals. Crops and people crowding them out. The cheetah, in my experience, is typically surrounded by nine or ten Land Rovers and vans. From these vehicles people are taking photographs and inquiring loudly, “WHAT DO THEY MAINLY EAT?” At the moment the cheetah and her cubs are eating some type of antelope. Which type is a matter of audible disagreement among the vehicles’ various guides.

“Do we need a constant comment’ry on the disemboweling of poor little whatsit?” asks one of the tourists. One of the guides is commenting so loudly that an earnest camera user in another vehicle shouts, “Shut up, man!” The guide takes umbrage and begins to yell, “Who are you? Who are you?” The guide in the vehicle with the shouting photographer begins reasoning in Swahili with the offended guide, but the latter yells, “I will talk! It is a free country!” The cheetahs give no sign that they notice all this, but you think they must.

Our guide, Richard, of Little Governors’ Camp on the Maasai Mara in Kenya, quietly observes things that the other guides don’t. “It is a Thomson’s gazelle baby,” he says of the cheetah’s meal. “There is its father.” Up on a rise fifty yards away, the father is staring at the devouring of the son. Once, the father stamps his foot, which is too small to help. Over the rise are another male and two females, one of which is the prey’s mother. She is staring into space.

We drive on and see a young impala off to itself. A baboon is sitting patiently between it and the herd. “The baboon will eat the baby,” Richard says. “There is the baby’s parents. They know where the baby is. It was asleep. But they do not know the baboon is there. He is clever. He waits till the baby is used to him. It will take about one hour.”

My image of a mongoose is of him killing a snake. But according to my observations from a Land Rover, mongoose parents are so preoccupied with keeping their offspring safe from predatory birds that you wonder where they find time for snaking. The mongoose family is living in a termite mound (having eaten the termites), which has ten or twelve tunnels and exits. Mongoose babies are popping out of first one hole, then another—squeezing out past their parents even—and the parents are rushing out, grabbing the babies in their mouths, and bringing them back, and the babies are popping out again. “I’ve seen it in a nature film,” says a Land Rover passenger. “But I never dreamed it was actually there.”

For a while we manage to be the only car parked next to a pair of sleeping lions, waiting for them to mate. A pair of lions will keep company for a week and have sex every twenty minutes or so, day and night, for that period. The male of this pair wakes up, licks the female for a few moments, and then mounts her. She growls. He lies back down acting as though it doesn’t matter to him, he just thought she wanted to. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that our presence may have anything to do with her attitude.

We watch another lion eating a fresh warthog’s head. The roar of a lion is like a stone rolling away from a tomb. You’ve heard of a whiskey baritone. A lion’s roar is warthog-head bass.

That night at dinner a woman cries in exasperation, “We did not see one copulating lion!”

You know how New York City has pigeons? That’s how Kampala, the capital of Uganda, has marabou storks. Stiff-backed, five-foot-long birds resembling public officials, bald-headed except for straggly fuzz, they stalk or glide through the midtown area, eating garbage and perching on used and disused buildings. Urban marabous may be the African fauna of the future. Scavenger birds. And there will be goats no doubt, and here and there a rogue hippo such as the one that “emerged from a sewage pond and attacked a bicyclist on the outskirts of Nairobi,” according to The New York Times, just before I traveled to East Africa to see wild game before it’s gone.

Here, far from the zoo, the hippo is a purple animal with big soulful eyes. Around the eyes and on the underside, pink. The tail looks like a nose with a stringy mustache under it. Hippos in the wild usually have scarred backs from fighting among themselves, biting each other. One hippo can come up under a small boat and flip it.

“I see no hope for it, really,” says an old white Kenyan hunter, “it” being Kenya as a place to behold fabulous beasts. (I have heard a New Orleans oil-company lawyer say something equally dismissive about lower Louisiana.) Of course there is always a chance that he meant a place, run by white Kenyans, to behold fabulous beasts. White Kenyans have a deep emotional investment in their sense of Kenya as paradise lost.

Tourism is Kenya’s number one industry. Tourism means coming to see the animals. And the minister in charge of protecting the game is no longer the one who escorted nine Arab sheikhs on a shooting spree—two hundred animals they bagged, including lion and water buffalo and cheetah—in a game preserve. So there may be room for optimism. Still, there is “less and less room,” as the white Kenyan put it to me, “for the game.”

“Game” is of course a speciesist term. Being a water buffalo is not a game to the water buffalo. Not a business either, more a way of life. Bit of cheek, really, calling oneself a big-game hunter or even referring to the taste of a fellow animal as gamy. But consciousness-raising along those lines won’t help much. In most parts of Africa today, hunting is illegal, and the poachers who kill rhinos and elephants for their horns and tusks, or the odd giraffe or hippo for its meat (the former is said to taste like beef or horse, the latter like pork), are not patronizingly sporty.

The main reason the youth of today may be the last generation to see free-ranging lions is the African youth of today. The infant mortality rate in Kenya is no longer 50 percent, thanks to modern medicine. Even with the AIDS epidemic, adults live longer too. And birth control is unpopular. Kenya’s population needs more and more arable land—the already limited supply of which has been shrunk by drought—to grow crops and raise cows on, which leaves less and less land for the king of the jungle and so on.

On the other hand, a modern young Ugandan, a journalist of Kampala (one of whose slim newspapers, The Evening Times, was coming out quarterly when we were there), told me he had managed to get through his coming-of-age lion hunt without reducing the lion population. He and his friends had one surrounded, late at night, and were closing the circle, hoomba, hoomba, with their spears raised. He was feeling, I gather, like an American Little Leaguer who prays the batter won’t hit the ball to him, when he felt more than heard an enormous uncoiling whoosh go right past him in the pitch dark.

“I didn’t say anything,” he confided. “I continued to move in, spear up, hoomba, hoomba, as did the others. I believe that in this period many lions may vanish mysteriously from hunters in that way.”

As to zebras, they look so zebraic! You’d think they might feel too boldly patterned—wouldn’t feel up to it all the time. Everything black and white! You’d think an occasional one would be gray. But no, zebra-striped as you please. They bray, or honk—a quick harsh hee-haw-heehaw that sounds almost like a bark—when they’re deciding to move to a different grazing spot and spreading the word. “They only seem to have such big rumps,” said a woman in our Land Rover, “because of the horizontal stripes.” She had brought along her teddy bear so he could see the wild animals too.

A giraffe running—that neck pumping loftily along over cantering legs—is like several animals at once, but highly coordinated. A giraffe has tremendous eyelashes—talk about looking down on tourists superciliously. An old elephant looks like two men in an elephant suit that is far too big. It knows only too well that it’s an elephant, you sense.

A baby elephant looks cutest from a distance. Up close, it is already wrinkled, and you realize that what makes an elephant’s visage is the ears and tusks. The rest is saurian and chinless. But when all is said and done, a baby elephant at any range is damn cute. And close to its mama.

We saw one that had no tail. “A hyena eat it off,” our guide said. “When it was little. There will be problems. With the flies.”

Let me qualify that. A wild fish ripped my flesh. If there is one point that Ney Olortegui, Amazon guide, would like to clear up, it is that people go overboard when they talk about man-eating fish. One small man-eating fish ripped my flesh.

Traditionally, tales told by explorers back from the Amazon are hard to swallow. Those fierce women warriors for whom the Amazon is named? Fabricated by an eighteenth-century Spaniard. Those three-hundred-pound catfish that will drag children to the bottom of the river and gulp them whole? Well, those do exist. We ate part of one that we bought in a village.

But I won’t sensationalize the man-eating fish. There I was, dog-paddling in the Huallaga, an Amazonian tributary in northern Peru. Our raft, the Yacu-Mama (named by Ney for a legendary Amazonian monster that is said to abduct people down into the depths), was at anchor. Several of us explorers were in swimming. Ney had assured us we needn’t worry about what he referred to as “my piranha.”

As long as we kept moving, he said, the kind of piranha that frequents this stretch of the river would rather eat something dead. “People come here, they make a documentary out of the piranha. They take a cow, they shoot pictures until they drown the cow. They use special pipes from the United States to blow bubbles. They buy one of the stuffed piranha, put it in the water, and make its jaws move. Then they strip the cow, so it look beautiful, to the bone. That’s false. That’s why my piranha have gained so much fame.”

The last time you visited a zoo, were you surprised to see someone jogging there? Well, that jogger was testing a safety device—located in his or her shoes. In 1999 in this country alone, over fifteen thousand runners were bitten by dogs badly enough to require medical attention. Hence the development of Roveroff, a tiny device that, when stepped on, emits a squeak that is too high for humans to hear but just the right pitch to repel dogs. Trouble is, that pitch also attracts owls—by giving them the irresistible impression that someone is running along stepping on mice. This year alone, five Roveroff road testers have been mauled, in broad daylight, by hungry awakened owls. So test joggers are now running past every kind of caged bird and beast to find a pitch setting that turns dogs away without stimulating the taste buds of any other animal.

Special pipes? This did not dispel footage of cow devouring that held me rapt in my boyhood. But another explorer was asking about something even worse: the candiru, a toothpick-sized fish that introduces itself (strange phrase) into one or another of a swimmer’s orifices, spreads open its set of spines, and sets up housekeeping. Was it true, in fact, that the candiru had such a yen for any old human entrance that it was capable of swimming up the stream of a person urinating into the river?

“Oh, yeahhhhhh,” said Ney. “They do that. Can … dee … ruh. But thass just if you not wearing a bathing suit.”

So there we were, treading water, energetically, in the brown-green, pleasantly warm, unhurriedly inexorable current. And I felt a nibbling on my upper thigh.

I should tell you who we were: the Emerald Forest expedition, booked through Sobek, a California outfit that specialized—this was back in 1986—in adventure vacations. Seven hundred miles in ten days along the Peruvian headwaters of the Amazon, through the heart of the rain forest, from Chazuta to Iquitos, on a raft handmade out of balsa logs, cane poles, wood poles, chainsawed planks, and palm fronds. Eight Peruvians and nine gringos, including the distinguished sports photographer Heinz Kluetmeier, my son, Kirven, then seventeen, and I, then forty-four. The three of us were doing a story for Sports Illustrated.

“I’ll tell you where I got the idea,” says Wade Beacham, the Dallas oilman who founded Rain Forest Fellowships Inc. “I took a fishing trip on the Amazon, and I saw how our native guides lived. And I got back to Dallas, and a friend of mine said he was worried about his son, who was off in college and wanted to be an environmentalist—save the rain forest. I said, ‘I tell you what. Let’s set up a program.’ So now any Texas college student who’s developing environmental leanings, and whose daddy has thirty-six thousand dollars to spare, can go spend a semester seeing, as Beacham puts it, “what the environment is really like. With these Indians down there, who kill and eat everything they can and chop down everything they feel like. In other words, the rain forest is just as much a jungle as the bidness world. These kids go down there wanting to hug a tree and come back mean as snakes.”

We made our way down the river from village to village. Very appealing people. Clear handsome faces with smiles for us everywhere. At one time in history, the agency charged with protecting the Indians fed poisoned candy to inconveniently situated Indian children, and the kids in one village ran from us, saying (according to Ney) that we were Germans who would kidnap them for their fat. They were giggling, though.

On the roof of the raft, we had chickens clucking and scratching. We acquired these chickens for the equivalent of nine dollars each in the market at Yurimaguas (where chicken feet and chicken heads were being cooked as snacks on braziers). One by one, we ate our chickens. We didn’t eat the rooster—who crowed early in the morning, when Heinz didn’t grab him and throw him in a sack first—until the last day. Ney identified with the rooster and pouted when Heinz sacked him.

We also ate fillets from horrible-looking catfish of various kinds, some fresh and some dried (the one portion I had trouble warming to was from a batch of insufficiently dried that I’d seen Ney’s assistant, Julia, scraping maggots off of), potatoes and potatoish yucca, mangoes with lime juice, beans, rice, a vivid beets-peas-and-potato salad, various hearty soups (one of which was augmented by swarms of melting gnats one unusually buggy evening), and some red meat that one of the crew, when asked, said was “bi’ef.”

Reed Duryea ate a cocker spaniel puppy once, okay? He was told he had to do it—find, clean, cook, and eat a puppy—to get into Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. “They sprang it on us in the last stage of initiation,” he told reporters. “Doesn’t everybody do something in college they wouldn’t do today?” Yes, but what Duryea did caused his chapter of SAE to create an award in his name, which is presented each year to the coldest-blooded initiate. It seems that the great majority of pledges when presented with the puppy requirement say they would rather forgo brotherhood than do that to a puppy, and they are congratulated. Those few who are gung ho enough to undertake the puppy quest are led by helpful hints on a wild-goose chase, so to speak, until a light begins to dawn. Reed Duryea is said to be the only pledge in history who, before he could be stopped, actually went off into the night for a couple of hours and returned with the bones. Now he is running for Congress, in northern Virginia, and the puppy thing has come out. “Here’s what is key,” says Duryea. “It was a secret, sacred ceremony. Whoever disclosed this violated an oath.”

“It monkey meat,” said Ney. “They change the name to protect the innocent.”

On the Sports Illustrated expense account (those were the days in magazine journalism), I bought a monkey, which we named Blanca. And a turtle who never got named, a little green parrot named Rosita, a puppy named Tipico (to replace the puppy named Inca, who got so sick we left him with some coca dealers we uneasily encountered), and a marmoset.

The marmoset needed no name. He was a pistol. In the face he looked exactly like a movie gremlin. He was smaller than an explorer’s hand but had more attitude than any four whole explorers put together. He would jump down onto the dinner table, wade right through somebody’s beans, and go headfirst into the lemonade. So during meals we kept him in a bag, where he expostulated like an arrested diplomat. One night he sat on the rafter above one of the gringos’ hammocks and screamed, as if hailing a cab, until the gringo stuck up his hand and the marmoset ran down his arm to his armpit, where he spent the rest of the night. The marmoset and the little green parrot were about the same size. Finding themselves on the same rafter, they fought toe-to-toe like King Kong and the dinosaur.

Some of us are hiking through a stretch of rain forest with a man from the nearest village. Ney hands one of us a guava fruit, he bites into it, passes it back to me without looking at it, I see it is crawling with worms. Local guy chops down a forty-foot palm tree with his machete at Ney’s behest to get one heart of palm for salad. (I hit the tree a couple of licks and it’s as hard as a railroad tie and clangs like metal.) We pass by a thorn tree with an orange impaled on it.

Lots of other things happened. I had nightmares from sleeping with two captured macaws under my hammock. We went off into the interior, where I prevented (in my view) Kirven from getting lost in the jungle and he pulled me out of mud that was keeping me from crawling back to the raft. (Are we even? Well…) Some army ants I was trying to set fire to (at Ney’s suggestion) bit me on each knee, through my rain pants, and on every knuckle of my left hand but one. Each bite felt like a blow from a small ball-peen hammer. Ney reminisced about his childhood in the rain forest:

“My father carry about five or six dynamites in his pocket, just for kicks. Sometimes he fish with it. Sometimes we fish with Indian poison: take mashed potatoes, put a little poison in them, toss them on the water, the fish hit them, pow! they jump around like crazy and you scoop ’em out before they die and cut their heads off so the poison don’t get in the meat. My father was a gold prospector, a merchant, a lawyer. He came here from Spain in a small boat. He came to get the gold. He travel the whole jungle here cheating people. He left me with the Campas Indians when I was thirteen. He got into hot water with the chief of the tribe. ‘If you don’t trust me,’ my father said, ‘I’ll leave my son here, and I’ll be back.’ I was one of forty-eight kids my father had with different women. He could care less about another son. I got scared with the Indians because this witch doctor, a lady came to him with the colic—she ate a lot of sugarcane and bar sugar. He tell that lady lie down, you got bad spirit in your stomach, and he cut a hole in her for that bad spirit to come out. With that the lady died.

We caught piranhas, panfish-sized, from a dugout canoe, with cheap rods and reels, malfunctioning plastic bobbers, and hooks so flimsy the piranhas bit through them (if you held a leaf in front of its mouth, a caught piranha would take a semicircle out of it clean as a cookie cutter). They were good fish to catch, the bigger ones fat and game as crappie, and sautéed with lemon they were oily but tasty. Ney caught a strapping piranha on a hook that had no barb or point and hardly any crook left on it. I don’t know how he did it. But other than Ney, I am the only person I know who has used bits of piranha for bait, caught piranhas, eaten piranhas, and …

I felt a nibbling, as I say, on my upper thigh. I had been pecked at by fish before. I grew up being pecked at by fish, in waters of northern Georgia that were about the same color and temperature as this. I swam a few feet away.

I thought to myself, This is just a hysterical piranha attack. I won’t give in to it.

And I hydroplaned back to the raft, yelling something that did not reflect well on me as an explorer: yelling, “Fish! Fish!”

Nobody else had been attacked by fish. The others were still bobbing around, and now as they bobbed, they were laughing.

“Sábalo,” said Ney. A sábalo is not a man-eating fish. It is more or less what I would call a shiner. “This time of year, the dry season, those fish are starving,” said Ney. “That is why. One hungry fish!”

Okay, I had been attacked by a charity-worthy baitfish. At least I had demonstrably been attacked. When you wiped off the blood, you could see the tooth marks. What kind of river was this, where you weren’t safe from the bait?

At any rate, got to get back on that horse. I stood, semi-vindicated, and prepared to dive.

A cooler explorer would have said, “Heinz, get the camera.” I said, “Aauughhhh!”

And it jumped out of my pocket! People witnessed this! It glistened red, blue, and voracious in the Amazonian sun! Eventually, even Ney admitted it was a small piranha.

Flip, floop, it bounced off the side of the raft and disappeared into the murk of the Great Brown God. I had a live Amazonian piranha in my bathing suit pocket for five solid minutes and lived to tell about it!

P.S. The piranha was not then, and is not now, a threatened species. The rain forest itself is—as more and more of it is cleared to make room for beef cattle and agriculture. The rain forest has always played an enormous role in keeping the earth sustainable by absorbing carbon from the air. Its number one enemy is the hamburger.

History. Has to be. As to the question

Of who among you might soothe our digestion—

You, you think, Louie? “I do a cold

Two-eel salad that I have been told—”

“Boo-ooo-ooo-ooo!”

True. Sounds too chewy. “And too gooey, too!”

Not you, Rousseau, ’twas you who so—

Yoo-hoo. Yes, you. ’Twas you, you know

Who jolly well made our bowels growl—

Your soup of greens and salt-pork jowl

Made our jowls turn aquamarine.

The sea, you’ll agree, is sufficiently green,

And we sufficiently salty and swinish—

But look at the time, already nine-ish,

And who’s to do dinner? Not you, Heinrich.

Was not the sea already wine-rich,

Wine-dark, however it goes, enough

Without that Wieners mit zwei Weine stuff

Of yours that caused us all to spew wurst

And sweet wine—what’s so funny, Dewhurst?

Did those fried pies we tried, your pride

And joy, go over? Yes, over the side.

But look, an island! A bit of land which is

Sure to provide us with stuff for sandwiches!

Uh-oh. Here come some men, canoeing,

And growling and … it’s as if they’re chewing.

They’ve got big teeth and jutting man’ibles,

And spears, it appears. I fear they’re cannibals.

Well, we’ll repel ’em. They’ll not dine

On pirate flesh, at least not mine.

My word, how awfully hungry they look.

Pity, we could have fed them the cook.

YOU CAN TELL A GOOD POSSUM

“This possum’s got pretty ears,” said my fellow judge Louis Moore, and I had to agree with him. Just a gut reaction. That is what you go by, mostly, on show possums, though to be sure, the Beauregard, the world’s most perfectly developed possum, was sitting up there onstage for purposes of comparison. “You can just tell a good possum,” says Basil Clark, president of the Possum Growers & Breeders Association of America Inc.

In a person show, Clark would win best of breed by default. “There isn’t but one Basil,” says his wife, Charlotte. He has a Coldstream Guards mustache, a bald head, a potbelly, and, usually, a doleful expression. He wears a cowboy hat, snakeskin boots, and a hand-tooled belt buckle with his name and a pair of possums on it. He says, “I was the only one who flunked subcollege English at Western Carolina College, but I am the only one from that class who ever got paid for saying anything.” Talks about the possum are what he gets paid for. He says that a possum will fold the white part of its ear down in the winter to hold in the heat and stick it up in the summer to catch the sun. I don’t know whether that is true or not, but I didn’t need to know, to judge possums. I gave this one a full five points on “Ears.”

There I was, at the annual PGBA International Possum Show at the Chilton County Fair, which takes place outside Clanton, Alabama. I was down on my hands and knees in the pine shavings on the floor of the livestock show building, trying to get a good view of a domesticated possum’s feet. I wasn’t even sure what a good-looking possum’s foot looked like. I did know that the tail ought to look clean. A possum’s tail looks bad enough without being scruffy and stained; a conscientious possum owner will not only shampoo his possum’s fur before a show but also take some kind of strong cleanser to its tail. The night before, Dr. Kent Johns, a leading owner in Clanton, had come to the back door of his house dangling a bubbly possum (shampoo was still foaming on it) by the tail and asked his wife for some Bon Ami. “Nobody uses Bon Ami anymore,” she said. She gave him some Comet.

* * *

Why was I judging possums? you may wonder. Some months before, my curiosity was stirred by a story in the Nashville Tennessean under the headline “Eat More Possum: No Joking Matter to Some.”

I had seen “Eat More Possum” bumper stickers and tags around the country, and as a boy I had often come upon a possum stretched out unconscious or dead on the sidewalk, and I knew that a possum had gotten into my mother’s air conditioner in the middle of a recent Saturday night in Georgia. He made a noise like a burglar putting an aluminum ladder up against the house, she said. She had to call a policeman to coax the possum out. “I went off to teach Sunday school the next morning just knowing I was going to say ‘possum’ instead of ‘Matthew’ or ‘Mark,’” she said.

But I had never heard of Basil Clark, who along with some others, The Tennessean reported, was developing the notion that possums were animals whose time had come. The story said the PGBA had some forty thousand members, about a hundred of them actual growers and breeders. One of the latter, Curtis V. Smith, a member of the Alabama legislature, was quoted as saying, “We’re just at the beginning of this thing. If it opens up as a supply of protein, it could be very valuable.” Smith and Clark were said to envision possums as the answer to the world food problem. “You can communicate with people with the possum,” said Smith. “You give them something to believe in. You give them something to eat.”

I wanted to know more. I called Clark and asked him when the next possum show was. In the fall, he said. He wasn’t falling all over himself in response to my query. “There … uh, really is a show, isn’t there?” I asked.

There followed the quality of pause that might follow if you were to ask the commissioner of baseball whether there really was going to be a World Series.

The greatest testament to the possum is that it has survived since before the Ice Age and spread itself wider and wider, in spite of the many natural enemies before which it falls prostrate: “playing possum” is not a stratagem; it’s a fainting spell. The first Frenchman ever to meet a possum—René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, in 1679—killed it with a stick. Then he killed the second one he met. He hung them both from his belt and walked back to camp. They appear, pendant, in the painting La Salle at the Portage, by Arthur Thomas, now hanging in the courthouse of St. Joseph County, Indiana. I would like to think that after La Salle went to bed that night, the possums came to and walked off with his belt, pants, and all, but history does not tell us that.

When you consider that in 1555 the Englishman Richard Eden described the possum as a “monstrous beaste with a snowte like a foxe, a tayle lyke a marmasette, eares lyke a batte, handes lyke a man, and feete lyke an ape”; that Basil Clark has called the possum an evolutionary link one step up from the duck-billed platypus, between cold-blooded, egg-laying reptiles and higher warm-blooded, live-bearing mammals; and that “Yes I can” might be translated into Latin as Ita possum, it’s a wonder possums aren’t taken more seriously.

The first possum my then wife, Joan Ackermann, ever saw, she ate part of. As many possums as I had seen, I had never tasted one. When we walked into the back room of Barron’s Restaurant, in Clanton, there on the table, surrounded by sweet potatoes, was a fresh possum. It was a former show possum of a prominent owner named Don McAfee that had lost part of its tail somehow and thus became available.

Since that night, I have often been asked what possum tastes like. The question is vexing. It is as difficult to put a taste into words as it would be to manufacture ice cream the flavor of, say, a New York Times editorial. Let me begin by saying what this baked possum looked like. A baked cat. I guess you could say it looked like many another baked small animal, but when I saw it, I thought, That looks like a baked cat.

There were two tables, set up in the shape of a T, as for a modest banquet. Joan and I sat at the head table, whose remaining seat was reserved for Basil Clark. At the other table were seated a small party of Clanton citizens. They seemed like nice folks.

So I assumed it was possum. But our hosts seemed to be holding back, as if waiting for some possibly untoward reaction. Perhaps other out-of-town guests had tasted possum in such a setting and bolted from the room. I noticed that McAfee ordered steak. But then it had been his possum.

Many people disdain the possum as food on the grounds of what it eats (just about anything), but how about the pig, the lobster, and the free-range chicken? And I am not a picky eater anyway, especially when I am sampling something proposed for the world’s hungry. Maybe possum would be a little gamy. I was game. Why, then, did I feel uneasy?

I don’t want to sound like a skittish person, but sometimes a situation strikes me as just slightly unsteady enough that I begin to anticipate an ontological shift. In this case, I began to wonder whether there was such a person as Basil Clark. Maybe the possum would rise up, begin to dance, and become him; or Clark, when he appeared, would be the Almighty or somebody and tell me, “You have been living a dream. In the real world, possums are Life.” And then the possum would dance. You never know, on the road, what you are getting into.

* * *

Then Clark arrived. He was wearing his hat, boots, mustache, and possum belt. He was of less than medium height and stooped. Answers to several of my questions had been deferred until his arrival. In a regrettable lapse of dinner-table taste, especially in light of what was on the table, I had mentioned that my research had suggested that possums picked up a lot of parasites. “Oh, chiggers and ticks,” McAfee had said. “They’re not parasites; they’re natives. But you better wait for Basil to give you the story on that.”

Now Basil trudged across the room amid expectant silence and took his seat next to me. He sat there hunched and gave me a sidelong look. Then he looked away. “I attended Western Carolina College, where I was served a diet of green eggs and dried baloney,” he said, “and it stunted my growth.”

With that, McAfee began to carve his late possum, which Mrs. McAfee had parboiled for half an hour and then basted while baking it with the sweet potatoes. The possum carved easily. “This is not the little old black possum that roams the wood,” said McAfee. “This is a registered possum.”

“A registered possum is a better possum,” said Clark. “Put that first, and everything else falls into place. Other day there was a long-distance call at the post office. They handed the phone out the window to me. It was a doctor at the University of Ohio, wants to come down and contract possums. Do embryological research on ’em. And psychological. Been using possums in the space program. The valves in their hearts are like a squirrel-cage fan.

“The fat in possum,” he went on, “is polyunsaturated—clean your arteries like a Roto-Rooter. There’s a husband-and-wife team working on that right now. A possum cools himself in the summer like an automobile—pumps his blood into the tail and licks it and the blood flows back into him cooled.

“Got to kicking this thing around in 1968. Incorporated in 1971. It just come time to register a possum. Had a lawyer said we couldn’t do it. I said, ‘They register horses, don’t they?’ I said, ‘They register cats and dogs.’ I said, ‘We done put a man on the moon, you mean to tell me we can’t register a possum?’ Got another lawyer.

“We got to get the eagle off the national emblem and put the possum up there where it belongs. There’s many a person in the United States that between ’29 and ’48 would’ve starved to death if it hadn’t been for the possum. Had a dog named Katy—me and old Katy, Uncle Billy, Uncle Buck, and Uncle James would go out, and when six or eight other people were chasing the same possum, that’s how you could tell that times were hard.”

One more point: “You got to know when to breed a possum. You’ve seen a possum dead in the road, grinning like he knows something nobody else knows? When that grin turns to a smile, it’s time to breed.”

Possum was like dark meat of chicken, only stronger-tasting and looser on the bone, and stringy, like pork. I want to say, altogether, about like armadillo, but the only way I’ve had armadillo is fried.

* * *

I next saw Clark at the Clanton Drive-In Theatre, which he manages and lives next door to in a mobile home. He got out a big floppy briefcase full of PGBA materials and opened it on the counter next to the popcorn machine. “There’s a bigger generation gap between me and my son Frank,” he said, “than between me and Jesus Christ. Animals are dying out. People can’t afford to devote two acres per animal to raising cattle. Ten years from now, when you see a cow and a calf, it’s going to be in the zoo. When you eat animal protein, it’s going to be possum.” He produced a letter from Samuel Taylor, food for peace officer, U.S. Agency for International Development, mission in El Salvador, which said in part, “Here in El Salvador … possums are considered a delicacy among the rural populace. At the same time, the prevalence of protein/caloric malnutrition is estimated at over 70 percent in the age group under five. Many people still think I am joking when I try to sell the idea that possums could be an added source of protein for many rural families. What I need to get for more acceptance of the idea is scientific data. Could you send me…”

I felt bad about certain doubts I had still harbored about the PGBA. Clark showed a picture of himself, several possums, and a class of schoolchildren. “Possums are educational,” he said. “I’ve had people in the association say, ‘Basil, I believe you’re serious with this thing.’ He shook his head. “‘You believe I’m serious!’ You know vision is what separates men from the animals. I studied to be a doctor. I could always see things other people couldn’t see, even in a microscope. But I couldn’t pass English. If I had, I’d be a doctor; the worst thing I coulda done. Doctors ain’t got time to do anything.”

* * *

Next day was show day. “You might have to judge,” Basil said, so we went out to look at possums. In the first year of the PGBA, he said, people went out into the woods and rounded up the best-looking “range” possum they could and fed it for a while. “How you going to tell a good possum when you haven’t got any good possums?” he said. “We just picked the best we had and named him the Beauregard and judged the others by him. I’d rather have the Beauregard than the world champion.”

But then a Mrs. Wilson in Wetumpka, Alabama, was found to have produced a better possum. “She’s the one bred the red on ’em,” said Curtis Smith, who owns the current Beauregard and also the world champion and whose farm outside Clanton we visited. Curtis is a big old solid man who played walk-on end for Auburn in the early 1950s and looks like he might be chewing tobacco even when he isn’t. “We got three from Mrs. Wilson and then started moving toward a larger, more domesticated animal.”

We went out back of Smith’s barn, and he started pulling possums out of homemade wood-and-chicken-wire cages. “He knows which ones you can pick up and which ones you can’t,” said Clark. “I don’t like to mess around with another man’s possums.”

“When you wake them up, they’re like anybody else—grouchy,” said Smith.

“That’s old Beauregard there. No, that’s old Stonewall, I guess. See those teeth? They’ll cut your finger off just like with the snips.” He took out Stonewall II, the world champion, and started grooming him vigorously with a hairbrush. “That possum has been in National Geographic and on To Tell the Truth,” said Basil.

“He’s been breeding,” said Curtis. “He looks a little poor.”

“I think that’s the best way to lose weight,” said Basil.

I asked Curtis whether he thought possums were very intelligent. “They’re intelligent if they have to be,” he said. “They’d rather just mosey along.”

I asked him whether his possums knew him. He seemed to muse. “I got no way of telling,” he said.

* * *

“Number one rule,” Basil announced at the show the next night, “any possum that bites a judge twice will be disqualified.” Kent Johns, the town doctor who works himself half to death treating people with or without money, got bit by one of his possums. He said it was a considerable nip, and he should know. He takes in hurt animals—eagles, owls, skunks, woodchucks—and nurses them back to health. “I’ve been bit by a lot of things,” he said.

Joan Ackermann was named Miss Possum International—international because she is from Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was substituting, it must be said, for the local Possum Queen, who had discovered boys and got a date. “We had a hard time getting a Possum Queen to begin with,” Basil said. “Then I came up with a prize they couldn’t turn down, something their mama made ’em get in for—an eight-pound bucket of pure lard. A Miss Possum is chosen on personality, looks, and poise. Poise is how they hold a possum.” Joan held them by the tail. Basil said he was going to get her on the Carson show.

I found that the other two judges and I tended to come up with very nearly the same point totals from possum to possum. “See,” said Basil, “you can just tell.”

One of Dr. Johns’s possums, whose name I never caught, won best boar possum, and Pat Cargile’s Miss Pollyanna Possum (“We call her April around the house”) repeated as best sow. Forty possums were entered, all of them from Alabama. A leading owner from Florida had been unable to appear. “They feed ’em mangoes down there,” I was told. In Alabama, they tend to feed them Jim Dandy dog food.

The last International Show was criticized as not entertaining enough for fairgoers watching from bleacher seats. “We’re not here to entertain,” Basil snapped. “We’re here to judge possums.” At this show, people enjoyed coming up to talk about the possums. Somebody claimed that his “grandparents used to catch a bunch of possums, turn them loose in the mulberry tree in the backyard, and tie a dog to the trunk. We’d have a dozen or fifteen possums in the tree fattening up on berries, and when we needed one we’d go out and shake a limb or shoot one.”

A lady described her emotions on seeing a possum in the Clarks’ living room. “One of them came walking in there and I jumped up on Charlotte’s couch, feet, shoes, and all. ‘He ain’t going to bother you,’ they said. ‘No, I ain’t going to let him bother me,’ I said.”

None of the show possums played possum—or “sulled,” as they call it in Alabama. “I’ve known possums the last fifty years,” said a man, “and some possums sull and some won’t. If he’s been handled, he won’t sull. He’ll bite. I’ve had as many as six or eight in a sack at one time. I love possums.”

Dorothy and Horace Goodman, from Columbus, Georgia, had driven over a hundred miles to the show for a reason. They wanted to replace their pet possum, Punky-Pooh, which had died. “He got mail at Christmas,” said Mrs. Goodman. “He was a wonderful pet. He had his own little bed. He’d go to the bathroom in the bowl and wake up by an alarm clock. He ate bacon and cookies. My daughter found him in the yard, just laid out. At first she threw him in the garbage can. We didn’t recognize it was a little possum till we got to looking at his feet. His tail was peeled down like a banana. A dog had got ahold of him and peeled him. But he revived.”

“When I was a boy,” said Clark, “the only thing in the world I’d have to look forward to was when I’d be big enough for someone else to carry the possum bag when we went on a hunt. Now look where possums have got me. You know the principle of Occam’s razor: the solution to a problem is always real simple. Possum’s simple.”

THANKSGIVING EVE: WHAT HAPPENED IN THE WOOD

(Adapted from a dramatic reading, first performed, with musical and sound-effects accompaniment, on A Prairie Home Companion.)

(“Over the River” tune begins, fades.)

“Over the river and through the wood—

Doesn’t this forest make you feel good?

This fresh-smelling air and fine autumn light

Will help us to work up an appetite!”

Enthuses Dad. Whereupon, he

Skids on a slick spot, into a tree.

(Crash, bang, hung up.)

“We should have gone around the wood,”

Says Mom. “I think I said we should.”

“The song,” says Dad, “distinctly says through.”

“Yes,” says Mom, “but I might remind you

That songs don’t give GPS, by and large.

In the song, I recall, a horse was in charge.”

Dad turns around to grumble at us,

“We’ll be off in a moment, why all the fuss?”

The car is making a hung-up noise

(Hung-up noise.)

And I’m in a pile with the girl and the boys—

Vera, Chuck, Dave, each one a brat.

I, by the way, am Herkey, the cat,

The family’s only rational member.

This is like my ninth November

With these people. I want you to know

That every Thanksgiving, all of us go

To Grandma’s house, and something goes wrong—

Which they’d never survive, if I weren’t along.

When weird Uncle Bert was about to sell Dad

Some weird investment that had to be bad,

I slipped right up next to old Uncle Bert,

Purred, rubbed his pant leg, and gave him a squirt.

When a mob of cousins jumped Chuck and Dave,

For no particular reason, save

That they, understandably, just couldn’t stand ’em,

I waded in slashing and made ’em unhand ’em.

When Vera poured gravy on infant Eugene,

I sprang into action and licked the boy clean.

At the moment, however, while trying to dis-

Entangle myself, I do nothing but hissss.

(Hiss sound.)

Dad says, “What’s the matter, Herkey?”

“I’ll tell you what,” says Mom. “A turkey!

Two turkeys! More turkeys! Up on our hood!

We should have gone around the wood.”

(Gobbling.)

“Well, I’ll be darned,” says Dad, “a flock

Of turkeys, and … they’re trying to talk!”

“Turkeys can’t talk!” the children exclaim.

Ordinarily, I’d say the same,

But as to these turkeys surrounding our car,

It does appear that, yes, they are.

(Gobbling.)

Ten or fifteen tough-looking toms.

I’m a tom, too, but—uh-oh, now Mom’s

Insisting Dad do something. That’s never good,

Especially when we’re trapped in a wood.

It’s up to me, so here goes this:

I arch my back and give a big hiss.

(Hiss sound.)

“Herkey!” Dad tells me. “That doesn’t help.”

But it does. One turkey responds with a yelp

(Turkeyish yelp sound.)

That seems downright communicative.

Calm, reassuring. Their leader. I give

Him back a calm, reassuring meow.

(Meow.)

The breed of cat he’s dealing with now—

A cat whose full name is Hercules—

Won’t lose his head in a bunch of trees.

I puff myself up, profoundly bouffant.

“My friend,” I growl, “I don’t think you want

To take on the raising of Dave, Vera, Chuck,

So be a good fellow and get us unstuck.”

At that, he nods, and turkeys abound,

Converging upon us from all around.

“This whole thing,” says Dad, “seems strange.

Is it something that turkeys somehow could arrange?”

“Oh gosh,” whispers Mom, “what if—if they

Search the cooler? Tomorrow’s entrée…”

But no, with the force of their presence the flock

(Gobbling.)

Take hold of our car and begin to rock

And flap and jiggle us free of the snag

That had us hung up.

I don’t mean to brag,

And the folks, of course, are oblivious that

They’re saved once again by a sensitive cat,

But animals know when they are in sync,

And that alpha turkey, he gives me a wink

As tom to tom and turkey to cat.

We know what we know, essentially that

I want no part of him, and he

Ain’t eating any of me.

Perhaps we’ve even influenced the diet

Of the folks in the car. They’re awfully quiet,

As turkeys make way and Dad drives ahead

Toward Grandma’s house to be well fed.

At last we see we’re about to clear

The wood—when back behind us we hear

A gobbly goodbye, whose subtext I’ll bet

Even my people are able to get:

(Distant, haunting, faintly minatory gobbling.)

“No hard feelings, good tidings to you,

But next Thanksgiving, CONSIDER TO-FU!

Otherwise, be it understood,

You’d better drive around our hood.”

The kids break our silence: “You were a-scared!”

“Was not! You were!” Their teeth are bared.

“For once,” cries Dad, “please put a lid on!”

“Did you notice?” says Mom. “That stuff we slid on—

Chucky! Vera! Stop biting Davy!—

It smelled like us. And sort of like gravy.”

(Ghostly gobbling fade-out, resumption of “Over the River” tune.)

The Gourmet Horizons specialty food catalog is advertising a new freeze-wrapped mail-order item it calls “perky turkeys.” Instead of slicing up one huge, bland, dry lunker of a gobbler for your whole Thanksgiving crowd, you can serve each person around the table one small young tender bird, which has been deboned, smoked over smoldering cranberry bushes, and marinated in applejack. Because these little individual turkettes have been kept tightly confined all their brief lives, like veal calves, none of their meat is darker than pink. PETA, the animal rights group, has denounced the marketing of “turkey tots” who have “never had a chance to experience any sort of animal existence,” but Gourmet Horizons says that demand for perky turkeys, at $9.95 apiece, has far exceeded expectations.

COME BACK TO NEW ORLEANS! (2007)

Where else would I breakfast on oysters and beer and feel just fine about it? This is my eighth trip to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina nearly killed the city. For a good while after that flood, New Orleans smelled bad. Can you imagine? I mean, not funky bad. Deadly bad. But as I walked over here this morning to Felix’s oyster bar, which has finally reopened, I inhaled a bouquet compounded of olive salad, tropical blossoms, fresh mule manure, and just a hint of something else—rosemary? My head is pulsing slightly from last night, but it’s pulsing rhythmically, because of what I would not get out of it, even if I could—the refrain a gospel group, the Dynamic Smooth Family, sang yesterday, over and over, in the gospel tent at Jazz Fest: “There ain’t no party like a Holy Ghost party, ’cause a Holy Ghost party don’t stop.”

Meanwhile, swirling winds were whipping heavy rain against the gospel tent, but nobody looked worried. People were where they wanted to be. “I ain’t no refugee no more!” shouted the group’s lead singer. “It’s good to be back home! And alive! Don’t you know somebody woke up this morning and didn’t have the action in their limbs. But you and I, we’re here!”

One morning, I woke up in a New Orleans hotel room, went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and saw to my astonishment that I had a big, thick gout of dried blood in the middle of my forehead. I said to myself, I had better change my way of living. I could remember doing several things the night before, but not, for the life of me, being shot. It was Winston Churchill, I believe, who said that the most exhilarating experience in life is to be shot at and missed. But to be shot at and hit and have no recollection? Especially if you’re a writer. You need the material. If you’re a writer, there’s no point in getting shot if you don’t remember what it was like. But then I turned on the light and looked closer. I had not been shot. I had just slept on my complimentary mint.

Yes we are. To tell the truth, it was a while after I woke up this morning before I regained the full action of my limbs. Yet I had not felt so virtuous since the last time I helped an old lady with a duck in her purse cross the street—which I did, once, many years ago, in New Orleans. The old lady wouldn’t admit I was helping her, and neither would the duck, but I didn’t mind, because I was delighted to be interacting in any way with that famous, ferocious character called Ruthie the Duck Lady. Ruthie isn’t around anymore, but during the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans I saw a bushy-faced fat man in a nun’s habit singing “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.”

In the gospel tent yesterday, a member of another gospel group asked, “Who all want to go to heaven when they die?” Maybe two hundred hands went up. “Who all livin’ like they want to go to heaven when they die?” Only one hand went up.

The singer gave the one hand raiser a startled look. “What is wrong with you?” the singer said. The tent was still being buffeted by a raging thunderstorm, but that was nothing compared with what the city has survived. Leaving Jazz Fest, I had to wade through two feet of water and a big crowd wading in. Many of the sloshers looked already sloshed and pleased with themselves. Where else can you do good by misbehaving?

When I say “do good,” I mean help keep a great American city alive. When I say “misbehaving,” I don’t mean, necessarily, pursuits that are, so to speak, nothing to write home about. Las Vegas’s marketing campaign, “What happens here, stays here,” wouldn’t fit New Orleans.

For one thing, New Orleans is not good at mounting campaigns. “Laissez les bons temps rouler,” the city’s French-ish motto, relies upon the assumption that in New Orleans good times will roll if you let them. And they will. Still. Just walk down a New Orleans street and watch out: if you’re not careful, you’ll be dancing.

Even now. Since Katrina, most of the hotels and restaurants and music venues have reopened. The parts of New Orleans that have always drawn out-of-towners are back in business. Take a look around the “Sliver by the River,” as it’s called—the French Quarter, the Garden District, the Warehouse District, the Magazine Street shops, Uptown, and the Faubourg Marigny—and you’d never know that in August 2005, the city was almost wiped out.

Except that you do know. That’s another reason the Vegas campaign doesn’t apply here: what goes on in New Orleans—jazz, gumbo, whoopee, disaster—doesn’t stay; it gets out. The world knows that stretches of New Orleans are still mostly deserted, and that the people who live in the Big Easy still face hardship as the city’s voodoo-and-corruption infrastructure slowly re-improvises itself, upon no bedrock but a beat.

The musicians, kitchen workers, oyster shuckers, buskers, bartenders, fortune-tellers, and assorted characters without whom the city would lose its savor are collectively an endangered species, because so many of them used to live in neighborhoods that were relatively inexpensive and now are gone. Where housing does survive, the shortage of it has driven up the rents.

You can do something. You can come to New Orleans and make merry and spend money.

Does that sound crass? Would you not feel right about kicking up your heels in a town where people are living in FEMA trailers, waiting for long-promised relief funds to come in, and mourning homes and family members swept away in the storm?

Consider this: you’ll be indulging in what would no doubt be regarded as overeating, overdrinking, laughing too loud, and staying up too late anywhere else. In New Orleans, these activities are normal and essential. And they’re a sound investment. Who can say what has become or will become of tax and charity dollars designated for New Orleans relief? But when you buy another po’boy or another Sazerac cocktail and tip the band pretty heavy at daybreak, you know (whether or not you will remember very distinctly) where that money has gone.

You don’t want to be too much like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, saying, “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” So go look at the long stretches of New Orleans that were flooded out. I don’t recommend one of the devastation bus tours, because some of your fellow tourists may not be as respectful as you are. Local people who come back to check on what used to be their homes are not gratified by the spectacle of people posing for pictures on what is left. For not much more than it costs to take one of those tours, a couple can get a map, rent a car, and drive to the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish and Lakeview. It won’t be as shocking as it was when houses were squashed together, cars were in trees, and the only signs of life were placards saying, “We Gut Houses,” and heartbroken people picking through rubble for family photographs. In fact you’ll see signs of revival here and there, notably in Lakeview, where upscale victims of the storm are rebuilding. That excursion will be sobering, though.

And when you return to the high ground that absorbed the least damage, you won’t be in a bubble. New Orleanians are not shy about sharing what is on their minds. You’ll be seeing defiant T-shirts—“Make Levees Not War,” “It Takes More Than a Bitch Named Katrina”—and everywhere you go, you’ll hear about the storm.

If the preservation of irreplaceable traditions of music and cuisine doesn’t strike you as sufficient cause to frolic in that context, then do it for the penguins. You may think that coming to New Orleans for the penguins is like coming to Casablanca for the waters. If so, you have been misinformed. Check out the Aquarium of the Americas, down by the Mississippi River catty-corner to Canal Street. Other cities’ aquariums surround you with just as many big flapping manta rays, swooshing hawksbill turtles, and darting fish of gaudy colors. The New Orleans aquarium is the only one I know of where the penguins are scandalous.

“Ernie and Fanny are twenty-five,” says one of the penguins’ keepers, when my wife and I get him going (New Orleanians love to get going, verbally) on the goings-on. “Snake is only six. Now Ernie has a nest with each of them. He’s over four times as old as Snake—why she goes with him I don’t know.” Two other penguins start ramming into each other, pecking and flipper whapping. “That’s Rocky and Dennis. Bunny has kicked Dennis out, for Rocky. Dennis pouts and mopes. Bunny is loving it. Come on, Dennis, you can take him.”

Penguin triangles may be eternal, but New Orleans penguins are a special case: they survived the deluge. The aquarium’s staff wanted to stay with their charges, but the police finally made them evacuate, and while they were gone, the generator that keeps the water aerated and temperatures correct went out. “It could have been fixed if we’d been here. Most of the fish died. When I came back into the darkness with a flashlight and counted all nineteen penguins…” His relief and the penguins’ were mutual. “Somebody got ahold of somebody named Dan from Dallas, because he had a refrigerator truck, and he said, ‘Sure, I’ll come.’ He was amazing, carrying dead sharks out … And he drove the penguins and otters to Monterey, California.” Now they’re back, all of them still alive except for one, Patience, who lives on (with her now widower, Tom) in the IMAX film about Katrina, Hurricane on the Bayou, which plays at the aquarium.

That film features scary-vivid storm footage, and it also lays out what an enormous undertaking it would be to make New Orleans secure from storms like Katrina or worse. The whole area around New Orleans, the wetlands that used to serve as natural buffers, needs to be reconstructed. You may want to devote some time to wondering how likely that is to happen, given how dysfunctional the relationships between the city, the state, and the federal governments were during the storm and have continued to be since.

A good place for reflection as you leave the aquarium is the peaceful river promenade known as the Moonwalk, after former mayor Moon Landrieu, who was popular. The incumbent mayor, Ray Nagin, cuts an elegant earthy figure. While watching him officiate in a Mardi Gras ceremony by the river here, I heard a young woman say, “I could just kiss him all day, and like it.” That is by far the most wholehearted expression of enthusiasm for this mayor I have heard. This summer Nagin put the high crime rate in perspective as follows: “It’s not good for us, but it also keeps the New Orleans brand out there, and it keeps people thinking about our needs.”1

In fact it keeps a lot of people, who might otherwise enjoy coming to New Orleans, thinking about staying away. It is true, as the tourist bureau says, that the city’s violent crime is concentrated in the under-policed flood-blighted areas, where thugs prey on isolated resettlers and on each other. But crime has always been one aspect of New Orleans—and, okay, I guess there are others—regarding which out-of-towners should exercise prudence.

Here’s what’s most distinctive about the annual Miss Outdoors pageant in Golden Hill, Maryland: in the talent portion, contestants sing, dance, twirl a baton—or some of them skin a muskrat. This rural area on the Eastern Shore is muskrat-trapping country, and there has always been a World Championship muskrat-skinning contest coincident with the beauty pageant, but in the last few years the two have begun to overlap. In 2003, wearing full makeup and sparkly earrings, seventeen-year-old Tiffany Brittingham deftly demonstrated how to separate a freshly killed muskrat’s skin from its carcass with her fingers, knuckles, and a four-inch knife. In 2005, when Tiffany walked onstage with a muskrat slung over her shoulder, a man in the audience yelled above the cheers, “I want to marry you!” That year, she won the crown, and since then other local girls have followed in her footsteps. Says Samantha Phillips, whose muskrat-skinning won the talent portion this year, “It’s not weird. You can be graceful and beautiful and well-poised and skin a muskrat. I can cook that big boy too.”

But not in broad daylight on the Moonwalk, where it’s just breezy enough to make the day sultry in a good way. A man is sitting on a bench by himself, playing “Ain’t She Sweet” on the trumpet. He gives his name as Alexander. He says he’s been living in Morgan City, bayou country a hundred miles or so to the east, “since Katrina ran me out of town. It took my house, wife, family, everything. Picked up the foundation, I mean. I put three kids through college playing music here. Now I’m back trying to find a place to live. What used to be three hundred dollars is fifteen hundred dollars. But that Morgan City … I woke up one night, there’s a banging on the front door. I got my twelve-gauge ready—‘Who is it?’ Well, it was an armadillo fighting a possum. That is too country for me. You ever watch a fourteen-foot alligator eat a raccoon? Whoo!”

Speaking of eating. From the Moonwalk, it’s a short walk to Annette’s2 on Dauphine Street, which is the last word in untouristy. It’s a no-decor, lunchroomy sort of place where Annette Truschinger, originally of Morocco, can give you directions in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Arabic, or English and can whip you up grilled grape leaves and hummus or a Creole omelet. Her place has appeared in novels by James Lee Burke, and when Adam Baldwin was making a movie in town, he was a regular. “He said I made him the best scrambled eggs he ever had. I said, ‘How can anybody screw up scrambled eggs?’ He said, ‘My wife…’”

As Katrina approached, Annette boarded up Annette’s and evacuated. Drove around with her daughter, two grandkids, and a dog, taking a look at other towns. None of which they could stand. “The baby got New Orleans food in her soul. In Dallas, she say to me, ‘Mimi, this food’s nasty. When we going home?’” When they did, the restaurant was a shambles. “Looters—I’d be happy if they took food and ate it. They took food and smash it all over. Had to replace everything, all my refrigeration … Before Katrina, I did two hundred omelets a day on weekends. Now I hardly do anything at all.” She’s missing her old local customers. You can fill in for them.

But you will also want to eat more lavishly. Check out some of the finer restaurants: Cochon, Dick and Jenny’s, and on Tchoupitoulas Street just out of the Quarter, August, in an old town house resplendent with chandeliers and fine linens. Try the green tomato pie with Creole tomato sorbet, grilled watermelon and heirloom tomato salad, Jim McCloud’s rabbit cooked two ways over artichokes barigoule and squash blossoms …

Sound (whoever Jim McCloud is) decadent? Know ye then that August’s owner and chef, John Besh, a New Orleans native, rowed a boat through the floodwaters trying to rescue all his employees, and he fed hundreds of FEMA workers with po’boys and gumbo.

Or go uptown to Casamento’s. Do it for the fried oysters, the ultimate in fresh moistness enfolded in toothsome crunch. And do it for Joe Casamento, who spent his whole life living above the gleaming black-and-white-tile-covered joint founded by his father, never ate anywhere else himself, and died the night he evacuated New Orleans for Katrina.

Here’s a post-Katrina banner that flew over St. Philip Street in the Quarter:

THANK YOU VERY MUCH to all those who came and helped us in our time of need, to the volunteers who are helping us clean, recover and rebuild: to the police, fire and military personnel who rescued us and keep us safe, to EVERYONE who helped, we greatly appreciate everything everyone has been doing for us.

Maybe you have an old-dame aunt who’s not like anybody else in the family; she’s had severe health problems, but she’s up and around again and full of zip, dresses with flair, has lots of unconventional friends, and is a great cook. Go visit her. She might not live forever.

* * *

P.S., 2016: No need to visit New Orleans for the sake of saving it anymore. Thanks to regular New Orleanians who refused to give up, and an of course crazily distributed influx of federal funds, and despite bad government, rapacious developers, and the BP oil spill, New Orleans is booming. You can walk places now that were iffy before the storm. There are more second-line street parades than before the storm. There are lots more restaurants. Check out Donald Link’s empire: Herbsaint (house-made spaghetti with guanciale and fried-poached farm egg), Cochon (panéed pork cheeks with creamed corn and sugar snap peas), Pêche (the fish sticks! get the fish sticks!), Butcher (Moroccan spiced lamb!). The last three opened after Katrina. My wife and I got to New Orleans a couple of months after Katrina and kept coming back and making more friends there. We have spent the last four winters in New Orleans. Now we live there (with a hot-months outlet in western Massachusetts) more than anywhere else.