For a month in 1989 I sailed around Antarctica, a landscape as sensuous as it is remote, whose crystal desert I had wanted to see for a long time. Some months earlier I helped raise baby penguins in quarantine at Sea World in San Diego. One fluffy brown yeti-shaped chick, which I became particularly fond of, I named Apsley, after Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who in 1911 trekked across Antarctica, and wrote a vivid and poignant book about it, The Worst Journey in the World. For two years, I had been writing natural-history essays for The New Yorker, the magazine that sent me to see and write about penguins in the wild. To be haunted by the ghostly beauty of pastel icebergs and astonished by the Antarctic’s vast herds of animals is an experience few people have ever known or will ever know, and I felt privileged—and still do. Not so long ago—in the days of Sir Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence, Lady Hester Stanhope, Beryl Markham, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, and others—there was a crossroads where physical and literary adventure converged. There is also a long history of the bards called nature poets, and this brimming category includes writers as different as Lucretius and Marvell. But my prose now seems to locate me among a small tribe often referred to as nature writers. How curious that label is, suggesting as it does that nature is somehow separate from our doings, that nature does not contain us, that it’s possible to step outside nature, not merely as one of its more promising denizens but objectively, as a sort of extraterrestrial voyeur. Still, the label is a dignified one, and implies a pastoral ethic that we share, a devotion to the keenly observed detail, and a sense of sacredness. There is a way of beholding nature that is itself a form of prayer.
In my Antarctic journal I wrote: “Tonight the moon is invisible, darkness itself has nearly vanished, and the known world, which we map with families, routines, and newspapers, floats somewhere beyond the horizon. Traveling to a strange new landscape is a kind of romance. You become intensely aware of the world where you are, but also oblivious to the rest of the world at the same time. Like love, travel makes you innocent again. The only news I’ve heard for days has been the news of nature. Tomorrow, when we drift through the iceberg gardens of Gerlache Strait, I will be working—that is, writing prose. My mind will become a cyclone of intense alertness, in which details present themselves slowly, thoroughly, one at a time. I don’t know how to describe what happens to me when I’m out in ‘nature’ and working’—it’s a kind of rapture—but it’s happened often enough that I know to expect it.”
I had been wondering then about the little penguin Apsley. Soon he would have fledged, replacing his thick brown down with black and white feathers, and would look very different. My plan was to gather pebbles from the rookery at Salisbury Plain, on South Georgia (where the egg he hatched from was collected), and take them back to him as a souvenir. Apsley was not the sort of penguin that builds nests from stones, but he might recognize the rich amalgam of smells.
Because I write at length about little-known animals in curious landscapes, people often ask, for example, Do you prefer whales to bats? I prefer life. Each of the animals I write about I find beguiling in and of itself; but in all honesty there is no animal that isn’t fascinating if viewed up close and in detail. I chose to write about bats, crocodilians, whales, penguins, and such because each would teach me something special about nature and about the human condition: about our terror of things that live by night, or the advantages of cold-bloodedness; about intelligence and music, or our need to withstand most any ordeal to behold a nearly extinct life-form before it vanishes. Before beginning each expedition, I knew some of my motives, but I always returned nourished by unexpected experiences. What is necessarily missing from the essays is all the fun, turmoil, stress, and welcome obsessiveness that went into setting them up. The emotional marginalia sometimes included acts of great generosity of spirit, and at other times revealed less becoming sides of human nature.
Much of a nature writer’s life is spent living by seasonal time, not mere chronicity, as you wait for nature to go about its normal ways. There are long pastures of quiet, broken suddenly by the indelible thrill of seeing a whale or an alligator, and then the long hours afterward, as the excitement mellows. Of course, we also live by the clock. Shifting one’s allegiance between those two perceptions of time is one of the most curious and uncanny things that naturalists do. On the way out into the field, and on the return, there comes a point when the two notions of time meet, as if they were nothing more than high mountain roads converging in the wilderness, and you must leap from one to the other and quickly get your footing. I found this especially true when writing “The Moon by Whale Light,” which required trips to both Hawaii and Argentina. Half the time I fretted about airplane schedules, boat rentals, getting permits and permissions, or fixing my tape recorder in the middle of lengthy interviews. But the other half I spent on the desolate, fossil-strewn beaches of Patagonia, watching the hypnotic movements of mother and baby whales. Falling asleep to their snoring and snuffling sounds, attuned only to their lives, I lived on whale time.
Entering an alternate reality that has its own social customs, time zones, routines, hierarchies, and values is not easy. You leave all the guideposts, the friends and relatives you rely on, and become part of a social group whose laws are rarely explained but include you, rule you. You have no bank account of esteem. You are judged by everyone. You are admired for your affiliations rather than your character or qualities. You meet people who wish in one way or another to exploit you. You can become distracted from yourself and enter a cone of ambiguity where you move as if you were an interloper or an outlaw. It is like waking up in a sci-fi story where people travel along a different time-line and you slide among them. In one sense, that freedom feels exhilarating, but in another it fills you with unsurpassable loneliness. It is difficult to explain the exact appeal of this paradox. Most field naturalists I know relish being new, anonymous, at their own disposal, untrackable, freed from their past, able (even required) to reinvent themselves; and yet they also tend to phone and write home often when they’re in port, many times a day blazing a link to their loved ones.
Some people think I court danger. After all, I straddle alligators and swim up to a whale’s mouth and climb down cliffs and stand in the midst of millions of bats and risk frostbite at the ends of the earth. Although there have been many times when I was truly frightened and a sentence such as Why the hell do you get into situations like this? would run through my mind, such moments passed quickly. I don’t take unreasonable chances. I’m always accompanied by experts who have spent many years working with the animal we are studying and who have been close to that animal countless times, often enough to know what may be dangerous.
“How could you walk across a lagoon when there were alligators under the water and not know where the alligators were?” one woman asked, clearly horrified. Simple: I followed the invisible footsteps of Kent Vliet, who was a yard in front of me. Kent and his colleagues had been working with alligators in St. Augustine for some time, and he knew where it was probably safe to walk and also what to do if attacked. But frightened? My heart was pounding.
“How could you let a big bat tangle in your hair?” That was a different situation—bats aren’t dangerous, just misunderstood. So I felt no fear at all, or, rather, was fearful for the bat, which I didn’t wish to hurt in any way.
I often find things renewing about ordeal. When I went out into the Texas desert with Merlin Tuttle and his friends, to net wild bats and photograph them, we didn’t get even two hours of sleep. By day we looked for likely batting spots and set up our nets. By night we patroled the nets or photographed bats. One night I spent hours aiming photographic lights for Merlin in an abandoned barn while startled bats peed on me nonstop. On the wall in my study I have one of the photographs of pallid bats that Merlin took that night, and it makes me smile, remembering just what the event looked, smelled, and felt like.
There were times handling alligators that I got banged up pretty hard. I didn’t jump back fast enough when climbing off an alligator, and it swung its head around and clobbered me on the shin. Alligators have exceedingly powerful heads, and this was like being slammed with a baseball bat made of pure bone. My shin bruised savagely, but the bone didn’t break. And that was a trivial price to pay for the privilege of being able to study an alligator intimately, to touch its mouth and eyes and the folds of its neck and the claws on its back feet and really get to know the look and feel of it up close.
At a later time, on an expedition to Japan to see certain rare albatrosses, I managed to break three ribs. Once I was sure that I would live through the injury, it became strictly a matter of pain. The pain was torrential. The top half of my body was paralyzed by pain. Every movement sent lightning forks through my chest and back. Standing absolutely still hurt badly, sitting hurt badly, lying down hurt badly, and trying to keep my balance on a small, rolling ship was agony. Once lying down, I could not get up. My muscles were too inflamed to work. On shipboard, leaving the island, the crew settled me into one of the tiny capsule bunks, which are small open cubicles recessed into the wall. I will never forget waking in pain some hours later and discovering that I was trapped in my low-ceilinged, coffinlike bunk. For two hours, I tried everything I could think of to get out. I have never known such helplessness. Because I couldn’t expand my chest, I was unable to call for help, hard as I tried. Finally, a Japanese passenger across the room woke up and crawled sleepily from his bunk. I pantomimed that I needed help, that my ribs were broken, and would he drag me carefully out of my narrow bunk. Sliding his arms under my shoulders, he pulled me out like a war casualty, as pain twisted its ragged knives. Then, holding on to the ceiling, I crawled up to the middle deck and sat against a wall. But this was just pain. I know now that I can withstand great pain. I was much more concerned by how inconvenient the injury was for everyone. I also learned about the generosity and concern of strangers—my journey out of Japan was a trail strewn with kindness. The animal adventures recounted in this book cost me no pain as violent as broken ribs (now my benchmark for a tough trip), just the occasional allergy, bruise, parasite, or heartache.
Outside the train station in Washington, D.C., these words are inscribed: “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him. So it is with travelling. A man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge.” That maxim is particularly true for a nature writer. I never mind abandoning habits, preferences, tastes, plans. I prefer to become part of the new landscape, fully available to the moment, able to revise or ad lib a perspective without warning, open to the revelations of nature. But you also need to know what you’re looking at. So I read everything I can—science, folklore, novels, whatever— and then plague my scientist companions with questions. This all adds to the creative feeding frenzy that each essay sets in motion.
In writing about rock-climber Mo Anthoine, A. Alvarez cites a phrase from an unlikely source—Jeremy Bentham. The father of utilitarianism dismisses as “deep play” any activity in which “the stakes are so high,” as Alvarez puts it, “that it is irrational for anyone to engage in it at all, since the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose.” Alvarez is wise to see that Bentham despises deep play for some of the very same reasons Mo Anthoine cherishes it. Anthoine confesses that a couple of times a year he has to “feed his rat,” by which he means that wonderful mad rodent inside him that demands a challenge or a trip that will combine adventure, fun, wonder, risk, and ordeal. Although I’m not a rock-climber, I know how the rat gnaws, and I must admit there is nothing like deep play. In On Extended Wings, a memoir about learning to fly, I wrote:
It isn’t that I find danger ennobling, or that I require cheap excitation to cure the dullness of routine; but I do like the moment central to danger and to some sports, when you become so thoroughly concerned with acting deftly, in order to be safe, that only reaction is possible, not analysis. You shed the centuries and feel creatural. Of course, you do have to scan, assess, and make constant minute decisions. But there is nothing like thinking in the usual, methodical way. What takes its place is more akin to an informed instinct. For a pensive person, to be fully alert but free of thought is a form of ecstasy.
Being ecstatic means being flung out of your usual self. When you’re enraptured, your senses are upright and saluting. But there is also a state when perception doesn’t work, consciousness vanishes like the gorgeous fever it is, and you feel free of all mind-body constraints, suddenly so free of them you don’t perceive yourself as being free, but vigilant, a seeing eye without judgment, history, or emotion. It’s that shudder out of time, the central moment in so many sports, that one often feels, and perhaps becomes addicted to, while doing something dangerous.
Although I never take unnecessary chances, a tidy amount of risk, discomfort, pain, or physical challenge does not deter me. At some point in the research for each of these essays, my rat found sustenance, and there were above all wonderful moments of deep play.
Why this form of play should include wild animals is no mystery. In many ways we’re totemic creatures who wear the hides of animals on our bodies and, in affectionate cuteness, at times even address one another by animal names—“pussycat,” “honey-bunny,” “my little minx,” and so forth. Animals share our world, accompany us through life, and frequently figure as symbols of one sort or another. Everyone has a bat story fluttering around in the half-lit mansion of memory. In my case, bats are inextricably linked to the first hint that I might be an artist.
In the small Chicago suburb of Waukegan, Illinois, which for some reason has driven over eighty of its onetime residents to become writers of some kind, my family lived in a bay-windowed house on the outskirts of town, where paved streets gave way to vast flat housing tracts and the tallest objects for miles were the orange bulldozers standing like mastodons in the dirt. Right across the street from us there was a small field and beyond it a plum orchard through which I sometimes walked on the way to Greenwood Elementary School. This was not the route preferred by my parents. The woods were overgrown and, as Frost wrote, dark and deep, and I was just a six-year-old with a Roy Rogers writing tablet and a mop of unruly hair my mother had temporarily tamed in a ponytail.
The route I was supposed to take went around the block, on sidewalks all the way, past the vacant lot on the corner, past the little blue frame house of Mrs. Griffith, who once phoned my mother to report: “Your daughter is talking to herself again! Lord knows what she talks about. I just thought I’d better tell you, Marcia.” Then on past the bookmobile stop across from the drugstore where I sometimes bought plastic horses and riders. I loved playing with the horses, whether they were ridden by cavalrymen or cowboys, and most of all I liked it when they came with small red rubber saddles and reins that fit into the groove in the horse’s mouth and even stirrups you could slide onto the foot of the rider. But the figures themselves were always frozen in a state of alarm or rest: the horses were always galloping, trotting, or standing stock-still at some invisible hitching post, the riders were always waving their arms or hunkering low in the saddle or sitting up stiffly on parade march. Though I tried to make them move, by bending or heating or twisting, I soon learned, as I would later about real soldiers and cowboys, that they could break beyond repair and disappear from my life. I never really thought of them as frozen; I thought of them as always frightened, always angry, always sad, always silently yelling.
Around the corner from the drugstore stood Victor’s house. I called my cousin Tic-Toe, and he was my best friend until his mother came between us. Once she shrieked to find me talking her son into tying a towel around his shoulders and leaping from the back roof onto the brick barbecue to see if people really could fly. On another occasion we concocted a gruesome brew of unmentionable fluids to give to Normy Wolf, a nerd who lived across the street. I wanted to see if it would kill him, and we would have found out if Victor’s mother hadn’t caught us crossing the street with the disgusting, full mayonnaise jar. On another day I drafted Victor into a bolder experiment. Was it possible to navigate an entire house without touching the ground? His mother walked in from shopping just as I was jumping from a bannister onto a doorknob, swinging into the living room, and then leaping from couch to chair to chair as if they were ice floes. I was not a hyperkinetic child, just curious. I wanted to see if it was possible—and would have, if she hadn’t banished me at once. Victor was told to play with boys from then on. It was clear girls were too dangerous.
But I didn’t know I was different, truly, irrevocably different, different in what I saw when looking out of the window each day, until one morning when I was going through the orchard with three first-grade schoolmates. We were late, and there were silhouette drawings, which none of us wanted to miss, so we cut through the orchard. I can still remember the sheen of the green-and-red plaid dress that Susan Green wore. She had a matching ribbon in her hair and a petticoat that made her skirt rustle as she moved. Above us, the trees were thick with dark plums huddled like bats. Susan dragged at my arm and pulled me along because I was dawdling, staring up at the fruit—or bats—and when she demanded to know what I was looking at, I told her. She let go of my arm and all three girls recoiled. The possibility of bats didn’t frighten them. I frightened them: the elaborate fantasies I wove when we played store, telephone operator, or house; my perverse insistence on drawing trees in colors other than green; my doing boy things like raising turtles and wearing six-shooters to tap-dance lessons; my thinking that the toy cowboys we played with had emotions. And now this: plums that looked like bats. All these years later, the memory of the look on their faces is indelible. But most of all I remember flushing with wonder at the sight of my first metaphor—the living plums: the bats.