Book: Soaring with Fidel by David Gessner

An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond.

A delightful book, about birds and the love the author especially has for ospreys. He writes of his adventures as he follows their migration route pretty much down the eastern coast, through Florida, across Cuba from west to east and over to Venezuela. The writing is lively, never boring or dull or pedantic and David is able to deliver, not only information about ospreys, but he also about the people he meets, almost always making them engaging, real and dedicated to birding science. He hasn't much money and so he makes the trip in stages, mostly by car, but is often given lodging and beer, etc.

On his way south from Cape Cod, he stops by Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania and Cape May in New Jersey, and every page has interesting anecdotes. He is irreverent and passionate and willing to learn what he can from the ornithologists he meets, the citizen scientists, or just the folks he meets who help him and who become interested in ospreys because of his enthusiasm.

"When thing were going well on the hawk-watch platform, it had the feel of a successful cocktail party, with strangers interacting  and calling across the deck to each other...."

At Cape May, he runs into a tour group led by Richard Crossley. (RC is a big name in bird guides and the world of birding.)  Someone had spotted a "Baird's sandpiper on the tidal felt. This was big news...but when I took my turn at the scope, all I could see was one drab wet bird amid a dozen other drab wet birds. I wasn't even sure I was seeing the right bird, but of course I nodded enthusiastically and pretended to be impressed."

Soaring a also travel story with a loosely planned itinerary, especially David's visit to Cuba, where he spends days on top of La Gran Piedra (the big rock - the "third largest freestanding rock in the the world"), accessible by walking through a bar, paying a dollar to the bartender and then climbing 452 steps. "The view was boundless."

"David said the stars promised that the next day would be a good osprey day. And it was, dear reader, it was. I know that it will strain credibility if I say that I saw a 'push' on my last day on the rock, But...I must tell you that I did, I did....For almost an hour the ospreys came: ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, twenty-nine."

He had a bit of trouble leaving Cuba:

They queried: "Why did you go into the mountains?"

David explains in his "mutilated Spanish...[his] love affair with ospreys and the books [he] had written, and would write, about them. What could be more winning? Who wouldn't love the story of a simple guy who loved birds--innocent little birds?" But, finally, after sweating and panicking and knowing he wouldn't do well with torture, he is finally allowed to leave.

"Birding is an eight-billion-dollar industry...bigger than hunting and fishing combined."

"The flyways that migrating birds follow cross state and national lines...so as Venezuela goes, as Cuba goes, as Cape Cod goes, as Carolina goes, so go the birds...Migration is the real worldwide web, the closest thing that nature had to connecting the entire planet."

DDT can be banned in the US but not in another country; the US have a protected status for certain species but another country may allow them to be hunted.

Think on that when you next see birds perching, flying, swimming, diving, eating, building nests....seducing humans....

Book: The River Swimmer by Jim Harrison

The River Swimmer is the second novella in this book. 

So, though I usually love Jim Harrison, The River Swimmer was weird. Thad is a young man who loves to swim, like for instance from mid western Michigan around the bottom of the lake to Chicago. Thad and his family live on an island near the towns of Big Rapids, Ludington, Reed City and Grand Rapids...all in western Michigan, and having lived in most of these towns, the territory was familiar. My country, off and on throughout my life. 

Thad arrives in Chicago, "slipped on trousers and a shirt from his fanny pack" and heads off to meet a rich girl whose Daddy (John Scott) takes over his life for a few months. Very soon they all fly in John Scott's private plane to rural Michigan (first stopping at Blodgett Hospital in Grand Rapids to see Thad's father who is in the ICU there). Thad and the rich girl go to France. Thad has an accident and almost dies. When he swims, he communes with water babies and "his little friends clung to him as if they were glue" as he swims out into cold Lake Michigan one night. 

Many, many sentences and paragraphs are beautifully written even though the story is often not credible. The characters are fine enough as individuals but what they do seems made up without much thought to the denouement. Mr. Harrison rambles on, easily, with humor and sweetness and fantastical events because he can, because he has the gift of writing lovely prose while making his observations.

"At the pond, Thad quickly stepped out of his clothes and entered the pond fearing the water babies may  have escaped into the river but there they were, perhaps a dozen in all in the deepest part of the pond drifting in a shaft of sunlight and watching his slow approach." 

"He had grown up with the habit of thinking about the cost of everything, typical of people who have to turn the soil into dollars and cents, people who are free of the abstractions money can twirl in our sorry head. How many bushels of tomatoes or sweet corn will it take to get the house painted? We're better off doing it ourselves in spare time that doesn't actually exit. So you paint after dinner until summer dark." 

"Writers seem drawn to the grace and peace of fly-fishing. He liked one in particular, a poet and graduate student from Michigan State working in despair on his PhD because he needed money for a burgeoning family of three children...He drank too much from a flask and occasionally tumbled in the water but had a wading staff and was strong enough to right himself. "

And the water babies are always with him...

But, the first novella The Land of Unlikeness was fine. Of course, I am always rooted in reality as this writing is. (No water babies or swimming to Chicago.) 

Clive "art professor, an emissary, appraiser, and culture handyman" living in New York City comes to northern Michigan to spend a month with his aging Mother while his sister (her usual caretaker) is off to Europe. He is gentled and calmed by the change in the pace of his life. He reminesces; he begins painting again; he renews an acquaintance with his lady neighbor; he drinks coffee on the porch early every morning, while waiting on his mother who is birding a nearby thicket, until she whistles for him to retrieve her. How shall we live our later years? What eases the mind? How important is the instant availability of nearly everything? A barrage of artificial stimuli versus those of nature....

"Clive woke at dawn having lost his self-importance..."

"Now that he was on a roll he also made a big order from Zingerman's deli in Ann Arbor. He had nearly three weeks to go on his mother-sitting and couldn't envision enduring the purgatory of her bland cooking."

"He recalled cutting wood with his father. A neighbor a mile away had timbered his woodlot but there were many huge branches of beech, oak and maple, all marvelous firewood. They had worked through an afternoon that featured high winds and an ice storm in late October. Passage through the woods and fallen branches was tight so they had brought Jerry dragging the stone boat rather than the tractor and wagon...By the time that they had cut three cords their coats were crunchy with ice...They reached home just before dark, fed Jerry and rubbed him down, and finally in the house shedding their wet clothes before the hot bellied stove, his father had poured them each a couple of ounces of cheap whiskey to the disapproval of his mother. They ate pot roast and gravy with a mixture of whipped potatoes and rutabaga and boiled cabbage..."

"In order to maintain equilibrium in New York City and to be taken seriously you had to maintain appearances whether you were teaching, giving a lecture, or evaluating a collection."

Again, having lived in northern Michigan, I loved reading about the woods and lakes and rivers, and I also liked the story.

One small correction: Jim Harrison writes that Clive saw a "yellow bird" which his birdwatching mother tells him is a yellow-rumped warbler. But yellow-rumps are mostly black and white with only small yellow patches on their shoulders, rump and sometimes a tiny yellow spot on the top of the head. 

Book: The Racketeer by John Grisham

I am never disappointed when reading a novel by John Grisham. This book begins as Malcolm Bannister, the protagonist and formerly a small-town lawyer, is an inmate in prison for a crime he did not commit. What follows is a lengthy and complicated plan to get out of prison, exact revenge and get rich. It's fun to read as Bannister and the FBI match wits. And, of course, you know who wins.

Book: The Kirtland's Warbler by William Rapai

The Story of a Bird's Flight Against Extinction and the People Who Saved It. 

No, the Kirtland's Warbler isn't Michigan's state bird, but it should be. There are a few breeding pairs in Ontario and Wisconsin but the majority nest in northern Michigan, mostly in jack pine trees of a certain age. They require this specific habitat so whatever threatens the jack pines also is alarming for the future of the Kirtland's.

As such, they have been watched and managed extensively the last half century. As of 2010, their numbers were over 1000, so it is possible they will soon be taken off the Endangered Species List. But their survival isn't guaranteed, especially as the mountain pine beetle (currently devastating foroests in the western US) is expected to reach Michigan in the not too distant future. And the effects of global warming will make for warmer winters which then allow many more mountain pine beetles to survive. And, there is also the sirex woodwasp to worry about. The woodwasp attacks living trees and has the potential to do major damage to jack pines.

"The ornithologist Charles Pease had no idea what kind of bird he had just shot in northeastern Ohio on May 13, 1851, but he knew what to do with it: give it to his father-in-law, Dr. Jared Kirtland."

It took some time to figure out where the warblers nested and where they wintered but slowly biologists, private citizens, politicians, the Michigan DNR, the USFWS and the US Forest Service prevailed and eventually the Kirtland's warbler was protected. But not without setbacks and discouragements....which is the story this book relates in a compelling way up to the present.

One fascinating bit of Kirtland's warbler history is the connection with Nathan Leopold. Living in Chicago, he and his friend, Richard Loeb, murdered Bobby Franks, thinking they had committed the perfect crime. But, "While disposing of Franks, Leopold accidentally let a  pair of glasses slip from his pocket. The glasses had an unusual hinge, and a Chicago optometrist told police that only three pair had been sold in the entire city. The optometrist provided the detective with a list of names. One of the names was Nathan Leopold's." He had done field work with the Kirtland's in 1923 before the murder. When he was released from prison in the 1960s, he visited the breeding area once again, never having lost his interest in this diminutive bird.

Kirtland's warblers winter in the Bahamas which took sleuthing and time to figure out. Of course that habitat also needs protection and is not subject to the US Endangered Species Act. All the details are in this interesting and informative account.

Greg Miller: "The stories and tales surrounding this rare and mysterious species are almost as captivating as the bird itself. Who knew that Kirtland's warbler research involved such things a murder, a disastrous forest fire, and a machete accident? This is an excellent source of current research on the Kirtland's warbler, the successes of the current programs and the perils and difficulties that still face the bird's population."

(Greg was one of the birders in The Big Year for those of you who might not recognize the name.)

So, IF making the Kirtland's warbler Michigan's state bird ever becomes a possibility, please support that.

Book: White Mischief by James Fox

The Murder of Lord Erroll ~ A True Story of Aristocracy, Alcohol and Adultery

There was a place called Happy Valley in Kenya in the first half of the 20th century to which certain rich folk from England came, settled on farms and lived their hedonistic expat lives. This book tells the story of a few dozen of them, although I suspect that many, many others also lived there and led exemplary lives. I hope so, as the men and women in White Mischief are pretty horrid. The book is a gossipy look at their messy, self-centered, pleasure-seeking way of life. 

White Mischief is an inspired title. It's the story of the murder, in January of 1941, of Jossyln Hay, Earl of Erroll and High Constable of Scotland, who was shot to death and of Sir Jock Delves Broughton, the prime suspect, who was acquitted. 

The author and his now-deceased fellow journalist, Cyril Connolly, have that peculiar British infatuation with titles and money and royalty. They had co-authored an article on the murder in the late 1960s, and Mr. Fox continued his interest in the case after Connolly's death. He wrote White Mischief in 1982. It was referenced in Alexandra Fuller's latest book, Cocktails Under the Tree of Forgiveness, which is why I read it. 

"Broughton was thirty-one when his father died in 1914. Along with Valentine, Viscount Castlerosse, he was considered the best-looing officer in the Irish Guards. Having for years found it difficult to pay his bills at the officers' mess, he now had a princely income along with the house and the acres." 

"Broughton was born into the protected, leisured world of racing and into the big league of landowning families. His father was the 10th Baronet, owned three houses: Doddington Park in Cheshire, Broughton Hall in Staffordshire and 6 Hill Street, in Mayfair, London...With the houses came some 34,000 acres: a vast estate mostly of prime Cheshire farmland which would now be worth something over 70 million pounds." 

And on, and on...

But the book is interesting for the glimpse into that time in Kenya (and Africa in general) when the Europeans could live with native black servants doing the work. It was the world of memsahib; it was the Kenya of Out of Africa, some of whose characters appear in this book. 

The author is a decent writer and does a good job of reporting. He has success hunting down and speaking with several people who had been close to the events 40 years earlier, so there is also the element of suspense throughout the book. Will we know for certain who killed Josslyn Hay? 

Book: Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die by Willie Nelson

Musings from the Road

A mishmash of recollections, random opinions, song lyrics and testimonials (mostly from his large extended family members).

This from his wife Annie Nelson: "Besides my own father, my husband is one of the funniest people I know, and the very best person I have ever met."

WIllie himself: "For instance, I don't know anybody who is better drunk than sober. You might get by a while but sooner than later it will take you down. I know. I tried it." But he doesn't talk much about his troubles. It's mostly a sweet little book. He likes his home on Hawaii; he likes to play poker; he's proud of his kids; he loves music.

He tells jokes:
"A drunk fell out of second-floor window. A guy came running over and asked, 'What happened?' The drunk said, 'I don't know I just got here.'"

It's that kind of book. You can read it in a night.

Book: The Pretty One by Lucinda Rosenfeld

A Novel About Sisters

A novel about three sisters that is pretty much chick lit. Modern, upper middle class, East coast people and their angst surrounding relationships, child-rearing and parental issues. Fun to read with credible enough characters but rather preposterous story lines, especially the sperm donor one.