Old Songs in a New Cafe (12 page)

When you feel yourself starting to become whole, it’s all right to accept positions of power, but not before then. The overriding
problem with our country, and our world in general, is that we are, in large part, managed by incompetents. Most of these
are men who have spent their lives seeking power rather than themselves.

Consequently, we are confronted with the grotesque spectacle of working for childish figures—halfbaked little generals with
overblown egos and no more understanding of the search for meaning than some primitive, base organism spending its time feeding
on the lives and feelings of others, guzzling them up like strained peaches, cackling to themselves as they play shell games
with other people’s destinies.

Moreover, somewhere along the way, I think it’s crucial to deal with the damnable issue of mortality. There is, of course,
the inevitability of it all—the end of life. As children, we are brought slowly to this understanding through events rather
than introspection. A grandfather dies when you’re eleven. It seems incomprehensible, at first.

But at the funeral parlor there are lowered voices and solemnity. The old man who was, more than anything, your friend lies
there quietly. And it comes to you, maybe for the first time, that all of this is not unceasing. The first sense of loss is
that of ice cream on Sunday mornings and the wonderful, atrocious lies with which he embellished the stories of his cowboy
days. The second is more haunting: We are not everlasting.

So you begin to understand mortality, dimly though, and with a vague assuredness that it applies to others, but not to you.
Around twenty-two, however, I endured what I call my “mortality crisis.” For six months, almost involuntarily, I lay in bed
at night examining the edges of my physiology, seeking peace with the tenuousness of it all. I lay there in the darkness,
thinking and sweating, terrified at the prospect of my own death. That period was excruciating but healthy, I believe, for
I determined that time and I should be wary allies, not opponents.

Then life gets busy, fears recede in the tumble of daily life. And nature helps in this. An inherent kindness exists in the
process of aging. Except for the unforeseen miseries of homicide or wars or sudden catastrophic illness, we are allowed to
move along gradually. Imagine, for a moment, that we looked and felt exactly the same at fifty as we did at twenty. But, then,
on our fiftieth birthday, suppose we changed suddenly to the physical condition and appearance of, say, a ninety-year-old.
That Wouldn’t work, psychologically. We graciously are given time to adjust. (Incidentally, I’m not denigrating the appearance
of older people; I’m merely talking about change.)

In my bathroom mirror at home it works just this way. I see myself every morning. The changes are unnoticeable from day to
day. But there are other reflections.

For the last ten years I have taught in an executive development program at the University of Richmond. I always visit there
in June and am lodged in undergraduate student housing along with participants in the program. Such quarters are standardized,
obviously, so even though I may shift from room to room over the years, the uniformity of the place provides the illusion
that I am staying in the identical room each year.

This provides a benchmark of sorts. On each visit, scraping the shaving cream away, I have a chance to examine what twelve
months have done to me. There is, I admit, a certain trauma connected with this annual experience. Yet, perversely, I also
look forward to it as a kind of gruff and unforgiving timepiece, measuring my progress, telling the truth, refusing to lie.

And every June I am given over to marveling at the human capacity for handling the certainty of our own deaths, for writing
our own obituaries even as we live. That we can comprehend our own demise and that we do not constantly whirl about in rabid
frenzy at the thought of it is part of our magic, a built-in mechanism for sanity of the most powerful kind.

But the borders are there. They are stern and ineluctable, and I see them approaching. Clearly I see them, on summer mornings,
as I stare at myself in the mirrors of Richmond.

Yet, there are voices that speak to me along the rivers, along the way. With scolding words, they counter the momentary sag
born of distant mirrors and honest appraisal: “Saddle up, caballero, and stop sniffling.” They are right, of course. When
Odysseus cried, “There is nothing worse for men than wandering,” he was correct in the metaphor but wrong in the physical
reality. There are Yaqui drums in high plains arroyos and ship engines north of Cairo I have not yet heard. There are beaches
where you can still run naked at dawn and visions within a yard of my house that I have not yet seen through the lens of my
Nikon.

I missed the last packet boat down the Missouri. It left from the Fort Lewis, Montana, levee in 1890. How I wish I had been
on it, coming by places with names such as Malta Bend, just to have gathered in the sense of history and change that must
have been stacked along the decks. But there are other boats. Some are Arab dhows with saffron-colored sails. They move through
the waters of Ocean India, and I aim to sail upon such a boat along the Somali Current.

The voices of the river remind me that neither chemists nor alchemists can save me. And they tell me it’s all right to remember,
in Kipling’s words, “That night we stormed Valhalla, a million years ago,” that it’s allowable to sing sweet lamentations
for the death of blue autumns, but not to dwell upon those things entirely. For in the pleasant sorrow that comes from remembrance,
time shifts in character. No longer an ally then, but a legendary bandit who’ll steal your woman and take your passion and
ride the evening train.

So the voices settle me. And I remember most of what I know that is good and true and lasting has come not from scholars but
from minstrels and gypsies, from magicians and magic, from jugglers swallowing fire. It has come from small bands of travelers
who followed the rivers and told me old stories and chanted old warnings of young women dancing through late afternoons and
into the firelight, leaving only a footprint for the morning that follows.

Listening closely, then, I have learned that languor is not the price of serenity. I know there is more ahead of me than discounted
airline tickets and shuffleboard, or a condo on the edge of a Scottsdale golf course. And, if it’s all right with everyone
else, I think I’ll skip the midlife passage involving gold chains and Porsches and suntans.

Instead, I’m lacing up my twelve-year-old Red Wings, loading the cameras, putting new strings on the 1957 Martin flattop,
getting ready to go where egrets fly. Like an old rider of the surf, I can already see the next wave coming. It looks fine
and fair. It looks worth the effort.

______________________________________

T
he thought is a haunting one. It comes to me at odd times, unpredictable moments. I might be playing my guitar or reading
or just driving along in the car. And suddenly I’m thinking about a fellow named Orange Band. I never met him, and I never
will.

His name resulted from a small strip of plastic around his leg. I used to think he deserved a better handle. In Latin he was
Ammodrarnus nigrescens,
but that seemed too coldly scientific and species-like, in the same way I am
Homo sapiens.
What was needed, I thought, was a name that captured in a word or two his unique place in the scheme of things. Something
that identified him as being the very last of his kind, that succinctly conveyed the isolation of his existence. A name that
somehow reflected the infinite loneliness that must accompany a state of undiluted unity. For he was perfectly and unalterably
alone.

But, in the end, I decided that Orange Band was a good name for him. He was plain, and he was gritty, and it suited him well.
Besides, the simplicity of such a name is more than fitting if you are the only remaining dusky seaside sparrow and there
is no one left to call it out. If I were the last of
Homo sapiens,
I think I would take such a name. And I would sit with my back against a granite ledge, near a river in a distant twilight
colored blue, and say, “I am Orange Band,” listening to the words come back to me through the trees and along the grass.

How do we measure loneliness? If the counting bears any relationship to the number of your species still around, then Orange
Band was lonely. It had not always been so. The duskies were common once in the marshes of Merritt Island, Florida. They were
six inches long, blackish above with a yellow patch near the eye, streaked in black and white lower down, and sang a buzzy
song resembling that of a red-winged blackbird.

That was before we slowly pitched our faces skyward and murmured, “Space “Along with the mathematics of flight and the hardware
to take us there, we had to deal with the nasty problem of mosquitoes that plagued the Kennedy Space Center. For reasons known
only to people who conjure up such things, flooding the Merritt Island marshlands nearby seemed to be the answer to the mosquito
problem. The water rose and took with it the nests of the dusky seaside sparrows.

There was one other place, just one, where the duskies lived. Propelled by conservationist pressures, the federal government
lurched into action and spent something over $2 million to purchase 6,250 acres along the St. John’s River. There were two
thousand of the little songbirds living there. Ah, but highways came. Always the highways come. They come to bring more people
who will need more highways that will bring more people who will need more highways. The marshes were drained for road construction
and fire swept through the dry grass of the nesting grounds. Pesticides did the rest.

By 1979, only six dusky seaside sparrows could be found along the river. Five of them were captured. None were females. The
last female had been sighted in 1975.

The New York Times
duly noted the problem in the August 31, 1983, edition under a headline that read: “Five Sparrows, All Male, Sing for a Female
to Save Species.” And just below the
Times
article, in one of those ethereal juxtapositions that sometimes occur in newspaper layouts, was an advertisement for a chichi
clothing store called Breakaway. The copy above a photo of a smartlyturned-out woman went like this:

You strive for spontaneity

To take life as it comes

The perfect complement to your dynamic Iifestyle

Our natural silver fox jacket

Now during our Labor Day celebration

Save $1000.00 off the original price

Originally $3990.00, now $2990.00

In the swamps of Florida, spontaneity was on hold. So were dynamic lifestyles. The five male duskies were brought to Disney
World’s Discovery Island, were pensioned off and made comfortable. Orange Band was about eight years old.

So it was, not far from the place where we launch for other worlds, that a different kind of countdown began. By 1985, there
were three of the little males left. Then one died in September of that year. On March 31,1986, a second one died. That left
Orange Band, by himself.

Now and then, I would think of Orange Band alone in his cage. The last member of the rarest species known to us. He became
blind in one eye, became old for a sparrow, and yet he persisted, as if he knew his sole task was to sustain the bloodline
as long as possible. I wondered if he wondered, if he felt sorrow, or excruciating panic at the thought of his oneness. Surely
he felt loneliness. Charles Cook, curator of the zoo, issued periodic bulletins: “As far as we can tell, for a little bird
like that he seems to be doing fine.”

Still it was inevitable. On June 18, 1987, a
Washington Post
headline said: “Goodbye, Dusky Seaside Sparrow.” Orange Band, blind in one eye, old and alone, was gone. He died by himself
on June 17th, with no one, either human or bird, around.

But the day Orange Band died there was a faint sound out there in the universe. Hardly noticeable unless you were expecting
it and listening. It was a small cry, the last one, that arched upward from a cage in Florida, ricocheted along galactic highways
and skimmed past the scorched parts of an old moon rocket still in orbit. If you were listening closely, though, you could
hear it… “I am zero.”

Extinct. The sound of the word is like the single blow of a hammer on cold steel. And each day the hammer falls again as another
species becomes extinct due to human activity. This is about 400 times the rate of natural extinction. Norman Meyers has projected
that, by the end of this century, species will be vanishing at the rate of 100 per day.

In open defiance of the International Whaling Commission, Japan and Iceland continue to slaughter whales under the guise of
“research.” The real reason, however, is to supply the inexhaustible Japanese appetite for whale flesh. The great California
condors are all in cages now,* Less than twenty of the black-footed ferrets remain. The number of mountain gorillas has declined
to under 450. The black duck is in serious trouble; nobody knows just how much trouble for sure. Over six million dolphins
have been killed accidentally by the Pacific tuna fleet the last thirty years. And have you noticed the decline of songbirds
in Iowa?

The count rises, year after year. Roughly eleven hundred plants and animals are identified specifically on the endangered
and threatened species list at the present time, but nobody really knows for sure how long the list should be. The reason
is that science has not yet determined exactly how many species exist, and the job of identification is a long way from completion.
With the clear-cutting of the tropical rain forests throughout the world, the numbers could be astronomical For example, the
current rate of forest loss is two hundred thousand square kilometers per year, and some estimates of species yet unknown
in the tropical forests range as high as one million.