The Flight of the Iguana (11 page)

But some people claim even today that their yappy little curs function as watchdogs—though it's a mystery to me why anyone would be foolish enough to rely on a warning system that delivers twenty false alarms every day. My own theory is that those “watchdog” people value their poodles and their scotties not for warning but as personal surrogates, less inhibited and more articulate than themselves, and take vicarious emotional satisfaction as the dogs deliver that shrill and mindlessly angry message to the outside world.

Wolves generally don't bark. Wolves howl melodically. Coyotes seldom bark. They yodel and yelp. From the Congo jungle comes an ancient domestic dog breed known as the basenji that also, bless its very soul, almost never barks. Basenjis were highly valued for their discretion by the Pygmies, who used them for hunting antelope in the Ituri forest. So quiet were these basenjis, in fact, that sometimes the human handler fitted one with a collar from which hung a gourd rattle, just so he could keep track of where the dog was. No one knows why basenjis originally fell silent, or retained the ancestral barklessness, but one very plausible reason would be that they were terrier-sized animals living among leopards, and therefore learned quickly the value of inconspicuousness. All honor to the good sense of the basenji. Unfortunately, most dog breeds did not evolve in the presence of leopards.

They evolved in the presence of humans, who are selectively deaf. It is a scientifically demonstrable fact that many people do not even hear the noise of their own dog. Generally that's because they tie the dog up in a backyard and go off to work downtown, leaving their pet to bark tirelessly at passing children and other dogs and the free-lance writer across the alley.

Why does a dog bark at all? One scientist who has spent the past twenty years studying dog behavior and origins, Michael W. Fox, says that “dogs may bark during greeting, play-soliciting, threat, defense, care-soliciting, distress, contact-seeking, or during group vocalizations. Barks may be simple or complex, e.g., growl-barks, repeated barks with howl-like endings and yelp-barks. This contextual variety indicates that the sound itself may not always convey specific information but rather attracts the attention of their receiver.” In other words, they bark for every damn reason you can imagine, and sometimes for no reason, other than boredom. (And boredom is liable to be a large factor in the life of even a modestly bright animal left captive in a yard.) As far as attracting the attention of the receiver—there is no doubting the bark's effectiveness for that. I can vividly recall one occasion, for instance, when a pair of toy terriers had solicited my attention with such success that at 3
A.M
. I got up, put on pants and shoes, walked down two flights of stairs, and crossed a street in order to throw three garbage cans over a fence at them. Like the dogs, I was seeking contact.

But of course fairness (and, even more so, my desire for continued matrimonial amity) requires me to note that not all breeds of domestic dog are equally loathsome. Golden retrievers seem to have a fair measure of charm and mental health. Toy poodles are at the other extreme, obviously. Malamutes and Siberian huskies are wonderfully handsome and tend to have a fine quiet poise about them, probably in direct correlation with the closeness of their relationship to the original wolf. Basenjis, as we've seen, should be a role model for all. And cocker spaniels are paragons
of hysteria: According to one set of studies, cockers started barking with less provocation, and continued barking with more persistence, than all other breeds tested. Take a cocker spaniel at eleven weeks old, lock it behind chain link on a small patch of grass, and you have a barking machine unequaled throughout nature. One cocker in those studies set a record of infamy by barking 907 times in a ten-minute period. Interestingly, the same researcher also found from autopsy data a trend among cocker spaniels for hydrocephaly. All of which may or may not be consequent from mankind's having bred cockers toward a steeply angled forehead.

Why do dogs bark so much more—and so much more randomly, stupidly—than their wolfish ancestors? Michael Fox says: “The outstanding feature of the domestic dog—barking—may be attributed to artificial selection.” We humans are responsible. But that still leaves open the question of whether we produced this excessive barkishness by liberating a trait that was suppressed in wild canines, or by accentuating a trait that was otherwise barely present—by protecting the domestic dog from those leopards, or by choosing the mouthiest dogs of each generation as our favored breeders. And that question can't be settled in isolation from the matter, also still in doubt, of the domestic dog's direct ancestry. Fox tells us: “The origin(s) of the dog therefore still remains an enigma although one might conclude on the basis of this study that if the wolf were the sole progenitor of the dog, then dogs would howl more and bark much less than they do.”

So maybe it wasn't the Indian wolf after all. Maybe that immediate ancestor to our domestic dogs was the jackal (with those elegantly wolf-like huskies and Malamutes reflecting some later cross-breeding back with real wolves). Maybe it was an earlier version of the Australian dingo. Maybe it was a missing link between dingo and jackal. Or possibly (and I offer this only as an hypothesis, understand) it was a cross between the hyena and the duck.

Hyenas have a certain dog-like majesty. The duck and the poodle have a similar sort of gait. And ducks are known to eat garbage. Furthermore, come to think of it, the quack is not so different from the bark. And don't I vaguely recall an etymological tie, in the old Anglo-Saxon, between the very words for the two animals: a common origin in the form
dok?
It's just a thought.

Anyway, from wherever they come, here they are. Sixty million
Canis familiaris:
as many dogs, now, as we once had bison. That's a very sobering little gauge, in itself, of the degradation of America. Man's best friend, don't you know—at least so we are endlessly told.
The dog is man's best woof woof woof
. But with friends like that, says I, who needs enemies? Bah, humbug.

The Hard, Noble Life of a Stranger in a Strange Land

I have been trying to imagine what life is like for an urban tree.

This is especially difficult—not just the life, but the imagining of it—during winter, when that life itself seems to be absent and the poor creatures just stand around, leafless and woebegone, looking dead as bleached Hereford skulls in the desert. Of course they aren't dead—but do they have reason to wish they were? That's the question. In response comes a wooden silence. I've just gotten back from a walk through the snow-packed and tree-lined streets of the town where I live, during which I took care to scrutinize in their sphinx-like stolidity a selection of naked cottonwoods, ashes, dogwoods, weeping birches, maples, and two very grand old elms towering over the sidewalk in front of the house next door. Every one of them, with the season, looking desolate and mute. I hoped for a hint of empathic inspiration, a murmur or a squeak, but they weren't obliging. No comment. Winter dormancy, that sort of stupor is called. By the time you read this, those same trees will have long since come a-flush with new greenery and I will be harboring a suspicion that they had only been gone on out-of-body experiences in the tropics. Even in summer, though, the life of a city tree can't be easy.

Landscape architects make a distinction between the “natural”
or “romantic” aggregations of foliage in a rolling urban oasis like Central Park and, on the other hand, the “street trees” that serve simply to border or punctuate lanes and boulevards. There is a large literature these days on the theory of urban park design and landscape planning. The romantic style is still in favor. Better yet is the new notion of preserving patches of “urban woodland,” indigenous, ragged, unmanaged. Street trees meanwhile tend to be the forgotten souls.

They grow up through that miserly gap of hard-packed dirt between sidewalk and curb, roots smothered, solitary, regimented like telephone poles, invisible as wallpaper. They get precious little attention and what they do get is often the cruelest sort. Occasionally someone will staple a poster into their bark. A dog stops to lift his leg. A drunk in a Chevrolet tries to park himself up in their branches. But no one puts a hose to their roots on a dry day in July, or gives them a fertilizer treatment in springtime, or sprawls out on a picnic blanket beneath to stare up and admire their canopy. Park trees, yes; lawn trees, yes; not street trees. Then, when they die, the city sends out a crew to fell them and grind them to chips. Otherwise they are ignored.

These are the trees that make me curious. The uncelebrated heroes of the urban environment. They not only add their small touch of shade and beauty to the starkest troughs of the city; they also cut winds, absorb noise, reduce glare, mitigate the extremes of temperature, and help appreciably to filter the city air. But how do they themselves fare? What sort of existence is it, living sealed off from the recycling flow of every soil nutrient, robbed of direct sunlight by skyscrapers, poisoned with road salt and poodle piss, deprived each autumn of even their own leaf mulch, choking on those various elaborate toxins of automobile exhaust? Is a tree such an amazingly stoic organism that such abuse doesn't matter? Or are their lives nasty, brutish, and short?

Does the mortification of having to stand stupidly in straight
rows show itself in a lowered life expectancy? Does smoke stunt their growth? Does their sap flow bitter?

I wondered especially about a single small tree that grows out of a pit in the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan, on Forty-fourth Street between Fifth Avenue and Sixth. This particular tree is barely more than a sapling—slender, sparse of crown, lonely and incongruous, with the Pan Am Building looming about a half mile above in the eastern sky. Last time I saw it, though, against even those odds, the thing was alive. I happen to be aware of this tree only because, down there in the canyon of Forty-fourth Street, it graces the entrance to the once reputable hotel where I stay when I'm in New York. Actually this tree is one of a pair, both of them small but spunky, both growing right out of that sidewalk on the south side of Forty-fourth, scarcely more than a bus length between; mine is the more westerly of the two. But I use the word “mine” undeservedly, confessing that I've never so much as noticed what species it is. I have no idea how it survives. Like everyone else, I have taken that tree for granted. So I decided to call the man responsible for worrying about the creatures no one else worries about, the street trees of New York City.

His name is Adrian Benepe. His title is Director of Natural Resources for the New York Department of Parks and Recreation. He seems to be a relaxed and sensitive fellow, and it was clear that I had the right guy (after some wrong tries) when he did not judge me a lunatic or a bothersome crank for stating that I'd phoned from Montana to inquire about the condition of this particular sapling I know on West Forty-fourth.

Adrian Benepe told me: “It's not easy being green in New York.”

•   •   •

Street trees have an improbable history. Up through the Middle Ages, in Europe, they didn't exist. The defensive walls that surrounded a medieval city were drawn about tightly, intended to
protect the inhabitants and their property from raiding enemies, and trees were a superfluity that could damn well take their chances outside. Back in the imperial days of Egypt and Rome, some spectacular palace gardens had been cultivated within urban boundaries, but those gardens were emphatically private, reserved for the enjoyment of the ruling classes. Street trees, on the other hand, are by definition public and populist. So it's ironic that their most influential precursor may have been Louis XIV's spread at Versailles.

Versailles was designed between 1661 and 1674 by a fellow named André Le Nôtre, now considered the first of the great landscape architects. The term itself—
landscape architect
—suggests something of the revolution that Le Nôtre brought to urban planting; his own father, under whom he apprenticed, is referred to, in contrast, as having been the king's
master gardener.
Le Nôtre the son studied painting as well as horticulture, and was evidently affected by what he learned of drafting and perspective. He grew into a gardener with an architectonic eye. His work is marked by the use of trees—planted in straight rows or in large blocks with crisp linear borders—to create grandiose vistas along which a grandiose monarch could survey his property. The Champs-Elysées, in Paris, one of the world's most famous tree-lined boulevards, was an earlier example of Le Nôtre's style. Then at Versailles in particular, on what had been a swampy hunting preserve, he created an exotically formalized environment, mixing nature with a regal sense of order, and drew the lines and the angles with trees.