Red and Green
12 & 13 August, Ian
Yesterday we set the alarm and hurried out of the
lodge early to make a Bird-banding breakfast at Creamer's Field. With the girls
in the back and me sitting at the wheel, Paula, who was last to leave the house,
ran down to the car and noticed that one of the tyres (tires) was completely
flat. Changing it took longer than it ought to since the hire company, whose
contract excuses them from any responsibility for tyres, had not equipped us
with a tool for removing the wheel nuts. Fortunately, we were not, as we could
easily have been out here, hundreds of miles from anyone and, with the use of a
neighbour's gear, we made it to the Alaska Bird Observatory just as everyone was
brushing off the crumbs from their bagels and heading out to see the birds.
Next time I hire a car for more than a couple of days I'll be
checking.
It was the first time that they had run the Bird-banding breakfast and the other ten or so people there were all local families. In the migratory seasons bird banders spread out fine nets in the woods to catch passerines (the song birds that account for over half of all birds) to develop an understanding of the populations and their behaviour. Volunteers check the nets every half hour or so and bag the birds for measurement, banding and release. An educator (Trisha) who normally works with the schools here explained it all, and any children who were keen to (Zoe was, Heidi was happy to watch her sister) got a chance to do the releasing. Each year they net about 4,000 birds here, with about 10% being birds who are already banded. They recently caught one flycatcher that they had originally banded nine years previously.
In Word Freaks I read about some top US players who are reluctant to play in international competition because it requires the learning of thousands of extra non-US English words. (It's easier for the Brits, Aussies, Kiwis and Canadians as there are far fewer US words that aren't in the official UK English lexicon.) Well, I can see that bird watching may be similar. I didn't recognise any of the birds that we saw from home: there was a savannah sparrow, a junco, orange-crowned and yellow-rumped warblers, and Zoe released a Swainson's thrush. Some birds - robins, for example - have the same name in the US and England but are completely different. Others have completely different names yet are the same - a marsh hawk in the US, for example, is a hen harrier in England. In fact, the educator believes that the bird whose photo I posted the other day was probably a marsh hawk rather than a young peregrine. Note the use of the word probably; this surprised me: the twitchers that I know have an astonishing ability to perform the most recondite discriminations from what seems to me like the vaguest and briefest fizz in a tree or bush. Yet this professional ornithologist was candidly speaking of probabilities when she had a crystal-clear photograph of a large hawk patiently displaying a perfect half profile. If any of you can give a definitive ID I'd be grateful.
This was a fascinating way to spend a couple of hours and we all learned a lot; again, more details may appear in the girls' newsletters. Here's a snap of the educator giving a warbler to one of the children to release:
I've written quite a lot recently about differences between the US and England, and, since we're only in the US for just over a week now, I'd like to write a little more about it; the topic has niggled at me for the past couple of months, and I've found it tricky to tease out a reasonable articulation of precisely why.
My dominant sentiment about the USA is that there is much more about it to like and admire than I can start to know. The majority of the best books that I've been reading are by US authors (off the top of my head I can't think of a novel by a contemporary English writer that I've liked and admired quite as much as the American book I'm reading now). The US produces many of the outright best movies, and easily the best genre movies. Technology in the US across the board runs far ahead of that in other countries. (The latest space shuttle, I hear, which just touched down in California, across the continent from the pack journalists awaiting it in Florida, travelled at 17,000 miles an hour, which I believe is about Mach 23!) When I has having trouble sleeping the other night probably half of the music shuffled to me by my IPod was American. (There was, fortuitously, a great transition from Nellie McKay's Manhattan Avenue to a prelude from The Well-tempered Clavier played by Glenn Gould. Since being a teenager I've loved the mad Canadian's rendition of Bach, and his inability to muffle the sound of his own irrepressible singing from the attempted perfection of his recordings continues to resonate with me as a rich metaphor for the voice of the unconscious.) The IPod itself and the mac from which I feed it (and on which I write) are both design classics from California. The shows that we watch on DVD in the evenings are also both American (West Wing and Buffy).
So never let it be said that we lame-economy Europeans have anything to feel superior about.
Yet there is a little sand in the vaseline that rankles, perpetually seeming like a small fault deep down. Having reflected on this over the past couple of months there are two causes that I can identify, one of which is serious - to do with external world facts - and one of which is just down to me.
The serious problem is to do with the current Administration, and hopefully is thus temporary. This is not simple a general political thing - how Americans choose to run their own affairs is up to them - and I have no blanket dislike of "red state America" (the transatlantic transposition of red and blue as colours of political allegiance is another instance of right-hand v. left-hand drive). But on the two most important issues in the world right now Bush is a disaster on the grand scale. One issue is the non-trivial subject of the future of the planet Earth, where Bush and his Haliburton cronies are ignoring the emerging stark facts of geoscience and aggressively doubling down on a losing bet regarding the ultimate safety of polluting fuels. The second issue is the peace between peoples. Whatever the final analysis of the perceived justification for the Iraq war, there is no doubt at all that the atrocities being committed at Guantanemo and Abu Ghraib are frightening and alienating Muslims all over the world. Organisations such as the International Red Cross are starting to use the word torture to describe the interrogation techniques in which trained medical personal are being pressed to assist in the extraction of "information" from suspects held for years without trial.
So this is the serious stuff, and it's serious for many Americans, too, such as the lady whose son died in Iraq and who has vowed to camp outside Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas until he agrees to meet with her and discuss it; she's also threatened to camp outside the White House should the President ever decide to go to work.
The other thing that I personally find uncomfortable here is the pattern of institutions (both private and governmental) tending to infantilise their public. I've listed many of these previously and the icon of them all for me now is our infuriating Ford Taurus: nothing would give me more satisfaction when we leave than setting about it with the large mallet that Norman keeps in the garage downstairs. Perhaps the omnipresence and commercial success of so many fast-food chains here is also an aspect of this infantilisation, cutting up meals into pieces, so to speak; though this particular manifestation is much darker, given the epidemic of obesity-related health problems here.
There are a couple of important strands in the tapistry of American history that may explain why these aspects of the culture work better here than they would in Somerset. See what you think. The first is the fact that the States were founded by settlers wishing to escape dissipate Europe and manufacture success for themselves in a place that could be better. While this may foster a pioneering rather than a dependent spirit, it does create a place for a normative view of life in which most grown-ups have a visceral sense that right and wrong are real. Slogans expressing this ("God is real", "The Bible is true", "Hell is hot") flash from neon boards at the roadside at the edge of town.
The waves of immigration since the first settlers have had an effect that syncopates with this. People from all over the world have been streaming in here for generations, defining the US quite as much as the initial mob. It doesn't seem a moment ago that whites became a minority in the state of California and the latest census shows that "people of color" are now a majority in three other states, the most recent of which is Texas. Many more states are lined up to follow and most people born at the same time or later than me will live to see the day in which whites form a minority in the US. As the reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote many years ago in the context of the UK, it's colonisation in reverse. It's a paradoxical dynamic that sees Bush's home state pass this point, turning Texas Latino, at a moment in history precisely when he's bullying the Islamic world to become "American".
As we have travelled around we have seen plenty of evidence of people from all nations (still including England) aspiring to a move to the States. Many of them make it, and a lot of them have moved from relative poor countries to the richest nation on earth. Maybe this is why there's such a premium here on convenience (a word whose etymology means coming together). If you just arrived from Eastern Europe or Mexico or Chad (or England) maybe it helps if your new car makes a loud noise when you open the door with the key still in, and if you can get a cheap meal in a bag served through your car window. It's natural, perhaps, that a 1-2-3 of living in the USA should have developed.
And of course those Americans who don't want to follow these low-friction paths don't need to, and most people here do their own thing most of the time. Especially in Alaska. The young guy from the gas station who fixed our punctured tyre and then put it back in place of the "donut" temporary had moved here with his family from Florida. He prefers Alaska as a place to grow up because it's easier to avoid the pressure to conform. (They have bears on their land - when bears are seen they get tranq'ed and then hauled higher up in the hills.) People here speak of "the Lower 48" (contiguous states) with the subtle superiority of Canadians, which they perhaps effectively are, judging by the gross facts of the map. Here in The Interior they're even a bit sniffy about Anchorage.
And if you want to have your own space this is the place to be. Lonely Planet asserts that Alaska has the land area of England, France, Italy and Spain combined. There is some evident difficulty in measuring the land area of a state that includes large tracts of tundra and ice: on page 11 Lonely Planet has the area as 570k square miles and by page 30 this grows to 591k sq miles - a discrepancy the size of Scotland.
There were apparently around 115 fires raging around Fairbanks yesterday. I'm hoping the smoke clears today but so far the mountains that can usually be clearly seen from the veranda are still hidden behind a white-grey curtain.
It was the first time that they had run the Bird-banding breakfast and the other ten or so people there were all local families. In the migratory seasons bird banders spread out fine nets in the woods to catch passerines (the song birds that account for over half of all birds) to develop an understanding of the populations and their behaviour. Volunteers check the nets every half hour or so and bag the birds for measurement, banding and release. An educator (Trisha) who normally works with the schools here explained it all, and any children who were keen to (Zoe was, Heidi was happy to watch her sister) got a chance to do the releasing. Each year they net about 4,000 birds here, with about 10% being birds who are already banded. They recently caught one flycatcher that they had originally banded nine years previously.
In Word Freaks I read about some top US players who are reluctant to play in international competition because it requires the learning of thousands of extra non-US English words. (It's easier for the Brits, Aussies, Kiwis and Canadians as there are far fewer US words that aren't in the official UK English lexicon.) Well, I can see that bird watching may be similar. I didn't recognise any of the birds that we saw from home: there was a savannah sparrow, a junco, orange-crowned and yellow-rumped warblers, and Zoe released a Swainson's thrush. Some birds - robins, for example - have the same name in the US and England but are completely different. Others have completely different names yet are the same - a marsh hawk in the US, for example, is a hen harrier in England. In fact, the educator believes that the bird whose photo I posted the other day was probably a marsh hawk rather than a young peregrine. Note the use of the word probably; this surprised me: the twitchers that I know have an astonishing ability to perform the most recondite discriminations from what seems to me like the vaguest and briefest fizz in a tree or bush. Yet this professional ornithologist was candidly speaking of probabilities when she had a crystal-clear photograph of a large hawk patiently displaying a perfect half profile. If any of you can give a definitive ID I'd be grateful.
This was a fascinating way to spend a couple of hours and we all learned a lot; again, more details may appear in the girls' newsletters. Here's a snap of the educator giving a warbler to one of the children to release:
I've written quite a lot recently about differences between the US and England, and, since we're only in the US for just over a week now, I'd like to write a little more about it; the topic has niggled at me for the past couple of months, and I've found it tricky to tease out a reasonable articulation of precisely why.
My dominant sentiment about the USA is that there is much more about it to like and admire than I can start to know. The majority of the best books that I've been reading are by US authors (off the top of my head I can't think of a novel by a contemporary English writer that I've liked and admired quite as much as the American book I'm reading now). The US produces many of the outright best movies, and easily the best genre movies. Technology in the US across the board runs far ahead of that in other countries. (The latest space shuttle, I hear, which just touched down in California, across the continent from the pack journalists awaiting it in Florida, travelled at 17,000 miles an hour, which I believe is about Mach 23!) When I has having trouble sleeping the other night probably half of the music shuffled to me by my IPod was American. (There was, fortuitously, a great transition from Nellie McKay's Manhattan Avenue to a prelude from The Well-tempered Clavier played by Glenn Gould. Since being a teenager I've loved the mad Canadian's rendition of Bach, and his inability to muffle the sound of his own irrepressible singing from the attempted perfection of his recordings continues to resonate with me as a rich metaphor for the voice of the unconscious.) The IPod itself and the mac from which I feed it (and on which I write) are both design classics from California. The shows that we watch on DVD in the evenings are also both American (West Wing and Buffy).
So never let it be said that we lame-economy Europeans have anything to feel superior about.
Yet there is a little sand in the vaseline that rankles, perpetually seeming like a small fault deep down. Having reflected on this over the past couple of months there are two causes that I can identify, one of which is serious - to do with external world facts - and one of which is just down to me.
The serious problem is to do with the current Administration, and hopefully is thus temporary. This is not simple a general political thing - how Americans choose to run their own affairs is up to them - and I have no blanket dislike of "red state America" (the transatlantic transposition of red and blue as colours of political allegiance is another instance of right-hand v. left-hand drive). But on the two most important issues in the world right now Bush is a disaster on the grand scale. One issue is the non-trivial subject of the future of the planet Earth, where Bush and his Haliburton cronies are ignoring the emerging stark facts of geoscience and aggressively doubling down on a losing bet regarding the ultimate safety of polluting fuels. The second issue is the peace between peoples. Whatever the final analysis of the perceived justification for the Iraq war, there is no doubt at all that the atrocities being committed at Guantanemo and Abu Ghraib are frightening and alienating Muslims all over the world. Organisations such as the International Red Cross are starting to use the word torture to describe the interrogation techniques in which trained medical personal are being pressed to assist in the extraction of "information" from suspects held for years without trial.
So this is the serious stuff, and it's serious for many Americans, too, such as the lady whose son died in Iraq and who has vowed to camp outside Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas until he agrees to meet with her and discuss it; she's also threatened to camp outside the White House should the President ever decide to go to work.
The other thing that I personally find uncomfortable here is the pattern of institutions (both private and governmental) tending to infantilise their public. I've listed many of these previously and the icon of them all for me now is our infuriating Ford Taurus: nothing would give me more satisfaction when we leave than setting about it with the large mallet that Norman keeps in the garage downstairs. Perhaps the omnipresence and commercial success of so many fast-food chains here is also an aspect of this infantilisation, cutting up meals into pieces, so to speak; though this particular manifestation is much darker, given the epidemic of obesity-related health problems here.
There are a couple of important strands in the tapistry of American history that may explain why these aspects of the culture work better here than they would in Somerset. See what you think. The first is the fact that the States were founded by settlers wishing to escape dissipate Europe and manufacture success for themselves in a place that could be better. While this may foster a pioneering rather than a dependent spirit, it does create a place for a normative view of life in which most grown-ups have a visceral sense that right and wrong are real. Slogans expressing this ("God is real", "The Bible is true", "Hell is hot") flash from neon boards at the roadside at the edge of town.
The waves of immigration since the first settlers have had an effect that syncopates with this. People from all over the world have been streaming in here for generations, defining the US quite as much as the initial mob. It doesn't seem a moment ago that whites became a minority in the state of California and the latest census shows that "people of color" are now a majority in three other states, the most recent of which is Texas. Many more states are lined up to follow and most people born at the same time or later than me will live to see the day in which whites form a minority in the US. As the reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote many years ago in the context of the UK, it's colonisation in reverse. It's a paradoxical dynamic that sees Bush's home state pass this point, turning Texas Latino, at a moment in history precisely when he's bullying the Islamic world to become "American".
As we have travelled around we have seen plenty of evidence of people from all nations (still including England) aspiring to a move to the States. Many of them make it, and a lot of them have moved from relative poor countries to the richest nation on earth. Maybe this is why there's such a premium here on convenience (a word whose etymology means coming together). If you just arrived from Eastern Europe or Mexico or Chad (or England) maybe it helps if your new car makes a loud noise when you open the door with the key still in, and if you can get a cheap meal in a bag served through your car window. It's natural, perhaps, that a 1-2-3 of living in the USA should have developed.
And of course those Americans who don't want to follow these low-friction paths don't need to, and most people here do their own thing most of the time. Especially in Alaska. The young guy from the gas station who fixed our punctured tyre and then put it back in place of the "donut" temporary had moved here with his family from Florida. He prefers Alaska as a place to grow up because it's easier to avoid the pressure to conform. (They have bears on their land - when bears are seen they get tranq'ed and then hauled higher up in the hills.) People here speak of "the Lower 48" (contiguous states) with the subtle superiority of Canadians, which they perhaps effectively are, judging by the gross facts of the map. Here in The Interior they're even a bit sniffy about Anchorage.
And if you want to have your own space this is the place to be. Lonely Planet asserts that Alaska has the land area of England, France, Italy and Spain combined. There is some evident difficulty in measuring the land area of a state that includes large tracts of tundra and ice: on page 11 Lonely Planet has the area as 570k square miles and by page 30 this grows to 591k sq miles - a discrepancy the size of Scotland.
There were apparently around 115 fires raging around Fairbanks yesterday. I'm hoping the smoke clears today but so far the mountains that can usually be clearly seen from the veranda are still hidden behind a white-grey curtain.
Posted: Mon - August 15, 2005 at 02:18 AM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM