What Language Are You Speaking?

This is another in a series of counties I'm describing for my upcoming book "A Quest for Counties"

Georgia – Clark County

When I fly, I try my best to get a window seat, and preferably one away from the sun.  Since they stick me in a metal missile cruising at 35,000 feet, I might as well learn something about the landscape over which I am passing.  A painful divorce had made it impossible for me to stay in North Dakota, for psychological reasons if nothing else.  Instead of living out my days on the prairie, I transferred to an office in Georgia, a state that caused many misgivings in my mind. 

I had only once before been in the south, but never the “deep South” like Georgia.  To someone who had grown up in northern Wisconsin, any place at a latitude below Milwaukee was "the south,” and any place below Indianapolis was the "deep south."  That May, the "deep south" had been subjected to tremendously heavy rains for over a week causing some people to talk about building arks.  Once we passed over Indianapolis, the news reports were apparently not wrong.  Each valley, no matter how wide, was flooded from bank to bank.  Southern Indiana and most of Kentucky were floating toward the Mississippi River.  

Once past northern Tennessee things seemed to dry out a bit as we approached the Appalachians. On each of my earlier trips to Washington, D.C., the Appalachians had been hidden either by clouds or by darkness or both.  Today, the sun shone brightly and I was finally able to see them.

Not far north of Chattanooga we began our descent into the next stage of my life.  We approached Atlanta from the northwest, then passed over the city in an easterly direction almost to Stone Mountain before beginning our final approach into the airport.  I knew that Atlanta was a big city, but had no idea it was this big.  It seemed to go on forever.

When I asked in the airport for a map showing me how to get out of the airport and on the road to Athens, the woman at Hertz said, "Y’all have such a sweet accent, y'all must be a Yankee."

"No,” I said, “I'm an American.” 

Getting out of the Atlanta airport and onto the freeway is a trip and a half during the daylight hours.  Its nuts the first time you try it and ten times worse at night.  Finding the right road, I turned in the direction of Athens.  Forty-five minutes later a sign was pointing to Macon.  I had made a wrong turn somewhere and was nowhere near Athens.  In fact I was about 40 miles the opposite direction and far south of Atlanta.  Swallowing my pride, I stopped in a gas station for help.  Not only was I lost in a strange state, but Georgians apparently spoke a different language.  A British author once said that Americans and Britons were the same people separated by a common language.  He should have visited Georgia first.

I told the man behind the counter that I was lost and needed help.

"Where y'all headed?"

"Athens."

"Well y'all's headed in the wrong dye-wreck-shun.”

"I know.  That’s why I stopped.”

"Well where y'all from?"

"North Dakota.”

"Y'all ain’t Yankees up there is y'all?"

"No, we're American just like you.”

"This y'all's first time in Joejaw?"  This man was a master at double contractions.

"Yes, and it might be my last if I don't figure out where I am.".

"Well, where'zit y'all is headed again?"

"Athens!"

"Well, y'all's headed in the wrong dye-wreck-shun."

"That was obvious when I stopped here for help, now would you please give me some?"

"Well, alls y'all needs ta do is ta turn around and head back towards Atlannah, right the direction y'all just came from.  In a few miles y'all see signs for Athens.”

Now we were getting somewhere.  

Eventually a sign came into view directing me to Athens, home of the famous Georgia Bulldogs football team.  Many people, especially Georgians, seem to forget that Athens is also the home of a prestigious university.  Athens was also the home of the "40 Watt Club,” and the new wave groups REM and the B-52s.  Not long before this trip to Athens, Newsweek ran a piece about how this little island of liberalism in a sea of red necks was the epicenter of new wave music in the United States. 

Never before had I lived in a football-mad town.  Here you do not greet a friend on the street with an outstretched hand and a "hi, how are you?"  In Athens, you reach out your hand and say "Hi, how 'bout them dawgs!"  On a football Saturday, the stadium where they play "tween the hedges" becomes the fifth largest city in the state.  If you ever wanted to rob a bank in Athens, just do it on football Saturday because all the police are at the game.  For added cover, wear a red blazer so you look like all the other football fanatics.

Although Georgia was “home” for three years, it was never really home.  Instead it was more of a way point I passed over when traveling from one place to another.  I had misgivings about having to live in Georgia since the day they asked me to move there.  Most of the misgivings came from notions I had about the state long before I moved there.  Some things I thought about were things like, weren't Georgians the ones who still called us northerners "Yankees?”  Weren't Georgians the people who played "Dixie" at the start of basketball and football games?  Weren't Georgians the ones who still called black people "niggers" - and in the twentieth century no less?  Wasn't Georgia the state that once had a governor who ran for President on a platform of racial segregation?  No, that was Alabama - but it bordered Georgia.

Georgia promotes itself as the capital of the south.  The huge, cosmopolitan city of Atlanta has dominated it, but beyond the lights and glitter of the city lies and lives a state that still has not gotten over the fact that a Union Army General named Sherman once visited Atlanta and created quite a light show during his visit.  How any group of people could evolve from once being slave owners to claiming they are cosmopolitan while still harboring resentment over a war that none of them fought in is still an impossibility for me to comprehend.

I used to enjoy it when some redneck somewhere would call me a “Yankee” only to have me tell him moments later that the only Yankee I know plays center field in a baseball stadium in New York City.  Georgian’s like North Dakotans’ never seemed to appreciate hearing an opposing view point.  Countless times in Georgia someone told me that I did not understand the issue because “y’all’s not from around here are you, son?”  Apparently in the mind of a Georgian, if you have not grown up with the same backward thinking of all your ancestors who rarely ventured beyond the county line, then your opinion does not matter because “y’all’s not from around here.”

A pair of south Georgia rednecks waiting in line with me to board a flight to Houston one night at the Atlanta airport symbolized just how far Georgia has to go if it really wants to be the capital of anything.  I knew these two were south Georgia rednecks and not from north Georgia by how they spoke.  A north Georgia redneck would say to me “come over here,” while a redneck from the opposite end of the state would say “come over he-uh.”  These two were saying “he-uh” in every other sentence.

Their topic of complaint this night was the how the “Goddamned Yankees” were ruining the south.  Their conversation was about the “Goddamned Yankees” this, and the “Goddamned Yankees” that, incessantly.  Standing in line with me was a woman from Los Angeles who had a look on her face that suggested she was waiting for the Starship Enterprise to appear and beam her out of Dog Patch.

After several more references to “Yankees” I couldn’t resist any longer.  It may have had to do with it being 1:30 in the morning, or it could have been the fact that I had just reached my fill of this ignorant outlook.  However, I decided to say something about this obsession with Yankees, especially since the “Northern War” had been fought and lost more than a hundred years ago.

“Ah, excuse me, but didn’t the Civil War end more than a hundred years ago?” I asked.

One of the two looked down at me and drawled out “The Northern’ war won’t be over ‘till there ain’t no more of you Goddamned Yankees.”  He placed special emphasis on the last two words.

I never really enjoyed Georgia for several reasons.  I did not enjoy it because Georgia was where I went as an absolutely raw nerve after a painful divorce.  Mainly I did not like Georgia because, except for a few close friends I made, Georgia never gave me the chance to feel like I belonged.  I was “not from here” and that made me a suspect.  I might spend time in Georgia and spread ideas that were different from what my “my great-granddaddy who fought in the war for southern independence,” had thought.   And heaven forbid someone with an original thought should upset the parochial apple cart of the Peach State.

The Best Jimmy Buffett Concert Ever

(This is another in a series of chapters I'm writing for my book "A Quest for Counties.")

Hawaii – Oahu County

A great commotion broke out in the seat behind me when my flight from Tokyo to Honolulu was halfway to its destination.  A Japanese woman seated behind me began to suffer from an allergy to some food she had consumed and flight attendants begged for any doctor on board to offer assistance.  Two doctors responded to the pleas for help and the passenger was transported to the large open area by an exit door directly in front of where I sat.  There she was stretched out on the floor and there she died as first aid was being administered.

The United Airlines flight attendant noticed that I was visibly upset after watching this woman die in front of me.  Hailing me from my coach seat she led me to the First Class section where she re-seated me.  Giving me a glass of wine and taking a Xanax from her purse she told me to relax and try to forget what I just witnessed.  A few hours later I woke up as the giant engines on the giant 747 began to slow down as we began our approach to the Honolulu airport.  As we lined up for arrival I looked out my window and saw the fin-like dual mountain ranges that dominate the Oahu skyline.  I looked north over Hickam Air Force Base and saw Pearl Harbor and in it saw the memorial to the USS Arizona. Gazing further into the gathering morning light I attempted to juxtapose what I saw with what I knew and to relate all of that to the carnage and the confusion that broke out here on December 7 1941. 

It was then that the irony of the entire situation began to settle in.  On that long ago December day planes that originated in Tokyo and armed with bombs and torpedoes made a surprise attack shortly after dawn on the tranquil waters of Oahu County.  Today I was arriving on another plane that had originated in Tokyo and that was filled with Japanese.  Only today those Japanese were not armed with bombs or torpedoes.  Instead they were armed with yen and cameras and an overpowering desire to photograph every animate and inanimate object they came near.

We taxied to the Ewa Concourse of Honolulu International Airport where the contents of our fully-packed 747 were disgorged into the Hawaiian morning.  I was returning from two weeks in Taiwan.  I had traveled there a year earlier flying on nonstop flights to and from San Francisco.  However while researching my second trip I discovered that I could stop over in Hawaii for no extra cost.  For a traveler this was ideal because it allowed me the chance to recalibrate my body clock for a few days in the mid-Pacific rather than traverse the entire distance in one nonstop rush.  Best of all I got to see Hawaii for free.

I had never possessed a desire to travel to Hawaii and I felt that way for several reasons.  Paramount among them was the biological fact that Hawaii had become an ecological disaster.  The forces of nature had, over millennia, come together to create a hotbed of biological diversity unknown elsewhere on the planet.  The islands of Hawaii are the most geographically isolated island group on earth.  Here far from any large land mass, simple organisms that found their way to the islands were able to evolve and adapt in perfect isolation.  Charles Darwin made the Galapagos famous because of his observations and interpretations of evolution there.  Had he found Hawaii first, nobody would pay attention to the Galapagos.

However Darwin didn’t discover Hawaii.  Polynesians discovered it followed by Europeans and eventually by fat old ladies from the Bronx and from Tokyo.  The Polynesians brought with them pigs and other animals to and about which the native Hawaiian species had no natural defenses. Soon these evolutionary gems began to decline and disappear.  Then Europeans arrived on the scene bringing with them more foreign organisms to compete with the markedly reduced populations of native species.  The Europeans also brought with them diseases with which no plants or animals in Hawaii were familiar.  As if that were not enough, fat old ladies from the Bronx and planes full of Japanese armed with yen and cameras read the tourist brochures and began to flock to Hawaii.  They brought with them back hoes and drag lines and drainage ditches and structural engineers who loved discovering new ways to cram more resort hotels into less and less space.

Eventually with enough ecological changes much of Hawaii was no longer Hawaii.  It could have been a manicured lawn in Orange County, California or Tokyo Prefecture or any province of Canada.  All of the changes brought on great calamity in wildlife populations and with them came no desire on my part to ever travel there – until I traveled there.  I have now been to Hawaii on 11 different trips.  I cannot wait for the 12^th trip or the 112^th trip.  And my fascination with Hawaii began in Oahu County.

My travels to Hawaii have involved time on each of the six main islands and among them Kauai is my most favorite.  Reasons for that preference are legion and I am never at a loss for reasons to go there.  Perhaps it’s because Kauai and its biological systems are largely still intact that my outlook has changed from my earlier perceptions.  Granted I will never see the bird species that became extinct before I was born. And granted it annoys me greatly that the Kauai oo went extinct a few years before I could get to the island to look for it.  Many of the introduced species are making it more difficult to find the few remaining native species.  However there remains an aura about Hawaii, a feeling that its fragility is its strongest point, that keeps bringing me back time and again.

My youngest daughter Dana called me one October day from her home in the soon-to-be-snow-covered wilds of Minnesota.  She had been in contact with a friend-from-grade school now living in Laniaki on Oahu.  Because of various issues Dana’s friend asked her if she would consider moving to Oahu to help her get back on her feet.  Dana had inherited a sense of wanderlust from her father and leaped at the chance.  Once confirmed it dawned on her that she needed to get to Hawaii to make all of this happen.  Most college students, Dana included, don’t have large sums of disposable cash but some of them, Dana included, had a father with a large cache of frequent flier miles on airlines that flew to Hawaii.  Knowing this she picked up the phone and asked for help getting to Honolulu.

Dana had lived several months on the windward side of the island when her sister and I decided to descend on the island for a visit.  Jennifer and I planned on a week or so with Dana and our first full day was spent visiting sites where scenes from the recent Drew Barrymore movie “50 First Dates” were filmed.  We also spent time with the surfers on the north shore and visited Pearl Harbor and hiked to the top of Diamond Head and snorkeled with sea turtles off the coast below the volcano.

The day before my return to the mainland we read in the Honolulu Advertiser that Jimmy Buffett was coming to the island for a performance at The Shell in Kapiolani Park on Waikiki Beach.  Tickets for this concert were going on sale tomorrow at about the same time my flight back to the mainland was lifting off.  Dana suggested that if she could get tickets to the concert would I be interested in coming back in a month for the show.  Knowing how quickly Buffett concert tickets sell out I told her yes but held out little hope that I would be back in a month for the show.

Fourteen hours after lifting off from Honolulu I dragged myself into my home in the Washington DC suburbs.  As I unlocked my door I heard my phone ringing and on its other end was Dana.

“Well, dad,” she began, “Remember what you said about coming back if I got tickets to see Jimmy Buffett?  Well I’m holding them in my other hand right now.”  A month to the day later I flew from Washington DC to Minneapolis where I boarded a DC-10 from a Northwest Airlines gate that had “Honolulu” flashing on the departure board.

My first Jimmy Buffett concert was in Chastain Park, Atlanta.  Gerry Benny, a crazed and frequently drunken Canadian friend from Grand Turk Island showed up on my door step in Athens, Georgia one night informing me that we were going to a Buffett concert the next night in Atlanta.  Gerry didn’t have tickets to the show but that didn’t matter to him. Tickets would fall in place and that was all that mattered. And they fell in place as he predicted.

The most memorable part of that first concert was the yuppified atmosphere of the concert goers.  Chastain Park is in Buckhead which was the epicenter of the yuppie community in Atlanta. There we saw chartered limousines arriving at the show.  We heard one couple squabbling with the husband yelling “You’ve been a fucking bitch since the driver came to get us!”  Inside the venue we saw quaint yuppie couples with quaint catered dinners noshing with other quaint yuppie couples at quaint little tables each holding their own quaint little candelabra.  Each quaint couple was busily evaluating the bouquet of the wine they were drinking and its body and the boldness of the brie they were eating from the French crackers freshly arrived that afternoon from Paris and how much money they made that afternoon in the bullish stock market. 

At a Jimmy Buffett concert?  Chris Haney, Gerry Benny and I showed up in shorts, t-shirts, and jesus sandals and we swilled beer from a plastic cup as we ate cheeseburgers al a Francaise off a Styrofoam plate. 

Jimmy took the stage precisely at 8:00 p.m. and as he strode to the microphone and absorbed the scene before him he made an astute observation.

“Looking at his crowd,” Jimmy began, “Something tells me there are a lot of BMW keys in the audience.” 

The assembled quaint yuppie population of Greater Atlanta very primly and properly clapped its quaint hands making sure that no wine was spilled or brie dropped on the ground.

In response to the applause Jimmy bellowed into the microphone, “Well fuck you!!! I drive a Ford Falcon!”  Pandemonium broke out as the real Buffett fans in the crowd screamed and shouted and Jimmy started the set by singing “Fins.”  It went downhill from there.

There have been many Buffett concerts after I lost my virginity in Chastain Park.  I saw him once in San Francisco for a Labor Day weekend show which he mentions in one of his songs.  Another time I saw him five nights in a row at Red Rocks near Denver.  It didn’t matter that he played the same songs in the same order and told the same stories at the same time each night.  It was a Buffett concert and that is all that mattered.  Then there was the concert he had to benefit the Florida manatee that he held in Fort Lauderdale. Through considerable good fortune my friend Jon Andrew and I spent a half an hour backstage alone with Jimmy before the show. And there were all those concerts in Raleigh, and Washington DC and Tampa and Boston. 

None, it turned out, was better than the night Dana and I saw him in Honolulu.

We had lawn seats and Dana was there with a Republican she met but quickly jettisoned not long after the concert.  The music was vintage Buffett tunes with the classic Crosby Stills and Nash song “Southern Cross” because you can see it from Honolulu.  However what made the show unique was the venue.  Parrotheads will quickly recognize the significance of a show at The Shell.  It is 1) on an island that is 2) in the tropics.  The stage is 3) surrounded by palm trees from which 4) parrots flew overhead.  The venue is 5) at the base of a dormant volcano (Diamond Head) which is less than a half mile from 6) Waikiki Beach offshore from which 7) great white sharks were swimming. Tropical breezes cooled us as Landshark Lager beer flowed and Dana watched in awe as her 50-something father dressed in his finest Parrothead regalia sang and danced and carried on like all the other 50-somethings who for a few precious hours that night on a tropical island were allowed to play in a sandbox again and nobody else cared.

The music selection was classic and I didn’t miss a single word. When the show ended a woman who stood near me with her husband walked up to me, excused herself,  and in all seriousness said, “Sir, you know the words to every song!”

I smiled and said, simply, “Yes, I know.”

She repeated herself once more saying more strongly, “No, sir, I mean you know the words to every song!”   I just nodded and said, “Yes, I know.”

Not satisfied with my brief answer she said “I have been to lots of concerts for lots of performers but I’ve never seen one where everyone knows all the words to all the songs the performer sings!”

A woman standing to my left jumped in saying, “Well, sister, if you don’t know the words to every song what in hell are you doing at a Buffett concert!”  There is no way you can honestly argue with that observation.  It’s simply the way it is.

I have now seen Jimmy Buffett in concert 37 times and I hope to make that 137 times before he retires.  The best show so far and I have a feeling the best show ever, was the one at The Shell at the base of a volcano in the tropics of Oahu County.  I always thought it was my best show because of where it was and where I was.  I now realize that it was my best Buffett show because I was able to take my daughter and let her see that her dad is just a big kid who still wishes he could play in a sand box every day.

Tornado Warning!

(This is another in the series of county-specific stories I'm writing for my book "A Quest for Counties."  This one relates to my most favorite place in Nebraska

Nebraska – Hall County

President Franklin D Roosevelt said on December 8, 1941 that the previous day, December 7, 1941, was “a day which will live in infamy.”  He was referring, of course, to the unprovoked attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It was an action that was the catalyst for the United States to enter into World War II.  What FDR didn’t know at the time was that June 4, 1958 would also become a day that lived in infamy although on a much smaller scale.

In late afternoon June 4, 1958, my mother and I sat in a Volkswagen car next to a barn in eastern Dunn County, Wisconsin.  There we first heard and then watched in abject horror, what would later become known as the “Colfax Tornado” as it passed less than one-quarter mile from us.  Later analysis of the storm pegged its intensity as an F-4 or the second most violent possible.  It was a huge wedge funnel whose colors changed from black to green to gray to black to green as it churned up everything in its path.  After passing us the tornado smashed into the small Wisconsin hamlet of Colfax where, it is said, the storm divided and two vortexes demolished Colfax.  The damage was extensive and widespread and to this day people in western Wisconsin still talk about the Colfax Tornado.

Being typical human beings we drove north of Menomonie Wisconsin after the storm passed so we could make our own assessment of the damage and, like everyone else, so we could get in the way of rescue workers as they tried to save lives and protect property.  Two sights remain from that afternoon and they are forever etched in my memory.  First was the former farmstead of George House, a farmer who lived adjacent to Wisconsin Highway 25 just south of Tainter Lake.  My father, an artificial inseminator, bred a cow in George House’s barn at 10:00 that morning.  Seven hours later all that remained of the House farmstead was the cement foundation where his house used to be and his bath tub that, with its pipes, remained in place on the foundation.  Absolutely everything else that had not been reduced to the size of a match stick had vanished.  The other indelibly etched vision was a Holstein cow standing in someone else’s barnyard that had a large board protruding from her stomach.  The horrific winds sent that board into her body like a piece of sand in a sand storm.  I can still see a fireman walk up to the cow, put a gun to her head, and pull the trigger to put her out of her pain.

Through many years afterward, through and including today, June 4 has been a day of great angst for me and it all started with the Colfax Tornado.

While a graduate student I took a course in meteorology.  It was one avenue and outlet for me to try to quench my unquenchable thirst for knowledge about tornadoes and why they are the way they are.  I joined the American Meteorological Society so I had access to their regular publication of scientific journals in the hopes that I could glean more knowledge of tornadoes from what researchers were discovering.  One of the books that was required reading for the course was an account of tornadoes in Iowa written by a meteorologist at Iowa State University.  In it he recounted the history of some of the most substantial tornadoes that have visited the Hawkeye state.  This book contained many photos of tornadoes and several graphs depicting scientific data about the storms.  One such graph was a map of the United States showing the average occurrence of tornadoes per thousand square miles each year.

On the graph, the area between Oklahoma City, Wichita Falls Texas and Dallas Texas, collectively known as “Tornado Alley” and regularly ground zero for the most tornadoes in the United States each year was shown in a deep purple color.  This deep purple region was shown to experience a minimum of nearly 9 tornadoes in each thousand square miles each year.  As you move away from the deepest purple the color hues lightened as the density of tornadoes decreased in all directions.  That remained true until you reached a bend in the Platte River in Nebraska where the density of tornadoes was exactly the same as Tornado Alley 500 miles to its south.  Sitting directly in the middle of that bend of the river was Hall County and the city of Grand Island Nebraska.

I was conducting research on breeding bird populations in habitats along the Platte River in May and June 1980.  There I would record the number of singing males of each bird species present on randomly selected census plots and after enough plots were sampled statisticians would manipulate the data and from that information calculate the estimated population of every species of bird that breeds in those counties.  On June 3, 1980, I finished my census plots in late morning and dropped my car at a Grand Island service station for repairs.  A colleague, Gary Lingle, met me there and we drove to the Wendy’s Restaurant on South Locust Avenue for lunch. Returning afterward for my car I left Grand Island headed west on Interstate 80.  The National Weather Service office in Grand Island had issued a tornado watch for Hall County but nothing really special seemed to be brewing in the skies above it.

That evening as I was examining a barn owl nest in a road cut along the North Platte River in Garden County, I casually looked toward the east and scanned the sky.  It was about 7:00 p.m. and I saw that the eastern sky was filled with a tremendously tall cumulonimbus thunderhead (later it was measured at more than 60,000 feet high) that was blocking the horizon a long way off in eastern Nebraska.  I thought nothing more of it until breakfast the next morning in Lewellen, Nebraska where the topic of discussion among patrons was, “Did you hear about the tornadoes in Grand Island last night?”

About the time I was looking at the barn owl nest the National Weather Service office in Grand Island was issuing a tornado warning for Hall County.  As I looked at that 60,000 foot tall thunderhead, at least six and possibly seven different tornadoes were dropping from its base and changing the landscape of Grand Island.  This incident and the tornadoes would later be recounted in a book and a television movie titled “Night of the Twisters.”  Many places that I knew well in Grand Island disappeared in the storm.  One of the tornadoes dropped from the sky and followed South Locust Avenue.  The Wendy’s Restaurant where I ate lunch at 1:00 p.m. that afternoon was a crumpled heap of concrete that evening.  The night of the twisters remains engrained in the minds of Grand Islanders today just like June 4, 1958 remains fixed in my mind.

My thoughts returned to that night in Nebraska one November day several years later when I sat in my office in Clark County Georgia and I received a phone call from John Spinks in Denver.   John was the Deputy Regional Director for the US Fish and Wildlife Service.  His office and his responsibility included oversight of all issues in Nebraska.  John called to ask if I was interested in transferring to Grand Island, Nebraska, to work on water issues on the Platte River.   “We’re putting together the best ornithological expertise in the Service to be out there and I want you out there.”  He then added, “I want you to be on the Platte before the first sandhill cranes return in February.”  Despite my healthy and well-deserved respect for and fear of tornadoes and especially those that show up in Grand Island, Nebraska, I could not refuse the offer to work on the Platte River.  Less than three months after that call I was a resident of the Cornhusker State.

Most parts of the nation experience four seasons each year but in Nebraska there are only two.  Tornado season begins on March 1 and extends until football season in the fall.  It remains football season until the tornadoes return the following spring.  My first home in Grand Island was a duplex on Waldo Avenue and I moved into it on March 1.  Eleven days later, a Friday, with patches of snow still on the ground, the National Weather Service in Grand Island issued a tornado watch for Hall County.  I found this a bit comical because the air was chilly and there was still snow on the ground however the tornado sirens began to wail at 5:00 that afternoon with the sky black and green and spinning in a circle.  Looking out my living room window I saw two things simultaneously.  One was a huge wedge tornado rumbling ominously across the landscape.  The other thing I saw was most of my neighbors piling into the street to watch the tornado. 

Since the Colfax Tornado nearly thirty years earlier I automatically sought shelter when I heard a tornado warning siren.  However here in the middle of Tornado Alley, people took to the streets!  It turned out that tornadoes are a social event in the Great Plains. They are an opportunity to get caught up with what your neighbors are doing and to pick up the latest gossip.  Having just moved to my new home and not knowing anyone living nearby I sheepishly ventured out into the street and began talking to people. 

Jim, a lawyer who lived next door, greeted me by welcoming me to the neighborhood.  I told him I found it a bit odd that everyone was standing in the street while a tornado roared through town.  Jim simply snickered and said, “The way we look at it if you can see the damned thing and it’s not coming directly at you it’s not going to hurt you.  Plus they are a good reason to get caught up with the neighbors.  I’m dying of thirst. Want a beer? I’m buying.”

With Jim’s beer in hand we stood in the middle of Waldo Avenue and watched this massive storm tear up the countryside by Northwest High School.  About the only real damage done to anything was a coal train that was blown off the tracks on the north side of town.  Other than that it was just another tornado day in Hall County.  Two days later, on Sunday, we received a foot of freshly fallen snow.  Two weeks to the day after the March 11 tornado the sirens wailed again as another tornado roared through town following almost the same track as the one two weeks earlier.  This time, following my neighbors cavalier lead, I crawled up on the roof of my house with a six-pack of beer and watched Mother Nature’s show play out on the prairie.

I lived for six years in Nebraska and they were the six most productive years of my 31 year career with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. True to its reputation there were many tornadoes near Grand Island during my six years there.  Luckily we never had a repeat of the June 3, 1980 outbreak when six or seven tornadoes visited downtown.  However you always thought of that night each time the sky took on that peculiar green color and the wall cloud began to lower and spin and you wondered if this was going to be the next time.

Despite my own healthy and well-deserved fear of tornadoes, whenever my daughters were with me I had to project an aura of confidence when the skies turned green and the warning sirens wailed.  One summer, as an experiment, instead of filing into the basement when a tornado was sighted I took my daughters to an area northwest of Grand Island where we could see in all directions as a super cell thunderstorm built to the west.  Here at the edge of Taylor Ranch we could sit on the top of a rise with a commanding view of the prairie in 360 degrees. Because of a four-way road intersection we also had an escape route should any storm get too close.  It was a perfect situation to watch tornadoes and ease the levels of angst in young daughters and their father.

We spent two hours on that hill that night and saw three funnels form at the bottom of three different super cells.  One of them briefly touched the ground making it a full-fledged tornado in the eyes of meteorologists.  As the funnels danced across the prairie I explained to my daughters that what we were witnessing was Mother Nature letting off some steam.  If we watched them and respected them and gave them the space they required these tornadoes were no different and no more dangerous than the polar bears we had traveled to the Arctic to see several years before.  As the night dragged on I could feel some of my daughters fears about tornadoes leaving them.  I didn’t tell them at the time but it was also leaving me.

The 1992 tornado season was a particularly active one and I saw six different tornadoes that year in Hall County.  The most memorable among them occurred late on a Tuesday night.  A group of friends had formed a softball beer league team and we played regularly in the summer at a field in Fonner Park.  At about 10:00 p.m. one evening we could all see a violent thunderstorm uncorking just southwest of Grand Island and none of us was really surprised when the tornado warning sirens began to wail.  Calmly returning home I went to the basement and turned on KRGI radio and then listened to Ellen Dolan give a blow by blow account of where the tornado was located, what direction it was headed and what damage it might have caused.  As I listened we heard the all-clear sirens blast telling us that the danger had passed and it was safe to sigh a sigh of relief.

However a few minutes later the sirens wailed again as a second, more massive, tornado formed and moved toward Grand Island.  By now I had moved to a house on Oak Street that was directly north of Fonner Park.  Ellen’s reports of this new storm indicated that this one was headed for Fonner Park.  Out of curiosity I walked out my front door and down the steps and stood in the middle of Oak Street looking south.  There, at 10:30 p.m., just thirty minutes after leaving my position along the third base line of our softball field, I watched as a tornado tore its way across the Fonner Park softball field.  Tired of the inconvenience that had visited us all summer I returned to my house, curled up in bed and went to sleep.  Tornadoes had now become a nuisance.

I am profoundly sad that I no longer live in Nebraska.  It is populated by some of the kindest most caring people on earth and I think they became that way by regularly having to race out to the street with a beer in hand to watch the sky when it turns green and the tornado warning sirens erupt at the end of football season each year. 

What Are You Doing to Those Sea Otters?

(This is another draft chapter from "A Quest for Counties)

California – Monterey County

John Steinbeck’s classic novel Cannery Row was published in 1945.  It begins with a convoluted sentence that says, “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”  That opening sentence was still fresh in my mind as my flight from Minneapolis began its final approach to the San Francisco airport.  Out of boredom on the four hour flight I pulled out my collection of Steinbeck novels and opened to the first selection.  That first selection was Cannery Row and its opening sentence was quickly etched in my mind.

My interest in Steinbeck had been piqued years earlier in a university-level literature class taught by an irascible intellect named Zane Chaffee.  He whetted our collective appetites for Steinbeck with Tortilla Flat and from it we graduated to Of Mice and Men.  Although far from a comedy which was the focus of the class, Zane also had us read The Grapes of Wrath for its literary value if nothing else.  Concluding that Steinbeck classic, Zane had us read Cannery Row, and occasionally I think he had us read it then for comic relief.  By now I read anything that Steinbeck wrote simply because he wrote it.  And the words “Cannery Row in Monterey in California…” hung fresh in my mind as we plunked down on the tarmac in San Francisco.

This first trip of mine to California, a state in which I would reside thirteen years later, was so that I could present a scientific paper at a large gathering of ornithologists at the Asilomar Conference Center in Monterey.  Everything I had read about the meeting and about the conference setting said that Monterey was an idyllic tranquil beach community and the perfect place to learn about nature.

The ride south began on the 101 Freeway and soon found me lost in a maze of traffic, all of it moving at warp speed to places that were totally foreign to me.  The meeting was in late October yet the 101 Freeway was lined with flowers and greenery.  Back home in Jamestown, North Dakota, where I resided at the time, everything had turned brown because of the impending arrival of winter.  Much to my chagrin, we had already experienced several snow storms that left a stark reminder on the landscape of what lay in store for the next several months.   Not so, however, on the 101 Freeway where everything looked like June.

Taking an exit and heading southwest toward Santa Cruz we climbed through pine-cloaked hills until topping out at the peak of a pass.  Below us and for as far as I could imagine, lay the beauty and the bounty of Monterey Bay. To bird watchers and mammal watchers this Bay is akin to Mecca because of the bounty of seabirds that occur here.  For as long as I could remember I had dreamed of birding on Monterey Bay and now it was only a few meters away.

As we turned south and approached the city I saw several freeway exit signs proclaiming that Cannery Row was a mere mile or more away.  However it didn’t strike me then that this was the Cannery Row that had been described at the end of Steinbeck’s pen until we exited Del Monte Avenue and followed the road west toward Point Pinos.  Somewhere along this road, near the intersection with the side street that leads visitors to the bay, there were several more signs proclaiming Cannery Row and one of them contained the opening line from Steinbeck’s novel splayed across the sign for everyone to read, “Cannery Row in Monterey in California…”.  Back in my dope smoking college days I would have proclaimed this as a cosmic experience. Two hours earlier I had nonchalantly read about Cannery Row being in Monterey and now I was on a side street leading to Cannery Row.

A major drawing card for wildlife enthusiasts in Monterey Bay is that deep ocean currents are extremely close to shore.  Travel just a few miles from the dock on Fisherman’s Wharf and the waters extend down more than 10,000 feet from the surface.  Because of the geographic location of the Bay and the tremendous depth of the water, extremely cold and nutrient-laden currents well up from the bottom creating a food source of almost unthinkable dimensions.  Microorganisms attract larger organisms that in turn attract larger organisms and soon a kaleidoscope of wildlife becomes available to view.

Tens of thousands of seabirds like albatross, shearwaters, storm-petrels, and alcids flock to Monterey Bay annually to feed on nature’s cornucopia.  Attracted with them are all manner of whales of several species.  I will never forget a trip in January 1983 when I went out on the bay with a boat load of drunken fishermen.  As we moved north across the bay toward Santa Cruz we encountered large groups of migrating whales. By the end of the day I had seen 96 gray whales, and six blue whales. The latter are the largest animal ever to occur on earth. 

A rich forest of kelp also grows in Monterey Bay and with it comes an abundance of sea creatures that are dependent on kelp for their survival.  The southern sea otter is one of those species.  At one point in their existence there were hundreds of thousands of sea otters on earth but habitat degradation and over harvest for their incredibly soft and resilient hides caused the continental population of this creature to plummet to just a few thousand individuals.  Luckily for them there was an abundance of habitat remaining for sea otters on Monterey Bay and through the efforts of Congress and Federal laws sea otters were protected from harassment and exploitation.  Woe to anyone who attempted to harm a sea otter on Monterey Bay.

A particularly active and well-meaning although totally annoying group known as the Friends of the Sea Otter, has been established in the Monterey Bay area ostensibly to protect sea otters.  However I am not quite sure from what they are being protected.  As I would discover later this well-meaning and well-intentioned group of good deed doers was more than a loose-knit lobbying group.  They also took it upon themselves to be their own personal self-appointed savior of the southern sea otter.

Putting away my luggage at the conference center I borrowed someone’s car and went out to explore.  The principal place I wanted to visit was along the ocean front near Point Pinos because the view there allowed access to seabirds and marine mammals without having to venture on to the surface of the water.  Arriving by the ocean an hour before sunset I found a place to park my car, unload and assemble my spotting scope, and then begin to learn about southern sea otters.

The kelp-lined rocky shore of Monterey Bay teemed with bird life and soon species I had never seen before began to fill my binocular field.  Along the shore I saw black turnstones and just offshore several red phalaropes spun in endless circles scaring up small organisms for their dinner.  A little further from shore was a pair of Harlequin ducks bobbing in the waves and just beyond the ducks was the first southern sea otter I’d ever seen.  Because of its rarity and its endangered species status I was particularly anxious to find at least one during my trip to the Bay.  At first when I saw it the otter, I assume an adult, was floating on its back beating an abalone against a smooth rock that lay flat against its stomach. The otter was so close that I could hear the smacking of his lips as it hurriedly and loudly slurped down the contents of the demolished abalone shell.  As I watched this single otter a second one swam into view and began in unison to tear apart its own abalone.

A woman in her early 60s watched me watching the otters as she stood down the street from me.  I had not paid attention to her before but now that I was enjoying both sea otters, I noticed that her walking pace increased as she came closer to me.  I continued to watch the otters as she continued to watch me.  Finally when she was perhaps ten feet away she barked at me “What are you doing to those sea otters?”  Because I wasn’t doing anything to the sea otters I unwittingly assumed she was talking to someone else.  However looking around me there was nobody else she could have been barking at.  She had apparently seen me doing something with which she was not happy but with which I was not familiar.

Finally figuring out that she was referring to me, I addressed her concerns saying, simply, “I’m watching these sea otters. They are the first one I’ve ever seen.”  Excited by my find I offered her a view of the otters through my spotting scope.  It was a gesture with which she wanted no part.  Instead she chose to recite to me several sections of the Endangered Species Act that apparently nobody but her had ever read before. 

“You are harassing those otters by observing them,” she began.  It didn’t seem to matter to her that hundreds of cars and trucks were passing by on the nearby highway.  It didn’t matter that families were walking their dogs and tossing Frisbees on the lawn in front of the shore.  It mattered not one scintilla that sports fishing boats were zooming by the otters on the water a lot closer to them than I was while standing on shore. None of this mattered.  All that was important was that Ms. Good Deed Doer was excoriating me for violating a nonexistent section of a law about which she knew nothing.

Explaining to this Florence Nightingale of the sea otter world that I was not harassing the otters I informed her that I lived in North Dakota and these were the first sea otters I’d ever seen.  Not believing me she asked for my name telling me that she was going to report me to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for harassing these endangered sea otters.  Rather than answer her I removed my U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee identification card from my wallet and as I handed it to her I said, simply, “I am the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”

Clearly livid now, Nurse Nightingale went into histrionics about how despicable it was that a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist was harassing her otters and it was people like me that caused them to form a group like the Friends of the Sea Otter to protect the creatures.  Writing my name and employee number on a piece of paper she told me she was going to contact my Regional Director and let that person know one of his disreputable biologists was on the ground openly and defiantly violating the Endangered Species Act and doing so in front of god and everyone else. Figuring this person had forgotten to take her bi-polar disorder medicine that morning I assumed that nothing of her diatribe would ever surface and I went back to watching sea otters until the sun was absorbed by the Pacific Ocean.

Thoughts of this woman and the sea otters did not cross my mind again until about a month later when the Director of my Research Center in North Dakota summoned me to his office.  He had sitting on his desk not only a letter from the Regional Director in Portland, Oregon (who had jurisdiction over sea otters in California) but also from United States Congressman Leon Panetta who represented not only Monterey Bay in the U. S. House of Representatives but also this constituent who had forgotten to take her meds.  Both letters wanted to know why I was openly harassing a Federally-listed endangered species and worst yet why I was doing so on official government travel and at official government expense.

Luckily I had taken pictures of the sea otters that day on Monterey Bay.  Even the visually impaired could see that they were almost a speck on the horizon.  The pictures showed their distance from shore and one picture showed a car on the nearby city street to provide a sense of scale.  Those photos and my own testimony were enough to convince my Director that I had done nothing wrong.   That same information convinced the Regional Director in Portland that I had likewise done nothing wrong.  Still, because a Federal employee was involved it was a requirement that at least a pound of flesh be rendered so in the letter to Congressman Panetta that I personally had to write for the Director of my agency in Washington DC, I explained that the Service’s disreputable employee in North Dakota was ashamed because of his behavior and how that same employee had been counseled to treat the public and public resources like the southern sea otter with greater respect in the future.

Thirteen years later I became the supervisor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Ventura, California.  Our area of responsibility extended along the coast from Santa Cruz County south through and including Monterey Bay to Los Angeles County. Now instead of being a casual observer in the area I was responsible for the management and hopeful recovery of 118 Federally-listed threatened and endangered species in coastal California.  One of the larger and more conspicuous among those 118 was the southern sea otter.

Not long after arriving in Ventura I decided that it would be a good gesture to travel to Monterey to visit with the Friends of the Sea Otter because now they would be an ally in my agency’s attempts to recover this precious natural resource.  I made an appointment for Tuesday afternoon and on Tuesday morning I flew from Ventura to Monterey.  Our approach to the airport took us out over Monterey Bay and looking down from just a few hundred feet above the surface of the ocean I could see sea otters on their backs beating abalone into submission.  My arrival allowed me several free hours before the meeting so to use that time wisely I drove out to Point Pinos where I set up my spotting scope and began surveying the water for sea otters.  It had been several years since I last saw an otter and I wanted to renew my familiarity with them.

Finding one sea otter as it lay on its back cracking open an abalone shell, I settled in to watch it but as I did from behind me I heard someone screech, “What are you doing to those sea otters?”

Staring Down a Moose

Staring Down a Moose

Northwest Borough - Alaska

What must have been the Arctic analog of a tropical heat wave had swept over Nome during a week-long jaunt across the Bering Sea to St. Lawrence Island and its funky settlement known as Gambell.  Less than two feet of snow now covered the mountain tops.  This provided the break we needed for the next phase of the trip.  Before leaving Nebraska, I had volunteered to work on a research project dealing with the population of bristle-thighed curlew that nests on the Seward Peninsula in the confines of the Bering Land Bridge National Monument.  Some concern had been raised about the status of this bird, and they put together a research project to find out more about this little known bird.

Boarding a helicopter the next morning, we made a noisy departure from the Nome airport and sped north over the Seward Peninsula for one hundred ten miles.  The pilot glided us to a smooth landing on a trackless expanse of tundra five miles south of the Arctic Circle, and inside the boundary of the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve.  Finding a suitable place on the tundra that provided for drainage, we pitched a tent, ate a quick lunch, and went out in search of curlews.  Near mid-afternoon I sat on a tussock of sedge and scanned the tundra spread out before me.  It stretched from horizon to horizon.  Everywhere I looked in all directions that I looked there was nothing but wild, untouched, raw, Arctic tundra.  On the surface, the tundra landscape reminded me of vast prairie landscapes in the Dakota’s and Montana.  Maybe it was a hallucination that made me think I saw a pickup truck rumbling down a prairie trail.  I was one hundred ten miles from the nearest thing that closely resembled a trail. 

This was what I had dreamed about as a child growing up in northern Wisconsin with a head full of fantasies about living off the land in Arctic Canada and squeaking out a living by being a trapper.  I had fantasized about the vastness and the openness and the isolation.  Awe and insecurity swept over me while I tried to take in the sights and the sounds and the feel of its vastness. 

I tried to imagine the prairies of the United States when they were still virgin like this tundra landscape.  It was a trackless prairie that reached from horizon to horizon.  Currents of wind whistling by my ears were transformed in my mind to the sound of a million pounding hooves of a herd of bison thundering across the imaginary landscape.  I tried to transform a distant rock into a musk ox and followed it through my mind as the musk ox crested a hill and disappeared.  Thoughts from long ago, buried ages ago, deep in the mind of a child, came rushing back. They were thoughts of me tromping across a Wisconsin hayfield when I was seven.  It was a hayfield that I had made into the tundra in my mind.  Visions of the first deer I shot when I was twelve became the moose I shot on the tundra to feed me through the winter.  Childhood fantasies of canoeing a river checking beaver traps in the spring came back to me through watching water that two days ago was frozen solid, follow with new found freedom along the banks of a nearby river.  Visions locked away long ago were now released and relived on a landscape that likely no human being had ever experienced before.

This close to the Arctic Circle the sun set for a few minutes each night, though total darkness was never around us.  Rock ptarmigan and Lapland longspur were our constant companions as e navigated over the tundra landscape searching for curlews.  My college botany professor, Jim Richardson, once told me that when he went to college his original plan was to be an ornithologist. That profession’s stark reality that birds are most active at sunrise told Jim that he needed to find another field.  He chose botany, he said, because no matter what time of day he woke up, his study subjects would be there to observe.  Jim may have had another epiphany had he been here with me today on the Seward Peninsula.  Here our work schedule was what we made it.  Birds were just as active at eight in the evening, or three in the morning, as they were at three in the afternoon.  The sun’s constant presence made time immaterial.  Here, Jim could have studied birds and plants and not have a care about what the clock said.  Most days we would sleep until noon, prepare a meal, count birds until seven or eight in the evening, have another meal, then count birds until one or two in the morning.  It didn’t matter to the birds so it didn’t matter to us.

A willow lined stream flowed fresh and fast and clear through a census plot we established five miles from our base camp.  We counted birds on this plot on our sixth day in the field.  Binoculars were standard equipment for all ventures involving birds.  Here in the Arctic, standard bird counting equipment also included a gun for protection from grizzly bears.  A growing appreciation for the fragility of life, added to growing doubt about some tenants of wildlife management, had transformed me from a once-avid hunter to a non-hunter.  Species like cranes and swans and mountain lion, and bears should not be hunted at all.  For those species I was an anti-hunter.  At least I felt that way until the opportunity to study bristle-thighed curlews in grizzly bear country was given to me.  Not being particularly keen on serving Craig to a bear I hardly knew, I carried a shotgun with me whenever I stepped from the tent.  At “night” the shotgun lay loaded, at my side, as we tried to sleep.

Stumbling through the tussock mounds as we moved slowly down the stream, I saw a large brown form moving steadily in our direction.  My first thought was that it was a grizzly bear.  Showers and clean clothes were nonexistent, and after six days of hiking for twelve hours a day, we were both in critical need of cleansing.  Knowing that (disguising it was difficult), the presence of this brown object that I thought was a bear made me want to stay downwind from it so our ripe scent wouldn’t be detected.  I checked the gun to make sure it was still loaded.

When the animal moved closer, I was relieved to see that it was a moose.  The danger of being dinner was past.  A new danger was formed, though, when a young moose calf walked out from behind its mother’s legs.  Although a moose lacks the teeth and the strength of a grizzly bear, they can be as deadly.  A multiplier factor of about ten can be added when a calf is present.

A moose is very nearsighted.  They make up for that lack of distance sighting with a highly-developed sense of smell.  A shift in the wind currents suddenly swung behind us, and our ripe, six-day growth of grungy filth was picked up by the wind and carried to the moose.  We could tell almost the instant that our scent reached her.  She had been moving slowly, feeding on lichens and tending to her calf.  The instant our scent arrived, her head bolted upward and her ears laid back tight against her head.  Having spent more than my fair share of time around moose in the Rocky Mountains, northern Minnesota, North Dakota and in Canada, I knew instantly that the laid back ears meant the Moose would never be a door greeter at Wal-Mart.

It was highly unlikely this moose had ever experienced the scent of a human before.  We must have had some characteristics in our body odor that reminded her of a bear because she started to trot closer to us.  It also did not help that we were dressed entirely in brown, and were standing upright like a bear on its hind legs.  Until she was about a hundred yards away, she would move slowly forward, stop, smell the air, and then take a few more steps.  As she came closer, though, she started to make short rushes toward us. In her mind now, we were two bears she was not ready to let near her calf.  With each stomping rush toward us, I could see the hair on her neck laid down tight against her skin.  Her ears were laid back against her head, and mucous was dripping in cups full from her nose.  She was one pissed off moose.

Before leaving Nome, they had instructed us in how to deal with a charging bear.  More precisely, they had instructed us to wait until the animal was sixty feet away before firing the first shot.  The 12 gauge shotgun I carried a round of buckshot in the chamber and four more rounds of slugs in the magazine.  “Make the first one count” we were told in Nome.  Slow the animal with the buckshot and then kill it with the slugs.  That’s how it was supposed to work with a bear.  No mention was ever made about what to do with a charging moose.

Mother moose was closing fast.  Each charging rush would bring her ten feet closer.  She was certain that we were a danger to her calf.  She was just not certain what we were.  In retrospect we probably should have turned and run away from her when she first started her charges.  Fear and awe are probably what kept us frozen in our tracks.  Her final charge brought her to within sixty feet. It was only the distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate.  She was so close I could hear each of her breaths and could count her ribs.  I told myself that if she takes another step we would be eating moose for dinner that night.  I took the safety off the shotgun, raised it to my shoulder, put her forehead in my sights, and waited for another step.

While this drama was unfolding, my partner stood in shock next to me.  Maybe it was the inevitability of what was about to happen that caused it, but suddenly she started to jump, waving her arms wildly and screaming at the top of her five foot one inch lungs.  Her timing was perfect and her yells were effective.  Mother moose wanted nothing to do with this loud, noisy thing.  She turned quickly on her hind legs, snorted at her calf, and they ran quickly away from us.  She would look over her shoulder every few steps to see if we were following.  When my heart had been safely swallowed back into my chest, I laid the gun down and started running after her.  One short burst across the tundra.  It’s said that turnabout is fair play in love relationships.  It also works with an enraged moose.

Returning to Nome four days after our moose encounter, our first order of business was a long and seemingly endless shower.  Stories flowed about our experience on the tundra.  Stories also flowed about our encounter with the moose.  A local in the Golden Nugget bar heard me telling about the hair-raising experience of holding the sights on the moose only sixty feet away.  Snickering he said to me “didn’t anyone tell you that buckshot and slugs won’t stop a moose?”  It made me think that if it would not stop a moose, why did they give us that gun for protection from a bear?

A Trip Down the Keys Highway

Below is a proposed chapter for the book "A Quest for Counties."   It deals with the Florida Keys (Monroe County) and recounts a real tale from the summer of 1984 in Marathon.  This is indicative of how I would like the other chapters in the book to read and to flow.  Let me know if this works for you as a reader:

                                                                                   11

“If They Shoot, Shoot Back”

Vaca Key, Monroe County, Florida

(Portions of this chapter appeared previously in Faanes, Craig, 2001.  Somewhere South of Miami.  America House Publishers, Baltimore)

About 100,000 people call themselves permanent residents of the Florida Keys.  Some times on weekends during winter when there are more visitors than residents of Florida in Florida it may seem like there are 100 million residents in the Keys.  It seems that a trip down the Keys highway is now a required pilgrimage for everyone; it’s no longer a requirement just of Jimmy Buffett fans.

The Keys hold a special place in the history and folklore and the current-day psyche of Florida.  From the days of pirates there has always been an outlaw meme to the Keys.  No matter who was in charge or from where they were in charge, side stepping the rules and doing things differently was the norm in the Keys.

Henry Flagler and his long-sought Overseas Railroad probably had the longest lasting impression on the makeup of the Keys.  Through the trials, tribulations and travails of tens of thousands of men, Flagler oversaw the building of his dream railroad down the spine of the islands.  Logistics of this endeavor remain an awe-inspiring feat especially when you consider the state of technology in the early 20^th century with our contemporary ability to build structures like the Sunshine Skyway crossing the mouth of Tampa Bay and to accomplish that task in just a few months.

Flagler’s railroad opened the door for many to travel where few had gone before.  Originally designed to be a conduit for trade goods to be loaded to and unloaded from ships traveling between Key West and Panama or Colombia, the railroad soon eclipsed expectations with the sheer number of visitors that passed through the Keys.  Marketed early and often as “America’s Caribbean Islands” industrialists and other ultra-rich northerners flocked to the Keys to escape the Arctic conditions further north in winter.

Keys tourism continued to flourish through the 1920s but the Great Depression took its toll in the early 1930s.  Adding more insult to additional injury was the famous Labor Day hurricane of 1935 that completely changed the face and the structure of the Keys for years to come.  Roaring ashore on September 2 1935 and still pumping out energy on September 4 when it moved away, the Great Hurricane left the Keys and Flagler’s railroad in a complete shambles.  Internal pressures recorded with the storm remain among the lowest ever observed on earth.  Topping it off was a 18-foot high tidal wave that roared ashore cleansing everything in its path and leaving utter chaos behind it.

As is the nature of humans, Keys residents didn’t let the Great Hurricane hold them down for long and repairs were quickly made.  A major change from the days of Flagler was that this famous railroad was not replaced.  Instead, built over the bed of that rail line was what is now known as the end of U.S. Highway 1, the “Keys Highway” or the “Overseas Highway.”  Its presence today allows for hundreds of thousands of visitors to pass into the Keys and in most instances to bring along with them the toys of modernity that they sought to escape on the mainland.

Although the railroad is gone and it has been replaced by the highway, Monroe County and the Keys remain a safe haven for eccentrics who enjoy life at the end of the road.  Many Keys residents moved there to get away from the rules and regulations that govern life everywhere else.  Only on their arrival they discovered that despite their protestations, the rules and the regulations still apply.  Long-time residents of the Keys call themselves “Conch’s,” a reference to the Queen conch, a massive marine snail whose flesh is a delicacy.  Referring to someone in the Keys as a “Conch” is like a badge of honor, and referring to that person as “an old Conch” is akin to having been present when Moses found the tablets on the top of a mountain in the Middle East.

Given their escapist mentality, many Keys residents believe they should be their own governmental entity away from and in spite of the United States, the state of Florida, or Monroe County.  I’m sure they feel that way until there is a natural disaster like a hurricane and they need financial assistance but that is another story.  In the early 1980s at the height of one of a million controversies created by Ronald Reagan and his disreputable Administration (and quickly swept under the table by a protective media) was the decision by a group of Keys residents to break away from the United States in protest of Reagan and to create their own little country to be known as “The Conch Republic.”  To this day you can still purchase “Conch Republic” license plates and “Conch Republic” flags.  Someone in Miami still produces and sells “Conch Republic” passports so if you want to be a dual citizen without leaving the comforts of America, you can purchase a passport and travel the world as a Conch. 

On the day the Keys declared their independence from all government around them, then-Florida Governor Bob Graham was scheduled to land at the Marathon airport for some function.  When he arrived and was informed of that he was now in a sovereign nation (at least in the mind of those who created this sovereign nation) Governor Graham asked politely at the airport if he needed a passport to be there.  Nobody was sure if he did or not.

My first visit to Monroe County was in July 1984 when I was conducting research on an endangered species of bird that nests in Michigan and winters in the West Indies.  We wanted to put tiny radio transmitters on the backs of the birds and track their movements but before doing so we wanted to practice on a more widespread and more numerous common species and we wanted to do this in habitats and humidity similar to what we would occur a few months later in the West Indies. 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service maintains and manages four National Wildlife Refuges in the Florida Keys and we made arrangements to conduct our research on the Big Pine Key and No Name Key units of the National Key Deer Refuge.  Despite this being the latter half of the 20^th century there were still all sorts of crooks and thieves and low-life’s in the keys and especially on weekends.  Given the extensive area of open ocean that surrounds the Keys they were (and remain) a prime location for drug runners to attempt to bring their products into the country.  The ever-vigilant U.S. Coast Guard maintained offices at both Marathon and Key West and one of their responsibilities in 1984 was drug interdiction.  To do so they needed to be out on the open ocean looking for bad guys.  I saw this as an opportunity to get out on the open ocean to look for birds I had not seen before that live on the edge of the Gulf Stream.  A quick stop at Station Marathon one day confirmed that I could go along with the Coast Guard on their Saturday foray out into the Gulf Stream from Marathon.  We never got that far.

When I arrived at Station Marathon I was given a quick briefing on how to keep from being thrown overboard if we encountered rough seas.  Afterward we took off to look for birds in the cobalt blue waters of the Gulf Stream. The Coast Guard was out there to aid stranded boaters and to check safety equipment and to look for drugs and contraband.  I was along simply for a Saturday morning of looking at birds.  Not long after leaving the Station, we received a call instructing us to be on the lookout for a stolen boat.  Hearing this, the boat’s captain knew exactly where to look and we changed course for the “Cuban Docks” on Vaca Key.  Apparently if you are going to rip someone off and try to hide afterward the most logical place to try to hide was the Cuban Docks.

We had a description of the boat but to me they all looked the same.  As we made our approach to the docks the Coast Guardsmen asked me to stand in the bow of their boat with my binoculars so I could read the registration numbers on those other boats we passed. This was exciting at first but soon it became boring.  That all changed when we came on to a thirty-foot shrimp boat because sitting in its wheel house was a simple, lone, unassuming marijuana plant that was growing in a bucket.  Not thinking much of it I casually mentioned to the Captain that there was a marijuana plant in that boat and was he interested in it?  He took my binoculars, looked at the potted pot plant, and exclaimed, “I’m going to seize that boat!” 

Our plans changed again when the pot plant was found.  First we docked the Coast Guard vessel next to the shrimp boat and kept it under surveillance.  Then we radioed the U.S. Customs Service and the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department to alert them to our find and both groups said they would send backup.  This was followed by the rather dramatic laying on of guns.  Two of the four Coast Guardsmen were designated the boarding party.  It was their responsibility in these situations to board boats and look for contraband.  The boarding party strapped on their .45 caliber revolvers and waited for Customs and the Sheriff to arrive.  In the mean time I stood with the other two Coast Guardsmen wondering what would happen next. 

Arrival of the reinforcements meant that the boarding party could jump into action and as they approached the shrimp boat, one of the two Coast Guardsmen still on the boat went below decks and came out carrying three 12 gauge shotguns.  He handed one shotgun to the boat captain and then loaded a shell in the chamber of the second gun and kept it for himself.  He then turned to me.

“You’re a Fed aren’t you,” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “but I’m not in law enforcement.”

Thrusting the loaded shotgun in my hands he yelled “If they shoot, shoot back!”

The last thing I considered that morning when I got out of bed was that I would be in a shootout with drug runners on Vaca Key but that is what it was beginning to appear was going to happen.  I wanted this as much as I wanted a toothache but I wasn’t going to argue.

The boarding party, made up of two Coast Guardsmen, a Customs agent and a deputy sheriff approached the shrimp boat with their guns drawn.  As instructed I stood in the bow of the boat with the 12 gauge shotgun aimed at the wheel house of the boat.  It was my responsibility to shoot if anyone shot first.  Between them the four-person boarding party had enough armaments to support a small insurgency in Nicaragua yet as they made their way to the shrimp boat I maintained my aim at the unseen doper inside.

With guns drawn the boarding party walked up to the main door of the shrimp boat and yelled at the occupants to come out.  Nobody inside moved.  They yelled again and still nobody moved.  At the conclusion of the third yelling session, one of the Coast Guardsmen on the boat kicked in the door.  I flicked off the safety on my shotgun.  The entire scene reminded me of a script for some surreal movie but it was real life and real time.

No shots rang out as the four men entered the shrimp boat to confiscate the lone marijuana plant in the wheel house.  After what seemed like an hour inside they returned to the main door leading a rather disheveled individual who was shirtless and shoeless (this was the Florida Keys after all) man with scraggly hair.  His arms were securely behind his back and his wrists were held together by hand cuffs.  The Customs Agent yelled at us and told us they had found some cocaine on the table along with the supposedly malevolent marijuana plant.  He also informed us that we could take down our arms and prepare to tie off the boat.

With the boat shrimp boat secured to the Coast Guard cutter we slowly made our way back to Coast Guard Station Marathon where it was tied off and guarded by another Coast Guardsman who proceeded to do about face marches in front of the boat.  It was his responsibility to ensure that nobody came near that shrimp boat unless they were personally known to the Coast Guardsman.  Should some nefarious individual attempt to board the boat before the Customs Service could tear it apart, it was this Coast Guardsman’s responsibility to shoot that person.  Hearing this I made it triply certain that no matter where I walked for the rest of my time on the Coast Guard station I had someone with me who personally knew the man walking about faces in front of the shrimp boat.

The shrimp boat incident in the Cuban Docks severely cut into our time on the ocean but the Coast Guard had made a promise to me that they would get me offshore to look for birds.  After maybe two hours of paperwork and interviews we again left the dock headed for the open ocean.  As we passed under Seven Mile Bridge we received a call from Marathon but instead of telling us to go back to the Cuban Docks to look for another boat, it was Coast Guard Station Marathon wishing us a successful trip to find birds.

We didn’t find many birds because by the time we arrived on the Gulf Stream the winds had kicked up and the waves were horrendous and there was little else for us to do but ride out the tempest.  I suggested several times that we return to shore but the Coast Guard had promised me time on the ocean and they were bound and determined to give it to me. After an hour in the rollicking angry ocean we had two Coast Guardsmen down with sea sickness and the other two were beginning to look green. Rather than subject them to more discomfort I begged them to take us back to shore.  I could always get offshore another time to look for birds.

Our return to the station was greeted with high fives and congratulations because on dismantling the inside of the boat, Customs and the Coast Guard found several large packages of cocaine tethered to the inside walls.  Today’s action turned out to be the best bust of the month for Coast Guard Station Marathon and it all started with an off-handed remark about a single marijuana plant growing in a bucket in the wheel house.  As I was preparing to leave Marathon and return to Big Pine Key I asked one of the Coast Guardsmen if they didn’t come off a little too extreme in dealing with the shrimp boat owner at first because on the surface it appeared he had just one pot plant.  The Coast Guardsman snickered a bit and said “When you deal with low life’s every day you have to treat everyone like they’re going to kill you.”

I have had nothing but the utmost respect for the Coast Guard since that day.