Swallows

“Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them.  The least we can do is try to be there.” – Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I’ve been reading Annie Dillard.  It’s my first time in her world.  When I bought Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the guy at the used bookstore gave me a dollar discount because he likes that book so much.  “I’ve tried to read that book three times, and each time I’ve gotten so inspired that I had to stop.  I can’t finish it!” he said.  I get it now – a month, and only 91 pages, in.  It’s so good sometimes it hurts.  Instead of inspiring expectations, though, it leaves a satisfied trail.  Nuggets of light and airiness within the pages, images that bring you soaring alongside her and the banks of her creek. 

She is enthralled by the natural world, and will explain for five or ten or fifteen pages the excitement she feels when she finds the egg cases of praying mantises and watches them hatch, and grow, and mate.  When I read her prose, the awe she feels drips into me like honey, and I want to go outside and practice seeing. 

Last Sunday, I spent the afternoon on the Delaware River, tubing.  A small group of us, two cars full, drove up there and paid our thirty bucks to be bused to and from the river.  We snuck in beers and meandered lazily up to the floating hot dog stand halfway down the six-mile stretch of river we were on.  Hamburgers and pepsi.  A juvenile bald eagle and swallows.

The swallows hovered in two packs along the course of our five-hour ride.  We came at them slowly, idly in our rafts, so they didn’t notice and instead went about their business.  ‘Cigars with wings’ Matt would say, but they weren’t Chimney Swifts, but Bank Swallows, I discovered later.  White belly, brown above, each wing longer than the stout little body they propelled together.  I could feel a breeze now and then on the river in my tube, but they could feel it first.  I would watch a tiny bird swoop across in a straight line and then rise and turn, suddenly swept into the air current.  These birds were perfectly in tune to the movement of the wind, that invisible substance of earth and sky.  I realized acutely the fact that all of us – every element and creature in my immediate surroundings – were going in the direction we desired.  Rock stood firm as water fell over it, resisting in places but always bending.  Bird flew true and then flexed a wing and dove, depending on the texture of the wind on which it hovered.  We humans bumbled along on our rafts.

Annie Dillard wrote this of sitting by Pilgrim Creek, watching swallows and all manner of other elements.  “I didn’t know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridge’s spider webs made invisible by the gathering dark, or take a chance on seeing the carp, or scan the mudbank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying upstream with their tails forked, so fast.” 

Read that last bit again.  Doesn’t that just lift you up? 

Not my swallows.  From telegraph.co.uk.

“There’s nothing like following a man with a rifle into the jungle”

Trip to Kerala, Part I

Last week, Matt and I took off from the farm for a week’s trip through Kerala.  Known for its backwaters, its communist government, and – to some – its literary prowess, Kerala is India’s southernmost state to the west.  The state meanders along the Arabian Sea, connecting Karnataka to India’s southernmost tip at Trivanduram.  Apparently, Kerala attracts 90% of the 10% of tourists who choose to visit South India over North India.  I had been eager to visit the place since setting foot in the south, mostly because it is home to the story and the characters that once entranced me in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.  So when I heard about an agriculture and export conference in Kochi, Matt and I jumped at the chance to take our first big trip through a new part of India.

Our first impressions were of motion and comfort.  We had taken a bus from Madikeri three hours south to Wayanad, to spend a few days looking for wildlife before heading toward the coast and down to Kochi.  As we passed through Kutta, the last town in Karnataka, and headed into Kerala, our rickshaw suddenly sped up, and Matt and I stopped bouncing into each other.  Well, we thought, the roads are certainly better in Kerala. 

We were greeted by breakfast and coffee at the guesthouse we had booked, and ushered up to a tree-house bungalow.  Wooden walls! we noticed happily, after months of cement rooms necessary to withstand the hefty rains of Madikeri.  The bungalow was built on wooden stilts, and attached to a real live tree.  It was raised, we mused, in case a wild elephant came crashing through the coffee plantation. 

We wasted no time, jumping at our first opportunity to explore the Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary across the road.  We did it safari style, piling into a covered jeep with two French tourists and two Indian guides, one in front and one behind.  As we entered the reserve through a big iron gate and drove through the first towering stands of teak trees, I imagined I could hear the wildness of India breathing huge sighs of relief.  Here was a natural place thoroughly protected by the Indian government, in a country that is hungry for space for its bulging population.  Not only is it a fairly large wildlife refuge, but India has done well in connecting it with several other nearby national parks to create a massive, continuous habitat for the big and small animals that desperately need it – elephants, tigers, giant squirrels, deer, and monkeys, to name a few.  Helping to cement its longevity, India also uses the area to create several streams of revenue, such as tourist dollars and profit from carefully sustained teak “orchards” grown within the reserve. 

Our experience confirmed the wildlife’s relief.  Almost as soon as we were 100 meters into the reserve, our safari driver slowed down.  “Spotted deer,” he whispered, pointing to a herd of fifteen or twenty deer, full grown fawns to my North American eyes.  And then, “Hanuman langur monkeys,” as he pointed up into the trees.  Within another ten minutes we had spotted the elusive luna moth, a trio of bison, a sambar deer, and a malabar giant squirrel.  And then, as we rounded a bend and headed deeper into the jungle, our guide in the back of the jeep called for the driver to back up.  He cut the engine and we all leaned out the open windows, listening.  There was crashing in the brush just beside the road, and I could see young stands of bamboo waving wildly against some mighty force.  Elephants, the guide mouthed to us.  And we all leaned a little further out the windows of the jeep, straining to see the cause of all the ruckus in the brush. 

Soon another jeep pulled up behind us, and we moved on.  Hearing the elephants was powerful in itself, perhaps even more than seeing them right away, as it made me begin to understand the vast appetite of the animals, and the sheer power of the lumbering beasts.  They pull whole trees down when they’re snacking, and make no effort to quiet either their footsteps or their munching. 

Partly because of our unrequited encounter with the elephants, and partly because of a longing to connect with the reserve in a more personal way, Matt and I splurged the next morning, and hired our very own guide and guard to take us, on foot, into the reserve.  This is a rare privilege, and to do it you have to pay for these two men, one a local tribal guide, and the other a man touting a rifle, to personally walk you through the place.  The duo in serious brown uniforms added some clout to our small entourage, and as we stepped past the gate, rather than rumbling past it in a jeep, I immediately felt a sense of adventure overcome me. 

We walked along the road for a while, spotting an isolated langur monkey here and there, and marveling at tiger prints and bison droppings.  Soon enough, our guides pulled up short and stopped to listen.  Silence, and then a muffled crushing of sticks and leaves and bamboo.  We looked for the source, and there, not 50 meters away, a tall, skinny bamboo stalk wavered and fell, and was shortly dragged away into the undergrowth.  This time, we knew what stood behind the brush.  Matt and I walked back and forth along the road, testing views from every angle, and getting short glimpses of a fanning ear, a dusty gray back, and a tail whipping back and forth.  After a few minutes, our guides motioned to us.  They were looking for openings in the brush to creep into, and one of them, the man with the rifle, Anu Kumar, said to us, “we go in, behind them.”  Through this shortened sentence, I assumed this meant that Anu Kumar was going to circle behind the elephants and flush them out so we could get a better look.  This seemed somewhat risky, but feeling grateful for our gutsy guide, I said, “okay, good luck!”  But then he beckoned for us to follow. 

Looking back at me, Matt said, “there’s nothing like following a man with a rifle into the jungle,” and we plunged into the brush.  The guide cut a quiet path with his machete, leading us through a swampy area and around the backside of the elephants.  We emerged on raised ground covered by trees and shrubs, and looked across a small stream to a herd of four wild elephants.  They hadn’t noticed us at all, or maybe they simply weren’t concerned.  There was one huge male, with long white tusks and two massive humps on the top of his head.  Three smaller females, not three quarters his size, stood around him.  All four chewed slowly at the pile of bamboo they had pulled down, first shaving off the bark and then sucking out the fiber within.  They waved their giant ears, and curled their wiry tails back and forth along their bodies, and it was a perfect display of elephantine calm.

Shortly, Anu Kumar started pulling on our sleeves, beckoning that it was time to go.  He was worried that a jeep would drive along the road and spook the small herd our way.  It was a valid concern, but after a minute of entrancement in the company of such calm wildness, I didn’t want to go.  He continued to coax us out, and we turned to backtrack along the makeshift path only two or three minutes after finding our view.

That was only the beginning of our trek through the jungle, but a description of each and every moment would hardly be blog-friendly.  We spotted dozens of tiger prints and even a pair of leopard prints, and encountered a half-dozen malabar giant squirrels.  These creatures, perhaps the most beautiful to be seen in this stretch of rainforest, are reddish-orange and nearly as big as a German Shepherd.  They run along the rainforest canopy like the most adept monkeys, and when they turn to look at you from their treetop lookout, their faces are circled like a raccoon in whites and browns and blacks.  Their bushy red tails follow them like a final flash of brilliance as they disappear into the forest.

Thankfully, Anu Kumar did not need to use his rifle even once during the trek, although we did get attacked by a hoard of wild beasts.  The leeches, my personal bain of the rainforest, finally got the better of me, devouring both Matt’s and my feet during one particularly moist stretch of trail.  Their ferocity would leave their mark for the rest of our week-long trip to Kerala, as their nasty little bites swelled up and had me itching for the next six days.  But it was worth it – for the elephants, and the squirrels, and all the other creatures we encountered, and for the experience of walking absolutely vulnerable into a wholly wild place, except for the presence of a guide with a gun. 

Photos: 1- Entrance to the Tholpetty Wildlife Sanctuary; 2- Luna Moth; 3- Entering the jungle with our guides; 4- Elephants!; 5- Sweet relief from the leech bites