Whodunit and Why?

Here’s the beginning of a novel.

A hunter in the Savage River State Forest raises his gun and kills the only nesting female goshawk in the state of Maryland, leaving her body on the forest floor and her three chicks to die in the nest. That part is not fiction. It happened this week.

The rest could be a novel. Even if the shooter is caught we may never fully understand the motive. It takes a heap of abuse or some radical thinking for a person to kill deliberately such an extremely rare and beautiful bird.

Farmers have been known to kill predators that endangered their livestock and thus their livelihoods. That could be understandable, though it’s hard to imagine that the only goshawk in Maryland did that much damage living in the midst of a 54,000-acre state forest.

Or did it attack and kill someone’s pet? That would be another story.

The Maryland Legislative Sportsmen's Foundation offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of this shooter. Persons with information about the crime are asked to call the Poacher Hot Line: 1-800-635-6124.

The Baltimore Sun's outdoor writer Candus Thomson wrote a detailed story in the paper of June 27. The earlier accounts can be found here and here.
This is a stunning story. Again I say it's worthy of a novel or nonfiction book. 

Using and Abusing Language

The Novel continues apace. The main character is now in a bind (Isn’t that where he’s supposed to be?) and trouble is all around him. Good. The deeper we get into it, the looser the writing becomes, it seems. Inconsistency is not desirable; I’d like it to be so loose throughout. Perhaps I can fix that during revisions.

What do I mean by loose? I mean the opposite of tight as in uptight or self-conscious. When the action is sailing along the writing does too. When the poor old author is trying too hard the writing betrays his discomfort. It gets tight. (This meaning has nothing to do with conciseness or verbosity.)

One day I became acutely aware of idiom and whether it properly reflected the time and place of the action, a time and place I personally did not experience—middle Europe during World War II. Sometimes expressions from middle East-Coast-America during 2011 slip in. Must I worry about that?

My response is this. The characters should use expressions of the time and place to the extent that I can represent them naturally. I try to do this by channeling (a fad word I won’t use elsewhere) people I knew from that time and place. I’m old enough to remember terms and expressions of the late 1940s. I had two uncles in the war who came back with favorite wartime expressions and European brides. And I had the good fortune to enjoy long exposure to central European people and culture during much of my own life. The trick is to hear those voices and mimic them. 

Once or twice my readers have objected to an expression I used as too modern, and I changed it. But since the characters are conversing in their native language or occasionally someone else’s language and only rarely in English it seems reasonable that the book, being written in English, might be a translation of their dialogue. The translator, who is also the author, is a twenty-first century American living on the East Coast and striving to produce a book his contemporaries will find readable.

The script for the recent remake of “True Grit” starring Jeff Bridges was so wooden and stilted that the dialogue was often incomprehensible. Did the scriptwriters actually believe late 19^th century people talked like that? Or was this some elaborate Coen Brothers joke that I didn’t get? Either way it nearly ruined a good story in spite of Bridges’ first-rate performance. You’ll have to see the whole movie to hear what I mean, but here’s a clip to tempt you.

A Wild Goose Chase

In the midst of a quiet day after the storm we were sitting on the (now partially) screened porch discussing the unwanted treetop in our midst when a neighbor and his wife came by walking their dogs. 

The dogs were playing at the water's edge when the youngest, a German Shorthaired Pointer of some eighteen months, felt herself provoked by the sight of Canada geese in the cove and set out to chase them. In the blink of an eye she was nearly out of sight, which set off general alarums and excursions.

The geese swam away, and soon it began to appear that the pup was swimming in circles. Neighbor Peter is a courageous man and loves his dogs. In an instant he had handed someone his wallet and hit the water fully dressed, shoes and all. Our niece Sloane (Excitement travels with her.) headed to the shed to launch a kayak, and I went to help her. By the time she was in the water Peter had almost reached his dog, having walked the entire distance on the muddy bottom. 

When Sloane the kayakmeister reached them Peter had turned Masha the dog around and was bringing her back, their two heads barely visible in the distance, the water close under their chins, and Sloane in the kayak comfortingly nearby.

Since Sloane’s arrival always heralds excitement perhaps I should have a video camera ready for her next visit. 

A Bad Day for Trees

This was not your usual Chesapeake Bay thunderstorm. Not by a country mile. At first glance I thought tornado. But the experts were right; there was no rotation. Everything that fell—century-old trees, halves of trees, big limbs—everything fell eastward. The west side of our house looked sandblasted, with less paint but a new coat of leaves. The other three sides were untouched. It looked like the straight-line winds of a microburst.

The result was devastation to trees. Throughout our little village big trees came thudding down. One neighbor lost six including a solid willow oak some 150 years old that took several others with it. The workers said a piece of its trunk weighed 26,000 pounds. A grand old maple at the corner of our lane left a stump the size of a card table. Miraculously there was no report of personal injury or damage to dwellings, though a few outbuildings were damaged.

We found three bird nests and several dead birds the next day as we picked up leaves and branches in the yard. Our resident ospreys seem to have weathered the storm well in their nest on the navigation light; Ma and Pa and one or two chicks were visible there. The osprey nest on my neighbor’s dock looked smaller than before, but the adults were still on it and I saw what I believe was a chick.

But the character of our bucolic tree-shaded village has changed. Now it looks undressed and exposed to the merciless sun.

It all happened without warning during the Friday cocktail hour. A local weather station that records conditions every five minutes showed a 5-mph gust and then dead calm at 7:24 pm. The next five-minute record, at 7:29 pm, showed both sustained wind and gust speeds at 70 mph. There the record stopped suddenly and didn’t resume until 11:30 the next morning when the power came back. (Oddly, the Friday record read 40 mph when I checked it today.)

I suspect that the actual top wind speed was higher. Neighbors who experienced it—we did not—agreed that it was closer to 100 mph, and I believe them. It may have been still rising when the power failed.

One neighbor said she heard a heavy thump-thump—“It sounded like a giant walking the earth.”—of big trees broken off or ripped up by their roots.

Once there was an old silver maple with a big hole in the trunk and an imaginary resident owl that stared out with ghostly aspect at the end of a neighbor’s lane at twilight. We called it the Harry Potter tree. It was removed more than a year ago revealing a picturesque young pine tree. Now the pine tree is broken in half.

The healthy and shapely young persimmon tree that shaded the south side of our house became a misshapen snag, the top half of it stuck into our screen porch.

I’m convinced there’s a lesson in this storm, a pattern developing. A damaging wind of a somewhat less ferocity blew two venerable Adirondack chairs far into the cove last summer. Two years ago the village became impassable under several feet of snow from two blizzards in the same week. Tides are consistently higher than they were two or three years ago. High tides routinely wash the bottom of the docks and cover riprap, and low tides no longer reveal the mud. As recently as five years ago water washing the under side of docks was rare, the result of an unusual storm or days of strong southerly wind.

Climate scientists suggest we’re in for an period of more extreme weather, and it looks to me like it has begun. 

Return of the Cottontail

Some years ago a large family of cottontail rabbits gamboled and grazed in our yard on warm summer evenings. Then quite suddenly they disappeared and we missed them.

I didn’t think it was the arrival of Sam the vizsla that chased them out. Eventually I realized that we’d destroyed their habitat. They lived in the forest of Phragmites that was taking over our shoreline. Because this reed multiplies so aggressively and kills other plants, the state tries to eradicate it. So one autumn our Phragmites disappeared and so did our rabbits.

Well, this morning Sam the vizsla disappeared into the boxwoods where the sun never shines, and a moment later out popped Peter Cottontail himself in a big hurry, followed by Sam in hot pursuit. Now Peter was headed for the invisible fence, which would have administered a convincing admonition to poor Sam, and I didn’t want that.

“Wait!” I shouted with as much authority as I could muster. That’s a command we’ve practiced a lot, Sam and I, and to my delight she skidded to a stop that would have done a New York taxi proud. Maybe Peter will return.

Meanwhile, Mother Osprey sat serenely on her nest—no sign of Papa or the chicks—summer goslings swam about, now almost as big as their parents. A lone duck watched from the riprap, and young shoots of Phragmites poked through the sandy bank. 

Berlin Showdown: So who won?

Throughout the Cold War there was only one direct confrontation between Soviet and U.S. soldiers. It could hardly have been more dangerous. In the fall of 1961 ten Soviet tanks and ten American tanks faced each other in a narrow shopping street at a distance of 100 paces across the white line dividing East and West Berlin. For eighteen hours their crews awaited further orders with nervous trigger fingers, sighting gun targets and revving their engines.

When the orders came, they withdrew, Soviets first, then the Americans. It isn’t known what the agreement included, but the four-power right of access to all of Berlin ended on that day. The United States never again challenged the right of East Germany to control Berlin’s crossing points, even though under the four-power agreement the East German government had no authority in the city. War—which could have become nuclear—was avoided at the cost of the agreed principle of free access. Berliners, like Hungarians five years earlier, were abandoned. The tension of Berlin, and Cuba a year later, shaped American policy for the next thirty years.

Frederick Kempe, in his new book Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the World’s Most Dangerous Place, offers a detailed and well researched account of the politics, personalities, and events that contributed to this crisis. He lays much of the responsibility for it on the doorstep of the new and inexperienced American president John Kennedy.  

Allied leaders and the entrenched American establishment distrusted the young president. The disaster at the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy's rebuff of Nikita Khrushchev’s initial gestures of rapprochement contributed to Khrushchev’s distrust of him. Khrushchev sharply changed course and ambushed Kennedy at their summit meeting in Vienna. Shortly thereafter the Russian gave in to domestic and East German pressure to stop the westward flow of East Germany’s intelligentsia through Berlin by agreeing to close the border and let the East German leader Walter Ulbricht precipitate a confrontation. 

I experienced this crisis some distance away as a member of a medium tank battalion whose assigned duty in the event of war was to slow the advance of a vastly larger Soviet Bloc tank force that was expected to pour through the Fulda Gap. Our 50-ton M48A1 tanks, consuming gasoline at the rate of three gallons per mile, hadn’t enough capacity to reach the battlefield and then to fight. The solution to this problem was four external 55-gallon steel drums of gasoline fitted aft of the back deck about two feet from the usually red-hot exhaust ports. The driver was meant to jettison the drums at the critical moment by pulling a lever. Mercifully, we never went into combat with this arrangement or any other.

Kempe’s account corrected the date of my experience, related in a post last month. Though the other facts of that account are correct to the best of my memory, Kempe’s work makes it clear that our battalion was not called to alert in August because ranking Americans, both military and civilian in Berlin and Washington, saw no urgency in the first closure of the border on August 13, 1961. It wasn’t until October 27 that American officials insisted, with military preparation to enforce it, upon their right to enter East Berlin freely. When the East German guards stood fast, the crisis began. So it was early in the morning of October 28, a Saturday, that our unit was called to alert 300 miles southwest of Berlin. To our good fortune and the world’s, nothing violent happened.   

Excitement

Our niece came down the other day and took one of the kayaks out on the cove. After a while in response to some excited shouting I ran outdoors to see what was the matter.

“Sloane rescued a baby osprey!” came the reply.

Glad our niece was safe, and quite certain nothing could be done for a baby bird fallen out of its high nest, I went back to my book. Soon there was more excitement. I returned to find our kind neighbor lady on the dock, a shovel in her hand, and her guests gamely motoring away toward the navigation light with a round little bundle of feathers, beak, and claws about the size of a softball, wrapped in a towel. 

The osprey nest, perched on the very top of the light’s supporting structure, was far out of reach. What a dangerous and foolish mission, I thought. The parents will be angry like a mama bear. In a moment, one of the guests was out of the dinghy and climbing toward the nest. Mama and Papa Osprey circled warily making no sound or warlike approach.

In the blink of an eye all was well again. Baby was in her (his?) nest. Mama and Papa were back, standing guard. The dinghy departed, and I felt quite foolish. Nothing could be done? Indeed!

Congratulations to the neighbor lady who took charge, Sloane who fished the bird from the water, and the sailors who returned it to its nest. 
For the rest of the weekend all seemed normal around the nest as far as we could tell. But we know so little about these creatures. For example, we've heard it said that if the scent of humans is on a baby bird the parents will disown it. So Sloane scooped it out of the water with her paddle, and everyone took care not to touch it. But is that belief true?  

Another question: If ospreys can carry birds and fish to the nest in their claws couldn't they have returned their baby to the nest? If anyone knows the answers to such questions, we'd like to hear from you.