Brace yourselves, this is a long one.
And so it was over, just as it was getting started. We got up, I got two last photos of myself with Tir' and Ann respectively (I'd include the latter in the web version of this, but we both look so miserable I don�t think it'd be very appealing), we loaded my stuff into the boat, and left the cabin for the last time. The weather that day was perfect, and watching the little point of wooded land complete with boatshed fall away behind us, I felt nearly homesick. All of my leavings were difficult; it was sad to leave people. This time it was hard to leave a place, too.
I noticed, as we left, that the trees around the foreshore were defoliated down to an absolutely even level, about six or seven feet above the water, as if the forest had been given a pudding-bowl haircut around the edge of the lake. Tir' explained this was because deer stand on the ice in winter to eat the leaves, and the cut-off point was the height of a deer with neck extended.
We stopped off at a garage and picked up a map of the lake area as a souvenir, then it was goodbye to Ann and the girls, and Tir' took me in the 4WD down to Toronto for my flight. We stopped somewhere on the way at a roadside store which sold some wolf T-shirts (my first Jodi Bergsma T-shirt), and I bought a small, sitting wolf plush who I eventually named Parry, after Parry Sound.
Toronto airport rolled up too soon, truncating another of those conversations about furriness that ought to have had more room. I remember the phrase 'Werehouses' popping into my head sometime during the drive.
Toronto turned out to be one of several occasions on which the arrangement of the airport terminals, roads and parking seemed intended to lessen your chances of getting to your plane on time. It might be a nice way of saying 'We don't want you to leave.' I made it though, albeit after having to jump out and let Tir' find a parking place. He joined me before the plane left, and the mood was simply 'This was too short.' A feeling of unspoken emotions and stories welling up at the last minute, when it was too late for them really to be spoken. Not the only time this happened, but perhaps the most intense.
America again. Chicago. Big City. Windy City. Boring rock group (Ooooeee baby, please don't go. 1976 memory. Urgh!) Prohibition. Al Capone. Worse still - O'Hare airport.
No problems arriving. I was successfully met by Dan Perry, Barbarian, and Sheila (sorry, can't remember your screen name now. Chouette?)
This was the first time I'd been met at an airport by _three_ people, and straight away there was a bit of a festive mood. We made our way to Dan's car, me with rather a large quantity of plush by this stage. Everyone was really cool about them; Pawla and Kali and Sarsha and Beth and whoever the heck else was there all got to ride in the car, mostly in the back set, nursed by Fred and Sheila, who obviously loved them. (Fred and Sheila will appear interchangeably with 'Barbarian' and 'Chou'. Sorry. As a rule, once I know someone's RL name, I tend to revert to that, though there are some peculiar exceptions.)
Toronto Airport may be designed to discourage you from leaving the country. O'Hare seems to be designed to prevent you entering it, or at least from leaving the airport. Dan had been to Chicago before. Fred and Sheila lived there. So how come it took us about three or four attempts before we managed to actually drive out of the airport, without mysteriously ending back where we started from? It was very Twilight Zone.
As we were going around on one of these bewildering circuits, I pointed to what, for some strange reason, I initially took to be an Israeli flag. After a brief discussion, it was decided this was the flag of the City of Chicago. This was a bit of a new concept for me. Back home we have State flags, but I'd never heard of City flags before. Was this as far as it went, I wondered, or were there Suburb flags, too? (are there?) I'd like a flag for the West side of Raminea Rd, between Oliver Ave and Wellington Rd, please.
We finally escaped from O'Hare, and Barb' (Bar-bar-bar Barbarian. Sorry) pointed to a spot where he said a deer had run across the road the other week. This is something you don�t get in Tasmania: very large animals constantly running across roads in front of you. Lots of no so big ones, but even then, not in the middle of a city, and we don�t have a city a twentieth the size of Chicago. Everywhere I go in the United States, someone seems to tell me "A deer ran across the road just here last time I came by" (and indeed I saw this happen once.) Still seems funny there should be one in Chicago though. Maybe he snuck in on a plane.
Dan, Fred, Sheila, the plush and I were heading for the JES exotic animal sanctuary in Wisconsin. This was about two-thirds of the way to where Dan lives. After the visit, the plan was to drive Barb' and Chou' back to Chicago, then drive all the way back to Dan's place. Which is why I expect this will probably be the longest 'Northern Summer' entry of the lot. It seems improbable that I packed so much travelling, and so many memories - especially _that_ memory - into one day.
Before long we were clear of the airport area, and heading north, into progressively more rural vistas, towards the Wisconsin border. On the way I got treated to another new accent:
oh, wait.
I forgot. Does anyone else think Canadians pronounce 'ou' as in 'house', like Scotsmen? "Hoose". I'm fascinated by long vowels. In Baltimore you go down the 'Roowud' or 'Rerwerd', and in Canada you arrive at the 'Hoose'. I think I mentioned this to Ron and Ann and they strenuously denied it, but nevermind.
Anyway Fred just has the best accent. I can't remember where he grew up, but Southwards, anyway; so it was a real delight for me to luxuriate in the ambience of this exotic sounding Southerly accent. It's another one of those American things that I privately suspected people only did in movies. We stopped somewhere in northern Illinois at a small Mexican restaurant. It was nearly empty, the waitress was very nice, and Sheila left her hat behind.
As we drove into Wisconsin the landscape became very green. There were water towers, and wide fields of corn. I drew on this part of the countryside for imagery in the first part of 'Season Cycle':
"It was corn country. The roads were long and flat; a vast grid thrown over endless acres of tall yellow-green stalks. I�d walked miles in the cool dust, scuffing rocks, catching fox on the breeze, hemmed in by rustling, fibrous walls. We�d come to the end of the fields now. Behind us at the last intersection a tractor like a dark red clot sat hunched for morning, a cough waiting deep in its diesel lungs."
Well bits of that happened. There's more, but it's on my website under 'Hybrid Things' if you're interested.
I described the countryside in that passage as 'flat'. It really isn't. Not by comparison with some parts of the Eastern US. Still, at most I'd have described it as 'gently undulating'. Sheila and Fred pointed out an impressive 'mountain' to the side of the road, which I think was maybe 150 feet high. I guess I'm just very accustomed to hills, and it never really occurred to me before going to the USA, that some people might literally never have seen anything bigger than a small hill. When I was in Maryland on my subsequent trip, I showed someone a photo of me and my horse. He looked astonished, and indicated that the hill in the background went 'right up to the top of the picture' - which must have been about 30 or 40 metres :) (Tasmania, BTW, doesn't have anything like Himalayan scale mountains, but we do have about 200 mountains over 4,000', and not much of the bits in between are flat - which on an island the size of West Virginia tends to mean there are hills or mountains around you virtually wherever you are. But we were talking about Wisconsin, which is very beautiful, and renowned for its Cows, so I'm told, and so the whole effect was quite lush and pastoral, even though the weather was going to get well up into the 90's (how do you handle 100o in summer and -35o in winter in half the country. Wow, it's hard to imagine. We get maybe a 70-75o average in summer, and 50o in winter.)
Some time after noon we arrived at the JES Exotics sanctuary. I seem to recall the name of the town is Shannon, or possibly Sharron, but I hadn't noticed anything resembling a town in the area. Like most of Wisconsin which I'd seen so far, the countryside around the sanctuary was fertile, agricultural land, divided into long blocks of crops or pasture, with buildings limited to what you'd expect to see in a farming community.
After a brief bit of security clearance at the front gates (only sponsors and sponsor's guests are allowed in. Dan was the sponsor) we were admitted into the parking area. JES, from this vantage point seems pretty much just like a country house with a barn, and a paddock out back. Most of the animals are housed in enclosures to the left of the parking area, with some in the barn beside the house, and others in a smaller area to the rear of the house. We started our tour with the main area to the left.
The vast majority of the occupants at JES are felines. Tigers, Lions, Cougars, Black Panthers, and so on. One exception are some Brown Bears which we encountered soon after entering. I found their vocalisations rather eerily human; strange groans and moans, which seemed always to be on the point of resolving themselves into some articulation of despair.
A fair bit has been written here about JES over the years, and I won�t try to recount other people's experiences in detail. I remember Sheila stroking a panther through the fence. I remember very clearly the textual sensation of stroking a Lion's mane. The hair is extremely rough, more like hemp or thin rope. A bit further along we met Sammy. Sammy, if I'm right, is the oldest Tiger in captivity. If I recall correctly he was 32, and to the best of my knowledge, he's still alive, two years later.
Nearly all the animals at JES have some sort of horror story attached to their previous history. Some had been bought for canned hunts, had been declawed, or even, if I'm right, defanged. I think the former condition might have applied in Sammy's case, but it may have been the latter. I do remember Dan suggesting that Sheila's letting him suck her fingers was possibly not a good idea, nonetheless, as his jaws were still quite powerful, regardless of the state of his dental equipment. In fact it was pretty hard to imagine Sammy doing anything deliberately to hurt anyone. He was very endearing, and he and Dan obviously have a great closeness. I know Dan has been inside the enclosure with him. There was a slight feeling of intruding on a private relationship, actually. Not that Dan did anything whatever to deliberately foster that impression, or to discourage us from getting to know Sammy.
Just across from Sammy's enclosure lives a truly enormous being named Nook, who is a Liger, or Lion/Tiger hybrid. I seem to recall that he weighs in at some stupendous and unlikely figure in the region of 1500 pounds, which is about as much as the average horse. He was also extremely friendly, though I seem to recall he is roommates with a Lioness who is a little less social.
Between Sammy's and Nook's enclosures was an area containing a number of Lions. One of the males decided to try to spook me, by suddenly lunging towards me, then stopping, just short of the wire. I am quite sure this was intended as a mildly contemptuous exercise, designed to win back a little respect from the monkeys on the other side of the cage. Or maybe he just realised he wasn't my phenotype. In any case I tried not to take it personally, but it was, in my mind, quite clearly a bit of mind-gamesmanship on his part, rather than any aggression born out of a desire to actually 'get at me' physically.
Around the back of the area in which most of the felines were housed, things opened out a bit. There was a paddock patrolled by a goat, with two tigers in an enclosure on the far side, and, in a hutch near the other side, some foxes. I think there were three: one who didn't emerge at all, a liver coloured female, who appeared pretty disinterested in anything more social than looking out rather balefully from the entrance of the hutch, and a male, called Kalief. Kalief came right out, and was curious enough to get nose to nose with me. Yes, he smelled a bit coffee-ish, IMO. This was the first time I'd ever been near to a Fox. It was a memorable occasion, though I can't say anything particularly spiritual happened to me, or to him, as far as I could see. Kalief had a very unusual coat; largely white, with tabby patches. He was rather old, and had apparently been taken from a fur farm, which had been closed down, but which he had continued to hang around, presumably because he'd never known any other existence.
I'm very sad to say that Kalief died last November. He was the animal who Dan was sponsoring at JES, and he told me earlier this year, that Jill, one of the owners of the place, found him curled up in a ball one morning inside the doghouse, which is apparently what they called the box attached to the run. Apparently the third fox, who I had not seen, passed away last year, too.
Not far from Kalief's house were the two Wolf hybrids, Harley, and.... someone else. Jim, who either works there or is the co-owner (I forget) told me they were Wolf/Malamute crosses, but this didn�t seem very likely to me. I would have guessed Wolf/Golden Retriever, and more of the latter than the former. In fact it was perhaps only a certain quality to the hair which marked them out as something other than canis familiarus. In addition their behaviour struck me as most un-wolflike, though I must admit that at this stage I did not have very much personal experience to base that assumption on. In short, they were absurdly friendly and playful. Their suspiciousness of perfect strangers appeared to be absolutely nil. They were, in fact, such gorgeously good-looking, charismatic, outgoing, exuberant and totally endearing canines, that any pet store would have sold them in five minutes flat. |
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If there was some hidden, dangerous aspect to their personality it was completely absent while I was there, and in fact I can't understand why it is necessary for them to be confined in a sanctuary at all. I had a lot of fun playing with the woollies, even if the experience was somewhat lacking in the as yet unspecified dimensions I'd thought might be present in an encounter with a Wolf.
I spent some time after this meeting the part-draft horse who occupied the paddock behind the house, and trying to gain the confidence of the local German Shepherd, who was considerably more skittish and wary than the wolf hybrids. Eventually though, after we'd visited the Tigers in the barn - Kimba can tell you a lot more about them than I could possibly remember, I'm afraid - it seemed that everyone was pretty much ready to go though, and as an afterthought we decided to go take a look down the short walkway which curved around the back of the house, with enclosures on its inner side.
We walked past the enclosure housing some Cougars, and around the curve in the pathway to the back of the house - I was in the lead at this stage - and suddenly came face to face with a full grown grey wolf.
There was a moment of stunned silence as I stared into the penetrating eyes of this unexpected apparition, by which time Fred and the others had come round and behind me. At that stage all hell broke loose, as the wolf flung himself against the wire and started shouting aggressively at everyone. What I noticed in the few seconds it took for this to occur, was how goddam _big_ he was, compared to the hybrids, or even to the wolves I'd seen up at Ipswich. It wasn't simply a matter of sheer physical mass; there was something about the effect of him standing up against the wire and letting forth with this cacophonous aural assault, which registered cumulatively as 'Big, angry animal'.
Quite what happened in what order over the next little while is hard to remember. I was still reeling from the fact that I was suddenly one-on-one with a wolf, when I had expected to go through my whole visit to North America without this happening. Certain details remain etched in my mind, others are blurry. I don't remember exactly how I did so, or whether I even had an conscious strategy in place, but over the next five or so minutes I managed not only to calm Cain down - his name was Cain, I learned later - but shortly I was scritching him through the fence, and soon afterwards we were playing together through the fence; me on my hands and knees, diving at each other and generally fooling around. Unfortunately whenever anyone else tried to come around the corner he'd resume barking and yelling, so Sheila, Fred and Dan retreated and left us alone.
I don't know how long we played and scritched, and carried on. Half an hour, maybe more. It's probably not on the recommended protocol list, but he liked to do something to reciprocate for all the grooming he was getting, so I got some tongue-kisses through the fence. This was definitely a surprise. I hadn't expected when I got out of bed that morning in Northern Ontario, that I'd have a wolf's tongue in my mouth by the end of the day.
If I give you the impression I had fun, that's not really true. It was more than fun: it was a_blast._ It was like being suddenly sensually alive; like having a couple of hundred extra volts running through my nervous system. I can't even begin to explain what it was like, except to say that anyone who has had a close experience like this with their special animal knows what I mean. But it was sad, too. It was sad to see this big old wolf locked up in some little cell out the back of a house; sad to know it was an improvement on where he'd been before: alone in a dark cellar with one grimy window, and food chucked in by an unknown woman who apparently physically abused him, too. It made me ache that he was alone, and that I had to leave again. And I have no doubt that this mixture of feelings is what caused the effect I'm about to describe.
I have a variety of canine noises which I discovered I could make, quite accidentally one afternoon in 1979 (another story). I don't quite know how to describe the mechanical means by which these noises are produced, but anyway I decided to talk to Cain. I started a low howl, and he joined in instantly, and for the next few minutes we simply faced each other across the wire and howled. I am not exaggerating when I say that this was one of the most intense and extraordinary experiences of my life. Again, words aren't sufficient, but two things happened which I want to try to describe. The first was at the level of unspoken communication. There was this sudden, unshakeable knowledge that we were communicating something quite articulate at a depth and intensity which I had not previously known was possible. I felt absolutely sure that this mutual howl an expression and a recognition of each other's loneliness, and of the joy of this sudden togetherness - and yes, of the transitoriness of this, and of the fence between us, and of more I can't really explain.
The other effect was more physiological, and even harder to explain. It seemed to involve a sudden shift in the way I processed sensory input. The world, reality, changed somehow. I think I expressed this sensation in a poem, as a feeling that the horizon had come unhinged. It seemed to involve a sudden perception of vastness; of the extent of the Earth; of things which I couldn't even see, for miles around; and yet it was a phenomenon originating from the few square feet he and I were standing in. Perhaps there is some chemical explanation for this. I don't think I'm going to find it in a book though, and I don't particularly care to look.
Some time later, eventually, I had to leave. We had to get Sheila and Fred back to Chicago. When I sadly dragged myself away, consoling myself that Dan was at least gong to try to arrange a subsequent visit on Saturday, I must obviously have been in a somewhat altered state. Sheila simply put her hand on my arm and said something to the effect that I'd obviously just had a rather unique experience. I think I'll always remember her tenderness when she said that. She was right of course. I have always felt a little sorry for her and the others that Cain was such a bastard about them being there, but I guess at the same time I can't help but be pleased that he was quite the opposite with me.
Now, do I put the poem here? It's actually cobbled together from the visits of day one and two. Well, maybe I should. I ought to explain, the business about the Tornado comes from Dan telling me on the phone the next week that there were tornadoes in the area around the sanctuary, and there was some concern about it being hit. Anyway, apologies to those who've seen it before. (This link will take you to a page including the poem, along with several other photos of Cain and myself, and a link to JES�s website
Tornado in Wisconsin
The heat around him filled with lines of grey
intensity. My friend, the old Wolf, Cain
came out to see me on my final day
and licked my face. Growled at my friends again
His eyes like wells of yellow gravity
Someone had kept him in a small dim cell
This cage is an improvement, obviously.
But still, no pack. I know. His eyes: I fell.
and howled, and Cain replied. One naked sound
and I had never sung before: it burned
Outside the Cage a vastness crossed the ground
unlatching the horizon. And I turned.
This month a grey tornado came, and raged
and tore the earth, within sight of his cage.
Cain died last year.
Before we left, I saw fireflies in the yard, for the second time that summer.
We had a lot of driving to do. We headed back to Chicago and dropped of Barbarian and Chou. I have to say that I couldn�t imagine meeting two more delightful people, and I'm sorry I haven't been able to take you guys up on your offer of a visit to Chicago. I _will_ be at O'Hare airport for about 45 minutes this year, but I don�t think that's going to quite count.
We dropped them off at a service station, where I impressed everyone by being able to retrieve cash from an ATM using the card from my local bank. Not only that, but the machine said "Hello Mr Gadd, last time I saw you, you were in Albany", or something along those lines.
It was dark by then, and Dan and I still had to drive all the way back to Oshkosh, Wisconsin. We cruised along in a pretty much non-verbal mode, quiet ambient music playing on the tape deck in the back seat. I was quite grateful for the unspokeness of the trip, in fact. It was ok to be with someone who didn't seem to feel uncomfortable with my need to just be for a while. The miles went by with a few words in between them, but probably more miles than words.
Sometime late that night we got into Oshkosh. There is an aircraft museum somewhere just outside of town, and a big WW2 plane of some description sits on the side of the highway. At least I think that's what I remember seeing as we went by.
Everyone was asleep when we got to Dan's place. We went downstairs to his basement apartment; I hit the mattress on the floor and slept.
It had been a hell of a day. Everything about it had been special, but my time with Cain alone, was worth crossing the world for.
