The day I saw my first wolves IRL (unless I saw some at Taronga Park zoo in Sydney in 1974, but I don't remember seeing any that time. What I remember most clearly from _that_ day, for some reason, are the Electric Eels. And a Gorilla which I remember my mother insiting was playing with himself in front of a crowd of onlookers.)
It was a stinking hot day. In Australia, a little known fact about the USA is how stinking hot it can get in summer. The extreme variation in seasons in most parts of the US is one of the major differences between our nations. Most of Australia has a climate pretty much like southern California (Tasmania maybe like northern California).
Alex and I drove up to Ipswich, on the north coast of MA. Alex hadn't been there before, and I seem to recall we got lost a few times, but it was a nice place to get lost in, and besides, the purple boiled-lolly, vanilla-smelling Ford thingie had air-conditioning.
I was excited about visiting the wolf sanctuary (Wolf Hollow) of course. It was one of my highest priorities to be face to face with a wolf before I came back from north America. Wolf Hollow is a rather modest affair - really just a very big back yard containing what was perhaps a few too many wolves for a space that size, but I'm no expert. The wolves were very beautiful, though a little smaller than I'd expected. Their colouring showed a lot of variation, with the most handsome, IMO, being a coffee and cream coloured one - a colouring I've rarely seen in photographs.
As it was about 95 degrees the wolves were rather lethargic, but the same could not be said for our hostess. We turned up slightly late for the presentation. The lady in question stood in front of a double wire fence, behind which the wolves gradually congregated - being coaxed forth from the shadow of their lair by the cubes of cheese which she kept slipping them through the fence. To the human audience of a couple of dozen, she delivered an obviously heartfelt sermon on the mistreatment of wolves by humans in America. I suppose I should note that I thoroughly agreed with her POV on absolutely everything she said, but I think that her presentation, which had a rather militant, if not military feel to it, in combination with her monopolisation of the wolves' attention, detracted from the experience that might have been. After a while I really wished she'd just leave off. I tried to tune her out and take in the wolves. Even though there was really no opportunity to make any personal contact with them, the mere fact of being in their presence was enough to make the day unforgettable. At the end of the presentation, she tried to get them to howl, but without much success. She blamed the heat, which is probably fair enough, but I suspected that howling 'on cue' would have been a pretty meaningless exercise for a wolf, so in a perverse sort of way, I was kind of glad they didn't.
An almost completely useless piece of information, is that the little souvenir shop a mile or so down the road from Wolf Hollow had the cheapest photo developing I came across in the USA :)
Still glowing somewhat from the 'first contact' experience, we headed back to the campground. Alex has my eternal gratitude in that on this day, not only did he arrange for my first encounter with wolves; he also accommodated one of my other desires - to visit Providence, and hopefully, to walk down the street in which H.P. Lovecraft used to live. Towards evening, we hit the road for Rhode Island.
Several things stick in my mind, from the road to Providence. An American flag the size of a small suburb, flying over a truck dealership (no way they were going to get that thing down by dark. Anyway they could probably afford to pay $1000 fine per day). Then an abandoned drive-in theatre. A sad sight this, for someone who grew up in the 70's, when drive-ins were a weekly magic ritual. I first saw 'Star Wars' at the drive-in - and a lot of really bad early 60's stock-car racing movies. There are no drive-ins in Tasmania any more; only a few on mainland Australia, and it seems they're a vanished breed in the US, too. This one was a mournful sight, but there was still something atmospheric and exciting about it's acres of undulating grey bitumen, cracked and broken, and thrusting forth tall weeds which climbed the old speaker poles.
The strangest thing I saw was a large milk can on the roof of a shed. This may not sound very strange, but what was odd is that this milking can just wasn't big enough to be a 'Big Milking Can' (and believe me, I'm an expert on these things. In Australia we have the Big Pineapple, The Big Banana.... most of these idiotic things are in Queensland. you drive up the Pacific Highway, and every twenty-five miles "Oh, it's the Big Prawn", or the Big Cow or something. When I was a little kid, these were major tourist attractions, and it was everyone's ambition to go see the Big Pineapple if they went to Queensland.) Probably my favourite Big Thing is in New South Wales, though. The Big Sheep: a giant Merino Ram, at Goulbourn. I saw it at dusk one night. People who had climbed up inside it, were looking out through it's eyes, which were illuminated, so that the people resembled eyeballs, moving around in asynchronous, chameleon-fashion.)
But this milk-jug was just, well... medium sized, really. Too big to be a real milk can, but too small to be a Big Milk-Can, and it was just on top of an abandoned shed. Why? It seemed an important question at the time.
We got into Providence after dark, and got thoroughly lost straight away. It was only after a long time pondering over a map bought from a garage that we worked out how to get to Lovecraft's old haunt: Angell St - famous from 'Call of Cthulhu' and numerous other mythos tales. We even drove past Brown University, mentioned in the same story.
A word or two about Providence itself, before we get to Angell St. Lovecraft wrote about the moody, atmospheric quality of the streets at night: the gabled rooves of the buildings leaning towards each other over the streets, the old churches, and colonial architecture. I wrote that Providence is perpendicular to America, because it seems an entirely separate and demarcated thing from everything around it. It is hilly, the streets are narrow, and on this warm summer night, people were out on their verandas, or milling about on the streets. Lost, we drove into a cosmopolitan, restaurant area, and for a while it seemed to me we were in New Orleans (or what I imagined New Orleans would be like.) The place was hot and buzzing with happy, extrovert people who wandered all over the road, without much regard for the traffic - of which there wasn�t much, other than us.
That was one aspect of Providence. Lovecraft's area was different. It took us a while to get there. We took a wrong turn down a one-way street, and someone coming the other way yelled obscenities out his window, in a way which seemed delightfully American to me. If the lady in the plane on Day 0 could be believed, this is what New York is like all the time, except presumably they yell at you even when you're going the _right_ way.
When we finally found Angell St, it was dark, and quiet. We left the car and walked many blocks up the long incline of the hill which Angell St climbs. There was no-one on the street here; the only evidence of life was the music which occasionally drifted up from what I'd mentally christened 'the bohemian sector' downtown. The houses all looked old, and were built of wood. At least, they seemed to be. I was disappointed on closer inspection to discover that at least some of these antique wooden structures were of carefully aged plastic panelling, but somehow that didn't seem to matter. Walking this street, which seemed both desolate and intimate, ominous and quaint, it was easy to imagine Lovecraft on his nocturnal wanderings. It was even possible to imagine Eric Zann, or some half-mad academic, communing with unspeakable cosmic horrors within the strangely-angled attic of one of these old houses.
Unexpectedly, we came across a huge building, set back from the road, across an expanse of black lawn. Few lights shone in the face of this great and mysterious structure, and one could only speculate as to what eldritch happenings might be occurring within its cryptic walls. The most awe inspiring moment of all though, was a great church of black flints which reared up into the sky on the other side of the hill, it's angular spires pointing heavenwards, more in defiance than reverence, it seemed. This appalling piece of Giger-esque architecture was too good to be true. I'm positive that if I were ever to go back during the day, it would be impossible to find. It wouldn�t surprise me to find, after consulting the local historical records, that such a building had never existed. In fact, I don�t think I ever want to go to Providence during the day.
I'm so grateful to Alex for indulging this whim of mine (more than a whim really, but that's what it must have seemed.) I should point out too, that the black church wasn't on Angell St; we passed it driving out of the area (ah, what an image!)
When we got back to the trailer there was one more encounter in store: a skunk! This was the first American animal I'd really encountered in its natural setting. She was a real beauty, too! (I find it hard to think of skunks as anything but female, which may come from the memorable female skunk at the end of Robert Lowell's famous poem 'Skunk Hour'.) This skunk was, if I recall, going through the pasta which had been turfed out the back of the trailer (what I can�t remember is how we came to have pasta there. Am I imagining this, Alex?) I managed to get a good snap of this lustrous apparition, and you can see it on the HTML version, which ought to be on my page by tomorrow.
A word about skunks and their smell. I like it. This was one of the big surprises about America. I'd heard all these dreadful things about the smell of skunks, and whereas I concede that the aroma is potent, and even aggressive, one of the things I miss most about America is the experience of driving at night through the country, and suddenly finding your senses overcome with the bitter, musky, coffee smell of skunk (There is a coffee-grinding shop in Gregory St in Sandy Bay, and walking past it one day I was certain for a moment that I was back in America.) I should add that when I eventually got to smell Fox, the odour was not dissimilar, though a little less strident (there are no foxes in Tasmania, FYI. Well, except for the ten or so in my house :))
This was to be my last night at the trailer. The end of a wonderful four days with Alex Rakune, my first host in the USA. I'll never forget the times I've described here, but now, as then, it's time to move on to the next leg of the journey.
Click here to see a page of other Australian Big Things
