Chapter 14: Leaving it to Beaver

Should New Yorkers learn to chill out?


What does the return of Castor Canadensis mean to New York City, really?
Image © Valerie Druguet

To quote Ed Abbey in the first punches of his Desert Solitaire (as much of a book as a beating), every human has a favorite place, a place known to him/her as “the most beautiful place on earth”. Abbey attributes this to there being “no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment”. Our “ideal place”, the “one true home” could be anywhere, depending on the individual: “a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country” or, for “those of a less demanding sensibility […] a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan…”

Ouch!
We all have a favorite spot in mind. Me, apart from the entire Universe which I consider to be like, totally awesome, or Inwood Park, the best Manhattan can really muster, or the stinking hot Amazon, my ideal place has always been, since childhood, a few square yards of silent understory in the cool and dark – and to me, cozy – embrace of a thick patch of hemlock trees outback of my folk’s place in northern Vermont. Nothing grandiose, no giant waterfalls, sweeping vistas or charismatic beasts involved, just a small fragment of biosphere tucked away within one hundred and fifty acres of maple and ash and beech and butternut with small things like toads and spring peepers and jumping mice that bounce about the grove within the intimacy of their ecological niches. There’s a tiny stream that trickles through the Hemlock and winds and loops around their trunks like some Lilliputian version of a great meandering river, creating a series of small, sensual beaches of pink sand and blue pebbles where the toads hang out. Then there’s the moss, the plump green moss, on the dank fallen logs of ancestral trees where you can spot red eft; the celestial petals of the white and violet trillium; the foamflowers; the generous curves of cinnamon ferns hanging over the stream’s steeper banks; not to mention the unwavering vibe of mystery emanating from conifers in general, the inebriating whiff of resin, as primeval as oxygen, as old as granite or the grin on a dinosaur. Finally, there’s the clear water of the stream itself, like liquid silk, running its course, dribbling away, downhill, through space, through time, one day to reach the sea, the abyss. This is rain water, runoff from the green mountains, it irrigates and inseminates this dot on the map, the world to me.
I used to go out to the grove as a lonely kid and sit on its shores and look for gnomes and fairies and daydream my summer afternoons away. It was my outdoor den, my most beautiful place on earth, and it set the stage for my pre-adolescent visions and fantasies. It taught me to hide out and aim high, like a kitten, to look up and peer through dark canopies - and into the future that lay ahead- for rarity and beauty to pounce on, to possess, things like the fleeting scarlet of tanagers, the fluorescence of Blackburnian warblers – or one day soon, the female of my species. Let me add to Abbey’s observation: the ‘ideal place’ also has the power to define us, it forges our identity, sexual or otherwise, and by ‘identity’ I refer to that thing we recall in the face of adversity. For reassurance. For strength. When we call out for Mommy, or for the team or party or tribe to whom we belong. Some of us rely on the flag, on patriotism, others invoke Jesus or Mohammed, the Founding Fathers, Yoda and Luke Skywalker for all I care, movie stars or brand names even, others still we fall for the workaday version of the Stockholm syndrome, by kissing our employer’s ass and defending it, too. Me, I take Hemlock. Since my childhood in the woods I have pledged allegiance to the memory of this seemingly random spot of Appalachian green and it has since been my own private life raft, my savior, my imaginary friend, my church, my nation-state – my identity. When confronted by adversity in my adult life (like, every day for the past 30 years spent living behind enemy lines, in bars, in foreign countries and crowded places) I simply call up the image of my favorite place on earth. My home in the woods. It’s automatic, compulsive. It allows me to regress to the comfort and safety I felt as a 10 year old, crouching under those trees. I use the memory of this secret outdoor womb, its sweet and uplifting smell of water, sap, chlorophyll and rot, the same way I rush for my morning mug of bean, so I can wake up again and plow ahead, or when I reach for my daily measure of opiates, to regulate my flow of serotonin, to finally calm down. Or when I call in on my buddies Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. Yep, this little place of mine has been my favorite drug of all time. My ultimate addiction. And I have returned to it physically, once every 5 years or so, for a refill, a walloping snort of the Dave identity.
No longer. On a recent visit ‘back home’, last Thanksgiving as a matter of fact, I walked over to my most beautiful place on earth for a fix and it wasn’t there anymore because it was gone. Underwater, submerged, erased both by time and by H20. More precisely, by two f-ing beavers.
(Let it be said that when you leave the blue city and set up camp in the wild red woods, squirrels, mice, raccoons and beaver, like doing your taxes, can turn you into an instant republican).
The two beavers (I later caught them working…) had just recently moved in, judging by the freshness of the cut wood, the tooth marks, the glistening logs of young poplar used to make the damn, the fresh cakes of mud applied to the side of the hut. In a flash, my tiny stream had become a swimming pool for giant rodentia. I searched the water’s surface for signs of my beloved beaches beneath. Nada. My dark green hemlock trees, now standing knee-deep in a small lake, would all die in the few years ahead from aquatic overkill, soon to be giant broken quills sticking out of the brown back of a still-assed beaver pond. I paused to recover. Part of me was gone, forever. Drowned out by beaver. I felt powerless. Then I smiled. Time to move on. I thought of these Hemlock trees in the near future; their hollowed out trunks would soon be homes for nesting Tree Swallows, Wood Duck and maybe even a few Great Blue Herons crouching like gargoyles at their tops. Come to think of it, these trees, they’d stick out like living totem poles. Reincarnation, just around the corner. And the slimy periphery of the new pond would be the breeding ground of red-spotted newts and tree frogs, home to mosquito larvae and baby twelve-spotted dragonflies. And the pond’s shores would have pink lady-slipper orchids growing on it, and in the water’s depths would hide the hideous giant water bug.
All of these new things and more for Thanksgiving. A beaver’s gift. Beware, because the gift of Castor canadensis is always a gift in disguise. It looks like destruction, but it ain’t. Beavers aren’t engineers, they’re horticulturists, they make habitat. They unnerve the hell out of us humans, too. These two not only sowed the seeds of a new community, a new ecosystem, a new place for this forest, this valley, these mountains, this planet and universe, they invited albeit forcefully one bipedal predecessor (me), to withdraw, to let go. To grow up, already. When a beaver slaps the water with its tail it is to alarm its congeners that potential danger is near. These two guys slapped me right in the face. Good, because Kitten now an Alpha wolf. From now on I embrace novelty and loss, catharsis. My new identity? I breath in, one change at a time. And I howl with the earth.
A few notes about beavers. A species of giant beaver was part of the Meg-fauna in North America as recently as the last Ice age, and it was the size of a black bear. Whoa. And what triggers a beaver’s damn building? Water, of course: beavers have been experimentally shown to start amassing sticks and mud in front of speakers that broadcast the sound of water – duh - but also, the lay of the land appears to be equally important, but which topographical cues the discerning beaver actually looks for remains a complete mystery. Is it all touch and go, trial and error? A failed damn here, a successful one there? Experience? In any event, a beaver’s digs can be, have been, ginormous. Consider the one near the present town of Berlin, in New Hampshire. The historic dam measured 4000 feet in length and the ensuing pond – or lake- housed 40 separate beaver lodges and as many families of beaver. It follows quite naturally that for all their construction of ‘dams’ and ‘houses’ Beavers have long been compared to us, of course, because “unlike almost any other animal except human beings, beavers actively modify their environment”. Hmm. Let’s correct this half-witted quote from an aging guide book uncovered in the dustbin of my childhood bookshelf. What about ants? Termites? Beavers are just like everything else out there; not only do they modify their environment, they evolve with that environment. The fact that they build big stuff only makes it more obvious. But their influence amounts qualitatively to no more, no less, than the wing-beat of a butterfly. As part of a self-creating, self-referential system (called life on earth), they and everything else out there are all, simultaneously, responsible for creating all of the other of nature’s ‘components’. They are part of a system, a holon, they’re driving forces within a low entropy, complexity-driven dynamic called life in the universe. Funny, because when us humans do something like build a dam, we achieve the exact opposite. We drain the system, we weaken it. We channel the water and kill a diversity of life forms and amplify the risk of one hundred year floods and aggravate erosion. Whereas beaver dams create habitat, provide flood control, minimize erosion, increase aquifer recharge and improve water quality by reducing silting of streams in addition to providing habitat for marsh plants that do the purifying themselves. Beavers indirectly create great farmland, too, by damming watercourse and allowing nutrient rich silt to accumulate. So, easy on the analogies between beavers and humans, because when all is said and done there is no comparison: we are outclassed by beaver biotechnology, and find ourselves in an incomparably different ecological niche, one of true parasitism, which according to the ecological definition, defines the behavior of those organisms that take all yet return nothing to their host – in our case, the planet we stand on.
Speaking of erroneous or misleading analogies, I say we also refrain as a species from using terms the likes of “busy as a beaver” or “busy bee” or thinking of ants and monkeys and hummingbirds as equally industrious workaholics. They’re not. Nature is indolent. It doesn’t fidget or fuss. Its stays calm either to cool down or to warm up. Beaver’s work 5 hours a day at the most and even then take a number of breaks and retreat to their huts for a doze. As for bees and ants, they spend 20% of their time doing chores, the remainder of their existence unfolds as siesta or just a plain old state of ‘quiet vigilance”. High-strung critters like hummers or shrews rest anywhere from 70 to 80 % of the time (in addition to a good night’s sleep), sitting on a twig or sprawled out in a burrow. Monkeys hang out for ¾ of the day. For most, resting is actually mandatory. Consider the Moose. For every hour of grazing on vegetation, it needs 4 hours to stand still and metabolize its food - no other option but to chill. All in all, in the functional world of Life on earth (when devoid of post-industrial humans), plants and animals are inherently Buddhist, they’re calorie saving and cautious. Humans are 4 times more active (neurotic?) than anything else out there. “Busy as a human” should be the correct usage. Or rather, modern humans of the Western variety (by western I mean anybody born into a civilization centered around organized agriculture). Indigenous hunter-gatherers go to work 3 or 4 hours a day. The rest of the time, where they are still permitted to survive and live according to their own rights and agenda (or absence thereof), they hang out in hammocks and laugh irreverently at our happiness of pursuit. They also believe in the reality of their dreams.
No one is immune to misusing metaphors. The Lenne Lenape, Indigenous hunter-gatherers of the New York city area nick-named New Amsterdam’s earliest European inhabitants…beavers. No joke (although the thought of some chief hailing the arrival of one Peter Stuyvesant with a “Yo Beaver!” sort of splits my side). There is a serious explanation. The Lenape worldview was one couched in totemic thinking, like with a lot of indigenous cultures, whereby people took from nature and/or the enemy what powers were needed for oneself. If you cut off and ate your opponents heads (like, in New Guinea), you usurped his strength. If you took bison like the Lakota, you inherited its qualities. And if you were Lenape and you saw a bunch of booze-ridden Dutch traders running around the lower Hudson killing beavers and shipping their pelts off to a distant unknown land and then building wooden houses and forts all over lower Mannahatta, well then, you’d think they had a totemic relationship to a great big beaver ancestor dude in the netherworld and that the more beaver they consumed, the more beaver power they assimilated. Actually, early Dutch and later, English traders and businessmen the likes of Astor hogged so much beaver the animal went extinct in much of the area.
And now, for those of you itching about the etymology for the slang usage for beaver, I looked this up online:

“Gynecological sense ("female genitals, especially with a display of pubic hair") is 1927 British slang, transferred from earlier meaning "a bearded man" (1910), from the appearance of split beaver pelts.”


If you look back at our history, we never stopped building. Even the Great Depression got us making more crap, then after the War, consuming more and more, converting more and more natural resources into throw-away human capital. New York has been our economic engine room ever since. We are responsible. First we transformed the region, then the country, now our tentacles reach out and wrap around the entire planet. We can’t stop. Even when we have the two front teeth of our all-consuming man-beaver empire removed, we grow a bigger tooth back. And then we cry freedom. When perhaps, we should be, in this city that never sleeps, reverting to the 5 hour workday, a workday replete with multiple breaks and pauses back within the safety of our digs. Let’s be like real beavers for a change. New Yorkers, chill out.
I find it mildly ironic that the real McCoy has now, this past year, returned to New York City for the first time in centuries. José, a male beaver swam into town from up north and staked out some of the Bronx River –the part the flows within the Bronx zoo – for himself. He was named José after Congressman José E. Serrano (D-Bronx) who, according to the papers, “has helped secure $14.5 million in federal grants for the Bronx River's restoration over the past five years. A quote from congressman Serrano: "I've always felt that what's good for the environment is also good for the Bronx and its citizens."
Sigh.
I wish Jose’s return had hit the front pages with a slam-dunk, more specifically and effectively by embodying the message this animal is truly capable of carrying, from the standpoint of its biology, its ecology, its behavior, one of joyous lethargy and sloth, of transformation, of creativity. Beaverhood could signify a new value system, a new paradigm, the realization for us absurdly frenetic humans that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell” (to take, once again, from Abbey), and that the built-in logic of industrial capitalism and work for the sake of work (and greed) is to devour the world inside out; in thermodynamic terms, like having an infinite system try to sustain itself within a finite biosphere. Can’t work, won’t happen. We work too much for stuff we don’t even need – to be happy. We are the new meteor, the new extinction. Worse. We are committing suicide, buckling at the knees, collapsing under the weight of our own gluttony. We take everything down with us. Anticipate total ecocide. Expect that we will no longer be able to write, as Abbey did: “this is the most beautiful place on Earth.”
Unless, of course, we leave it to Beaver to slap us in the face.

Howl with the Earth,
Xo
Dave

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