Farthest North, Log 3: Arctic Landscape
© 2013 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved
Farthest North, Log 3: Arctic Landscape
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Farthest North, Log 2: Arctic Reveal
Farthest North, Log 2: Arctic Reveal
© 2013 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved
The camera gear – all of it – has made it on board the plane. In the high regions that is not a given, so I disperse the things I need. My photo vest has a camera body in one pocket, a very bright F2.8 70-200 lens in the other, a waterproof case with 32 gig cards to keep the camera fed. In the pack has the shotgun mic, my field recorder, pounds of batteries and cables and the hydrophone. It barely squeezes under the seat – I should be sitting in the middle one where the space below the seat in front is widest – but four hours in the middles? Forget it. n yet another pocket a broadcast quality digital recorder. The recorder, a birthday present from Valerie, is for taking notes but if the primary recorder is damaged or if the most important piece of sound gear doesn’t make it. This is the parabolic stereo mic. If that bag which also has the carbon fiber tripod and all my arctic clothing is lost in transit, the pocket recorder will be the only stereo device. How it will do in the presence of the distance sound of fracturing glaciers and whatever else presents, I have no idea. But the main camera box, large, yellow, waterproof and heavy as hell, is the overhead and that is huge relief.
The 4 ½ hours of airtime goes by quickly. Out of Toronto low cumulous white out the land but just over Churchill Falls, as we cross into western Labrador, there’s a break. The land below, ground flat by glacier and patterned in reticulations of small water confirms we aren’t in Kansas anymore: this is the arctic, and we are here.
Farthest North, Log 1: En Route
Farthest North, Log 1: En Route
© 2013 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved
I am flying into the sun, a sun that refuses to quite give up the ghost, though it’s after nine o’clock. It is one day past the Solstice. The twin-engine Beechcraft is the oldest thing I’ve flown in for 20 years. The last old crate was a DC 3, then the only regular service in Costa Rica from San Jose to the Osa. The cowling blew off the starboard ending and they circled the field, landed again, found the damn thing and tied it on with a clothes hanger and off we went, indestructible. This time I’m dead-heading the other way. West of North, toward Toronto. The plane roars and rattles. It reminds me of the contraption Jimmy Stewart pilots in The Flight of the Phoenix (the 1965 original), except the kid at the controls has no idea who Jimmy Stewart was.
For all that this plane is the safest since that DC 3. The ground below is all farmland, we can land just about anywhere, just gliding in, dead-stick, slower than you’d dare to drive your car on any four lane highway. We are 2/3 empty, there are only two crew. There is no security door and you can watch them at the controls, adjusting the trim, changing transponder from one tower to the next. And that peachy-orange light pouring through.
Toronto is only the departure point. The next leg of the trip is the flight to Kangerlussuaq, at the top of the long fjord of the same name, in southern Greenland. There I join up with Adventure Canada’s ship, and we cruise north along the western coast, a land of glaciers and calving icebergs. In three days, I’ll be across the Arctic Circle, where the sun only halfway sets this time of year. I will sleep little, that’s how I am in the field. I don’t want to miss a thing. This is only the beginning.
Mark Seth Lender
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Bellows
Bellows
© 2013 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved
Spring clings to the Spanish moss. Comes up from the swamp in sheaves of mist. It brings the nesting herons home. And raises the blood in an ancient’s bones.
Big
Bull
Alligators.
Breaking out.
Wake up from the wintery mud where they sleep alone. Slide into that swamp they call their own. They stretch, halfway out of the water and expand their throats like over-stuffed pockets. And all around that water starts to dance. Like spit on a griddle. Like ants in your pants. Like boiling oil. It doesn’t have a choice – the bigger the gator the deeper the voice.
But down where the dancing starts it’s only silence humans can hear. I know. I’ve ducked my head below where a person ought not to go, and listened: The only thing that greets your ears is the scrape and the rake of alligator toes. Only another gator knows what all that dancing means…
She hears (what you can only see) and moves on over to the Alligator of Her Dreams.
Ignited by her cold-blooded heat he burns, and bellows all the more. Her emotions bulletproof, close to the vest, but when all is said and done she leans her head upon the leather-studded back above his massive chest. Completely still. You can barely see her breathe, or him.
Possession is a two-way street when all the lovers are armed to the teeth!
Possession
Field Note
The St. Augustine Alligator Farm and Zoological Park at 100 years of age has a name too old to change even though, nothing Prada, no Gucci boots find their origins here. They never did. There is instead a large and well cared for collection of rare reptiles and a gem of a swamp, the only one left in the entire area. Not only alligators abound but hundreds and hundreds of nesting egrets, herons, storks and even roseate spoonbills. That swamp is their moat, and the gators are the posted guards. Nest robbers read them like a neon sign:
KEEP OUT!
Trespassers will be eaten!
While true it is also too much the Hollywood version. In the movies. On TV. And consequently in our nightmare dreams. We think we know Al the Gator but we don’t. His hunger portrayed as ravenous is only occasional. His temperament quite variable. This I say from personal experience.
You can turn your back on the gator St. Augustine’s calls Bob. Sipowitz? Not so much. And both of them know their names. Each will slowly swing his head around and look at you if you call to them. And after a while, you will see clearly that each face is unique and identifiable. Which leads to the presumption that the alligators also recognize and distinguish their individual selves and quite likely us one from the other.
Alligators keep a military order. The penalty for Little Gator eating what Gig Gator believes to be his can a crushed head. Likewise the snowy egret who ventures incautiously close to water ends badly. Yet Alligators, male and female, cold blooded though they be, have a tender heart. Once they choose each other they are loyal and gentle. This in their own terms. Not like us. And not so different as we might have thought.
If you plan to visit St. Augustine bring a camera. A telephoto lens (between at least 300 MM up to 500 MM) plus a good medium zoom like the Canon 70-200 would be the ideal combination. However, the birds are close enough – and the gators big enough – that consumer cameras are sufficient for most people. Spring is an exceptionally good time for birders as the plumages are spectacular, the behavior rich, and baby birds loud and plentiful. Not to mention, the gators will be bellowing.
Sound Bites
Here’s what bellowing alligators sound like, up close and personal:
Alligators BELLOWING (MONO – Short #3
Mark Seth Lender reading Bellows on Living on Earth(PRI)
Alligator Gallery
Low Rent High Price
Roseate Spoonbills Compete for a Perch
The Alligator Farm in St. Augustine, Florida has its very own gator-filled swamp. In spring that swamp is also home to as many as 600 pairs of nesting egrets, herons, wood storks and roseate spoonbills. The gators keep the birds and their nests safe from a host of predators but, there is a price to be paid.
Low Rent high Price
Birds of Many Feathers weave and dance and settle in to guard their fragile eggs. All these nests: of many shapes fastened to branches thick and thin high and low. Hidden in the tropical green of cypress. Sequestered in the cup-shaped pockets where palm fronds join their prehistoric trunks. In plain sight upon the topgallant of a great live oak where only the widest wings set sail, or touch down. The swamp below is a remnant, reduced to a vanishing point reptilian and dark. The canopy above is where the wealth resides, shimmering like the many-colored light of planets and stars – Birds among alligators, by the hundreds of pairs! Danger is the rent. When rent is due, there will be no partial payments made.
Soft soft silent s-curve of tail in sans serif lower case, only a ripple for a wake. Only eyes and nostrils show, no more remarked than a shelf of water-worn stones when water is low.
Alligator.
Ancient grace.
Drifts at the gate.
Waits… waits… waits…
Snowy Egret dips too careless and too close, wingtips clipping water. Better to thirst. Better heat than trip those golden feet to cool in the sulfurous spring where an ancient device lies ready to be sprung… All is undone.
Roseate Spoonbill on wings hued of sunrise, so confident in color and in form, the clapping bill a rounded gentleness, glides down to an untimely end. Jaws like vice grips, clamped in that unchanging Alligator grin.
Bobcat and Raccoon will not set foot here. Nor Climbing Possum, Creeping Snake. Every would-be robber of the nest fears the cut Alligator takes. Thus Great Egret finds repose here, Wood Stork and Spoonbill find retreat. Safe from the thieves they fear the most dear, while the Doorman only charges what he eats. Symbiosis by the bite dear, wing beat by wing beat
When the rent is due...
To hear Mark Seth Lender reading Low Rent High Price on Living on Earth (PRI) please click the player below:
Snowy Egret
Learn the “Backstory” of Low Rent High Price. Listen to an interview of Mark Seth Lender by Living on Earth Senior Editor Eileen Bolinsky