field trip, party of four

Am I excommunicated from the fellowship of city lovers if I admit that, from time to time, I want nothing more from my love than to get the hell away?For the first time in months, I headed beyond city limits to celebrate the long weekend at Starved Rock State Park. My good friend, confirmed urbanite and fellow volunteer piled me into her trusty little car along with two of the adoptable dogs from our animal shelter ARFhouse Chicago, Deck and Peach, and hit the road. Destination: cheap gas, cornfields and frolicking in the forest. Starved Rock’s thirteen miles of trail wind through a series of sandstone canyons along the Illinois River. The well-marked paths are meticulously groomed, with solid wooden stairs at each change of elevation: all designed to keep it an easy hiking experience for families and for dogs. (We were clever enough to discover one notable exception, when our triumphant arrival at the final trail marker brought us within feet of our exit—facing a steep metal staircase edged in sharp, jagged scales. Great for steady footing if you’re hiking in foam flip-flops, but impassably cruel for dogs.) Peach flashed her lunkety pit-bull grin from the first minute to the last, while Deck bounced along like a champion on his three strong legs. And though it’s easy to get blasé about the brown old Midwestern temperate forests, the right combination of travelers can still feel, and share through each other’s eyes, a magic there. Glimmering spiderwebs, luminous emerald semaphore-flashes from slick black cavern walls, slender moon-headed mushrooms, the scent of soil and stone and water… Deck and Peach ended the evening back in their cages, where they’ll continue to wait for their families to come along. But for those few full hours together we clambered, and pointed, and basked, and bounced, and grinned the day away.

i’m coveting…

…these watercolors from English wildlife artist Tim Hayward.

His website has additional work, most in a traditional wildlife portraiture style, but it’s the paintings in these collections— Pedestals and Pedestals II —that inspire me most.

The paintings’ luminous backgrounds shed a hushed and exquisite stillness on fragments of architectural detail, while animals leap and balance and burst into flight. Exotic avians like the flamingo and the lyrebird, backyard icons like the squirrel and rabbit—each is caught in a moment’s immobility, a lightning-flash intersection between their scurry toward nonexistence and the slower journey of even our most enduring works in the same direction. They’re quirky and reflective, elegiac and joyful in profound balance. My kind of memento mori.

(All images from Jonathan Cooper Gallery. Tim Hayward’s own website here.)

know your species: Panthera tigris balica

The late days of summer and the flickers of a coming fall always get me in the mood for a vacation—a restlessness, an urgency to see and to do and to wander before winter comes. So through the magic of the internets, also known as the magic of being too damn poor, let’s take a trip to the remote splendor of Bali. Mmmm, Bali—just the name tastes exotic. But intrepid (imaginary) travelers that we are, let’s go further and travel through time, to visit a lost species native to that (presumably) breathtaking Indonesian island—the Bali tiger.

All the world’s tigers belong to a single species, with our familiar Siberians and Sumatrans forming two sub-species of Panthera tigris. In addition to the five still living, three subspecies of tigers were driven to extinction in the twentieth century. With only a single island to call home, the Bali tiger was particularly vulnerable to habitat destruction. As population pressures deforested the landscape, a craze for destination hunting among wealthy Europeans sealed the tigers’ fate. The last known example, an adult female, was shot in September 1937. Unconfirmed sightings were reported over the next decades, but whatever their truth, Bali’s forests were soon too small and fragmented to support even a solitary tiger.

The Bali was the smallest of tigers—at 6’ to 7’ long, comparable to our cougar. Its fur had fewer stripes than typical for tigers, sometimes punctuated with black spots. With no captive specimens in zoos and no living tigers captured in film, they exist today only in a few museums, speaking just in skulls, and in their skins.

Bonus! Here you’ll find the first in our series of extinct species trading cards and greeting cards. Packed with pictures, stats and fun facts about these ghosts of the ark—we’ll be exploring more wildlife from the past, so check back often to collect them all… Download the Bali tiger trading card. Download the Bali tiger greeting card.

scratchin’ and survivin’

This is the Cabrini-Green housing project.

15,000 inhabitants once lived here in 3600 units, divided between row houses and high-climbing towers. Like all public housing, it was begotten by optimism mated to pragmatism. Given: that the poor, mostly Italian laborers were going to cling where they had carved out a precarious shantytown living; so clean and healthy homes could be provided, a springboard to stability. The first construction in 1942 created the Frances Cabrini Rowhouses, named for the Italian nun who ministered to these same poor neighborhoods. She would become the first American citizen canonized in 1946, the patron saint of immigrants.

Then came the high-rises. Then came the white flight from cities across America, the shift in Cabrini-Green’s population to become almost entirely African American. Then came the factory closings, the shift in Cabrini-Green’s population to become marked by poverty, unemployment, death of the dreams of improvement, advancement, transcendence. Optimism’s race was run, and pragmatism’s roots spread. Green space: paved. Fire-damaged apartments: boarded up, left charred and vacant. Stalled elevators: grounded on the bottom floor. No longer a stepping stone to higher ground. The last stop. Wrap the buildings tight in wire, like a cage.

Amidst the gang wars, the crime, the fear so intense that police refused to patrol, Mayor Jane Byrne moved in. Her presence was supposed to mark yet another new era, a reclamation. Instead she left after three weeks; and her fourth-floor unit, with its rear door welded shut for protection, proved such a popular innovation with the gang members who moved in that it became standard practice for drug dealers throughout the projects.

Fifty years after it was built: demolition. Forced by the federal government, Chicago’s Plan for Transformation calls for the destruction of all its existing high-rise housing. Officials estimate 2,000 to 4,000 current residents; no one knows how many squatters remain, pressed behind plywood in the empty spaces.

And now this Queen Anne’s Lace has staked its claim. A ruthless opportunist, Daucus carota is supremely adaptable to disturbed soils, and brutally efficient in strangling out other species that try to lay their thin roots down. Neltje Blanchan rhapsodized over its imperial domination in her 1917 work Wild Flowers Worth Knowing: “Having proved fittest in the struggle for survival… it takes its course of empire westward year by year, finding most favorable conditions for colonizing in our vast, uncultivated area; and the less aggressive, native occupants are only too readily crowded out. Would that the advocates of unrestricted immigration of foreign peasants studied the parallel examples among floral invaders!”

Inspired by Blanchan’s mad anthropomorphizing, we might be seduced to believe that Queen Anne’s Lace deploys even more insidious tactics to defeat its competitors and predators. The flower’s seeds have been used as a contraceptive—preventatively and morning-after—at least since the time of Hippocrates. Chinese laboratory trials indicate that terpenoid compounds in the seeds block production of progesterone, which is essential to uterine implantation. Would that the advocates of unrestricted procreation studied the parallel… well, enough of that.

Maybe—just maybe—there’s nothing sinister in the wild carrot’s quest to inhibit human reproduction. (Did I mention that another of its nicknames is Mother Die? Apparently bringing it into the home presages the death of the gatherer’s mother. I’m just sayin’.) Abortifacient charms aside, I’ll add in the interests of full disclosure that this Class C noxious weed is my favorite flower. Spotted in highway medians, it’s my heart’s true sunshine. It’s an unlikely choice for me, with its old-fashioned frills and abundance. I’m usually drawn to sleek lines, single blossoms, the chilly groomed economy of a calla lily. But there’s something raffish about this hairy-legged, tumbling thing. It’s a tomboy flower in lace collars and petticoats. Blanchan sums it up as “sprangly”, and I can think of no better word for its exuberant self-sufficiency. If the supermodel calla lily is my aspirational bloom, then the untidy urban wraith Queen Anne’s Lace is my own soul’s flower.

White gave way to black. Upwardly mobile gave way to desperate. Construction gave way to decay, and then to destruction, and now the next wave has taken over, an advancing tide of white foam washing over it all.

wildlife on the web

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources has launched a new website dedicated to Living With Wildlife in Illinois. The site offers useful information about coexisting with the state’s wildlife, including: Identifying animals that live in your area Helping orphaned or injured wildlife Preventing encounters that could be dangerous to you, or to wild animals

Although the site’s focus is wildlife native to Illinois, much of the information is helpful no matter where you live. Check it out here.

(And for all you dwellers in other states, it’s worth finding your state’s website to get more familiar with the species you share a state with.)

(Also, “on the web”? Who still says that? Sorry. I can’t resist the alliteration. It’s a problem.)

magic abroad in the air

And what better place to begin than with introductions all around? Meet our blog’s patron bird, the nightingale. A small songbird of the flycatcher group (family Muscicapidae), the nightingale might well have faded into the obscurity of its cousins the wheat-ears, the silverbirds and chats without one singular talent: its song. (Did you know that nightingales migrate in a non-stop journey from northern Europe to wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa—a flight of 38 million times its own length? Few of us do. In the shadow of the peregrine, this is the curse of all birds: flying will not make them famous.)

To Hans Christian Andersen, the nightingale’s song was joyful and light as a mother’s kiss; to Keats, mourning his brother’s death at age 19, it was a “plaintive” dirge, a “requiem”. But however it may feel to you, the nightingale’s song is agreed to be the most exquisite the class Aves has to offer. Birds magazine, whose editors must have heard a tweet or two in their time, was moved to conclude in 1898, “O doubt those who never hear the song of the Nightingale are denied a special privilege.” Indeed, the name that has followed them for over a millennium, direct from the Anglo-Saxon, means “night singer”—the ‘”gale” still living among us in another form as our word “yell”.

In Eric Maschwitz and Manning Sherwin’s 1940 song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” (since recorded by Vera Lynn, Nat King Cole and a dozen others paled by comparison to the definitive Bobby Darin version), two lovers’ first meeting transforms the world to magic. Angels dining at the Ritz. Streets paved with stars. And when he turned and smiled at her… cue that nightingale.

To know the magic, we must remember that the nightingale has not been a London dweller since shortly after Dickens reported hearing them in the Harrow Road. Increased urbanization sent them winging to quieter habitat. But they don’t shun cities entirely. In fact, nightingales are observed in cities throughout Europe. Far from being silenced by the roar of the crowd, the nightingale simply fills its lungs and sings even louder, to send its voice to any other nightingales, or lovers, who might be listening. The nightingale thrives among us, and prospers in our centers of commerce, and makes sure to sing its song a little louder.

So the nightingale is our perfect patron here, where we’ll celebrate the traces of nature that mark our steps through a city. For us, the urbanized, for you and me and Bobby Darin, life still holds magic. We don’t see visions, and don’t see the face of God: it’s the nightingale we see, the voice of the wild, calling through the city to find us. The nightingale is the magic, this real and living thing of feathers and of flaws. The world around us holds all the magic we know, or ever need. It’s being reminded of that—by flowers breaking through the sidewalk, by the dancing rainbow on a pigeon’s wing, by the songbird’s echo in the tremor of a kiss—that exalts us beyond the city, where our own noise can drown us.

(And in 2004, a solitary nightingale was spotted by ornithologists in western London.)