Jukebox In My Head

It is the day after the equinox, Good Friday to boot, and I suppose this is our celebration, since watching wildlife is as close as we get to spirituality. We are in the viewing area about quarter to seven this morning. There are three or four cars and a few people with cameras and scopes already set up in the pull-out. The sun is still behind the Sangre de Christos, but it is light enough to see the birds roosting. Steam rises around them.

Most aren’t moving yet, or if they are, just beginning to stir or preen. (Click on the photo at the top to get the idea. La Veta Pass is between the two ranges, Mt. Blanca on the left.) But as the minutes wear on, they begin to move around more freely. From the further reaches of the refuge, cranes begin to rise. A few from in front of us join them. Others are jumping in anticipation. The energy level rises with the sound of their cries, and soon it is as if the ones in the air are screaming at the others to get off their cartilages and join them.

About 7:15 we drive over to Eight Mile Road, pull off the side of the road and just let the birds waft over us. This is the greatest thrill, to see the birds honking overhead, getting into formation, occasionally running into each other as they head off. They rarely fly directly overhead, but sometimes they are low and close enough that you can hear the quiet, almost mechanical whoosh-whoosh of their wings beating. Wow.

Our friend Kathy, who first turned us on to the crane phenomenon, had suggested driving farther south on Gunbarrel Road. We took off, passing more small farms and ranches. Behind one ranch house, there are literally thousands of cranes standing out there amongst the cattle – a real sight. The pavement ends. The ranches disappear. A sign offered lots two miles off a dirt road near the foothills. We wind up next to a field with junked cars lined up to the horizon. In front of the trailer home where, I assume, the owner lives, there are some metal crane art pieces. I didn't get a very good photo with the iPhone.

I really had fun with the iPhone camera app, though. It is desperately simple, takes excellent photos, and I found it an invaluable device for recording a trip like this. The photos came out better than I expected, and for someone who likes to document travel, this is as easy as it gets.

After breakfast at the Mountain View Restaurant, we head back out to the refuge. Last year we found a large group of birds along a road in a field and watched them during the day as they mingled, ate and danced in the high grain. But today there is no high grass and no birds, either, on the eastern road inside the refuge.

It was top for a nap, but soon, after stopping for some coffee and a donut at Don Thomas Bakery, we were back in the refuge. Arriving about four p.m. at the circle area on the south end on Eight Mile Road, we set up and get more than an hour's worth of intense crane interaction. Birds are flying in and out all over the place; it kinda reminds me of a SXSW afternoon schmoozing session for cranes.

We get ample opportunity to watch the birds take off and land. It seems so effortless. Some glide in from high above, falling out of the sky, dropping their legs as they get closer to the ground to slow their descent. Just before they hit, they flop their wings a couple of times and land in a quiet flutter. Some glide in like bullets on a straight line across the field not fifteen feet off the ground before the characteristic leg dropping, fluttering and landing.

Taking off seems just as easy. A couple of hops and they are airborne, and those flapping engines take them easily into the air and upward. They bark at each other as they organize their formations. Sometimes one bird, sometimes two, often many more, head off together. Apparently, cranes, who mate for life, also travel in family groups.

Far above us, another group of maybe 50 cranes are circling. They are up high enough that they are difficult to spot with the naked eye unless the sun is just right. With the binocs, you can watch them speeding up, gliding and slowing down so each can maintain his/her position in the circle. It's mesmerizing to watch, a crane merry-go-round in the sky.

After asking a guy to move his car and stop approaching the birds with his camera, a ranger walks over and watches the high flyers with us for a few minutes. Nobody really knows what they are doing up there, but his theory is that the birds are circling to check the winds, and if they find a good thermal going in the right direction and the time is right, some might take off for the north, toward their breeding grounds.

Dinner tonight is at Baldo's, the Mexican restaurant Kathy suggested. It was great. And then back out to the refuge for the fourth time today. It is still warm as the sun pokes in and out of clouds above the peaks before setting, and again we get to watch waves of cranes taking off and dispersing into the night. You can't ask more; the cranes have behaved perfectly all day.

March 21, 2008
Monte Vista, Colorado

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Billie and I again celebrated our birthdays in Monte Vista, Colorado. We drove there to watch sandhill cranes, who spend the month of March at the Monte Vista Wildlife Refuge during their migration north. It's our second year, and I started this weblog with two posts from that trip, here and
here. (Click on the gator's snout to get the full impact of my iPhone picture.)

South Park was a big bowl of white. A huge snowdrift that sometimes towered over the car stretched for miles from the bottom of Kenosha Pass all the way to Red Hill Pass. Wind blowing from the north across the top of that drift made the road wet and sometimes a little icy, but once I got around a big truck splashing water everywhere, we didn’t have any problem navigating it. We stopped in Fairplay to take photos of the burro memorial and pick up coffees and pastries at a shop across the street. The owner says that hers was the first coffee place in town. Today she shares the Fairplay caffeination business with three other shops. No Starbucks.

There are two roads down to Monte Vista once you get in the San Luis Valley. Today we took the eastern road, Colorado 17, to Alamosa and then over to Monte Vista on Colorado 160. North of Alamosa we stopped at the Colorado Alligator Farm, near Mosca. I have always wanted to go there, having only been to an alligator farm once, in Florida during a spring-break trip back in the '60s. Just the idea of alligators at 7500 feet has kept my interest high.

The secret is that the farm sits on a thermal vent that keeps the area and water warm, even during the cold, snowy winters. Underground water is one of the things that makes the San Luis Valley distinct. At an average of 7,500 square feet, boxed in on three sides by mountain ranges, the San Luis is a desert, with about eight inches of precipitation per annum. The largest sand dunes in the United States are piled up just east of us.

Two aquifers beneath the valley, augmented by careful diversion of snow melt-off, several water storage areas and the Rio Grande and Conejos rivers, make the valley, since the 1850s, an agricultural desert, with substantial crops of alfalfa hay, wheat, barley and potatoes. If you're interested, you can read about how it works here here.

That water is a fragile commodity in the valley is apparent this weekend. The city of Alamosa, the valley's largest, is in a water crisis. The town suspects that more than 100 reported cases of salmonella poisoning by residents came from its water system, which it believes is tainted with the bacteria, which is usually carried by food. We usually stop for coffee and/or a meal in Alamosa, only 16 miles from Monte Vista, but not this time.

The owners of the alligator farm began, and remain, tilapia fish farmers. Tilapia are listed as noxious pests in certain areas of Australia, but they have become an important aquaculture fish in the United States. According to the American Tilapia Association, the perch-like fish are the fifth-most popular seafood in the United States. I don't know about you, but I have never willingly or knowingly ordered, bought or eaten tilapia. Have you?

The gators were first brought in about twenty years ago to eat the leftovers and garbage, and now four hundred gators, crocs and cayman sprawl around the farm’s acreage and lake. The fish farm is still the business, but the gators are the attraction, along with some big birds, emus, ostriches and rheas that reside there.

Morris, an American alligator that has appeared in many television series and films – a sign in front says he once trashed a Cheers set – has his own pen, and female partner. The rest have to share the lakes with the other gators. The owners also care for iguanas, snakes and assorted other turtles and reptiles, most abandoned after the owners found they got more than they bargained for in a pet viper.

A friendly hippie kid has us pose with Little Bob, a small but well-equipped two-and-a-half foot American gator who reluctantly lets us pose with him. The 8X10 we purchase sucks, but the fourteen dollars we paid for it seems to be going to a good cause. I console myself with the fact that Little Bob left his sharp alligator teeth marks on the certificate.

We’re staying in the Gary Cooper room this time in the Movie Manor Motel. With no films showing, the motel is fairly empty this time of year; the rooms are large, the beds nice, the showers wonderful, and we wouldn't stay willingly anywhere else – it's part of the visit. And it's only about twelve minutes from the refuge where we set up to watch birds.

We had sandwiches at Kelloff's, the restaurant at the motel, before heading out to see the birds this evening. Driving down to the refuge on Gunbarrel Road, we pass fields of standing water and/or sheets of ice. Small farmhouses line the road, and all except one were above the waterline, surrounded on three sides by lakes of ice and water. Cattle and horses are stranded on patches of higher, muddy islands where ranchers have left bales of hay.

The refuge is a flat world, an immensely complicated ecosystem of fields of grain, lakes, ponds, wetlands, swamps, ditches, sluices, locks, gates, meadows and even a few trees. It could be in the middle of Kansas. But then you look east, and there is Blanca Peak and the Sangre de Christos. Turn around and there are smaller ridges that lead into the largest wilderness area in Colorado.

We were at the turn-out on Eight Mile Road at the south end of the refuge proper about 6:30. South of the road are a large number of cranes scattered out at least a quarter mile – it's hard to judge distance. Inside the refuge are at least another thousand more scattered out northward.

They are making a big racket that continues to get louder as the darkness spreads. Sunset is around 7:15, and for fifteen minutes we stand in shock and awe as these ancient birds take off for their roosts, rising into the night skies for places unknown. The energy of the birds permeates the ground and the purple sky. In the morning, they will leave their roosts for the fields once again, in the same crescendo of pure abandonment. It is a ritual that has been happening longer than humans have trod the earth. We can just stand there dumbly and smile.

Monte Vista, CO
3-20-08

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Reporter Philip Shenon was assigned to cover the 9/11 Commission by The New York Times, which put him in a unique position to write a book that details the inner workings of that investigative body. It has been published as The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission (Twelve Books).

It's a necessary addition to the 9/11 canon. The book got a lot of pre-publication press when a couple of the more provocative allegations – phone calls between the commission's executive director Philip Zelikow and then White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove that alarmed Zelikow's staff -- were leaked to help build interest.

Zelikow is the central figure in Shenon's account, and Shenon does an exhaustive job of detailing the day-to-day workings of his role, but the Rove phone calls are a pretty inconsequential part of the book, with the weakest sourcing.

Zelikow comes under particular scrutiny because he had co-authored a book with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and was part of the Bush transition team. That many people within and outside the commission questioned Zelikow's objectivity, especially with regard to Sec. Rice, is true. But though Zelikow made his staff and some commission members anxious, the book offers no proof that he influenced the final report. As the book makes clear, the decision not to point fingers at individuals came from the body's two leaders, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, not Zelikow.

Shenon has a weblog and site that includes news about the book, information about the author and links to Zelikow's arguments and notes. If you want to really understand the importance of the 9/11 Commission Report and why it was published the way it was, you won't find a better source than The Commission.

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One day in December of 1964, I bought three singles that encapsulated the period for this deeply committed adherent of the First British Invasion: the Zombies' "She's Not There," the Kinks' "You Really Got Me," and the Dave Clark Five's "Any Way You Want It."

Each single deserves its own essay, and I could go on and on about the Kinks, perhaps my favorite live band ever, but "Any Way You Want It" caught the essence of the Dave Clark Five, a full two minute and thirty one second assault on the senses that begins and ends at full throttle – with a lot of echo. The DC5, first and foremost, was a great singles band. I bought at least 12 of their 45s during the band's brief day in the sun, including the one pictured here with the column. My admiration and enthusiasm continues unabated.

Some people remember that Dave Clark, who led the band and played drums, retained the copyrights to his material, something very rare in those early days and worth mentioning – the individual Beatles have spent decades fighting for the rights to their own music.

Musically, the DC5 sound was completely unique. With rare exception, the guitar, bass and saxophone were mixed like one huge monolithic instrument. The inclusion of tenor saxophone was unusual, something that young Bruce Springsteen no doubt picked up on when he saw them on The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights during the band's heyday.

No band was more economical than the Five. On the group's definitive hits collection, The History of the Dave Clark Five, only three of the 50 tracks last more than three minutes; 12 don't make it to two minutes. There is no padding, no wasted notes, no filler in any DC5 track. They won't be remembered as a jam band.

One of the great ironies of the English Invasion was that we American kids were learning American soul songs from white English kids who were reinterpreting singles they imported from the U.S. And nobody this side of Stevie Winwood was a more natural interpreter of that music than Mike Smith, who also played organ. "I can do the blues, I can do the twist," he sang, understating his enormous range, on the band's magnificent cover of the Contours' "Do You Love Me."

Smith, who co-wrote many of the Five's songs with Clark, translated soul hits ("Reelin' and Rockin'," "Little Bitty Pretty One"), crooned Beatles' knock-offs ("Because," "Don't Be Taken In") and led the charge on the pedal-to-the-metal rock ("Glad All Over," "Bits and Pieces") that was the band's bread-and-butter. Nobody did Chuck Berry better than Smith on the band's outrageous take of "Reelin' and Rockin'." Listen to the primal scream that opens "All Night Long," a b-side instrumental, and tell me that Smith wouldn't equal even the mighty McCartney in a Shriek-Like-Little-Richard competition.

Mike Smith, the secret weapon of the Dave Clark Five and the best vocalist of his generation, died outside London on Feb. 29. He was 64. The band is to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Monday night.

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I consider myself a fan of the band Wilco, willing to follow leader Jeff Tweedy's strange flights and fancies over a series of albums known as much for their quirkiness as for their music.

One of the their discs, A Ghost is Born, was especially trying. Not that it was an awful album. There were some songs, "Theologians," "Handshake Drugs," "The Late Greats," that remain favorites. "Theologians don't know nothing about my soul" is still perhaps my favorite Tweedy line. But the disc also contains a couple of longer pieces that, quite frankly, gave me a headache.

Tweedy published a journal on theNew York Times Opinion pages this week that will tell you more about creativity than anything you'll read in a music publication this or any year.

As it turns out, the two songs that got on my nerves were written by Tweedy, who has suffered from migraines, depression and panic disorder since he was child, during one the worst times of his life, the making of A Ghost is Born. He collapsed and wound up in a treatment center that, he says, treated his migraines as well as his mood disorders for the first time. He has not had a migraine in five years.

And now those two musical pieces on A Ghost is Born make sense. "There is a lot of material that mirrored my condition. In particular there’s a piece of music — “Less Than You Think” — that ends with a 12-minute drone that was an attempt to express the slow painful rise and dissipation of migraine in music.," Tweedy writes. "I don’t know why anyone would need to have that expressed to them musically. But it was all I had."

Hearing “Less Than You Think” in this context this morning, Tweedy somehow captures the sensation of falling into and out of the netherworld of migraine. I'll probably still hit the fast-forward on the shuffle when it comes up, but I have respect for what it represents.

Not surprisingly, Tweedy manages to convey brutal truth with good humor. "You know, seeing a rock musician vomit on the side of the stage, I’m sure people thought I was completely out of my mind on drugs or strung out," he admits. "It didn’t have any kind of long term impact on how people perceived the band, though. Crazy thing is, in my business, that sort of thing is considered an asset. Sick but true."

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