Deeds & Words

8. Shiny things!  Shiny things!  Steampunk is filled with brass, copper, silver, glass, leather, silks, feathers; chrome, bubbling liquids in glowing colors;  gears and rivets and studs and bosses, and . . . oh, my!

7. It’s hard to go wrong. Doctor Who fans will glare and sniff if you confess that you can’t remember if Sarah Jane came before or after Rose Tyler. Steampunkers won’t care. Costume-wise, a poodle skirt and penny loafers would be a hard sell (unless you were with someone dressed as HG Wells) but other than that, you can make an argument for almost anything. Victorian lady and gentleman? Check. Dance-hall girl? Check. African Explorer? Check. Egyptian priest and priestess? Check. Space Alien?  Sure. 1920s flapper?  Why not. Mad scientist? Mildly irritated scientist? Spiritualistic medium? Vampire? Zombie? Or how about a mix-n-match—safari pantaloons, bodice and vest, long-barrelled brass steam-powered handgun and a crystal orb for channeling psychic energies? It’s all good.

6. Clockwork. Digital is great and everything, but admit it—watch innards fascinate you, don’t they? Cogs and toothed gears that interconnect create this powerful, comforting illusion that we can understand how the world works—not like that quantum stuff. Plus, they just look neat. Steampunk recycles dead watches into jewelry and accessories better than anybody.

5. Beer.  And wine.

4. Victorian hotels. There is no reason to stay at an expensive Victorian hotel seven miles from your house unless you are going to dress up in a costume that includes painful footwear, and you don’t want to have to park a mile away. Thank you, Handcar Regatta, for giving me an excuse to stay at the Hotel La Rose.

3 .Economic stimulus. This event pulls in $60,000 a year in spending, mostly for the merchants of Santa Rosa’s recession-strapped downtown. At Chevy’s, for instance, a franchise Mexican restaurant in Railroad Square, they are about ready to erect a statue to the event. Margarita sales alone put them in the black for that day. This sounds trivial. It isn’t. The last two years, the Regatta has coincided with the Annual Book Fair. These two events, over a weekend, have filled local hotels and restaurants, wine bars, antique stores  and specialty shops.

2. Music. A guitar made from a shovel, Celtic music, enthusiastic gypsy fiddles and accordions, Americana, a capella  and more.

1. Handcars. Rolling sculptures of imagination, whimsy and dream. Well, sometimes rolling, anyway.

The game park’s aviary is extraordinary. The owner’s first area of interest was birds, so in addition to the large cranes, flamingos and other birds in the corral, they have several varieties in cages and a large covered area with egrets, pheasants, waterfowl, and exotic pigeons. I remember the park as having a lot of hornbills, but we only saw two on our visit this time.

Many, but perhaps not all, of you know that flamingos are born white. The coloring comes from beta carotene in the foods they eat. With the flamingos, this was obvious when you see live ones up close because the color variations are obvious. Somehow, I never noticed it on the plastic ones on people’s lawns.

Danny liked the two new hornbills because they were so curious, always coming up to the mesh and watching the park goings-on. He said that experts now think the “horn,” or crest, which is hollow, is actually used to amplify sound.

Ner the gift shop, a flock of bright goldenrod birds live in a large cage. Their nests are fascinating; woven orbs with holes in the bottom. I didn’t get to ask how the birds keep the eggs from rolling out.

The macaws act as official greeters. I noticed handlers were taking them back into their private aviary around three-thirty. They are friendly and noisy birds who squabbled with each other the whole time they were out. Very entertaining.

The cheetahs are called Safari West’s ambassadors, but the park is most famous for its giraffes. There was even a documentary made (it showed on Animal Planet, I think) about the birth of Kalula.

Danny said the giraffes are reticulated giraffes. He called Kalula a Rheingold, I think—something of a hybrid. Her color is more of a gold color, and her markings aren’t as crisp and distinctive as some of the other giraffes. She’s a drooler. This is not a trait connected with a particular variety. “That’s all Kalula,” Danny said.

Danny supports the new theory about why the animals developed those long ungainly necks. The old theory was that it evolved so they could eat leaves, but where they live, there is plenty of grass—leaf-eating wasn’t a survival function. Why, then? Male giraffes fight each other for mates by whaling on each other with their bone-plated heads. They attack heads and torsos. An adult male can knock another male over by hitting him in the side with his head. Therefore the new “DNA” theory is that the long necks evolved for that reason. The DNA theory is very popular these days. The idea is that survival is on the DNA level—fathering and giving birth to offspring, passing on the genes—rather than the level of an individual animal or a family group. It’s an interesting idea and it’s informing most of the scientific discussion of mutations at this point.

Many antelope and gazelles share this corral as well as some of the larger birds. The park has a large flock of crowned cranes, the national bird of Uganda. They may be shades of gray, but they are gorgeous shades of gray.

Danny took us over several high bumps in the road.  It was what we would have called an E-Ticket Ride in the old days.  Curving around the lake, the road led us back toward the admin buildings and the corrals. Before we entered the corral, we stopped to see Ayesha and Mufassa, the pair of Cape white rhino.

Each of these, Danny said, go about 5,000 pounds right now. Mufassa, the male, can reach 6800 pounds. These are some seriously territorial animals who use immense piles of scat to mark their territory. Getting some on you shoes would be the least of your worries. These two animals and gentle and friendly to their keepers, but would probably not be so hospitable to anyone else.

And that reminds me that there are a few rules when you go on the vehicle safari. Stay inside the vehicle. If you drop something outside the vehicle, let the driver know. Do not poke, stroke or try to pet the animals. Do not try to feed the animals. Do not approach the animals.

Ayesha and Mufassa have a good-sized fenced in pen, so approaching them by accident was highly unlikely.

There was a fatality at this park just last year. The victim was a middle-aged woman who was visiting with her daughter and grandchildren, and the killer was an oak tree that fell on the tent-cabin they were staying in.

As a guide, Danny had a lot of strengths.  He was smart, educated, interested in the animals of the park; he was funny, he liked to answer questions and debate theories. He had a weakness; he wasn’t good at driving a manual transmission, and he got one of the trucks with a stick shift. Also, there was some glitch with Taylor’s door, that it wouldn’t open while the truck was running, or at least that was her story and she was sticking to it, so Danny frequently had to stop the truck, get out to unlock a gate, and start us up again, only to stall.  He did that twice in a row in the zebra area. It’s nice to know someone’s not completely perfect.

Zebras are equines, most closely related to donkeys. They can breed with donkeys and horses, but the offspring will be sterile. They are not the most docile of creatures, and they have weaker spines than horses or donkeys–hence, not really a good riding or pack animal. The offspring of a zebra and a donkey is a “zonkey,” I guess because “Debra” was already taken.

The striped pattern is unique with each animal. I asked if there were familial similarities and he said he thought there were geographic similarities. Why stark black and white, when so many other animals are shades of brown, gray, tan etc? The latest theory, he said, is that with high contrast colors, the eye tries to focus on one or the other, and the rapid switching back and forth messes up your depth perception. Predators count on depth perception. A lion, therefore, going for a zebra’s neck will most likely miss and strike the handquarters, and zebras are good at bucking them off.

“For these animals, this is like Club Med,” Danny said. “Plenty of food and water, no predators.”  There is grass in the range area, mostly dry this time of year, that the antelopes will nosh on, but they are used to the alfalfa that is delivered from trucks by humans.

In the Back Forty, the first animal Danny pointed out was the aoudad, also known as Barbary sheep. A bachelor group was resting under the trees. In addition to stunning curved horns, the males grow beards long enough to reach their front hooves. During mating season, they urinate on their beards, saturating them with pheromones. Somehow, it doesn’t sound as charming to me as it probably would to a female aodad. (Pictures will follow in a later post—these animals were elusive and I had to use the long-lensed film camera).

This whole area is fenced, but it is more like range land than corrals (the area near the administrative buildings has large corrals). Fences are more about keeping out native species than keeping animals in. We asked about predators.  What about bobcats and mountain lions? Danny snorted politely. “These animals are prey animals for tigers, leopards, cheetahs,” he said. “Lions.  Our little cats wouldn’t bother a twelve-hundred-pound Cape buffalo too much.”

He stopped next to quiz us on the name of the animal we were seeing.  He gave us a hint; “Chevy named a car after them.” So we knew they were impala. Impala escape predators, he told us, not just by running, but by leaping. They can make a thirty-foot-long leap that’s ten feet high, out of reach of most predator cats.

The scimitar-horned oryx is one of Danny’s favorite antelope because of its physiology. This larger, desert antelope is considered extinct in the wild. Its pale color marks it as a desert-dweller. This oryx can survive without ever drinking water, because it gets water from the plants and succulents it eats, and by licking condensation (dew) from its coat. It can also control (reduce) urination, and, he told us, it’s heterothermic. It can maintain different body temperatures in different parts of its body. It’s also gorgeous, but Danny didn’t mention that. The park has a small herd of these.

Danny talked a little bit about the movement to reintroduce some of these species back into habitat. Reintroduction would take several generations—for instance, the animals at the park, fed by humans, would not survive, but their offspring could survive on a bigger preserve, and then their offspring could be released to the wild.

We talked about the threats to animals; poaching certainly, and habitat loss, but one of the biggest causes of habitat loss in Africa is the human wars that have raged over the past decades. Genocide is not just for humans anymore.

Danny, who has a degree in anthropology and is attending graduate school to finish a paleontology degree, really likes antelope and gazelles, largely because he’s intrigued by migrations. I’d had guessed he’d be a primate guy, and he does like the primates too.  Taylor works every day with the grazers, and so she seemed to have a more matter of fact approach to them.

Eland are forest-dwelling antelope, one of the larger species. I had seen vertical white stripes on the body of one of the youngsters, and I thought it had scraped itself, but Danny and Taylor explained that the tan coloring and the white stripes are protective coloration. A few yards further on we found the buck of this herd, demonstrating camo for us. Eland males can reach a thousand pounds, and from a distance, this guy could be mistaken for a milk cow, except for those horns and that narrow, distinctive antelope face. 

The wildebeests, or gnus, seemed quite relaxed as we drove up and parked next to them. These are strange looking animals. “They look like they’re made out of a bunch of other animals,” Danny said. He was proud of the gnu baby (see what I did there?) that had been born this spring. Being big on migrations, Danny has to be a gnu fan, since they have a long migration and two million animals a year make it. The wildebeest migration can be seen from outer space. The migration is, as he put it, “One long buffet for predators.” The herd loses two hundred thousand animals to predation, and just about that many calves are born during the migration. Gnu calves can stand within moments of birth, and run by the end of the day they’re born. Hardy little things.

“This is the deadliest animal for humans in Africa,” Danny said. “It kills more people than tigers, lions, rhinos, or gators.” Why, because it’s fierce and vicious? No, Danny says—because people hunt it, and if you don’t kill it on the first shot, you have serious problems. Cape buffalo also work in herds, and if you attack a calf, the entire herd will come after you. The animal just looks impressive, with those muscular haunches and uni-brow horns. These guys were pretty unconcerned about us.

Spouse asked if the buffalo ever knocked down the fences to get to the lake.  Danny said no, “Although they could if they wanted to. Any one of our animals could either knock down a fence or jump it if they had a mind to.”

Our next stop would be zebra-town.

There are four hundred contiguous acres in Sonoma County that aren’t planted in grapes. Surprising, I know. Even more surprising is what they do raise there; African animals.

Safari West is a game park located almost at the intersection of Porter Creek And Calistoga Road. It’s been there since the 1990s, when they had two giraffes, an aviary, and a couple of cheetahs. Now they have nearly a dozen giraffes, four cheetahs, three serval cats, several varieties of primates, two rhinos, twelve Cape buffalo and scores of fleet-footed grazers or “hoofstock,” as the staff call them.

Five of us went there Friday.  Three of us have birthdays within a month of each other. This was our birthday celebration and we invited our friend Lillian.  Spouse joined us. We met for breakfast at Jeffrey’s Hillside Café. Jeffrey’s is a diner style place next to a motel, with an owner chef who used to cook at five-star restaurants. It doesn’t take reservations, and you should show up early or expect to wait. By a fluke, when Spouse and I got there, there was no wait and we went right in, along with Lillian who had gotten there shortly before us. Greg and Mary came in a few minutes later. Breakfast was delicious, even though all of us except Lillian, who had the juevos benidictos, stuck with the traditional breakfast fare.

It took us about twenty minutes from the restaurant, back on the freeway, up to the Mark West Springs exit, to pull into the Safari West parking lot. We were early, very early, about an hour. That meant we had plenty of time to check out the gift shop. My friend Tina, daughter of my dear friend Kathleen, checked us in, gave us our wristbands and directed us down to the corrals and staging area, where we took lots of pictures!

Our guide’s name was Danny, and we had a bonus guide; Taylor, who is an animal handler for the hoofstock, rode along with us. Our vehicle was a Korean-Conflict-era two-and-a-half ton truck with seats and room above the driver! Our group consisted of the five of us, and a couple with a four-year old. Dad and the four-year-old wanted to be up top, but that left room for Lillian and me.  Best seats in the house!  We jolted off across the flatlands and were soon climbing into the oak-covered Sonoma County hills.

I’m really used to seeing wild turkeys along the Coast Highway.  They are an introduced species that was brought here about twenty years ago, mostly for sport hunters. They adapted and thrived.  We see them frequently while we’re staying at St. Orre’s, driving up the coast, walking in our neighborhood park, or driving almost anywhere in Sonoma County.

When I came around the corner on Highway One and saw these three in the road, the body-shape made me think “turkeys.” Then I saw the colors. Clearly these are feral peafowl. The single female and two males configuration seems like a common one, but that might just be because that’s how people buy them. It’s past mating season, so the males have molted and lost their elaborate tails. I wonder what its like for the occassional farmer in the spring, heading out  in the foggy dawn to milk his cows and seeing a peacock perched on the spar of an oak tree, its glorious tail sweeping the ground.

Wise is a  found-object sculptor based in Eureka, CA.

The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan; Knopf, 2011

Jake Marlowe is a monster. One night a month he turns into something lupine, a creature with the strength and senses of a wolf but the intelligence of an educated man. The monster is only satisfied by human flesh. The transformation lasts while the full moon is in the sky.

The horror, or beauty, of Glen Duncan’s wulf is that the Hunger that drives it cannot be satisfied by the flesh of other animals. The werewolf devours human flesh and consumes with it the memories, the essence of that person. There is no easy way out of this curse; no making due with rabbits or rats, no dreamy scenes of Jack Nicholson chasing down a stag in a manicured Connecticut forest. You can lock yourself away during the full moon, but sooner or later the Hunger will overcome you, and you will not want to lock yourself away. You will choose to kill. That is the monstrosity. Jake should know. He’s been a werewolf for over two hundred years, and now he’s the last.

Marlowe has been hunted over the decades by WOCOP, the World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomenon, which is mostly an elaborate hunt club for werewolves. In this world, there are vampires too, but vampires are less bestial, and so WOCOP (funded originally, we are told, by the Vatican) came to an arrangement with them, and the vampire Fifty Families are allowed to have one hundred vampires each. The head of the werewolf division of WOCOP, Grainer, has been gunning for Marlowe for years, because Marlowe ate his father.

It’s the voice of this novel, the self-assuredness of the prose, that held my interest in the opening pages. Jake is matter of fact about his condition. He does not make excuses for the people he’s killed. The wolf does not really allow excuses; at the point you’ve been infected (bitten or scratched by a werewolf) the only choice you have, if you are not going to kill, is to kill yourself. Jake did not do that. Neither did the others. Humans are selfish, and the drive to live is strong. How about only killing bad people, then?  Sure, Jake says, try that. It’s fine until the novelty wears off. 

 Jake is intelligent, educated as someone with two hundred years of leisure time can be, and sardonic. Here, he describes Madeline, his latest call girl, because Jake will never have sex with a woman he likes: 

“Madeline. . . brimming with tabloid axioms and fluent in cliché. She been there done that, bought the T-shirt. She goes ballistic. She gets paralytic. She wants the organ-grinder not his monkey. She wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. . .her telephone farewell is mmbaah. This, more than her spiritual deficits has kept my dislike going, but it can’t last forever. A month in I can see the confused child in there, the gaping holes and wrong bulges in the long-ago fabric of love. There was a Doting and borderline Dodgy Dad, a fading and viciously Jealous Mum. This is the drag of having lived so long and seen so many: Biography shows through, all the mitigating antecedents. People teem with their own information and I start to get the headache of interest in them. Which is pointless, since when you get right down to it they’re first and foremost food.”

You don’t get the full beauty of the rhythm of that paragraph because I snipped some of it, but Duncan piles up the words, starting simply and layering the images and the observations. Often it starts with a physical description and then goes deep into Jake’s history, or into his head. 

For a book with such a powerful viewpoint character, others in this book border on cliché. Harley, Marlow’s human assistant, is the stereotypical Old British Queen character. Ellis, Grainer’s second-in-command, is a Grotesque, although a good one. What we know of Grainer we hear from Jake, or mostly from Ellis. I think Grainer speaks perhaps three lines of dialogue in the whole book. Jake, however, is so powerful, and the book so compelling when we are in his memories, that he balances out these problems.

Jake insists that he is not a good man, that he has given himself to the monster, and that the countless good works and brave works of his life—fighting Nazis, dictators and drug cartels, funding children’s hospitals and foundations, is not attempting to make up for the destruction his wulf has caused, but mere social book-keeping. It’s a flimsy argument. The juxtaposition of the man Jake was supposed to be—a good one, a happy one—and the monster he is kept me reading even when I was disapproving, sad or horrified. I was often horrified, at what Jake did, and what was done to him.

The plot has some problems, or at least, loose ends. Some reviewers have said that there should be a sequel. I hope there isn’t because the book has a certain purity by itself, even if it is flawed; but a sequel would explain some of the things that just drop through the cracks, like the mysterious journal that explains the origin of werewolves. Jake, on the run for his life, simply has to have it, then stops looking. Just like that. I mean, he’s busy dodging vampires and silver bullets and all, but still. There is a long explanation about why there aren’t any more werewolves; people stopped transforming and started dying. This is all set-up for an elaborate vampire plot. The vampires want Jake alive, WOCOP wants him dead—or at least Grainer does. Some things were a bit too coincidental. A point of view shift away from first person near the end telegraphs things a bit too clearly.

And yet. . . the voice, the life of Jake Marlowe is powerful. There is a section where the reader follows him, in werewolf form, as he attacks and kills a human. We see him immediately before and immediately after a kill, and Duncan communicates the cruel, alien, yet so understandable joy of this sheer power.

And, you get observations like this, “You forgot sex could do this, cast the divine fragment back into the divine whole for a moment, then reel it out again, razed, beatified.” 

And this, “I’m sorry Harls, for the mess I made of your life. For costing you your life. Vengeance, now, late, shamefully overdue, but vengeance nonetheless. Grainer. Ellis, too, eventually. I’m sorry it’s taken so long. I’m sorry the bare fact of you living wasn’t enough. I’m sorry it took loving someone. Someone else.”

It may just be the long cross-continental American trip in the middle of the book, but for some reason Jake Marlowe reminded me of Humbert Humbert. It’s strange, I know, but there is some click, some connection, with the theme of a man who does despicable things (Jake’s are worse than despicable) but is somehow engaging, human. Duncan shares Nabakov’s sense of farce, too. I can’t tell if this was Duncan’s intention (the name conjures Jacob Marley and Christopher Marlowe, not Nabakov,) but I can’t shake the resonance. It’s still humming around me. 

It’s difficult to write much more about this book without spoilers. I will say that there is a telephone conversation in an airport that is breath-taking in its immediacy. Plotwise, there is a surprise discovery that isn’t terribly surprising. It  makes the ending of the book unavoidable and the reader will see it coming, but you’ll want to stay with it, just for the power of Duncan’s words.