A Sporting Life

It was a melancholy evening in a northern Michigan tavern when I sat down to watch The Guns of Autumn, a CBS News documentary ostensibly about hunting in America. In what I thought to be a strange tack, hunting was presented as a white-trash habit, something that ill-educated, mostly rural boobs do every fall. In one of the strangest forms of advocacy journalism I'd ever seen, CBS developed an idea of hunting, then wandered around the country shooting footage that supported its idea. It was, in short, the total New York cheap shot: badly researched, poorly filmed and edited, full of honkie slurs that most poor hunters wouldn't begin to comprehend. For the first time as a leftist I felt some sympathy for Republicans who complain about media bias.

But my own irateness was short-lived; the program, after all, was about shooting, not hunting, and the bumbling McCarthyism of the CBS attack even offended the sense of fairness among the nonhunters in my tavern. Why did CBS bother? Was it the negative influence of the National Rifle Association on gun control? Perhaps. You would undoubtedly find that hunters as a group don't prey on their fellow man, despite their closets full of guns. Any anger I felt quickly turned to despair. How could one of my primary obsessions, hunting, be so totally and woefully misunderstood oncamera, as if Martians were filming Venutians at play? Has "city" been so separated from "country" that it has become a different planet? I'm usually tolerant when other writers, on learning I hunt and fish, say. "Oh, the Hemingway bit," as if the late doctor's son from Chicago had a corner on the outdoors. But the CBS program was a sloppy wholesale blitzkrieg on my sense of reality and honesty.

Ultimately, what is wrong with hunting is a great deal worse than CBS conceded. And what is right, the grace and beauty of the sport, was left out. It was as if the whole spectrum were represented by a single color. Television news is good at singular items when there are hordes of people acting stupidly, dramatically--or on puddle-deep numbers like the capture of Patty Hearst. But when it attaches the cameras to something so ingrained and ancient as hunting, a sport that is doubtless part of our racial memory, the result is a ghastly sort of nonevent as embarrassing as the "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" of years past. The truth of the matter is novelistic, no more or less than the human who picks up a shotgun or a fishing rod, for that matter, and carries along with him the baggage of all that he is on earth.

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It begins very young up in the country whether you are raised on a farm or in one of the small villages, which, though they often double as county seats, rarely number more than 1000 souls. There is a lumber mill down by the river that manufactures crossties for the railroad, and the creosote the ties are treated with pervades the air. It is the smell of the town, depending on the wind: fresh-cut pine and creosote. In the center of town there's a rather ugly yellow-brick courthouse, plain Depression architecture. The village is in northern Michigan and does not share the quaintness of villages in New England or the Deep South, being essentially historyless. There are three baronial, rococo houses left over from the hasty passing of the lumber era, but most dwellings are characterized by their drabness, simply places for the shopkeepers to hide at night.

In the spring and summer the boys in the town carry either baseball mitts or fish poles on their bicycles. Two different types are being formed and though they might merge and vary at times, most often they have set themselves up for life. During the endless five months of winter one boy will spend his evenings poring over the fishing-tackle sections of the Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs while the other boy will be looking at the mitts, bats and balls. One tinkers with a reel while the other sits in a chair plopping a baseball over and over into his glove just recently oiled with neat's-foot. One reads about the Detroit Tigers while the other reads Outdoor Life and fantasizes about the time when he will be allowed his first shotgun. He already has an old .22 single-shot, but he knows it is an interim weapon before the shotgun and, later yet, a .30-30 deer rifle.

The village is surrounded by woods and lakes, rivers and swamps and some not very successful farms. The boy wanders around among them with a World War Two surplus canteen and a machete he keeps hidden in the garage from his mother's prying eyes. His family owns a one-room cabin a dozen miles from town where it spends the summer. He shoots at deer with a weak bow and arrow. On many dawns he accompanies his father trout fishing on a nearby river; he is forced to fish the same hole all day to avoid getting lost. The same evening he will row his father around the lake until midnight bass fishing. The boy and a friend sit in a swamp despite the slime and snakes and mosquitoes. They pot two sitting grouse with a .22 and roast them until they are black. The boys think they are Indians and sneak up on a cabin where some secretaries are vacationing. A few feet behind the window in the lamplight a secretary is naked. A true wonder to discuss while walking around in the woods and gullies or while diving for mud turtles or while watching a blue heron in her nest in a white pine.

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Two decades later. Wars. Marches. Riots. Flirtations with politics, teaching, marriage; a pleasant love affair with alcohol. Our boy, now hopefully a man, is standing in a skiff near the Marquesas 30 miles out in the Gulf from Key West. He's still fishing with a fly rod, only for tarpon now instead of bass, bluegill or trout. He wants to catch a tarpon over 100 pounds on a fly rod. Then let it go and watch it swim away. Today, being an open-minded soul, he's totally blown away on a triple hit of psilocybin. And a few numbers rolled out of Colombian buds add to the sweet stew. It's blissful except for an occasional football-field-sized red hole in the sky and for the fact that there are no tarpon in the neighborhood. A friend is rubbing himself with an overripe mango. Then he rubs a girl who is fixing a lunch of white wine, yoghurt and strawberries. Where are the tarpon today? Maybe in China. They want to hear the gill plates rattle when the tarpon jumps. The overripe mango feels suspiciously familiar. Peach jokes should be changed to mango jokes.

An osprey struggles overhead with a too-large fish. Opreys can drown that way, not being able to free their talons in the water. The flight slows painfully. Between the great bird's shrieks we can hear the creak and flap of wings and the tidal rush through the mangroves. Lunar. The bird reaches the nest and within minutes has torn the houndfish to pieces. A meal. We watch each other across a deep-blue channel.

Barracuda begin passing the skiff with regularity on the incoming tide but no tarpon. We rig a fly rod with a wire leader for the barracuda's sharp teeth. And a long wonderfully red fly that matches the red holes that periodically reappear in the sky. The fish love the fly and the strike is violent, so similar to touching an electric fence it brings a shudder. The barracuda dashes off across the shallow water of the flat, is fought to the boat and released.

The midafternoon sun is brilliantly hot, so they move the boat some 15 miles to a key that doubles as a rookery for cormorants, pelicans and man-of-war, or frigate, birds. They watch the birds for hours, and the sand sharks, rays, bait fish and barracuda that slide past the boat.

Why get freaked or trip while you're fishing? Why not? You do so only rarely. You're fishing in the first place to avoid boredom, the habitual, and you intend to vary it enough to escape the lassitude attached to most of our activities. If you carry to sport a businesslike consciousness, it's no sport at all. Only an extension of your livelihood, which you are presumably trying to escape.

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But how did we get from there to here across two decades? In sport there is a distinct accounting for taste. That corn pone about going through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms is awesomely true. We largely do what we do, and are what we are, by excluding those things we find distasteful. You reduce your life to those few things that you know you are never going to quit. And when you reach 35 your interest in these few things can verge on the hysteric: A freshly arrived single white hair in a sideburn can get a book written or instigate a trip to Africa. What energy you have left becomes obsessive and single-minded. When I am not writing poetry or novels I want to fish or, to a slightly lesser degree, hunt grouse and woodcock.

But this is to be an idealogue about something that is totally a sensuous, often sensual, experience. We scarcely want a frozen tract by Jerry Garcia on just why he likes "brown eyed women and red grenadine." Visceral is visceral. Always slightly comic, man at play in America has John Calvin tapping him on the shoulder and telling him to please be serious. For beginners you have to learn to tell John to fuck off.

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Twenty miles off the coast of Ecuador near the confluence of the El Nino and Humboldt currents. It's just after dawn and already the equatorial sun is shimmering down waves of heat. I count it lucky that when you skip bait for marlin the boat is moving at eight to ten knots, thus creating a breeze. The port diesel is fluttering, then is silent. We rock gently in the prop wash, then are caught in a graceful Pacific swell. It wasn't the port engine. Or the starboard engine. It was the only engine. The pulse quickens. My friend smiles and continues photographing a great circle of man-of-war birds hovering far above us, far more than we have ever seen in the Florida Keys. It must be hundreds of miles to the closest pesticide. The birds follow schools of bait as do the striped marlin and are considered a good sign. The captain looks at me and shrugs, the universal language of incompetence. He speaks no English and I no Spanish. My friend, who is a French count, pretends he (continued on page 214)Sporting Life(continued from page 146) speaks Spanish but in a week down here has yet to make any significant contact except with some Braniff stewardesses who speak fluent English.

I stretch out along the gunwale trying to convince myself that I am relaxed, though fear comes in surges. They'll never get the engine started and we'll drift to Australia, missing the Galapagos in the night by a helpless few miles. I can't even see land. We don't have any water, which anyway is undrinkable hereabout. A lot of foul-tasting Chilean soda pop. One of the two mates hands me a plate of fresh pineapple in a shrugging fit. It is ripe, cool and delicious. Feed the fearful bear. I toss a chunk at three passing sea snakes that look terribly yellow in the blue water. They are related to the cobra and extremely venomous though not very aggressive. They scatter, then one swirls around to check out the pineapple. I've been assured that they never bother anyone but the wretchedly poor Peruvian fishermen who deep jig from cork rafts. Good ole swimming hole. Sharks. Snakes. Even whales. Often in nature you get the deep feeling you don't belong. This is especially true of the Pacific and the Serengeti Plain.

Hours pass and they are still tinkering with the engine. I glance into its guts and regret not knowing anything about them. The day before, the engine had quit while I was fighting a striped marlin. It is a difficult and exhausting job from a dead boat, especially after the spectacular jumps are over and the fish bulldogs. You can't follow the marlin on his long runs. You have to pump him back. And I had hooked the fish out of vanity on 20-pound test. It took over two hours in the 90-degree sun and I felt murderous. Now I was pretending the boat had a marine radio, which I knew it didn't.

But it had been a fine week's fishing so far, though we had failed to catch a striped marlin on a fly rod, something that had been done only twice before. My friend had teased a marlin to within 40 feet of the boat with a casting rod and rubber squid. When my streamer fly hit the water the marlin rose up and slashed with his bill, then took it firmly in the corner of his mouth. I was thinking numbly about how beautifully blue his body was and how from the side his eye appeared to be staring at us. Perhaps it was. But it lasted only a few seconds while he twisted his head and sped off in a flume of water. The leader popped. It was like fly-fishing for Dick Butkus or a Harley-Davidson, I thought while trying to sleep on a sunburn that night. We had been getting a lot of sleep, having been warned by the hotel manager of the endemic shanker problem in the local villages.

You have a great deal of time to think between fish, and you wonder why you are never bored. A friend, the novelist Tom McGuane, has fished for months in a row in the Keys, particularly when he was learning salt-water fly casting. When I was learning from him there were moments of doubt until I had my first big tarpon in the air. Before that I had been quite pleased with a two-pound rainbow. And still am, though the true maniac deserves a tarpon. Such sport is a succession of brutally electric moments spaced widely apart. Someone with McGuane's quantum energy level quite naturally applies the same effort to fishing.

There is doubtless the edge of the lunatic here. In Ecuador the crew was enormously alarmed when my friend went overboard to get underwater photos of a fighting marlin. Billfish have been known to charge a boat out of generalized ire. I was supposed to control the fish. I was sure my stomach wall would burst and spill its contents--an even quart of Anejo. But dangers in nature are vastly overrated, though while backpacking I tend to think of grizzlies as 700-pound Dobermans that don't respond to voice commands. In Africa you are more likely to get bitten by a snake than attacked by a mammal. Comforting thought.

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There are unquestioned flops. We try to see the brighter side of our Hops, telling ourselves we haven't wasted our time. And we are dolts if we aren't comfortable in a world outside our immediate preoccupations. A sports bore is far more deadly than a krait or Gaboon viper. A true N.F.L. freak can make a more casual fan pine for opera. A real quadra or stereo buff makes you want that Victrola the big white dog was listening to.

One of the reasons I wanted to go to Russia was to scout the possibility of an extended trip for fishing and hunting. How splendid to shoot grouse where Ivan Turgenev had hunted, and I had heard that there was good steelhead and salmon fishing on the Pacific coast of Siberia. As a poet I have a tendency to imagine conditions and pleasures without precedent on earth. When fishing is bad, you can't tell but that just around the next green island there might be a nude fashion model sitting in a mohair chair on the water.

When I reached Russia my ideas seemed clearly impossible except for an important official visitor or on an established tour, a loathsome prospect. Red tape is a euphemism. And my first morning in Moscow had been encouraging, watching old men fish the broad Moskva River, which runs through the middle of the capital. They were sitting on an embankment below the faded red walls of the Kremlin, the mid-October sun catching the gold of the minarets as a backdrop. But I never saw anyone catch a fish, just as I had gazed at other fishless afternoons on the Seine in Paris. It is enough to have a river in a city.

After several days of badgering I managed to get to a horse race, but the weather had turned bad and the horses all but passed invisibly in what must be called a howling blizzard. The tote board said that Iron Beauty beat out Good Hoe, our plump female guide translated. Her pleasure was to wander aimlessly in great halls filled with the machinery of progress. It's hard to explain to someone so adamantly political that you see enough progress at home, and that to you progress means motors that quit rather captiously far out in the ocean. Or the shotgun that misfires when you have a good chance at a double in grouse. No matter that it is the first time in your life that a shotgun misfires. It brutishly picks the wrong time.

The climate of inquiry was more pleasant in Leningrad, where a black market is active and there are more creature pleasures. I found a sporting-goods store on the Nevsky Prospekt where the clerks were affable. An electrical engineer I met there joined me for a number of drinks and explained that fishing in Siberia would be difficult. Permissions were necessary. Bird hunting would be difficult but not impossible. Since I find even mild theater queues a torment, I checked Russia off my list. It was sad, as I had visions of sitting at the edge of a swale taking a break from grouse with a chilled bottle of Stolichnaya, some blinis on which I would spread large amounts of Beluga caviar, rolling them up like miraculous tacos.

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Outdoor sport has proved fatally susceptible to vulgarization based mostly on our acquisitiveness. Fishing becomes the mechanics of acquiring fish, bird hunting a process of "bagging a limit." Most sportsmen have become mad Germans with closets full of arcane death equipment. To some an ultimate sport would be chasing a coyote with a 650-c.c. snowmobile and an M-16. And some have found that baseball bats work as well, as a coyote can't run more than 20 miles and a snowmobile has a superior range.

You suspect that the further hunting and fishing get away from our ancient heritage of hunting and gathering the better. And I don't mean the native Americans, the Indians, who had the mother wit to understand that "the predator husbands his prey." Hunger causes the purest form of acquisitiveness, but our tradition always overstepped hunger into the fields of hoarding and unmitigated slaughter. The saddest book printed in our time is Peter Matthiessen's Wildlife in America, where the diminishing and disappearance of many species are minutely traced to our greed and game hoggery. Sporting magazines still publish those obscene photos of piles of trout, though there does seem to be a change in the air. The dolt who stands before the 100 crows he shot, smiling, should be forced at gunpoint to eat them, feathers, beaks, feet and offal. The excuse is that crows eat duck eggs, as if crows were supposed to abandon a 1,000,000-year food source for some clown who has taken Saturday morning off for a duck hunt.

Any sense of refinement seeps slowly into the mind of the sportsman and every advance made to improve the ethics of sport by organizations such as Trout Unlimited or the Grouse Society is countered by thousands of examples of boobery, murder and exploitation. Each state has a professional natural-resource staff, but so often its efforts are countered by what are called the beer-bottle biologists in the legislature who think of hunting and fishing as some sort of patriotic birthright, something they know intimately by osmosis. You see the same thing out West with townspeople who've never been on a horse assuming they are all-knowing because they are Westerners.

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I know a plain of about 500 acres near the Manistee River. We often begin a day's hunt there and my image of grouse and woodcock shooting is inextricably tied up with this great flat pasture cut near the river by a half-dozen gullies choked with thorn-apple and cedar trees. On our long walk to the grouse cover near the river we hunt a small marsh that invariably yields a few woodcock and snipe. You are lucky if you connect with one shot out of five. It is always early in the morning: cold, often wet, with the shotgun barrels icy to the fingers. The same location means nothing to me in the summer before the frost has muted the boring greenness.

Part of the pleasure of bird hunting is that it comes after the torpor of summer: beaches, the continuous sound of motorboats, the bleached air of August, a tendency to go to too many parties and to experiment with drinks an honest bourbon addict finds abominable in the winter. (A drink of my own devising I call the Hunter Thompson Special: Take juice left over from four stewed figs, add ground lime rind, a jigger of bitters, eight ounces of cheap tequila, one gram of hash, powder from three Dexamyl Spansules and a cherry bomb for decoration in an iced mug, stir vigorously with either end of a cue stick. This is the only aphrodisiac I know of. It will also remove warts and give you an interior suntan.)

And there is the color, the hardwoods sinking their juices into the ground before the horror of a Michigan winter. This stunning transformation of leaves creates colors that would look vulgar on a woman. They look good on trees and with the first cool days of autumn you find yourself hunting grouse and woodcock. You have given up duckhunting as too sedentary. Besides you have to get up at dawn, while midmorning is plenty early for grouse. So you walk around in the woods for a month and a half. Unfortunately, the steel-head fishing is good during the same period, but you can't afford to divide your attention. Surely it is a dreamworld; the nearly thundering flush and the always difficult shot. Grouse are very fast and the cover is heavy. If your shooting isn't trained as a gut reaction you simply miss, and when you miss a grouse you lose a very good meal. I suppose I especially value this form of shooting because I lost an eye in an accident and it has taken me years to reach even average competence.

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The symptoms of all the vaunted instabilities of artists tend to occur in interim periods. It is the mental exhaustion of having just finished a work and the even more exhausting time of waiting for another set of ideas to take shape. Poetry and the literary novel are a desperate profession nowadays--they probably always were--and any satisfying release seems to be desperately energetic. You tend to look for something as intricately demanding as your calling so you can forget yourself and let it rest.

Fly-fishing for trout offers an ideal match of the exacting and the aesthetically pleasant: to sit by a stream during the evening hatch and watch what trout are feeding on, then to draw from the hundreds of variations in your fly boxes a close approximation and catch a few trout. It's easily the most hypnotic of the outdoor sports. Once we began fishing the middle branch of the Ontonagon at dawn. I was numbly depressed from having finished my second book of poems and had been sleepwalking and drinking for weeks. My friend, who is equally maniacal and has no pain threshold that is noticeable, insisted we eat a pound of bacon, refried beans and a dozen eggs for strength. We fished nonstop then from dawn to dark at ten in the evening. It was a fine day, cool with intermittent light rain and enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes away. I remember catching and releasing a half-dozen good brook trout from a pool where a small creek entered the river. We saw deer and many conical piles of bearshit that gave us pause, but then, our local bears are harmless. We watched the rare and overwhelming sight of two adult bald eagles flying down the river course just above our heads, shrieking that we didn't belong there.

To perhaps lessen the purity of the day I admit that at nightfall we drove 100 miles to a whorehouse across the Wisconsin border. The next night a local bumpkin of the Deliverance sort was waving an ax around at the edge of our fire warning us not to steal any of his logs. We felt at ease--rather than a bow and arrows we had a rifle along.

This is a peculiarity of trout fishing--you can lose yourself completely for days at a time. If you feel your interest in women and the not-so-ordinary simplicities of sex waning, try getting on a horse and spending a week or two fishing up in the Absaroka Mountains of Montana. There are no women up there. Not even a little one. When you get back down to Livingston the most resolute dog looks good unless she actually begins to bark. A barroom tart invariably reminds you of the Queen of Sheba or Lauren Hutton. Unless you're careful you can manage to get into a lot of pointless trouble. Of course, the same conditions can be imitated by going off to war, but it's not as much fun.

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There is something about game that resists the homogeneity of taste found in even the best of our restaurants. A few years back, when we were quite poor, lower class by all the charts, we had a game dinner at our house. There were about 12 people contributing food and with a check for a long poem I bought two cases of a white Bordeaux. We ate, fixed in a number of ways, venison, duck, trout, woodcock, snipe, grouse and rabbit and drank both cases of wine. I doubt you could buy the meal anywhere on earth.

The French, however, are marvelous at game cookery. Two years ago I spent a week up in Normandy covering a stag-hunt at the invitation of a friend, Guy de la Valdene. His family has a château near Saint-Georges and a breeding farm for race horses. You do not go to Russia to eat and I had just returned from a hungry trip to Moscow and Leningrad. Other than the notion that staghunting seemed to me the pinnacle of stylishness in mammal hunting, the memorable part of the week was the eating, a vulgar word for what took place nightly in a local auberge. Despite my humble background, I found I enjoyed saddle of wild boar or a '28 Anjou with fresh pâté de foie gras in slabs, trout laced with truffles, côtelettes of loin from a small forest deer called a chevreuil, pheasant baked under clay with wild mushrooms. It all reminded me of the bust of Balzac by Rodin at the Metropolitan in New York, the evidence in his immense, bulbous face of his legendary interest in food and wine. But moderation makes sense only to those to whom such food is continuously available. The staghunt itself began after dawn and the animal was brought to bay by the hounds at twilight, when the master of the hunt dispatched the stag with a silver dagger after the manner of some six centuries. All day we had been sipping Château Margaux straight from the bottle and not feeling even vaguely boorish.

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After reading about African hunting for 20 years it took a trip to Kenya and Tanzania to cure me permanently of any notion that I might hunt there except for duck and grouse. And it's not that a great deal of the hunting there by outsiders lacks validity, excepting the endangered and diminishing species. It's simply that my time there more closely resembled a religious rather than a travel experience. In the Serengeti you get an eerie conviction of what the American West was like before we got off the boat. Perhaps I could have hunted there in the Twenties or Thirties before it became apparent that the natural world was shrinking in direct proportion to our insults against it: almost as if this world were a great beast itself and it had so demonstrably passed the mid-point of its life and needed the most extreme and intense care not to further accelerate its doom.

The problems of East Africa have been talked about and publicized to the saturation point, which has not in the least slowed the unnatural predation of new farms, overgrazing, poaching for skins, the title of population, ivory smuggling for jewelers and to the Orientals, who have the silly notion that ground ivory gives them hard-ons. Think of the boggling sexual vanity involved in killing a seven-ton beast for hard-ons. And it is not at all sure how long we can expect native populations that smarted under colonialization to maintain game parks for wealthy Westerners, no matter how beneficial.

I came to the point rather early when I realized I was not much interested in shooting mammals. This does not mean I disapprove of others' doing so. Maybe it's my squeamishness over gutting and cleaning a large animal, though I suspect my qualms would disappear if I needed the animal to feed my family. And deer hunting as opposed to bird hunting is difficult to do cleanly. We mammals are more sturdy than we assume. While a single pellet can bring a grouse tumbling down, both man and deer can crawl on for hours after Claymore Mines, .357s, a half-dozen badly placed rifle shots. When they were butchering it took seven unlucky shots for my neighbors to bring down their Holstein cow.

Last Thanksgiving Day during deer season we heard loud bleating, then barking from up behind our barn. Our horses were frantic and stared in the direction of the wood lot like pointing dogs. The bleating was from a deer dragging itself through the snow by its forelegs. The deer had been wounded in the spine and a hind leg had been shot nearly off, barely hanging by a tendon. A large collie had been harrying the deer and had torn much of its ass off. It was red like a baboon's. The game warden came and put it away. The deer was a young buck and lacked legal horns. Someone had shot it, then discovered the lack. Before the game warden dispatched it the deer, in deep shock, stared at us, seemingly well past caring, some kind of runaway slave that had fallen victim to our fatal hobbies.

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It is finally a mystery what keeps you so profoundly interested over so many years. The sum is far more than simply adding those separate parts. In the restorative quality there is the idea that as humans we get our power from the beauty we love most. And the sheer, unremittent physicality makes you lose for a while those fuzzy interior quarrels your head is addicted to, sitting as it does on the top of a Western man. It is also the degree of difficulty: to outwit a good brown trout with a lure less than the size and weight of a housefly or mosquito, to boat and release a 100-pound tarpon on a 12-pound-test leader, to hit a grouse on that long shot between the poplar trees. It could be very sporting to hunt a lion if you had the balls to do it like the Masai--with a spear.

The beauty and sensuousness of the natural world is so direct and open you often forget it: the tactility of standing in the river in your waders with the rush of water around your legs, whether deep in a cedar swamp in Michigan or in Montana, where you have the mountains to look at when the fishing is slow. With all of the senses at full play and the delicious absence of thought, each occasion recalls others in the past. It is a continuous present. You began at seven rowing your father around the lake at night, hearing in the dark the whir of his reel as he cast for bass, the creak and dip of the oars and the whine of clouds of mosquitoes around your head. You might have been lucky enough to hear a loon, surely the most unusual birdcall on earth, see heat lightning silhouette the tips of the white pines and birch.

You think of this 30 years later in Anconcito, a small, shabby village on the coast of Ecuador. You're taking the day off from fishing with heat weakness, vertigo, sore hands and the fear of death that being sick in a foreign country brings. You are sitting on a cliff next to a pile of refuse and a small goat. The goat is pure black and when it stumbles closer you see that it can't be more than a few days old. The goat nuzzles you. Not 30 feet away a very large vulture sits and stares at you both. You stare back, idly listening to the Latin music from the tin-shed café in the background. A piglet scurries by. You, the goat and the vulture watch the piglet and the goat takes chase. Far below you, so far that they are toys, there are fishing boats in the harbor powered anciently by sail. It is the hottest day you can remember. Beyond the harbor is all the vast, cool, deep-blue plenitude of the Pacific.