Month: May 2023

It was in 1964 when I last walked through the doors of a YMCA as an overnight guest. That had been in downtown Manhattan as I was heading to Europe for the summer between my junior and senior year of college. I distinctly remember that the room was not much larger than the bed, but it was clean, and the lobby and halls seemed to bubble quietly with normal, or what I perceived as a mid-60s college kid, to be normal people.

Twenty-two years later, in May of 1986, I was coerced into staying again at a Y, this time the Minneapolis YMCA, by a close friend with whom I had spent two summers, 1981 and 1982, doing research at NASA Johnson Space Center, in Texas. We were attending the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), not my first choice for my only professional conference for the year, but Jim was a great friend and a university geographer from Texas A&I Kingsville (now A&M). I was a university ecologist from Nebraska. Jim was a devoted tight wad, who cut corners wherever and whenever possible. He frequently stayed at YMCAs and fleabag motels to save his per diem money provided by his university.

I soon discovered that the YMCAs of the 80s were not the YMCAs of the 60s, especially in the big cities. The clues of serious deterioration were all there, but I chose to ignore them, at least initially. When I called several months in advance to make my reservation, I thought the desk clerk had lost his voice. The silence was audible. After I introduced myself, he yells into the office, thinking he has the receiver covered with his hand,

“Hey Rip, this guy from somewhere in Nebraska is trying to reserve a double room with his buddy from Texas. Do we do that kind of stuff? Yeah, that’s what I said, a double. How the Hell am I supposed to know? He don’t sound like one.” There is a long silence while Rip was apparently going through records, probably to see if any policy existed on making reservations to gays in advance. Back on the phone, Buck says, “We don’t ordinarily make reservations, either you’re here or you ain’t, but we’ll try to reserve you and your buddy a double even though they’re hard to come by. Bye.”

May, 1986, 10^th floor, Room 1005:

“What the Hell have you gotten me into,” I blurted to Jim when we reached our $15 double. Having just walked through the chaotic, inert body-choked lobby, we now faced the worst accommodations I had seen anywhere, and that included Mexico and South America. Jim said nothing but carefully deposited an army duffle bag full of popcorn, oranges, and bagels, onto a heavily charred table. The table appeared to have suffered from a previous tenant’s attempt to build a winter warming fire. I sympathized completely; you could see your breath in the room even in May. I couldn’t imagine that they would have had the AC on.  

I had seen that same duffle bag before, in 1982, in Houston. Only then, the since-patched corner was dribbling popcorn into an immense Houston cinema. Then it had a hole that only a dedicated mouse or squirrel could drill. Jim and I had entered the movie late with the popcorn and a 6-pak of Diet Pepsi concealed under our coats. I had the Pepsi and Jim had the duffle of popcorn somehow stuffed under his coat. I’m not sure how he managed to hide an entire duffle of popcorn under his army surplus trench coat without looking pregnant, but he did.

The movie that hot Texas afternoon, was the newly released ET, and the theater was completely full except for two empty adjacent seats in the second row, mid-row. Our eyes had not adjusted to the dark, especially against the light of the mega-screen as we indiscreetly maneuvered toward the two seats with our sustenance to keep us alive for 2 hours. The children we sat on were as stunned as we were, and they screamed. The office saw our duffle of snacks and still refunded our money.

Back in our now icebox room, Jim casually dropped onto the solitary metal folding chair. I cautiously lowered myself onto one of the cots and sank into its depths to the point where my feet lifted off the floor and my butt bottomed out. I could see only the upper half of Jim. I started to itch immediately.

                “You know why I do this, don’t you?” he said.

“Well, I assume it has something to do with the fact that you’re writing a book about the Third World,” I replied.

“That’s only a part of it. The other side of that coin reveals the simple truth that I am trying to beat the Texas university system of providing a lump sum for lodging and meals.”

Then he launched into telling me about last year’s AAG meeting in downtown Detroit, one I intentionally missed because Detroiters had, at that time, a penchant for wasting each other at an uncomfortable rate, especially in the heart of the city. I, as a biologist, was interested in life, mine most especially.  In Detroit, Jim had managed to locate a YMCA very near the convention center for under $10 per night. But he was unable to find a cabby who would take him to the front door, even in broad daylight. The best he could arrange was a moving drop-off, several blocks from his destination.

When Jim and I returned to the Y our first night after an excellent KFC dinner, the lobby was packed. The crowd did not represent what my original impression from 1964 of a good socio-economic cross-section. As Jim and I cautiously snaked our way through the inert bodies, the pervasive smells of regurgitated burgundy and cigarettes added a latent dimension to our greasy dinner. Almost to the elevator, an elderly woman blocked our way to freedom.

“Would you nice-looking young gentlemen help me with my luggage? They don’t seem to have a bellhop in this establishment,” she said. Her “luggage” were of the Safeway label. No Samsonite anywhere visible in the lobby.

“You go on up to the room, I can handle this,” Jim said, as he shoved me through the closing door of the elevator. “This is right up my alley. Third World to a T.”  The elevator, under normal circumstances, is an improvement over the staircase when you’re tired and on the 10^th floor. There are exceptions. Had the Y made the decision to rip out the shag carpet floor cover to allow for frequent and thorough cleaning, it would have been a wise decision.  After the doors sealed me in, my olfactory system hit Red Alert. Simultaneously, my peripheral vision detected a grayish, lump of something propped up against a corner of my tomb. The lump was urinating into a half-pint chocolate milk carton that appeared to already be full of a chocolate-urine combo. I could see that, under the low lighting in the elevator, it could have been misconstrued as a urinal.

One hour back in our room, Jim had not yet returned. My mind envisioned bag lady accomplices dragging Jim’s bullet-riddled body toward the Y dumpster, having fleeced him for his empty wallet. I met him on the staircase coming up with a blanket under his arm.

“She doesn’t have any covers on her cot,” he explained. “Furthermore, I’ve found her fascinating. She is an intelligent, articulate woman down on her luck. Come along and have a chat with her. You’ll see what I mean.” Within seconds after introducing us in her doorway, Jim had evaporated.

Have some ice cream, my good man,” she said, and offered me some cream out of one of the paper grocery bags that filled the tiny room. She had no cones or cups and it was already oozing out onto the floor.

                “That’s okay. I’m stuffed with KFC,” I said.

“So, what meeting did you young gentlemen say you were attending?” she asked. After telling her that we had an all-day field trip, she said, “Would you mind if I joined you? I love field trips.”

“Unfortunately, the trips are restricted to the conference attendees,” I quickly countered, not knowing if that was true, but I was fairly certain she wouldn’t have passed for an academic.

Then she asked, and I never saw it coming, “Do you perhaps have a twenty that you might loan me?” Her voice had dropped considerably. “I afraid that I need money for a heart transplant.” I glanced futilely over my shoulder for some invisible support for Jim. Long gone. The hallway was empty. Even Jim, with his alleged Third World mindset and frugal tendency, would have balked. Twenty dollars would buy him one helluva lot of popcorn and maybe even a new Army duffle.

                “Do you think I would be staying in this place if I had that kind of money?” I said.

“No, that’s true, you wouldn’t be,” she conceded. “Well how about any loose change? I need to make some long-distance calls to my surgical team in New York.”

The following day, Jim and I transferred to the Minneapolis Marriot, where the meeting was being held and the other Third World geographers were staying.

Originally published Feb, 24, 1987. Potpourri Writers’ Bloc #5. Texas A&I University Literary Magazine, pp. 26-28.

Now that Aye Matey (I’m 80), I’ve circled the sun 80 times, am I supposed to be a white bearded sage sitting in the corner, smoking a pipe, pontificating, and casting juicy pearls of wisdom to be snatched up by a doting audience? Or, a smelly, black bearded pirate, mumbling with his nasty parrot in the corner, drooling into his grog, the parrot occasionally releasing droppings into his owner’s grog? The latter, according to my wife. Mexicans refer to my stage in life as the tercera edad, the third age, when you get free entry into museums and half fare on buses and free visits to the cemeteries on Dia de los Muertos. Oh, and free entry when go in box. The problem once you are officially tercera edad material, you don’t remember where your wife told you to get off the bus at the museum, so you ride around and around the city all day, staring vacantly out the window. Twenty-four hours later, you do the same thing.

Let’s pretend that I have a crystal ball and can look ahead another 80 years to 2103, and see the Seattle 3, my three grandsons, currently 11 and 9 (twins) at the ages of 91 and 89 respectively.  They’re living on the moon or Mars in sweet little suites because the Earth has become way too unpleasant to live on. Venus is out, regardless how uncomfortable the Earth gets, because Venus is nasty hot and dry. If you listen to James Hansen, retired director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a world authority on Venus, Earth could become another Venus in a very long time. Hansen devoted the tenth chapter in The Storms of My Grandchildren, to The Venus Syndrome, a sci-fi saga in which he prophesied the extreme possibility of Earth becoming another Venus with surface temperatures in excess of 800 F. That won’t happen because we won’t continue to play the role of the frog acclimating to a slowly boiling pan of water, until he utters his final croak and croaks. We’ll be extinct or on the moon if we allow ourselves to reach the Mother of All Tipping Points (MATP), and take the Disney Land super-ride, the Downward Spiral to Venus and commit globacide. Zap!

Globacide means the whole enchilada. With a globacide, Homo sapiens species may survive to see another day if we develop the moon. But what about everything else? Globacide is pretty final for everything, including our cultural histories. I’m not a futurist, so I certainly don’t know what’s possible and what isn’t. Once on the moon, humans would have virtual reality with lions, and tigers and bears attacking us and each other for fun. According to Lewis Gordon, in the article, Can virtual nature be a good substitute for the real outdoors? The science says yes. (Washington Post, April 28, 2020).  

We may not miss the incredible natural beauty of species abundance and biodiversity and whole ecosystems like coral reefs and rain forests, but that is only from our perspective, which seems to be all we care about. What about the millions of extinct or suffering extant species’ perspective? Are we going to argue that animals like dogs, crows and octopi don’t have feelings? Can’t they love us and each other? Absolutely that your dog loves you. Your parrot loves you. What about the octopus in the documentary, My Octopus Teacher? Would her descendants and those of all other species be able to replace their authentic nature with virtual nature? Are we going to provide a virtually real world for the millions of species and hundreds of ecosystems that have gone extinct or will go extinct? So what if we can clone every species that ever lived, are we going to clone whole ecosystems and biomes? A virtual Earth on the moon? Even if virtual nature and cloning on large scales were possible, aren’t the decisions to do so dependent on our long-term survival which is dependent on an awareness of our need for survival and be able to do something immediately about the preparation needed? We knew Hitler was threatening the future of the world and we went directly to war.  Isn’t it obvious that climate change is doing the same thing now, only not as dramatic but definitely with the strong potential to destroy Earth?

Animals and plants are teaching us more every day they have feelings and maybe they sense that their lives are endangered but don’t have the capability to do anything about it. In the mid-1970s, Tom Michell rescued a barely alive, Magellanic penguin from piles of thousands of dead penguins that had been killed by an oil spill off the coast southeastern Uruguay. Forty years later Michell published a very endearing book, entitled, The Penguin Lessons, about living with a penguin, while the author was an instructor at a private school in Buenos Aires. In the final chapter Michell wrote,

“Is there any chance the world’s oceans can survive damage we are causing but just don’t we see? Thanks to inflation, it is the penguins and the rest of Nature’s descamisados (sic, innocent victims of war, economic and environmental crises, etc.) who pay the real cost of our way of life, in the only currency they have. The way we live today illustrates human capacity for dramatic change over a very short time, yet despite knowing that our modus vivendi is unsustainable, our modus operandi has so far proved incapable of bringing about measures necessary to allow wildlife populations even to equilibrate, let alone recover. What seems undeniable is that the Bank of Nature’s descamisados becomes insolvent, no amount our money will ever bail us out.” After reading this little book, I definitely believed that the little penguin, Juan Salvado, taught Tom that he had feelings and was every bit as capable of true love. So, who’s to say that animals and plants don’t have perceptions about their deteriorating homes?

Fifty-one years ago this spring, I was in northwestern Argentina studying desert armadillos for my doctoral field research and preparing to make a very tragic and costly mistake that really reflected my true attitude toward Earth and its inhabitants. I was preoccupied with thinking how I was going to ship 27 animals back to Tucson and to Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago that next August, and not have to put them in quarantine for a month in LA. I failed. Not because I couldn’t get them through customs, which I did, but because of my incredible stupidity and singular focus – in me. Ten animals were successfully shipped to the zoo, but 17 died in the Mojave Desert in the middle of the night while I slept off a drunken party. They suffocated in the closed U-Haul trailer behind me. Some of those armadillos were friends. It played out like the worst horror movie made, and I was Dr. Frankenstein. They were buried that morning in the desert under a big mesquite tree. I cried for weeks and almost gave up my plans. Since that horrific time, I’ve dedicated my life to saving Earth. From us. In my estimation, climate change has upped the ante a million-fold since the first Earth Day, and Earth Day has surpassed the Super Bowl and Mother’s Day in importance. To not celebrate Earth should result in incarceration, at least until people like me realize there may just be more important creatures and ecosystems on this planet than us.

In 2103, another 80 years and I will have gone the way of all crusty pirates, but the Seattle 3 may be around along with hopefully thousands of other species. By then we and possibly other species will be very aware of the fact that one species, Homo sapiens, was responsible for premature globacide. And even if the other species can’t fathom our crime, it shouldn’t make any difference; we took complete advantage of their naivety and vulnerability.  

So, what possible reason would we have to do that? A death wish? Passion for global termination? An addiction to human greed of money and power by a tiny minority of us who could care less about the future?  Yes, but to a much lesser extent, all of us who knowingly do not attempt to reduce our ecological footprint are guilty. What other explanation is there? Do we have a choice? Absolutely. Can we still do something about reversing the process now? Absolutely, but the clock is ticking faster and faster. The modern pirates of the world, the power mongers, need to consider their parrots are as important as they are.