The Galápagos of North America. It’s a tired phrase, but one she conscientiously works into all her press releases and talks, whether formal or informal, because it never fails to have its effect, people drifting off on a fugue of National Geographic specials, of blue-footed boobies, frigate birds, vampire finches and marine iguanas presented in loving close-up while azure waves beat at crinkled shores, only to awaken to the connection she’s trying to make—that these islands, our islands, are equally unique. And equally worthy of preservation. And not simply preservation, but restoration.
She lifts her head to gaze out on the audience, sweeping left to right as if she’s speaking personally to each and every one of them, though with the spotlight in her eyes and her glasses on the podium beside her and the auditorium lights turned low, she can barely make out anyone beyond the second row. “Anacapa,” she pronounces, giving each of its aspirated syllables a long lingering beat, “is, as I’m sure you all know, a unique and irreplaceable ecosystem that is home to endemic species of both plants and animals found nowhere else in the world, from the island wallflower and an autochthonous Malacothrix, of the chicory genus, to the shield-backed cricket and the native deer mouse, Peromyscus maniculatus anacapae, just as the other islands harbor unique species of birds, as well as the spotted skunk and”—here a click of the mechanical mouse to display the next picture, one that never fails to arouse a tongue-clucking murmur of approval—“the island fox. Which, through some sixteen thousand years of separation from the mainland, has evolved into a separate subspecies, featuring the dwarfism often common to insular populations. On average”—she looks to the screen behind her, the fox blooming in the darkness, ears erect, paws neatly aligned and gazing out into the audience with all the ferocity of a stuffed toy—“these little guys weigh four to six pounds, the size of a house cat . . . one that gets regular exercise, that is.” This last, her icebreaker, always generates the first laugh of the evening, or rueful chuckle, at least, as the cat owners reflect on the overfed, kibbleized giants curled up asleep on the sofa at home.
She has them now, and never mind that privately she’d like to see all free-ranging cats exterminated in fact and by law, because she’s ascending into her rhythm, the Latin nomenclature rolling off her tongue as if she were a priest in training, every fact and figure at her command, no need at all to glance down at the notes she’s printed in 22-point type so she can dispense with her glasses and give them the full effect of her eyes. As the images click behind her, she presents a quick overview of island biogeography, of how isolated species evolve to fill niches in the ecosystem and of how that balance, unique to each island throughout the world, can be upset by the introduction of mainland species. She talks about the dodo, perhaps the poster animal for island extinctions, a pigeon-like bird that found its way to an isle in the Indian ocean and subsequently evolved, in the absence of predators, into the waddling big-bottomed flightless bird made infamous by its very helplessness.
“The dodo was naive,” she says, giving them a hard, no-nonsense look, because this is the reality, this is what it comes down to—the permanent loss of an irreplaceable species—and there’s nothing funny or even remotely ironic about that. “That is, it had had fear and suspicion bred out of it, and so waddled right up to the first seaman to land on the island of Mauritius, who plucked and roasted it, then introduced pigs and rats, which fed avidly on the eggs of this ground-nester. Flight is expensive,” she goes on, “in light of caloric resources expended, and so too is tree-nesting. Why fly, why nest in a tree, if you’ve evolved in a place where there are no predators? The answer for the dodo—the result, that is—as every schoolchild knows, was extinction.”
The audience has settled in, the initial rustling, nose-blowing and fist-suppressed hacking fading away into what she’d like to construe as engaged silence rather than a collective stupor. But no, they are engaged: she can feel them, alert and awake and alive to the argument to come (key words: rats and poison) and the bloodletting of the Q&A that will follow. All right. Time to bring it on. She clicks the mouse and the next image to infest the screen behind her is of those very rats, eyes gleaming demonically in the sudden illumination of the photographer’s flash, as they rifle the nests of gulls and murrelets, their paws and snouts wet with smears of yolk, albumin and chalaza.
“Rats,” she announces, letting the final s sibilate on her lips till it buzzes back to her through the speakers, “are responsible for sixty percent of all island extinctions in the world today.” A pause for effect. “And rats are killing off the ground-nesting birds of Anacapa Island.” Pause the second, this time accompanied by the steeliest squint she can manage, considering that she can barely see the audience. “Which is why I am here tonight to tell you that we must act and act now if we want to save these endemic creatures from the same fate that met the dodo, the Rodrigues solitaire, the Stephens Island wren, the Culebra Island giant anole and dozens—hundreds, thousands—of others.”
And now the rustling, the creaking of the chairs and the whisper of voices, excitement flashing through the crowd like an electrical charge: this is what they’ve come for. And it’s what she’s come for too, the moment of truth. She straightens up, squares her shoulders. She has them in her power and now is the time to lean into the microphone, hold them with that squint, and say: “Which is why we have, after long deliberation and with the full backing of the National Park Service’s biologists and the California Department of Fish and Game as well as the scientific community at large, decided to go to the air with the control agent brodifacoum to suppress the invasive rodent population, which, incidentally, is threatening the native deer mice in addition to the murrelet, the pigeon guillemot, the western gull and the cormorant.” She clicks the mouse to display a close-up of a tiny Xantus’s murrelet with its black head and mask over a white throat and underbelly, looking stricken as the snaking dark form of a rat gnaws the egg out from under it. “And let me assure you that this agent is quick-acting and humane, and that if we were presented with any other alternative we would gladly have taken it, but given the urgency of the situation and our confidence in the method of control, we have, have . . .”
The crowd has fallen silent. They’ve become aware of a presence she’s just now perceived at the periphery of her vision, the figure of a man risen from a seat at the far end of the front row, his hair in rusty dreadlocks, his head bowed, muscles rigid, his jaw clamped in fury. She knows him. Of course she does. And of course he’s here and of course he’s interrupting her and behaving like a brownshirt, like a, a—
“Bull,” he pronounces, and his voice echoes from one end of the auditorium to the other. “Propaganda and doublespeak.” He swings round on the audience suddenly, his arms raised like a prophet’s. “Did we come here to listen to the party line like a bunch of drones under some communistic dictatorship, or is this a public meeting? Do we want our questions answered? Our point of view represented? Or is this show for mutes only?”
A groundswell of applause, a scattering of voices, male and female alike, calling out encouragement and then a chant starting like the rumor of a distant wind and blowing stronger with each repetition, “Q and A, Q and A, Q and A!”
And now she’s raising both her hands, palms out, in a gesture for silence, patience, simple common courtesy, and a rumble of voices arises in support. “Sit down,” someone calls from the darkness. “Button it.”
“All right,” she hears herself say, her amplified voice coming at them like the voice of a god, stentorian, omnipotent—she has the microphone and they don’t—“we’ll address all your concerns and take your comments in a minute. As for you, Mr. LaJoy”—he’s still standing there, his arms crossed in defiance—“your opposition to our goals is well documented, and you will have your chance to comment, but I’m going to have to ask you to sit and wait your turn.” And then she adds, superfluously, “All things in time.”
The applause now is definitely on her side, on the side of civili
ty and restraint, and it continues until Dave LaJoy sinks back into his seat and she’s had a chance to take a sip of water from the glass Frieda has left for her on the ledge beneath the lectern, and is her hand shaking as she lifts it to her lips? No. It’s not. It’s definitely not. Determined not to let them ruffle her, she sets the glass firmly down and picks up where she’s left off, describing—and yes, minimizing—the effects of the control agent and once again bringing home the point, in ringing terms, that there is absolutely no alternative to the proposed action, even as the final image, of a murrelet tending its nestlings against a soft-focus background of clinging plants and dark volcanic rock, crowds the screen behind her. She takes the applause graciously, bows her head and waits till Frieda has mounted the stage in her rangy unhipped slump-shouldered stride and thrust herself into the spotlight. “Now,” Frieda projects into the microphone on an admonitory blast of static, “now Dr. Takesue will take your questions. In turn. And one at a time, please.” She waits a moment, as if daring anyone to defy her, shields her eyes against the glare, and calls out into the void, “Up with the house lights, Guillermo. We want to see just whom we’re addressing.”
Immediately, Dave LaJoy is on his feet, his hand rocketing in the air—and there she is, Anise Reed, seated beside him in her cyclone of hair, her eyes burning and her hands clenched in her lap. Alma, her glasses clamped firmly over the bridge of her nose now, ignores them and flags a woman ten rows back. Red-faced, with a corona of milk-white hair and a pair of rectangular wire-rimmed glasses that could have come from the same shop as Frieda’s, the woman unfolds herself from the chair and in a thin sweet aqueous voice asks, “What about the mice? Won’t the poison hurt them too?” then drops back into the chair and the anonymity of the crowd as if to stand for one second more under the public gaze would crush the breath out of her.
“Good question,” Alma purrs, congratulating her, relieved to field a query from someone who’s come to be informed, to learn something rather than suck up attention like a parasite, and that’s exactly what Dave LaJoy is, a parasite on the corpus of the Park Service and the museum and Frieda and everyone else who works to improve things rather than tear them down. “Our field biologists”—her voice is soft now, honeyed, the pleasure of the exchange erasing the tension that settled in her stomach and migrated all the way out to the tips of her fingers till they tingle as if they’ve been frostbitten—“have taken the mice into account and we’ve trapped a representative population for captive breeding and release after the rats have been extirpated—and we expect them to repopulate very quickly in the absence of competition from the rats.”
“And the birds? What about the birds? Isn’t it a fact that there’ll be a massive kill-off?” A man on her left—a confederate of LaJoy’s?—has popped up out of nowhere, unrecognized. She sees a goatee, the glint of gold in one ear, the glaring blue unbreachable eyes of the fanatic, and for an instant she thinks to ignore him, but immediately relents—if she doesn’t answer she’ll look as if she’s evading the issue.
“The bait is colored bright blue, a hue that doesn’t fall within the range of anything the avifauna might be expected to consume. And, of course, we’re going to do the aerial drop now, in winter, when bird numbers are down.” She raises a placatory palm and lets it fall. “We expect very little collateral damage.”
“Little?” It’s LaJoy again, again on his feet. “The loss of a single animal—a single rat—is intolerable, inhumane and just plain wrong. Why don’t you tell them—Dr. Takesue—about what this poison does to any animal unlucky enough to ingest it, whether that’s a rat or one of your precious little birds? Huh? Why don’t you tell them that?”
She can see Frieda stirring in the chair she’s taken in the front row, Frieda the watchdog, her neck craned, glasses shining militantly. And where’s Bill Braithwaite—wasn’t he supposed to provide the muscle here? And Tim? Where’s Tim?
“The agent is quick-acting and humane,” she hears herself say.
“More doublespeak.” LaJoy is swinging round to incite the crowd, juggling his arms and flaying the dreadlocks round the stanchion of his neck. “The fact is that this poison—call it by what it is, why don’t you?—this poison causes slow death from internal bleeding over anywhere from three to ten days. Ten days! You call that humane?”
The audience breathes out, massively. Chairs creak. A soughing murmur of opposed voices starts up. She’s losing them.
“Listen, Mr. LaJoy,” she says, her voice as sharp-edged as one of the arrowheads in the back room, and she’d like nothing better than to run him through, pull back the bowstring and let fly, “I’m not going to debate you here—”
“Then where are you going to debate me? Name it. I’ll be there. And then maybe people can get around to the truth of this thing, that you and your so-called scientists—”
“Frankly, nowhere. We’ve had your opinion. Thank you. Now—yes, you, the man in back, in the plaid shirt?”
But LaJoy won’t give it up, just as he wouldn’t the week before in Ventura when he had to be escorted from the room, spewing threats and curses. “You’re no better than executioners,” he shouts over whatever the man in plaid is trying to say. “Nazis, that’s what you are. Kill everything, that’s your solution. Kill, kill, kill.”
Suddenly Frieda is there beside her, the microphone riding up to the level of her irate face. “Now that will be enough. If you can’t be civil—”
He throws it right back at her. “How can you talk about being civil when innocent animals are being tortured to death? Civil? I’ll be civil when the killing’s done and not a minute before. Those rats—”
Alma feels the heart go out of her. She’s standing there at Frieda’s side, feeling helpless and exposed, trying to keep her shoulders from slumping, the scepter of the microphone taken from her and the crowd too, even as Frieda glares at the rear of the auditorium and calls for order. “Bill,” she cries, “Guillermo. Will you please have this gentleman removed from the hall?”
And here they come, Bill Braithwaite, all two hundred fifty ventricose pounds of him, and the tech person, Guillermo Díaz, head down and a hundred pounds lighter, making their way up the right-hand aisle, looking grim. “Those rats have been there for a hundred and fifty years!” LaJoy calls out, edging down the row to box them off. “What’s your baseline? A hundred years ago? A thousand? Ten thousand? Hell”—and he’s out in the far aisle now, facing the crowd—“why not just clone your dwarf mammoth and stick him out there like in Jurassic Park?”
“Bill,” Frieda pleads in a long expiring sigh of exasperation that bleats through the speakers like a martyr’s last prayer. “Bill!”
Everybody seems to be standing now, voices caroming off the high open wood-beamed ceiling, no bringing them back, another night lost—or at least the most instructive part of it. And why couldn’t the informed people speak up? Or the schoolchildren who want to know about the fox’s habits or what the spotted skunk eats and how it got so small? Why the controversy? Why the anger? Why the hate? Jurassic Park. That was a low blow, the demagogue’s trick of confusing the issue, and she wants to snatch the microphone back and let him have it, but she can’t because she’s a professional, she abides by the rules, she has taste and manners and truth on her side, and getting into a shouting match with a sociopath just isn’t the way to advance her agenda.
She looks out into the audience, LaJoy already at the exit, a good half the crowd between him and Bill Braithwaite and Guillermo so that she won’t even have the satisfaction of seeing him thrown out. He’s taking his time, all hips and shoulders, his head swaying cockily, carrying himself like a wrestler marching into the arena. He’s almost there, the crowd at the door parting to make way for him as they would for any embarrassment, any pariah, but at the last moment he jerks himself up, swings round to shoot a withering glance at the podium where she stands beside Frieda on the forgotten stage and lifts his chin to deliver the parting blow, loud enough for all to hear: “
And who exactly was it appointed you God, lady?”
Afterward, over warm white wine and stale tortilla chips at the reception the museum board has arranged for her, a number of people come up to tell her how stimulating and informative her lecture was and how much they support what she’s doing for the islands and how they deplore the sort of rude behavior and ignorance on display in the audience tonight. They mean to be kind, but a reflexive smile and a gracious “thank you” is the best she can come up with. Once LaJoy had been ejected—Anise Reed slithering off with him—Frieda managed to settle the crowd and the Q&A went off as planned, people genuinely interested and Alma taking advantage of the opportunity to educate them with all the graciousness and facility at her command. Which was plenty, especially considering the dramatic tension left hanging in the air—in a strange way, the outbursts made the audience all the more sympathetic and receptive. All things considered, she’s weathered the evening well—and, more important, gotten her point across, nudging people toward the light in a calm and reasonable fashion that went a long way toward negating the distortions of the PETA fringe and the FPA and all the rest. Yes. Sure. And so why is she standing here balancing a plastic cup of tepid undrinkable wine on one palm while fielding the sort of looks usually reserved for the perky little gymnast who falls off the balance bar at the Olympic trials?