Geographica: Tigers!

By now it should hardly need saying that every issue of National Geographic is  wonder-park of astonishment (or words, you know, to that effect). It's a continuous source of confusion to me why every thinking person I know isn't a lifelong subscriber, doesn't eagerly await each new issue and put everything on hold to pore over it like I do. Of course, that very same abundance makes a regular feature like Geographica feel almost redundant, since virtually every issue of National Geographic is so bursting with fascination that it feels nearly misleading to point out any one thing. My only justification is that some things strike me more than others in my reading of each issue. And in this current issue, Stevereads recidivists might be expecting the talking-point to be Adam Nicolson's wonderful, fast-paced overview of the King James Bible - its history, its 'reception' as a text, etc. And it was indeed a joy - as was the photo taken by Jeffrey Chua de Guzman on the sea-bed off the coast of Manilla: he spotted something moving and saw a broken soda bottle (it's standing upright in the photo - my inner Suspicious Aloysius wonders if the photographer didn't find it on its side and stand it up himself, for dramatic effect) - with an octopus leisurely canted inside.

But for me, this time around, the highlight was Caroline Alexander's tough but hopeful article "A Cry for the Tiger," in which she writes about both the plight of the world's wild tigers and (in the magazine's long tradition) the fight to save them. The article opens with an incredibly enheartening sight: a trip-wire camera's midnight shot of a tiger walking by in the forests of northern Sumatra, a magnificent creature caught for one instant in the middle of its invisible life. But then the very next image is discouraging: four hopeless little felons apprehended outside Chandrapur trying to sell a tiger skin (pretty discouraging too the shot in this article of a terrified puppy being used as live bait in a tiger-trap). I lived for a while in Chandrapur many years ago, and I saw tiger-articles - pelts, claws, teeth, tails - in the bazaar all the time ... it was immediately saddening to know it still goes on, even in today's far more eco-conscious atmosphere.

Sill, at least Alexander's prose is an unmixed joy. Her article bogs in statistics or exposition, and her narrative is always sharp with awe:

Consider the tiger, how he is formed. With claws up to four inches long and retractable, like a domestic cat's, and carnassial teeth that shatter bone. While able to achieve bursts above 35 miles an hour, the tiger is built for strength, not sustained speed. Short, powerful legs propel his trademark lethal lunge and fabled leaps. Recently, a tiger was captured on video jumping - flying - from flat ground to 13 feet in the air to attack a ranger riding an elephant. The eye of the tiger is backlit by a membrane that reflects light through the retina, the secret of his famous night vision and glowing night eyes. The roar of the tiger - Aaaaauuuuunnnn! - can carry more than a mile.

The perfect accompaniment to the article: a pull-out poster with a beautiful Fernando Baptista illustration of a lion on one side and a gallery of incredible Vincent Musi photos of the world's big cats on the other.

Of course it will come as little surprise to any of you that I find these animals extra disturbing - pretty tough for a confirmed dog-person not to find the idea of a 600-pound cat with linoleum-knives for claws disturbing. But the article left me tensely hoping there's a future for these magnificent animals. National Geographic does that to you: it broadens your reactions to everything in the world.

Geographica: Hope!

Wonders abound in the latest National Geographic, which isn't always the case. Sometimes, in the Society's zeal to present nothing less than the entire world to its loyal readers, it inadvertently conveys so much of what's wrong with the world that those readers (this one, certainly) put down some issues ready for a good long cry - or a good stiff drink. The undeniable toll that mankind is wreaking daily on virtually every inch of the planet is difficult to balance out with anything like good news. Species are disappearing every single day; humans are multiplying at something very near to a billion a year; and worst of all, the very climate of the planet is changing, and changing so rapidly that nobody alive today will escape the consequences, and most of those consequences will be horrifying - probably in ways we haven't yet conceived. Sharks are being annihilated for their fins; abandoned old Soviet nuclear power plants are being raided for their weapons-grade plutonium; camels are mistreated throughout the Middle East. Bad news abounds.

The September issue manages to bring good news, and that feels great. Not the daffy fake-good news of the cover story, but real good news, from a motorized exoskeleton that could allow paralytics to move around again, to a dreamy little photo of a woman paddling her canoe in Florida and being joined by an inquisitive manatee.

And two of the issue's big feature articles are likewise bright with optimism. The first is by Charles Siebert and deals with Kenya's many orphanage-farms for parentless young elephants. The article is illustrated by several heartwarming photos by Michael Nichols, showing these pint-sized behemoths at their most vulnerable and adorable, receiving the patient and loving care of the humans who work at these orphanages. Siebert is very good at supplying the larger context along the way:

What makes this particular moment in the fraught history of elephant-human relations so remarkable is that the long-accrued anecdotal evidence of the elephant's extraordinary intelligence is being borne out by science. Studies show that structures in the elephant brain are strikingly similar to those in humans. MRI scans of an elephant's brain suggest a large hippocampus, the component in the mammalian brain linked to memory and an important part of its limbic system, which is involved in processing emotions. The elephant brain has also been shown to possess in abundance the specialized neurons known as spindle cells, which are thought to be associated with self-awareness, empathy, and social awareness in humans. Elephants have even passed the mirror test of self-recognition, something only humans, and some great apes and dolphins, had been known to do.

The claims here might be a bit narrow (the octopus and the raven, for instance, also routinely pass the mirror test), but anything that gives elephants even a small added chance of garnering more of the human protection every species in the world now needs to survive is welcome. They're a long-lived and slow-maturing species, so from humans they need the most precious gift of all: time.

The wonders that time can produce are on full display in the article by Verlyn Klinkenborg on the Adirondacks, accompanied by stunning photos by Michael Melford. The piece celebrates the 'primitive forest' vibe given off by the place - a feeling experienced by everybody who's ever been there in the happy present day. It's a feeling that would have been much more difficult to access a hundred years ago, when rampant mining and road-cutting had the place looking grimy and denuded throughout much of its range. As unbelievable as it feels when you're hiking through it, most of the Adirondacks has been reclaimed in the last century. Klinkenborg captures something of the magic:

What's arresting about the Adirondacks isn't the tantalizing promise of another view lying out of sight, though the park is an endless beaded chain of new perspectives. What's arresting is the absence of a view, the dense enclosure of the eastern forest, the depth of the biotic floor you step across as you move deeper and deeper into a kind of Leatherstocking shade. It seems irrational to feel the trees closing behind you, as if the forest is cutting you off from the present. But the gravity you feel - drawing you over rock and moss, through small streams where the light opens overhead, across deadfalls, and into pure dim stands of hemlock - is the returning wildness of the place.

I've trekked the Adirondacks many times and felt that same sense of enclosure - a weird and not entirely enjoyable feeling that can be profoundly stirring, even when you're shepherding a small crowd of noisy, inquisitive beagles. It's amazing to think that deep green atmosphere needed less than a century to re-assert itself after near-fatal deforestation. It's amazing to think that, and gives you hope.

Back to some familiar faces in the Penny Press!

Predictably, the short story "Reverting to a Wild State" in the 1 August issue of The New Yorker has the gay literary world all a-twitter (we can't use that word anymore, can we? Not without sending dozens of people scurrying for their feeds). The story is by Justin Torres, and it's about a cute young gay man who begins to cheat on his nice, normal boyfriend with an older man who likes to pay him to clean house in his skimpies ("The man passed comment on all the usual parts of my body, but the unusual as well - my calves, the notch at the top of my spine. To comment is not necessarily to compliment, we were both aware"). The narrative is rather pretentiously fragmented into four numbered parts counting down backwards (we start at 3 and end up at 0), but readers can ignore such details and concentrate on the important stuff. There are four important things about this story, and the first two are the ones getting it so much attention this week: it's gay-themed, and it's published in The New Yorker. Those two things don't coincide very often (New Yorker readers of any standing will remember the first story to break that particular barrier), and this occasion is made all the more noteworthy due to the third important thing: the story is well-written - it captures with agility the mercurial flashes of breaking up, of the weird little things you remember when a relationship is ending, and the weird reactions those memories produce:

Nigel was always finding discarded plants and taking them home to regenerate. Everywhere in our apartment were plants, thriving. This, too, infuriated me - and when Nigel instructed me not to come home that night, when he told me to come by the next day, while he was at work, and remove all my shit and never come home again, I thought of those plants, of a space in the world without them.

"It's over," Nigel said. "You're free."

[caption id="attachment_3352" align="alignleft" width="249" caption="illustration by autumn whitehurst"][/caption]

It's the fourth important thing about the story that bugs me, however: it's bigoted. The main character is in a long-term relationship with a loving partner, and then - out of the blue - he reverts to a wild state, apparently the wild state from which all cute gay boi's come, a wild state that's always with them, calling them to abandon their lovers and start polishing some rich guy's woodwork for pocket money. The main character doesn't leave poor earnest Nigel because he's in love with someone else or even attracted to someone else - he leaves a stable, caring relationship for a cash-and-carry arrangement in which he's mainly a sex object, and the title of Torres' story leads us to think he does this because it's his nature, like a salmon. There's a segment of the American population that believes all gay men are by nature shallow, sex-obsessed bed-hoppers, and that segment of the population has used this characterization to deny gay men civil rights and equal legal treatment (in addition to denying them jobs, physical safety, and sometimes the right to go on breathing). I'd bet my last basset hound Torres doesn't consider himself a part of that segment of the population - he went to the University of Iowa, after all, and trained dogs, and worked in a bookstore. So why this story? Something he himself experienced but lacked the patience to transmute? Or is it that a significant chunk of The New Yorker's subscribers come from that aforementioned segment of the population, and what little gay fiction they ever force themselves to read must be of this 'I can't help myself' blackface variety? Neither answer is good enough, and I find myself wondering about a third.

Leaving a magazine wondering something unsavory is of course part of the risk you run when you read as many magazines as I do. But there's one that almost always leaves me feeling the clean, uplifting kind of wonder - National Geographic, of course. Specifically, the current issue, the one with the polar bear on the cover - only NO! That's not a polar bear - it's a white black bear, a "spirit bear" from the deep rain forests of British Columbia! In an article by Bruce Barcott, I learned there may be as many as a thousand of these remarkable animals roaming the forests and feeding on fish, and that nobody quite knows why they've developed their distinctive coloring, and that their existence was largely kept a secret by the local tribes, who venerate the animal and don't want outsiders hunting it (a laudable intent utterly undone by this issue - if even 1 percent of the world's insane trophy-hunters read this article and realize there's a whole new kind of bear they've never killed, the spirit bear will be extinct before the next issue of National Geographic hits the stands). I myself have trekked all over those very same rain forests of British Columbia (with beagles in tow), and although I was perfectly well aware of all the other animals lurking about, I had no clue I was sharing those mossy glens with a creature I'd never even heard about. Leave it to National Geographic to show me something that wonderful.

I've likewise been staring ardently at the moon for a very, very long time, loving the light it sheds in the night, taking a comfort I can't explain from its placid stability - and yet before this issue of National Geographic, I would never have guessed that the moon had a liquid outer core just bubbling there at some 2,600 degrees F. The accompanying article mentions the possibility that in the distant past, the moon might have been actively molten, although speculation is that it's core is stagnant today and has been for millions of years. But still - the idea that the moon, this planetoid that for my entire life I've considered beautiful in large part for a tomb-like beauty dependent on the lack of a beating heart, actually has a fire burning under all that grey rock ... the idea is jarring, although not necessarily in a bad way. Thanks to this issue, the world around me will be different in my mind because it contains a big, fierce animal I never knew existed, and the moon itself will be different because I now know it harbors a fire to match its rock.

National Geographic makes me burble like this, as some of you will know.

Geographica: The Toll of Man!

Another classic issue of National Geographic slaps on the doorstep this week, 'classic' both in the sense of 'great' and in the sense of 'typical.' The 'great' part has been sung here at Stevereads before: great writing, great breadth of coverage, most of all great artwork. The 'typical' part is also a frequent component of my regular conversation: that when reporting on mankind's interaction with the rest of the planet, the news is mostly bad.

Bless them, the folks at National Geographic never let an entire issue go by without some good news, and the good news in this issue is pretty damn good: Jane Goodall. Just the two words of that name ought to be enough to bring a smile to the face of every right-thinking human on the planet. The mighty David Quammen gives us a spirited overview of her groundbreaking career and some great Quammen prose along the way (“everyone calls her Jane; there is no sensible way not to call her Jane”). Those of you who know me already know how thoroughly I tend to despise the human race, but for somebody like Goodall – sorry, Jane – I'll gladly make an exception. This Quammen piece was an obituary if ever I read one, and on the day the good lady of Gombe actually does die, I shall mourn.

But elsewhere in the issue, the despising is in full bloom. The cover story explains in mind-numbing, hope-extinguishing detail just how bad the Gulf oil spill really is, how extensive the toll there will be in terms of dead wildlife and wrecked ecosystems. And as bad as all that is, it's nothing compared to the issue's most memorable story.



It's by Joel Achenbach, and it's called “Lost Giants,” and it's about the vast array of prehistoric megafauna that inhabited Australia until about 50,000 years ago. In gorgeous drawing after drawing by Adrie and Alfons Kennis, we see these great creatures as they might have looked in life: a 350-pound marsupial lion, a seven-foot-tall kangaroo, a fifteen-foot-long variation on the komodo dragon, a ten-foot-tall 1000-pound flightless 'thunderbird,' a wombat the size of a rhino, marsupial tapirs the size of cows, etc.



In the accompanying article, Achenbach faithfully reports on the usual conflict between the two warring camps of scientists who have position on why, exactly, none of these fabulous creatures is with us today – on why, in fact, virtually non of the Pleistocene's true giants survived into historical times. The saber-toothed tiger, the wooly mammoth, the giant ground sloth, the flat-faced cave bear, giant rocs and emus – all these creatures and hundreds of others once flourished in the forests and marshlands of Australia, North and South America, and New Zealand and now exist no longer.

Which would hardly be grounds for despising anybody, you might reasonably point out. After all, species die out all the time – as one famous natural history writer put it, 99.9 % of all species that have ever lived on Earth went extinct.

And yet, the despite is there, in bucketloads, because in the case of all those Pleistocene extinctions, the megafauna had a little help. Achenbach is very scrupulous – he quotes from both sides of the issue and gives everybody equal time at the podium. But the fact remains that the megafauna of the Americas died out precipitously (in evolutionary terms, virtually overnight) around 13,000 years ago – right around the time humans arrived over the Bering Strait. The subject of this article, the megafauna of Australia, died out around 50,000 years ago – right around the time humans arrived there. The megafauna of New Zealand died out around 700 years ago – right around the time humans first settled there. And so on. And so on.

Some scientists say this is purely circumstantial evidence – they site the fact that there are no archeological signs of butchering and rendering on a large scale, no chipped bison bones, no caches of ground sloth femurs. Other scientists point out (some more gently than others) that absence of evidence can hardly be construed in this case as evidence of innocence. To which I might add: take a look at the rest of this issue. Everywhere mankind goes, wide-scale destruction and despoilation occurs. Scientists who want to make a case that mankind is not to blame – that climate change and shifts in rainfall patterns account for all these extinctions – don't need to convince me. They should talk to the American bison. They should talk to the dodo. They should talk to the passenger pigeon. Hell, they should talk to the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists are reputed to be intelligent people, but it's not very intelligent to quibble causations in the middle of a cancer ward – especially if you're the cancer.

The article had only one little respite from despair: those drawings by Adrie and Alfons Kennis make it clear that at least one Australian megafauna survived, as I can personally testify:



Then again, maybe despair is called for after all. Sigh.

Geographica: The Curse of King Tut!

When he was asked what he thought of P.T. Barnum's “Grand Scientific and Musical Theater,” Henry Adams once said “I have no objection to him – provided he remembers he's not Agassiz, and provided his audience remembers it.”

He was referring to that internationally esteemed Harvard luminary Louis Agassiz, perhaps the pre-eminent zoologist and natural historian of the day, and his point was simple: the only danger involved in popular entertainments like Barnum's (with its “life-like” tableaux of cannibals, and its “Fiji mermaid” and the like) was the possibility that large segments of the public would mistake them for the scientific facts and conclusions of which Agassiz was a master. Adams would have been appalled by the young people who earnestly debate the motivations of characters on so-called 'reality' TV as if those characters were living anything remotely approaching authentic lives. And Adams would have been appalled by the latest National Geographic.

The issue has its usual blend of stunning visuals and far-ranging reporting, but the centerpiece article is about the “family secrets” revealed by a recent DNA study of the mummified remains of King Tutankhamun and several other Amarna-period individuals. The article purports to be written by Zahi Hawass, the so-called secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, and that should serve as the first sign of trouble, since Hawass hasn't written a memo unghosted in about thirty years, let alone a full-length National Geographic article. So this won't be one of those display-articles the magazine sometimes shows us, where every line is meticulously red-penciled for accuracy and clarity. This will, we can legitimately fear, read more like a press release.

And it does, dolorously so. Hawass (we'll refer to him as the piece's author until the guilty party chooses to step forward) has previous experience in press releases: five years ago, he amassed funding sufficient to perform a modern CT scan on Tutankhamun's remains, with results he has since characterized in only one way, which he recaps again here:

… by carrying out CT scans of King Tutankhamun's mummy, we were able to show that he did not die from a blow to the head, as many people believed. Our analysis revealed that a hole in the back of his skull had been made during the mummification process.

 

Never mind that his team's analysis “revealed” nothing of the sort, never mind that their determination, ginned up for public consumption, could be exactly wrong on the flip of a coin. The hole shows none of the necrosis associated with natural causes, but it wouldn't show those signs if mummification was performed soon after what could have been an injury – or, in certain fictional imaginings, murder; so the analysis of Hawass' paid scientists is only right if it isn't wrong, which is hardly worthy of a press release. But this also should have served as a warning sign.

The problem with CT scans and scientific teams to analyze their results and then guess about them on Egyptian TV is that such things cost money. Press attention generates tourism, and that in turn generates money (forget about the periodic flooding of the Nile: hordes of credulous tourists have always been Egypt's most reliable natural resource). Since this looks like a self-feeding process, you might wonder what the problem with it could possibly be.

But it's only a self-feeding source if the appetite stays constant. And in Zahi Hawass, Egypt has found an appetite for attention so deep as to be bottomless. The hoopla associated with that CT scan eventually faded, and all that remained was the boring old field work being done by boring credentialed Egyptologists who've never been profiled in The New Yorker and who wouldn't dream of referring to themselves as a 'modern-day pharaoh.' It's doubtful Hawass even knows such wretched creatures exist; he certainly has no interest in their miniscule, responsible findings. If the world's attention has wandered away from Egyptian antiquities, that attention must be drawn back, and there's one sure way to do that: more technology!

Hence, this article. Hawass has the brazen effrontery to start it off with the line, “I believe we should honor these ancient dead and let them rest in peace.” I don't know about the rest of you, but a horrific scene like this:

 

sure as Hell doesn't look like resting in peace to me. I think Hawass himself might feel different about the whole process if it were his grandmother's corpse plopped down on that tarpaulin – but alas, there's no money to be made from gawking at her remains under strobe lights.

The project this time around is to use modern DNA analysis to look for genetic markers held in common by Tutankhamun and several of the other mummies, in hopes of establishing concrete relationships between some or all of them (historians haven't been able to say with certainty who Tutankhamun's father was, for instance, with opinion split between Amenhotep III and the heretic-pharaoh Akhenaten). Hawass portrays himself as a reluctant convert:

In the past I had been against genetic studies of royal mummies. The chance of obtaining workable samples while avoiding contamination from modern DNA seemed to small to justify disturbing these sacred remains. But in 2008 several geneticists convinced me that the field had advanced far enough to give us a good chance of getting useful results.

 

A child (one with a good moral grounding, anyway) will have spotted the trouble with this: respect is an absolute. Remains don't become less 'sacred' in proportion to how 'useful' the results are that can be extracted from them. Calling something 'sacred' while in the process of defiling it is generally considered a false piety. The ancient Egyptians themselves had stronger terms for it, and stronger penalties than getting on the cover of National Geographic.

Granted it's distasteful, some readers might say, but if it really does advance our knowledge of the past, isn't it worth it?

The answer to that question is 'no' (always awkward when rhetorical questions turn out to have actual answers, but it can't be helped), but even if it weren't, the point is moot: there was never any chance of legitimately advancing our knowledge of the past here – there has never been such a chance associated with anything Hawass has ever done in the entire course of his professional life. It's true that he tells us his team found some of the 'family secrets' they'd been instructed to find:

Once the mummies' DNA was isolated, it was a fairly simple matter to compare the Y chromosomes of Amenhotep III and Tutankhamun and see that they were indeed related … But to clarify their precise relationship required a more sophisticated kind of genetic fingerprinting. Along the chromosomes in our genomes there are specific known regions where the pattern of DNA letters – the A's, T's, G's, and C's that make up our genetic code – varies greatly between one person and another. These variations amount to different numbers of repeated sequences of the same few letters. Where one person might have the same sequence of letters repeated ten times, for instance, another unrelated person might have the same sequence stuttered 15 times, a third person 20, and so on. A match between ten of these highly variable regions is enough for the FBI to conclude that the DNA left at a crime scene and that of a suspect might be one and the same.

 

But any reader who thinks obtaining viable DNA samples of 3000-year-old mummified bodies is akin to collecting fresh DNA samples from a crime scene is just asking to be duped. They are exactly the kind of audience Hawass wants, and he'll always be ready to sell them a certain bridge in Brooklyn. Considering that a strong genetic match can be obtained between any human being and the hamburger they had for supper last night, the level of discrimination necessary to start sending Father's Day cards around the suburbs of Luxor is simply not possible with non-Star Trek technology. Even Hawass isn't prepared to gloss over all the difficulties, and some of those difficulties should give pause even to the truest of believers:

If the extraction and isolation succeeded, [Tutankhamun's] DNA would be captured in a clear liquid solution, ready to be analyzed. To our dismay, however, the initial solutions turned out to be a murky black. Six months of hard work were required to figure out how to remove the contaminant – some still unidentified product of the mummification process – and obtain a sample ready for amplifying and sequencing.

 

Six months of 'hard work' were no doubt required to transform a 'murky black' solution into something clear enough to support modern analysis, but surely that studiedly offhand mention of 'amplifying and sequencing' will raise an air-strip full of red flags? Once upon a time, we all banded together to make “Jurassic Park” the #1 movie in the country – have we so soon forgotten its lessons (not only about spotty science but about showmen marketing flea circuses)?

In the end, this National Geographic article might raise all sorts of speculation to new heights – was Tutankhamun really the son of Akhenaten and the grandson of Amenhotep III? Did he have a club foot? Was he entombed with his wife's miscarried fetuses? - but it takes one speculation and banishes all doubt: there is at least one grave-robber still active in the Valley of the Kings, cracking open 'sacred' bones in search of media gold. Shame on him for so often betraying his 'sacred' trusts in order to hog a little spotlight, and shame on National Geographic for continuing to fund his serial sacrileges.

Geographica!

Another amazing issue of National Geographic hitting stands this week, and it starts off in true mind-expanding Geographica fashion with three little pieces on three different kinds of contamination.



First is the evil, lunatic idea being pursued by Project Tauros, a European scientific consortium currently dedicating their efforts towards using existing Limiana and Maremmana cattle-stock to bring an extinct form of cattle back into the world. The dead animal in question is the auroch, a massive bovine that once roamed Europe’s forests – the last remnants of its population died out many centuries ago, but Project Tauros wants to use bits of the animal’s DNA ginned up from miscellaneous auroch teeth, combined with the random auroch genes still carried by the aforementioned cattle-breeds, to breed the species again. Juli Berwald, the little article’s author, tries to put a positive ecological spin on things:

Aurochs were herbivorous behemoths, and in the past they browed on beech, a type of tree now choking Europe’s woods. Today such housecleaning would help regrow native flora – as one resurrected species gives other, threatened ones a chance at survival.

But you’d have to have the brain of an auroch to buy that for a moment. None of these Frankensteined creatures will ever come within ten miles of unrestricted European woodland – aurochs averaged half a ton heavier than modern cattle: these poor magnificent creatures are obviously being brought back from extinction in order to be crammed into slaughter pens and carved up alive to satisfy mankind’s endless appetite for cheap meat. And even if some ‘wild’ aurochs were released into those European forests, what they’d eat would be anybody’s guess – they fed primarily on beech centuries and millennia ago because it was natural for them to do so, in their natural environment. Maybe they hated it but had no choice because the enormous woolly rhinoceros of the time ate all the really good stuff. And even if they do somehow target beech, what happens when they do their job? Europe no longer boasts saber-toothed tigers or dire wolves capable of taking down a bull the size of an SUV - so we get just another hapless animal to cull whenever they decide to live in a way mankind finds untidy.



The second kind of contamination in this issue was certainly meant in a much lighter tone, although its implications are just as sickening – literally. National Geographic takes on the infamous “five-second rule” that states if you drop a piece of food onto the floor and immediately scoop it up, you can still safely eat it.

Not so, says Catherine Barker, this delightful piece’s author. It turns out “salmonella and other bacteria can survive up to four weeks on dry surfaces and transfer to food immediately upon contact.” The lip of a shared cup of water (or any other beverage – like all the cheap beer found in those innumerable red plastic cups going into use by the thousands in Allston and Brighton as we speak, it being a Friday night) can have more than 10,000 bacteria; even chopsticks can be swimming in germs (they don’t come in cellophane wrappers, after all). Barker doesn’t mention the risks you’d be running with your first auroch burger, but I wouldn’t be hopeful.



The third kind of contamination is of a decidedly bigger scale than the bacteriological. Michael Lemonick turns in a fascinating, disturbing piece on the vast shroud of man-made, man-launched, man-forgotten space junk currently orbiting the planet (and Sean McNaughton provides a fantastic graphic that will stop you dead in your tracks – it’s exactly the kind of weird, instinctively-effective visual at which National Geographic excels). The numbers are staggering: 11,000 objects in low orbit, and another 10,000 further out, all of them flying around at thousands of miles an hour, some of them slamming into each other harmlessly, but still … it’s only a matter of time until, say, five of them smash together simultaneously and give everybody a bigger problem to worry about than chopsticks.

Of course the rest of the issue is marvelous as well (National Geographic being, as I’ve said before, the world’s only actually perfect magazine)(sorry Open Letters! I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em!), including a very funny little essay by Virginia Morrell (with arresting photos by Tim Laman) about the male bowerbirds of New Guinea, who frantically, obsessively, and masterfully create elaborate nest-decorations in the hopes of attracting females willing to settle down and start laying eggs. The bowerbirds will use anything shiny to further their home-decorating efforts, including discarded CDs and, um, glistening caterpillar feces (the things you learn …), and reading about them is always a treat. And they aren’t even remotely endangered … which helps, in this day and age.

Geographica: November 2009!

Don't get me wrong: November's issue of National Geographic has the usual incredible roster of articles, from a haunting (almost literally) look at all the animals the ancient Egyptians mummified to greet them on the other side of eternity, to a lively (and, alas, all too accurate) piece on India's water-woes.

But sometimes, an issue's visuals just overwhelm the text, and this is one of those times. There's the joyous shot of a human swimming with a curious, even playful young sperm whale off the coast of Dominica


And there's the blood-curdling picture of a hummingbird freshly murdered by a big ol' praying mantis (note the super-long hummingbird tongue hanging out)


There's the shot heard round the world, this hilarious vacation shot of Melissa and Jackson Brandts that was rudely commandeered by a curious squirrel (the squirrel-bomb quickly 'went viral' on the Internet, and rightly so: it's one of those pictures that just makes you laugh out loud)


And then there's what has to be the single most disturbing photo I've ever seen in National Geographic (that wasn't an actual in-the-moment shot of an animal being murdered, that is - fortunately, the magazine doesn't run many of those anymore): a chimpanzee in a Bangalore zoo who's lost all his hair and sits forlornly in the crook of a tree branch looking pathetically human - not human-like, but entirely human. Try to tell me your first visual impression of this isn't 'man covered in mud'



Throughout its long history, National Geographic has been doing this: not just presenting us with colorful and detailed expert reporting from every nook of the world, not just assembling the latest scientific thought on every subject confronting society, but also this - showing it all to us, with the finest photography in the world. The fact that these shots were all taken by Geographic readers goes a long way toward proving two things: that cameras are now everywhere, and that perhaps to a larger extent than we think, we owe our eyesight when viewing nature to this great magazine.

The issue's eminently worth reading (and has lots and lots of further great photos, of course), but be prepared to close it thinking about the photos, not the text, this time around.

Geographica: Venice and BOOM!

It''s bad news and much, much worse news in this month's National Geographic. Don't get me wrong: the magazine itself is still fantastic, fascinating, and grippingly beautiful. But sometimes the balance of its tidings is decidedly tipped toward the glass-half-empty side of the wet bar.

Under the 'bad news' heading: Venice is still sinking, and Venetians are still being mulish assholes about it. Sigh. Some things never change. Although to be fair, Cathy Newman's article is so heavy on Venice-cliches ("What is Venice - so seductive, so lethally attractive - except the most sublime setting for the thrilling of the heart?" And so on) that it doesn't help things any.

The problem is the same one that's plagued Venice for its entire history: the incoming tides are swamping the city. When we're talking about tides of water, from the lagoon, the wrangle revolves around Venice's celebrated MOSE project, which would erect man-made walls across the mouth of the lagoon. The gates would rise into place when dangerously high tides are predicted, and the thinking is that this would save the city from any more excessive erosion. The MOSE gates will allegedly be finished around 2014, but the Venetians have been arguing about it for more than a decade now, and it's unlikely they'll stop any time soon - starting with the city's mayor, who often and publicly sneers at the idea of gates doing any good for his city.

And when we're talking about human tides, the problem takes on an even bigger scope. Venice is visited by roughly 2 billion fat people every day, each and every one of whom a) complains about how crowded it is, b) complains about how hot it is, c) complains about how everybody's talking I-talian, d) complains about how much stuff there is to see, e) complains about how narrow a lot of the streets are, f) complains about how expensive everything is, g) complains about the flooding, h) complains about the plumbing, i) complains about the long waits for all the famous restaurants and bars, j) complains about the smell of the water, k) complains about the Lido (its size, the quality of its sands, etc), l) complains about the dog-poop on the sidewalks, m) complains about how every living Venetian seems to expect a generous tip for every single thing they do within sight of even one tourist, n) complains about the fact that the houses and gardens of real Venetians seem permanently closed to them, o) complains about the differences between the real city and the one they've read about in Donna Leon (this complaint is most often heard during the many 'Donna Leon' tours that wind through the city every day), p) complains about how many churches are in their guidebooks, q) complains about how much of the artwork in those churches is so religious in nature, r) complains about the prevalence of typical American food in restaurants ("we came all this way for this?" etc), s) complains about the native food (too spicy, not spicy enough, too 'watery,' and the perennial #1: portions too small), t) complains about the noise during the day ("I can't hear myself think!" brayed by Methodists who haven't engaged in that particular activity since grade school), u) complains about the sounds at night (favorite American complaint among Venetian hotel staff: "There's a dripping sound"), v) complains about the fact that even restaurants, churches, and islands their guidebook assures them are "seldom visited" are, in fact, crammed to the rafters with people from Spokane, w) complains about how tiring it is to walk around the city (Venice is, roughly speaking, the size of your average K-Mart), x) complains about how rude the Venetians can be (on your average 1-week vacation, every single Venetian you talk to will be in the process of being evicted from their apartment because they can no longer afford the rent, but still ...), y) complains about how all these people are ruining Venice for the rest of us, z) complains about, for the love of God in Heaven, all the canals, then tosses all their plastic bags off their hotel room porch and gets back on their plane for home.


One sensible solution to this human inundation is floated briefly and sarcastically in the article then seemingly dismissed: charge people a lot of money to visit the city. I'm thinking 60 euros per adult, 20 per child, with a significant chunk of the proceeds going to subsidizing the rents of Venetian citizens.

But then, Venetian citizens might have worse things to worry about than long lines for coffee in the morning - and those things would fall under the 'much much worse' news: we're all gonna die.

Apparently, lurking underneath Yellowstone National Park (which, we're informed, contains half the geysers located on the entire planet) is a massive super-volcano that has erupted three times in the very distant past - each time with results several orders of magnitude worse than anything the living memory of the world has ever seen. Vesuvius? An after-dinner belch. Mount St. Helens? A minor night of food poisoning. We're talking about sooper-dooper eruptions that leave holes in the Earth big enough to be seen from Mars.

As Joel Achenbach writes:

Volcanoes form mountains; supervolcanoes erase them. Volcanoes kill plants and animals for miles around; supervolcanoes threaten whole species with extinction by changing the climate across the entire planet.

So we've got that to look forward to. Naturally, the various geologists interviewed in the article are cagey with their comments - nobody's willing to come right out and say when this sooper-dooper eruption will likely take place. Instead, like earthquake experts, they obscure things in the cant of probability - the odds are that, the likelihood is that, etc. But a caldera building towards a major eruption has many very specific signs, and the Hayden Valley in Yellowstone is showing all of those signs. You'd think at least one of Achenbach's specialists would say, "well, nobody can predict the future, but this sure looks like an area that's going to erupt in a big way, certainly in our lifetime." But noooooo ... the bastards.

By now you're all probably asking if there's any good news in this issue of National Geographic. Well, not much: life is still hell for refugees, policing efforts are still failing against fish-poachers in Kamchatka, and the issue still ends with that idiotic crossword puzzle instead of one last glorious photo.

Actually, there's your tiny bit of good news right there: the photos throughout are, as usual, excellent. I know that's not much to counter-balance stupid tourists and killer volcanoes, but hey, there's always next month.

Geographica: um, Svarlbad!

The latest National Geographic is out, and as usual it's stuffed full of great articles and fantastic photos. There's the cover essay on the ruler Hatshepsut, and there's a grim but fascinating look at the worldwide plague of frog-deaths (and what it means for the rest of the food chain), and there's a profile of religion in modern-day Russia that managed to go on for about 200 pages without saying a single interesting thing (OK, that last part wasn't exactly fantastic, but if Homer can occasionally nod, so can the world's greatest magazine).

The article that grabbed me most this time around was an engaging profile of an exotic land I'd never even heard of: the far-off frozen realm of Svarlbad, where night descends for a crushing unbroken string of months, where polar bears and walrus rule a titanic landscape of tundra and semi-frozen sea. The article is written by Bruce Barcott, with absolutely stunning photography by Paul Nicklen (my favorite shot is of a massive walrus methodically plodding toward the camera underwater), and it portrayed Svarlbad as a pristine land (65 percent of its islands and 75 percent of its local seas are inside national wildlife preserves) of natural wonders, with a sparse human population struggling to find a balance between the demands of the modern world and the need to protect those natural wonders for future generations of Svarlbaders. Most of the article is devoted to the wildlife that fills Svarlbad - foxes, thousands of shorebirds, reindeer, polar bears, walrus, seals, and bowhead and other whales who sport and feed in the food-rich waters around this frozen land. Most of these animals are experiencing growth and health in their protected populations. "A remarkable thing happens when you give animals habitat and peace," Barcott writes with rather dry wit. "They thrive."


I was thrilled while reading the article (it's not National Geographic's fault, but still - the world being what it is, they rarely have opportunity to report a picture this rosy), and out of old habit I naturally started yearning to visit this cold, beautiful realm of Svarlbad (I'm very much in favor of anyplace where the sun disappears entirely for months at a time), as once upon a time I visited many such distant lands. And I was puzzled why I'd never even heard of this untroubled little pocket of the planet.

Then I took a closer look at the map provided in the issue and got a distinct Arctic chill of deja vu: Svarlbad is Norway! Apparently, in the years since I was there, the same nefarious forces of multi-culturalism that robbed the world of Burma and Ceylon have now deprived it of Norway as well, replacing it with something that sounds like the title of a Klingon opera. An old friend of mine once told me you could measure how long you've been on this planet by the number of countries you've visited that no longer exist, and I'm beginning to think she was right.



This National Geographic also has another installment of a feature I hope they continue for the rest of time: it's a single-page factoid report called "Wildlife," and it features a quick meditation on some new scientific finding, accompanied by a fantastic old-fashioned colored illustration (like the kind magazines - and books - had to use all the time, back before the advent of easily-reproduced photography). This time around, the article is about how scientists unraveling various avian DNA are discovering some unexpected kinships in the bird world - like between hummingbirds and nightjars, who look quite different to the naked eye. But the real attraction of the feature is the artwork of the mighty Aldo Chiappe, whose work is characterized by thin, graceful linework. I'm hoping that after a few years the magazine collects these pages into a book of their own.

And in the meantime, there's always next issue to look forward to! Expect a report here when the stork drops it off!

Geographica: Liechtenstein!

Geographica turns today to the February 1981 issue of National Geographic, and we turn to that issue because a number of people read my recent posting on Danielle Steel's book H.R.H. and emailed me (too shy for the comments field, apparently!) wondering if that book's principal setting, the tiny German kingdom of Lichtenstein, is a real place. It of course is (although the spelling of its name wanders, as German spellings sometimes do), although a person could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, since it's been a tried-and-true pick for a foreign-sounding location that sounds fictitious.


But no, Liechtenstein is real enough. It's minuscule (forty times smaller than Rhode Island!)(although not, as that might make you think, the smallest such pocket-kingdom in the world - it's fairly roomy compared to some of the others), and it's benignly corrupt (it's tax-laws are so lax that you can set up a holding company there even if you show up at the Registry carrying burlap sacks with dollar-signs drawn on them), nestled comfortably under the greater corruption of Switzerland and possessing no currency or army of its own.

Liechtenstein is a rich little country, therefore - its postage stamps are prized by collectors all over the world, it's skiing and mountain sports are destination-spots for the international jet-setting crowd, and its hereditary monarchy sits on a personal treasure-trove brimming with priceless works of art. It's perfectly fitting that a writer as possessed by surface-levels as Danielle Steel would pick Liechtenstein for the fairy-tale setting to one of her books: nestling comfortably in one of the little country's hotel rooms while an Alpine blizzard rages outside, it actually seems like a fairy tale place.

But even as far back as 1981, Robert Booth's National Geographic article - and, more menacingly, John Launois' photographs - make it clear that Liechtenstein isn't perfect. As in so many other places in this worried old world of ours, evil can creep into even the most idyllic of settings - it moves on soft feet, evil does ... soft feet, and very, very short legs.


Liechtenstein, even beautiful Liechtenstein, has not been immune. We must pray for this tiny country.

Geographica: Cats!

Geographica this time around takes us way, way back to April of 1964 and to a delightful article called "The Cats in Our Lives" by Adolph Suehsdorf with lots of fun, fascinating photos by Walter Chandoha, and the whole exercise is undertaken in response to a number of private complaints I've received that Stevereads is entirely too canine-centric - that I should, in effect, give the opposition a moment in the spotlight from time to time. Fair enough, and this old issue of National Geographic is worth hunting down just for this piece (although the article "At Home in the Sea" by "Capt. Jacques-Yves Cousteau" is also worth the effort - not least for that familiar frisson old National Geographics so often impart, that feeling that you somehow know more than the magazine, because you're living in the future it couldn't, of course, know; we're all living, for instance, in a future in which Jacques Cousteau no longer requires such careful identification).



I confess, I've never seen the appeal of cats as pets. Of their utility I have no doubt - despite thousands of years of domestication, they've retained their hunting instincts intact, so their mousing and ratting capabilities make them eminently useful for house and barn. It's the whole 'keep them indoors and call them Smooshy' part I've never understood. Cats are moody, distant, superior, and utterly unpredictable in terms of what - if any - affection they'll show you and when they'll show it. If I wanted that package, I'd live with humans.

Yes, cats can be trained with minimal effort to go potty indoors, but they also hack up large and slimy hairballs on a regular basis - it seems like an even swap to me.

The first and most important thing a dog wants to do is please you (most dogs, I'm talking about here ... not horrible, evil breeds); the first and most important thing a cat wants to do is please himself ... if he even thinks about pleasing you (not actually doing it, but just thinking about it), it'll be a distant second to that first priority. It's like having a snotty, condescending young Japanese exchange student in your house - he understands almost nothing of what you say, he's full of demands, and any obedience you show only makes him disdain you more. Dogs are like an exchange student from, say, Liverpool, who doesn't have a lot going on upstairs, if you know what I mean, but who's up for any madcap scheme you might conceive, who's always enthusiastic to hear what you have to say, and who'll cheerfully eat anything you put in front of him (and who, since he flunks out of his exchange classes almost immediately, hangs around all day napping while you're out working). The differences make a preference seem like a no-brainer to me.



But I have many dear friends and acquaintances who have cats and love them deeply, and Suehsdorf, our National Geographic writer, is definitely one of them, as he makes clear in an anecdote about his own cat, who "rejoices in the name of Kitty":

One evening, Kitty trailed me to the kitchen, discussing the virtues of ice cream while I served the portions. I placed her dish in her accustomed eating place and took the family's into the study, where we were watching the 11 o'clock news. Kitty snooted her ice cream and joined us in the study, complaining.

My wife, who is quick at this sort of thing, said, "It's simple. She wants to eat with us."

And so she did. The scorned ice cream in the kitchen became delicious ice cream in the study, where we could all eat together.

Suehsdorf is a cheery guide (and Chandoha's enthusiastic, energetic photos help immeasurably), recounting the upsurge in purebred cat ownership that was gripping America in the late 1950s and early 1960 (oddly enough, the Siamese breed was outselling all others at the time ... I doubt that fact is true today, fifty years later, and I'm hard-pressed to explain why it would have been so at the time Suehsdorf was writing .... my instincts tell me the culprit is probably some recent movie - The Pink Panther, perhaps? - but I don't really know)(and as you all know, I'm a stone-cold superhottie who's way too young to remember it personally) and retailing all the usual - but still interesting - lore of the species:

The intellectual elite have also made obeisance to cats. The roster of distinguished cat fanciers includes Cardinals Wolsey and Richelieu, Petrarch, Montaigne, Newton, Dr. Johnson, Keats, Poe, Dickens, Walpole, Teddy Roosevelt, and Mark Twain.

Alexander the Great, Louis XIV, and Napoleon are high on the list of cat haters, or aelurophobes. They never could stand anyone who didn't come when called.

Cats, like people, found freedom from persecution in America. It is believed that they first came over in the Mayflower, although it may have been earlier - with the Spaniards in the 16th century.

I can't speak for the pestiferous little Corsican, but in the case of Louis XIV and certainly Alexander, the problem wasn't that cats don't come when called - it wasn't that cats weren't abjectly subservient, it's that those two men needed to know where exactly they stood, personally and emotionally, with everybody around them.

And you can't know that with most cats. The way they stare at you, no blinking, tails enigmatically twitching to no recognizable rhythm ... only to walk away and not be seen for hours, or days, reappearing not one bit more spontaneously affectionate than when they left .... it's frustrating just thinking about it. Dogs (again, good dogs) aren't happy sleeping out in the living room if you're in your study's easy chair, and if you return home from a very good day and decide to do a little jig in your living room, your dog will immediately join in, cavorting and yodeling with sheer, mirrored joy.




Your cat would just sit there on the top of the couch, neatly collected, tail twitching, watching you make a fool of yourself. Your thoughts might be, "Heh - I guess I'm making a fool of myself," and your dog's thoughts might be, "Yay! We're making fools of ourselves!" but your cat's thoughts are very clearly, "I've always known you were a fool, and this little incident just goes into my files."

No, I don't understand the allure of cats as pets. But "The Cats in Our Lives" made me smile several times just the same.

Geographica: Ancient Egypt!

King Tutankhamun's tomb was opened in 1922, and in 1977, over fifty of the 5,000 or so artifacts taken from it went on the road to dazzle the world - and nowhere did the show have a more enthusiastic audience than in America, where millions of people thronged to see these often weird and always beautiful items the teen-pharaoh had placed in his mortuary chamber with him, for his use in the afterlife. We are that young man's afterlife, and his fame lives on in our own day in a way he would probably have found quite pleasing.


Audiences marvel at the ostentatious wealth on display - so many items coated or entirely composed of gold, so many fine gems, and most of all such stunning craftsmanship - things of breathtaking beauty, preserved for mind-boggling amounts of time. This is true for all the remnants of Ancient Egypt, and it serves both to underscore the sheer ocean of time that separates the present day from their distant ages (when Herodotus saw the Great Pyramids 2000 years ago - or claimed he did - they were already over 2000 years old) and to annihilate it.

And surely no single artifact from all of Ancient Egypt produces this weird double-effect quite as strongly as does that face, the sumptuous golden face-mask of Tutankhamun that has become so iconic in the modern Western world that many people take it for granted, as much a background detail of the Ancient Egyptians as those pyramids themselves. But if you stop for a moment and really look at that face, you can almost feel the temporal certainty of the ground beneath your feet tilt a little. There's perhaps nothing in the world at once so aloof and so immediate; the eyes look like they're looking at you, the mouth looks like it's about to sneer just a little, at you; the combined affect is of an entire civilization looking right at you - or no, not a civilization but a civilization's ideal conception of itself, its dream of what it wants itself to be.

Nations often find such things in the oddest places. In England, it's the face of Winston Churchill; in America, it's the Lincoln sitting in the Lincoln Memorial. And here it's the death-ornament of a boy who didn't live long enough to become even a good pharaoh, much less a great one, an ornament that was never meant to be seen by the world at all.

Naturally, National Geographic was on hand to commemorate Tutankhamun's tour through the United States, and the short pictorial piece about it is the highlight of the March, 1977 issue.

Geographica: Airplane Safety!

Today's Geographica harks back 30 years, to an article written in the August 1977 issue by Michael E. Long with photographs by Bruce Dale. The article is called "The Air Safety Challenge," and it was written in a radically different era of aviation history than our own. In the late '70s, commercial airlines were beginning to bask in the ubiquity (and remarkable workhorse capability) of the jet engine, and newer and more sophisticated equipment was starting its slow migration from the military theater to the civil one. Many of the finer points of aerodynamics were still unknown or only sketchily known, and President Reagan had yet to fire the air traffic controllers.

The '70s saw a marked drop in fatal aircraft accidents (4 in 1976), prompting Long to echo the famous line of Christopher Reeve's Superman immediately after saving Lois Lane from a near-fatal helicopter accident, "Statistically speaking, it's still the safest way to travel" (this line played considerably better in the late '70s than it did in the early 2000's when it was uttered again - without irony - by Brandon Routh's Superman). The increase in safety stats was probably due to a combination of factors, with an emphasis on consistently rigorous pilot training and the aforementioned advances in flight technology, although as Long points out, problems persist.

The main problem in this article is wind shear, the sudden and largely unforeseeable change in wind velocity that can wreak havoc with a jet engine, causing near-instantaneous losses of lift pressure, forcing pilots to make split-second decisions that are often counter-intuitive. "I was funneling all my years of flying experience into those moments," one veteran pilot tells Long, referring to a time when his craft encountered such unheralded wind shear. Naturally, the focus of this part of the article is the crash of Eastern Flight 66 at JFK in 1975, in which 113 people were killed; wind shear was fingered as the culprit, and the National Transport Safety Bureau did a thorough examination:

As part of its investigation, the NTSB re-enacted the accident in a 727 simulator. Computers programmed the winds encountered by Flight 66. Experienced pilots "flew" numerous approaches. Their instructions: Land if possible, make a missed approach if necessary, don't crash. Of 54 approaches, only five were successful.

One of the pilots told me, "I crashed five times in six approaches. I didn't believe a wind existed that could so overwhelm an aircraft."

Long also concentrates his attention on another key factor in pilot efficiency: their ability to see where they're going. Specifically, their ability to draw "vertical guidance" from visual clues outside their craft, so they can tell how high up off the ground they are. At one point, a 747 pilot allows Long to pilot the craft to its landing, which he does with some trepidation and immediate candor:

Am I asking you to believe that I stepped right into a 747 and landed it? No. But there's something I'd like you to understand: During that approach I had no trouble keeping the aircraft lined up with the runway. But I had to keep referring to the flight director and other instruments to maintain the proper descent angle. The name of this problem is "vertical guidance."


Of course the main obstacle to something like good vertical guidance is bad visibility - visibility being a key element in an era where electronic instruments were only for in-flight maintenance and pilots still used their eyes, their hands, and their instincts to land their planes. If your visibility is poor, if you're using guideposts that aren't accurate (or aren't what you think they are, or where you think they are), you'll lay yourself open to critical error, often with only seconds to recognize and correct what you've done. Long surveys the wide world of 70s aviation and comes to a quick conclusion about what will likely solve the problems of vertical guidance: "better gadgets."

The inevitable trend is automation. Someday a jetliner will be built that will fly itself from takeoff to touchdown; pilots will merely monitor its performance.

Or, as one veteran pilot puts it:

In the flight deck of the future, we might as well put the pilots behind glass and give the flight attendants an axe, with instructions to break the glass in case of emergency.



Long ends his piece on an upbeat note, looking forward to a future in which pilots continue to be rigorously trained, a future in which air-traffic continues to be carefully controlled and monitored, and a future in which the advances of aviation technology continue to make things easier for the pilots and safer for the passengers. He couldn't have known that in only a year into that future, despite the presence of all those advances, Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182 would collide with a private Cessna in San Diego, killing a total of 144 people, including seven on the ground ("Ma I love you" being the famous final words on the cockpit recording), although if he had known, he'd no doubt have said the technology will keep getting better, and tragic mistakes like that will someday be eliminated completely.

We'll take a look much, much further into that confident future, in the next Stevereads.

Geographica: Turtles!

It's so self-evidently the greatest publishing endeavor in the history of periodical literature that it can often get forgotten for the towering achievement it is (like people can sometimes through the very familiarity of Beethoven's symphonies forget what towering masterpieces they are), but for a century, National Geographic has been so consistently thought-provoking, curiosity-appeasing, and awe-inspiring that we'll be adding a new regular feature to the Stevereads rotation: Geographica, dedicated to exploring the vast treasure-trove to be found in that century of issues.

One of the curious ironies of National Geographic is how ubiquitous those issues are - go to any used bookstore, any flea market, almost any musty attic, and there you'll find them: stacks of those distinctive square-bound yellow spines. Their original owners, all subscribers at one time or other (as who of us hasn't been?), often keep them, neat but ignored, when doing the same for any other magazine would never cross their mind. Likewise, those used bookstores choose to sell them, when they'd never dream of devoting precious space to back issues of any other magazine.
The reason, I think, is wonder. Every reader of National Geographic has, at some point or other, experienced sheer, unalloyed wonder at something brought to them by the magazine. Almost no other periodical ever produces that feeling, much less produces it on a monthly basis, and people instinctively accord that a different kind of consideration than they do the merer trifles of the Penny Press. We remember what amazes us long after we remember what only informs us. And when the two happen together ...

So we'll be regularly looking at randomly chosen issues of National Geographic, but my inaugural choice isn't random - it's about turtles! The article is from the January 1986 issue, written by Christopher P. White with illustrations by William Curtsinger (with one wonderful painting by Karel Havilcek), and it's all about freshwater turtles like the ones we discussed last time. White and Curtsinger traveled to the South to examine the various kinds of turtles - and turtle people - inhabiting rivers like Florida's Rainbow Run river.


One veteran Florida turtle-trapper, Uley Bass, relates his first-hand (so to speak) experience with the legendary ferocity of the alligator snapping turtle:

"Late one night 16 years ago, my son and I pulled an old 75-pound alligator snapper out of a swamp. Like a fool I put the snapper right behind me in the boat. After a time we got stuck in some reeds, so I reached back for a paddle and slam! - something hit my hand so fast I didn't know what had happened. Then all of a sudden there was blood everywhere, and my son was shouting, "Dad, two of your fingers just dropped into the bottom of the boat!"

Of course, this being 20 years ago, turtle-hunting crops up often in the course of the article - states were just starting to realize that their turtle populations were being hunted to extinction, sought mostly for food. Long-time Georgia turtle hunter Al Redmond tells White about his own part in that slaughter:

"Six years ago, I realize that almost single-handedly I was trapping the alligator snapper right out of existence in Georgia - in one week of 1978 I caught more than three and a half tons of turtle. Other trappers saw how easy it was and started working the streams too. Snappers were plentiful then, but nothing's that plentiful, so I quit and started raising them instead."


He led us to a holding tank and with a quick move hoisted a 118-pound male alligator snapper.

"This is what it's all about," he said proudly. "Do you know how long it takes to replace a turtle this size? You wouldn't live long enough to see it."

He gazed fondly at the huge, unlovely creature in his arms. "Come on, tell me that's not a dinosaur."

Well, it's actually not a dinosaur, but then, why would you want to be a dinosaur when you can be something better - a survivor? While dinosaurs were living and dying off, turtles were living and staying alive, both land species and aquatic species. And even after the advent of mankind, some of those same turtles have always been exerting their slow, alien magic on humans, who've come to love these, the most lovable of the reptiles.

This turtle article, "Designed for Survival," was the highlight of the January 1986 National Geographic. Look for lots more highlights in the months to come!