Tagged
The short answer is no. The landlord asks if I saw this morning’s paper. He says he’ll get it for me, before I can get to the long answer. The long answer is I haven’t touched a newspaper since January 9. Nothing special about January 9, except that’s when I set out from Davenport. The Quad City Times still arrives at the Iowa homestead, for the sole purpose of reading about kids we know in the high school sports pages. Otherwise, it’s just a sad and usually angry end to some tree, somewhere (although Alma and Autumn are bright spots). Haven’t touched a television remote control in a month, either.
Don’t really miss either of them. Books, tunes and the interweb have sufficed, so far.
The landlord returns with the Herald. James Herrera stopped by week before last and we chatted for a half hour or more. The results are on page one and four of the local news section. I toss it in the Jeep and head out for the day. The CTE factory end of season extravaganza / commercial prom is about an hour north. Pinnacles National Park is about an hour south. Southward, then. I do hope the old guy wins, and has a few good years before all the hits take their toll.
The Herrera article is consumed as the Jeep fills up in Salinas. James did a fair job. There’s a few not quite exact moments, mostly from that sad end to a tree publication 2,000 miles eastward, but he didn’t put words in my mouth, which is about all I really ask of a reporter. I’ll say enough dumb things that you won’t have to make any up (Barb). The pump clicks off just as I’m reiterating teamwork. Sounds about right.
Eight hours on the trails and rocks of Pinnacles cleanses the spirit nicely. The highlight is turning a corner of a trail near the top and seeing three California Condors gliding past. I thought I’d be lucky to see one, but here are three, at eye level no less. One circles twenty feet away. It’s enormous, and makes a swooshing sound as it passes.
Later, I come upon an ornithologist operating some handheld antenna on one of the peaks. He’s tracking the condors by their radio tags, and is happy to answer my questions on what he’s doing and the behavior of the birds. At one point down to just 23 birds, the species is making a comeback through a captive breeding and release program. There are just over 200 in the wild he tells me, with 70 in Northern California. He knows 67 of them by their particular radio frequency, and says there are three young condors in Northern California which haven’t been tagged yet.
For some reason, I start to cheer for the three untagged condors to stay that way.
I understand the importance of the tagging, and how the species wouldn’t have come back from the brink without human intervention. But as someone who gets tagged and monitored in my day job, the idea that there are condors out there … just being condors … seems to me to be the long answer.
2/7/16
