Defending the Small Places

by

Nicki Leone

My dog and I have a routine in the summer. Every day we go for a walk during the hottest part of the day, ambling down the road that skirts our small neighborhood boat dock, aiming for the fields of as-yet-undeveloped properties at the end of the road. We turn, wander through the scrubby sand hills, and end up at the edge of the sound—an expanse of waving green spartina grass, marked out by deer trails, mounded banks of oysters shells and sand bars. Here I slip off my sandals and, barefoot even at high tide, we wander out into the marsh, heading for a small strip of sand at the edge of the Intracoastal Waterway several hundred yards out.

I keep to the sand bars and the oyster beds, preferring to walk on firmer ground rather than in the soft, black squishy muck of the deeper marsh. The dog is not so particular, and forages in and out of the marsh grass chasing smells and discovering treasurers like the skeleton of a deer weathered grey-green, which he has been taking apart piece by piece over each day’s trip.

Eventually we reach our “beach” –a sandy area under a never-used pier—and I put the sandals I’ve been carrying up above the water line and wade in to swim. The dog follows reluctantly—he likes to get mucky but he’s not found of being completely soaked. Still, he hates to have me out of his reach so he will at least paddle out to where I’m treading water, staring at the fish darting under my feet, just to make sure all is well.

Then, when he is bored chasing the crabs he starts to nose at my sandals and restlessly inch his way along the oyster shell bank. So we wade back out, soaking wet, and wander back through the marsh and the scrubby open fields to go home. By the time we get to the road our house is on, we’re both almost dry.

The response I get from people when I tell them about this little daily ritual is almost universally the same: “You walk through a swamp, barefoot? What about snakes!?”

There are snakes, of course. We’ve seen them—more often in the scrubby fields rather than in the marsh. I’ve seen (for the dog rarely notices anything) water snakes and hognose snakes and once a young cotton mouth. But the dog is not stealthy. He crashes through brush and undergrowth in a way that is a joy to see and pretty much guarantees to drive away anything in his path. He’s good at flushing birds, rabbits and deer, and I have him to thank, not just for scaring way potentially harmful snakes, but also for rousting a hawk from where it had landed with a dead rabbit in its talons, and for driving up an osprey, a fish still flailing in its claws. I have more to worry from sand spurs and fire ants than snakes. No, when I walk barefoot along the sandbars, it’s with respect, with fascination, but not fear.

These midday walks are a kind of mental reset button for me.  I don’t think about anything, I just walk, and watch. And although I’m not a naturalist, not able to rattle off the Latin names of the birds or the plants (or the snakes) after several years of wandering I am, somewhat, in tune with the area. I know what blooms when, and where. I know which trees are the favorites of the red tail hawks, and which of the ospreys. I know where bluebirds like to nest and when to expect which butterflies.

So it is clear why I might be drawn to a book like E.O. Wilson’s Anthill, a novel about a boy who loves to wander through his own favorite marshes—in this case a wild tract of land along Lake Nokobee, northeast of Mobile, AL:

The boys passed a water snake swimming toward shore. A great blue heron stood rigidly in shallow water at the edge of a sandbar, waiting for a passing fish. Two ducks passed overhead, going down the river arrow-straight in tight formation, driven by pounding wings. A turkey vulture and broad-winged hawk spiraled upward on a draft of warmer air, at such a distance and height they were little more than silhouettes. Two smaller hawklike birds with long forked tails sailed over the canopy on the opposite shore. “Those have got to be swallow tail kites,” Raff said. “I never saw one of those before.” He added helpfully, “They eat snakes up in the trees.”

Raphael Semmes Cody, or Raff, grew up on the edges of a tract of land that contained one of the few vestiges of virgin long leaf pine forest, as well as a unique and diverse wetland ecosystem fed by the Chicobee River that included not only Lake Nokobee, but a maze of winding tributaries and streams that meandered their way through low marshland until they eventually reach the Gulf Coast. Raff’s particular haunt, the Nokobee tract, was not an especially large piece of land, but it was large enough for a boy to become happily lost in for hours and hours at a time.  Large enough, too, for stories of swamp monsters and a mythical giant snake called the Chicobee Serpent and a twenty foot alligator named “Old Ben” and kept as a pet by a recluse the boys called “Frogman” who was quite real and much scarier than his name implies.

And large enough for any number of other wonders. “I’m gonna find the Lord God Bird” a young Raff announces to his friend and mentor, a botanist named Frederick Norville who takes the boy under his wing when Raff’s own parents become too distracted by their troubled marriage to be there for him. Raff doesn’t ever see the Lord God Bird—also known as the ivory-billed woodpecker, the largest woodpecker in the world and believed to be extinct although even now reports of sightings still occur in the same way people claim to have seen Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster—but the boy does find a new species of ant, which in some circles is just as exciting. (“All children,” says Norville to the reader, “have their bug period.”) He spends a happy few years watching the ant colonies by Lake Nokobee grow and change, and when he ends up going to college at Florida State University he studies entomology and they become the subject of his senior thesis. The thesis is a hit, at least among bug people.

The beauty of the Nokobee tract is that it has remained relatively untouched by mankind. The Civil War raged around it, but passed the quiet shores of the Lake by, in pursuit of more strategic victories. Railroads were built, but went around it, keeping to flatter and firmer ground. Towns grew up nearby, but not so near, preferring to stick close to the railroad. The lake and its surrounding long leaf pine forest was mostly let alone in a way that is rare for any natural place in the South any more.

But the problem was the Nokobee tract was private, not public land. And while ownership was entangled among a mess of family disputes and claims, there was no question that someday—someday soon—this beautiful lakefront property would catch the eye of developers who would look at its blue water and unspoiled shoreline and think “gated community” and “golf course.”

In fact, it was to save his favorite childhood haunt such a fate that made Raff, once he graduated from college, go on to study environmental law at Harvard. Well, that, and his family on his mother’s side, which was old South and old money, seriously pressured him into doing something more respectable than his father, a desultory auto mechanic, ever managed. But in the end it is Raff’s determination to safeguard a place he loves that decides his course and takes him down some unexpected paths. In a way, navigating his life’s course was a lot like navigating the byways of the Nokobee tract as a boy—know the land, know what lives there, keep your eyes open.

Edward Osborne “E.O.” Wilson is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author best known for his work studying ant colonies, and for his theories on biodiversity and sociobiology (founded in his work on those same ant colonies). He is a household name among environmentalists and biologists. He would be a household name for the rest of us if we were, like him, in the habit of paying attention to even the very small things that go on in the life around us. He has literally dozens of books to his name, including, most famously, Biophilia (1984), The Ants (1990), The Diversity of Life (1992), The Naturalist (1994) and Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). He has, in fact, published a book approximately every two years, a level (and quality) of output that should make John Grisham envious (especially considering that Wilson is in his eighties and Grisham, um, is not).

Anthill is a departure for the author in that it is fiction, although it wears its fictional clothing lightly. The story is strongly—even transparently—autobiographical. Wilson, like his protagonist, grew up in the country near Mobile, Alabama, and studied ants when a project to study flies was hampered by, of all things, a shortage in insect pins thanks to the deprivations of World War II. Like Raff, Wilson was an Eagle Scout. Like Raff, he made a name for himself with his work studying fire ants near the port of Mobile. Like Raff, he went to Harvard. Unlike Raff, he is still there.

So the novel feels less like a story and more like reminiscence—a tribute, perhaps, to what the author most loves about the South. It makes for some lovely passages and imagery, but also some confused narrative structure. The book itself is divided roughly into four sections: the first part telling the story of Raff’s parents and Raff’s own burgeoning interest in the natural world, then his decision to “save” Nokobee from development and his pursuit of a college career that could help him accomplish that goal, his foray into the wilds of Harvard where he has to adjust to a society with rules that feel completely foreign (not to mention the weather—poor Raff is all but undone by the winter nor’easters), and finally his return to his home town, law degree in hand, ready to take on the fight to save the Nokobee tract from the depredations of rabid golfers.

In the middle of all this is a peculiar section called “The Anthill Chronicles”–Raff’s college thesis rendered into layman’s terms by the book’s occasional narrator, his mentor Fred Norville. It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that The Anthill Chronicles are the most unique and riveting section in the book—following the rise and fall of four different colonies through wars with competing colonies, the death of queens, the rise of neighboring super powers, and the inevitable disaster and destruction that follows when things in nature become out of balance. The Anthill Chronicles are succinct, vivid, and oddly breathless, as readers get wrapped up in the slow decline of one colony, unable to recover from the death of its queen and the rise of another, younger, stronger, more aggressive in nature. And although Wilson is too conscientious a scientist to anthropomorphize his subjects, there is nevertheless a not-very-subtle parallel drawn between the way ant colonies operate and the way human societies do. When a genetic mutation allows for a Supercolony of ants—a colony with more than one queen—the whole area suffers. The Supercolony grows beyond the ability of it environment to support it, blanketing the forest in a kind of living carpet of ants: “. . . surviving plants were too weak to set seed. Ground foraging animals including brown thrashers, clickers, squirrels, rabbits, voles, lizards and snakes, avoided the area.” Eventually, the ants impinge on human habitation and they retaliate, with catastrophic results. “By trading sustainability of the home for wider dominance, [the Supercolony’s] genes had made a terrible mistake. A price had to be paid, first by the ecosystem and then, with its support systems declining, by the Supercolony itself.”

There is no question that Wilson is a scientist first, and storyteller second. This is not necessarily a bad thing, if your goal as a writer is to convince your readers about the importance of conservation and biodiversity. It does, however, have some perhaps unintended amusing results, such as Wilson’s tendency to describe moments in his protagonist’s life in terms of biological imperatives. A face off with rival young man at radical environmentalist meeting is won when Raff, challenged, suddenly remembers “It’s the way of nature . . . Animals spend a lot more time displaying and bluffing than they do fighting.” And the first girl Raff ever has sex with (he waits until he gets to Harvard) is a sexually aggressive “force of nature” and he, a “normal young male, released himself” to her demands and desires. It has been only several chapters since the author had described the mating flight of the ant queen (“full-brained and powerfully muscled”) and her male consort (“a guided missile loaded with sperm”) who’s only role is to impregnate the queen and then die. The vivid fate of the doomed male ant looms large in the background of poor Raff’s first attempt at a sexual relationship.

In the end, Anthill is what some might call an “issue” novel–the author’s plea for conservation and environmentally friendly development subsumes less important narrative elements like character development or internal psychological consistency. The people are simplistic in a way that the ants are not. Raff’s evolution from a child afraid of guns to an enthusiastic card-carrying member of the NRA and crack shot, for example, is just one of a hundred small details glossed over with hurried explanations Wilson would never allow if he were describing his ants, instead of his characters.

Because the novel is so heavily autobiographical—because, that is, the author is writing about what he knows—and because it is clear that he is passionate about preserving the wild places, the story is readable, even enjoyable. Passion and enthusiasm can carry a faltering narrative, and it often does so here.  It is clear that the author loves the country he is writing about, and that love is what keeps the story going. And in the end Wilson’s message, Raff’s message, is an easy one to hear and a hard one to refuse: You don’t need to save the world, just take care of your small piece of it.

In an interview with Deborah Treisman in The New Yorker prior to the novel’s publication Wilson commented “Almost nobody ever hears about Mobile, at least not in fiction.” Anthill was published on April 1, 2010. Twenty days later, an explosion on a deepwater oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico caused an underwater pipeline to break, pouring out about 5,000 barrels of crude oil a day onto the sea floor. Two months later, the broken pipe is still not fixed and oil is still spewing forth at the same rate. Oil slicks are washing up on the shores of the Gulf Coast from New Orleans to Panama City, along with dead and dying sea turtles, fish, pelicans and seabirds. Gulf Coast fisheries have been destroyed. Oyster beds ruined for years. The Chicobee River so beloved by Raphael Semmes Cody is still above the affected area, but Mobile itself is almost dead center. So people are at last writing about Mobile, Alabama. Alas, it is not fiction.

Books mentioned in this column:
Anthill by Edward O. Wilson (Norton, 2010)
Biophilia by E.O. Wilson (Harvard University Press, 1984)
The Ants by E.O. Wilson (Harvard University Press, 1990)
The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson (Harvard University Press , 1992)
Naturalist by E.O. Wilson (Shearwater Books, 1994)
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E.O. Wilson (Knopf, 1988)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.