DADWAGON

From my good friend Kerry comes word of this front-page Key West Citizen report that the oil is, as feared, closing in on the southern Gulf. According to the Citizen:

Fishing is banned in parts of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary west of the Dry Tortugas, where an oil sheen was 100 miles away and closing in on the area, federal officials declared Wednesday.

Nearly 38 percent of the Gulf of Mexico, or 88,502 square miles, is now closed to fishing because of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, said Roy Crabtree, the National Marine Fisheries Service’s southeast regional director.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) expanded its fishing ban in federal waters effective at 6 p.m. after projecting the sheen would be within 50 or 60 miles of the Tortugas by Friday, Crabtree said.

In case you’ve never been to the Dry Tortugas, let me try to explain it. The picture above is of Garden Key, which was discovered by Ponce de Leon and later was home to Fort Jefferson, the hexagonal brick structure you see there. Like most forts of its kind, it was obsolete before it was finished, and so became a federal prison (Dr. Samuel Mudd was its most famous–and, during disease outbreaks, valorous–inmate). The fort itself is an amazing artifact of American cruelty (it was partially built by slave labor, and garrison/prisoner conditions there were beyond harsh) but also a wonder of ingenuity, built 70 miles west of the nearest populated island and 70 miles from fresh water, and having now withstood every test of time and weather since 1846.

But Fort Jefferson is just a squalid hut compared with the cathedral that surrounds it: the Dry Tortugas themselves. I’ve been going there, just like everyone from Key West, since I was a boy. It’s a few hours by boat, less by seaplane. Most people come for the day, but you can camp alone out there. When I interviewed Jimmy Buffett a couple years ago, he had the same memories I did (although he had, of course, his own seaplane): not just a getaway, but a glimpse at what the Keys might have looked like before they became Margaritaville.

Words, like country-calypso songs, can’t really describe what’s at stake in the Tortugas. There’s a shade of blue-green to the ocean there that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anywhere, in any painting or picture. One of my earliest memories of being in those waters was of being enveloped in school of silver minnows, thousands of them, flashing like steel, coursing like electricity, just off of Garden Key. It’s not just the minnows, or the schooling yellowtail, but also the grouper, the dolphins, the sea turtles. And above the waterline, there are days that you can barely see land on the island across from Ft. Jefferson, it’s so thick with migrating birds. It’s not just a national park, it’s frigging Pandora. And now there’s a world of sludge heading for it, about to do what it has done all along the Lousiana coast: choke the water, starve the fish, kill the birds.

The thing that hunters and fishermen and conservationists all know is that nature is, beyond its own intrinsic value, an heirloom, something passed from generation to generation. I would be a different person if I didn’t have the chance to grow up with moments of awe like I’ve had swimming in the Dry Tortugas. It’s something I desperately wanted to have my children experience. We live in New York City, but I hope the soul of our family stays in the Keys. The times that we’ve been able to take the kids out kayaking in the Mud Keys, fishing the backcountry around Jewfish Basin or looking for sand dollars at Snipe Point: that’s not only a good time. That’s heritage. It’s one of the few truly good things I’m sure I can offer as a parent.

And so, yeah, I’m incredibly pissed. In the annals of corrupt profiteering, gambling with people’s mortgages now seems tame compared with gambling away the last clean reef in our country. The AP reports helpfully that BP is likely to survive this spill. Well, bully for them. And as for their stricken stockholders, well, there’s a reason why we have green mutual funds and other environmentally-minded investment portfolios. The opposite of “doing well by doing good” is “doing poorly by doing bad”. In other words, karma sure is a bitch.

The AP report gamely tried to quantify BP’s exposure. The Valdez debacle ended up costing Exxon $654 per spilled gallon of oil, in today’s dollars (Exxon, which paid $0 in federal taxes last year despite $35 billion in profit, has thrived since then). Because of liabilities to a crowded tourism and fishing industry in the Gulf, that cost-per-gallon will likely be exceeded in this spill.

But it wouldn’t matter if BP was chased into bankruptcy, if Louisiana fishermen were allowed to personally hold BP CEO Tony Hayward upside and shake the change out of his pockets. What’s about to happen in the Dry Tortugas goes beyond money, and money can’t fix it. Neither, for that matter, will anger.

Not this time around. But anger can serve a purpose, if paired with a good memory. Next time Sarah Palin says she meant Drill, Baby, Drill differently, remember and be angry. Next time a Democratic president horse-trades the environment for some unknown concession, remember and be angry. Anytime you vote, with your wallet or at the ballot, remember and, for the sake of all this beauty about to drown in oil, be angry.

This Memorial Day weekend, we stopped by Terhune Orchards in central Jersey, because what could honor our troops more than apple cider slushies, u-pick strawberry fields, and a fleet of broken-down toy tractors?

All of that entertainment was secondary, however, to the little farm section of the orchards, where goats and geese and (sometimes) a horse hang out behind a wire fence and are fed handfuls of corn by city slickers.

Just as in the city, the weirdest creatures on the farm were the married couples. I got a few minutes, while my kids ran feral, to just sit and watch the adults interact, and in ten minutes or so, I lost a bit of hope for parents, and in particular for fathers.

Judging by that admittedly small sample size, it would seem that the Fathers are a race of idiots, constantly needing minding and reminding from their overlords, the Mothers. Yes, the dads seemed a little mopey and disconnected, but hardly warranting the acrid micromanagement they seemed to be getting. A few of the choicer interactions:

1) One dad, accompanying his preschool-age daughter on a mission to feed a goose, was told by the mom, no less than three times, some variant on “geese bite!” and “watch her fingers!”

2) When that daughter turned her attention to the cat, the mom called after both of them, “Don’t let her touch its poo-hole!” (?!)

3) Another mom made some sort of bobbing motion with her head, like a rooster, as she chided her husband about their son, who had just finished touching a goat-snout: “Make sure he washes his hands. Good this time.”

4) A second mom said under her breath to her husband, apropos of nothing that I could see: “Don’t you mess with me, Brian.” A threat which received no reply, just shrug of the shoulders and a meek smile.

Now, I’m sure my significant and I have our own verklempt little tussles, but lord knows I can’t complain, not after seeing all that foolishness. And men (myself included) are certainly not blameless in the war of the sexes. Far from it. But there was something in the public meekness of those men that I think a lot of dads have experienced at one time or the other. It’s a kind of a survival gesture, an attempt to defer and flatter your mate until the danger passes.

There’s an analogy from nature here, but it’s got nothing to do with goats or gander: Being a father is sometimes more like being a hiker perpetually caught between a mama bear and her cub. Except that when a mama bear charges in the wild, you’re supposed to stand your ground. When the mother of your children attacks, I wouldn’t recommend it.

If every third word that comes out of JP’s mouth is a variant of poop–“poopie pants,” “poopy face,” “you’re a poop,” “poop-head,” “she’s a poop,” “I’m gonna poop on you,” etc.–can that be considered verified evidence that he has entered the anal phase, and if so, is this a good thing?

I’m sure most of my DadWagon following–those of you who don’t come to the site just for Matt and Nathan–must certainly be Freudians, right? So you guys oughta know. Frankly, I don’t really have a clue about what the anal phase is, other than it has something to do with Austrian doctors, spiritual malaise, and environmentally-correct toilet paper. Here’s a definition I found online:

ANAL OR ANAL-SADISTIC PHASE: The second phase of early childhood psychosexual development, according to Freud, when pleasure is oriented to the anal orifice and defecation (roughly 2-4 years of age). This phase is split between active and passive impulses: the impulse to mastery on the one hand, which can easily become cruelty; the impulse to scopophilia (love of gazing), on the other hand. According to Freud, the child’s pleasure in defecation is connected to his or her pleasure in creating something of his or her own, a pleasure that for women is later transferred to child-bearing.

“Anal-sadistic”? “Psychosexual”? No, no, no. That’s not my kid. My boy knows nothing of this scopophilia (I leave that to my downstairs neighbor). He just thinks the word “poop” is funny. And I kinda agree…it’s just a phase, right?…he’ll stop soon, no?…or if not soon, at least he’ll let up at the grocery store, ’cause those checkout girls don’t think it’s so cute anymore…and neither does the teller at that bank…I mean, she’s not really a poop-head even if she did screw up my withdrawal.

Definitely a phase. He should be out of it by the time he’s 20.

Our son’s in the phase where he marches up to us holding a book, demanding that we read to him. How can I refuse? I make my living with the printed (or pixellated) word, and I was always faintly afraid that I’d end up with a kid who rejected reading. Turns out that he likes nothing more, at least at the board-book level.

He’s got four or five favorites these days, but the one he asks for most often is called Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb, by Al Perkins. It was published in 1969, which means it’s just about as old as I am, and I vaguely remember it from my own childhood (probably at a friend’s house; I don’t think I owned a copy). It’s from a Random House series called Bright and Early Books™, most of which are by Dr. Seuss and several other authors and illustrators who work in the same idiom.

But what’s mysterious is that Al Perkins has otherwise disappeared. All that’s out there is Random House’s rudimentary author page, with a couple of sentences’ worth of bio. It’s in the past tense, suggesting that he’s no longer with us. That bio reappears around the Internet. Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb is still on the Publisher’s Weekly top-50-sellers list; the 1998 edition alone (probably the board-book version, I’m guessing)  has sold 145,000 copies and counting.  And that is absolutely everything I can tell you about Al Perkins. He’s left no Nexis trail, no obits. His book’s been read millions of times over the years. His family could be living on the royalties, or maybe he got a bum deal from Random House and they see nothing. Maybe there’s a small-town museum devoted to his work; maybe it was all tossed out in a spring cleaning years ago.

We writers think about this stuff a lot. You kill yourself to write even a simple magazine story, and it goes in the recycling at the end of the week. You spend a year on a book, and (as a memorable scene in The Philadelphia Story reminds us) you end up with $600 to show for it. And sometimes you actually hit the jackpot, and your book sells—and then you disappear anyway.

If you’re out there, Al, or your family is, drop us a line. We love your work. You ought to have a little something out there to reward everyone who Googles you.