The Wildlife of a Veteran

In the twelve years that I knew Bonar Blong, I yearned to write about him. A teenage survivor of the Okinawa landings, a passionate hunter, a wildlife biologist who roamed the Southern California desert by burro, he might have been crafted in a Hemingway novel, or perhaps conjured in the depths of Edward Abbey’s imagination.
For years I tried to find the right time, occasion or news angle to pitch an article about Bonar, and avoided mentioning him to other reporters for fear they’d get his story first. We invited him over for scotch one winter evening, so I could jot down notes on his life in hopes of using them later.
He passed away last spring, however, his peaceful death marking the end of a bold and adventurous life that I never got around to documenting. I’ve been thinking of him this week, as Veteran’s Day rolled by.
He served in WW II, on the deadly landings at Okinawa, which took the lives of tens of thousands of troops. That horror of those engagements must have shaken him, but when he described the Pacific Theater, he usually recounted vignettes of daily life: spear-fishing on the reefs, delivering fresh-caught lobster to the ship’s cook in exchange for fresh-baked pies, or bartering with local cannibals for trinkets.
Sociologists generally agree that true cannibalism is exceptionally rare, so were these were real, flesh-eating cannibals? I was never sure. For the purposes of Bonar’s story, I liked to think they were. It fit well with Bonar’s cheerful outlook on danger.
Defying fate, he had survived in Okinawa when most of his unit perished. I wonder if that experience, hanging on by the thinnest of lifelines, gave him his extraordinary hold on life for the next six decades.
Returning home, he became the first California Fish and Game biologist stationed in Idyllwild, a post my husband, Kevin, held many years after him.
Before GPS and Google Earth made accessible the remote regions of the planet, Bonar would travel the most inhospitable canyons on his burro, Jose, to follow the elusive wanderings of bighorn sheep. Later he helped pioneer the use of helicopters to track the animals, a practice that Kevin and other scientists employ today. Other times, Bonar would track sheep on horseback as far as the border, sometimes popping across to pick up cases of tequila for the road.
One summer evening he sat sipping beer during our backyard summer solstice party. Gazing up at a 100-foot cedar, he said, “That looks like a good tree for a flying squirrel.”
Indeed, Kevin had seen one glide from that very perch a decade earlier – one of the last such sightings on the hill.
It was just that nuanced eye for nature that made Bonar such a skilled field biologist, but as keen as he was to protect creatures menaced by drought, disease or development, he was just as eager to shoot their more prosperous cousins.
An avid hunter who grew up in an era before politically correct euphemisms, Bonar eschewed many niceties of language. Instead of describing his favorite hunting ground, he would say, “It’s a good place to kill deer.”
This was startling talk to a city girl like me, but I grew to anticipate Bonar’s colloquialisms with delight. Every time we visited he said something that had us laughing for days.
When his old hunting lab, Brew, entered the dog equivalent of geezerhood, Bonar complained, “All he ever wants to do is argue.”
Fuming about a particular Forest Service manager he disliked, he said, eyes sparkling merrily, “I’d like to roll him up in barbed wire, real slow-like.”
During a memorial service for Bonar at his home last spring, we listened to a litany of tales from his former colleagues, examined his shed full of antique tools and watched children climb the apple trees in his yard. A slide show played happy images of his life. Most depicted him smiling broadly while holding a big fish or game animal. I was sad he wasn’t there himself, regaling us with more wild yarns.
I was pleased, however, to consider how he had lived several lifetimes worth of adventure in one. Veteran’s Day reminds us of all the other young men and women, lost to war, whose adventures ended before they had the chance to write their own life stories.

Wild Things

“Where the Wild Things Are” finally made it to our local monoplex, the Rustic Theatre, so after much anticipation I took my kids to the big screen version of a favorite bedtime book.

As we left a post-soccer pizza dinner to make the movie, a friend warned me that it was really too depressing for younger viewers. Predictably, my kids loved it.

The film was darker and moodier than the original story, which itself was whimsically eerie. In a wintry forest the Wild Things wreck their homes, battle for position and struggle for acceptance. Max, as king, must resolve their disputes or risk being eaten.

Some of the best children’s art and literature acknowledges the shadow world of fear and fancy that lies on the border of kids’ consciousness. The dream forest is where they test their vulnerability against monsters and raze the rules of decorum.

Here where we live, in the real forest, that mythic landscape is superimposed on our backyard.

Last week my eight-year-old son Malachy requested homemade waffles for breakfast. When I asked him to wash his hands before cooking, however, he declared he’d had enough of the meanest mommy in the world. He was running away. I would never see him again.

He packed a bag with survival necessities, including a shovel and blanket. He wanted to take a kitchen knife to fight off mountain lions, but I said no. Later I discovered he had smuggled out a bread knife for self-defense anyway.

Equipped with a backpack he marched up the driveway toward the empty lot next door, set against the state forest. Its sandy slopes are dotted with oak and manzanita, and form the perfect gentle angle for sled rides. Last winter we saw bobcat tracks sprawled across the snow at twilight. This is Malachy’s occasional hideout.

His little sister followed him into the hills, and so did the kitten. Ailish wanted to bring all her toys along, but Malachy assured her there would be no time for play, what with fighting off coyotes and mountain lions, and hunting for deer. That reminded him that he needed rocks for a fire, so he added those to his cache.

I opened all the doors and windows so I’d be within earshot of any frantic cries for help. Minutes passed before I heard Ailish shouting, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy….Mommy, Mommy!”

I started toward the door, but noticed that her voice sounded more excited than alarmed. She raced inside and announced that Malachy wanted me to come get the kitten, who was not safe.

I walk toward the lot to find Malachy wandering back, cradling our enormous kitten, Pangur Ban, in his arms. Pangur Ban might have wandered into the woods, Malachy warned me. Coyotes could have attacked Ailish. Also, he was hungry and wanted to make waffles. He came in and washed his hands.

I’m grateful that works like “Where the Wild Things Are” lay bare the maddening dilemma of parenthood. While raising a child requires values like discipline and restraint, it can also shred them like bark, imposing the unsettling joy of bringing Wild Things into the world whose thoughts and whims remain terribly, magically, outside our control.

The Wild Things sail off on a boat, a raft, a pirate ship and we have to let them navigate the dark waters at the edge of childhood. All we can do is set out something warm and tasty to draw them back.

I see Malachy sleeping now, his cheeks still soft and round as a toddler’s. At bedtime he sang his sister the lullaby he made up for her, about a baby frog. It’s hard to remember that this is the same brigand who struck out for the woods alone.

Fierce and fragile, he is my Wild Thing, my Huck Finn, my Peter Pan. Although cultural and educational norms hold that a child who will not wash his hands or stay safely in the yard is not acceptable, film and literature conspire to tell me that he is quite simply a little boy.

Honey, I'm home!

Tonight my husband came home from work, wiped out after a long day. His uniform was sweaty and dusty and the three-by-six-foot metal cage in the back of his truck was bent and gnawed.

I know what you’re thinking; yes, I had to do an extra load of laundry to clean his work clothes! But back to the cage.

Two of the steel bars were bent inward; the welded wire was rippled and broken in spots. The steel chain was bitten through, and there were tooth and claw marks on every surface. Kevin had no apparent toothmarks on his person, happily.

Kevin, (a wildlife biologist for anyone who doesn’t already know him,) received a call Tuesday morning to pick up a bear cub at Moonridge Zoo in Big Bear. The animal had been roaming, bewildered, around city streets in Upland on Saturday. Sheriff’s deputies shot it with rubber slugs and pepper spray to haze it back toward the hillsides, but without the desired result.

Two Fish and Game wardens captured the bear and drove it to the zoo, stopping periodically to sedate it with immobilizing drugs.

Now, a cub, in wildlife management parlance, connotes a juvenile of less than 50 pounds.

A curious thing happened, though, as Kevin approached the zoo. At the Banning Pass, Kevin checked in with his supervisor. Astonishingly, the bear had already grown into a 70-pound yearling. As he passed the Ranger Station in Mentone, it had morphed into a 90-pounder.

He arrived at the zoo to find a very frightened, hulking creature lurking in the shadows of a pen. Its mood didn’t improve when Kevin jabbed it with a dose of tranquilizer. Despite the injection, the animal refused to be sedated. Kevin tried a second shot. That’s when the bear bolted out of its den, into the cage-trap.

With the animal presumably safely in the cage, Kevin and the zookeepers waited for the second dose of tranquilizer to take effect. The bear did not cooperate. It turned out it was on a bender from the repeated doses of tranquilizer it received on its ride up from Upland, and had already developed a resistance to the drugs.

Instead of a docile, sleeping cub was an irate, young adult bear. It took four grown men to hoist the angry beast into the truck. It growled, gnashed, snapped its jaws and charged the sides of the cage.

As Kevin drove down the road, the bear chewed away the cardboard box covering the cage, along with the fasteners that secured the doors, and began biting the metal apart.

Kevin pulled over and began a tug-of-war with the bear over the cage door it had pried opened. The bear clawed at his hands, but Kevin eventually reclosed the door with leather hobbles. (I checked his hands when he came home: all ten fingers still attached, no gaping wounds, wedding ring intact.)

Motorists gawked at the raging bear as Kevin rushed along the freeway, up a mountain road and into a remote canyon where he released the animal. The bear glared at Kevin and the wardens, then noticed the open door and bolted. All they could see was dust plumes as it vanished into the brush.

Hours later he arrived home, unscathed, but weary and hungry. Kevin, that is. Probably the bear too.

Pangur Ban; of Felines and Free Press

Pangur Ban

By Deborah Brennan

To anyone who’s a cat person, this story will be crystal clear. If you’re not, bear with me, because it will eventually wind around to other matters.

The first time I saw a Maine Coon Cat, with it’s placid eyes, fluffy fur and melon-sized head, was at a cat show I covered for the Los Angeles Times in the 1990’s. I wanted one ever since.

When we visited Maine on a family vacation this summer vacation, my husband insisted it was time. We found a listing in an ad circular, and followed the typically circuitous New England directions to the address, marked by a mailbox perched atop a stepladder. “Now I KNOW we’re in Maine,” Kevin said.

Inside a farmhouse stuffed with antiques we met him – a frisky little guy with a coat of rakish black-and-white fur framing his lively face. Pangur Ban. The name we chose stretched back a millennium to a ninth-century Irish monk and his cat.

I found my previous cat at the Berkeley flea market, while I was a graduate student of journalism then. He rode on my lap from Berkeley to Los Angeles, and followed me through a half dozen jobs and as many cities. When I got married and moved to Idyllwild a decade ago he thrived on mountain life, scrambling up a 100-year-old oak tree to our back deck and trotting behind my kids and I with doglike loyalty as we explored the woods around our house.

In March of this year, however, he died of kidney disease, a few months shy of 17 years. Just days later Kevin and I travelled to Berkeley for my journalism school reunion. Driving to the campus we passed the flea market where I came across my late cat. I felt an empty hole in my stomach.

The theme of the weekend was “How to Save Journalism.” And journalism was, indeed, in need of saving. The Tribune Company, with its flagship papers the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, was in bankruptcy proceedings. The Old Gray Lady – the New York Times – was hanging on by the threads of some Mexican junk bonds. During the conference, reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle announced that employees of the paper had staved off outright closure by agreeing to pay cuts and layoffs.

For all the exuberant talk throughout the sessions about multimedia content and micropayments for news stories, however, no one seemed to know what to do about the implosion of the news industry - its apparent slide into the kitty litter box of history. I felt the empty hole grow wider.

Fast forward to summer, when we get our new kitten. It was apparent once we brought him home that he would likely be a fierce mouser. On the ride back from the airport he climbed on my husband’s shoulder and swatted chicken nuggets from his hand. At home he attacked houseplants, pounced on stuffed animals and toted them around the house like trophies of the hunt. He tried to swipe anything we were eating.

Pangur Ban’s name comes from a poem cited in the book “How the Irish Saved Civilization.” This whimsical history describes how Irish monks preserved literacy during the Dark Ages by hand-copying not only religious tomes, but also texts of history and civics, philosophy and science, into colorful volumes of bound vellum like the Book of Kells.

Tucked among one such book was a light-hearted ode by a monk to his cat, Pangur Ban.

I and Pangur Ban my cat

‘Tis a like task we are at:

Hunting mice is his delight,

Hunting words I sit all night…

I loved the name Pangur Ban immediately; because of its magical ring and the palpable connection I felt that toiling Irish Monk and his cat.

Sometimes it seems that we are entering a bloggy age of misinformation, in which dark rumors fly freely through cyberspace. I take comfort by imagining the ancient scribe working at a rough hewn desk, perhaps sipping a mug of tea, while his cat scampers happily across the stone floor.

This, however, is what my kitten does when I open my notebook to read news or type an e-mail: he leaps on the table, walks across my keyboard, bats at my face, chews my hair and licks whatever food and drink I have on hand, including coffee.

This is not the gentle muse I expected.

But then, after scooping him off my keyboard and onto my lap thirty or forty times, I realized that we’re in a different era. This time it’s not erudite monks struggling to uphold the written word, it’s editors and reporters.

Journalists annoy people. They ask too many questions, demand documents. They lap up the milk from your cereal bowl while you’re trying to eat! They bat their sources around like mice. At least that’s what the mice say.

So it occurred to me: Pangur Ban – my Pangur Ban – is the perfect mascot for the scrappy holdouts of the free press! For everyone who fact-checks and spell-checks, for everyone who has stalked a crooked politician or tracked an elusive source, here’s a cat, in black and white, after your own heart.

The word on the street (and by that I mean the journalism blogs I read,) is that smaller papers are holding fast, less affected by the downturn than massive metro dailies. So I was pleased to read, in an article about the retirement of Town Crier editor Becky Clark, that our local paper is solvent and secure.

It won’t be as much fun without Becky at the helm. But I wish her many happy catnaps, and endless days of playing with yarn!

(It’s worth noting that while I complain about blogs, if I had written something like this as a newspaper staff writer I would be asked to turn in my police-issued press pass and step over to HR for a little chat.)

By Deborah Brennan

Don’t talk about politics or religion, conventional wisdom dictates. We all know these topics can lead to some uncivil exchanges.

Jim Oleson has been turning conventional wisdom on its head.

“Talk to Me,” reads his brown sign, posted outside the tables at Nature’s Wisdom. He doesn’t want to talk about the weather. He’s here to talk about faith.

The retired electrician and non-denominational minister found his calling with that simple invitation.

“Let me share why Christians seem so obnoxious,” he says. “If you believe that if you don’t receive Jesus as the son of God, then you don’t have eternal life… if I really believe that and I didn’t share that, then that would be criminal.”

Obnoxious, however, might be one of the last words you’d use to describe Oleson. Soft-spoken, with thoughtful eyes, he’s steadfast in his beliefs, but also unwavering in his willingness to listen.

“I’ve met a lot of people here that want to talk about religion,” he says. “We don’t always agree.”

Oleson grew up in Los Angeles and describes an idyllic childhood in which panoramic vistas of the Santa Monica Mountains, then unsullied by smog, were sources of spiritual inspiration.

He served three years in the Marine Corps, became an electrician, married, had four children, and then enrolled at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. He was ordained as a non-denominational minister in 1979.

In 1997 he moved to Idyllwild, and shortly afterward retired, putting to rest his trade in favor of his calling. He began setting up a table in front of the Post Office, where his sign evoked curiosity, and eventually controversy. He agreed to leave after a couple complaints, and found a new site at Nature’s Wisdom.

“This is the greatest country in the world,” he says. “We have the constitutional freedom to believe whatever they want. I respect that freedom, but I happen to believe in the Bible, and believe it’s important to share His plan of salvation.”

On a recent Wednesday morning at Nature’s Wisdom, he reads passages from the Book of Matthew with three men, commenting on the parable of the bad seeds. The parable describes the mix of “wheat” and “weeds” in a farmer’s field, the uncomfortable mingling of “good” and “bad” seeds.

“When you read the bible there’s neat stuff that gives you a lift,” Jim says. “There’s some scary things too.”

Don Lenik, who describes himself as a reformed or conservative Jew, is skeptical about those parts.

“I know you believe in Armageddon,” he says. “I don’t have that fatalistic view of the Almighty, of religion. I don’t think religion should be that deadly.”

Another reading of the parable is the inevitable mixture of good and bad in humanity, and within individuals. It can be read as a cautionary tale about making judgments. Oleson seems to have absorbed that meaning as well, maintaining a comfortable clarity about his own beliefs, along with openness to others’.

“I think friends can speak to friends frankly, and speak their hearts,” Don says. “You’re a good man.”

“Well, you’re a good man too,” Jim answers. “And we’ve become very good friends.”

Fiery Spectators

There’s nothing like a bonfire to draw a crowd. If the bonfire is a 400-acre, uncontained wildland blaze, so much the better.

Thursday night, as the Cottonwood fire consumed acres of hillside above Hemet, Idyllwild residents gathered to watch it burn.

“You’ve got to check it out,” my husband raved, returning from a fire-scouting expedition to Double View Drive. “It’s a party up there. It’s like the post office and the dump, rolled together.”

Someone offered him a beer, he said. They talked about softball and discussed the fire’s benefits to deer hunting prospects. Is this a natural disaster or a sporting event? I wondered. As he tucked the kids into bed, I raced up to the lookout.

“You want to buy a ticket, to the fire show?” a man asked as I walked up.

“I got one on the way in,” I answered. “I got my hand stamped.”

The top of a distant hill smoldered like Mount Doom. Flames licked up the side, further illuminating the landscape. People came equipped with flashlights, cameras, even a police scanner. They debated what percentage of the fire was contained, how long it would burn, whether it posed an imminent threat. Dozens more arrived, sneezing and coughing.

“I’ve never seen a fire like this before,” a girl told me. “It’s mind-boggling. I’m kind of excited and scared.”

She and her sister worried about evacuation. They’d have to leave the chickens behind, they confided. If they had to choose one animal, they’d bring the dog.

Back at home, my husband tracked the blaze through the Geomac site and news reports.
In this internet age, however, when we can follow a wildfire on a screen, we still feel the elemental need to look for ourselves, gauge the danger, and watch the flames.