Eating crow
A peace offering to the great black bird, a dry-drunk apology, and a remembrance of a brilliant ocean scientist.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We have nothing to offer this week about the American election. We’re aware that many of our readers were disappointed or worse by the result, as were we. Two impulses arrive, one to address the emotional impact and the other, with a cooler head, to analyze what happened and why. Some readers have told us that Wild Things is often a welcome emotional respite from the day-to-day political chatter, a sentiment we share. Still, we will present an annotated guide next week to analyses from political thinkers, some of them friends, who are less concerned with clicks (or cliques) than with clarity.
BIRDS
Beware the murders
I KNOW I GOT OFF EASY. John Marzluff, a University of Washington professor, reports that crows can hold a grudge for as much as seventeen years, even passing them on to their offspring. A recent and widely discussed New York Times article reported incidents of crows dive-bombing a victim down the street, repeatedly slamming a person’s glass door with their beaks and, oddly, destroying dozens of cars’ windshield wipers in a parking lot. Crows are smart and can recognize and remember human faces. Even a minor offense—one guy used a rake to chase off a group of crows attacking a robin’s nest—can ignite their revenge. Not for nothing are groups of them known as a “murder” of crows.
Now for any crows reading this, I want you to know that I love you. I have often photographed you with affection and care. (That New York Times reporter is on his own.) I slipped up once, shooing you off for dipping your stolen french fries in our pond, thus creating an oil slick. But I did my time—almost six months as I recall—when you chased and screamed at me from both sides of the street every time I walked home. And even though I’m also fond of owls and eagles, I never once complained when you let off blood-curdling screams while dive-bombing their heads. I’ve also learned my lesson and won’t interfere with any future french-fry dipping. I’ll even throw in a few fries. So, truce?
TALES FROM THE CLINIC
An Apology
By Barbara Ramsey
ONE DAY AROUND LUNCHTIME, Marty Waukazoo, the executive director of the Native American Health Center, paid me an unexpected visit. He stepped into my office and shut the door behind him. “Dr. Ramsey!” His voice was unusually distraught. Did a grant get pulled? Had someone died? His tone was alarmed and alarming.
“I have something to tell you. I’ve had it with the Board of Directors! I’m sick of this, I don’t want it anymore. I’m going to hand in my resignation!” He was angry and determined. My mouth fell open but I couldn’t think of anything to say.
Marty was the glue that held the clinic together. A longtime member of the Bay Area Native American community, he provided one of the central bonds that knitted together our little non-profit organization and the people it served. He was also a recovering alcoholic whose struggles helped inspire patients and staff members. If he suddenly resigned, especially in anger, our entire institution would be threatened.
“Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone,” he said. I nodded and he left. The office was suddenly empty except for me and my half-eaten cheese sandwich. For the next hour I took care of patients, answered phone calls, and discussed lab results with one of the nurse practitioners. But I was flooded with anxiety about Marty. What had just happened? What would happen next?
The clinic manager at that time was a fiercely intelligent, gregarious nurse named Kathy Asfeh. A recovering alcoholic in her thirties, she had special insight into patients with addiction issues. She appreciated that Marty was a fellow alcoholic, which gave her a sense of camaraderie with him.
She walked into my office, took one look at me and said, “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Though no one had noticed a thing in the past hour, it took Kathy exactly two seconds to sense my distress.
“Nothing, just a lot of patients to see, I guess.”
“I saw Marty come outta here awhile ago. What’d he say to you?” I suddenly felt like I was five years old, trying to hide something from my mother.
“Oh, I can’t tell. I promised him I wouldn’t.”
“Promised him?”
“Well…I mean, he told me I couldn’t. I mean…” Then I spilled everything. Kathy listened, but was utterly unconcerned with Marty’s imminent resignation. That floored me. Instead, she focused on the fact that he’d dumped a bad piece of news on me and then forbade me to speak of it.
“That’s classic dry-drunk behavior,” she said. “He can’t stay sober if he gets away with shit like that.” She set her shoulders and raised her chin. “I’ll be leaving the clinic for a little while. If anyone needs me, tell them I’ll be back by four o’clock.”
A few hours later, I was in my office jotting notes in a chart when Kathy reappeared—with Marty. She pulled on the sleeve of his suit jacket until he was standing right in front of me. “Marty has something to tell you,” she said.
He looked at me directly. “I apologize for what I did earlier. I wasn’t being fair to you.” He sounded compassionate and concerned for me and my feelings. I’d never seen him looking so vulnerable yet so full of purpose. “I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“Of course! It’s okay,” I rushed to reassure him. “I understand you’re under a lot of pressure.”
“That doesn’t make it right. I shouldn’t have done that,” Marty said. I wanted to hug him. I’d rarely received an apology both so courteous and heartfelt.
“Well, I’ve got a clinic to manage. See ya later,” said Kathy. She strode away, humming to herself.
I never learned what set Marty off, but he didn’t hand in his resignation after all. He and I continued to work together for another twenty years. We had our ups and downs, but there was always a strong bond between us. Kathy helped mix the cement.
SCIENCE
Einstein of the ocean
WALTER MUNK’S AUSTRIAN MOTHER worried that he might never amount to anything. His aristocratic family had made a fortune in banking and had plans for him to join the firm. But in high school, he seemed to be frittering his life away on skiing and other fun-loving pursuits. To set him on the right track, his mother sent him away in 1932 to a boarding school in Lake George, New York, where he secretly became captain of the ski team and then chased a young woman to San Diego. There, he ultimately found his life’s work.
I met Munk at his home in La Jolla when I was writing about ocean waves. Though he was then 93, he balked when I referred to him as a professor emeritus, correcting me that he was still an active research scientist. At the time, he was developing techniques for measuring the rate of melting under the Greenland ice sheet—a key indicator for climate effects on the ocean’s circulation. Earlier in his career, he had created many of the key concepts for understanding how currents and waves move around the globe, including the effects of wind, the earth’s rotation, and heat transfers.
But back in 1939, Munk’s mentor and later co-researcher, Harold Sverdrup, warned him that he would never find a well-paying job in the field. Sverdrup had been scientific director of the Almundsen expedition to the North Pole and headed up the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, which was tiny at the time. He also saved Munk’s life.
After Hitler invaded and occupied his native Austria, Monk left Scripps to join the army, where he was assigned to a unit later wiped out by the Japanese. But Sverdrup intervened. The Allies desperately needed ocean scientists and he convinced the army to release Munk. Working together, the two developed a wave prediction method—critical for deploying landing craft—that the Allies came to depend upon, including on D-Day.
After the war, Munk became the first scientist to prove that the waves arriving on the southern California shore originated in the Antarctic 10,000 miles away (see film below). He led a research team that used newly developed pressure sensors placed on the ocean floor to follow a set of swells at discrete locations from New Zealand to Alaska. Munk monitored the experiment from a station two thousand miles from the start point, in Samoa, where he set up camp for the summer with his wife and young daughters. The team made the unexpected discovery that, once formed, the swells lose little energy over the thousands of miles they travel.
While working at the Scripps Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, which he established and his artist wife helped design, Munk also broke new ground in understanding tides. He was the principal founder of the field of acoustic tomography, and showed how sound waves traveling very long distances through the ocean could be used to measure global ocean temperature. In the early 1990s, Munk took a wait-for-more-data approach to climate change, but then became convinced that a substantial rise in sea level and concomitant changes in wave dynamics is inevitable. He then experimented with acoustic tomography as a method to help predict the rate of sea level rise. His multiple breakthroughs in ocean geophysics won numerous science awards and led many to call him the “Einstein of the Ocean.”
Having earlier identified a problem in how sea rise affects the earth’s rotation—known as “Munk’s Dilemma”—he was still working with other scientists to solve it shortly before his death in 2019 at the age of 101.
WAVES ACROSS THE PACIFIC reminds me of the times our high school science teachers would whip out the projector for an educational film. Complete with crackling background noise and corny music, the half-hour film is a clear and wonderful guide if you want to learn how ocean waves are formed in the southern seas and travel enormous distances without significant energy loss. It describes Munk’s extraordinary experiment, setting up wave detection devices across the Pacific, including a ship transformed into a vertical lab.
EXHIBITS
BLUE SKY GALLERY is hosting a public reception for exhibitors, including me, this Saturday, November 16, 1-4 pm. The gallery is located at 122 NW 8th Avenue in Portland. I’ll be there at a table showing photographs and chatting with visitors . If you’re in the area, please stop by.
A THOUSAND WORDS, a group exhibit at The Meadwerks in Port Townsend, will be open weekends, noon to five, through January. I have a piece in the show from our recent trip to Norway. The artist reception is scheduled for Saturday, December 7, 2-4 pm. Please come by—and sample some of Meadwerks’ delicious libations.
STILL HERE, with five-foot-tall portraits of contemporary Chemakum people by Brian Goodman, is on exhibit at The Commons at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend through December. This is one you don’t want to miss.
But what is the origin of the terms a “murder of crows”, a “parliament of owls”, and a “gaggle of geese’”? Upon further investigation, I learned that the term “murder of crows” originates from folklore: flocks of crows held trials to judge and punish members of the flock that had transgressed. If found guilty, the “defendant” was executed (that is, “murdered”) by the flock. There may be some factual basis to this, as crows are territorial and may kill another crow that has encroached on their turf. https://lenichoir.org/fr/2013/04/05/a-murder-of-crows-a-parliament-of-owls/#:~:text=But%20what%20is%20the%20origin,has%20encroached%20on%20their%20turf.
I once had the privilege of spending a week on the Farallon Island bird sanctuary. My task involved recording the daily condition of gull nests. The ph.d gull researcher there wore a mask whenever he banded gulls so that they wouldn't attack him as he walked around the island. Gulls might not be as smart as crows but they definitely recognize individual humans--more than we can say about them.