Wild animals, savage people

by Eric Lucas

The 8-year-old boy chasing the young sea turtle down the beach was having “fun.” His father stood by, glancing up occasionally while he texted a football bet to a buddy.

Green sea turtle by davidd via Flickr CCL.

Also enjoying themselves were the two dozen beachgoers who had surrounded a full-grown, 4-foot-long green sea turtle in the water at shore’s edge at this lovely, famous island resort. As the turtle drifted back and forth in the swells, trying to get out to sea, its “admirers” followed it to and fro, cell-phones clicking incessantly so they could capture the special moment for Instagram and Twitter and Pinterest and Facebook. Some were barely a foot away. I wondered if they knew that a turtle has jaws strong enough to easily clap off a finger.

But sea turtles are gentle creatures; too gentle, actually, as they were long easily captured until international outcry brought them protected status. Now, U.S. law requires that people maintain a respectful distance from sea turtles, not encircle them or block their path to the open ocean, or otherwise bother or annoy them.

The penalty for violating this law runs up to $20,000. It’s called Level B harassment, which sounds serious indeed; but in our brave new world where all of the earth is on display for all of humanity, in person or digitally, the law means little. Nor, I’m afraid, do simple standards of decency, integrity and care.

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The journey of a lifetime

by Eric Lucas

Peter T. Lucas, 1931-2012

There’s never enough time.

My hero lay in bed for his final journey, the trip we all take to who-knows-where. I sat beside him and took his hand for the last time. His palm was dry from a day of heat and sweat, now cool to the touch. His breaths thrust out in fierce exhalations, little drawn back in return. This is called Cheyne-Stokes breathing. It comes very near the end.

His nurses had promised he could hear us, so I told him everything that mattered—how he saved my life and shaped its meaning, how what he stood for was living in us and would pass on to those coming still, even those just born. I’d make sure of that.

I told him how much I loved him.

I told him what a remarkable journey he’d had. And so it was, for Peter Lucas first met the human road in 1931 in Berlin, Germany, at the dawn of a deep, ugly darkness. His parents were from upper-class European Jewish families—his grandfather was the honcho of General Electric in Germany. His father was a progressive journalist and an enemy of the Nazis, so the little family, Peter, Margot and Kurt, escaped to Holland, then on to Britain.

There the young boy spent years on an English farm during the Blitz, while his grandparents died in a concentration camp. His mom took him to New York in 1947; he smuggled in 50 gold coins. He excelled in high school and college, studied geology, went to work for Royal Dutch Shell. He found a $5 billion oil field, became a corporate executive, ran an arm of Shell with 500 employees in Houston. In the middle of this time he helped save my life.

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I'm A Citizen Of ...

by Eric Lucas

“So, how does it feel to be in your homeland?”

My wife, Leslie, looks at me inquisitively.

Tindari by Leslie ForsbergWe’re visiting Tindari, Sicily, where the Black Madonna of Tindari hangs in a cool-stone basilica on an olive-scrub headland overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Beside the Madonna is an equally ebony Christ hanging on a crucifix. Up the road is a theater used by Greeks and Romans; stone seats persist on a rocky hillside, 2,000 years after they were first set down.

“She is known as the ‘Black Madonna of the Orient’,” our Sicilian guide, Lita, explains about the sepia-hued sculpture in the basilica’s huge bronze altar. “That means ‘from the east.’ In this case, Byzantium. So many, many people have come through Sicily over the centuries.”

And many have left.

“I’m Sicilian,” I tell Lita. She raises her eyebrows, looks me up and down. I hope I pass inspection: oxhide skin; walnut eyes; bones like the old olive trees nearby. She nods.

“One quarter Sicilian,” I clarify. “My great-grandparents came from a village above Palermo.

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TUCSON AFTER THE SHOOTING: To go or not to go?

by Eric Lucas

It was just an ordinary neighborhood Safeway until a heavily armed lunatic showed up with a pistol. What happened next was disastrous.

I’m speaking, of course, of our local Safeway in Ballard, Washington, where I live—but you thought I was talking about the store in the Tucson foothills where an unbalanced young American gunned down six people and tried to assassinate a U.S. congresswoman. What happened at the Ballard Safeway was “milder” but in its own way illuminating, and the irony struck me because both places are well known to me. I visit Tucson a half-dozen times a year and wrote a guide to the city for a major global internet site. I am very fond of both places. I buy great heaps of toilet paper at the Ballard Safeway; at the Tucson Safeway, I help out my dad by loading up sacks of salt for his water softener.

You know what happened at the latter store, so let me describe the scene at the Seattle one when a member of the “open-carry” movement decided to saunter about one day last year. These are Americans who believe the way to assert the right to carry firearms is to, well, do so, even when you are shopping for toilet paper. Who knows when a TP bandit may strike? So Messr. Six-Gun clumped around, pistol strapped to his thigh, severely alarming everyone in the store. Our neighborhood is not a gun-totin’ place. He departed without shooting anyone, preventively or otherwise, but the incident provoked a storm of controversy on the chat-boards at our neighborhood website. Hundreds of comments flew back and forth; about 80 percent wanted to vote Mr. S.G. off the island.

Ballard is a wonderful place and I urge all to come visit—great restaurants, nice people, fresh salt air off Puget Sound, and believe me, you are very, very unlikely to be shot.

I’d say much the same for Tucson.

Lost in the coverage of the Tucson catastrophe is the fact the city is a marvelous place to visit. Its cuisine includes a unique local specialty, the Sonoran hot dog, which uses onions and chiles to meld ballpark frankfurters with North Mexico culinary styles. Its many first-class resorts include one of America’s finest spas, Canyon Ranch, and a distinctive selection of family-owned guest ranches. The Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum is among the world’s leading natural history facilities. Tucson’s cultural climate makes it Arizona’s most progressive community. It’s the heart of the Sonoran Desert, a lovely and interesting Southwestern landscape that is surprisingly lush because, even though it’s an arid ecosystem, it has two distinct rainy seasons a year.

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Global whining vs. Amsterdam

words + photos by Eric Lucas

The bumper sticker that caught my eye was on one of those big, glistening, jet-black ¾-ton dual-wheel pickups that are never, ever driven by women. It was named after a horned beast. There was a gun rack on the back glass. Twin exhausts gargled fumes and dripped pustulence. A CB antenna rose skyward. The driver had on a tractor-company ball cap.

Amsterdam CanalThe sticker said, “Stop Global Whining.”

What was really strange was the location for this spectacle—the historic center of Amsterdam, right next to one of the city’s lovely canals.

Unbelievable.

I mean it—if you believed me, even for a few seconds, you have obviously never been to Amsterdam and were fooled by my fictional ruse, which I devised to make a point about the world and traveling around in it. This iconic ultra-American pickup, guzzling diesel like an old drunk, with the sticker sneering at global warming, would never, ever be seen in Amsterdam.

I actually saw it in Eastern Oregon, a beautiful place I happen to like. It’s got towering mountains, secret canyons, ancient trees, hidden stream valleys with songbirds in breeze-tossed willows. It has many fine residents; and also some who are under-educated and have never been to Amsterdam.

In Amsterdam, not only do people not drive around in massive pickups that could not be parked anywhere, bikes outnumber residents. There are twice as many bicycles in Holland as there are people. While its citizens use their own muscles to get themselves around, unlike monster-truck owners in Oregon, Hollandaise “whining” about global warming is actually alarm. Most of Amsterdam is below sea level.

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Many happy returns

by Eric Lucas

Oh, how I love new places, new tastes and smells and sights and sounds. Just this year, I have discovered hot, amber sabia chiles in Tucson, peaceful historic beguinages (cloisters) in Bruges, the warm chartreuse water of Kanaka Bay in British Columbia, the mind-bending apocalyptic canvases of John Martin in London.

Love, love, love. But.

While we’re admiring the snazzy glamour of new discoveries, let me bring on stage the simple wonder of happy returns.

It was while visiting Tucson last week, dipping into the pool at dawn with my wife Leslie, that I had second thoughts about the siren song of newness. Not second, exactly; call them revisionist or retrospective. I was enjoying something I have often done before, in the exact place I had been many times. Hundreds of times, in fact, have I slipped into this exact pool, which is framed by subtropical plantings and the stern, cactus-clad heights of the Santa Catalina foothills behind, burnished by the fierce, loving sun of the Sonoran Desert.

A morning breeze feathered the mesquite fronds of the desert woods just yards away. A hummingbird buzzed by. Spent bougainvillea blossoms laid their vermilion origami on the surface of the water. A Gila woodpecker whacked a roof tile. The summer-warmed water was 85 degrees, both cleansing and comforting. Tendrils of overnight thundershowers curled by nearby escarpments, and the monsoon humidity lent the air a silken touch.

“Doesn’t this feel like Tobago?” asked my wife.

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