Wolf Quest Part II

Almost can't fit both locations on one screen

Ellesmere Island is so far north that the compass almost goes in circles. The only people who have seen Ellesmere Island are soviet submarine captains and arctic explorers. But that's where Arctic wolves live. While Antarctica is a continent drifting so far south that the snow and ice covering the land never thaws, Ellesmere Island is the last land mass before entering a vast sea of ice in the north. This ice would influence my quest because research proves it is shrinking at an increasing speed and what was once only traverse-able by dog sled has recently become open to ships. Minimum ice mass is now half of what it was in 1984. The Arctic Ocean will be free of ice during Summer in the future but the exact details are debated. I predict 2040 but long before that ships and oil developers will flock north to seize resources and they will populate Ellesmere Island as the closest land base to their resources, ports will be constructed, docks will appear, pipelines, Denny's, WalMart, all of it will find a place on Ellesmere Island and the wolves will be eradicated or relocated. The wolf is the one land species who has adapted to every climate so he will survive, but it irked me that this innocent wolf, quietly killing a musk ox or two on the far reaches of the planet would soon come under siege and would be killed. This irked me and irks me still but in 2009 I thought I would devote some time to the wolf's plight. No, that's not accurate because the wolf's plight had not yet begun. The ice still exists, the shipping lanes are still being debated, the land is still uninhabited. The wolf's plight is theoretical at this point so I was trying to stay ahead of the curve. I determined it could take a decade to reach Ellesmere Island so if I didn't start soon then I might miss the opportunity to recruit the army of wolf defenders in time to do any good.

The first step to traveling to Ellesmere Island was getting out of Mexico so I bought a spare tire, pointed the van north and drove at 45 mph. If I go further into detail than that then I'll never finish the tale because I will have to explain a whole series of events and introduce people who are not relevant to the wolf quest. So, I will leave my activities in Mexico unexplained and simply say that I wept as I irreversibly burned bridges by beginning my quest to save the Arctic wolf. There's a lesson here...that a quest begins when one quest ends. Maybe this isn't true in every case but it was true in mine. The wolf quest was incompatible with my goals in Mexico and something had to be abandoned. I decided the wolf was a priority. The single lane road threading up the Baja Peninsula is long and remote and vast and dangerous but I had a basic plan in my head involving a visit to my bank in Los Angeles to clear up a financial technicality, then drive to...I looked at a map....a Canadian province called Labrador...then get a boat to Baffin Island and onward to Ellesmere Island. It was a 4 step plan with lots of room for improvisation. After the tears had dried I was excited, a quest renews an old man's heart, it forgives all past failures. A quest gives a man purpose and from that moment on if anyone asked me what I was doing I said, "I'm going to Ellesmere Island to save the Arctic Wolf." And after a quizzical frown I would then begin to answer the questions that followed, questions that I was learning the answers to as I went along.

I had dreams of landscape like this alive with wolves.

Here are links to the installments of the Wolf Quest

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Part VII

Part VIII

Part IX

Part X

Part XI

Part XII

Part XIII

Part XIV

Part XV

Let Them Eat Soup

Seattle, WA is a much bigger than Santa Cruz, CA but they recently counted around 2500 'unsheltered' people and decided to help them during the last months of winter. I can feel the generosity oozing from the citizens...

could these arrogant cunts be more condescending?

Seattle's population is 652,000 so 1 in 250 people are homeless. It's probably an underestimate but it's in the ballpark. In 1993 the population of Santa Cruz was about 50,000. Today it's around 62,000. It's a small city. Well, the estimates were 5,000 homeless people in Santa Cruz at that time and I think that's an accurate ballpark figure. Or you could say that 45,000 people had houses to live in and the remainder were homeless. So 1 in 10 people were homeless which is probably the highest concentration of homeless people anywhere in America. I'd be surprised if that ratio stands true today with an additional 1000 homeless people in Santa Cruz. It felt like 5000 was the maximum but I could be wrong.  During the three years I was living there I only knew a handful of people who had traditional housing. The rest were sleeping rough every night. The police force in Santa Cruz was less than 2 dozen officers and they were in the position of social services, emergency health care, law enforcement, etc. 

Wolfman Cometh Part 1: Oggy Has A Vision

Editor's Note: This is the first installment of the Wolf Quest. The links for the other 14 installments are at the bottom of this page and on the bottom of the page of all the other installments.

I can look back and laugh now, the baggy pants, back pain, broken muffler, broken batteries, broken transmission...the video footage I have is a mockery of all documentaries. The real beginning of this twisted tale of confusion and wasted youth begins around the time of the Industrial Revolution...but I need to skip some of that and jump right to the part when I had a vision as I succumbed to the 127 degree heat in my van in Mexico, heat that melted plastic, heat that boiled water, and I crawled outside into the sand and rolled into the Sea of Cortez to cool off. I had a vision of wolves and how hot they must be and how hot they would become as their habitat heated up. They might initially enjoy the warmer weather but the men would soon arrive with their development plans and the wolf would be considered a pest, dangerous to progress...and it would be eliminated. Well, the wolf is resilient having survived all attempt to eradicate it like the American Bison but Baffin and Ellesmere Island are the end of the road. The inhabitants of those islands took thousands of years to develop. The first wolf probably walked onto Ellesmere Island across an icy path in pre-history and developed a balance of population and habits over generations. All that could be destroyed in a solid year of hunting. It would be like landing on The Galapagos Islands with a bazooka and killing everything in your path. The freezing winters and the hordes of mosquitoes are all that protects Ellesmere Island. Once the climate allowed development the Arctic wolf would not adapt, it would become extinct at least on that ancestral home of Baffin Island. And as my head fell beneath the warm water, surrounded by excrement pumped into the Sea by the oblivious Mexican hotels, I decided I could do something about it. I could go to Ellesmere Island and defend the wolf when men came with guns. I would get there first and establish a defense system. I knew that the only hope of salvation would be boots on the ground and a fight to the death. I could cross the country and recruit an army of Wolf Warriors to defend Ellesmere Island. All the evidence predicts a showdown in the Arctic for new territory, new resources and the wolf would not survive unless someone was there to defend him. I decided that someone would be me.

the wolf's best hope?

 How does one travel from the tip of Baja California to Ellesmere Island? This question was not foremost in my mind. I am bound by my imagination alone. If I wanted to play golf on the moon, I believe I could do so. So, the physical details, I knew, were the least of my problems. I woke up in the Yukon Territory once and I had camped under an electric fence, that immediately shocked me. I camped during a violent storm in a grassy area near a narrow road and was woken up by a tree full of howling monkeys and giraffes that were behind the fence of the Rapid City, South Dakota Safari park. I tried to bicycle to San Francisco from Boston...and ended up in Fairbanks, Alaska. When I sleep in the van with the curtains closed I have no idea what I'm going to see when I open the curtains up. It's like a surprise present that determines my future every morning. If I want to go to Ellesmere Island then the question isn't "Who will let me," but rather, "Who will stop me?"

Wolf Point, Mexico

All quests have a beginning and an end. A quest will tell a lot about a person, reveal much in the manner of character and fortitude and cowardice. He will stand naked before himself on a quest and stare his fate square in the eyes. All will be revealed. This is perhaps the function of a quest, to strip the vanity and fringe accessories away until all that is left is the quest. A quest exposes the heart of the pilgrim...to himself and to others. He may try to disguise himself but eventually the quest will expose all. What makes a man into a pilgrim? Thoreau already wrote the best answer, "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life." But what Thoreau leaves out is the implied dissatisfaction with the traditional that first gets a pilgrim thinking. Thoreau's discontentment is the initial mover, not his idealism. The pilgrim is dissatisfied with the shallow life, the nibbles at the leg bone of society, the thread count exasperation. His imagination is not satisfied with fiction. When a man finds society beneath him then he invents a goal that is worthy of his self-image, something worth striving for. Along the way he purges the dissatisfaction and determines that frustration, failure and even death are preferable.

planting trees in Quebec

I have 7 hours of video footage of this journey, plus many photos...and there is a story here no one but I can write.

Here are links to the installments of the Wolf Quest

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Part VII

Part VIII

Part IX

Part X

Part XI

Part XII

Part XIII

Part XIV

Part XV 

 

Oggy's Dream

Oggy lay on his back and wiggled his way into his new stick cocoon. He had a rough wool blanket now and the plastic mattress cover and new women's overalls with a fairy patch over a hole in the knee. He wore the overalls and his bright green cotton sweater over the silk blouse he found in the piles of free clothing at the shelter. All they needed was a lemon juice wash in the river levee. His back ached after the tumble he took from the railroad trail on his bicycle. One second he had been pedaling casually, singing an old John Denver melody to himself, and the next second his bicycle had vanished from under him and he was falling head over ass over guitar into the thorny brush. The trail needed maintenance with so many wing nuts and meth minions tromping it down every day and night during their commute to and from their huts. The meth minions especially were responsible for the degradation of the trail because they were irresponsible and delirious most of the time. It's a physically repulsive recognition of the habitat destruction that Oggy tried to extinguish from his brain but he could hear the echoing thump of their bongo drums and smell the smoke from their fires. The meth kingdom was growing more and more bold as the drugs started to erode their brains. Night after night the minions would raid the shelter bread box, they would terrorize the Food Not Bombs meals, they could not be reasoned with, their blood shot eyes and wiry necks and bulging jaws all professed their consumption by Meth. They would fight with anyone, throw perfectly edible peaches at passing police cars and then run toward the river laughing. They had no more respect for civilization than real estate investors did. But they were a mere footnote in the tragedy of Oggy's day. The whole affair had been a horror, the language of Oggy's day was tormented and rebuffed, ugly, unwholesome. Why? Because of the abortion.

It all started during the weekly FNB anti-hostility virtual barbeque

Last Resort

I'm having all kinds of problems finding place to start writing about Santa Cruz. I excuse myself because this is a traumatic era and my keyboard has a shift key that's sort of sticking and I'm troubled because of intestinal worms and possible mental decay and a long list of other life details to draw my attention from this project. I am not leaving Guatemala until this project has a substantial progress. It's a life goal and involves dramatizing something that is rarely understood. But not in the normal Oggy fashion, which I'm about to delve into, but in a Russia style, embracing the vast opera, the homeless cast of dereliction and emotional refugees, detailing the dirt beneath their nails, the meek expressions they have, all evidence of a broken spirit. Some were not adult children, some had surrendered to circumstance. Some were passing through and some were students of humanity but had elements of all the above. I considered writing the entire thing as a first person recollection, an indictment of myself and my past to shove it down the throats of the reader, brutalize and humiliate them, pull no punches in my attempt to injure those whose stultifying ignorance made them look like wounded cows next to an electric fence with their mouths gaping and chewing cud with flies nesting near their eyes while my brethren were led to slaughter. Motherfucking impotent cunts, my disdain has no words and that's the problem. Because I witnessed the homeless holocaust and smug elite pissed on their graves with no knowledge of anything except their own hidden shame, I have to find better words. I'm dealing with bread dead people, horses without eyes plodding toward some mystical carrot and my ordinary essays will not have an impact with that kind of idiot. I need to step up the game beyond anything I've written before because I don't want to preach to the choir; I want to burn the church down. Metaphorically, of course.

How does one do that? And there are so many anecdotes that I've reflected on in misery and self-loathing nostalgia. I will share one with you in order to move ahead with this madness.