I love you, dammit!!

Arktomorphism?

I just spent the weekend in the company of a few hundred trainers and a smattering of scientists at the annual west coast Clicker Expo, organized by Karen Pryor and her skilled cohorts. My exhaustion last night spoke to the quality of the program and the liveliness of the other attendees -- it's good to be reminded in a training context of how much energy the brain consumes when it's fully engaged!

There were many ideas and provocations I encountered in the ballrooms and hallways of the Doubletree Hotel that I want to return to, things I'll need to gnaw on for a long time before I can digest them. What looks most temptingly chewy this morning, however, is a question that was posed to me by a fellow trainer yesterday morning. I had volunteered with a dozen or so other KPA graduates to offer a little coaching to interested parties (two sessions of twenty minutes apiece), with donated proceeds going a local charity. We worked in pairs, and it was unfortunately toward the end of our first session that our "client," whose dog was not with her, described how he would often growl when he lay on his bed and she approached and pet him. What should she do?

I really regret that our next client was waiting and we weren't able to give the question the attention it deserves, because it's loaded. Personally, emotionally, and theoretically. I didn't get any further than remarking that the dog was telling her something that she'd be wise to respect, which might have been a fine response if I'd had time to elaborate it, but was surely too brusque given the circumstances. My partner did better, noting that the dog was a terrier, asking whether the dog followed her hand when she withdrew (yes), and suggesting that the dog might be experiencing a conflict of intent: to roughhouse or to cuddle? But we had to leave it at that.

On the theoretical side, this presents as a relatively straightforward matter of strategic reinforcement, and I hope the woman with the terrier found her way later that morning to Ken Ramirez's excellent lecture, wherein he explored the promise and perils of working with secondary reinforcers, those things (not always tangible, sometimes experiential) that accrue value only by their association to other things that satisfy an animal's strong intrinsic needs (i.e. primary reinforcers). Is gentle touch a primary reinforcer? Considered broadly, for slow-developing, social mammals, it does appear to satisfy an intrinsic need, especially early in life. (Harry Harlow's poor rhesus macaques demonstrated this most tragically and persuasively.) But touch is critical at that early stage in part because it is instructive: a mother's or other's tactile tenderness teaches us what kind of touch is safe, and when. Squirming, jostling littermates and human carers contribute significantly to that education in the case of most dogs. Physical intimacy is double-edged for all of us: it has the simultaneous potential to be terribly harmful or deeply rewarding. So each of us necessarily becomes a connoisseur of touch, highly idiosyncratic in our taste for different varieties of contact.

As Ken noted, in the practical life of a trainer or pet owner, the need to draw any distinction between primary and secondary reinforcers is not nearly so pressing as the question of whether something is reinforcing at all. The question for the woman with the terrier is not whether her dog has a primal desire for touch, but whether he wants to be touched by her, in that way, in that place, at that moment. His growling suggests that he does not. Which does not mean that her desire to touch her dog in such a way under such circumstances must remain forever frustrated, only that she needs to teach her dog to enjoy it. Or risk getting bit.

There are many people who see these (sometimes irresistible) urges to kiss, hug, and cuddle our pets as yet another dangerous form of anthropomorphism. This is true to the extent that our species-typical touch repertoires do not everywhere overlap, and we need to be attentive to the places where they typically diverge. But when we're talking about an individual human and an individual dog (or cat or monkey or whale or other human), knowledge of what is typical may not only be immaterial, it may also be distorting. There are quite a few of us humans who find hugs from most people in most contexts highly aversive. Some find them aversive from all people in all contexts. Can we be shaped to enjoy them? Most of us, probably. But the more often we get hugged when we do not want to be hugged, by people who just want to show us how much they love us, the less a hug will communicate that professed love, and the more likely we'll be to interpret it as invasive and aggressive. As someone who should really know better, I am sorry to say that I think I inflicted an unwanted hug on someone this weekend, and the sincerity of my affection had no bearing on the question of whether it was rewarding for the victim. I "anthropomorphized" her, insofar as I made the narcissistic assumption that my desire to hug her was mirrored by her desire to be hugged.

Animals do this to us, too, as we'd be wise to remember the next time we get leapt on, slobbered over, or humped. My husband has a pair of black running tights that we've taken to calling his "sexy pants," because they drive our boy Pazzo into an amorous frenzy. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Pete vaguely resembles Pazzo from the waist down when he wears them.) Pazzo is clearly sincere in his passion for Pete, but the very force of that passion makes him insensitive to the question of how best to express it.

If dogs wore shoes...

Really??

...we'd more easily walk a mile in them. But most don't, and those who do don't look happy about it. Our relationships with our pets are wonderfully peculiar, as the ties that bind us braid together intimacy and alienation. This is true to a degree of all relationships (between dogs, between people, and certainly between cats), but when we extend our interest and care beyond the bounds of our own species, we seem sometimes to find more direct access to each other's emotions than we ever enjoy with our nearer kin. At those very moments, however, we may also be struck by the other's unfathomable otherness.

I think we need to sustain and not to collapse the tension between these simultaneous truths -- "we understand each other perfectly" and "we don't understand each other at all" -- if we want to flourish together. More, I think we should celebrate it. In the history of our relations with other animals, and particularly in the history of our domestication of other animals (and their domestication of us!), views have tended to swing from one pole to the other, from the conviction that other animals exist only as extensions of human need (or of human fear, as in the case of the benighted wolf) to the conviction that they exist utterly apart from us. Wittgenstein's oft-quoted aphorism captures the latter belief nicely: "If a lion could speak, we couldn't understand him." Likewise, Thomas Nagel's famous (and to his mind impossible) question -- what is it like to be a bat? -- encourages an all-or-nothing judgment on the possibility of shared experience. But otherness is always radical, and subjective feelings of connection are always an objective illusion. (Or rather, the connection itself is illusory, though the feeling would probably show up on a brain scan.) We have no direct means of access to any other being's perception of the world, no matter the species, so unless we wish to retreat into lonely solipsism, we have to make do with indirect means and earnest approximations.

With that limitation in mind, we have good reason (founded on objective evidence) to suppose that, in many ways, our pets' and other animals' emotional and cognitive experience strongly resembles our own. The speaker whose talk I'm most excited to hear at the upcoming Clicker Expo is Jaak Panksepp, the neuroscientist who holds the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science at Washington State University (wonderful that there should be a chair so endowed). He is one of a small (but happily increasing) number of scientists who dare to emphasize the obvious homologies (common structures with common origins) among diverse animal minds, especially among the minds of humans and other social mammals. (I use "minds" advisedly, as Panksepp is interested in subjective as well as scientific modes of inquiry and description.) He is also leading research into homologies that are not so obvious, teasing out the physiology and chemistry that underlie those brain processes that we hold in common (and variations that we do not). His book Affective Neuroscience is a marvel. Densely technical in places, it nonetheless serves both as an excellent overview of contemporary research into the dynamics of primary emotions (including their influence on cognition and learning) and as an eloquent, richly speculative description of the big questions that remain.

In scientific circles

I think the mirror test demonstrates, at the point where its popularity as a measure of self-consciousness intersects with its inadequacy, the tendency of scientific investigation to wander into tautology when it treats the phenomena of sentience. It requires great care and imagination to conceive an experiment that will yield some verifiable external measure of an internal process, and when someone succeeds as elegantly as the originator of the mirror test, there's a strong temptation among those who credit the significance of the results to "move forward," to avoid any needless backtracking (e.g. to the definitional boundaries of the phenomenon under scrutiny).
     Thus the question of whether an animal possesses self-awareness elides irresistibly with the question of whether he can, with the help of a well-placed polka dot, make a connection between his kinesthetic or proprioceptive sense and an alien image that (bizarrely) coordinates with it; in the absence of any similarly compelling measure, the mirror test becomes definitive for hundreds of scientists who go on to paint scores of unsuspecting animals in their sleep. Will a parrot pass or fail? A tamarin? A zebra? As Frans de Waal observes, "for better or worse, this test has remained the gold standard of self-identity."
     Even the test's critics seem to accept its foundational terms: if, they say, an orangutan who touches a spot on his forehead really understood the image in the mirror as a representation of his own body, then the conditions for self-awareness would be met. But, they argue, he probably just likes to poke at his face. Or he learns to do so because it makes humans grimace in that weird way that means more dates and sunflower seeds.
     Again, methodological limitations lead us to chase our tails: the mirror test measures the capacity for self-consciousness because... we don't have a better test. Or a more complete one. Hell, I don't know what it means to be self-conscious! Do you?
     My feeling, one I'd like to develop into a well-reasoned conviction (so goes the trajectory of my mental life), is that there ought to be a kind of intellectual affirmative action in the direction of granting non-human animals manifold intelligence and complex consciousness. We ought to assume they're endowed with great riches of thought and feeling until they prove otherwise, though we ought not to assume that their thoughts and feelings trace the same patterns as ours. I have some sympathy for Marc Hauser, despite his faults and all the damage he's done to the cause of anthropomorphology, because a bias in favor of non-human intelligence remains so rare, while the bias against almost defines "respectable" research.

Self-consciousness without mirrors

There's a question I want to dig into a little further before I arrange another rendezvous between Hamlet and Burrhus (Frederic Skinner), a question regarding self-consciousness. This is one of innumerable capacities ascribed until recently only to humans. Various experiments with mirrors and paint have widened the circle of self-conscious creatures just a little bit, to include apes and magpies (!) among a few others, but I think the assumption that underlies the research may be too restrictive to allow a full description of the phenomenon. While it may be difficult or impossible to demonstrate under scientific controls (this is clearly a case in which observation itself may distort the nature and behavior of what we observe), informal study argues strongly for the emergence of "personality" in many social species who (pronoun used advisedly) fail the mirror test. Canis familiaris, to take one salient example.
     What if one accumulates (even if unwittingly) a distinct and precious identity, an identity one is motivated to defend (even if reflexively)? Mightn't this constitute a kind of self-consciousness, whether or not the self is pinched off from consciousness and set out as an object for one's contemplation and deliberate manipulation? I think anyone who has ever observed the wounding of a dog's pride or a cat's dignity must admit the possibility.
     The counterexample of the octopus also supports a more expansive definition of self-consciousness. Experiments performed using HDTV suggest that, however intelligent, an octopus has no personality: that is, it demonstrates the patterns of behavior that we generally attribute to personality, but these patterns are extremely short-lived. An octopus that is extroverted and aggressive one day may be terribly timid the next. (Wonderful that the subject of this research was Octopus tetricus: vulgarly, the "gloomy" octopus.)
     If the range of an animal's behavior (and the probability of any specific response to a stimulus) were determined simply by a passive stockpiling of experience and not by any active sense of internal coherence - of individual integrity - one would not expect to see such wild variations in the robustness of behavioral patterns among species.
     **There's another experiment, performed back in 2008, that hints at a canine capacity for self-consciousness. Austrian researchers trained a pair of border collies to sit and shake on cue, then measured the time it took for the behaviors to extinguish when they received no reinforcement. The salient data came from a comparison between "control" trials, wherein one of the dogs worked alone, and trials wherein the two dogs worked side by side but only one received reinforcement. Behaviors extinguished significantly more quickly in the second case (and the unrewarded dog showed many more visible signs of frustration). Discussion of the research has focused primarily on the question of whether this demonstrates that dogs have a sense of "fairness," but it certainly suggests that they have a vigorous sense of "me" distinct from "him," a protective self-regard that might amount to a form of ego.

Neocortical lipstick

The widespread reluctance to acknowledge (let alone to explore or elaborate) how deeply we remain embedded in "animal" life has serious practical consequences, as it accelerates our destruction of the world we commonly inhabit. This is obvious in the sense that our failures of identification with other species remove barriers to violence and rapacious exploitation; it is less obvious in our expectation that "uniquely human reason" will rescue us from our own greedy appetites. We wishfully suppose ourselves ennobled by our comparatively well-developed cortices, but the reasoning (or rationalizing) power supplied by those wrinkly blankets obfuscates as much as it elucidates; it has made us masters at self-deception.

Jonah Lehrer makes the excellent point (in Proust Was a Neuroscientist) that the neocortex, in its very novelty, may be regarded, should be regarded as less developed than supposedly more primitive parts of the brain-- there hasn't been time to smooth out its kinks, or make its wrinkles perform most efficiently and effectively (that is to say, most adaptively). It remains fundamentally less reliable than older structures, though the dialogue that ensues between them has clearly been productive in the (geologically) short term: it has allowed us to overrun the planet. Yippee.

This is my point: the emanations of the neocortex (e.g. reason and faith) have not yet produced any notable constraint on our "animal" compulsions to consume and procreate, and to expect that they ever will is patently ridiculous, when our brains have been "designed" bottom-up for the opposite purpose. Even our most hopeful discoveries in neurology (of mirror neurons, for example, with their strong suggestion of a built-in capacity for empathy) can only embellish the fact of our dominant hunger, that is, to live beyond ourselves in the proxy of our genes. That superobjective (says the theatre gal) spawns an astonishing variety of more trivial hungers in day-to-day life, few of which consent to be curbed by reason or faith (though both propose compelling accounts of why other people's appetites should be suppressed or refused outright). Even those of us who have abdicated our procreative vocation find alternative modes of proliferation (hello, blogosphere!), and our consumption continues apace, as if we were not genetic dead ends (and indeed we may not be, if we help our nieces, nephews, or cousins to thrive).

Yes, this is to say that I am extremely pessimistic about our ability to pull ourselves by our elastic bootstraps into an enlightened state-- of mind or self-government. But if we do, the mechanism will not, I think, be reason or faith. I think it will have to be pleasure, unless it is desperation. If we cannot channel our appetites in less destructive directions (e.g. by encouraging people to remain "selfishly" childless, by cultivating our inner resources and capacity for pleasure), we will sprint ever faster toward that great brick wall of finitude.

I'm pretty sure it's already too late, at least for anything like the life I happen to lead (the outrageously wasteful kind). But crisis is normal in the long life of the planet. The dinosaurs never dreamed of us, and we can't imagine what (or who) will flourish when we're gone. I can still rage against the dying of the light in my visible spectrum-- the snuffing of lives I am disposed by evolutionary accident to cherish.

Hannah the Homesick Honu IV

You might have guessed by now that the Honu weren’t behaving so strangely because of anything fishy in the waters of Mokupapapa. No, they had all come there to mate. It often happens that shy creatures without many social skills will act rather foolishly when the spirit of romance catches them in its invisible net. Hannah was lucky to have found a steady turtle like Sam, and Sam was lucky that she knew it. I wouldn’t want to embarrass them or you with the details, but it wasn't long before Hannah had a belly full of eggs and an important new journey to make.

Sea turtles are called sea turtles for a very good reason: they don’t like to be on land. Their shells weigh them down when they’re out of the water, and they struggle to move across the sand. The Honu love to swoop and glide and soar, but on land they can only shuffle inch by awkward inch. Hannah knew other turtles who beached themselves for a good dose of sun when the cold slowed them down, but she had only been ashore once before in her life, when a tiger shark had chased her into a dead end cove. She had glided onto the sand just as its jaws snapped shut behind her. Now she would need to leave the water again.

As the sun set, Hannah made her way to the edge of the known world, where shadows gathered around her. These were other female Honu, all waiting like Hannah for the safety of darkness. When the blue waters had finally faded to black, they let themselves be carried by the breaking waves onto the shore, then began a difficult climb, away from the surf’s edge and toward the light, loose sand a hundred feet further up the beach.

Again and again, Hannah thrust her front flippers as far in front of her as she could, then pressed down with all her strength and dragged her heavy body forward. She seemed to make no progress at all, but she knew she could not quit. She had traveled too far to give up now. She thought of all the new turtle lives she held in her belly, each one closed away in its own private shell, and she pulled herself another five inches up the beach.

At last, Hannah made it to the soft, dry sand that lay beyond the reach of the highest tide. Here her work became harder. There was no rest for the tired flippers that had taken her across the ocean and out of the water she loved: she needed to dig a nest. The sand flew all around her, as a dozen Honu hollowed out big shallow bowls as wide as their own bodies. They used their back flippers to carve narrow burrows into the same quiet dunes where their mothers had nested, and their mothers’ mothers, and their mothers’ mothers before them.

Hannah didn’t have to ask whether her nest was big enough or deep enough. She simply knew. She laid her bright, precious eggs—more than a hundred of them!—in the shelter she had made. Then she covered them carefully with sand. When she was satisfied that she had hidden them well, she looked up to see that all the other mothers were making their slow way back to the water.

Hannah hesitated. Were the Honu really leaving their eggs behind? Would that thin layer of sand be enough to protect them from harm? She wanted to stay. She wanted to cover her nest with her own stony shell and fend off every threat that might come. She wanted to be there on the moonlit night when her babies would hatch and emerge in a tumbling crowd from the sand. She wanted to guide them to the water, through the pounding waves, away from the crabs who might snatch them on land, past the tiger sharks who waited for them in the depths. But she knew she could not.

In that moment’s hesitation, Hannah remembered all the many joys of the Honu life. She had been very frightened when she was a hatchling herself, no more than a mouthful for any hungry bird or fish. She might have wished for some protection then; she might have wished for someone to look out for her like Sam had done when she returned to Mokupapapa. But Hannah had traveled hundreds of miles before she met up with Sam, and she had not been afraid. She would never have learned to be so brave if her own mother had nervously followed her on her first great journey across the open ocean. She would never have learned the pleasure of solitude or the value of quiet. She knew her life was sweeter for the dangers she had faced.

“Have a good flight,” Hannah told her sleeping eggs. Then she turned and shuffled back down the slope of the dune, into the welcoming water.

Hannah lingered with Sam at Mokupapapa for many weeks. Three times she returned to the beach. Three times she made a new nest and hid her eggs carefully under the sand. The moon was bright on the night that Hannah dreamed again. In this dream, everything was familiar: the pink coral and the long, swaying grass. She saw once again the strange, peaceful human who had first tickled her curiosity. When she awoke, she could feel her blood humming in her veins.

“It’s time for me to go back,” she told Sam.

“Would you like company?” he asked. He remained a most gentlemanly turtle.

“Thank you, Sam,” Hannah said. “I think I’m good.” She brushed his flipper in farewell and soared out into the boundless blue, on her way home.

Photo by Marc M. Ellis

Hannah the Homesick Honu III

All through the day Hannah swam, and at night she rested. The further she swam, the further the ocean floor dropped away beneath her, and the further she had to dive to find a place to sleep. When she settled on the sand, she became perfectly still, so that you might have thought she was a pretty sort of a rock. Hannah's heart took long breaks between beats, and her blood inched along her veins. There was no hurry—everything was moving in the direction it should.

For a long time, the ocean yawned deeper and emptier than Hannah had ever known it. She took wide detours around a few tiger sharks and marveled at the blue flash of the long, skinny ono who passed her by, but she was as surprised as she was pleased one day to see another turtle swimming right in line with her. In her excitement, she forgot to be shy. “Hello!” she called. “I’m Hannah.”

“Sam,” said the other turtle. “A pleasure.” He looked curiously at her, and she was briefly reminded of the funny human.

The same whisper that had sent Hannah into the open ocean now urged her closer to Sam. He was a handsome Honu, his face gentle, his broad shell gleaming brown. “Did you have a dream, too?” Hannah asked him.

“Ah,” Sam said. “It’s your first return.”

“My first return?” Hannah was puzzled.

“To Mokupapapa. Where the silver monk seals swim and the coral grows wide as a ray.”

“Yes!” exclaimed Hannah. “That’s the place of my dream.”

“You’re headed in the right direction,” Sam told her.

“I know,” said Hannah. But she was glad to hear it all the same. “Mokupapapa. What a beautiful name.”

Sam cocked his head in a silent invitation, and Hannah happily joined her journey to his. They swam together for many days. Though Sam rarely spoke, he looked out for Hannah. “Dolphins,” he’d say, and steer her clear of the speeding pod. “Pa`imalau,” he’d say, and point his chin toward the surface, where a glamorous man-of-war draped its long tentacles like a poison curtain across her path. He shrugged off Hannah’s thanks: “Don’t worry about it. You’d do the same for me.” And he was right, she would.

Hannah had been amazed to find Sam in the middle of the open ocean, but every day more turtles appeared. Their deep memory of Mokupapapa pulled them like a magnet through the water—they swam and swam without tiring. On the very day that Hannah had begun to wonder whether they would ever reach their destination, Sam motioned with a flipper toward a shadow in the distance. “Nearly there,” he said.

Hannah awakened from her swimming trance and noticed that the ocean floor was quickly rising to meet them. After miles of blue, a rainbow of corals sprouted before her eyes, alive with fish and urchins and eels. There was the strange flat coral she’d seen in her dream! And there was the silver seal with its smiling round face!

In Hannah’s dream, she’d been alone, but here the Honu crowded around her. That would have been fine if they had behaved with their usual courtesy, but some were downright rude. The closer Hannah and Sam got to where the reef broke the skin of the water, the more frequently a strange male tried to swim between them. “Back off,” Sam would say.

They'd ignore him and slide in close to Hannah. “Come fly with me” was about the nicest thing she heard from any of them.

“You can do better, baby,” said one, but she didn’t think so.

Another told her, “You gotta be cracked, knocking shells with this guy.”

Hannah gave him a hard nip, surprising herself.

“Ow, hey!” he cried. “You don’t gotta be like that.”

“Get a life, leatherback,” Hannah replied. She saw Sam smiling. “Go chew barnacles for all I care.”

“Whatevs,” said the tactless turtle before he swam off. “You two deserve each other.”

“Yeah, maybe we do,” said Sam. Hannah smiled back at him.

Hannah the Homesick Honu II

Over the next few days, something changed in Hannah, and she wasn’t sure whether the human was to blame. She felt a tickle inside—sometimes in her head, other times near her heart. In her head, it was like a teasing whisper whose words she could never make out, even if she nestled under a soft layer of sand and lay perfectly still on the ocean floor, listening. When she swam, the tickle left her head and moved through her blood. It danced and skipped around her pulse. Everything in Hannah seemed to quicken to this new double rhythm, so that she found herself rising more frequently to the surface to take in a fresh lungful of air.

Unexpectedly, too, Hannah’s appetite grew. She didn’t stop to savor every mouthful of sea grass the way she always had—as soon as she’d taken one bite, she was already thinking about the next. For the first time that she could remember, Hannah felt something pushing her out of the moment she lived in and knew, felt it nudging her toward... what? She had no idea, she only knew that she needed to find a new patch of grass. She’d munched this one almost down to the sand, and she wasn’t even close to full.

When Hannah decided to move on, she noticed another strange thing. She knew that she would find the best and most tender grass on the other side of the reef to her right, but when she turned toward it the water seemed to press her back. The tickle in her head made an ugly buzzing, but as soon as she turned to swim in the opposite direction, it quieted to a lovely low hum. This happened many times, until Hannah no longer knew where she was. She didn’t understand how she had wandered so far, but she wasn’t afraid. That seemed strange, too. She didn’t recognize the surrounding coral and rock, and she didn’t recognize herself. What had changed?

Now, maybe you’re wondering why Hannah didn’t stop to ask another turtle what was going on. It’s a very good question, and I hope you won’t find the answer silly. The Honu, as I mentioned, are extremely polite. They are also terribly shy. It’s hard to say which came first, the politeness or the shyness, but because they like their peace and quiet so much, they really hate to be a bother to anyone else. On the rare occasions that Honu try to converse, they spend so long clearing their throats and apologizing that they often forget what they wanted to say. A typical exchange might go like this:

Horace the Honu quietly coughs, “Um, so. Hm.”

Hannibal the Honu lifts his head in surprise. “Whassup?”

Horace sees that Hannibal is eating. “Oh, dude, I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll come back after lunch.”

“No, man, stay,” replies Hannibal. “It’s a way tasty tuft. You should have some. Please.”

“Ah, I couldn’t, really. I had a crazy big breakfast, couldn’t eat another bite.”

Hannibal insists, “Come on, just a nibble, man.”

Horace snips off a few blades with his beaky mouth and delicately munches. “Sweet.”

“I told you, right?” Hannibal takes another bite. He chews contentedly with Horace.

Horace coughs again. “Um yeah, so.”

“Something you need, friend?” Hannibal asks. “Just say the word.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Horace tries to remember. “I mean there was. I don’t know.”

Hannibal shrugs. “It’ll come back to you. Or not. Meantime, there’s plenty of grass if you just want to chill.”

The Honu like nothing better than chilling—except when they get a tickle in their blood and they begin to wonder why. One night a dream gave Hannah something new to wonder about. She dreamt of a beautiful place where butterfly fish fluttered and silver monk seals somersaulted through brilliant blue waters. She dreamt of angelfish with sunbright faces, of corals that fanned out flat and wide as manta rays.

When Hannah woke from her dream, she wasn’t hungry anymore. She didn’t want to eat, she only wanted to swim. She had to find her way back to the place of her dream. She knew she’d been there before. That was what the tickle had been telling her all along: it was time to go home.

Anthropomorphology

I've begun writing a series of stories for "middle readers" (the artificial segmentation of kids' reading experience seems silly to me and possibly pernicious, but whatchya gonna do?). They're stories with talking animals, which aren't supposed to interest "middle readers," but I forge mulishly ahead. Here's the beginning of the tale now in progress...



Hannah the Homesick Honu

Like every other green sea turtle she knew, Hannah tried to swim clear of trouble. "Live and let live" had been the Honu way forever, and if trouble seemed to find the Honu more often these days than it had in the past, that gave them all the more reason to love their peace and quiet. Once in a long while, a tiff would break out between two turtles over an especially tender patch of sea grass, but it rarely amounted to more than a nipped flipper and an hour's sulk before everything was right as Hawaiian rain.

Hannah had been hatched knowing that a little distance makes it much easier to be polite. Three feet is good, ten feet even better. Once she found a free spot to lunch, she munched her grass bite by slow bite, enjoying its coarse texture and bright flavor as much as if she had never tasted it before in her life. In fact, she'd been eating the same thing for years, too many years to count. Why bother counting, thought Hannah, when the sun reached through the water and laid its warm hand on her shell? Why count years, or days, or moments, when just now the grass swayed and danced, flickering from gold to green, green to gold, and back again?

A pleasant tingle at the outer edge of her flippers told Hannah to rise from her meal. She swept effortlessly to the surface and popped her head out of the water's embrace, into the thin air. She opened her nostrils and filled her lungs in one great breath. If she'd been counting, she would have known that this took her only a second, but that was enough for her to catch sight of another head bobbing above the water, a head that did not belong to a turtle.

During the course of her uncounted years, Hannah had encountered many of the strange, peeled creatures known as humans. They looked to her like overgrown clams without shells, or octopuses with half the limbs and none of the grace or smarts. Most of them splashed noisily at the surface—Hannah thought they might be trying to swim, but they never got much of anywhere.

In Hannah’s experience, humans did not understand that distance was the better part of good manners. Unlike the Honu, they seemed to love trouble. They chased fish for fun, poked the soft bellies of anemones, and lifted rocks without any thought for the privacy or comfort of the creatures underneath. Worst of all, if Hannah ever let them close, they reached out their long arms with the starlike grabby ends and tried to touch her, sometimes even to hold on to her flipper or shell. Just thinking about it made her panicky.

For all these reasons, Hannah carefully avoided humans, and she didn’t understand at first how this one had surprised her. Then she realized that it was quiet. It didn’t thrash or splash; it dived down through the water almost as easily as she did, but it didn’t swim any closer. She could see its curious eyes peering at her from behind the funny cover it wore over its face.

Hannah felt curious, too. Was this really a human, or a gentler something she’d never met before? Before her fear could stop her, she swam toward it. Not too close—she knew how far those arms could reach—but close enough to admire the tendrils of moss that waved in the water around the creature’s head. It definitely looked like a human, but it didn’t act like one. It made Hannah wonder, and she’d never really wondered before.

When the new human rose back to the surface, Hannah followed it, even though she still had plenty of breath in her lungs. With the moss now slicked flat over its head, the human inhaled sharply through its mouth. It made a series of soft, musical sounds, looking at Hannah all the while. Then, wonderfully, it swam away.

Photo by Hugh, husbandry volunteer at the Aquarium of the Pacific