Richard Wolkomir & Joyce Rogers Wolkomir

 

 

South Hero Island, in Vermont, offers stunning views of Lake Champlain. It also offers "Birdhouse Forest."

 

Driving north, toward Canada, you pass a sign: "White's Beach." Look to your right.

 

Most travelers stop here, where a swamp borders the road, unsure what they're seeing.

 

Every tree sports a birdhouse, each in bright flower colors—rose, lilac, daisy, buttercup….

 

This might be a fairy city.

 

Even a few dinosaurs roam among the trees.

 

All this began when two neighbors learned tree swallows eat huge numbers of mosquitoes. Living beside a swamp, they had mosquitoes. So they decided to craft twenty swallow houses and put them up.

 

Swallows came, and flew through the swamp on mosquito hunts. So the neighbors put up more birdhouses, and more, and more….

 

Twenty years later, Birdhouse Forest is a swallow city, with 800 brightly colored birdhouses. For an added frisson, they installed carved wooden dinosaurs. Probably the reptiles wouldn't scare away mosquitoes, but still, worth a try.

 

Keep a lookout, driving America's back roads—you never know what you might see.

 

--Joyce

 

 

One July afternoon, when I was ten, a classmate and I bicycled through the hills outside of town.

 

We rode through a tippy landscape of slopes and valleys, where brown-and-white Herefords grazed in green meadows, and maple and sycamore leaves riffled in the breeze.

 

In a small pond, on a floating log, a line of painted turtles sunbathed.

 

I took it in without noticing, the way we breathe.

 

And then, in a bush, a flash of blue—it startled me.

 

One sneaker planted on the road to balance, I stared.

 

I knew what it was, because my father had just returned from his annual session at furnace school, learning the new models, and he'd brought me a gift: The Golden Nature Guide to Birds, 112 Birds in Full Color.

 

I'd never particularly noticed birds. Now, having gone through that book, page by page, mesmerized by the golds and oranges and scarlets, and the sharp black eyes, I knew what I saw in that bush.

 

Indigo bunting.

 

Blue as the zenith.

 

In a moment, it vanished, deeper into the foliage, I suppose.

 

Many decades later, I still remember that indigo flash, so stunning it seemed a message.

 

Message received, but never fully understood.

 

Keep alert, I guess. That would be one thing.

 

Because, any time, you could pedal past a marvel, thinking about something else.

 

You'd miss it.

 

--Richard 

 

 

 

"We'll stop at this iceberg for lunch," the sergeant told me. "But first we do a drive-around, to check for polar bears."

 

This was a routine two-man snowmobile patrol over frozen Baffin Bay—the French-Canadian sergeant and an Inuit constable. They constituted the entire Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment at Pond Inlet, the Inuit village at Baffin Island's northern tip.

 

I was just a visitor, along for the ride, swaddled in a borrowed RCMP parka. My hands had started freezing, so the constable loaned me his spare dog-skin mittens—last winter, distemper killed every sled dog in town, and the Inuits salvaged what they could.

 

After lunch, we roared past more frozen-in icebergs, jutting up like buttes and mesas, blue and green. We headed toward Bylot Island, all that stood between us and Greenland.

 

A glacier covered the island, and we faced a nearly vertical ice wall.

 

"Get a good running start," the constable instructed me.

 

I watched the two Mounties roar up and over. I started up after them, but too slow. Near the top, my snowmobile's treads spun. No traction. I slid backwards, ever faster, toward the rocky scree at the glacier's base.

 

I squeezed between boulders. Lucky. On my second run, I made it over and saw…more ice.

 

I saw lots of ice during my stay on Baffin Island. I ate raw seal blubber at Pond Inlet's annual spring on-the-ice party. My hotel was a large Quonset hut, where the nightly menu consisted of Arctic char. I remember purple evening skies and kids riding tricycles in the midnight sunlight. What I remember most, though, is the Inuit constable.

 

"You might as well call us Eskimos," he told me. "That's what we call ourselves."

 

He'd been born in an igloo, and raised out on the tundra. When Canada decreed all indigenous children must be schooled, his family migrated to Iqaluit, the larger town at the island's southern tip. He befriended the RCMP officers there, and it led to his career in law enforcement.

 

So here we are, the constable and I, in Pond Inlet's town hall, to fax a report to the main RCMP post in Iqaluit, and I hear him muttering to himself: "This baud rate's way too slow!"

 

So complained the man raised in an igloo.

 

Here's another moment: he's describing Pond Inlet's winter, since spring seems frigid enough to me, and he says it's not the cold he minds, but the weeks of darkness.

 

"My wife, my kids, me—every winter we take a vacation," he said. "We fly down to the Caribbean."

 

--Richard     

 

 

After he anchored his boat at the reef, the ichthyologist let us choose—Richard opted for aqualung, Joyce for snorkel.

 

Here, not far out from George Town, the Grand Cayman Island capital, we looked down through perfectly clear Caribbean waters at black bat shapes gliding across the white sand bottom.

 

A moment later, we swam among them. They looked like B-2 Spirit strategic stealth bombers.

 

Sting rays.  

 

We should have been frightened of creatures that looked so lethal. In fact, the Australian conservationist and zookeeper, Steve Irwin, died after accidentally disturbing one and receiving a sting to the chest.

 

Yet, we felt no fear. We felt charmed.  

 

As Joyce snorkeled near the surface, rays flew up and swam with her, gently flapping their huge wings. She felt surrounded by friendly dogs.

 

Richard, near the bottom with his aqualung, found himself escorted by a squadron of the black animals, each the size of a dining room table. One swam up from behind and wrapped its wings around him, scuba gear and all.

 

And what Richard would always remember, looking into those brown eyes—sentience.

 

Maybe humanity doesn't need to go as far as the stars.  

 

We can find intelligent alien life here on Earth, and in its waters.

 

—Joyce & Richard

 

 

After I left O'Hare, I drove  out of Chicago, then through farmlands and hamlets, until a futuristic skyscraper loomed on the horizon—Fermilab.  

 

Scientists took me down into the buried accelerator, a subterranean ring, 3.9-miles around, where they crashed protons into anti-protons, to study the debris.

 

That's how physicists here discovered the "top quark."

 

I had a day rife with bosons and gravitons, gluons and photons, and chalkboards covered with equations—finally I had spinning head syndrome. So I went outside, taking a break.

 

Sunshine, and a tremendous gabbling of waterbirds.

 

Fermilab's accelerator generated tremendous heat, which went up into a surface pond to radiate off into the atmosphere. Always warm, steaming even in January, that pond became a heaven for ducks and geese.

 

I wandered off to look at the lab's approximately one-thousand acres of reconstituted tall-grass prairie. Something moved behind those thick grasses, tall as a basketball player, and the grasses parted—I gazed at the enormous head of a bison.

 

Fermilab maintains a herd of bison, currently 32, with little bison born annually, aiming to preserve a bit of the ancient prairie.

 

So, under my feet, subatomic bits of energy whizzed and collided. Down there, I suppose, and in the skyscraper, our future understanding of reality's underpinnings is evolving. Up here, I'd stepped back centuries, to when giant grasses covered the prairies, and vast herds of bison roamed.

 

After all that, heading back to Chicago to catch my plane, I found I'd lost my rental car in the lab's huge parking lot. I had to enlist security guards in a patrol cruiser to drive me around until I found my wheels.

 

There's meaning in all that, I think. Someday, maybe, I'll figure it out.

 

--Richard   

 

 

We flew to Egypt to see temples and obelisks, tombs, giant stone pharaohs, and people who died thousands of years ago, wrapped in linen.

 

Our boat, featured in the movie Death on the Nile, reconditioned (sort of), took us upriver toward Sudan, through places where no tourists go.

 

On a hill paralleling the river, a little boy rode a burro, eyeing us—across his lap, a Kalashnikov automatic rifle.

 

Farther on, we foundered on a sandbar, and a farmer and his wife brought basketfuls of dates, gathered from their palms, and pleaded with us on the boat to accept their gift.  

 

We chugged on, until our engines got the vapors, forcing us to dock at a city nobody ever heard of, with perhaps a million residents, and virtually no contact with the larger world.

 

Joyce joined a number of other women from the boat to take a walk through town. Quickly, young men and boys surrounded them, staring and clapping and chanting. Joining arms, the women pushed through the crowd and power-marched back to the boat, and safety.

 

Richard, meanwhile, also took an exploratory walk. Somewhere in that city, a Jeep drove up and pressed its front bumper an inch from the back of his legs. Two men in uniform inside, with suspicious eyes, indicated they needed his passport, which he had no intention of surrendering. With an affable smile, and hand signals, he suggested he'd go back to the boat to fetch it, although it was in his back pocket.

 

All the way that Jeep pressed its bumper against the back of his legs.

 

Finally, repaired, the boat got underway—next stop, the Valley of the Kings.

 

--Joyce & Richard

 

 

Just one rental car remained on the island—A 1950 Citroen 2cv.

 

It looked its age, olive-green, battered, seemingly made of tin cans, with what looked like a lawnmower engine.

 

Take it or leave it.

 

Well, hadn't we flown to St. Maarten for a mid-winter refresher? New experiences? Without wheels, we'd be stuck on the coast, amidst high-rise resorts and time-shares.

 

Where was the adventure in that?  

 

So we rented the 70-year-old zombie car. We headed  inland—ignoring the car's hiccups—to see what we might see.

 

What we saw, miles into the island's interior, was smoke billowing from under the Citroen's hood. Then the engine died.

 

Silence.

 

Empty hills to the horizon. No cell phone service.

 

One hill back, we'd passed an isolated tavern. Joyce stayed in the car, while Richard trudged back along the road, to find help.

 

Inside the dark tavern, a big man stood behind the bar. More large men occupied the seats. When Richard walked in, all eyes focused on the interloper. Richard asked the bartender if there was a telephone he could use.

 

A silent stare. Then a slow head shake, no. Richard sensed that, even if there was a phone, the answer was no.

 

He explained about the comatose Citroen. Any garage nearby?

 

Another head shake.  

 

Trudging back down the hill, Richard tried to guess how many miles they'd need to walk, back to the coast. And when it would be night.  

 

He glanced back—two of the tavern's biggest patrons followed him down the hill. He walked to the car, thinking hard.

 

His only idea: tell Joyce to lock the doors. But the Citroen's doors had no locks. And then the two men from the tavern stood looking down at him.   

 

After a silent moment, one man unlatched the Citroen's hood and peered inside. He reached in a hand. Finally, head still under the hood, he spoke: "Shoelace."

 

It would be best, Richard decided, to offer up the sacrificial shoelace. Under the hood, the man did something mysterious with the shoelace. Then he stuck out  his arm and twisted his hand, the message clear: turn the ignition key. Richard got in. He turned the key.

 

A sputter, and the Citroen started.

 

A moment later, both men were walking up the hill. Richard ran after them, pulling out his wallet.

 

"Wait," he said.

 

They looked back, saw the offered bills, and shook their heads. No.

 

"Please," Richard said.

 

Shrugging, they accepted the bills. Then they turned and trudged on up the hill, back to the tavern.

 

--Richard and Joyce

 

 

They had us at "Robots."

 

We'd never heard of this company, in Royalton, Vermont. But they'd set an open house, to show off their robot workforce. So we drove down I-89, to see kissing cousins of R2-D2 and C-3PO.

 

Richard's latest novel, Caliban Rising, a thriller, has a plot driven by artificial intelligence, controlling squads of robots. It reflects the  unease many of us feel, as the technology shaping our society evolves at high velocity—we stand on shifting ground. 

 

A tiny Vermont town seems an odd place to see cutting-edge tech. 

 

There's an old joke: "Vermont has more cows than people." In fact, decades ago, it did. When we settled here, Holsteins and Jerseys dotted the hillside pastures. Now, what farms remain are likely to raise organic kale or make gourmet cheese from goats' milk.

 

Vermont is still America's most rural state, but we aren't what we used to be.

 

Here's what we expected at GW Plastics: a  pipsqueak operation in a converted dairy barn. What we found was a sprawling factory complex in—yes—what once were cow pastures, with branches in San Antonio, Tucson, China, Mexico, and Ireland. They mold plastics into hyper-precise components for surgical instruments, hospital equipment, automotive parts….

 

We saw a menagerie of robots. But what really mesmerized us were the giant arms, housed in Plexiglas cubicles, each like an octopus's writhing tentacle. Under the sea, each octopus tentacle contains its own brain, and so it seemed with these steel tentacles.

 

A robot arm stretches far back to fetch a component, then whips around, like a striking cobra, to connect that part to another component, pluck up what it assembled, twist sideways, snap it precisely into a slot, and….

 

Every move exact, at lightspeed. Working all day and night, never tiring.

 

Human workers can't match that productivity. And the jobs these robots do would give humans repetitive strain injuries, and numb their brains. Even so, with all its robots, GW Plastics still needs humans to design and program, and to assist the robots. They actively recruit workers. So do other businesses. All over we see "Now Hiring" signs.

 

Tomorrow, though? Will your next attorney or physician be an artificial-intelligence algorithm?

 

Will the joke then be—"Vermont (replace with your favorite state) has more robots than people!"

 

—Joyce & Richard

Joyce awoke in the night and looked out the window. She saw a full moon, shining on fresh snow.

I lay half-asleep. Then Joyce gasped. I bolted out of bed to see what alarmed her.

“Something’s out there,” she said.

I saw only snow. Then, behind the pond, I saw a shape, indistinct in the moon-cast shadows, but something huge.

Massive shoulders hunched, it glided across the snow.  Read More 

Just as we looked out Joyce’s home-office window, a large black bear hurried up our lawn.

Behind her, struggling to keep up, waddled a dutiful cub, worried Mom would outdistance him (or her—who knows?).

A moment later, at the lawn’s far end, a second cub burst from the bushes. This one stared in alarm at Mom’s receding back, then scrambled up the lawn after her and the dutiful sibling.

Now, her two cubs closely following, the bear stepped over the stone wall and started down the hill by the waterfall. At that moment, out from the bushes, burst yet a third cub. This latecomer eyed the rapidly disappearing family, then bounced up the lawn after them, jauntily—the naughty cub, the rebel, the I’ll-do-it-my-way cub.

Not that Mom seemed to care. She splashed full tilt across the stream below the waterfall, then disappeared into the pine woods, cubs hurrying behind. Mom, apparently, had an important date, probably with somebody’s birdfeeder, and if the cubs wanted to stay parented, they’d better keep up. No hover parent, this ursine tiger mom dished out tough love.

It brought back a memory: once I worked as a zoo’s bear-cub keeper. My twenty-eight charges lived in a broad round pit, with concrete walls they couldn’t scale. At the circular pit’s hub stood their nighttime cub cave, a stone igloo with an iron door. For climbing, they had a two-story dead tree, rising from the igloo’s top. They also had a little swimming pool, for taking a dip.

One of my responsibilities was warning visitors to stop dangling their toddlers down into the pit to pet the bears, an extremely bad idea, because my cubs were all little swatters. It was how they played and expressed themselves. I also cleaned the pit’s sand floor, but my hardest task was herding all twenty-eight cubs into their cave every night and shutting the door.

I’d get three in, go out for more. Meanwhile, the first three would seize the opportunity for a jailbreak.

Heading home in the evening, I’d stop first at my father’s shop—he tarred roofs and installed forced-air furnaces—where the two guys working with him always sniffed, then proclaimed: “Hey, do I smell bear?”

Here’s how tough my cubs were: once two of them got into a fight on top of their climbing tree, and one got swatted off. He plummeted two stories, bounced off the stone igloo, and sat on the pit’s sand floor, glaring up at his rival and literally shaking his fist, or paw.

I’d get home every night with new scratches on my arms. My cubs did love to swat.
They came in black, brown, and cinnamon, although they were just one species, black bears. They also came in assorted ages and sizes, from halfway to my knee (when standing erect on their hind legs) to just above my knee.

My littler cubs loved me. They’d stand up, throw up their arms (front legs) and beg to be lifted and held. Others regarded me with indifference. However, the biggest cub, whom I called “Gargantua,” hated me. I threatened his alpha-cub position, in his mind, and he wanted me to die.

He’d hide behind the igloo and when I passed by, from around the curve, a paw would flash out to swat.

Eventually I gave up trying to make friends and ignored Gargantua, who’d sit off to the side glaring at me. One evening, though, his glare seemed more thoughtful, as if he’d been pondering the situation. Finally, he made up his mind. I’m sure I saw him nod.

He walked to me and held up his front legs, as he’d seen the littlest cubs do, begging to be lifted up and held.

At last, I thought.

I lifted him up. I looked into his brown eyes, he looked into my blue eyes. His expression turned to triumph.

He gave me a powerful swat, on the cheek.

Then he jumped down and I could almost hear him sniggering.

Here’s what: I love bears, and I especially love bear cubs.

And the one I’ve always loved the most was Gargantua, who never loved me.

--Richard  Read More