LETTERS FROM HOME: IN THE LAND OF EMUS

March 17, 1994

Dear Pat,

This week, one of DC's patients, a child from the hills around Garberville, told her that her class from school had come to town on a field trip. DC asked what they were here to see. "A parking lot," the little girl said.

No, Toto, we aren't in Missouri anymore.

Another patient invited us to see the wild bird farm she works on. We drove far to the west, meeting her near a small bridge over the Mattole River and following 20 minutes up a hill as the asphalt road turned to gravel and then dust. At the end of the road we were met by a forbidding, locked gate leading we knew not where. But beyond another gate on our left was a scene out of a domesticated "Jurrasic Park." Segregated in matching pairs within a sophisticated maze of large outdoor steel cages were hundreds of squawking, extravagantly plumed parrots, some from the Amazon, some from Tibet, some on endangered species lists. One breeding pair of cockatoos had just sold to a Japanese buyer for $50,000.

The farm once housed 400 birds, but only about half that many parrots are still in residence. The owner says he's weary of fighting government restrictions on his business for the past 20 years so he's selling off his parrots.

He's especially had it with the DEA planes and helicopters that buzz the hills at the end of every summer looking for marijuana plantations. They disturb his birds. So Fred finally dug up an obscure regulation that establishes no-fly zones over areas where threatened bird populations live. He went on "Nightline" and "20-20." The Feds no fly over Fred anymore.

Now he's on to marketing his new computer-controlled wild bird incubator, already in demand by zoos, and predicts the future is in low-fat, highly nutrition emu meat.

On the way back from the bird farm, we came upon a small ancient school bus blocking the entrance to a narrow bridge. A long-haired young man in a tie-dyed shirt was moving around inside, talking to people we couldn't see because the windows were covered. They turned out to be a woman and small child. When he finally came outside and said he might be out of gas, he sounded as if he'd almost rather the problem was mechanical than foolishness.

I felt sorry for the guy. Got your good looking mama, got you baby, got your homemade home on wheels with the toy bicycle strapped to the back. But he didn't want help and was cursing like a New Jersey stockbroker. DC and I took a walk. Leaning over the bride, we spied an irrigation system running from upriver to a scrap-wood shack nearly hidden below.

We figured we were stranded along with him, halfway to nowhere and no way off that hill. The road up stopped at the gate, and in marijuana-growing country you don't go through a stranger's gate. Hey, we might be eating emu after all.

About 15 minutes later we heard the bus start. "Out of gas," he said, disgusted with himself. Fortunately, he had a spare tank.

A few days later DC and I went to a 15-poet reading up in Arcata, "a town of poets" in one's words. A town the mayor called "eco-groovy" in Monday's Wall Street Journal. One poet did a Knight-of-the-roundtable rap, another likened a poem to laundered clothes: "Everything else is in the wash."

On the way back to Garberville at midnight, we saw the old school bus pulled off on the shoulder of Highway 101. Everyone appeared to be asleep. We drove into the night, poetry in our heads and "out-of-gas" smiles on our faces.

Love, Sam