Kobayashi Maru

A flashback this morning on Facebook to three years ago, when a friend of mine, Tracy, also my wilderness first responder instructor, posted this photo: 

It seemed familiar, but I couldn't place it. The Usual Suspects? I asked. (There is a Kobayashi in that movie, and there is a ship.) Not even close. Star Trek, he answered. "It is actually a very famous reference to no-win situations or situations that can only be 'won' by redefining the problem. I actually named one of my pre-hospital [EMT training] scenarios after the Kobayashi Maru, but I call it the 'Little Wooden Ship,' which is the translation, so the students who are familiar with Star Trek don't realize that they are walking into a no-win scenario." Tracy teaches EMTs and paramedics. His scenario involves a room filling with poison gas. What do you do? Do you keep working on your patient, or do you get out, fast, dragging them with you if you can? 

The answer should be obvious—as first responders, our first duty is always to ourselves and our fellow workers—but in the heat of the moment, of course you want to do what you are trained to do: save lives.

The situation originally plays out at the start of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Saavik (Kirstie Alley) is in command of the USS Enterprise when a distress call from a civilian freighter is logged. She orders Helm Officer Sulu to plot an intercept course with the imperiled ship, but he warns her that this violates the Neutral Zone declared by Federation/Klingon treaty. She overrules him. Soon contact with the Kobayashi Maru is lost and three Klingon battle cruisers appear headed toward them. Outgunned, Saavik orders a retreat, but it's too late. The Klingons overwhelm the Enterprise, and most key personnel—including Uhura, Sulu, McCoy, and Spock—are killed. 

It turns out—of course, because why wasn't Kirk in charge of the ship?—that this is a training exercise. Saavik failed. She protests that the test didn't properly reflect her command abilities, but Kirk explains that it is intended to reveal how the subject confronts an impossible situation, and that how one deals with death is as important as how one deals with life. There is no correct resolution; the scenario is a test of character.

As backstory, we learn that Kirk himself took the test three times while at Starfleet Academy, and on the third occasion he cheated by reprogramming the simulator—for which "original thinking" he received a commendation. ("I don't like to lose," he shrugged.) When Saavik protests that he's never actually faced a no-win situation, he replies that he doesn't believe in such a thing. 

Later in the film, of course, Kirk gets his own Kobayashi Maru experience, which results in Spock's selfless death to save the Enterprise.

Here is a flowchart showing various possibilities one could follow in the simulation. All of them, of course, lead to failure.

As one critic points out, the fact that Kobayashi Maru is a simulation—which, naturally, everyone involved knows—renders it somewhat moot. I've certainly experienced the frustration of training in a serious skill—Search & Rescue technical rope rescue and medical triage, Red Cross crashed-plane and active-shooter scenarios—knowing that, in a sense, it "didn't matter" what I did because the point was to learn, not to save actual lives. 

And how often do we find ourselves in truly impossible situations? They do happen, to be sure—if by "impossible" we mean that death could result, depending on choices we make in an instant. I'm flashing now to Captain Sully Sullenberger and Flight 1549—or to those in command of wartime battles. Even to a more mundane situation, such as a motorist traveling at 65 on a freeway whose car all of a sudden malfunctions. Never mind the sheer helplessness of being in a plane that is about to crash, which I can't begin to imagine.

I hereby resolve to keep my life as event-free (along those lines, at any rate) as possible.

My point in writing about this today? No point, really. I was just surprised to rediscover that old Facebook conversation with Tracy, which I'd completely forgotten about. I don't see Tracy anymore except on FB, and probably never will again in person (he's moved, I'm no longer in SAR), so it was nice to have some old, pleasant memories float up. Tracy is a mensch, and as I commented in signing off from that conversation, I am happy to know his good noble indefatigable self. 

N.B. 7/5/21. I am FB friends with a woman, Amanda Sowards, who happens to be the daughter of the screenwriter of Star Trek II, Jack B. Sowards. She posted today about having to curate some uninvited additions to her father's Wikipedia page—and deletions, since this non-invitee edited Amanda and her two siblings right out of that page. (As she said, "Ouch!") Curious, I took a look at the page and learned this: "Sowards created the term Kobayashi Maru . . . , naming it for his next-door neighbors in Hancock Park." So, there's that as well.

Ghazal

From October into early December, I participated in an eight-week poetry workshop with Mark Doty. It was hard work: I am not a poet. But it was also satisfying work: I love poetry (well, much of it . . . some of it is pretty opaque). Today, five of my eight fellow workshoppers met and shared a poem each—something that we intend to continue to do on a monthly basis. It was lovely to see them again, and to talk shop. 

Ana mentioned participating in a "living room craft talk" series hosted by poet Ellen Bass, and recommended it. I bit. (Of course I did!) After I signed up, I received a syllabus, complete with suggested reading. On the list was Tony Hoagland's Real Sofistikashon: Essays on Poetry and Craft. Which I happen to own. (Of course I do.) So I found it in the garage, and started reading. And am hooked. It's just what my seeking mind wants right now.

In the first chapter, on the "three centers of power" in poetry—imagery, diction, and rhetoric (these are Hoagland's construction, but they make sense in his explication)—I came upon a poem I love, immediately but all the more so after reading Hoagland's analysis. (It is included in the "diction" category: intrinsically semantic, consciously making reference to historical contexts and usages, providing personality to the poem.) And I felt moved to include it here in my blog, which has become far too book report–heavy.

Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West 

     by Galway Kinnell

A tractor-trailer carrying two dozen crushed automobiles overtakes a tractor-trailer carrying a dozen new.
Oil is a form of waiting.
The internal combustion engine converts the stasis of millennia into motion.
Cars howl on rain-wetted roads.
Airplanes rise through the downpour and throw us through the blue sky.
The idea of the airplane subverts earthly life.
Computers can deliver nuclear explosions to precisely anywhere on earth.
A lightning bolt is made entirely of error.
Erratic Mercurys and errant Cavaliers roam the highways.
A girl puts her head on a boy's shoulder; they are driving west.
The windshield wipers wipe, homesickness one way, wanderlust the other, back and forth.
This happened to your father and to you, Galway—sick to stay, longing to come up against the ends of the earth, and climb over.

What is a ghazal, you might ask. (I did, so I looked it up.) It is a form, often about the pain of loss or the beauty of love despite heartache, originally Arabic but popularized by Persian poets. Typically a ghazal is constructed of couplets, with repeating words (or phrases) at the ends of the first two, fourth, sixth, eighth, etc. lines, that word preceded by a rhyming word (or two)—and the last couplet always contains a proper name, usually the poet's own. From what I can tell, "Driving West" only adheres to that last rule. Here is a ghazal that follows the formal rules, if not necessarily the thematic one. 

Hip-Hop Ghazal

     by Patricia Smith

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,
decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping 'tween floorboards,
wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips.

Engines grinding, rotating, smokin', gotta pull back some.
Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips.

Gotta love us girls, just struttin' down Manhattan streets
killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view. Hips.

Crying 'bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off
what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips.

I wanted to find a perfect illustration of singing, gliding, struttin', swinging blue hips in shells and splashes to illustrate this poem. But I did not. And really, in this case, no image could do this poem justice. But here's Patricia Smith, whom I found on searching for "shells + splashes + hips + hip-hop":

Book Report: The Poet X

6. Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X (2018) (1/25/21)

An honest, vibrant novel-in-verse featuring 15-year-old Xiomara, the daughter of older Dominican parents, twin sister to Xavier, living in Harlem, going to school, attending confirmation classes at her conservatively devout mother's behest, falling for a boy, Aman, confiding in her best friend, Caridad—and most important, coming into her own as a confident, passionate poet, encouraged by her teacher Ms. Galiano: this book was a delight to whip right through. Indeed, reading it all at once in several big gulps made Xio's trials and tribulations over the course of a little over five months that much more heart-rending and, in the end, gratifying. We know this young woman, this poet, will succeed in life.

Here are a couple of samplings:

How I Feel about Attention

If Medusa was Dominican
and had a daughter, I think I'd be her.
I look and feel like a myth.
A story distorted, waiting for others to stop
and stare.

             Tight curls that spring like fireworks
out of my scalp. A full mouth pressed hard
like a razor's edge. Lashes that are too long
so they make me almost pretty.

                                                    If Medusa
was Dominican and had a daughter, she might
wonder at this curse. At how her blood
is always becoming some fake hero's mission.
Something to be slayed, conquered.

If I was her kid, Medusa would tell me her secrets:
how it is that her looks stop men
in their tracks                why they still keep on coming.
How she outmaneuvers them when they do.

                                                  *

Tuesday, September 25
What I Didn't Say to Caridad in Confirmation Class

I wanted to tell her that if Aman were a poem
he'd be written slumped across the page,
sharp lines, and a witty punch line
written on a bodega brown paper bag.

His hands, writing gently on our lab reports,
turned into imagery,
his smile the sweetest unclichéd simile.

He is not elegant enough for a sonnet,
too well-thought-out for a free write,
taking too much space in my thoughts
to ever be a haiku.

Book Report: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

5. George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (2020) (1/23/21)

Let me say to start off, I just love George Saunders. He's funny, wise, imaginative, generous--and a damn good writer. He's also a good reader. 

This book is a sort of sampling of a lecture course he has taught for twenty years at Syracuse University on the nineteenth-century Russian short story in translation, featuring seven stories: three by Anton Chekhov, two by Leo Tolstoy, and one each by Ivan Turgenyev and Nikolai Gogol--winnowed down from some thirty that he treats in the classroom. As he puts it in the introduction,

We live, as you may have noticed, in a degraded era, bombarded by facile, shallow, agenda-laced, too rapidly disseminated information bursts. We're about to spend some time in a realm where it is assumed that, as the great (twentieth-century) Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, "no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place." We're going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made of a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn't fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art--namely, to ask the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?
     (You know, those cheerful, Russian kinds of big questions.)
     . . . The basic drill I'm proposing here is: read the story, then turn your mind to the experience you've just had. Was there a place you found particularly moving? Something you resisted or that confused you? A moment when you found yourself tearing up, getting annoyed, thinking anew? Any lingering questions about the story? Any answer is acceptable. If you (my good-hearted trooper of a reader) felt it, it's valid. If it confounded you, that's worth mentioning. If you were bored or pissed off, valuable information. No need to dress up your response in literary language or express it in terms of "theme" or "plot" or "character development" or any of that.
     . . . The main thing I want us to be asking together is: What did we feel and where did we feel it? (All coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction.)

Saunders walks us through each story--the first one, Chekhov's "In the Cart," page by page in fact--talking about just those questions, often couched in terms of technique: how did the writer get us to feel what we might have felt? He looks at what makes a reader keep reading; at what constitutes the "heart" of a story; at the effect of pattern within a story; the interplay of straight factual exposition and interiority; strangeness as a door to truth; how quiet contradiction (in life, in literature) can enhance meaning; and the power of omission. 

And I confess, I needed his hand-holding for these stories to come to have bigger meaning for me. I "got" something from an uninformed reading, of course, but I got so much more from Saunders's wise, interrogative explication. Could I carry on and read other stories by these authors, and maybe get a bit more from them than if I hadn't read this book? I think so. If only to ask the very simple question, "What is the writer trying to convey, and how is he doing it?" A simple enough question, even if the answer usually is not. 

My book is bristling with flags, and I took pages of notes, such as: TICHN (Things I Couldn't Help Noticing); Be specific! Honor Efficiency (REP: Ruthless Efficiency Principles)! Always be escalating! Focus on increasing causality! (not "and then," but "and so")!; follow the voice. Et cetera.

Here are a couple of representative nuggets:

A well-written bit of prose is like a beautifully hand-painted kite, lying there on the grass. It's nice. We admire it. Causality is the wind that then comes along and lifts it up. The kite is then a beautiful thing made even more beautiful by the fact that it's doing what it was made to do.

*

We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer's goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.
     That's it.
     What is the exact flavor of the thrill? The writer doesn't have to know. That's what he's writing to find out.
     How is the thrill accomplished?
     To use an archery metaphor (and how often does a person get to do that?), one way to produce the thrill is to stop aiming at the target and concentrate on the feeling of the arrow leaving the bow. In this alternate version of archery, the arrow then sails off in a certain direction and keeps adjusting course, and where it lands . . . that's the target.

I could go on quoting, but instead I'll link to an essay that Saunders wrote a few years back (some of which appears in this book), "What Writers Really Do When They Write." It's a fair representation of his breadth and humor as both a writer and a teacher. And I'll end as I began: I just love George Saunders!

Book Report: Travels with Epicurus

4. Daniel Klein, Travels with Epicurus: Meditations from a Greek Island on the Pleasures of Old Age (2012) (1/17/21)

Reading this short book is a bit like having a conversation with a favorite uncle about the meaning of life, in particular life as it starts to wind down. Klein was 73 when he wrote it, revisiting the Greek island of Hydra, a place he'd first lived as a young man, and one he'd visited many times over the intervening years. It is a quiet place (no cars), a place separate from the hustle of commerce and ambition, a good place for contemplation.

He has come here with a suitcase full of books, among them A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Svendsen, the book-length essay Time by Eva Hoffman, The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga, and The Art of Happiness, or The Teachings of Epicurus. The seven chapters plus prologue and epilogue are divided into short chunks, pondering such topics as spirituality, time, authenticity, stoicism, play, and mindfulness.

I liked the book. Klein is examining, interrogating, his own life to some extent, though this isn't a memoir. He finds moments of clarity that somehow add up to who he is, and yet he recognizes that he is still in the process of becoming--and, too, that that process will end. He pans, rightly, the forever-young mentality that American culture pushes. It's a coming to terms with mortality, but also a celebration of life. I guess my take-away is nicely expressed on the penultimate page:

Maybe that Buddhist notion of mindfulness will lead to the most valuable way of living a good and authentic old age. Perhaps whatever we do, we must try to remain mindful that we are old: that this is the last stage of life in which we can be fully conscious, that our time in this stage is limited and constantly diminishing, and that we have extraordinary opportunities in this stage that we never had before and will never have again. Perhaps if we are as mindful as we possibly can be of where we are in life right now, the most fulfilling options of how to live these years will reveal themselves to us, not by rigorously following the prescriptions of the wise philosophers, yet by being ever mindful of their wisdom.
     By simply being aware of the old-age options that philosophers like Plato, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Sartre, and Erikson examined and commended to us, we can make authentic choices for how we want to conduct this period of our lives. We can try their ideas on for size, see how they fit with our considered values. This may be what it means to grow old philosophically.

Book Report: Missionaries

3. Phil Klay, Missionaries (2020) (1/10/21)

This ambitious book tackles the complicated politics and war-torn society of Colombia, dipping as well into the eternal war of Afghanistan—both arenas very much influenced by American neocolonialism. The first half introduces us, in alternating first-person accounts, to four main characters: the poor Colombian Abel, a paramilitary foot soldier and young victim of violence who is trying to go legit; Lisette, a cynically skeptical yet compassionately curious American wire reporter; Mason, a former Special Forces medic in Afghanistan turned liaison in Colombia; and Juan Pablo, a well-to-do, conservative lieutenant colonel in the Colombian army. The story then shifts to a town in the northern part of the country where events—and our main characters, along with a good dozen more—coalesce in 2015, following a U.S.-assisted raid on a drug kingpin and shortly before a national referendum on an internationally brokered peace. 

It is difficult to summarize the complex plot, or array of plots, which cover some thirty years as background is established and the convolutions of Colombian politics—a constantly shifting balance of government, left-wing guerrilla forces, right-wing paramilitary actors, and coca growers and distributors—are laid out. Violence is at the heart of this society, and capriciousness, and loyalty. Writ large, the book is about globalized warfare of the 21st century, but on a smaller scale it is about people struggling simply to survive in a slippery world.

Here are a couple of passages for a taste of the excellent writing. First, Abel:

Most people think that a person is whatever you see before you, walking around in bone and meat and blood, but that is an idiocy. Bone and meat and blood just exists, but to exist is not to live, and bone and meat and blood alone is not a person. A person is what happens when there is a family, and a town, a place where you are known. Where every person who knows you holds a small, invisible mirror, and in each mirror, held by family and friends and enemies, is a different reflection. In one mirror, the sweet fat boy I was to my mother. In another, the little imp I was to my father. In another, the irritating brat I was to Gustavo. A person is what happens when you gather all these reflections around a body. So what happens when one by one the people holding those mirrors are taken from you? It's simple. The person dies. And the bone and meat and blood goes on, walking the earth as if the person still existed, when God and the angels know he doesn't.
     So let's not talk about this boy as if he and I are the same person and not two strangers, one who walked in this body before the burning, and one who did after. Let's talk about this boy, whose memories and face I share, as the dead child he is. We can call him Abelito.

And here's Lisette, in Kabul, Afghanistan, about to head out the door to cover a bombing:

Moments like these, they're the best part of the job. The part where something awful happens, and I get assigned to do something about it. To write the story. To sort through the chaos and find narrative, meaning. Sure, it's not giving blood, picking up the bodies, or hunting down the killers. And maybe those lines we recite about journalists writing the first draft of history, maybe those lines will rub the wrong way after you've filed the story. You've sent your work out into the void enough times with only the smallest hope that anybody will care. It even becomes funny when a colleague sends you an email from Washington telling you, "You know I got back from Afghanistan only a month ago and already I catch myself talking about the war as if it's not still happening." And you think, what am I doing here? But before I file, when I'm talking to survivors, when I'm gathering the pieces, and finally when I'm writing, when I'm piecing together the awful parts into some kind of whole that readers can accept and digest, I'm a believer. Doing something means believing in it. It means faith. So when horror happens, I don't just have to endure it, the way most people here do. I get to act.

Starlings

There has been an amazing murmuration of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) up in San Rafael the past couple of weeks, at the Mt. Olivet Catholic Cemetery on Los Ranchitos Road, between 4:30 and 5:30 every afternoon. Many hundreds of thousands, perhaps up to a million. They roost overnight in the graveyard's eucalyptus trees. A FB friend, Jerry Downs, posted this magical photograph of them the other day, remarking, "I never thought I would take a picture with thousands of birds that I would consider minimal until I shot this one on an overcast evening two days ago." (Click on the photo to see it large.)

I wondered out loud to David on our afternoon walk today, where did they come from? Shakespeare, he said; somebody back when wanted to bring all the birds of Shakespeare to America, and here they are.

It's true: in 1890, Eugene Schieffelin of New York City released 60 starlings in Central Park as part of an effort to populate the country with Shakespeare's birds. A year later, he released 40 more. Since then, they have multiplied to some 200 million, and spread throughout the continent. They did well. So did house sparrows, which the same Mr. Shieffelin introduced thirty years earlier. His attempts to introduce bullfinches, chaffinches, nightingales, and skylarks were less successful. Fortunately, perhaps. Because introduced species tend not to be ecologically beneficial.

Starlings, for example, nest in holes, outcompeting other hole-nesters such as red-headed woodpeckers, purple martins, and bluebirds. They also wreak havoc on agriculture, damaging fruit trees and stealing nutritious grain from dairy cattle's feed, to the tune of $1 billion in losses to farmers annually.

They are a pretty bird, to be sure, and marvelous singers, with up to 35 separate songs and 14 clicking sounds. Mozart had a pet starling.

I can't fault them for being successful. I just wish they'd stayed in Europe, and didn't outcompete our native birds. But what's done is done. There's no putting that genie back in the bottle.

Ironically, starlings are mentioned just once in Shakespeare, in Henry IV, Part I: Hotspur is planning to drive King Henry crazy by letting a starling endlessly repeat the name of Hotspur’s brother-in-law, Lord Mortimer—whose traitorous name Henry has forbidden him ever to speak again. Says Hotspur: “Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him, to keep his anger still in motion.” That's it! That's why we now have hundreds of millions of starlings—because Hotspur wanted to drive King Henry crazy. And because of Eugene Schieffelin. 

I am seriously considering a trip up to San Rafael this weekend. To see hundreds of thousands of birds in choreographed flight? It must be magical. 

3/6 I did not go to San Rafael.... But I am here now to post a link to some more amazing photos of starlings, over Lough Ennell, in Ireland: here. 

Book Report: Memorial Drive

2. Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir (2020) (1/3/21)

Memorial Drive is a searing exploration of love and trauma, centering on the 1985 murder of Trethewey's mother by her step-father when Trethewey was 19. Nearly thirty years later, she returns to the site of the murder, a part of her effort to understand the "wound that never heals" that she has borne all those years.

The book is also an examination of race in the South, Trethewey being the daughter of a white Canadian and her Mississippi-born Black mother. It is a return to the happy days of her childhood, surrounded by the love of her grandmother and aunts and great-uncle.

Trethewey is a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, and her prose reflects that, with some glorious description. But her language is also often quite plain, stripped down to recall the pain she felt as a teenager, when she became aware that her step-father was beating her mother, and especially in the aftermath of the murder, knowing, from a certain incident, that it could have been her. Decades later, she was given the police files of the case, some of which she reproduces word for word—no need to embellish.

When I finally sit down to write the part of our story I've most needed to avoid, when I force myself at last to read the evidence, all of it—the transcripts, witness accounts, the autopsy and official reports, the ADA's statement, indications of police indifference—I collapse on the floor, keening as though I had just learned of my mother's death. What comes out is uncontrollable: the long, unbroken primal wailing I never allowed myself back then. So I live it again in real time, only what I am reliving now is not my own feeling of sudden loss, but rather the terror of her last moments.

They could have saved her.

Ultimately, Trethewey is not just trying to clarify her own past; rather, she is pursuing underlying themes of trauma, agency, and voice, attempting to understand "how the past fits into the narrative of our lives, gives meaning and purpose." This must have been a tremendously difficult book to write, but to read it is a revelation and a bestowal of grace.

Book Report: Wolf Time

1. Barbara J. Moritsch, Wolf Time (2020) (1/2/21)

This book begins with a death. Yet it is not a mystery. It is, in part, a sad story of ongoing hatred and decimation. But the book is also very much a celebration of an amazing species—communicative, playful, intelligent, social, and, as a top predator, a crucial part of the ecosystem. The goal of the book is both to instill appreciation for these exquisite creatures and to raise awareness of all that wolves are up against.

The story is told in two main strands. It begins (after a 2014 prologue) in 2018 as Sage, a wildlife biologist living outside Yosemite National Park, is roused by a scratching at her front door: two wolves, Issa and Tish. Not just any wolves, but old-soul wolves, who are able to speak to Sage, and she to them; they are also able to "merge" her into them and carry her to places and times where they can instruct her on just what it means to be a wolf in the wild. They need help, and Sage has been chosen to write their story. We then switch to 2010 and a household in Salmon, Idaho. Almost-twelve-year-old Blue has discovered a wolf den, which he shares with his younger, "special" sister, Sunny. Fascinated, they fall in love, and ultimately are called upon to help an injured wolf. The chapters proceed to alternate, Sage's continuing in real time in the present, Blue and Sunny's progressing through the years, until ultimately they merge. 

In the meantime, wolf hatred is all around, and we learn of ongoing, senseless death. The numbers of wolves in the United States have been plummeting, protections vanishing. Fear of wolves is deep within the human psyche, and violence is the result.

The book ends on a hopeful note, though I wonder if facts don't belie this optimism: On October 29, 2020, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service finalized a rule that removes all protections from gray wolves in the lower 48 states. As the Center for Biological Diversity put it in a news release, "The Service made its decision despite the fact that wolves are still functionally extinct in the vast majority of their former range across the continental United States." Here is a timeline for the rocky road that wolves have endured since they were first declared virtually extinguished in 1933, and then were officially listed as endangered in 1974—later, in 2003, reclassified as threatened, thanks to ongoing and successful reintroduction programs. A mere 6,000 wolves exist in the lower 48 today, on less than 10 percent of their historic range—down from 250,000 to as many as 2 million individuals historically. They honestly do need all the help they can get. (A portion of the proceeds from this book is being donated to the Center for Biological Diversity for their ongoing work on behalf of wolves.)

But back to Wolf Time, a book full of imagination and soul. Here are the opening three paragraphs of the book, to give an idea of the lovely lyricism of some of the writing:

A sharp-tipped crescent moon cast its pale glow over a solo wolf, a well-used deer path, and a remote mountain lake in central Idaho. Snow had fallen intermittently over the past three days, and the large, fluffy flakes muted the sounds of the night and softened the edges of the pines and rock outcrops that framed the lake.
     Moving at a steady trot, Tierra pushed easily through the soft blanket of snow that covered the path and wondered if the spring storm would ever end. The early spring conditions forced her to take the long way around the big lake; the ice was no longer thick enough to hold her weight. In a hurry, she'd travelled the better part of the day and stopped only for short breaks to catch her breath. Her family was waiting for her, relying on her to bring food.
     The rendezvous with the other members of the Blackline Pack lasted longer than expected. She'd been surprised to learn most of the wolves in the area already were on the move to get out of Idaho, heading east and south to the region called the Yellow Stone, which was rumored to be safe.

The book's epigraph, too, bears quoting, and heeding:

If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them, and what you do not know you will fear. What one fears one destroys.
                                        —Chief Dan George