The Three Battles of Wanat Read online

  By winter our hand-reared flock had been cruelly whittled down to just two: one white and the other gray (the latter is called a “pearl”). We decided to keep our two survivors safely cooped up, and then give them away come spring, hopefully to someone in a more peaceable spot.

  It turns out to be hard to give grown guineas away. When the weather grew warm, the two survivors clamored ever louder each day to be turned out. They are insistent birds, and they can make themselves very loud, as in scare the horses and annoy the neighbors. We relented one morning, and against our better judgment opened the coop door and bade them adieu.

  Then an amazing thing happened. They came back! Not just the first evening, but the next, and the next, and the next. They stayed right on our hilltop property, just as all the books and websites promised they would, and just as all their more headstrong feathered brethren had not.

  Intelligent behavior in guineas, it seems, is an inverse function of their number, a truth long known about human beings. The large flock was good at only one thing: panic. Confronted with a threat, its members acted out a perfectly choreographed charade of a nervous breakdown, full of fluttering feathers and high-decibel clatter, and then succumbed to whatever had alarmed them.

  Our survivors still panicked, but they also evaded. When one of our dogs took off after them, they would squawk with annoyance and fly to the nearest roof or high branch, hurling fowl invective down at their tormentor. Conscious of danger from above, they would move swiftly when crossing a pasture or yard, and mostly keep to tree lines, tall grasses, or brush. These two—the white and the pearl, almost a year old—seemed to have figured things out.

  We still refused to name them, anticipating their certain extinction, but despite ourselves by early summer we had grown quite attached. I loved to see their wattled, bobbing heads pop up unexpectedly from our gardens, or watch them flee in loud panic when the lawn mower scared them from a thicket. There is something innately comical about them. Sure, two birds weren’t enough to be useful for tick control, but they were a charming and (in their own way) beautiful addition to our farm.

  Then the pearl stopped coming back. One night it was just the big white waiting outside the coop, and we assumed the worst. It was a sad but unsurprising turn. But, the next day, the pearl reappeared, frantically racing around with the white, as if feeding in double time. That evening, again only the white waited outside the coop. The answer was apparent. The previous summer’s massacre had by chance left us with a male and a female. Our pearl was a girl. She had built a nest somewhere in the woods, had filled it with eggs, and was now sitting on them.

  Every scrap of intelligence about guineas, who are native to much of Africa, assures you that their offspring are not likely to survive in the wilds of Pennsylvania. Eggs and newly hatched keets need a steady dry temperature of at least ninety-five degrees, the experts say. Besides, the hen, exposed outdoors overnight for weeks on end, is, to borrow an expression, a sitting duck.

  So we stalked the pearl one afternoon, crawling through underbrush and lurking behind trees, following her to the hidden nest. This task was ironic, in that we had purchased the guinea flock to help rid our farm of deer ticks. We were now crawling through tick-rich habitat, inviting far greater exposure to the tiny bastards than ever. The nest was on the ground in a deep thicket of grass and brush, so cunningly placed that had we not watched the hen wriggle into the spot, we might have stood right over it without seeing it. In her nest were twenty-two eggs.

  I shooed her off with a broom, which she pecked at valiantly, while Gail collected all the eggs. The pearl was vocally unhappy about the theft for about thirty seconds, and then promptly went off in search of her mate. They went right back to their old routines. We went to the local grain and feed store and bought an incubator.

  The pearl built and filled four nests last summer. She laid upwards of eighty brown-speckled eggs. We incubated three of the batches, enthusiastically but inexpertly. I had ambitions for replacing the entire original lost flock, but we ended the season with fourteen new birds. The coop was once again a noisy, lively place.

  It wasn’t easy. Some of the keets popped right out of the egg after twenty-eight days, as though arriving on time at a train station. Once out, most were hardy and fast-growing. But nature is neither clean nor perfect. Some got stuck in their eggs and didn’t make it, so we listened to them chirp plaintively for days, trapped and dying. We learned the hard way that helping them out is ill-advised—if they can’t make it out of the egg, they are usually doomed.

  A few of our hatchlings arrived damaged. One keet chick could not stand. It could move only one leg, enough for it to scoot itself around well enough to reach foot and water, but not enough to protect it from being viciously pecked by its siblings. I watched it waste away day by day until I couldn’t take it anymore. It took longer than anyone would wish to drown it in a tennis-ball can, and while I still believe it was the merciful thing to do, I can’t shake the feeling that I will be punished for it. Another of my interventions ended more happily, at least at first. One white chick was born with a more common deformity: the long orange toes of one foot were curled. Taking instructions from a website, I straightened the toes and taped them firmly to a small square of cardboard. The keet stomped around unhappily on the makeshift flapper for about five hours, and—voilà! Straight toes! But even after the foot was fully restored, he remained suspect, for some reason, to his fellow hatchlings, a fact that was not immediately apparent.

  We now had three groups of birds. There were the older two, the parents. Then came the first batch of offspring, hatched in early July, whom we now considered teenagers. And we had a batch of toddlers, hatched in early September. As with all the other issues we faced in this saga, we turned to our not-so-trusted adviser, the Internet, for how best to integrate younger birds with older ones in the coop.

  Some websites stated flatly that it was best to introduce the younger birds when they were still small, because they would naturally submit to the authority of the teenagers and adults. If you waited until they were more mature, the new birds would be more likely to fight back, and that could get ugly.

  Others argued that the right way was to place the smaller birds in the coop inside their own cage, so that the flock could get used to them over time without being able to attack them.

  We initially opted for the first approach, which went fine for all except the one white keet whose foot I had straightened. There was nothing different about him anymore to my eyes, but the teenage birds attacked the little guy mercilessly. I found him one afternoon jammed into a corner of the coop with his head hidden in a narrow opening between a pipe and the wall, where the other birds could not get at him. I rescued him and nursed him back to health.

  I then attempted, with him, the second approach. I put him back inside the coop in his own cage. He was in with the rest of the flock, but they couldn’t attack him. This apparently just built resentment, because when, after a few weeks, I decided to let him back out, the teenagers waited until I left and then pecked the poor little guy nearly to death. I found him bloody and unconscious, with what looked to be a hole pounded into the top of his head.

  He survived, and I ended up giving him away with the one bird that hatched out of the third batch of eggs we recovered. The newly hatched sibling seemed to think his older brother was hunky-dory, and they got on famously. Both are reported thriving.

  As for the dozen new guineas we kept, we don’t plan to let them leave the coop until the spring, when they will be about the same age their parents were when they demonstrated a knack for survival. We are hoping they will follow the example set by their elders—the eternal hope of parents everywhere.

  The two adult guineas—the male white and female pearl—have names now. Our son Ben dubbed them Adam and Eve, although we prefer the more pedestrian Mr. and Mrs. They are inseparable. Next summer, when we turn their offspring loose, we do not plan to hunt down every last nest and egg, nor do w
e plan to go through the sordid business of incubating and integrating another batch.

  We are instead going to test the theory that guineas cannot successfully breed in the wild in these parts. Internet advice has been iffy about everything else. My money is on the birds.

  Last words on the guinea fowl (2015):

  I lost my bet on the birds, who are no more. It was a failed experiment. We replaced them with three chickens—two Barred Rock and a Buff Orpington—who have done wonderfully. My granddaughters Clara and Audrey named them Flotsam, Jetsam, and Buttercup, respectively.

  As farm birds go they are superior to guinea fowl. They don’t run off. They don’t flap around and kill themselves. They get along. They have sweet dispositions and are not annoyingly loud. They lay delicious eggs like clockwork. Before Gail and I ever started with the guinea hen experiment, my friend Walt Leis, a man with far more experience in such matters, said, “Don’t do it. Guineas are nuts. Get chickens.” As usual, Walt was right. When we sold the farm last year, Walt took the three chickens to live with him. He sometimes brings us fresh eggs, for old times’ sake.

  Cry Wolfe

  In Defense of the Last Writer in the World Who Needs Defending

  Atlantic, April 2006

  In one of many deft set pieces in Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, a group of student journalists at his fictional Dupont University hold a meeting in the “lumpen-bohemian clutter” of their campus newsroom. The editor wants a firm story list for the next issue’s fast-approaching deadline, but the discussion bogs down over an item that might just be important breaking news—they’re not sure.

  It seems that the campus custodial staff cleaned from the quad sidewalks crude chalk depictions of homosexual acts. Camille Deng, a feisty archfeminist and civil libertarian, is outraged by such heedless destruction of gay art. The campus administration has countered the charge, not by asserting its obligation to erase obscene graffiti, but by an alert piece of politically correct one-upmanship—it claims the drawings were “homophobic,” meant as a slur on campus gays. Deng isn’t buying it.

  “Do you think it’s just a coincidence that Parents Weekend is coming up?” she argues; “… you think they might just possibly not want the parents to see descriptions of how Dupont guys make love written in chalk all over the sidewalks? ‘We’re Queer and We’re Here’—you think Dupont Hall wants to let that big cat out of the bag? Because they are here.”

  Then another staffer, who is gay, turns on Deng’s use of the word “they.”

  “You sure you don’t have an issue yourself?” he accuses her. “Like maybe a little covert pariah-ism? Like maybe a little self-loathing lesbianism?”

  Their argument forms a perfect uroboros, illustrating that the game of impugning motives (even subconscious ones) forms a self-destructive loop. It’s a neat insight, and I Am Charlotte Simmons is full of such little gems, stabs at the rich variety of pseudo-intellectualism that flourishes on a college campus. It is above all a novel of ideas, a point perhaps obscured by the entertainment value of Wolfe’s prose. In addition to being one of the most original stylists to ever write in the English language, Wolfe has long been America’s most skillful satirist, and in Charlotte Simmons he struck a nerve. In his first two novels, The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, Wolfe lampooned the excesses of the nouveau riche, the criminal justice system, and other generally urban white-collar targets, all of which were widely considered fair game. In I Am Charlotte Simmons, he took aim at youth culture—at the children! Many young critics resented being made fun of by a septuagenarian in a fusty suit, and some dismissed Wolfe as a scold, arguing that binge drinking, social cliques, and rampant screwing have always been part of the undergrad journey … right? Reviewers with children or students (or both) the same age as those in the novel reacted defensively. They stuck up for the modern student, and for the quality of thought at modern universities, and found Wolfe’s take on campus life to be shallow, prudish, inaccurate, and unfair. “In the course of a very long 676 pages [Wolfe] serves up the revelation—yikes!—that students crave sex and beer, love to party, wear casual clothes and use four-letter words,” wrote Michiko Kakutani, whose reviews in the New York Times are routinely parroted by critics throughout the land. Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books faulted Wolfe for losing his cool, for letting the fine contempt that fuels satire degrade into mere outrage, which, the critic wrote, is “flaccid as social satire.”

  The book became a best seller, as all Wolfe’s books do, but fell somewhat short of the blockbuster status achieved by his first two novels and unmatched journalism. There may have been other factors involved in the slight drop-off in sales, but no doubt it resulted in part from the sour reviews. The assault this time out owes something, I suspect, to the contemptuous treatment Wolfe received a few years ago from several of his esteemed contemporaries in the modern literary pantheon—notably John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving. Their attacks are best summed up in one deliciously bitchy sentence from Updike’s otherwise flattering New Yorker review of A Man in Full, in which the celebrated author and critic assessed Wolfe as a writer of “entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form.” Thus did a high priest of the novel brand Wolfe a pretender, and grant dispensation to the herd to have at him.

  Charlotte Simmons is a fat gray-and-green paperback now, and despite the assertion by Slate critic Jacob Weisberg, who wrote in the New York Times that Wolfe is fun but that no one ever rereads him, I recommend a second look. The book is brilliant, wicked, true, and like everything Wolfe writes, thematically coherent, cunningly well plotted, and delightfully told. It should firmly establish him as not just one of the most popular of serious American writers, but one of the most accomplished. Writing that sentence means aligning myself with the proles in an ongoing dustup, but, hey, if you’re going to get into a fight, make it a literary one. Ever since Mailer’s hips gave out there isn’t much chance of anyone throwing a real punch.

  Certainly one factor that elevates fiction from mere “entertainment” to even “moderately aspirant literature” is substance. Is the book about something important? Does it reward study? Is the author saying anything new? Is the work carefully crafted around a theme?

  In Charlotte Simmons Wolfe is attacking a pet insight of the emerging science of the brain: that consciousness itself is nothing but an illusion, that inside us all there is no “I,” just a theoretically predictable pattern of firing synapses. This is behaviorism taken to the furthest extreme, and a fairly startling premise, one that precludes not just free will but presumably the very notion of morality. The novel’s assertive title takes issue with that notion and its consequences, echoing Descartes’s famous declaration, “I think, therefore I am.” It is about the testing and ultimate triumph of Charlotte’s selfhood.

  Wolfe opens the book by describing the experiment that earned Dupont psychologist Victor Starling a Nobel Prize: when a critical portion of a cat’s brain was removed in the lab, it triggered a “hypermanic” state of sexual arousal, which was then imitated by “control” cats who had not undergone the operation. “Starling,” writes Wolfe, “had discovered that a strong social or ‘cultural atmosphere,’ even one as abnormal as this one, could in time overwhelm the genetically-determined responses of perfectly normal, healthy animals.” The experiment is, of course, an analogy for Dupont University, where the school’s national champion basketball team is revered, and its players, all genetic freaks with, in effect, the thinking portion of their brains removed (they are discouraged from taking real courses), enjoy a “hypermanic” sex life with the eager coeds who line their paths. They are the equivalent of Starling’s surgically altered lab cats. Normal students are the “control” group, who observe the players on the court, on ESPN, and on campus, and imitate them. Dupont, which Wolfe depicts as the nation’s premier seat of higher learning, is in thrall to jock values—sex, booze, drugs, and pursuit of the big postcollege payday. One of Wo
lfe’s early triumphs, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, ridiculed the pretensions of the hippie movement, and here, nearly two generations later, is the legacy of the “summer of love,” not an egalitarian free love utopia but a repellent pit of sexual predation, where status is conferred by fucking.

  Into this rampant promiscuity wanders beautiful, innocent, idealistic, painfully traditional Charlotte Simmons, a Candide-like scholarship student from the deep backwoods town of Sparta, North Carolina, in search of the “life of the mind.” Some of the novel’s critics complained that anyone so naive as Charlotte in this day and age is implausible, but these are people who are apparently unfamiliar with rural America, where for better or worse traditional values thrive in places cable television doesn’t yet reach, and where evangelical preachers are building mall-sized churches. But whether someone like Charlotte actually exists is irrelevant. She is a construction, a device, one of a long and celebrated series of satirical vehicles in English literature, all the way back to Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. On the surface she is fragile, but underneath she is a warrior, a “Spartan.” Charlotte is, by degrees, sucked into the campus culture. She is lured into the self-abnegating realm of Starling’s neuroscience lab, ravished and discarded by the novel’s premier predator, and plunged into a profound period of depression and confusion, only to rally and establish herself (and her jock boyfriend, Jojo Johanssen) on her own terms, mind and body. She doesn’t just triumph over the tawdry reality of Dupont; she transcends it. Mendelsohn completely misses the point when he describes Charlotte at the end of the book as having been “reduced by her own craving for ‘acceptance’ to being arm-candy for a famous college jock.” Far from it: she has beaten back the hedonistic tide of peer pressure, escaped the soul-deadening pull of Starling’s lab, and reasserted her selfhood and her moral bearings. She is said jock’s girlfriend, a fact that marks her ascension to the top rung of social status on campus—always a prime Wolfean preoccupation—and she holds that distinction strictly on her own terms; she has restored the missing piece of Jojo’s brain (turned him into a real student), and is, as Wolfe makes abundantly clear, the dominant partner in the relationship. In the distorted context of campus life, she rules. All this in her freshman year, no less.