Freebooters, Crows, and Hikers -- a Three-view

Hey,

  Long time no blog.  Let's talk about what I've been reading:

  First up:  Bayou of Pigs  by Stewart Bell.  Back before the Civil War, there were a number of filibusters who traveled from the US to invade various Central American countries to take them over.  Most of these failed before they even left the states and the most successful of these filibusters, William Walker, only managed to seize control of Nicaragua for a few months before a coalition of Central American states (plus money from Vanderbilt) kicked him out.  After the Civil War this sort of thing died out...

  ...unitl 1981 when a guy named Mike Perdue decided that there was a lot of money to be made by invading Dominica and helping the recently deposed Prime Minister Patrick John get back into power.  There was also a lot of talk about restoring democracy to the island and using it as a base to launch further attacks against Grenada's newly formed pro-communist government, but what it really came down to was the opportunity to take over an island and make it into your own criminal haven.

  Perdue gathered together an extremely unlikely band of mercenaries and co-conspirators (including Canadian neo-nazis and Dominican Rastafarians), haggled around for money and supplies and then got his little invasion force on it's way.  As you might imagine, law enforcement stepped in and stopped the invasion before it started, but it was kind of a near-thing that anyone was paying attention to these guys.

  Although there's not much in the way of dramatic firefights or combat, the logistics of putting together an invasion (even the fairly inept logistical efforts of Mike and his crew) makes for a fascinating read.  If you've ever had an impossible dream...well, here are a few guys really going for it.  Their dream is crap and luckily they're not very good at realizing it, but there's some amazing chutzpah on display.

  Next up:  Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr by John Crowley.  Mr. Crowley has written a number of magical realist books over the years (Little, Big probably being the most famous) so I was interested to pick this up.  Here an unnamed narrator takes in a sickly crow and discovers that he and the crow are able to converse with each other -- not exactly telepathy but a combination of sound, gesture, and a bit of intuition.  This crow is named Dar Oakley and he's an Immortal Crow -- well, he dies quite a bit but he always re-incarnates and eventually remembers that he's Dar Oakley.

  The book is mostly stories Dar Oakley tells about his many adventures throughout history.  Mercifully, Dar isn't a Forrest Gump-like character who is always present at major historical events.  Dar has regular interactions with humans, some of whom understand him, some who don't.  Dar also has a number of encounters with other animals.  In a neat twist, crows can talk to other crows and have a limited ability to talk to ravens, but other birds/animals are generally incomprehensible to them.  Dar, being a Special Crow, can sometimes get around these limitations.

  The reason why Dar is a Special Crow is because he keeps getting involved in Ymr -- the world of humans which includes the afterlife (however it looks to the person Dar interacts with).  In Dar's first life, he befriends a young shaman and must help her reach the land of the dead to steal the secret of immortality.  He does so imperfectly and is left with this imperfect immortality.  Through his various incarnations, he keeps having interactions with humans seeking to pierce the veil and adventures beyond the veil.  This is a bit frustrating to him since a.) to crows and other animals Dead is Dead and this afterlife stuff is so much human nonsense and b.) getting tangled up in the human sphere has changed him (beyond the obvious immortality) and he's not sure if he likes it.

  The book was ok, but it didn't really grab me.  Like any biography, it doesn't follow a neat set of plot points to form a coherent narrative arc.  Obviously a bit of that happens here because it is a work of fiction, but it does sort of ramble a bit and hangs a little loose.  I really enjoyed a number of world-building bits around Crows and crow culture (like how crows define directions and other fictional bits like that), but overall it was a bit of a slow read for me.  

  Finally, I finished up:  Trespassing Across America:  One Man's Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland by Ken Ilgunas.

  A few years ago I started reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson where he was going to hike the length of the Appalachian Trail.  About a third (maybe even a quarter) of the way into the book, he decides to bail on hiking the trail and just drives to different points.  At that point I put the book down because if you're going to hike the Trail...hike the damn trail.

  In 2012, Ken Ilgunas got the idea to hike along the route of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta all the way down to Texas -- a distance of almost 2000 miles.  Although he'd done a little planning/training, he essentially decided to go for it, grabbed his stuff, taped down a broken toe, hitchhiked to Canada and then, cheeky bastard that he is, he walked the entire distance.  If for no other reason, that makes this book better than Bryson's.

 Luckily, Ilguans is a pretty good story teller.  In particular, he gets up close and personal with the Great Plains in a way that most people never will.  Because the pipeline cuts over private property almost the whole way, Ken jumps fences and crosses vast, rolling pastures.  His descriptions of the natural environment are spot on and I was instantly transported back to the wandering rambles of my youth.  He discusses the ranchers, preachers, cops, cows, dogs and other encounters along the way and tries to get at what the pipeline means to them.

  That communication between Ken and people living along the pipeline is pretty interesting.  It's often difficult to have a conversation with someone on the opposite side of a polarizing topic.  Ken himself often has trouble meeting people where they are, but he does recognize that even beyond partisan politics, some people see the pipeline as something good for them or their town.  For landowners along the route, there are direct cash payments and for many people on the Plains, that's probably enough to justify its existence and given the poverty in the region that's not an easily dismissed argument.  Because Ken depends a great deal on the people he encounters on his hike, he can't easily ignore their viewpoints and I think it really helps flesh out the nuances of the issue for people on the pipeline.

  I really enjoyed this book, mostly for the adventure and not the environmentalism, but to help understand what the pipeline means, you may want to use Google Maps to find Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada.  Switch to the Satellite View and look a few miles north of the city.  The tar sands operations are easily visible and stretch for over 30 miles.  You can easily imagine that if/when the pipeline is built, the operation will continue to spread outwards and more and more of the deep green forest will turn into tan pits and black pools of wastewater and tailings. Seems a bit of a waste.

 Anyway, I liked the book and I think folks might find it interesting.

later
Tom