Driving Home, page 52
The second document was the beginning of a scripted phone call that he apparently intended to make to editors of the London tabloids:
Good afternoon, my name is
I am a close friend and confidant of Neil Entwistle. I am approaching you because I feel that Neil is in a frame of mind to tell his side of the story. What is of interest to us is what price you would be willing to pay for exclusive rights to the full story? There is no loyalty to any particular paper because all have printed slanderous comments, so we are leaning it goes to the highest bidder.
This was another of his millionmaker wheezes. The third document, a page torn from Wednesday’s Daily Sport, advertised the services of prostitutes and escort agencies—adultfriendfinder in hard-copy form.
The contents of his bag were like his online life, as he flipped from persona to persona, switching identities and avatars on his Internet journeys. By the time of his arrest, all that seems to have been left of Neil Entwistle was the accent of the Nottinghamshire mines, nearly all now abandoned: a polite, bemused, and childish voice sounding like an echo from a past England.
Entwistle is now spending twenty-three hours a day in solitary confinement in the maximum-security wing of the state correctional center at Shirley, Massachusetts, where he’s said to pass the time “losing himself in books.” An automatic appeal of his conviction is pending. The lead prosecutor in his case, Michael Fabbri, was recently interviewed by the MetroWest Daily News. Asked what possible motive Entwistle could have had for doing what he did, Fabbri, who must have studied the murders in more detail than anyone on earth, said, with commendable philosophy: “Sometimes you just don’t know why … No ‘why’ would really explain this. There is no why.”
London Review of Books, August 2008
Second Nature
IN 1959, WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN, the lake was as wild a place as I knew. My friend Jeremy Hooker and I would arrive there at around 4 a.m. in early summer, ditch our bikes in the tangle of rhododendrons, and pick out the narrow path by flashlight as we tiptoed, in existentialist duffel coats, through the brush. Still some distance from the water, we moved like burglars, since we attributed to the carp extraordinary sagacity and guile, along with an extreme aversion to human trespassers on its habitat. Crouched on our knees, speaking in whispers, we assembled our split-cane rods. In the windless dark, the lake’s dim ebony sheen was at once sinister and promising. Somewhere out there, deep down, lay Leviathan, or at least his shy but powerful cyprinid cousin.
Our style of fishing was minimalist—no weights, no float, nothing but a hook concealed in a half-crown-sized ball of bread paste, attached to a hundred and fifty yards or so of nylon monofilament. Though the fish in the lake ran to twenty pounds and more, our lines were of six-pound breaking-strain. The carp, we believed, had eyes so keen that it would balk at nylon any thicker than gossamer 2X, soaked in strong tea to camouflage it on the muddy bottom. Before first light, and the first woo-woo-woo-wooing of a wood pigeon in the trees, like a child blowing over the neck of a bottle, we’d cast our baited hooks far out, settle our rods between two forked twigs, and squeeze a bead of paste onto the line between the open reel and the first rod ring. A quivering movement of the bead would signal that a carp was showing interest in the bait. The rest was watching, waiting, taking gulps of hot coffee from a shared flask, smoking Anchor cigarettes, and talking in a conspiratorial murmur about books and girls.
The lake slowly paled, with helical twists of mist rising from the water. Then, as the sun showed through the woods, a big carp jumped, crashing back like a paving stone dropped from the sky and leaving behind a pin-sharp, reminiscent after-image of olive and gold. We strained for signs of moving fish—the sudden flap of a disturbed lily pad, or a string of tiny bubbles filtering to the surface—and, tense with expectation, willed the telltale beads to tremble into life.
We nearly always had the lake entirely to ourselves. It was out of bounds to the boys in the prep school, a converted Queen Anne manor, on whose grounds it stood, and we regarded it—and the permission we had from the headmaster to fish there—as our exclusive privilege. The lake was no more than two acres at most, but with its resident water rats, moorhens, and wagtails, its visiting herons and kingfishers, and its enormous, mysterious fish, it felt like a sufficient world, magically remote from Lymington, Hants, a few miles to the west.
As often as not, the carp disdained our bait, and we’d leave at midmorning, five Anchors apiece for the worse, but on good days, usually after hours of waiting, the bead of paste would twitch, then stop, then twitch again. This could go on for half an hour or more. The carp—with its big, lippy, toothless mouth—is a leisurely feeder: it rootles along the bottom, vacuuming up silt; swills it about in search of delicacies, then ejects the muddy mouthful like a wine taster using a spittoon. The bead would rise an inch or two toward the first ring before sinking slowly back. Then, either nothing at all would happen or the line might at last begin to slide steadily through the rings, uncoiling from the open face of the fixed-spool reel. Here was the moment to strike—to lift the rod, engage the pickup on the reel, and find oneself attached to what felt like a speeding locomotive as the carp ran for the deep, the rod bent in a U, the taut line razoring through the water. Of the fish we hooked, most were quickly lost when they jumped, doubled back, or buried themselves among the lilies, but sometimes we’d have a thrilling twenty-minute battle, never seeing the carp until the last moments, when it flopped, exhausted, over the rim of the extended landing net. Out of its element, it looked prehistoric, like a paunchy coelacanth—its armor of interlocking golden scales glistering in the sunshine, its great mouth framing an O of astonishment and indignity at its capture. Still jittery from our encounter with this creature from a netherworld, we’d unhook it, weigh it, and return it to the water.
Jerry later wrote a fine poem about these expeditions, “Tench Fishers’ Dawn” (there were tench in the lake, too, though they evidently interested him more than they did me), whose last line reads, “Then, casting out, we’re suddenly in touch.” In touch with what, though? Nature was how it felt at the time, an engagement with the wild. But in England, nature and culture are so intimately entwined that their categorical separation is a false distinction. At the lake at Walhampton, the two were fused. The rhododendron jungle where we hid our bikes was made up of species introduced to England from the Alps, North America, and the Himalayas between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Carp were first imported from Eastern Europe in the early thirteenth century. Until the monastery’s dissolution in 1539, Walhampton was one of the many outposts of the powerful Augustinian priory of Christchurch, Twineham. The lake was certainly artificial—probably a later enlargement of a monastic fishpond—and our fat carp were the direct descendants of the exotics farmed by the monks, or so I like to think now. The surrounding woods were sculpted by “improvers” in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. We were fishing in the deep waters of several hundred years of patient engineering, cultivation, fish husbandry, and landscape gardening—not first but second nature.
As the word itself says, landscape is land-shaped, and all England is landscape—a country whose deforestation began with Stone Age agriculturalists, and whose last old-growth trees were consumed by the energy industry of the time, the sixteenth-century charcoal burners; where the Norfolk Broads—now in danger of becoming an inlet of the North Sea—are the flooded open-cast mines of medieval peat diggers; where the chief nesting places of its birds are hedges, many of which go back to hawthorn plantings by the Saxons; where domesticated sheep have shaved every hill clean; where coverts, coppices, and spinneys exist (or did until the ban) as subsidized amenities for the foxhunting brigade; where barely a patch of earth can be found that hasn’t been adapted to a specific human use.
The English have a genius for incorporating industrial and technological change into their versions of both nature and the picturesque. It’s hard now to imagine the wholesale wreckage of the countryside by huge gangs of Irish navigators, otherwise known as “navvies,” as they dug and tunneled across England during the canal-mania period of the Industrial Revolution. But spool on another century and a bit, and the canals—still busy with commercial barge traffic—had become symbols of all that was green, pleasant, and tranquil in our land.
When my father was abroad in North Africa, Italy, and Palestine during the Second World War, my mother kept him supplied with a series of slender books, printed on thin, grainy war-issue paper and illustrated with evocative wood engravings, about British churches and cathedrals, pubs, cottages, ancient market towns, gardens, and scenic byways, designed to remind the patriotic serviceman of the world he was fighting for. One book in the series, brought home to Norfolk by my father in 1945, and a particular favorite of mine, was devoted to the canals of England and their locks and bridges, now solidly established as key items in the paraphernalia of conventional English pastoral.
Many city children of my generation got their first experience of nature courtesy of the Luftwaffe, when bombed-out houses were transformed into little wildernesses of thistle, teasel, willowherb, and loosestrife. Redstarts and other birds nested in crannies in the ruins, among staircases leading to nowhere, with peeling wallpaper and upper-storey fireplaces, still with ashes in the grate, now open to the sky. The bomb sites, where I yearned in vain to be allowed to play, appeared to me to be immemorial landscape features, full of character and mystery, and one of the major attractions of family visits to London, Liverpool, and Birkenhead in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Or one might look at Turner’s astonishing Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway (exhibited 1844), whose rendering of elemental swirl and tumult makes it close kin to his Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth … (1842). But where the earlier painting shows the paddle wheeler all but overwhelmed by a hurricane-strength wind and terrifyingly steep cross-seas, the train in Rain, Steam and Speed is not the victim of the wild weather but its apparent prime mover. To the peaceful, lately sunlit arcadia of Maidenhead, with its plow, scarified hare, and the unruffled Thames below, where two figures are seated in a punt (gudgeon fishing, I suspect), has come this roaring Boanerges, son of thunder, raising a perfect storm. On the final page of his J. M. W. Turner: “A Wonderful Range of Mind,” John Gage asks, “Has the railway desecrated the beautiful stretch of the Thames it crosses here at Maidenhead?” But it’s surely clear from the painting that Turner loves the locomotive, with the blazing inferno of its firebox eerily exposed. He paints the newfangled intruder on the landscape as a force of nature in its own right. Gage remarks on the “light-heartedness” of the picture’s imagery; its wittiest touch is that the gudgeon fishers, if that’s what they are, don’t even bother to look up in wonder at the transcendent marvel of their age. But then they’re English, born to a casual phlegmatic acceptance of astounding alterations to the landscape, and perhaps the train and Brunel’s great flat-arched viaduct have already been absorbed into their sense of the natural order of things. If you’re bred to living in second nature, it’s relatively easy to find room in it for a Firefly-class steam engine alongside the gudgeon and the plow.
When I moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1990, I felt at a loss. Accustomed to living in England’s secondary nature, I had difficulty reading a landscape in which so much primary nature showed through the patchy overlay of around a hundred and forty years of white settlement and enterprise. Hunting for a workable analogy, I tried to see myself as a visitor to Roman Britain at the end of the second century, taking in the new cities, the network of paved highways, and the agricultural estates and military installations superimposed on a land lightly occupied by tribal people. But that conceit was flawed: the British tribes had permanently altered the land with mines, farms, forts, and ritual or funerary monuments long before the Romans came, while the Northwest Indians left few visible traces of their twelve-thousand-year habitation. West of the Cascade Range, where wood rots fast in the soggy climate, the Indian past faded continually behind the ongoing present, like the dissolving wake of a cedar canoe. Artifacts like painted chests, ritual masks, and wall hangings survived, but whole towns were reclaimed by the forest within a generation, leaving little more than overgrown shell middens to mark where they’d stood. Wherever the land was significantly shaped, or “scaped,” the work appeared to have been done just recently—a spreading accumulation of raw concrete, pressed steel, brick, sheetrock, telephone poles, pavement, fencing, neon, glass, and vinyl scattered in piecemeal fashion across a nature whose essential bone structure of mountains, lakes, forest, and sea inlets was still so prominent that the most ambitious attempts to build on and subdue it looked tentative and provisional.
Living in Seattle, one would have to entomb oneself in the basement to avoid the view. On clear days, the snowy bulk of Mount Rainier, high as the Matterhorn, towers over the city, which squats on the edge of Puget Sound, more than a hundred fathoms deep. The lower slopes of the Cascades to the east and the Olympics to the west are thickly furred with forest, or the appearance of forest (for most of the visible timber is actually second- or third-growth “tree farms”). Black bears and cougars forage in the suburbs; threatened chinook salmon flounder through the shipping on the Duwamish Waterway, struggling upstream to spawn and die; from my window, less than two miles north of downtown, I watch bald eagles on their regular east–west flight path over the Lake Washington Ship Canal. A walker in this city can see killer whales breaching, California sea lions hauled out on docks, beavers, coyotes, opossums, foxes, raccoons.
Nearly four million people live in the coastal sprawl of metropolitan Seattle, and there can be very few cities of its size where it’s so easy to feel like a trespasser on the habitat of other creatures, and to be uneasily aware that given half a chance they would quickly regain possession of their old freehold. Squint, and you can imagine wood-frame houses collapsing into greenery and large mammals denning in abandoned malls. It’s hardly surprising that the urban Pacific Northwest is home to a strain of radical environmentalism whose aim is not just to conserve what’s still left of nature in these parts but also to dismantle the machinery of industrial civilization and restore large tracts of country to the wild.
Whenever a bridge on a forest road washes out in a winter storm, a lobby springs up to demand that the entire road be condemned. Some dams are being breached to return rivers to the salmon, and many more are targeted for demolition. The movement, supported by a string of court victories, to prohibit or drastically restrict logging, mining, and livestock grazing on public lands has steadily gained momentum over the last decade, even though the Bush administration and—until January 2007—the Republican-controlled Congress have fought to unstitch the environmental legislation of the Clinton years. Gray wolves, fishers, wolverines, and grizzly bears—all species that survive here in minuscule numbers at present—are being reintroduced. (In the case of the widely feared grizzlies, Canadians are making the reintroductions in British Columbia and the undocumented bears are immigrating into Washington State.) At present, two bills moving through Congress will soon add two hundred square miles of mountain lakes, old-growth forest, and river valleys to existing “wilderness areas” within an hour’s drive from Seattle. As the Wilderness Act of 1964 put it: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
This is landscaping in reverse. Its main advocates are politicians, activists, and nonprofit foundations in large coastal cities such as Seattle and Portland, Oregon, who argue that the rise in “quality of life assets” created by such wilding of the countryside can amply compensate for the loss of jobs in traditional rural industries such as logging, mining, ranching, and farming. “Nature” and “Solitude”—those Emersonian essay titles—have a potentially higher cash value, say the conservationists, than horizontal trees or pockets of natural gas trapped in the coal seams underlying a beautiful mountain pass. When land is designated as wilderness, property prices immediately increase in its vicinity, and so does the flow of cash brought into the area by campers, hikers, hunters, fly-fishers, snowshoers, and mountaineers.
For the economist in a city office, it’s a simple transfer of figures from column to column, from Agriculture & Industry to Services & Retail Trade: if the loss in one is equaled or exceeded by the gain in the other, nobody should have cause for complaint, at least in the long run. But that’s not how it’s seen in the country, where the fast-advancing cause of wilderness has been met with very modified rapture.
To loggers and farmers, the visitor who does not remain is just another tourist, a member of a breed much disliked in the rural West for its presumed wealth, ignorance, and disdain for the concerns of people who work the land instead of using it as a weekend playground. Hundred-year-old lumber and market communities, faced with the prospect of a radical shift in their economies, can see the future all too clearly in the “gateway towns” that rim national parks like Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite, desolate strips of competing motels, minimarts, gas stations, gift shops, and fast-food outlets. Whatever these places may once have been, their only business now is to make the beds, pump the gas, serve the meals, and wash the tourists’ dirty linen—occupations in which there’s money but little dignity.
