Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Between Murdo, South Dakota, and the Alberta — Northwest Territories nesting grounds, the cranes had disappeared. Canadian officials eyed the Americans suspiciously. American officials eyed the Canadians suspiciously. Was the highest card in the Deck of Birds up somebody's sleeve?

An American plane traced the whooping crane flyway from Nebraska to the Saskatchewan border. A Canadian plane followed the migration route from the U.S. line to the nesting grounds. Nada .

“We're scheduling daily flights along the flypath,” announced the Americans. “We're scheduling daily flights along the flypath,” announced the Canadians. The first American flight passed just out of view of the Rubber Rose, where tiny Lake Siwash was shimmering like a pool of cowgirl tears.

The calendar had dipped its muzzle into late May — nearly two weeks after Jim McGhee's infamous “routine” flight — when the craneless news was broken to the public. A terse, unemotional press release from the Department of the Interior, an announcement that urged citizens to cooperate by reporting any and all sightings of tall white birds, hit the media like a ton of human interest bricks. Every TV network and most of the nation's papers gave the story major play. The scope of the coverage caught the government off-guard, as did public response. Interior's switchboards were flashing like a light-show gone stoned mad at the Fillmore, and every ecology-oriented organization from the Sierra Club to the Girl Scouts wired pledges of assistance. The following day the Secretary of the Interior himself was obliged to call a press conference (It made the six o'clock and eleven o'clock news). “Umm, ah, er, hum,” said the Secretary. “No cause for extreme concern.” Although the cranes constitute a single flock, they travel in smaller units of one to three families, the Secretary explained. And the families nest miles apart. There was no probable way the entire flock could have met foul play ("Ahem. No pun intended") either from humans or the natural elements. The whooper flyway passes almost entirely over isolated regions, and the Canadian wilderness is vast. Sooner or later these splendid birds will turn up. Even should they remain incommunicado all summer, they would certainly be back in Texas come fall.

The Secretary believed his remarks, as men of his station sometimes do. His underlings in the Fish and Wildlife Service believed them, too. Up in Canada, the skinny, pipe-puffing official shook like the icecubes in a fire-eater's highball and was not so sure. As for field biologist Jim McGhee, he sucked on a bottle of Uncle Ben's, signed another alimony payment, stared at aerial maps of the terrain he would search next day and muttered to no one in particular, “Wild animals don't snore.”

80.

DESPITE HIS TITLE, the Secretary of the Interior was a shallow man. He was given to surfaces, not depths; to cortex, not medulla; to the puff, not the cream. He didn't understand the interior of anything: not the interior of a tenor sax solo, a painting or a poem; not the interior of an atom, a planet, a spider or his wife's body; not the interior, least of all, of his own heart and head.

The Secretary of the Interior knew, of course, that there was a brain in his head and that the human brain was Nature's most magnificent creation. It never occurred to the Secretary of the Interior to wonder why, if the brain, with its webs and cords and stems and ridges and fissures, with its glands and nodes and nerves and lobes and fluids, with its capacity to perceive and analyze and refine and edit and store, with its talent for orchestrating emotions ranging from eye-rolling ecstasy to loose-bowel fear, with its appetite for input and its generosity with output; it never occurred to the Secretary to wonder why the brain, if it is as awesomely magnificent as it purports to be, why the brain would waste its time hanging around inside a head such as his.

Maybe some brains just like the easy life. The Secretary of the Interior did not put many demands on his brain. Mainly, he wanted only to be informed if this or that action would be politically expedient. For example, the Secretary went to his brain there where it was lolling lazily in its cerebral hammock, sipping oxygen and blood, absently humming some electrochemical folderol culled from two billion years of continuous biological chatter; a brain that bore no neon scars of love, that showed no signs of having ever been dazzled or crunched by art, that obviously was not staying awake nights puzzling over what Jesus really meant when he said, “If a seed goes into the ground and dies, then it will grow"; a brain that would have appeared preponderantly placid were it not for the skinning knife, the automatic rifle, the bazooka, the machete, the napalm, clubs, arrows and grenades that were piled under its pillow where they might be employed instantly to chop, gut, bludgeon, burn and blast the very first mouse squeak that might threaten it; the Secretary went to his brain, prodded it and asked it how he might end this whooping crane hubbub in a manner advantageous to himself.

His brain's immediate reaction (yawn) was that the problem should be passed up the line to some other brain to solve. That, however, was not feasible this time. The only person up the line was the President, and the President's brain, having been finally cornered after a lifetime of cheating, conning, lying, hustling and vampiring greedily on jugulars public and private, was rolled up like a sick armadillo at the moment and could not be enlisted. Should he get through to the President he could expect only that the President would yell, “Shove those fucking birds up your goddamned ass! What are you doing to protect me?” or something, and the Secretary did not wish to be yelled at by the President. Should he speak to one of the President's intimate advisers, he would be told in an aseptic German accent that the matter should be turned over to the CIA, and while the Secretary was not entirely opposed to the high aides' method of putting annoying problems in the hands of the secret police, he wasn't certain that it was expedient to have his own authority thus usurped.

No, sorry, brain, fat old pal, but you and the Secretary must work it out yourselves.

Under normal conditions, the Secretary might have donned the Pendleton wool shirt his wife had given him for their twenty-second wedding anniversary (Or was it the twenty-third? His brain couldn't remember), requisitioned a jet and gone out personally to lead a massive crane hunt. Now that would have been good politics. Ha ha! Then, when those kooky environmentalists got in a snit because his branch of government was allowing industry to develop the land the way God intended it to be developed, he could say, “Trust me, friends; I have proven myself an ardent conservationist. I am the man who rescued our whooping cranes!”

Alas, normal conditions did not prevail. The major oil companies were in the act of pulling off a daring economic coup, a brilliant piece of business, on the whole, but one that had of necessity created a simulated shortage of petroleum products, and the citizenry, not understanding what was best for it, was bemoaning what had been labeled an “energy crisis.” The average working man was a helluva lot more concerned about the energy crisis than he was about a missing flock of goony birds, the Secretary reasoned quite accurately; the Secretary wasn't convinced the average working man gave a moldy tail feather about those missing birds. Were the Secretary to authorize a large-scale air search for the whoopers, there would most surely be adverse reaction to the quantities of fuel an expedition of that size would require. He simply could not justify such an expenditure of precious petroleum.

So he would do this: he would keep a single light plane plying the wide and capricious migration route; one plane, in the air daily. If the working stiffs complained, he could say, “We've got a little bitty economy-sized Cessna looking around for those birds, boys; that's it.” If the conservationists bitched, he could say, “I've got a modern up-to-date reconnaissance aircraft with radar and all the latest equipment in the sky this very moment searching every inch of isolated territory for those marvelous herons, and I won't rest until they are safely back where they belong.” Umm. Yes. Yes, indeed. All bases touched. Good work, faithful brain. You've earned a siesta.