Writing – Page 5 – ABOUT ELEPHANTS

Africa, Elephants, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Travel, Writing

Miles per Pound of Trees

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

An excerpt from my book in progress:

Thembi, she of the evenly matched ears, long-lashed eyes, and diamond-shaped scar on the bridge of her nose, farts as she walks. Big, burbling farts.

All the trees, grasses and leaves Thembi eats gather in her 10-gallon stomach, which is pretty much just a holding area. From her stomach, roughage travels into her small intestine and then on into her large intestine. Joining the two intestines is a junction called a cecum, where digestion actually takes place. Her cecum is filled with billions of microbes, just like most mammals, including us. The microbes break down the cellulose of leaves and trees into soluble carbohydrates Thembi can digest, but the process also gives her enough methane gas to power a car 20 miles each day.

I wonder, as I walk behind her, just how one could harness this gassy natural resource. I live at the edge of a small town. Twenty miles would more than cover my daily errands. I imagine exhaust fumes smelling like fermenting grass. I imagine driving down highways inhaling the scent of mulched trees.

I wonder, as I walk behind her, why I think of such things.

Percolating along, Thembi lifts her tail and farts again. It’s a stupendous displacement of air. In this just-right light, I can actually see this fart. It looks like heat waves blasting from the back of a jet engine.

One advantage of Thembi’s size is food efficiency, miles per pound of trees. An elephant eats four to seven percent of its body weight each day – four hundred to six hundred pounds of vegetation. Mice eat a twenty-five percent of their weight daily and hummingbirds two times their own weight, or two hundred percent. If hummingbirds ate trees, the forests of the world would already be gone. Pound for pound, Thembi needs far less food than rodents or birds. And with her size comes another advantage over smaller creatures – a longer life span.

We humans, with our penchant for measurements, have conjured up a precise formula for figuring out things like longer life spans. The formula is called quarter-power-scaling. A cat is about 100 times more massive than a mouse. To calculate the cat’s age, take the square root of 100, which is ten, and then the square root of 10, which is 3.2. The lifespan of a mouse is around 800 days, or just over two years. Multiply 800 by 3.2. The result is 2,560 days, or seven years, the average lifespan of a cat.

However, if a cat’s metabolic rate was 100 times faster than that of the mouse, all cats everywhere would spontaneously combust into feline fireballs. Oddly enough, heart rate, the engine that drives the cat to chase the mouse, scales to the same formula, but in the opposite direction, to the minus quarter-power. The resting heart rate for a mouse is 500 beats per minute. Divide that by 3.2 and you have the average heart rate for a cat, around 156 beats per minute.

An elephant’s resting heart rate is a placid thirty-five beats per minute and a bit higher, around forty, when excited. While the jittery mouse lives just over two years, an elephant lives around sixty-five years, certainly long enough to power my car for the rest of my life.

Africa, Elephants, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Travel, Writing

The Most Useful Appendage Ever Evolved

Posted on November 16, 2013November 17, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

Since I have a huge cold and can’t think, I’m re-blogging this post from early in 2012.

An excerpt from my book-in-progress:

Morula plucks a branch from one of her favorite snacks, a bush-willow. She holds the stem in her teeth, wraps her trunk from right to left around the branch, and sheers off leaves, top-to-bottom with a single swipe. She drops the branch and transfers the leaves from the curl of her trunk into her mouth.

Morula is right-trunked, as I am right-handed, preferring to grab and wrap from the right. Thembi is also right-trunked, but Jabu’s a lefty.

One of the ways to determine an elephant’s dominant tendencies is to inspect the underside of its trunk for green stains on either the right side or the left. But before you do this, make sure you know the elephant and, more importantly, the elephant knows you.

Morula peels and discards branch after branch. Shredded bushes mark her path. She pauses next to a candle-pod acacia, easily recognizable by its upright seedpods. It reminds me of a giant leafy candelabrum, holding a hundred or more candles in ruffled tiers. Sharp curved thorns protect each pod. Morula strips the acacia of a branch, then puts it in her mouth and eats it, thorns, pods and all.

She sidles close to Doug and curls her trunk against her forehead.

“Those round bumps on her forehead might be an old skin infection,” Doug tells me, “but we really don’t know.”

: Morula waves hello

A light breeze feathers the hair in her ears as she stands slightly sideways and nods the tipof her trunk in a tiny Hello. . . Ribbed muscles cross the underside of her trunk. Bristles stick out like the legs of a giant centipede.

There is no other living creature on this planet that has a trunk. If elephants were already extinct, which brave paleontologist would go out on a limb and reconstruct the trunk just from evidence of bony nostrils high on the skull? Who could imagine a nose dangling close to the ground where scents abound? A nose with the ability to pick up a single straw, rip a tree out by its roots, bench-press 600 pounds and untie your shoelaces without you ever noticing?

“Stand here,” Doug commands me.

I obey, my back to an elephant lineup.

With a little guidance from Doug, Thembi gently places the tip of her trunk on top of my head. It feels like a big beanbag up there, but one that’s warm, wiggly, drooling and breathing.

As Thembi rubs nose slime into my hair, Doug places Jabu’s trunk tip on my right shoulder and then Morula’s on my left.

Jabu has trouble keeping his trunk balanced on such a narrow ledge. He constantly fidgets and pokes my cheek with his bristles. Morula’s trunk drapes over my shoulder like a slack hose with a dripping nozzle. Her runny nose continuously drains to clear out inhaled dust – the common condition of all elephant trunks.

When I look down and to the left, I have a close-up view of the two “fingers” on her trunk. Her top finger is more pointed than the one on the bottom. The shape of it reminds me of a hooded cobra. But perhaps that’s because I think of Morula’s trunk as thinner and “snakier” than Jabu’s spectacular snout.

Which is getting heavier by the moment. With the peripheral vision in my right eye, I see two nostrils dotted with grains of moist sand, nostrils more flesh-colored than gray. Each opening is nearly as wide as the “O” of my mouth.

All three trunk tips, I can attest, are not just sheer weights. They sniff, snorf, squirm, wiggle, inhale and exhale. They create an atmosphere of elephant breath around my head.

Doug lowers my camera and pronounces, “Allll-right.”

The weights disappear. For a few steps I am oddly light, as if walking on the surface of the moon.

Africa, Elephants, Nature, Photography, Travel, Writing

Windows of the Soul

Posted on October 13, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

Like us, like all mammals, an elephant’s eye has one large lens, its aperture always open, except for a blink, or in sleep. Like us, like all mammals, Jabu’s round iris controls the amount of light that enters his pupil. Like us, the lens of his eye focuses light images on his retinas, where they are converted into chemical and electrical impulses, and conveyed along the optic nerve directly into his brain.

The iris is the only muscle of our bodies not colored a shade of red. It contains pigment instead. The density of that pigment colors our eyes from brown to blue, mostly shades of brown for elephants, although a blue-eyed calf was photographed this year in South Africa.

Iris is the Greek word for rainbow. When light refracts through countless prisms of rain, it produces that arched scatter of reds, greens, blues and violets that we call rainbows. But what we see is only half the story. Rainbows are perfect circles cut in two by the horizon. It’s only possible to see a complete circular rainbow if you are in an aircraft and the sun is high enough behind you. A round rainbow is named a “glory.” A halo for the earth.

How did the Greeks know rainbows are round?

Hurtling towards earth at 186,282 miles per second, light from the sun is carried by subatomic particles called photons, which vibrate up and down in perpendicular motion to the direction of the advancing light waves, passing along their energy to the retinas of our eyes. Photons are both the medium and the message, carrying waves like water carries waves, invisible surf lapping against the islands of my eyes. The cells in my eyes, in Jabu’s eyes, are precisely one photon wide.

I blink, he blinks, photon by photon we gaze into each other’s souls.

Africa, Elephants, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Travel, Writing

Deja Vu

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

It’s an ancient feeling, this memory of a moment I’ve never had before, this exact smell of scuffed dust, this slant of light, the slightly spicy taste of sand, the warm brush of sunrays across my cheeks, the squint my eyes adopt as if they’ve always looked into the African sun. It’s the way my bones melt, the acceptance in my mind and nerves that tells me not to run when a monster materializes from a clump of brush and moves to an arm’s length, breathing so quietly I wonder if it’s sleepwalking, I wonder if I’m sleepwalking, because everything that is happening, this monster, this place, my fog of serenity, must be made from dreams.

The monster moves closer.

A familiar monster. One with a shape. One with a name.

His eye, a huge topaz oval, stares down at me. He’s motionless, concentrating. I can’t even hear him breathing.

Like us, like all mammals, an elephant’s eye has one large lens, its aperture always open, except for a blink, or in sleep. Like us, like all mammals, Jabu’s round iris controls the amount of light that enters his pupil. And like us, the lens of his eye focuses light images on his retinas, where they convert into chemical and electrical impulses and whisk along the optic nerve directly to his brain.

What would it be like to think without words and recognize shapes without names?

Both of us, human and elephant, witness only a small portion of what is out there to be seen. Francolins, mambas, tsessebees, zebras and lions – everything that crawls, swims or walks – witness the world in ways I cannot even imagine.

Even in the womb the eye of a fetus moves through its amniotic dreams. Does it dream about the glories of a life to come?

“Hello,” I whisper.

The light from his eye just now reaches mine.

Africa, Elephants, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Travel, Writing

Mud Wrestling

Posted on August 7, 2013August 15, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

It’s a mucky, slimy, gloppy mud. A young elephant snorkels on his side, the tip of his trunk swiveling above the surface, as he slides towards the other elephant, a brother or cousin. His days are filled with heat and dust. It’s winter in Botswana, the sun is relentless, and mud will soothe his scorched skin. He lifts his head from the muck, curls his trunk and closes his eyes. This feels good, his body language says, this feels really good.

If we could imagine ourselves weighing four tons and think of gravity’s effect on those four tons, then maybe we could imagine wallowing in such mud, pushing and shoving like giant sumo wrestlers, reveling and rolling in the sheer pleasure of warm gunk. We would inhale a slimy trunk-full of ooze, squirt it like a water gun in any direction, even at each other. We would rub our eyes clear with a curled fist at the end of our trunks. We would arise glistening and bright as a metallic statue. We would be cooled, refreshed, gigantic, gentle beings. . . . if we could imagine such a thing.

Africa, Elephants, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Travel, Writing

How Much of the World Are We Missing?

Posted on July 30, 2013August 15, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

Just at the edge of darkness, where the light of our fire does not penetrate, an elephant thunders by, trumpeting the whole way, like a locomotive off track in a dry forest, a classic illustration of the Doppler Effect, sound that condenses, rises in pitch, crescendos, blows by, drops pitch, recedes.

We lift our heads in surprise. Waves of sound undulate away from us, kin to ripples on a pond. We use pulsed sound waves, Doppler Radar, to see rain, to know when we should run for cover. There is no such radar for an incoming elephant.

Eventually his outrage is extinguished in our ears, but elephants a mile away are just beginning to hear it. Resonance fills the night air around us, yet we are deaf to it, to the sounds just below our range of hearing.

How much of the world are we missing, circle upon circle? Perhaps instead of placing ourselves at the center we should move to the edges where our skills are low and our learning curve high. We should extinguish our fire and sit in the darkness listening, really listening.

Africa, Lions, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Writing

Bring on the Lions

Posted on July 19, 2013August 15, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

Most impalas die of old age. And most people die of old age, too.

But that’s not a very exciting story, is it?

What makes us want to bring on the lions?

Nature, Writing, Zoos

Solitary Confinement

Posted on June 21, 2013August 15, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

Alone,

alone,

two steps forward, two steps back,

the elephant sways to a rhythm no one, not even she, can hear. Two steps forward, two steps back. Swaying, her head dips to one side, then the other. Her motions are born from a numb brain, from uncut boredom, from the measurement of a life by that which does not happen.

Beyond the barriers that surround her, a jerky stream of humans flows past, day after day. Their powerful odors overwhelm her, and she touches her temporal gland, samples her urine, the only familiar smells left to her. At the end of each day, after the humans are gone, she hears a multitude of rumbles, but none have resonances she can recognize.

Sometimes she will lie down on the huge square stone into which she is entombed and sleep. There are no stars over her head.

She ceased calling out to her kin a long time ago.

As near as she knows, she is the only elephant left on earth.

Note: There are 284 elephants in 79 accredited zoos in the United States. Most zoos have more than one elephant, because elephants are social creatures who need companions from their own species. I originally wrote this piece when I learned of Maggie, who lived at the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage for 24 years, the last eleven of those years alone. In 2008 she was transported to the PAWS sanctuary in California, where she now lives with other African elephants. Here are the remaining zoos that keep just one elephant:

San Antonio Zoo – “Lucky”
Double M. Ranch, New York – “Reba”
T.I.G.E.R.S., South Carolina – “Bubbles”
Natural Bridge Zoo, Virgina – “Asha”
Wild Adventures, Georgia – “Shirley” – Shirley is age 69 and has been in captivity since 1946.

Sources: verified independently, using the database from http://www.elephant.se

Africa, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, Writing

Our Journeys are All the Same

Posted on June 12, 2013August 15, 2013 by Cheryl Merrill

We tell old stories in order to see anew. Each and every one of us takes the same journey from life to death, though our paths are never the same.

We begin as an explosion of infinite possibilities and then fall back upon ourselves, grabbing at some of those possibilities during our fall.

Our trajectory, which touched the very rim of life, descends toward the center, ending at zero, at what some see as a portal and others see as finality.

Falling, always falling towards the center of ourselves, the huge unknown universe within, our journeys are all the same.

Sunset at Doug & Sandi’s camp, Okavango Delta, Botswana

Elephants, Writing

On the Air! Radio Interview About Writing and the Writing Life

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Cheryl Merrill

Several months ago, Sheila Bender, friend and fellow writer, interviewed me for her radio show, “In Conversation: Discussions on Writing and the Writing Life.” The show will air Tuesday, Nov. 27th at noon PST and Thursday, Nov. 29th at 6 p.m, PST. It can be heard streaming from our local radio station at http://www.kptz.org. I talk about elephants and why I decided to write about them. I hope you get a chance to hear it.

In writing Larger than Life: Living in the Shadows of Elephants, I tried to answer two questions – what is it like to live with elephants, and, what is it like to live? For me, writing is living. I write everywhere, all the time, tucking pieces of paper into pockets, jotting down notes under the covers, with a flashlight on. I write on the backs of envelopes, I write in the margins of manuscripts, I write in notebooks, notepads and ipads. I write because reading is just one of the pleasures caused by words, even though words by themselves are drops of human magic, sprinkled against death and darkness. I write to grave rob my own language, excavating tombs of words and phrases, looking for riches, for golden ideas buried in underworlds of common dust.

Every writer tells old stories in order to see anew. All humans take the same journey from life to death, though our paths are never the same. We begin as an explosion of infinite possibilities and then, for the rest of our lives, fall back upon ourselves, grabbing at some of those possibilities during our fall. Our trajectory, which touched the very rim of life, descends toward the center, ending at zero, at what some see as a portal and others see as finality. Falling, always falling towards the center of ourselves, the huge unknown universe within, our journeys are all the same.

I write to tell about my journey, my story, and it all comes together in just one place, my writing room.

As you listen to this interview, you can also see where I write.