The Flatulence Tax

If you really want to get on my good side, you'll find me a fossilized termite fart. Nothing would please me more. I wasn't even aware that such a thing existed until I perused a National Geographic magazine and there it was: a blob of amber, or fossilized tree sap, containing a termite in flagrante pootus. What a find! I thought. What are the odds that a booger of tree sap would not only trap a termite but preserve his gaseous eruptions for eternity? I was reminded of the photograph of the grizzly bear standing in the stream, his toothy jaws perfectly framing a doomed, leaping salmon. One-in-a-billion shot, I thought. Then I saw more and more of them. Apparently, one needed only to come to the right spot and set up a tripod. A significant portion of the salmon population travels to the ocean to gain weight for three or four years and then finds its way back to the waters of its birth following a primeval instinct to become bear poop.

Turns out the fossil termite farts are the same kind of deal. Tree sap has buried plenty of termites over the years, inasmuch as they are in the wood-chomping business, and trees tend to be mainly wood. And it further turns out that termites do only two things: they chomp wood, and they fart. It's not easy to metabolize wood: it takes a village of bacteria to do it. The bacteria are working in permanent overtime status, and as a result, termites are a regular methane machine.

Literally: 1/4 of the methane production of the world can be traced to termites. It's a problem, because methane is a major greenhouse gas, more potent in disrupting the climate than even carbon dioxide. Fans of fossil fuel consumption like to hold up the lowly termite as the villain in this piece, but it should be noted that the termite population has not changed much over the millennia, so their contribution to the atmosphere in the form of farts is probably static and they are not to be blamed for the current spike in greenhouse gases. "But if we could get rid of all the termites," they say, "couldn't we keep pumping all that fossil fuel into the atmosphere for another hundred years?"

As if. Tom Delay was in the pest-control business and even he couldn't get rid of all the termites in the world. This stuff is hard. We can't even bring down the numbers of Republicans infesting the House of Representatives with The Vote and access to factual information.

Termites are not the only source of methane, however, as I am in a particularly good position to know. But even outside our house, there are animals producing more than their allotment of methane. Herbivores, mostly. Cows and other vegetarians are famous for it. It isn't easy to digest plant material. Cows can't even do it without throwing up a little in their mouths. And since we have artificially augmented the planetary number of tasty cows, there has been an uptick in flatulence traced to bovines. It's a problem. New Zealand was the first country to try to do something about it. Not cork the cows; but try to mitigate damages to the atmosphere in a responsible way, by assessing a tax on the owners of cattle and sheep, of which they have a great many.

This is a sensible approach. One of the reasons greenhouse gases have gotten to be such a terrible problem is that the things that produce them are artificially cheap, because no one is being asked to pay for cleaning up after them. Those who whine about the free market and how vital it is are sitting on top of a stacked deck. If the consumers of fossil fuels, and hamburger, were required to pay the full cost of their use, the free market would reflect some way different choices. "I guess I could take the train and eat fewer bananas," we'd say.

It's a simple concept. If I poop in your well, I owe you. For some reason, though, we give people a pass, if they have really massive amounts of poop, and the well is only the atmosphere that has sustained us. An atmosphere that, true, has had different compositions in different eras, producing climates that have varied over time; but if we had our druthers, and a clear choice, we'd probably opt for the climate that allowed us to flourish, and not the one that only sustains termites.

So yes. New Zealand attempted to tax the purveyors of livestock to counter their emissions. And the idea was batted down rather handily, once opponents began calling it a "flatulence tax." Hell, people get traction here talking about Death Taxes, even though no one has ever been taxed for dying, or Job-Killing Taxes, whatever that means. This, on the other hand, really was a flatulence tax. That doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea.

Paradise No Moa

Reminder! I'm reading from Trousering Your Weasel this Friday, 2/8, at 7PM at St. Johns Booksellers in North Portland. I'll read other stuff too. It'll be fun. I'd love to meet you.

New Zealand is not in its original condition. The flora and fauna have been reengineered in the typical clodhopper human fashion. Our species loves to tinker with things as though we were polishing the good china with a backhoe. These islands (two full-size, with a set of smaller seed-islands for backup) sailed out of Gondwanaland fully forested, which offended the early settlers’ mercantile sensibilities, and they scraped them almost bald. The land was home to a companionable group of flightless birds that pecked about in peace. The birds strolled past each other in grand profusion, with nothing to worry about but thigh-feather abrasion.

A depressingly thick tome

The first humans that arrived found them delicious and a lot of fun to kill, and promptly wiped out the biggest ones. Then they looked around and thought the place was a paradise that could only be improved by the addition of a few bunnies. And while it is possible that a few bunnies might have been an asset, no one will ever know. Not to be undone by the great rabbit eruption, our heroes hauled in some stoats and things to polish off the bunnies, and now there are stoats, bunnies, and possums up the national ass, none of which was conducive to a good paradise, from the point of view of the ground birds. Even the iconic kiwi is down to about twenty peevish examples that have elected to come out only at night, not that I blame them, and I never saw a one. The species-introduction experiments unfortunately stopped short of grizzlies and pythons, which might have done a good job curtailing the original source of blight.

Because we’re still here.

But not, by recent planetary standards, that many of us—not here. This is a comfortably unpopulated land, with the vast majority of residents corralled in cities, as people should be, and the remainder strung out in the countryside with a thousand sheep each available as spacers. The principal occupations are being nice to people in airports, sheep arrangement, and trail maintenance. Anywhere a person might rightly want to tramp is all laid out with boardwalks and graveled pathways and a lavish architecture of steps and bridges over the damp spots. The whole system is tidied on the hour by reasonably-compensated pebbleherds who keep the gravel spanked into its proper borders. To my eyes, the weed-whacking on the sides of the trail was overdone, until I realized that all the border plants would clap their hands over your head by noon and consume stragglers by nightfall, if not subject to regular discipline. 

So what we have here is a beautiful set of islands that is completely walkable, which is my definition of a civilized state. We are encouraged to travel the whole thing on foot by the splendid trail system and the fact that automobile fuel is five million dollars a gram, which is exactly the price God would have put on it if he were as powerful as the oil moguls.

I kid. Most people know a lot more about God than I do, and many of them believe he is even more powerful than the oil moguls. They’ve only got that on hearsay, but I suspect they’re right. And if he is, it will all become much clearer over time. Not that much time, either. Hope we get to wave at our fellow space travelers before we go.

Life Under And Above The Cross

Stuff is expensive in New Zealand. Books are expensive, clothes are expensive, and food is expensive. But no one expects a tip, and everyone is paid a livable wage, with the minimum set on high. I do not know all the economic implications of the high price of food, but suspect that one culprit is that, unlike in America, ¾ of the menu is not made entirely out of federally subsidized corn syrup, and the lamb and beef originated as actual self-propelled animals, rather than hybridized meat-units bred square to economize on space. Plus, anyone who wants to can pluck her own fruit salad from right outside her window. I saw no evidence of extreme poverty or extreme wealth. Those might be related observations.

Other observations: there are stars. Just as you’d expect, over time a whole lot of our stars have slid down to the southern hemisphere, and bunched up at the bottom. So it’s a good place to look at stars, unless you’re hoping to spot ones you know personally. I made a point of finding the Southern Cross as my friend Dale suggested, even though I was leery that it might be a huge scary constellation sponsored by the Klan. It wasn’t. It was an unassuming little number more appropriately called the Cute Little Southern Kite. And I did catch a glimpse of good old Orion loping over from the north, although his dangling—let’s go ahead and call it his hunting knife—was pointing straight up.

Lake Tekapo

Anyway, the whole star thing is such a big deal that they put up a nice set of telescopes on a prominent hill called Mt. John, just to keep track of them all. If you stand on top of Mt. John you can see in every direction, and watch gangs of weather jousting for supremacy. We didn’t stay for the star show. The sun in New Zealand goes down reluctantly and briefly, like it’s just stepping out for a cigarette. But daytime visitors can comfort themselves with massive slabs of carrot cake at the hilltop café. Any lighter desserts would get blown into Lake Tekapo ("Taah-wow-wow"). The astronomers here are especially interested in flagging down stray planets that might resemble our own. They’d be dim, of course, but can be detected if alignment is just right when they wobble the starlight behind them. The ideal would be to wave at another group of life-forms like us and in the same phase of evolution, just after developing telescopes and before engineering their own apocalypse. Which gives us probably another hundred years or so, but it’s not like we have anything better to do. It’s a long shot for sure, but there are a LOT of stars.

In the southerly regions, much of the bush (snort!) looks like Oregon, if Oregon had parrots and the ferns grew into trees instead of just on them and everything smelled like Juicy Fruit. A lot of the plant life is familiar as specimens that have showed up in Portland nurseries angling to make a buck off climate change. These are the plants available in two-inch pots with instructions to tuck them into a protected corner, feed them with an eyedropper, and read to them on the chillier nights, and if instructions are followed, the odds were good they’d double in size in ten years. Here, those same plants had gone Godzilla. One in particular, with great towering stands of spiky leaves, was especially familiar. I gaped at acres of them and struggled for the name. “They’re New Zealand flax,” Linda said. Oh yeah! We save up for those and nurture them through two or three seasons until they’re big enough to be considered viable, at which point we gingerly begin to announce them to our Facebook friends and sock away for their college educations, and then on a single winter day they all turn into snot. Which is why they’re not called Portland flax.

Far from being tucked away in a protected corner, they romp over the mountains and smirk at the winds. It is very windy in New Zealand. People plant giant walls of greenery around themselves just so they don’t have to tack across the yard to get the mail. We stood on a mountain and watched a rain squall roll in over the ocean, giving us enough time to put on our raincoats and Ziploc our cameras, and then a single raindrop an acre wide smacked into the side of the mountain and on into the next territory by the time we’d zipped up. Couldn’t say how hard the wind blew, because they have pretend measurements over there. Four thousand kilometers per fortnight, or something. But it makes peeing an extreme sport. I anchored myself well, and in thirty seconds my stream never hit the ground, I was air-dried, and had the beginnings of a Brazilian.

Hey! I'll be reading from Trousering Your Weasel on Friday, Feb. 8 at 7PM at St. Johns Booksellers in North Portland. I'll probably read other stuff too. There might be cookies. See you there.

To See A Kea

This is not a parrot

When I got home from vacation, I read that there had been a little excitement in O'Hare when airport security turned up a set of eighteen frozen human heads in cargo. Well. This sort of thing is going to happen. It's as common as pants-monkeys. In fact, it isn't even the first frozen-head incident I've read about in the past year. But it got everyone all het up, especially in Chicago, where there might have been political implications.

Also, not parrots

You sense a different national attitude before you even get out of the airport in Auckland. In New Zealand, officials would assume you wouldn't be carting around a box of severed heads unless you had a good reason. We slid through security without being asked to remove our shoes, with the agent requesting only that we partition our daggers in a baggie for admiring. The entire setup was designed to funnel travelers through one at a time so that security personnel could wish each of us a proper good day, hand us a complimentary pair of sheepskin slippers and top up our shampoo. They were a little touchy about us bringing in apples, but otherwise everyone was nice as pie, and in something closely resembling English. The only sign of passive-aggression I witnessed was the placement of doorways in shops and houses. You have to step up into them, as though entering a hatch on a rocket-ship, and they were clearly designed to sieve out the easily-tipped-over visitor; probably a sensible ploy in a land with good medical care available to all. But on the heels of a series of spectacular crashes, I had recently developed a high prancing step like a Clydesdale with an admirer. I was not about to be selected out at the beginning of my trip, and I caught on right away.

Again, a very nice picture, but not of a parrot

On our first foray to a snow-covered mountain, I was promised a kea. The kea, I am given to know, is the world's only alpine parrot. An alpine parrot! I visualized a stunner bright as the flag of an island nation, wearing a sporty fur earflap-hat and a muffler. I had to see a kea! Sadly, none materialized. "They'll be around soon, when we get lunch," I was told. "They'll strafe your shirt and make off with your sandwich, and then they'll do the finger-poppin' number from West Side Story." Oh boy! Parrots!

No parrots. We even went on a hike specifically labeled "Kea Point," but it was pointedly unparroted. "Is this something I'm liable to overlook?" I asked my friends, who insisted that it was quite a large, ungainly parrot, sort of soiled-looking and dingy, and not overlookable. Plus, any one of them was likely to entertain us by eating our rental car. I was assured they would show up any time we slowed the car down sufficiently, massing up on the windshield wipers and mirrors in a gang, and one of them would shove a sharpened beak through the window and demand five dollah. Oh boy! I thought. Parrots!

No parrots. Many other feathered oddsters showed up. My favorites were the silver-eyes, sweet greenish jobs with pink armpits and flight goggles, and the fantails, which spread their tails just for fun, coy as geishas. The guide book claims they do this to attract insects, but I believe they're just tarty by nature. It's hard to resist a truly flirtatious bird, and I was very happy, but I still thought I deserved a parrot, especially if everyone else had already bagged a quorum.

This is Betsy, not a parrot, but it was RIGHT HERE, swear to God.

Monday we hiked the Te Henga ("Taaah-wow-wow") trail. I spotted another fantail and a brace of silver-eyes and then--oh spank me with a glory paddle--in a pohutukawa tree ("paaah-wow-wow"), I saw a new bird, now known loud and wide in a localized area as Murr's PARROT! PARROT! PARROT! LINDA! HOLY SHIT! PARROT! PARROT! PARROT! or, elsewhere, the Eastern Rosella. And a proper parrot it was, too, red and yellow and blue and green and probably other things not even on the visual spectrum, attractive and bouncy and not at all put off by sudden loud noises. Way finer than that big, dingy, greasy, car-eating, invisible, hooligan parrot. I looked that one up. Closest living relative is the jackalope.

Attention Portland-area readers: I will be reading from my book, Trousering Your Weasel, plus some new bonus material, at the splendid St. Johns Booksellers at 7PM on Friday, Feb. 8. I'd love to meet you and shoot the you-know-what.

New Zealand: Where Tomorrow Begins Today

It takes about thirty-two hours to get to New Zealand from Oregon, the way we did it. I had a petite cold before we left and distributed the last delicate strands of it over the air circulation system of a series of airplanes, but it took Dave to make something manly of it, ramping up to a galloping bronchitis upon our arrival, where we met our traveling companion Betsy. Betsy has a raft of fine qualities. In fact she is very accomplished, for a woman who could totally have made it on her looks alone, but it was her stash of potions that really stood out at first. "You have a sore throat?" she said, animated, pulling out pharmaceuticals from her luggage like scarves from a clown's sleeve. "Gargle with this. It's really stinky, but it works great." Instructions on the bottle echoed her advice, as well as going on to explain how to clear slow drains and repel mice. Dave performed a glum, heroic garble and went straight to bed in horror. Betsy funneled three thumb-sized capsules into him and tamped them down, and when he came out of the coma twelve hours later, he was measurably improved. We got set for a hike.

It was supposed to be a five-star beauty, through the bush [hee hee! they say 'bush'], around a turquoise lake, with the promise of parrots, and the likelihood of biting flies. I was stoked about the parrots but Dave whimpered. "Oh, you attract bugs too?" Betsy said, animated. "I've got this amazing stuff. Wipe it on yourself. It's really stinky, but it works great." Dave wiped.

Rachael, demonstrating youth and springiness

The remarkable Linda organized the whole trip as a sixtieth-birthday present for herself, which is making me rethink my own plan to splurge on socks for my own. Going anywhere with Linda is a ticket to miracles. For instance, she dramatically improves one's odds of finding an insect with a tubular snout. There are wonderful things to see in any new place, but sometimes it's the humdrum stuff that catches my attention. Right off the bat we were able to witness the southern-hemisphere Corolla Effect wherein all the cars circled the wrong way around the rotary. Fortunately we were chauffeured by Linda's daughter Rachael, whose brain is still nimble enough to override habit. The signs facing us as we approached the rotaries said "GIVE WAY" instead of "YIELD." Variations on idioms charm me, and I traveled the world's rotaries in a daydream: "ACQUIESCE POLITELY" (U.K.); "SUBMIT" (China); "PREPARE TO DIE" (France).

Other road signs indicating locations with Maori names revealed that New Zealand is blessed with an abundance of vowels. This is usually good news. Your South Pacific nations have built entire languages around the prevailing human response to the weather, which is "aah, wow, wow," as opposed to the poor consonant-encrusted Eastern European countries whose founders were reduced to "brrrr" and stuttering. Our friends had just come off a tramp near Te Anau (pronounced "taaah-wow-wow") and snatched us up in Queenstown on Tuesday (pronounced "Wednesday").

Done right, this is what sixty looks like

I was looking forward to new flowers, new birds, and new toilets. In my experience, every country has its own proud toilet tradition. My dream toilet would feature the display shelf that I saw in Germany forty years ago, the little balconies upon which you can admire your glistening output properly before whooshing it away. New Zealand toilets are light on display functionality, but they get their own room and have their own majesty. At the press of a button all contents are shot straight to the center of the earth where they remain for millions of years before being volcanically recycled. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to demonstrate their powers right away. "You should poop," Betsy advised. "It's really stinky, but it works great."

The sun dawned bright on Double-Dookie Day ("Thursday").