FoxCraft

Chicken Fingers

I was at a fast food restaurant yesterday and encountered something almost too horrible to write about.

On the menu were three different salads. Signs on the counter listed their ingredients—in large print, right out there for everyone to read, even small children. Two of those salads featured "chopped chicken fingers!"

It's not that I'm a chicken lover, by any means. I don't even like chickens (as a species, I mean; they're perfectly acceptable when broiled, roasted, fried, or fricasseed). In my opinion, they're both mean and stupid, and I've neither forgotten nor forgiven all the times as a child that I was pecked on my scrawny little arms when I was trying to gather eggs.

But be that as it may, this kind of brutality is too much, even for chickens. Just imagine those poor birds, squawking in helpless terror while their little fingers are chopped right off. It isn't just the immediate pain of that experience, either. What kinds of lives can they possibly have afterward? They can't type, or play the piano, or use their cell phones, or even tie their own shoes. Most of them wouldn't be able to work, of course. Think about the cost to society of supporting all those fingerless chickens.

Wendy's was sued for millions by a couple of wannabe con artists merely pretending to have found a chopped human finger in their chili. Yet this other restaurant can get by, not only with using chopped chicken fingers on a regular basis, but with blatantly advertising the fact.

Where is the outrage? Why isn't anybody doing anything about this horrific abuse? Where are the PETA protesters when you need them?

It's a harsh world we live in, where innocent birds can be tortured in this way, and no one seems to care. The compassion for these poor victims seems to be as scarce as—well, as hen's teeth.

"Scarce as hen's teeth," by the way, is a really old expression that comes from the fact that hens don't have any teeth. They swallow their food whole and grind it up in their gizzards. That's because they're birds, of course. With feathers. And two feet. And wings—instead of arms, and hands, and, um, fingers. Oh.

Never mind.

Here Lies Fido

My town's daily newspaper is now inviting the publication of obituaries—for pets. We do not live in Boulder, Berkeley, San Francisco, or some other community where New Age is old hat and people who have pets are considered "guardians" rather than "owners." This is South Dakota, for Pete's sake. Farming and ranching still hold a sizeable place in the economy, and most of us still eat meat with relish (with ketchup or steak sauce, actually) and a clear conscience.

I suppose I should be grateful that these "pet tributes" are being solicited as paid inserts in the classified section. The obituary page, thankfully, is still—so far—reserved for human beings.

Of course, there is a bright side here. The obituary page has traditionally been the training ground for entry-level journalists. Pet obits could add a new level for those novices—the sub-basement, as it were. If I wanted to break into the newspaper business, I might aim for that level by submitting some sample tributes such as the following.

Rex, Labrador retriever, age three. His greatest love in life was fast cars. Unfortunately, he finally caught one.

H.D., border collie, age six. He rode to his first Sturgis Rally on the back of a motorcycle when he was just a pup. At what would turn out to be his last Rally, he learned that it's not a good idea to try to herd Hell's Angels.

Corky, golden retriever, age eight. He loved walking in the rain. He learned too late that it was a mistake to leave his mark on a fire hydrant during a thunderstorm.

Ringo, blue heeler, age ten. He spent his whole working life as chief cow dog of the K Bar J ranch and was dedicated to the cattle business. He never would have sunk low enough to kill a sheep. The only wool he ever got in his teeth came from chasing one of them mangy little cocklebur collectors out of his pasture. He died a hero, and the sheep-shearing SOB who shot him had better be watching his back.

Fluffy, gerbil, age 18 months. She had the heart and soul of a great explorer. Her last expedition took her inside the wall of the family room. Our memories of Fluffy will last forever—or at least until the smell goes away.

Madame Pomp-Adore, toy poodle, age two. She was a little sweetheart who spent her short life bringing pleasure to others. This was true even in her last moments; witnesses saw a look of great satisfaction on the face of the mountain lion that ate her.

Long John, boa constrictor, age unknown. Poor John ended his life by means of a hangman's noose made from his own tail. He was assumed to be despondent because his fellow stage performer for more than 40 years, Ms. Boom-Boom LaDouce, had announced her retirement from show business.

Okay, this may not be great journalism, but even Woodward and Bernstein had to start somewhere. At least one thing is clear—there's nowhere to go but up. Today, pet obits. Tomorrow, a Pulitzer.

The Magic Card In My Wallet

One of the many credit card commercials on television asks the question, “What’s in your wallet?”

Their card—whichever one it might be—isn’t what I carry in my wallet. What I do have there is a card that’s much more valuable to me than any MasterCard, Visa, or American Express. It is my library card.

One of the things I enjoy most in the world is learning. I love finding out useless but fascinating bits of information. A common phrase at my house is, “We’ll have to look it up.” And, despite the convenience of the Internet, the best place to look things up is still the library.

I don’t remember when I got my first library card, but I have been a bookworm since kindergarten. I remember childhood trips to the Tripp County Library in Winner, which was on the third floor of the county courthouse. As I remember it, going to the library meant going past another courthouse institution—the county jail.

By the time I was in high school, I had access to other libraries. Almost every Wednesday after school I headed for the Gregory public library. Mrs. McMeen always gave me a warm welcome. She even let me take books from the adult shelves that she wouldn’t have checked out to other high school kids.

I also remember the high school library, the domain of Mrs. Gerard. You often hear writers talk about teachers who influenced them. You may be expecting a heartwarming story here about Mrs. Gerard recommending books or encouraging me to write. I hate to disappoint you, but that’s not why I remember Mrs. Gerard.

She seemed to think her mission in life was to protect the library books from anyone who might want to actually use them. She would go through lockers in search of overdue books and take them back to the library. Sometimes, the story went, she would take books that weren’t even due yet. She evicted students from the library for whispering, laughing, coughing, or sometimes merely breathing. I was scared to death of her. She was the reason I, the book addict and library lover, never once during four years of high school ever checked a book out of the school library.

Thank goodness Mrs. Gerard, as a librarian, was the exception rather than the rule. In all my years of hanging out in libraries, she is the only librarian I can remember who was less than helpful. The rest of them were far more like Mrs. McMeen.

In fact, librarians as a group are so well regarded that they even have their own action figure. It’s modeled after a real librarian from Seattle named Nancy Pearl. The figure is a middle-aged woman in a conservative suit, and when you push a button she puts her finger to her lips to say, “Shhhh.”

Some librarians don’t appreciate what they see as a stereotype. Others take the doll less seriously and think she pokes fun at the stereotype. I don’t mind the shushing, because one of the things I value about libraries is their air of quiet busyness. Still, I would have designed the librarian action figure a little differently. When you pushed the button, she would hold out a library card and give you a big, welcoming smile.

Libraries have changed a great deal since the first time I checked out a book. Card catalogs have been replaced by computers, there are shelves full of videos and CDs as well as books, and there is access to the Internet. One thing hasn’t changed, though. A library is still a doorway to information—and the key to that doorway is the library card.

That card is an admission to entertainment and information, recreation and research. It’s all I need to access a priceless pool of knowledge from all over the world. That’s why the most important piece of plastic in my wallet is my library card.

Is It Hiking, or Is It Geology?

Spring. The time of year when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of—rocks, if he’s a geologist.

Actually, that isn’t quite true. Geologists think about rocks all year around. The difference is that spring is the time they can start to go out into the field again to examine the rocks that have been covered with snow all winter.

Living with a geologist, one would think, means lots of opportunities to go hiking. It does. That’s the good news. Those opportunities involve geologic hiking rather than ordinary hiking. That (to a non-geologist) is the bad news.

Because, you see, when geologists are out in the field they aren’t just walking around looking at rocks. They’re stopping to examine rocks. They’re pondering. Some of the time, they’re doing geologic mapping. This is to regular hiking what geologic time is to regular time. The pace might be described as glacially slow.

Here is what geologic mapping looks like to a liberal-arts-person observer who has come along on a student field expedition in the naïve belief that exercise will be involved:

You walk a little ways, and you stop and break rocks open with your rock hammer to look at them, and sometimes you check them with your magnet or your hand lens. You discuss them with your working partner (in the case of the students) or with a group of students (in the case of the instructors) or even sometimes (in case no one else is available) with your liberal-arts-person assistant who can’t tell the difference between marble and granite anyway but is too polite to say so. From time to time you take a GPS reading so you know your exact coordinates. You stop frequently to make notes in your field book or to mark things on your map with your colored pencils. Sometimes you sit down to do this—on a rock, naturally.

The map is taped onto a piece of cardboard so the wind won’t blow it away, and quite often the liberal-arts-person assistant gets to carry it.  Sometimes she even gets to carry the rock hammer—though she has an unfortunate tendency to hit herself in the knee with it if she isn’t careful. She has been told that a geology student isn’t allowed to graduate until he (or she, though this practice seems to be more prevalent among male students) has mastered the art of throwing his rock hammer into the air so it spins, then catching it by the handle as it comes down. She admires this skill. She isn’t ever going to try it.

After tagging along on enough expeditions such as these, I’ve learned the difference between geologists and the rest of us. Most of us tend to think of the earth as static. There’s a hill, here’s a stream, there’s a canyon, here’s a piece of prairie; and that’s just the way things are. Geologists, on the other hand, understand that the earth is constantly changing. They know that this high meadow once was the bed of an ancient stream, or those hills once were deep beneath the earth, or that this prairie was once the bottom of an ocean. They understand that the planet is still being shaped and reshaped, so gradually that most of us can't comprehend it. They have the ability to think in terms of millions and even billions of years.

That, to me, is even more impressive than the ability to catch a spinning rock hammer.